The Memory of Salt, a play written by Lisa Maurizio, associate professor of classical and medieval studies at Bates College, will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 21 and 22, in the college’s Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the Bates dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the Bates gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 Bates graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at Bates.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on Tereus in Fragments, which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at Bates and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the Bates College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at Bates.

Tereus in Fragments: A Lost Play of Sophocles, a dramatic version of one of the more disturbing myths from ancient Greece, premieres on the Bates College stage in performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 16 and 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 18, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St. Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for students and senior citizens.

Lisa Maurizio, an assistant professor in the Bates classics department, has written a tragedy based on the myth of Tereus, his wife Procne and her sister Philomela — a story of love, memory, betrayal, revenge and divine intervention.

For Maurizio, Tereus began as a collaboration with Ellen Seeling, an assistant professor on the theater faculty who was scheduled to direct but has withdrawn due to illness. Maurizio, who collaborated with Seeling on a 2001 production of Prometheus Bound, says that working with this talented, imaginative designer and director has “totally transformed” her capacity for interpreting ancient tragedies.

John Ambrosino, a student of Seeling in the class of 2001 and the founder and artistic director of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble, is filling in for Seeling as director of the all-female, all-student cast. “She has basically taught me everything I know of the theater,” Ambrosino explains, “and I consider her my greatest mentor in modern theater.”

In Tereus, Ambrosino’s style is distinguished by the use of stylized gestures and line readings, as well as supporting effects like percussion and shadow puppetry, to throw Maurizio’s content into high relief. “The characters are not human; they’re archetypes,” Ambrosino says.

“There’s an otherworldliness to the play,” he says, that begs not to be interpreted in a naturalistic style.

In Greek myth, Tereus and Procne are married and have a son, Itys. When Procne asks to see her sister, Philomela, Tereus fetches her — but on the voyage back, rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue. Philomela nevertheless is able to inform her sister of Tereus’ treachery by weaving images of it into a tapestry and giving it to Procne.

In retaliation, Procne and Philomela kill Itys, cook the child and serve him to an unwitting Tereus. Tereus’ attempt to avenge himself prompts the intervention of the gods, who transform the three into birds: Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow and Tereus into a hoopoe (a Eurasian species named for its call).

Where Hollywood characters resolve bad situations through personal growth and hugs, the ancient Greeks were less optimistic about the human capacity to solve their dilemmas, Maurizio says. In their point of view, “human beings are profoundly limited in their understanding, and sometimes their emotions and desires lead them into places where they cannot save themselves.”

At which point the gods sometimes take pity and bail them out. “They don’t restore them, they don’t redeem them,” says Maurizio, “but they remove them from their suffering.”

The story was known to the Greeks as a play by Sophocles — of which only 57 lines now exist in scattered fragments — and to the Romans from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Shakespeare borrowed elements from it for Titus Andronicus, and an adaptation by a British playwright premiered in New York last fall.

In addition to Sophocles’ fragments, Maurizio looked to Iranian women’s poetry and Japanese drama, a particular interest of Seeling’s, for her inspiration. For her, unlike other interpreters of this story, the issue of male violence is not its most dramatically compelling aspect. “What I more explored was the love story between two sisters, and the dangers of remembering and dwelling on the past when the present is destitute,” she says.

In addition, the symbolism of Procne and Philomela’s plight is a reminder that in ancient times — and even today, in some ways — “women’s lives, and their rhythms and their meanings, are still opaque because they’re not part of the public realm.”

For reservations and information, call the Bates box office at 207-786-6161.

Presenters at the gathering will include students, colleagues and Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen. In addition to photographs documenting Seeling at work and the spectrum of set and costume designs she did for Bates, several of her costumes themselves will be displayed. The exhibition runs through the end of the month.

A designer, playwright and director celebrated for an intrepid style and bedrock commitment to teaching theater, the 50-year-old Seeling succumbed to cancer at her home in South Portland on Dec. 29. The exhibition illustrates a Bates career embracing seven years, 16 shows and countless students inspired by Seeling’s energy and talent.

“These are big shoes to be filled,” says one colleague, Katalin Vecsey, a lecturer in the theater department and vocal coach for the college’s theatrical productions.

Vecsey explains how Seeling made obvious her knack for engaging a room full of people before she was even hired at Bates. In her presentation to the faculty search committee, Seeling handed out pins, pieces of foam core and other materials, and asked everyone in the room to try building a model set for the play Blood Wedding.

Seeling directed a number of Bates productions and adapted one, The Sea Wall, from a novel by Marguerite Duras. But she was best-known as a designer, and her work — including the puppets that appeared in The Sea Wall and other productions — were distinguished by their edginess, expressiveness and versatility.

“Her sets would have flown on Broadway,” Vecsey says. She adds, “She would never compromise her designs” — but at the same time, Seeling encouraged colleagues and students to embrace their own ideas with the same kind of passion.

Seeling was born in Michigan City, Ind. She received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University, and her master’s at Brandeis University. After working as a scenic artist and costume designer, Seeling joined the faculty of St. Lawrence University as assistant professor of stage design in 1987.

She came to Bates in 1997 and earned tenure in the Department of Theater and Rhetoric in 2003. At Bates she taught a variety of design courses, as well as a course on women in film.

Her first production for the Bates theater was Antigone and her last, an autumn 2003 production of Hamlet that included some 40 costumes. In between she tackled productions as diverse as a futuristic Brave New World, a gritty “subUrbia” set in a convenience store parking lot, a puppet-filled Sea Wall and the genteel Victorian Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Outside Bates, Seeling did design work for Portland’s Mad Horse Theater and for companies in Boston and California.

Her death was a blow to Bates and to the region’s theater community. “I was so shocked to hear about Ellen,” wrote Lauren Todd, a member of the Bates class of 1999 who studied with Seeling and is now studying landscape design in graduate school. “She was such a wonderful person and really helped me on my way to entering the design world.”

“I’m really sorry for you as well to have lost such a great colleague.”

Live actors share the stage with puppets from a variety of puppetry traditions in the production of Marguerite Duras’ novel The Sea Wall. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 7-9, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 10, in Gannett Theater.

Ellen Seeling, assistant professor of theater, adapted Duras‘ novel for the stage and directs this production. Seeling, who calls The Sea Wall one of her favorite novels, says that this drama set in colonial Indochina is “full of metaphorical images that translate well to puppetry.”

The widow “Ma,” the protagonist, is depicted by a bunraku-style puppet — a lifesize figure directly manipulated by two people. The power of puppetry, Seeling says, is that the audience quickly stops noticing that it’s the puppeteers, not the puppet, who are acting. “It makes it magical that way,” she says.

Both sophomores, the puppeteers operating the widow are Saida Cooper, of St. Albans, Maine, and Mark Gaworecki, of Essex Junction, Vt.

Other puppetry techniques represented in the production include shadow puppets and hand puppets, which will be used to simulate a movie being shown. At the other extreme, 10 puppeteers will manipulate a 14-foot puppet. At some points in the action, Seeling says, nearly all 14 cast members are operating puppets.

Published in France in 1950 as Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the novel is substantially based on Duras’ own experiences growing up in Indochina, where she was born to French parents. It tells the story of a widow’s stubborn fight against poverty and the fading attachments of her children — a fight symbolized by the sea wall erected in vain to keep seawater out of the family’s rice paddies.

The novel, Duras’ third, was a hit with the French literary establishment. She went on to write 40 novels in all and several plays, and also wrote and directed films. Her best-known works are the 1984 novel The Lover and the screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Seeling explains that Duras herself wrote a version of The Sea Wall for the stage, titled The Eden Cinema. “It was an honor,” the director says, to obtain the rights from the Duras estate to adapt the novel. She adds that the company has been invited to present the production on March 14 in Vermont at Marlboro College, home of a summer puppetry institute offered by the acclaimed Sandglass Theater.

Admission for the event is $6 and $3 for Bates students. To purchase tickets, please call 207-786-6161.

Aside from directing the play, Seeling also designed the puppets, the costumes and the sets, which the cast helped build. Several Bates students worked with Lisa Maurizio, assistant professor of classics and classical and medieval studies, to translate a new version of the play, adding modern references and influences. The puppet design and performance in the play is inspired by Japanese and Balinese puppetry.

The cast includes: Brian Curtis, a senior from Belmont, Mass.; Hilary Kiskaddon, a sophomore from Wallingford, Conn.; Matt Royles, a junior from Simsbury, Conn.; Liz Wilson, a junior from Concord, Mass.; Martha Horan, a first-year student from Hoboken, N.J.; Meredith Mclean, a senior from Calais; Matteo Pangallo, a sophomore from Salem, Mass.; Melissa Penney, a sophomore from Arlington, Mass.; and Doug Aho, a sophomore from New York, N.Y. John Ambrosino, a senior from Avon, Mass. served as assistant director.

A Thinking Heart: The Diary of Etty Hillesum, directed by Ellen Seeling of Portland, features actress Suzanne Sturn, who adapted the production from Hillesum’s published works, An Interrupted Life and Letters From Westerbork. Hillesum’s work reveals how her intelligence and sympathy are a form of resistance during years of war and oppression in the Netherlands.

Hillesum’s writings have been called “unsurpassed in Holocaust literature” by The New York Times. “While these were years of war and oppression for Holland, they were for Hillesum years of profound personal reflection and discovery and an affirmation of hope and belief amid the most difficult of circumstance,” said Seeling. “Despite the horror around her, Etty remains a celebrant of life whose intelligence and sympathy are in themselves a form of resistance.”

The play moves from the early days of the war when Hillesum’s life seems almost unaffected by the occupation, to her time at Westerbork, a transit camp for Dutch Jews before their deportation to Auschwitz, when the realities of the era directly confronted her.

Seeling is new to the theater faculty at Bates College. A member of the United Scenic Artists, she is a costume and scenic designer and director who recently directed “Angels in America, parts I and II” at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo. Her design credits include university theater, Off Broadway and opera.

Sturn is an actor and director based in Rochester, N.Y. She has appeared at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and seven seasons at the 21st Street Players in Minneapolis. Most recently she directed Twelfth Night and Arcadia in Rochester.

Seeling and Sturn have collaborated previously on productions of Mother Courage and Her Children, Antigone, The House of Bernarda Alba and Beckett and Ionesco Shorts.

After its Bates opening, the play will run for the month of October at the Shipping Dock Theatre in Rochester, N.Y., followed by a road tour including performances in Minneapolis, Boston and Washington D.C.

Tickets are $6 for general admission and $3 for senior citizens and non- Bates students. For reservations or additional information, call the Schaeffer Theatre box office at 207-786-6161.