piebald

Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance.

Connor has created a soft-focus community that reads like a contemporary Grover’s Corners with its quirky assortment of kind adults and its cozy woodland setting populated with songbirds and even a fabled piebald deer.

Boo’ya Moon is nicely rendered — it has the feel of 19th-century fantasy paintings — and its monster more elaborately imagined than in the novel, which will only have you looking up the definition of “piebald.”

Pigeons could be made to look like roosters and peacocks, and dogs made short-haired, long-haired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.

His fierce eye gazed out across the mighty army: black rats, brown rats, grey rats, piebald rats, skulking weasels, furtive stoats and sinuous ferrets, all gathered round, their weapons glistening and dripping with the rain.