Nikhil Krishna ’13 as Proteus hears a mouthful from a Sam Metzger ’14 as Valentine. Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Bates presents The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a romantic comedy considered by some to be Shakespeare’s first play, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 7-9; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, March 9-10; and 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 11, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Admission is $6, and $3 for seniors and students. Tickets are available at batestickets.com or by calling the box office at 207-786-6161.

The Two Gentlemen, believed to have been written in the early 1590s, “just captures the spirit of youthful energy,” says director Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater. “It’s a love story, a friendship story and a betrayal story.”

He says, “Audiences can expect a lively and fast-paced play, and one that’s sometimes very funny and sometimes moving.”

Silvia is played by Singha Hon ’14.

The storyline is driven by the romantic impulses of two young couples: Julia and Proteus, and Silvia and Valentine, who is Proteus’ best friend. The fickle Proteus and coy Julia stir up a colorful plot — involving cross-dressing, a scene-stealing dog and a band of woodland outlaws — that works out happily for all in the end.

The themes of romantic love and friendship found here are ones that Shakespeare would return to later in such works at Twelfth Night and As You Like It, says Andrucki.

“From my perspective as a student of Shakespeare and as a director, I’m finding it really informative to see how Shakespeare’s mind was cooking when he was still learning how to cook,” he says. “It gives me a deeper appreciation of his later work.”

Sixteen students will perform in the Bates production. Portraying Proteus is Nikhil Krishna, a senior from Concord, Mass., who is performing as part of a senior thesis. Sam Metzger, a junior from Wellesley Hills, Mass., plays Valentine; Allie Freed, a first-year student from Magnolia, Mass., is Julia; and Silvia is played by Singha Hon, a junior from New York City.

The production features original music by Vonetta Trotter, a senior from New York City, who composed a setting for Shakespeare’s famous lyric “Who is Silvia?” Krishna will sing the piece.

Andrucki notes that his production is transposed to the late 1960s, an era marked by social upheaval that meshes with the setting of the play.

Wearing costumes designed by Carol Farrell, the cast takes a bow during a dress rehearsal.

Unlike other plays by Shakespeare, he adds, The Two Gentlemen meets college students where they are in terms of life experience and outlook.

“The characters are the same age as our students,” Andrucki says. “The kinds of emotional experiences they go through will be familiar to students — intense friendship, intense infatuation or love, and betrayal of friendship through love.

“So it’s all very accessible, and the actors can sink their teeth into it in a way that enables them to do justice to the play.”

The Learned Ladies, says director Martin Andrucki, is “a wonderful Molière play. It’s got all the Molière hallmarks — the wit, the elegance, both broad and refined humor.”

With intellectual pretension its theme, the play tells the story of two young lovers, Henriette and Clitandre, whose marriage is blocked by Henriette’s mother, aunt and sister. These would-be learned ladies, who embrace a bogus kind of “intellectuality,” have been captivated by Trissotin, a pseudo-scholar and mediocre poet. The ladies want Henriette to marry this fraud instead of the handsome and commonsensical Clitandre.

“It’s a good production for students because it’s about intellectual vanity, intellectual folly, true and false values,” says Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater at Bates. “These are all issues that students wrestle with as they figure out what it means to be educated. It’s about finding intellectual balance.”

Andrucki has reset the play into the 1920s, an era with its own brand of intellectual absurdity. But, he adds, “the play is surprisingly modern in tone at times. One project that the ladies want to do is to create a body of forbidden words that may not be uttered because people may find them offensive.”

In the cast are three students whose performances form part of their senior thesis, a distinctive capstone experience in the Bates education. Playing Henriette is Alina Volobuyeva, a senior from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Schuyler Rooth of New Orleans portrays Armande, the sister who is bent on keeping Henriette and Clitandre apart. Both are doing yearlong honors theses in theater.

For her one-semester senior thesis, Sarah Dice-Goldberg of Matawan, N.J. is designing costumes for the production, under the direction of Christine McDowell, assistant professor of theater.

Andrucki chose Molière to honor the 50th birthday of Schaeffer Theatre, home to most theater and dance productions at the college. The first piece presented in the 324-seat theater was also by that playwright: a December 1960 presentation of Tartuffe by the Robinson Players, the student theater company at Bates.

Built as the Little Theatre in 1960, the space was renamed in 1972 to honor Lavinia Schaeffer. Retiring that year after 38 years on the Bates faculty, Schaeffer was a moving force behind both the construction of the state-of-the-art venue and, more broadly, of the Bates theater program as it stands today.

She was an advocate at Bates of the “Little Theater” movement — “a movement to create smaller theaters that would be suitable environments for the serious and realistic plays that came along after Ibsen,” Andrucki explains. (Hence Schaeffer Theatre’s original name.)

“These were intimate spaces for probing psychological dramas,” he says, in contrast to the gaudier, more spectacular entertainments dominating commercial theater for much of the 20th century. “Lavinia was very much attuned to that spirit. That was the cutting edge of her generation.

“She wanted to be part of it and make Bates part of it.”

Bates College junior Michelle Schloss directs Fuddy Meers, the story of an amnesiac who must learn the facts of her existence anew each day, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 15-16, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 17, in the Black Box Theater, Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Admission is free; there are no seat reservations. For more information, please visit www.batestickets.com or call 207-786-6161.

Fuddy Meers, a dark comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire, depicts a wild day in the life of Claire, who awakens each morning with her memory an empty slate. On the day of the action, she is whisked away into a tumultuous world where she encounters an array of eccentric characters and seeks to discover the truth about her life.

Fuddy Meers won raves in its debut at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1999, sustaining a sold-out run. New York Observer reviewer John Heilpern called Lindsay-Abaire “some kind of comic genius.”

The play explores themes of communication, family dynamic and the construction of femininity. “The main theme is the struggle for communication. Every character has a block they can’t seem to get through to realize or to reveal their truth,” says Schloss.

“So we find out some characters aren’t who they say they are. And eventually Claire realizes the whole truth.”

Schloss, an English major and theater minor from Unionville, Conn., is directing the play as an independent study. She had no academic requirement to direct a play, but was so inspired by Lindsay-Abaire’s play that she proposed the project.

Part of her fondness for Fuddy Meers stems from what it offers Schloss as a director. “There’s so much to play with, and so much for me to write about and to think about,” she states. In the play’s comedic elements and its darker currents, her actors, too, find plenty to sink their teeth into.

Schloss has embraced the obstacles she has encountered. One complication is spatial: what to do with the limited space in the Black Box Theater, as the characters demand interesting and constant movement. “It’s really challenging to decide what kind of imaginative space you have and then to define that concretely in the beginning, and not take it too far.”

Schloss also faces a tight timetable. Due to construction in the theaters, she was given a month to bring the play to fruition. “It’s been a scramble,” she says, “It’s taken a lot of dedication.”

Schloss calls her adviser, Dana Professor of Theater Martin Andrucki, an essential force in the project, because he has kept her focused and the more absurd elements of the play in check.

The cast includes junior Nora Brouder, of Westminster, Mass., as Claire; sophomore Ethan Brooks-McDonald, of Schenectady, N.Y., as Richard; and sophomore Max Arnell, of Maplewood, N.J., as the Limping Man.

The production will be nominated in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

–  story and photograph by Elizabeth McKean ’12

Student-run theater group the Robinson Players presents staged readings of a Bates professor’s adaptation of the Nutcracker story at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 15, and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 16, in the Black Box Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

The readings are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8294.

Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater, adapted his play Marie and the Nutcracker from The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, the short novel by 19th-century author E.T.A. Hoffmann. Michelle Schloss, a sophomore from Farmington, Conn., directs the production.

The basis for the popular ballet The Nutcracker, Hoffmann’s story follows the young girl Marie and her Christmas adventures when her favorite toy nutcracker comes to life. “My adaptation moves away from the emphasis on dream and spectacle in the story and, especially, in the ballet,” says Andrucki, “and it clarifies Marie’s intentions.

“There’s still a lot of playful fantasy, but I’m focused on characterization and dramatic development. It’s a play about a young girl moving toward maturity through what she sees as a family crisis: the marriage of her older sister,” he explains.

“She wants to prevent this and, with the reluctant help of her little brother, cooks up a scheme to sabotage the wedding. Her encounter with Nutcracker and the Mouse King helps her to realize the shabbiness of her plot, and points her in a new direction.”

Andrucki calls the original Hoffman text “a wonderful piece of writing, with vivid characters, very weird psychological twists and turns, and a great sense of the power of the imagination.” He hopes that his play will come to serve as a companion piece to holiday productions of A Christmas Carol.

Schloss was looking for a theatrical project for Short Term, Bates’ five-week spring semester, when this directorial opportunity came along. “I couldn’t pass up a chance to work with a new script by professor Andrucki,” she says. And with the play scheduled for a full production in the fall by the Lincoln County Community Theater, “this is a chance for him to hear the script out loud and make final changes.”

“The challenge in directing the staged reading has been stripping down the production,” she notes. “In a text where characters can morph from toys to human-size heroes, enter the stage through a magical clock, and play the parts of both humans and royal mice, it’s difficult to picture staging the story with just stools and music stands on a bare stage.”

But with none of the technical demands of a full-scale production to deal with, the staged-reading format affords Schloss “the rare opportunity to focus on the best part of a play,” she says — “the characters and relationships behind the spectacle, and the way they communicate with each other.”

Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater, directs the Bates College theater department production of Alcestis, Euripides’ tragedy about a king, doomed to die, who offers up his wife in his place. Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, March 6, 7, 13 and 14, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, March 8 and 15, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Admission is $6 general admission and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

First produced in Athens in 438 B.C., Alcestis is the oldest surviving work by the Greek playwright Euripides. The play follows the death of Alcestis, sacrificed by her husband and brought back from the dead by Hercules.

The Bates cast performs a shortened version of the translation-adaptation of the play created by Ted Hughes in 1999. A famous poet, as well as children’s writer and operatic librettist, Hughes’ translations of ancient drama also included The Oresteia of Aeschylus and Seneca’s Oedipus.

Alcestis is widely recognized as a tragicomedy, addressing serious issues but ending happily. “It is a play that spans a gamut of feelings, from tragic loss to farce to romance,” says Andrucki. “It’s a play about young people grappling with death, a subject keenly relevant to college students.”

Alcestis’ death creates disharmony in the court of her husband, Admetos. When his friend Hercules arrives and no one wants to tell him of the tragedy, drunken revelry and a fight with Death ensue. Eventually, Hercules brings Alcestis back from the dead, resulting in a story both heartwrenching and thrilling.

Euripides is thought to have written at least 95 plays, though only 18 survive. Known primarily for his portrayals of strong female leads and intelligent lower classes, Euripides used his plays to satirize heroes of Greek mythology, including, in this case, Hercules.

“The play is full of compelling moments,” Andrucki says. “Death’s violent encounters with Apollo and Hercules; the heartbreaking farewell scene between Admetos and Alcestis, the wife who has chosen to die for her husband; and the miraculous conclusion, when Death is temporarily vanquished.”

“People will find the production excitingly modern in a variety of ways, but we respect the classical vision of Euripides,” he continues. “We have a chorus, gods and heroes who are engaged in a universal conflict: the struggle to find meaning in the face of death.”

Manny’s War, a play written by a Bates College theater professor about a Jewish American soldier taken prisoner by the Germans during World War II, opens in a Lincoln County Community Theater production at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, at the Lincoln Theatre, 2 Theater St., Damariscotta.

Playwright Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater, based Manny’s War on the actual experiences of the late Murray Schwartz of Mechanic Falls, Maine. The play debuted at Bates in 2000.

LCCT performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, Jan. 16-17 and 23-24, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 18 and 25. Tickets are $12, all general admission, and are available at the Maine Coast Book Shop, Damariscotta, and the theater box office. For more information or reservations, please call 207-563-3424 or visit the theater Web site.

Schwartz, who died in 2005, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, and his postwar inner conflicts and emotional turmoil form the dramatic basis of Manny’s War. The play premiered in a highly publicized joint production by the Bates theater department and The Public Theatre, an Equity company in Lewiston.

Performed to full houses, the play was nominated for the American Theater Critics Association’s New Play Award.

This moving and uplifting play takes place both in the present, in a psychologist’s office at the Veterans Administration facility in Togus, Maine, and in Manny’s memory — a place populated by scenes from an Army camp in Florida, a troopship in the mid-Atlantic, the Battle of the Bulge, a POW camp and Manny’s own home. The lead character is haunted by guilt caused by an act of betrayal during his wartime captivity.

Ann Foskett directs the LCCT production. “Our season planning committee read the script and was quite moved by it,” explains Barb Bowers, executive director of the theater company. “Since ‘Manny’ was a resident of Maine late in his life and the story is true, we felt it would be intriguing to this community, especially since Damariscotta is a retirement destination and we have many veterans here.”

Andrucki, who has taught at Bates since 1974, has directed more than 30 productions in academic and professional theaters, and appeared as host on “Wide Angle,” a WCBB-TV series about Maine film- and videomakers. He has taught modern drama and film studies at Harvard University, and performance technique to lawyers-in-training at the University of Maine School of Law.

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Hungary’s leading playwright, György Spiró, offers a talk called Trends in Contemporary Eastern European Drama at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 13, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, at Bates College, 56 Campus Ave.

The talk, which takes place the day before Bates presents a Spiró play in its American and English-language debut, is open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-8294.

Spiró is in residence as a learning associate at Bates during the theater production workshop that is presenting his short play Prah. Sharing a bill with Prah is Unveiling, by Czech writer Vaclav Havel. The program will be presented in performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 15-17, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 18, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 2 Andrews Road.

Admission for the plays is $6 for the general public and $3 for children and seniors. For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the Bates online box office.

Prah is about two people who belong to the in-between generation of contemporary Hungary, explains Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater at Bates. Born and raised under communism, the pair can’t imagine how to reinvent their lives when they suddenly become rich.

“It’s a darkly funny story about old habits confronted by new and unbelievable opportunities,” says Andrucki, who is leading the workshop, held during Bates’ five-week Short Term. Andrucki commissioned the translation of the play, which he hopes will be become the standard English-language version.

According to the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, Spiró’s work has “opened a series of windows onto an era of transition: out of the bane of communism and into the bane of uncertainty.”

As Andrucki puts it, the playwright “has paid sustained and detailed attention to the relationship between people and their social environment both during and after the communist era — finding plenty to be critical about in each period.”

He adds, “It’s important to see how an insider views life in Hungary after the fall of communism. Seeing this play will help American audiences understand some of the world’s headlines in terms of the everyday lives of ordinary people.”

For his students in the production workshop, meanwhile, “the play calls for detailed realistic acting and staging, so it allows the actors, directors and designers to dig deeply into character and environment.”

Having Spiró on hand will be an invaluable resource for the students. Not only will they be able to ask about character motivation and plot, but having the playwright in the audience is “the ultimate incentive to get it right” according to Andrucki.

Havel is known as both a writer and as the first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Unveiling is one of three plays he wrote in the 1970s, during the crackdown following Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” of 1968, about a persecuted writer named Vanek.

“Vanek is widely regarded as Havel’s alter ego,” Andrucki explains — “a man whose dissident politics have gotten him into trouble with the authorities and alienated him from his conformist friends.”

In “Unveiling,” a couple who invites Vanek to see their newly remodeled home try to sell Vanek on their consumerist view of life, with increasingly bizarre results. Havel’s scathingly funny satire of materialism gone wild has proven popular with audiences worldwide.

Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater at Bates, directs the college theater department production of “Measure for Measure,” William Shakespeare’s dark comedy about sex, public morality and private hypocrisy.

Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 7, 8, 14 and 15; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 10 and 16, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 2 Andrews Road.

Admission is $6 general admission, and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the online box office at www.bates.edu/boxoffice.

“Measure for Measure” is believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. Though known as a comedy, it’s also one of three Shakespeare plays that scholars term “problem plays” — meaning they address, but reach no conclusions about, problematic social issues such as the need for mercy in justice, the definition of gender roles in human sexuality, and, in particular, questions of sexual morality.

“Measure for Measure,” says Andrucki, “raises more questions than it answers, leaving the audience without any final or settled sense of the moral stature of the major characters.”

In the story, the Duke of Vienna has left the city in the hands of Angelo, a strict and austere judge. Though the Duke has rarely enforced the city’s laws against fornication, Angelo is an outspoken supporter of them, and his control of the city spells trouble for young lovers.

When one Claudio gets Juliet, his betrothed, pregnant, Angelo sentences him to death. But when Isabella, Claudio’s distraught sister, pleads for mercy for her brother, Angelo tells her he will spare her brother’s life only if she has sex with him.

Thus begins the commentary on the hypocrisy of public figures, and how social morality does not necessarily correlate with private morality. When it turns out that the Duke has not gone away at all, but stayed in Vienna incognito to observe the happenings without him, chaos reigns as the theme of secret identity prevails throughout the play.

Andrucki edited the play slightly, cutting a number of scenes, but is presenting the play essentially as it appears in standard editions of Shakespeare. But he has moved the action from Renaissance Vienna to New York in the 1970s, a setting for an urban breakdown parallel to that depicted in the Duke’s Vienna .

Two Bates seniors feature prominently in the production. Stephen Lattanzi of Winchester, Mass., plays Angelo and Sam Leichter of Wallingford, Pa., portrays the Duke. Both students are using the play as their senior acting thesis production.

“I knew I had two strong actors to play the male leads,” Andrucki says. “Then, I like the fact that the play has a lot of colorful and challenging cameo roles, which would allow a large number of students to get involved.”

Bates presents the play Big Night, a Depression-era satire by Dawn Powell, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 17-19, and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 20, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall.

Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. For reservations call 207-786-6161 or visit the online box office.

Because of construction, entry to the theater will be through a rear door from the college parking lot adjacent to Lake Andrews, accessed from College Street.

Big Night is one of a handful of plays written by Powell, a keen social observer better known for such wry novels as Dance Night, Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. The play tells a biting tale of people driven by greed — for money, sex, fame — to change partners and try to change their lives.

Directing the all-student Bates cast is Alice Reagan. A New York resident and member of the college’s class of 1997, Reagan received the prestigious Princess Grace Award in Directing for the 2006-07 season. Her recent productions include Women of Trachis, part of Target Margin Theater’s “On the Greeks” season, and A Small Hole at the New York International Fringe Festival. Reagan was a Dean’s Fellow in the MFA theater-directing program at Columbia University, and holds an MA in performance studies from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.

Reagan selected Big Night, which premiered in 1932, for her Bates residency. “The characters are so bad and good, morally complex, they’re just very interesting for actors to dig into,” she says. “We’re constantly discovering new ideas about the characters and what they want, and that’s a great exercise for the actors.”

“I’m interested in the 1930s, when America was really becoming America as we know it,” she adds. “It was this moment where people started to question the American dream — they wanted it, but it also destroyed people. That’s really present in this play.”

“And the actors get to wear great clothes and there’s great music.”

Reagan was invited to direct the production, which is taking place during the college’s five-week Short Term, by her mentor, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater Martin Andrucki, of Lewiston. “I love working with students,” she says.

In addition to the skills they’ll learn in performing and producing the play, a piece like Big Night also gives young adults another avenue for exploring their attitudes about social issues, Reagan says. For instance, “the way that some of the men in the play talk about women is really problematic,” she explains. “Things like, ‘You got looks, you don’t need brains, baby.’ ”

“It’s an opportunity to actually talk about feminism and relationships between men and women.”

The residency is an education for her as well, the director notes. “Not only am I directing but I also end up teaching acting, and it’s crucial for a director to know how to do that,” she says. “I’m constantly learning how to talk to different actors. Each actor needs a different kind of language, and working with students who are less experienced or younger presents bigger challenges.”

“It really gets me back to basics.”

Powell first began Big Night in 1928, and it was premiered by the famed Group Theater. But the theater company’s extensive reworking of the piece was a critical and popular flop. The Bates troupe will perform Powell’s original script with only slight revisions.