Boston Spotlight: January 2006

Now that the seasonal fluff has dissipated, Boston’s two major theatrical institutions — the Huntington Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre — are going head to head with offerings that couldn’t be more prototypical. The Huntington has brought in TV star Michael T. Weiss to star as the dastardly seducer Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 shocker Les Liaisons Dangereuses, (January 6-February 6) Meanwhile, the ART is hosting two experimental works. On its main stage is Imago Theatre director Jerry Mouawad’s rendition of Sartre’s No Exit, in which a home team of ART’s top resident actors — Remo Airaldi, Will LeBow, Karen MacDonald, and Paula Plum — must navigate the interpersonal politics of hell while trying to keep their footing atop a tilting platform (January 7-29); while in the satellite Zero Arrow blackbox, one can watch Home Movies, Everett Dance Theatre’s multidisciplinary exploration of American family life today (January 10-15).

Elsewhere around town, Lyric Stage is hosting Steve Martin’s adaptation of the 1920 German farce The Underpants (January 6 -February 4); the Celtic specialists at Súgán are putting on Aidan Dooley’s solo show Tom Crean – Antarctic Explorer (January 25-February 11); and the Speakeasy Stage introduces Boston to Five by Tenn, a group of recently discovered Tennessee Williams one-acts (January 27-February 25). Shows on tour include the musical Little Women (with Maureen McGovern as Marmee) at the Opera House (January 10-22) and Hamlet as interpreted by the Aquila Theatre Company at the Cutler Majestic (January 19-21).

Meanwhile, the Boston Center for the Arts is, as always, a font of alternative fare, serving up Jess Martin’s Home, an investigation of gender identity presented by Queer Soup (January 3- February 4), and the African American Theatre Festival, which is capped by the premiere of Jacqui Parker’s Dark as a Thousand Midnights (January 10-22). My Fair Heathen Productions — a Boston/New York collective — is presenting Charlotte the Destroyer, about a children’s book writer hitting the skids (January 11-21). Boston Playwrights Theater is home to both Eliza Wyatt’s Flowers of Red, about young peace activists in Gaza, (January 5-22), and Lyralen Kaye’s Catholic family drama They Named Us Mary (January 26-February 12).

In the suburbs, Lowell’s Merrimack Rep hosts Ann Randolph’s solo show Squeeze Box (through January 22); Stoneham Theatre stages Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (January 12-19); and the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown is mounting Frozen, Bryony Lavery’s chilling study of a serial killer (January 22-February 12). In western Massachusetts, the dazzling new ’62 Center at Williams College hosts Sonic Youth and Japanther in the puppet rock-opera Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty (January 13-14).

Moving on to Rhode Island, Trinity Rep finishes up its run of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, a study of inter-cultural conflict by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (through January 8), followed by a production of Hamlet in which Stephen Thorne assumes the title role, Joe Wilson, Jr. plays Horatio, and — in a novel twist — Janice Duclos plays Polonius (January 27-March 5). Meanwhile, the Gamm Theatre in nearby Pawtucket presents Martin McDonagh’s blacker-than-black comedy The Lonesome West (January 26-February 26).

In Connecticut, Hartford Stage is reprising the Long Wharf production of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (January 5-February 5) even as Long Wharf embarks on Private Lives, with Broadway star Tom Hewitt as the excoriating Elyot Chase (January 11-February 5). Also in New Haven, Yale Rep presents The People Next Door, a 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival hit by Henry Adam about a British slacker whose relatively tidy little life is turned upside-down when he’s roped into a covert counter-terrorism campaign (January 13-February 4).