TARTUFFE is a riot as Moliere intended and as HUB THEATRE COMPANY of BOSTON presents it. Onstage at the BCA PLAZA only through this weekend, this show explodes the confines of this tiny space with inventive performances, clever staging, and a plot as relevant in 2024 as it was the first time it was performed in 1664. We’re familiar with this landscape of conmen and hypocrites, secrets and sex scandals- and I’m not just talking about the US Congress. It seems the outwardly pious Tartuffe has wormed his way into the household of the wealthy Orgon who believes Tartuffe’s holiness will keep the household sin free! Tartuffe in the meantime is eating and drinking Tartuffe dry, while plotting to take over Orgon’s wealth and wife. Everyone but the master of the house can see through this creep and they mount an all out effort to prove Tartuffe a phony.

L to R Jeremy Beazlie, Brooks Reeves

Director Bryn Boice elicits just the right broadly hilarious tone, and this vibrant ensemble commits with abandon to Moliere’s rhymed couplets– but  it’s not so over the top that we don’t believe every word they say! In another excellent turn in a long and winding history of excellent turns, Brooks Reeves is truly funny as the duped master of the house and a pompous ass blinded as much by his own asininity as he is by the lying Tartuffe. Jeremy Beazlie is a particularly loathsome Tartuffe. We glimpse the growing hunger beneath the saintly facade, as he twists the truth and circumstances every more boldly to his advantage. But the more everyone tries to prove Tartuffe false, the more Orgon trusts him until the crazy slapstick climax  in which seeing is believing. If only it were that simple today. Enjoy the costumes, the horseplay, and the comeuppance. Thank god art can perfect reality. See this before it closes on 11/24 presented by HUB THEATRE  COMPANY OF BOSTON where all tix to all shows are PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN!

A haunting production of MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN at Merrimack Repertory Theatre is now onstage through the weekend! Superb sets, costumes, and performances enhanced by a beautiful soundscape and evocative lighting set in motion by director Brian Isaac Phillips deliver the origins of this horror classic. The tale erupted from the mind of 18 year-old Mary Shelley on a stormy night in an Italian villa where a contest was in progress to see who could tell the spookiest tale. Mary Shelley (a marvelous Jasmine Bouldin) along with her philandering husband poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (John Patrick Hayden powerful in a dual role also as Victor Frankenstein), the louche Lord Byron (Jay Wade who’s better at playing “The Creature”), Byron’s current romantic interest Claire Clairmont (Alexis Bronkovic), and Byron’s doctor John Polidori (Billy Chace) were all in attendance, but it’s Mary’s gothic story that weighs on us still.

The play by David Catlin based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel mines Mary’s psyche and emotional state to render a layered plot which dissipates some of the drama. The play flows back and forth in time, mixing fantasy and the sad realities of Mary’s own life. She had miscarried a child with Percy, who turned to other women, this after Mary had been  abandoned by her family when she ran off with Percy shortly after his first wife committed suicide. Mary’s tale of death, loneliness, and abandonment is buried in this tale of a Doctor who tries to create new life– but by rejecting his own creation, he turns this creature into a monster who is angry, lonely, and dangerous. Mary’s rage at her husband’s coldness and the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost is the implied spark of this ghastly tale of a creature deformed by the rejection of its maker.

The playwright has given us a complex knot of plot to untangle at the expense of dramatic focus. Act II winds to a somber conclusion. Even so, there’s much to savor here; the production invites us into its mysteries and I enjoyed getting lost in its sad beauty. Onstage at Merrimack Repertory Theatre produced in partnership with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. SEE MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN through SUNDAY 11/24.