The 2008 Baltimore Playwrights Festival continues at various venues around Baltimore with two new full-length plays. Each is the work of a Maryland playwright, and is making its world premiere at the theater indicated.

Targeting Ibsen or bust in 'Deceivers'

P.S. Lorio's "Gay Deceivers" is set in an unnamed Midwestern city in 1909, but the domestic situation seems like something out of the 19th-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen: a stuffy husband bosses around his wife, who seems like she'll spiritually suffocate in her Victorian furniture-filled parlor.

Presented by Theatrical Mining Company at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, this Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry is mostly successful at mining progressive themes as old as its early 20th-century setting.

Although it tends to wear its thematic message on its sleeve, perhaps this is inevitable in a play that's about how women in that era were defined -- and also confined -- by the very full dresses they wore.

When we first see that comfortably imprisoned wife, Tolly (Belinda Panelo), she's doing domestic chores while wearing an apron that makes the mistress of the house also seem like the maid. She's upset that her husband, Warren (Graham Pilato), seems too preoccupied with his job and social club to give her quality conversational time.

Tolly complains to her sympathetic friend, Rose (Janise Whelan), and their discussions about men amount to prototypical feminist statements. What makes all this funny is that Tolly conceives a scheme to win back her husband's attention. Reasoning that men of his generation admire women for their hourglass figures, she creates artificial padding to make her bust more imposing.

Her trial-and-error experiments to find the right material are amusing, as is the rapidity with which her alteration of her personal wardrobe leads to a thriving business that she's determined to keep secret from her conservative husband.

Tolly's refusal to tell her husband the truth about her falsies leads to comic scenes laced with social commentary. The playwright does not exactly have a light touch when it comes to having the characters list modern inventions, make observations about their ethical values, and devise extreme schemes to further their agendas. But Lorio generally keeps the plot moving ahead at an agreeable pace. Tolly may be padded, but the play is not.

The production directed by Barry Feinstein is anchored by the interplay between Panelo's nervous energy as the young wife and Whelan's bemused response as her more mature friend. In fact, Whelan gives such a naturally persuasive performance that most of the others in the cast seem forced by comparison.

This must be a tricky play for actors, because it's necessary to put across that period's formality without seeming too self-conscious and stodgy with the line readings. