It’s the swinging sixties in Paris, and Parisian bachelor Bernard (Christopher Holt) and he believes he has contrived the Platonic ideal of marriage for his time and place: three simultaneous fiancées, none aware of the other, all airline hostesses and all thus carefully scheduled per the infallible air timetables. What could possibly go wrong? About what you would expect, but quite winningly, in Boeing Boeing, by Marc Camoletti, to close out the Theater at Monmouth’s Vive La France season, under the direction of Dawn McAndrews.

We walk into the house to the mild and lovely strains of French pop, and it’s ever clear how tickled Monmouth’s designers are to indulge in the era’s vibe: everything looks and sounds perfectly fab. Bernard’s spacious flat features Mod furniture and a globe to the left, Old World upholstery and a bar to the right; silver fringe in one doorway and three other molded doors, all readied for farce. Into this flat he welcomes beautifully coiffed woman in uniforms of wonderfully Technicolor nylon: First, treacly TWA hostess Gloria (Lisa Woods), from the American South, in sky-blue pencil-skirt, jacket, and cap, with candy-red piping, heels, and lipstick. Next, mellifluous and elegant Air Italia hostess Gabriella (Ally Farzetta) in pale green and ivory ruffles. Finally, the passionate Gretchen (Lindsay Tornquist), of Lufthansa, in yellow and a Teutonic braid. Each sweeps in with a delectable entrance, charm, and affection for both Bernard and his visiting friend from “the provinces,” Robert (Michael Dix Thomas), who in his unmatched suit and bumbling provides a winning comic counterpoint to Bernard’s “sophistication.”   

Airline timetables are nothing on which to base a complicated polygamy, and Monmouth’s cast makes excellent work of the proceeding farce in both rhythm and tenor. Pacing is nicely varied but fleet in all the right places – as the flights are delayed and the women just missing each other. Further elevating timing and tone is the marvelous Wendy Way as Bertha, the long-suffering, scowling, ruthlessly sarcastic maid. All she has to do is give Bernard a look – let alone a belittling grin or a perfectly sarcastic “Yes, Sir” – to punctuate the comedy of his well-deserved mess. As for the women, Woods, Farzetta, and Tornquist walk a well-balanced line between international caricatures and the comedic realism of women in love and, increasingly, exasperated.

They’re real people in a way that callow Bernard isn’t until he’s forced to be, and Holt, wisely, makes the bigamist less a caricature of a playboy than a little boy posing as a grown-up and surprised and proud that he’s getting away with it. His Bernard’s full-force lampoonery doesn’t kick in until the multiple doors start opening and closing in dangerously close progression; in his quieter prequel to the chaos, he plays him low – this isn’t some outrageously charismatic man; he’s just an ordinary guy who can read the airline timetables. The choice has the effect of further sending up the male-fantasy aspect of the show in a way that makes its 1960s assumptions somewhat more palatable.

Still, don’t expect comeuppance for him or Robert – this is farce. He ultimately does get to learn his lesson about true love and get a second chance to actually have it. The script also uses the resolution to invoke some stereotypes about the sexuality of marriage-bound women, and American women alone get a surprisingly scathing critique as mercenaries in a litigation-crazy landscape of marriage. But then again, we’re not watching for substance. Boeing Boeing is a romp, and Monmouth makes it swing and take flight just as bouncily as the title promises.

Boeing Boeing, by Marc Camoletti | Translated by Beverley Cross and Francis Evans | Directed by Dawn McAndrews | Produced by the Theater at Monmouth | Through Sept. 25 | Visit http://theateratmonmouth.org.

The saga of Bonnie and Clyde, the iconic lovers who held up stores and banks through the American Depression, is both a cautionary and a romanticized tale. And odd as it may sound for a story that ends in a gruesome shootout, that story has also become a Broadway musical. Portland Players present a striking, energetic and beautifully sung production of Bonnie and Clyde, the Musical, starring the fiery duo of Joanna Clarke and Joel Crowley in the title roles, under the skillful direction of Michael Donovan.

The show opens with their career’s haunting end: film footage of the car in which, moments before, the couple was riddled with bullets. From there, we cut back to young Bonnie (the wonderfully dynamic Antoinette Hinitt), flashing eyes and smiles as she sings of rich, famous Clara Bow, and young Clyde (the show-stealing Ryan Phipps), throwing himself at the world with primal rage and desire as he shoots off toy guns, dreaming of money, clothes and Billy the Kid. From early on, the show invokes the American veneration of celebrity, outlaws, cars, and wanting more.

As the grown Bonnie and Clyde, Clarke and Crowly present two people who have sharpened and polished those desires like diamonds. Vivacious Clarke is lit up with Bonnie’s blaze of aspiration; we see its heat everywhere she turns her willful gaze. Crowley, long and tall, has a sensual arrogance in his loose-limbed swagger, and a hint of restlessness in his quick-moving eyes. Together, Clarke and Crowley make the lovers clear equals, raw, wide open and intensely sensual; their chemistry has a visceral need, passion and violence. The script develops and juxtaposes their relationship against that of Clyde’s brother Buck (a nicely measured Ryan Walker), convinced to go straight by his no-nonsense wife Blanche (Kelly Mosher, with intensely sympathetic strength).

Their tale is told against a back wall of rough-hewn planks, with two tall white doors that double as screens for the show’s many projections of period photographs. These and the many modular set pieces nimbly rolled on and offstage – a diner counter, an old cash register, a bed – convey a fine sense of the era. Bonnie and Clyde look fantastic – her in wine-colored or ochre silk, him in charcoal pinstripes and fedoras – and there are excellent staging moments on this oft-changing set: a sassy ensemble number in Blanche’s hair salon; a love song counterpoising Clyde and nice local lawman Ted (Eric Berry-Sandelin, with nuance and a fine voice), who also loves Bonnie; Clyde in a claw-foot tub serenading Bonnie, who perches sweetly on the edge, feet in the tub, chin in hands. And the cast consistently nails the show’s musical numbers, accompanied by a super pit band that moves skillfully between the show’s blues-, jazz-, and ragtime-inflected songs.

The story of Bonnie and Clyde does present a theatrical challenge, since we know so well its storyline and end-point. In its best moments, the script shows us the particular in what motivates and animates this pair. But there is also a lot of exposition and, in a show that’s over two and a half hours long, a few too many songs that seem designed to make sure we didn’t miss some symbolic point, like the brothers’ duet about loving fast cars.

But that’s no fault to this excellent ensemble, which blows the show out of the water with its talent and zeal. Portland Players’ production raises the heat and flare at the heart of this story, the near-mythic desire fueling both these glamorous thieves and the country that has romanticized them.

Bonnie and Clyde, the Musical | Book by Ivan Menchell | Lyrics by Don Black | Music by Frank Wildhorn | Directed by Michael Donovan | Musical Direction by Evan Cuddy | Produced by Portland Players | Through Oct. 9 | Visit www.portlandplayers.org.  

What recommends candidate Penny Easter (Shannon Campbell) to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Nebraska? Big, awesome hair, magnetic charisma, and a blithe dismissal of anything overly substantive. She can’t formulate language too well – “Things come in my mouth wrong” – and that’s where campaign manager Francine (Janice Gardner) comes in. But is Penny part of some kind of conspiratorial demagogic plot?

Thus Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s wallop of dark comedy The Totalitarians, directed by Chris Horton at Mad Horse. It’s less a balm for election season than a commiseration, and, perhaps, a jolting reminder that – maybe, hopefully, God willing – we might not have it so bad.

If Penny’s qualifications sound a little too familiar during our own appalled slouch toward Nov. 8, rest assured that the show doesn’t take its politics too seriously. Trope characters and lampoonery abound, and nobody is all that sympathetic. Mousy, yearning Francine hooks her brittle self-esteem to Penny’s star, despite the candidate’s clear deficiencies, while her doctor husband Jeffrey, jittery, plaintive, and petulant in the hands of Mark Rubin, resents Francine’s lack of interest in babymaking. And then there’s Jeffrey’s patient Ben (a terrific Jacob Cote), an angry young activist type and a vision of hyper-functional paranoia – scathing, sharp-eyed, and aggressively fluent as he rattles off conspiracy theories to susceptible Jeffrey.

As Francine, Gardner delivers a cartoon of anxiety, twitching, clenching and pacing as she frets over a speech, and, later, of the precarious arrogance of those new to power. Her antics are often over-the-top funny, though so much so, and so theatrically, that she sometimes keeps us at a distance from Francine’s character. Campbell’s Penny, on the other hand, draws us helplessly close. Her smooth, bleach-blonde confidence is miasmic, her self-centeredness so impeccable that it almost loses its negative valence – it’s like watching the Platonic ideal of narcissism in the flesh.

Penny and Francine have some fine scenes that juxtapose and sometimes – alarmingly – align their personalities. Watch Penny, emanating ease and assurance, silently appraise the self-conscious Janice. Watch a sorority-like moment when Penny and Francine hit upon the same inane turn of phrase, their mutual shared shiver and shimmy of mind-meld. And wow, watch Penny’s speeches: Campbell, mesmerizing, terrifying, presents a character blissfully unfazed by whole sentences she doesn't understand; it genuinely feels like Penny is casting a spell. It feels like she is irradiating us. Meanwhile, in superb contrast, Gardner’s Francine stands beside and below, clutching herself, eyes darting nervously apace Penny’s voice.

Production design hits some authentic notes in small details. The minimalist set shows us a modest campaign office and Francine and Jeffrey’s hotel-like bed; hair and costumes are A+: Penny’s towering, gleaming hair, Penny in swervy striped gold under a black suit, Penny in fatigues, a pink hat, and leopardskin heels. And after Penny’s successful debut, dowdy Francine suddenly sports coiffed hair, a chunky necklace, a phone earpiece, and a thick varnish of arrogance (Gardner delivers a super monologue here, dripping with smugness, on the phone to an influential backer).

Outrageous moments are many in Nachtrieb’s script, with blood drawn and more than one sex act mimed, and nobody gets off easy. There are potent whiffs of serious themes – the allure of power, disinclination to speak difficult truths, the tendency of the bullied to bully – but mostly, The Totalitarians is a darkly loony romp. A campaign is like a date, Penny says, in one stupefying simile, and then, “You wanna take this date to its inevitable drunken conclusion?” Maybe the one real lesson, for this or future elections, is that we actually can say “no.”

The Totalitarians, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb | Directed by Chris Horton | Produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company | Through Oct. 16 | Visit www.madhorse.com. 

As we age, do we evolve, or do we just become more extreme versions of ourselves? A man and a woman in their silver years confront the question when, after decades of marriage to other people, they get a second chance at a connection, in A.R. Gurney’s Later Life. Cecil MacKinnon directs a vibrant production at Portland Stage Company.

Austin (John Hadden) a banker and old-school Boston Brahmin, and Ruth (Rae C. Wright) Austin, who has lived all over, are re-introduced at a party, on an upscale roof deck overlooking the Boston skyline and a luminous Boston Harbor. (Anita Stewart’s luxurious set design.) Out here, in the intimate haven away from the louder party going on inside, Austin and Ruth undertake a leisurely re-acquaintance, punctuated by the periodic comic interruptions of other partygoers – their stylish blonde host, a Rick Moranis-like techie, a colorfully-dressed lesbian with a black pageboy, and more (all played, jauntily, by either Ron Botting or Kate Udall).

Our setting is university-riddled Boston in the just barely pre-Clinton era, and Boston’s old money, class structures, and Puritan ethos, of which Austin is a walking embodiment, are poised as the defining contrast between him and Ruth. Their attire alone – Austin in pinstripes and a quiet polka-dot tie; Ruth in a wine-colored halter dress with cleavage and a frolicsome belt of colored ribbons – signals Austin’s establishment restraint and Ruth’s freer spirit. (The telling costume choices are but one element in a production marked by attention to details of class, culture, and character – Satie playing inside, a long curl of lemon twist on Ruth’s glass.) Wright’s Ruth also moves more freely about the terrace as they talk, slinking around a potted tree and skirting the railing, and gradually draws more movement of stiffer Austin, too. Together, Wright and Hadden do a fine job of circling ever closer to each other, nicely balancing discretion and intimacy. Desire rises tangibly in both, though with interestingly different timbres – Ruth holds something deep and searching in her gaze, while Austin seems to feel his warming to her as a curious and pleasant surprise.

There’s plenty of humor to temper and deepen the themes of their rapprochement, with the character work of Udall and Botting providing a farcical comedy of manners. The two swerve gamely between the characters who interrupt Ruth and Austin, and are especially good in the roles that allow a little more nuance, like their ebullient Southern couple, new to Boston, whose comic cheer settles into something more complex and empathetic upon hearing of Ruth’s difficult past. Udall similarly deepens the arch élan of the party’s hostess as, over the course of several appearances, she subtly reveals the depth and compassion of her understanding of Austin. And as Austin’s best friend, Botting does his best work of the show, inflecting clear affection and concern into his clowning, sharp-eyed ironies, and faux-bumbling, as he advocates for Austin on the basis of the parallels between Austin’s squash game and his prowess as a lover.

Alongside the caricatures and comedy, though, Gurney’s script is bold and honest enough to hold us to ambivalence about feeling, connection, and the capacity for change. Gurney loosely weaves a variety of ways of being with – and losing – another person. By the end of Portland Stage’s striking production, once the last of the sunset has seeped from the watercolor-like vista behind Austin and Ruth, the complexity of love hangs tangibly in the darkened air.

Later Life, by A.R. Gurney | Directed by Cecil MacKinnon | Produced at Portland Stage Company | Through Oct. 23 | Visit www.portlandstage.org.

The debut performance of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 Cradle Will Rock, a scathing condemnation of corporate corruption in America, was a drama all its own: the musical, written as part of the Works Progress Administration, was at the last minute shut down and its performers locked out of their theater. The WPA cited budget cuts, but many suspected censorship. The production found another theater, where Blitzstein played the score on a lone piano and the actors, famously, performed from the audience. The story is the stuff of theater legend (and a 1999 Tim Robbins film), but rarely do we see performed the show at the heart of it. All the more reason to catch Cast Aside Productions’ savvy, stylish, searing new production of Cradle Will Rock, at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater, under the direction of David Surkin and Celeste Green.

Cast Aside’s actors, too, occasionally join us in the audience; in fact, we’re greeted pre-curtain by the doll-like Moll (Leslie Gail Reed), a lady of the evening with a threadbare zebra-print dress. We’re in Steeltown, USA, but Moll lingers on the edge of a stage that is open and mostly bare, with black curtains tied off at the wings and bare Christmas lights parted upstage. On this stage, Blitzstein’s brazenly stock characters wear lurid variations on commedia make-up – pink circles on the cheeks of white-faced Moll; pink smears along the jowls of the trench-coated vice squad brute, Dick (Surkin), who hauls her in. These are, by design, not naturalistic settings and characters, and Cast Aside’s excellent production choices keep us unsettlingly conscious that we’re watching.

In Night Court, Moll meets a drunken former drugstore owner, Harry Druggist (Tim Wooten, with sea-lost eyes and a watery, artless voice), who tells her of evil capitalist Mr. Mister (Bruce Lancaster). Moll and Harry are soon joined by the furious whirlwind of Mr. Mister’s “Liberty Committee,” a collection of professional types who have ethically caved to Mr. Mister or his Machiavellian wife (Tess Van Horn). Cast Aside’s Liberty Committee, dressed in iterations of black-and-white (plaid, polka-dot, leather), is a startling triumph of ensemble work, as its members reel, twitch and jabber about in high-pitched gibberish. As Moll and Harry while away the hours with these tools at Night Court, a series of flashbacks reveals how each Committee member’s corner of society has been sucked into Mr. Mister’s corruption.

Cast Aside’s Cradle features both exceptional ensemble work and striking individual performances. Vertiginously kinetic physical work sometimes throbs beautifully to a halt, as when Green, as a dead mill worker’s sister, sings alone with a clear, hard voice, perfectly grounded in place. Voice strength varies through the ensemble, but everyone pulls off Blitzstein’s angular and sometimes dissonant melodies, skillfully performed on keyboard by Rebekkah Willey. Ryan Walker’s meticulous Editor Daily has a particularly fine and subtle voice; also terrific are Catherine Buxton’s marvelously indolent cop and Van Horn’s mellifluous, horrible Mrs. Mister, in furs. Nathan Galvez makes his University President Prexy a fine jittery mess of spinelessness; and as Mr. Mister’s feral children, Adam Gary Normand and Kacy Woodworth are plain terrifying. And Reed’s Moll, who is most our own eyes, is at once bold and fragile, spunky and haunting; she struts haughtily but also quivers and wobbles a bit, marionette-like.

With its sly stylization and outrageous clowning, Cast Aside’s outstanding Cradle feels both expertly crafted and scrappily DIY – a sensibility that we could all stand to get behind as the our own times get ever darker, weirder and farther removed from what’s just.

Cradle Will Rock, by Marc Blitzstein | Direction by David Surkin and Celeste Green | Music Direction by Rebekkah Willey | Produced by Cast Aside Productions | At the Portland Stage Studio Theater |Through Oct. 23 | Visit www.castasideproductions.com.

You know you love, or should love, Chekhov – his mingling of the ridiculous and the tragic, his intricately flawed characters, his frank treatment of the human plight – but do you sometimes find him a little dreary? The 2013 comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike offers both a reprieve and an homage. This breezy, Tony-winning riff on Chekhov, by renowned comedic playwright Christopher Durang, is on stage now at Good Theater, in a smart, perfectly cast production directed by Brian P. Allen.

Bored, bitter, lonely misery is the status quo at the nice lakeside home of fifty-something siblings Sonia and Vanya, in Bucks County, Penn. Sonia (Laura Houck) smashes teacups, while her brother Vanya (Paul Haley) dreads and suffers her passive aggression. But then, enter their sister Masha (Lisa Stathoplos), a glamorous, narcissistic actress, who returns home with a charismatic, much-younger lover and would-be actor, Spike (Marshall Taylor Thurman). It wouldn’t be a Chekhov mash-up without a theater-loving ingénue, and so there appears blonde young Nina (Meredith Lamothe). Finally, Spike isn’t the only un-Chekhovian character here; Durang also throws in Cassandra (the mellifluous, sinuous, very funny Noelle LuSane), a Caribbean housecleaner and improbable Greek Oracle.

Good Theater’s attention to detail nicely heightens the dynamics at odds in this full house, which onstage is convincingly upscale-rustic – teal walls and wood trim, artwork of wood ducks and geese, potted trees and wicker, and, overhead, a wide stone archway.

Sharp costume design puts resentful Sonia in mismatched, angrily frumpy florals, slumpy Vanya in a grey nightshirt and matching mood, and flouncing Masha in sleeveless silk, black skinny jeans, and purple pumps. What sibling wouldn’t resent, at least, how well fifty-something Masha rocks skinny jeans?

As the family feuds, Durang’s script is both smart – with its myriad nods to Chekhov – and broadly comic enough – voodoo gags, a “reverse-striptease” – to entertain the uninitiated. This show has the potential to be played at antic comedic levels, but Good Theater measures it out; there’s slapstick and shouting, but also subtlety and stillness.

Some of the best comedy, in fact, is in the actors’ faces – a raised brow, rolled eyes, lips pausing infinitesimally over the rim of a mug.

Small, sharp touches like that abound: Spike’s gaze at his reflection in the lid of a pot, Sonia’s no-nonsense donning of a huge fanny pack. Haley’s finely restrained Vanya plays it especially low; his resigned irony is an opaque gloom-cloud – until he later pulls out the stops for a show-stopping harangue of a monologue (it might be nice to see a few more glints of Vanya’s ire along the way). Houck’s Sonia carries in her voice, eyes, and very frame a damaged child’s readiness to be hurt, which she later shifts beautifully when her self-esteem finally gets a spike: suddenly she struts, smiles, licks her lips.

As attention-addicted Masha, the slender, kinetic Stathoplos is pitch-perfect, vivacious and supple whether wrapping herself around Spike or sprawled at all angles over the loveseat, but she also has age in her low, husky voice, which turns raspy whenever her desperation surges. As her lovely foil, Lamothe makes Nina a clear brook of enthusiasm, empathy, and oblivious beauty. And Thurman’s Spike is exactly what he should be – hard-bodied, charmingly cheeky, happily shallow (and his remarkable reverse-striptease might make you think he’s done it before).

The un-Chekhovian sunniness of everyone’s resolution, finally, is sort of an inside-joke for devotees of the Russian master. But Durang’s script, and Good Theater’s playful, canny production, remain true to Chekhov’s amused affection for the human spirit, warts and all.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, by Christopher Durang | Directed by Brian P. Allen | Produced by Good Theater, at the St. Lawrence Arts Center | Through Nov. 20 | Visit www.goodtheater.com.

Upcoming in Theater:

Great theater news this week: Dramatic Repertory Company, the smart and intrepid Portland company founded by Keith Powell Beyland and a favorite of many theater folks in town, is back! After its months-long hiatus, DRC re-takes the stage with a workshop production of Sofonisba, by local playwright Callie Kimball.

In Kimball’s gorgeously written drama (which was workshopped for the Portland Stage’s most recent Little Festival of the Unexpected) Italian Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola (played once again by the virtuoso Abigail Killeen) travels in 1559 to Spain to be court painter to Philip II (Sean Ramey). There Sofonisba also becomes the confidante of the 14-year- old Queen Isabel (Marjolaine Whittlesey, and learns to navigate court as an unmarried woman and an artist. Kimball’s script elegantly explores the dynamics of art, gender roles, and the implications of the desire to create.

Directed by Sally Wood, DRC’s workshop production of Sofonisba runs Nov. 11-13 and Nov. 16-20 at the Portland Stage Studio Theater. Visit www.dramaticrep.org.

This past spring, on the 500th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library circulated editions of the famed First Folio of his work – the posthumous collection of poems without which The Bard might never have become The Bard. The men who got this anthology into print – actors John Heminge and Henry Condell – are the subjects of local thespian Kevin O’Leary’s new script, "Roles of a Lifetime." It runs at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater, staged by Luminous Productions (which brought us last season’s all-male King Lear) with the formidable cast of Rob Cameron, JP Guimont and Corey Gagne.

Muted medieval hues adorn the stage, ochre and sepia, quills, a workbench, a few curtained doorways, and many bushels of hand-inked sheaths. The show begins with a long, riddly monologue by dramatic Henry in meticulous blue (JP Guimont), with the occasional interjection by the shaggier, less ceremonious John (Rob Cameron); Henry pontificates on whether and when someone entered, or didn’t enter. They are, of course, actors, passing time in theater trash-talk whilst waiting for a printer, Edward Blount (Corey Gagne), to whom to present these many sheaths of their old partner and, possibly, friend. Is their project about The Theater, or Friendship, or plain financial gain? As the men bicker with, bait and entreat each other, O’Leary’s homage to Shakespeare also explores the borderlands between art, love and commerce.

Cameron and Guimont make a fine, fraught, tetchy pair, with Cameron’s blunt, long-suffering John often a ballast for the slaphappy or punch-drunk histrionics of Henry. Guimont, a very good actor (it’s gratifying to have him back on stage), has the challenge of playing a bad actor, and he has at it with gusto and a somehow child-like grandiosity, while John rolls his eyes. Between the two there’s kind of a stylized banter, along with strong co-dependent whiffs of Gogo and Didi, and whenever Gagne’s creditably stalwart printer enters the scene, he poses a solid, no-nonsense contrast to the sparring actors.

After a bit of a meandering start, the show picks up nicely as the actors recall first meeting “him,” back when he was “green” (“very green,” John says, and they exchange a smirk); as Henry recalls the loaning of an embroidered handkerchief “for his spittle”; as they debate whether to include A Winter’s Tale – “It is confusing,” says John. “He was confused by it.” Such tangibles ground us in dialogue that sometimes feels a little rhetorical, as with their ongoing fight over whether Shakespeare was their friend or partner, or through occasional moments that feel a little contrived dramatically, like when, jostling over a basket, they spill the precious pages everywhere, revealing something hidden. Over time, the script’s progressive revelations interestingly deepen the relationships between the actors and Shakespeare himself.

Perhaps most affectionately, along with its behind-the-scenes story, Roles raises and celebrates a world in which Shakespeare’s work is part of the general popular culture, across both class lines and the spectrum of art and entertainment. Printer Blount, noting the text of Midsummer, delightfully exclaims, “I saw that one! I liked the ass head!” as if he were talking about the head-in-the-toilet scene in The Big Lebowski.

And as counterpoint, listen for Henry’s movingly written and gorgeously delivered monologue about the art, about how much we need everything the Bard wrote: the rage, love, lechery, and guile; the victims, the villains, the lovers, and – he says, his voice catching in self-awareness – the fools. In its best moments, O’Leary’s ardent love-letter reminds us of how much the Folio holds of ourselves.

The Roles of a Lifetime, by Kevin O’Leary | Produced by Luminous Productions, at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater | Through Nov. 13 | Call 207.831.2434 or go to kevinoleary.ticketleap.com.

Five decades ago, Bemadette (Carmen Roman) traveled from her home in war-torn Germany to New York, where she waited in vain for her lover to join her. Since then, though she has written novels about life and relationships, she herself has long been isolated. Now, however, she is unexpectedly re-awakened by a young Cuban man, in Nilo Cruz’s compellingly lyrical and allusive "Sotto Voce," a “metaphysical love story” evocatively staged at Portland Stage Company, under the direction of Liz Diamond.

The stage and back wall conjure a breathtaking sea of deep indigo, studded with islands of low-lit lamps, classic furnishings, papers and books. The islands of writing table and ottoman are the house of homebound Bemadette, for whom the extent of her contact with the world comes in visits from her housekeeper Lucila (Anita Petry), herself an immigrant from Colombia. From across the stage, on an island stacked with books, come emails from young Cuban writer Saquiel (James Cusati-Moyer), who is obsessed with the story of Bemadette and her lover, whose immigration was long ago prevented when a ship bound from Germany to Cuba was refused landing.

Bemadette first resists but slowly opens to the charming and fiercely persistent Saquiel, who also angles himself into a relationship with Lucila. As the triangle deepens, the play meditates on loss, obsession, the urge to isolate and the urge to connect. “A stalker is someone who lives in the dark,” Lucila at first warns Bemadette about Saquiel. “And he’s obsessed with stealing other people’s light.” But the nature and behavior of light proves less predictable.

All three characters are separated from their homes by oceans, and PSC’s staging makes the psychic implications magically manifest. The set’s floor curves up slightly to the back wall, so that when Saquiel and Lucila meet out on the street, they step up as if into the very vault of earth, ocean, and night. Other striking moments of abstraction abound in the staging, as when Bemadette and Lucila move downstage to peer down at the street and Saquiel, whose character is actually placed upstage behind them, looking up. Beautiful use of projections conjures ambient clouds, sea, Central Park, Broadway’s lights in impressionistic blur.

Saquiel is interestingly ambiguous in his motivations, and the agile Cusati-Moyer makes him a compelling, charismatic enigma of manipulation and genuine affection, while Petry gives a vibrant performance of the outspoken Lucila, turning her inward adeptly as Saquiel comes closer. And as Bemadette, Roman’s long, elegant, expressive frame registers worlds of feeling as her careful composure softens, opens, thrills with the ardor of a much younger woman. Her reawakening is enrapturing.

Cruz takes on a challenge in having Bemadette and Saquiel communicate exclusively via phone and, more problematically, email. While the spirit and phrasing of their words unfolds in transporting fashion, making the actors say “send” at the end of each response gets old quickly, and sustains their distance rather than letting it dissolve. But overall, PSC’s production achieves richly moving payoff in the uncommon love that develops between them, at once sensuous and fascinatingly abstract, and the show’s success is a tribute to such a luminous harmony of writing, production design, and subtle, sensitive acting.

In so beautifully staging Cruz’s work, PSC takes on a work that poses questions without answering them, that dares to leave enigmas. Sotto Voce raises crucial and confounding questions about memory, displacement, and who gets to tell whose stories – but it does so in a gratifyingly low and gentle whisper, in neither black nor white, but silver-grey.

Sotto Voce, by Nilo Cruz | Directed by Liz Diamond | Produced by Portland Stage Company | Through Nov. 20 | Visit www.portlandstage.org.

Raised in humble circumstances by his surly sister and her blacksmith husband, young Pip nevertheless feels himself called to a higher station in life. The adventure and melodrama awaiting him are made interestingly psychological in the New Hampshire Theatre Project’s deft and evocative ensemble production of Charles Dickens’ classic Great Expectations, its script adapted by Gale Childs Daly for a six-person cast, with the virtuoso Bretton Reis as Pip and five narrators in an epic array of roles apiece, under the direction of Meghann Beauchamp.

The world that young Pip navigates, in his cunning corduroy jacket and cap, is one conjured by the frequent rearrangement of NHTP’s black box, as the ensemble moves around trunks, shelves and benches to create law offices, dining rooms, graveyards and boats. The five excellent “narrators” — Adam LaFamboise, James Stewart, Linette Miles, Molly Dowd Sullivan and Matthew Schofield — slip between characters, make a constant trade of shawls, hats, suits and dresses from a rack onstage. Director Beauchamp maneuvers them kinetically onstage, as when they line up in a slight V downstage and run in place to find Magwitch the convict (LaFamboise, with plenty of Cockney growling in his throat and gleaming in his eye); or create a chaos of grasping, bouncing domestic activity in the child-filled house of Pip’s London tutor (also LaFamboise).

The ensemble members make agile leaps between their sometimes opposite character types — LaFamboise plays both Magwitch and the savvy upper-crust lawyer Jaggers; Sullivan draws a striking contrast between her imperious Estella and her vivaciously sweet Biddy, Pip’s girl-next-door; Miles is fierce as mean Mrs. Joe and haunted as the moth-eaten Miss Havisham. Schofield’s most quietly sympathetic role is his gently burly Joe, Pip’s kindly brother-in-law; and Stewart gets in some great comic relief both as Pip’s wide-eyed, floppily jovial friend Herbert and as a memorably bad actor of Pip’s acquaintance.

As narrators, they trade off lines of prose, plaintively call out at Pip the voices of his inner conscience, and, in a nice touch, often narrate exposition about whomever they’re currently dressed as: “If only Pip could confide in Joe,” narrates Schofield mournfully, shamefully, while wearing the costume of the blacksmith, “but Joe was only a blacksmith, with coarse hands and thick boots.” The effect is an engaging fluidity between narration and character acting, one that draws us intimately and impressionistically into the very sensitive experience of Pip himself.

And as Pip, the long, lean, preternaturally expressive Reis is exceptional. His face, with its dual youth and agelessness, is supremely well-suited for Pip’s range from 6 into young adulthood, and his height lets him tower over Joe and Mrs. Joe even while playing a child, an interesting meta-cue of Pip’s precocious ambitions. Reis expresses Pip’s sensitivity in wonderfully physical ways, his hands running slowly over the surfaces of things, his upper lip curling open in fear as Magwitch threatens him. His frame, limbs and fingers register the slightest caution, fear or shame, as his superb Pip learns the vicissitudes, ironies and tragedies of the class system.

In the lull before the surge of Dickens’s most performed show, it’s good to get another taste of his social consciousness, with its acute observations about how injustice is felt by children, about how we commit our worst offenses “for the sake of the people we most despise.” And finally, true to Dickens, this beautifully wrought Great Expectations is also satisfyingly entertaining – poignant, funny, and exciting – even if we know where Pip’s expectations end.

Great Expectations, adapted from Charles Dickens by Gale Childs Daly. Directed by Meghann Beauchamp. Produced by New Hampshire Theatre Project, in Portsmouth, through December 4. Visit www.nhtheatreproject.org/.

“Twenty-four inches,” says one narrator. “That’s the width of the median strip on Preble Street at the corner of Marginal Way in Portland, Maine.” And then: “Thirty-two inches. That’s the width of an average man who stands on a median strip holding a cardboard sign, measured elbow to elbow.” Most of us have seen these men and women who stand in the street medians, holding signs and asking for money. A controversial 2013 Portland ban aimed to end the practice, then was twice ruled unconstitutional in federal courts. That ban, its history, and the community of “signers” it sought to restrict are the subject of a new theater work in progress, Anything Helps God Bless, by Snowlion Repertory Company. Collaboratively researched and written by Snowlion founders Al D’Andrea and MK Wolf and the show’s ensemble, Anything Helps gets its first audiences this weekend, in a workshop production at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater.

“Anything Helps God Bless is not just a story about signers,” explains another of the show’s narrators. “It’s a story about a city, and about a country where individuals have the freedom to challenge the city for their freedoms.” And Anything Helps certainly includes a range of people. The eleven ensemble members (Harlan Baker, Samuel Carlson, Cathy Counts, Callie Cox, Tom Handel, Patricia Mew, Chris Newcomb, Bob Pettee, Natasha Salvo, Pat Scully, and Eric Darrow Worthley) portray close to 100 different people: Culled from actual public record, we hear from City Councilor Ed Suslovic (the sponsor of the ordinance) and the rest of the Councilors; Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck; Zachary Heiden of the ACLU of Maine; dozens of concerned citizens; and, of course, the signers themselves.

The voices result in a rich range of perspectives. We see signers’ signs. We listen in on motorists’ calls to police dispatch about drunken signers, Councilors and citizens at city meetings and police incident reports. We hear signers discuss injuries, opioid addiction, abuse from motorists and signer etiquette. And we hear the self-reflection of the actors themselves, as they confront their own attitudes toward signers and prepare to interview them directly.

Snowlion Founders Al D’Andrea and Margit Ahlin had been wanting for some time to produce a piece about homelessness, said Ahlin (who writes as MK Wolfe), and as the legal battles over the ban unfolded, they saw the power of chronicling it theatrically, “to trace a story that touches on issues of giving, individuals’ rights, and how we all face people in need.” Meanwhile, the Maine Humanities Council sought grantees for projects treating the Fourteenth Amendment, which proved crucial in court arguments; Snowlion secured a grant, then launched into research.

Their project’s research and methodology are made explicit in the script. On stage, actors read from journals they were asked to keep, talk us through the formal and informal surveys they conducted, and they relate how they approached signers in medians, described their project, and asked permission to record and use their words.

“I hope that the play will help audience members to see the signers in a slightly different and more sympathetic light than they may have in the past,” said ensemble member Patricia Mew. Ahlin notes that at this stage of this show-in-progress, “the audience is the key final ingredient to creating this unique piece of drama,” and invites the public to attend, listen, and respond to this ongoing issue and conversation. Both performances will be followed by talk-backs with the ensemble and audience.

Anything Helps God Bless, a workshop performance. By Al D’Andrea, MK Wolfe, and the AHGB ensemble. Directed by Al D’Andrea. Produced by Snowlion Repertory Company, at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater, December 10 and 11. Visit www.snowlionrep.org/html/anything_helps.html.

The work of Charles Dickens is nearly omnipresent this time of the season, but what about the writer himself; what about Dickens the man? As it happens, the Englishman was a close friend and correspondent of Portland’s own illustrious writer, the nationally beloved poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And two Portland thespians bring that friendship to life, in a theatrical conversation between the two literary greats, An Evening with Longfellow and Dickens. The two-man show runs for one evening only at the Maine Historical Society, created and performed by, respectively, Daniel Noel and Andrew Harris.
What will we hear, when taken into the two writers’ confidence? Talk of their history, each other’s work, and even current events, says Harris. “For this performance we allow ourselves to return almost 'Marley-like' to former haunts,” he says. “Our audience, invited guests, are allowed to listen in on our perspective of the world today and for each of us to share what we enjoy of each other’s work.”
The “conversation,” which Noel and Harris first created and performed last winter, at the behest of MHS, is part scripted, using excerpts from the author’s work and letters, and part improvised, based on modern news that they believe might draw the men’s commentary. “You can imagine that in their respective afterlives they have each had a considerable interest over the past year in the ‘happenings’ in England and the U.S.,” remarks Harris, “so you can perhaps imagine what two Victorian gentlemen may have to say!”
Both Harris and Noel have already spent many an hour inhabiting their respective roles, in one-man shows and other theater works they’ve been performing for years, and both artists bring knowledge, intimacy and affection to the authors’ conversation. Harris has presented the character of Dickens around the state, in In the Company of Dickens. For his part, Noel researched, wrote, and acted in the 2007 play Longfellow: A Life in Words, created with an NEA grant to celebrate the bicentennial of the poet’s birth. To develop the work, Noel spent time in libraries and private collections, reading through Longfellow’s memoirs and correspondence.
The Maine Historical Society presents An Evening with Longfellow and Dickens as part of wider seasonal programming that also focuses on the men’s friendship; between December 16 and 23, Longfellow House will feature tours that are billed as exploring “the friendship between the man who is said to have ‘invented America’ and the man who is said to have ‘invented Christmas.’”
In An Evening with Longfellow and Dickens, audiences can look forward to a conversation that includes both the expected seasonal works — Dickens’ ultra-beloved A Christmas Carol; Longfellow’s poem Bells on Christmas Day, which became the well-known carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day — and some lesser known works. “I, as Dickens, have chosen a couple of poems from my friend's early work, which he himself was said to have thought he had neglected,” says Harris, naming Woods in Winter and Sunrise on The Hills as works that Dickens will praise.
Some points of conversation will not be on the table between the late greats, Harris jokes. “If you come to the event wanting a perspective on the afterlife from each of us, forget it, we are not letting you in on that; think more about making the most of your current existence and this life,” he advises. “I am sure my dear friend Longfellow would agree with me on that!”
Instead, expect the wit, nostalgia, and empathy for which both authors are loved, especially in this holiday season.
An Evening with Longfellow and Dickens, created and performed by Andrew Harris and Daniel Noel. Presented at the Maine Historical Society, Thursday, December 15, 5:30 pm. Visit www.mainehistory.org/programs_events.shtml.

After so much bad theater on the political stages this year, we might as well find solace in all the theatrical high points within the actual performance arts. Here we go!

To start, one of my favorite experiences of mingled human despair and beauty was Stupid F***ing Bird, Aaron Posner’s sly, smart, very funny riff on Chekhov’s The Seagull, at Mad Horse. Posner’s writing is both profane and profound, and Chris Price directed a superb ensemble of Brent Askari, Burke Brimmer, David Bliss, Shannon Campbell, James Herrera, Christine Louise Marshall and Casey Turner.

The year was especially fertile in Shakespeare, some of it in celebration of the First Folio tour. An especially subtle and poignant Shakespearean highlight was the Theater at Monmouth’s Henry V, with the exceptional Jake Loewenthal beautifully straddling the roguishness of youth and the wartime resoluteness of kingship. (Monmouth also delivered a lovely distilled Cyrano, bathed in the fond light nostalgia and starring an affecting Chris Holt, under Tess Van Horn’s direction.)

Another favorite lead bard performance was Ian Carlson’s Richard II, who looks into the void of his own reign and identity with excruciating nuance and physical poetry in Portland Shakespeare Company’s inaugural production, staged in the gorgeous nave of St Luke’s.

Also notable were the two bookends of mono-gendered Shakespeare tragedies, Luminous Productions’ all-male King Lear, directed by Dan Burson and starring Michael Howard, and Bare Portland’s all-female Macbeth, in St. Luke’s Cathedral, directed by Carmen-maria Mandley and James Patefield, with haunting original composition by the late Denis Nye (whose rare mind for theatrical composition will be missed by many).

And in a last Shakespeare pick, it was a delight to see JP Guimont back on stage, as part of a formidable team with Rob Cameron and Corey Gagne, in Kevin O’Leary’s new script for Luminous Productions, Roles of a Lifetime, about the men who made the Folio happen.

A more modern classic found deft interpretation in the University of Southern Maine’s breathtakingly acted student production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the directorial finale of William Steele’s 49-year tenure at USM. Steele’s fine cast delivered the fall-of-Rome dysfunction with rich physical nuance and emotional intelligence.

An exquisitely poetic new play came into being this year, through the workshop production and the then fully staged premiere of Carmen-maria Mandley’s The Ballad of Daphnis and Chloe. A lyrical, wise, and empathetic retelling of the ancient Greek myth of two young shepherds discovering love, Daphnis and Chloe was first read last spring in the Mad Horse incubator series By Local. Then, last summer, it received its first full production in the round of the beautiful ballroom of the Mechanics Hall, starring the marvelously paired Michael Dix Thomas and Shannon Campbell; their sensual, youthful candor was a delight.

Another strikingly lyrical production was Figures of Speech’s remarkable puppet staging of The Little Match Girl Passion, composer David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen story, at Bowdoin College, under the direction of the ensemble’s longtime artistic director, John Farrell. Lang’s intricate composition weaves the story’s text with minimalist renderings of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, and FOS gave the lead role to a delicate, fully-limbed Bunraku puppet, lent remarkably nuanced life by three puppeteers, along with compellingly elemental video projections by Derek Kimball.

Finally, we’ve all been fervently missing the work of Dramatic Repertory Company this season, so it’s wonderful that the company returned to the stage just this past month, with a workshop production of playwright Callie Kimball’s exceptional Sofonisba. Stay tuned for news about DRC’s upcoming full production, along with other theatrical highlights of 2017.

Let’s all take a deep breath now and look forward.

Offering an apropos start to 2017, Mad Horse continues its theatrical exploration of the dark and apocalyptic, with the dark “virtual wonderland” of The Nether (January 19–February 5). It’ll be followed by The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (March 23–April 9) and the acclaimed Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (May 4–21).

A special delight of the new year will be the return of Dramatic Repertory Company! The wonderful Keith Powell Beyland is back in the director’s chair to stage David Ives’ funny and erotic Venus in Fur (March 2–12), and it’s much to celebrate.

After starting its season with the comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (January 24–February 19), Portland Stage goes to the weird with Buyer and Cellar (February 28–March 26), a fiction about the true “private shopping mall” in Barbra Streisand’s basement. Later in the season comes Brenda Withers’ Clauder Competition winner String Around My Finger (April 4–23), and the Pulitzer-winning Disgraced (May 2–21).

Good Theater kicks off 2017 with the character-driven epistolary of Love Letters (January 4–Februrary 25); then stages two explorations of women returning to hometowns, The May Queen (January 25–February 26) and Horton Foote’s modern classic The Trip to Bountiful (March 29–April 30).

“Power, passion, and privilege” shape the season at the Theater at Monmouth, which in addition to Macbeth and Othello will stage Three Days of Rain, about an architect’s mysterious will; Molière’s The Learned Ladies; and Red Velvet, which tells of a black American in 1833 taking over the role of Othello in Covent Garden (all in summer repertory).

Over a dozen Shakespeare shows are woven together in an important new production by the newly formed Theater Ensemble of Color: The Others (January 13-15) presents a new formulation of the Bard, at SPACE Gallery. And Acorn’s Naked Shakespeare continues First Friday Bard scenes at Mechanics Hall.

This year Fenix Theater Company takes an exciting break from Shakespeare to present Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Elsewhere for classics, Portland Players brings out Romeo and Juliet (Portland Players, January 27–February 12) (along with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, March 24–June 4, and Rock of Ages, May 19–June 4). Pie Man Theatre Company opens 2017 at Mayo Street Arts with Shaw’s classic Arms and The Man (February 16–26) (and later presents the world premiere of Kevin O’Leary’s Lascaux, May 11–21, about the famous cave paintings).

Also at Mayo Street Arts come Puppet Cabarets on January 29 and March 25; a new Shoestring Puppet Theater adaptation of Peter Pan (March 17 and 18); and Bess Welden’s original play Legbala is a River, about a woman whose husband goes to treat Ebola patients in Africa (June 8–18).

Down in Portsmouth, the Players’ Ring offers an especially rich line-up, including Jean Genet’s The Maids (January 27–February 12); the cocaine-riddled Hollywood drama Hurlyburly (March 10–26); All the Way (April 21–May 7), about LBJ; its own Venus in Fur (May 12–29); and Compleat Female Beauty (June 2–18), about what happens a famous Elizabethan portrayer of female roles finds the rules changed to allow women onstage.

Also in Portsmouth, the New Hampshire Theatre Project stages an adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (January 13–29), as well as the super one-man show I Am My Own Wife (April 21–30), and a new multi-media show with animation and original jazz composition, The Adventures of Oliver Z. Wanderkook (June 16–25).

2017 offers plenty of musicals: Lyric presents Little Women (January 13–29), Spring Awakening (March 17–April 2), and Catch Me If You Can (June 2–18); and Maine State Music Theatre offers Always Patsy Cline (June 7–24), Guys and Dolls (June 28–July 18), Grease (July 19–August 5), and Disney’s Newsies (August 9–26), a David-and-Goliath story of the 1899 newsboy strike.

For the kids, The Children’s Museum and Theater of Maine stages The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (February) and The Little Mermaid (April).

In a show about kids, The Public Theatre in Lewiston puts on Under the Skin (January 27–February 5), about parent-child relationships; plus romantic follies in Wrong for Each Other (March 17–26) and nursing-home shenanigans in Ripcord (May 5–14).

The Footlights in Falmouth offers a variety of relationship-driven shows, including Kiss the Moon, Kiss the Sun (January 12–28); Shedding Light (February 2–11), about race and faith; the sex-comedy The Naked Truth (February 23–March 11); Right Place, Right Time (March 23–April 1), about a marriage of convenience; and a musical about pregnancy, Baby Bumps (May 4–20).

Finally, Snowlion Repertorty’s socially-driven theater project about panhandlers, Anything Helps God Bless, which just had its workshop production, is scheduled to premiere in full in the fall of 2017. Here’s to more good work to help us navigate the state of things in the new year.

In her 26 years living in Portland, René Johnson says, she remembers seeing only one person of color performing Shakespeare on stage here. And that one performer, she says, was herself.

That’s one reason why Johnson, founder and Creative Artistic Director of the Theater Ensemble of Color, chose Shakespeare for the company’s first fully produced show. The Others is a multicultural, multiethnic ensemble production that interweaves scenes from Shakespeare’s works, adapted by Carmen-maria Mandley (who also directs) and billed as “a compilation of slaves, strumpets, bastards, shrews, whores, monsters, witches, aliens and infidels.” Performed by an 11-member ensemble — of which ten are performers of color — from the ages of six to sixty-seven, The Others runs this weekend at SPACE Gallery.

The Theater Ensemble of Color (or TEoC, pronounced “TEE-ock”) began as Johnson, whose work at the Celebration Barn, in South Paris, was brought into contact with performers of color who, she saw, weren’t getting the work offered their white counterparts.

“Like me, they were getting offers to play non-speaking, dehumanizing roles, in stories that didn’t resemble the lives that we know,” says Johnson. “The slave/maid/mammy, the doo-wop girl or the angry black victim was all that was expected of me to know how to play.” Frustration grew to fury, she says, and in 2014 she began conceiving TEoC, with the mission of strengthening communities through performance, education, and activism.

The TEoC’s upcoming production interweaves scenes from over a dozen Shakespeare shows, centering — often with wicked slapstick humor — on characters (each actor plays several) who experience feelings of otherness, whether by virtue of race, religion, gender, or disability.

At a rehearsal last week, performers bellowed epithets of otherness — “Slave!” “Strumpet!” “Bastard!” — as Bridgette Kelly wove among them delivering Shylock’s most famous monologue (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”), before Prospero (Rodney Mashia) and his slave Caliban (David Thete) stalked and wished each other ill. Later came a sassily kinetic duel between Kate (Russell Kaback) and Petruchio (Mario Roberge-Reyes), filled with deliciously silly and suggestive stage combat. Portia (Nicole Mokeme) and another Shylock (Khalil LeSaldo) maneuvered with taut intelligence over the Jew’s bond, and Richard III (Jason Cunningham) rued his disfigurement. Casting transcends convention: a woman (Kelly) plays Desdemona’s father while a man plays Desdemona (Dontavis Hines); the role of Hermione is doubled into two performers (Kelly and Mokeme), who elegantly slip in and out of unison. (The ensemble also includes Christina Richardson and Delaney Tucker).

For TEoC to bring so many performers of color, including some new to acting, into Portland’s artistic conversation is important for both art and community — especially, Johnson notes, at this contentious political moment fraught with online echo chambers.

“As Creative Artistic Director,” she says, “my goal is to create opportunities for Maine families to be entertained by, educated by and involved with our neighbors the same way – and hopefully more than – we are by our technology.”

Actors agree. “Performing means everything to me, especially in the era that we are living in,” says actor Thete, who is also a founder of Kesho Wazo, a group of over 35 local activists under 21 dedicated to anti-hate work. “There are many young men whose crafts and skills aren’t being highlighted, when it comes to the art scene in Maine. Being part of this production, I feel like I get to shine a light on the other young kids like me who are being boxed. I hope the Portland audience will support local young artists and come to more events because the youth is very active. We have so much to offer!”

Listening and engaging beyond what’s familiar might be the surest way to start reframing our Others as part of ourselves.

The Others, adapted by Carmen-maria Mandley from William Shakespeare. | Directed by Carmen-maria Mandley. Produced by the Theater Ensemble of Color of the Celebration Barn Theater | $15 adv, $20 day of | Jan 13–15 at SPACE Gallery | http://teoc-maine.weebly.com.

The line between the real and the virtual is blurring, and Jennifer Haley takes it a leap further in The Nether: she imagines a future in which customers act out, through virtual avatars, urges that are socially taboo in the “real” world. But is one world really more “real” than the other? Are ugly virtual acts morally defensible? Under the finely tuned direction of Christine Louise Marshall, Mad Horse stages a strikingly designed, hauntingly performed exploration of technology and human need.

The “real” world of The Nether is one of bleak cyber-Brutalist lines and palette: dark concrete; silver-gray chairs; a stainless steel table with inset digital tablet. A black-clad investigator, Morris (Janice Gardner), separately interrogates two men in gray: Sims (Paul Haley), with an aristocratic face, bearing, and arrogance, is the creator and host of “The Hideaway,” a virtual realm for “opportunity outside of consequence,” of which Doyle (Tim Ferrell) is an obsessively loyal customer.

In a nicely staged contrast to this starkness, The Hideaway is a Victorian heaven of lovely analogue objects, tailored clothes, and beautiful people, all glazed in clear, warm light. Sims appears here as “Papa”; his favorite “child” is Iris (Maiya Koloski), in white petticoats, ribbons, and perfect dark ringlets. Enter Woodnut (Nick Schroeder, a writer for this newspaper), a first-time customer who develops his own special affinity for Iris.

As we alternate between worlds, Mad Horse cannily emphasizes both the appeal of the virtual world’s luxury and the physical world’s dearth of it. The interrogation scenes (though sometimes a little rhetorical or expository) provide fascinating moments with the faces of men straining to contain their emotions — shifting disdain, fear, shame, and grief — acted with magnificent restraint and nuance by Haley and Ferrell. Similar emotions also pass the face of their interrogator, in time, and Gardner does particularly fine work as Morris’s own motivations prove less certain, more complex.

In the picture-perfect Hideaway, Haley and Koloski conjure a disarmingly complex intimacy, with the power dynamic of father and daughter, the intelligent mutual awareness of lovers, and the no-nonsense candor of business associates. Watch Papa scold Iris; watch her happily lay her head in the crook of his arm; watch her shift from easy affection, draped around his neck, to workaday flatness when a bell signals a customer. Haley navigates Papa’s complexities with riveting intelligence and empathy; watch Papa’s look of mingled surprise, amusement, love, and professional curiosity to hear Iris say, as prelude to a birthday request, “I’ve never asked you for anything, have I?”

And young Koloski is so good that she’s downright spooky, with her Iris’s childlike alacrity, her watchful depth of feeling, and an eerily beyond-her-age intelligence that sometimes flickers, sometimes floodlights through her gaze. Watch her stroke a toy rabbit and quietly hypnotize Woodnut, who is, in Schroeder’s deft hands, awash with awe, alarm, and arousal. In one taut scene, Iris teaches him jacks, and the more his hands master the virtual but tactile game, the more his lips part in several kinds of excitement.

Indeed, how gorgeously, achingly sensual is this virtual world: Woodnut in ivory pinstripes with a bouquet of pink peonies. Papa in chocolate brown, handing Woodnut a cognac; Woodnut’s awed face, as he swirls the glass, lit with golden reflections of light and liquor. At the heart of The Nether, finally, is a longing for the tangible, the “real” — a record with real grooves, a real poplar tree, a “real” connection. This human need, as we see in Mad Horse’s exquisitely wrought production, one way or the other drives the pulse of any world.

The Nether, by Jennifer Haley | Directed by Christine Louise Marshall. Produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company, 24 Mosher St., in South Portland | Through February 5 | http://www.madhorse.com/

The powerless have a complicated relationship with power in Jean Genet’s 1947 Absurdist drama The Maids: Claire and Solange both hate Madame and love her, aspire to both kill and be her. Genet’s unnerving look at class, power, and Otherness never really gets old, and Gary Locke directs an exquisitely acted production at The Players’ Ring, starring the exceptional Seacoast-area actors Whitney Smith and Constance Witman.

Genet, the orphaned homosexual son of a prostitute and wrongly accused as a child of theft, soon became an actual thief, and spent time in and out of prison. His entire experience was concerned with power, belonging, and the sense of being an outsider despised by the bourgeois class. In The Maids, while Madame (Nancy Pearson) is away, maids and sisters Claire (Smith) and Solange (Witman)playact their rage and self-loathing in stylized, sadomasochistic rituals. Each woman takes a turn as “Madame” and as each other, in a murderous storyline in which personas and reality become increasingly convoluted.

In the Players’ Ring beautifully staged production, Madame’s bedroom – the site of the rituals – is simple Old World elegance, with bouquets, dressing screens, aand vanity table of select shiny things. Prominent center stage is a low, pearl-colored bed, a quietly luminous symbol of the eroticism implicit in power, and a wide slatted window upstage, backlit in blue or red, sometimes reveals a dark silhouette of Monsieur – the Man.  

Smith and Witman give well-paired performances of startling nuance, grace, and empathy. Smith’s Claire, the curvier younger sister, trills and laughs soars before stopping on a dime of darkness. She is the first to play Madame, and Smith gives her rouged “Madame” an exaggerated sonorousness and grandiosity. As the elder sister, Witman, with her compact frame and angular face, given a pallor and darkness under her eyes, is sharper, more restrained, with a controlled fury that feels as ancient and hard as a diamond.

The two are in near-constant motion and contact with Madame’s lovely things, movements in which every action carries a conscious weight – a hand mirror tossed to the bed, a dress smoothed. They immerse in their playworld with the intensity of children, breaking character only occasionally. Their personas, in constant flux, slip between that of “Madame,” “Claire,” or “Solange” and each woman’s “own” voice. “Get my necklace!” demands Claire as Madame, and immediately afterward, “Hurry, we won’t have time before she gets home!”

When Madame is in the room, her own melodrama and condescension, in Pearson’s hands, show us how accurate are her servants’ impressions. We can also see, in exacting physical work, how Claire and Solange have incorporated her gestures – cheeks blown in impatience, fingers combing the air as she speaks – not just into their impressions, but into their “own” personas. Such scenes also offer canny little moments of humor, in the sisters’ eyes to each other behind the back of Madame, being their “real” selves. And yet even these “real” selves are defined, inescapably, chillingly, against Madame.

I’ve seen The Maids breathtakingly performed with more garish trappings of makeup and costumes (and all-male casting, something Genet himself suggested), which edged its grotesquerie closer to horror and added a level of abstraction to its protagonists. This fine Players’ Ring production, with its superb actors’ fascinating, devastating nuance, lets us in closer to the women as women, not just as members of a class. Its scariness pivots on how much like us, or close to us, these enraged servants might be.

The Maids, by Jean Genet. Directed by Gary Locke. Produced by Fearon Productions, at the Players’ Ring, through February 12. Visit www.playersring.org.  

There are four desks in the office world of The May Queen, a “pod” in Kingston, New York’s Vallor Group Insurance Agency, and the first one you’ll notice belongs to middle-aged Zumba enthusiast Gail (Laura Houck) – a Hawaiian heaven of grass skirt and hula dolls. The desk where Mike (Rob Cameron) works, when he’s not suspended, is a minor mess of homage to New York sports teams and fast food trash. Of the other two desks, one belongs to uptight night school student Dave (Thomas Ian Campbell), and the other awaits the temp who will plunge the pod into chaos: Jen (Abbie Killeen), once the “May Queen” of Kingston High, has come back to her hometown. Her life is now a source of gossip, rivalry, and judgment by her co-workers in The May Queen, at Good Theater. Brian P. Allen directs a vividly appointed and snappily performed production of Molly Smith Metzler’s somewhat small-minded comedy about small-town loyalties and envies, old wounds, and nostalgia.

As Gail, Dave, and Mike gossip behind the back of their hated young manager, Nicole (Hannah Elaine Perry), Good Theater’s actors play up the broadly comedic types in vibrant, deftly timed sitcom-ical fashion. Perry’s nicely drawn Nicole clicks around in heels with a gait and bitchery so stilted that you might actually feel bad for this manager so out of her depth with her defiant subordinates. Houck’s ebullient, frosted-blonde Gail, wearing a series of sweater-robes, speaks in mellifluous self-help with a hard edge: “Stop being a pussy,” she commands anxious Dave, hands already rubbing his shoulders, “and get a massage.” Pent-up Dave, in high-waisted chinos, could use one; Campbell somehow gets his face incredibly red, as he clenches his mouth, mutters, and stalks around tetchily. Finally, Cameron can act a mean bro when he wants to, and his alpha-joker Mike, much adored by his co-workers – and who we first see wasted at 9 a.m. – is a silver-edition bro, with loud, insult-comedic charisma. He breaks all the rules trying to talk to unwilling Jen.

It’s through Jen’s eyes that we watch the office’s sometimes ugly provincialism. Killeen, measured and empathetic, spends much of the first scenes playing her so low that Jen seems to want to disappear into herself; she watches and listens with refreshing wryness and quiet, her mouth slightly agape as if in appalled stupefaction. Progressively provoked by her co-workers’ high-school-like behaviors, she’s finally drawn into what becomes a long and stunningly delivered monologue of stress, exasperation, and glimpses of her life since being a momentary high school luminary.

Turns and reveals ensue, and as they do, the cast gamely shifts the tone; Allen’s production is tight, bright, and smartly performed. It is better than the script itself, which uses its more serious reveals to explain, excuse, and even celebrate Mike’s out-of-bounds behaviors, but doesn’t investigate them with particular nuance. The same could be said about Jen’s own secrets, from which the script retreats as if from something that should not be spoken about. And Mike’s eventual triumph against Nicole – the bullying pleasure he takes in humiliating a younger female boss who has censored him for, after all, stalking a woman and being drunk at the workplace – might give us pause at this particular political moment.

Still, Good Theater’s plucky, talented cast pushes against the limits of the script. Its May Queen delivers a colorful if contentious comedy with deep doses of pathos, as it considers the lure and staying power of the past.

The May Queen, by Molly Smith Metzler. Directed by Brian P. Allen. Produced by Good Theater, at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, through February 26. Visit www.goodtheater.com.  

Are the nonstop national news alerts making you anxious, desperate, and easily triggered into dread and nausea? Well, you’ve got nothing on Greg (Mark Rubin) – he’s up for tenure. He and his wife Emily (Heather Perry Weafer) are about to host tenure committee heavy-hitter Professor Stilton (Lisa Muller-Jones) for cocktails, and his career depends on absolutely nothing going wrong. What could possibly go wrong? Ever so much, in Portland writer and actor Brent Askari’s giddily uncouth farce Cocktails and Travails, winner of the 2015 Neil Simon Festival National New Play Contest. Christopher Price directs a boisterous production with a smart, very game cast, at the Theater Project.

How many times can a new person think they’re the only one spiking the punch? A bunch of times, as it turns out, and it somehow keeps being funny. Askari’s is not a bedroom farce but a farce of food and inedibles, alcohol, and hi-lo cultural divides – cheese curls, coconut massage oil, whether mixed nuts may be served in their tin. Greg and Emily subscribe to both the Atlantic and People, and the décor of their apartment itself is somehow a marriage of starter academic class – dark green walls and ruddy wood, modern art, an Asian table – and casual low-brow – a frumpy gray couch, rainbow striped blanket, lots of pink flowers.

