Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24

Saint Dad Monica Wood (25 Oct.-19 Nov.) 

A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens (2 - 24 Dec.) 

The Play That Goes Wrong Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields (31 Jan.-  

25 Feb.) 

What the Constitution Means To Me Heidi Schreck (6 - 24 Mar.) 

Clyde’s Lynn Nottage (3 - 21 Apr.) 

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches Tony Kushner, Co-Produced with Dramatic Repertory Company (1 – 26 May) 

Manning Benjamin Benne (5 - 16 Jun.) 

This 2023-24 season, Portland Stage Company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary onstage. The theatre opened the season triumphantly, having completed its $6.4 million “Making An Entrance Capital Campaign” for facility renovations, which bore fruit in a beautiful new box office and elevator, and featured an all-local cast and a collaboration with Portland’s Dramatic Repertory Company for one of the year’s most important productions, Angels in America. The season also found PSC returned to pre-pandemic theatre ways, with all in-person shows and masking “welcome but not required.” 

The theatre opened the season with another play by beloved Maine writer Monica Wood, Saint Dad, which had received a workshop reading at PSC the previous year. Saint Dad, set in a Maine camp on a lake, is a romp of a comedy about three siblings who sell their dad’s camp when he’s on his last legs, then try to keep this fact from him once he’s miraculously recovered. Sally Wood directed a wonderfully physical production of the play, which explores issues of family, gentrification, and being “from away,”  with a standout comedic performance by local actor Moira Driscoll as the especially laconic sister. 

For its holiday show, PSC brought back its full-cast theatrical tradition of A Christmas Carol. Michael Dix Thomas directed a cast headed by PSC favorites Dustin Tucker as Bob Cratchit and the formidable Tom Ford as Scrooge.  

From there, PSC pivoted to meta-theatrical screwball comedy with The Play That Goes Wrong, about the foibles of an inept community theatre company’s production of a British murder mystery. Kevin R. Free directed a rollicking production of the show, rife with incredibly intricate set design as the play-within-a-play’s portraits, doors, walls, and floors all become hilariously compromised. The cast of eight had terrifically quick timing, and was funniest when performers let us see the community-theatre actors dropping their British characters in dismay or abandon. PSC will bring back the show this August as its summer theatre offering. 

March brought  Heidi Schreck’s popular show What the Constitution Means To Me to the PSC stage, starring  Portland actor Abigail Killeen. Brian Todd Backus directed a well-paced and emotional production, and Killeen’s nuanced and wide-ranging performance was by turns silly, tender, and enraged. The show also featured the excellent Matt Delamater, as a nuanced Legionnaire, and a rotating cast of “debaters” – young women from the local community, including Evangeline Cambria, Vagni Das, Lily Marie Jessen, Paige Scala, and the amiable and intellectually nimble Lyra Legawiec, who was onstage the night I attended. 

The company’s next show turned to theatre great Lynn Nottage’s recent new play, Clyde’s, about redemption, second chances, and beatific sandwiches (and an oblique sequel, of sorts, to Sweat). Germán Cárdenas Alaminos designed a marvelous down-and-out diner kitchen set for director Dominique Rider’s production, which featured excellent rapport between the four down-and-out sandwich makers, played by Lance E. Nichols, Roland Ruiz, Tatrisha Talley, and Derek Chariton. And Breezy Leigh was a terrifying Clyde, the malevolent, deeply damaged boss lady, in her incredible, incredibly hued power outfits, including a gold and hornet-green wonder (terrific costume design was by Emily White).  

Up next was Tony Kushner’s theatrical powerhouse of imagination and grief, Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches, an all-local co-production with Dramatic Repertory Company, a Portland company long committed to staging new, overlooked, and challenging shows, and co-directed by Peter Brown and Keith Powell Beyland, DRC’s founder. The show featured arresting performances by Portland actors Joseph Bearor, Paul Haley, Robbie Harrison, Michela Micalizio, Denise Poirier, Nate Stephenson, Casey Turner, and Ashanti Dwight Williams. Haley’s fast-talking portrayal of Roy Cohn made him both pathological and pathos-ridden, while Harrison, as Prior, was marvelous in animating the dying man’s emotional range, between rage, terror, sadness, and fascination. PSC will stage part two of Kushner’s masterpiece, Perestroika, in 2025, again in co-production with DRC.  

As its regular-season mainstage closer, Portland Stage presented Manning,  Benjamin Benne’s 2023 Clauder Competition Grand Prize Winning play, which was workshopped last spring as part of the 34th annual Little Festival of the Unexpected. Alex Keegan directed a cast of four in Benne’s show about two brothers who return home to their grieving father – and a supernatural zucchini – after the death of their mother.  

This May and June, Portland Stage presented its 35th annual Little Festival of the Unexpected, featuring a live reading of John Cariani's latest play, Not Quite Almost, another show of linked vignettes about love, hope, and being understood. Cariani is the author of the massively successful, Almost Maine, and his new show – which will take the PSC Mainstage in 2025 – is being billed as “It’s a prequel. And a sequel. You decide.” 

Portland Stage continues to vocally support anti-racism and the decolonization of the arts and public spaces. The theatre’s land acknowledgment encourages theatergoers to connect with Wabanaki REACH (a Maine organization that advocates for the self-determination of the Indigenous peoples in what is now called Maine) and also acknowledges Maine’s historical involvement in the slave trade.  

Next season will open with Conscience, a look at the relationship and political calculus between Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith before turning to Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika, in another co-production with DRC. PSC’s holiday show next season will shift to The Snow Queen, followed by an Agatha Christie murder-mystery comedy, Murder on the Links. Two Maine-grown plays, Bess Welden’s Madeleines and John Cariani’s Not Quite Almost (Or, Almost Almost, Maine) take the stage next spring, before closing with Albee’s toxically careening masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—a terrifying classic of the canon.  

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