Boston Spotlight: October 2006

The weather may be cooling, but the theater scene is just starting to heat up. One production fueling high hopes is the Huntington Theatre Company’s world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s, Mauritius, at the Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts (October 6-November 12). It’s about a pair of sisters at odds — and possibly in danger — over the disposition of a book of extremely rare stamps. This philatelic comedy wowed attendees of the Huntington’s Breaking Ground Festival of New Play Readings last spring.

The BCA’s black boxes are busily booked as usual. The Animus Ensemble promises a “gay twist” on Little Shop of Horrors (October 6-21). What that will consist is anyone’s guess — Animus’s last production, a transgendered take on Once upon a Mattress, was ingenious — but this much has been revealed: Audrey II will consist, not of a botanical puppet, but of a sextet of writhing dancers (think Pilobolus).

The Theatre Offensive takes over part of the BCA complex for its 15th Annual Out On the Edge Festival (October 19-November 11). This year’s selections include the premiere of MIT professor Thomas Defrantz’s revue Queer Theory: A Musical Travesty; Los Big Names with Marga Gomez; Nut/Cracked, a jazzed-up ballet starring David Parker and the Bang Group; and Paul Zaloom presenting a political satire, The Mother of All Enemies.

Meanwhile, three recent Off-Broadway hits come to town: Zeitgeist Stage Company tackles Stuff Happens (October 20-November 11), the timely David Hare play that blows the lid off back-room warmongering. Rounding out the month at the BCA, Company One embarks on its eighth season with After Ashley (October 26-November 18), Gina Gionfriddo’s critically acclaimed examination of the media’s fascination with victims. The Lyric Stage offers Heather Raffo’s multi-character solo show 9 Parts of Desire (October 20-November 18), about the plight of women trying to survive in a war zone.

Productions on the fringe include By the Bog of Cats… by Marina Carr at the tiny Devanaughn Theatre (October 12-29), which melds Irish realism — in particular, the hardscrabble life of itinerant “tinkers” — with the harrowing tale of Medea, and the Playwrights’ Theatre’s world premiere of First Blush (October 12-22), a “serio-comedy” by recent grad Amy Adler about two young couples whose lives keep intersecting.

Fanning out from town, the highly regarded Actors’ Shakespeare Project kicks off its third season in Dorchester with Hamlet (Strand Theatre, October 12 – November 5), starring company founder Benjamin Evett and directed by New Rep’s Rick Lombardo.
The Stoneham Theatre mounts Mark Brown’s clever condensation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (October 19-November 5), and Beverly’s North Shore Music Theatre promises a larger-than-life, in-the-round production of the hit Broadway musical Hairspray (October 24-November 12).

Never one to sugarcoat children’s fare, Wheelock Family Theatre stages Louis Sachar’s stage adaptation of his gritty YA novel, Holes (October 27-November 6), about a reform school whose premise is: “If you take a bad boy, and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy…”

The Berkshires, so busy in summer, are all but shuttered, except for one last gasp: Sandy Duncan starring in the Barrington Stage Company’s concert version of Mame (October 4-15). Meanwhile, the curtain-closer for Shakespeare & Company’s summer season is Kerfol (October 19-29), a lurid ghost story by Edith Wharton, augmented by a reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Cape Cod is winding down, too. The Provincetown Theatre ends its season with Meryl Cohn’s “lesbian dramedy” Naked with Fruit (October 7-14), and the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre with a world-premiere staging of D. H. Lawrence’s The Captain’s Doll (October 12-November 5), adapted and directed by WHAT co-founder Jeff Zinn.