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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Bates College will celebrate Native American Heritage Month with a series of events sponsored by the Multicultural Center, beginning with a talk by photographer Kenji Kawano, author of the book “Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers” (Northland Publishing Company, 1990), at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, in Chase Hall Lounge. A reception featuring foods from five Native American nations will follow, and the public is invited to attend free of charge.

Kawano’s work, on display at Bates through Nov. 15 in Chase Hall Lounge, chronicles the contribution of Navajo Marines who provided the language used for communicating classified messages and troop movements for the U.S. Pacific campaign during World War II. The Japanese were unable to break the code.

Kawano, who left his native Japan for the United States in 1973, first learned about the code in 1974 while hitchhiking on the Navajo’s Arizona reservation. The driver who picked him up had been a code talker during World War II. Eventually, Kawano became the code talkers’ official photographer and an honorary member of their association.

“It felt somewhat strange, because my father was a survivor of the Japanese program of training men to be human torpedoes during the war in the South Pacific,” Kawano writes in the preface of his book. “These soldiers had been my father’s enemies at one time.”

Other Bates events honoring Native American heritage include a lecture by the Honorable Robert Yazzie, chief justice of the Navajo Nation, who will discuss The Unique Status of Tribal Courts in the Context of the U.S. Judicial System, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 7, in the Benjamin Mays Center; and a talk by Andrea Smith, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a founder of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) and INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, who will discuss Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29, in the Mays Center. The concert scheduled for Friday, Nov. 30, by the Native American rap group WithOutRezervation(WOR) has been canceled.

The Yazzie and Smith events are also open to the public at no charge. For more information, call the Bates College Multicultural Center at 207-786-8215.

Chute’s books of poetry include Thirteen Moons-Treize Lunes, When Grandmother Decides to Die, Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems and Samuel Sewall Sails for Home, which won the Maine Arts Commission chapbook award in 1986. He received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the editorial board of The Beloit Poetry Journal, for “Heat Wave in Concord,” a poem re-creating a scorching afternoon in 1852 when Henry David Thoreau cooled himself with a walk in a nearby river.

“This is a delicately erotic and exquisitely detailed portrait of a man, a day and an era,” said Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal editor. “Chute has invented a fluid stanza to carry his narrative.”

Chute, Professor Emeritus of Biology and past chairman of both the department of biology and division of natural sciences at Bates, attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Chute, who lives in Poland, served as director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and was chairman of the state Commission on Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering.