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Bloody, edgy, original, iambic — this summer’s theater line-up fits some fine descriptors. Here are some of my picks:
In the summer months, the First Friday social/aesthetic scene can be a bit overstimulating, so it’s the perfect time for those fang-witted hawkers of the B-grade, Running Over Productions, to stage the beatnik horror tale of one busboy/artist’s chilling discovery: that making the art scene really does require blood, sweat and tears, and that the truly operative fluid is the blood. After taking artistic inspiration from the death of a neighbor’s pet, Walter Paisley makes it to the top of the too-hip heap. But can he stay there? Based on a Roger Corman flick, the tongue-in-bitten-cheek Bucket of Blood will run at the eerie urban-pastoral Presumpscot Grange Hall. It’s theater on the campy edge, and with sweet Grange ladies in the basement offering at least three kinds of pie (July 20-29; call 207.653.8898 or 207.409.3949).
Theatrical edge isn’t limited to gore and sent-up art worlds this summer. You can also lurch, spin, and stutter through the verbal manipulations of Albee and Mamet, made all the more disquieting because they will be performed simultaneously. Two Lights Theatre Ensemble will boldly entwine The Zoo Story and The Duck Variations, featuring Graham Allen and Sean Demers, at the Portland Performing Arts Center’s Studio Theater (July 13-23; visit www.twolights.org). In a more dissolute and heroin-chic vein, the Ogunquit Playhouse will offer the doom and eros of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret (July 10-22; call 207.646.5511). If adult situations are your scene, you might also enjoy taking a cue from The Penis Responds. The cunningly titled series of monologues runs in Portsmouth’s West End Studio Theater (through June 18) and then at Portland Stage Company (June 23-July 9; call 603.430.0770). And finally, if you missed the more intellectual yet relentlessly funny sharpness of Mad Horse’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead this spring, you have one more chance to see a fine production of one of the best comedies ever (August 17-20; call 207.730.2389).
New and homegrown works will also play into the summer’s theatrical shenanigans. Six months after its debut production, Kevin O’Leary’s fledgling Bath company, The Lanyard, is back with the world premiere of A Feeling of Family. Written by New York playwright Sid Ross, the comedy-drama presents a therapist who becomes dangerously immersed in the trauma of the family he treats (August 2-5 at the Chocolate Church; call 207.773.2727).
The actor-activists of ROil are going on the road with their “Exchange for Change.” They’ll bring several youth theater veterans from the Riverton Park public housing project down to Baton Rouge for a theater workshop youth displaced by Katrina. They’ll create and perform an original play, which they’ll then bring back to Maine at a mid-August date to be announced (visit www.roilnow.com).
And the Winter Harbor Theatre Company is curating another installment in the series of political revues that has also included Letters to Ohio and Letters to Katrina. Artists from New York, LA, Boston, and Maine will perform original songs, scenes, and monologues, as a response to the war in Iraq, at the St. Lawrence (June 26-29; call 207.775.5568).
