Play by Play: December 12, 2009

By JEFFREY GANTZ | December 9, 2009

SLEEP NO MORE | The second entry in the American Repertory Theater's mini-season of revisionist Shakespeare is presented by the London troupe Punchdrunk at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline Village; entering as part of a group, you're handed a white mask and invited to explore the four floors of the environment in any way you choose. The mood is set by World War II ballads and Bernard Herrmann's music from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and by the dim lighting and the creepy venue. Everyone's experience will be different; ours included the banquet in the school auditorium, a strobe-lit Black Sabbath in the basement, a stroll through Birnam Wood, and an unsettling version of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene where she's attended by a nurse in a hospital ward. | Old Lincoln School, 194 Boylston St, Brookline Village | 617.547.8300 | Through January 3 | Curtain 7 + 7:20 + 7:40 pm Tues-Thurs [no Christmas Eve] + Sun | 7:20 + 7:40 + 8 pm Fri-Sat [no Christmas Day] | $35-$39

TRU GRACE | Underground Railway Theater presents a holiday double bill of Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice and Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. Both plays are set in the 1930s. In the first, nice Jewish girl Shirley's great voice lands her the plum role in the school play — which just happens to be a Nativity play; in the second, Truman recalls making fruitcakes with his older cousin and exchanging kites as presents and how the two of them treated themselves (and the family dog, Queenie) to the whiskey left over from the fruitcakes. Wesley Savick directs. | Central Square Theater, 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 866.811.4111 | Through December 27 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed [December 23] + Thurs [December 10] | 8 pm Fri [no Christmas Day] | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7 pm [evening December 27] Sun | $35; $25 seniors; $20 students; $15 children

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ARTICLES BY JEFFREY GANTZ

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A dead tree hanging upside down overhead, with a spotlight slowly circling it. A piano on stilts on one side of the stage, an ice sculpture's worth of bubble wrap on the other.

HANDEL AND HAYDN'S PURCELL | February 04, 2013
Set, rather confusingly, in Mexico and Peru, the 1695 semi-opera The Indian Queen is as contorted in its plot as any real opera.

REVIEW: MAHLER ON THE COUCH | November 27, 2012
Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.