The constellation of the show’s characters and relationships are true to classic formulations of farce. As Greg and Emily, Rubin and Weafer do a super job both complimenting and ramping each other up; we see their differences even in the manner in which each pours vodka into the punch. Rubin’s fiercely insecure, buttoned-up Greg is impossibly taut, jittery, in constant seized motion, while Emily, in flowing clothes, is maternal, competent, and warmly measured, but with her own limits and exasperation. The situation is tenuous even before anybody uninvited shows up.

Which naturally they will. With the unexpected arrival of Greg’s deadbeat brother Dylan (Keith Anctil), stubbly in baggy gray everything, I felt actual panic on Greg’s behalf. Anctil’s in fine comic form playing Dylan’s disastrously misguided fraternal affections as earnest and good-natured; and he’s in good company with the marvelously brash Kate O’Neill as fellow tenure-deterrent Margaret, Emily’s loud, red-haired, low-brow, eternally wronged mom.

And what of the feared Sphynx-ish historian, Professor Stilton? Muller-Jones has her enter with a bored sideways non-smile that shows you exactly how she feels about being there, and we see that Greg had every reason to be paranoid about being judged. In large tortoise-shell frames and a blazer, Muller-Jones’s Professor perfectly exudes the wry, quietly disinterested superiority of someone confident in their power. Her role requires a lot of reaction and nuanced comedy over the long haul, and she misses not a moment as she quietly grows queasier and more confused. Later, when she stumbles getting up from the couch, she slurs, with priceless dignity, “Tripped.”

Askari’s script has plenty of fun verbal moments that highlight failures of verbality, as Greg fakes intellectual conversation (“Some theses are flawed and boring, but this one was flawed and interesting”) or describes the as-yet-nonexistent hors-d’oeuvres (“They look like food. Like little food”). And the physical gags are gleefully, unapologetically crass. Pacing careens from the get-go, and though things slow a bit in the second act, the farce sustains the momentum of its low-brow hijinks.

And the low-brow eventually proves useful, of course, in rectifying the wreckage it has caused for Greg. Perhaps that will prove true on the larger cultural stage as well. I wouldn’t count on it, but we still do need to laugh.

Cocktails and Travails, by Brent Askari. Directed by Christopher Price. Produced by the Theater Project, in Brunswick, through February 12. Visit www.theaterproject.com.

Just how sweet and honorable is it to go to die for one’s country? George Bernard Shaw looked askance at such romantic notions in Arms and the Man, which tells of how war-dazzled young Raina falls for enemy soldier Captain Bluntschli, a jaded, pragmatic soldier-for-hire. Pie Man Theatre Company presents the classic comedy at Mayo Street Arts, under the direction of Stephanie Ross.

Staged intimately in the round, the show opens in the bedroom of well-off Raina (Emily Grotz), who marvels with her mother (Patricia Mew) over the military braveries of her beloved Sergius. Later, alone, she has a gun pointed at her by Bluntschli (Joshua Brassard), a Swiss soldier fighting for the Serbs, who is looking for a place to hide. She mocks his lack of soldierly grandeur; he mocks her syrupy naivete. Yet Raina decides to help him, and despite — or because of — the two’s quite unromantic squabbling, something between them is lit.

Grotz’s Raina has an expressive heart-shaped face and long, graceful limbs, and her every sinew moves in service of the high-flown. She’s supple and sonorous as she thrills and declaims, and her mellifluous, glamorous indignation at Bluntschli contrasts nicely with Brassard’s haggard stooping, his gaze and voice seem to hold ache and scraped exhaustion both physical and spiritual. In their crucial first scene together, they make high, vividly rancorous sport of their mutual exasperation. I’d like to see more of the moment — granted, a fleeting one — when she decides to risk hiding him.

The next day, Sergius returns to Raina from battle, and Cameron Foley gives him the smarmy self-righteous swagger of a bantam cock as he panders to Raina’s mother and father (Howard Rosenfield). But later, as he comes on to the cynical maid Louka (Allison Kelly), he shows his real, lecherous self, and Foley shifts gears admirably, bringing the volume down and the valance up. In Kelly’s hands, Louka poses a bewitchingly dark, subtle foil to Raina’s bright posturing, with her disdainful sidelong second looks and infinitesimal sneers. She scorns her fiancé, fellow servant Nicola (Kyle Aarons, who gives the servant’s priggishness a sympathetic dignity), but also shows an interesting ambivalence when he finally releases her to her higher aspirations.

Pie Man’s production design gestures at the 19th-century period and its stations, but also contains a few odd anachronistic touches. Raina’s father’s jacket — red velvet, many-zippered — seems plucked from the 1970s; a scene furnished with upper-class wicker inexplicably finds the table set with suburban-style plastic cups — maybe a nod at the provincialism of these self-regarding “sophisticates,” but still a little puzzling. Director Ross also makes a few cute slapstick comic strokes, with a big teddy bear, that perhaps overshoot Shaw’s comedic flavor.

But Shaw’s comedy is certainly big and full of bombast, and the show excels at this. What we might see a touch more of is the lower, more knowing levels, the cracks in the bombast. We see it in Louka’s scenes with Sergius, played deliciously low and dirty, and Grotz does drop what Bluntschli calls Raina’s “thrilling voice” when it counts, at the climax. I’d love to see a few hints of the real Raina even before then, a few more little glimpses of how his candor beguiles her before she understands why.

Like Raina, we surely feel the most ardor for the lover who sees through our bullshit and calls us on it. Perhaps love of country, at its finest, is no less clear-eyed? Suffice it to say that Shaw’s critique isn’t ready for the dustbin just yet.

Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Stephanie Ross. Produced by Pie Man Theatre Company | through February 26 at Mayo Street Arts, 10 Mayo St., Portland | www.piemantheatre.org 

Some of the most acute and devastating insights on race in America came from African-American writer James Baldwin. He grew up in Harlem, moved to Paris to flee racism, and returned for a time during the American Civil Rights Movement; his analysis of the nation has the depth of a thinker who is at once native son and outsider. Director Raoul Peck places Baldwin at the center of a new film, I Am Not Your Negro, which screens at the Portland Museum of Art this weekend. In this searing, elegantly crafted documentary, Peck sets Baldwin’s life and ideas against imagery from the nation’s political history and popular culture, both celebrating the writer and using him as a lens to consider our long and continued racial wounds.

Peck frames I Am Not Your Negro around an unfinished project of Baldwin’s, begun in 1979, to examine America through the lives of three close friends: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Baldwin got as far as 30 pages of notes toward the project, titled Remember This House. Peck lets Baldwin’s own words drive the film, carefully excerpting from notes, letters, and essays (read by a subdued, reverent Samuel L. Jackson), and including dazzling footage of Baldwin himself, speaking at debates and on television.

As B-roll to Baldwin, Peck assembles an extraordinary body of archival material — of the three murdered leaders, segregationists, black marchers, politicians, and more.  Sometimes Peck follows the lead of Baldwin’s words, and sometimes he elaborates pointedly: As Baldwin talks about the disconnect between “America's moral stance and public life,” we see a vapidly smiling white family shopping in a shiny 1960's supermarket. As Baldwin talks about the "corpses of your brothers and sisters" piling up, we see smiling school portraits of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.

Peck also draws cannily from popular culture. We see cuts from films and performances that are part of Baldwin’s analysis — heroism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin versus in Stagecoach; the tonal America of Gary Cooper and Doris Day versus that of Ray Charles. We see old ads featuring subservient blacks with bulging eyes, and a white woman bemoaning her daughters’ black boyfriends on a talk show. We even see the banalities of “The Gong Show,” while Baldwin memorably observes, "To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality." 

Particularly penetrating are Baldwin’s reflections about the psyche of the subjugator, about the terror and damage at his core. "You cannot lynch me and keep me in the ghetto without becoming something monstrous yourselves," we hear, as Peck shows us photos of hung black men. And Baldwin, live in debate: “If you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it. If I am not a nigger here, and you invented him — you, the American people, invented him — then you've got to figure out why.”

And the expressive nuance of Baldwin’s delivery is arresting — his sad glance down or tired look away, the unexpected warmth of a grin, his hands come suddenly alive, how he wistfully draws out an s. At times, he projects almost embarrassment for white America. At times, almost pity. 

Peck’s film is a revelation of Baldwin’s spirit and a continuation of his formidable cultural synthesis. The filmmaker asks us to by turns witness, contemplate, condemn, praise, and, above all, to look. "Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin writes, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced." I Am Not Your Negro brings Baldwin’s words into a present America that still desperately, urgently needs to hear them.

I Am Not Your Negro | Written by James Baldwin. Directed by Raoul Peck. Screens at the Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Sq., Portland | Fri March 10, 2 & 6:30 p.m.; Sun March 12 11:30 a.m., 2 & 5 p.m. | $8 | www.portlandmuseum.org/events/movies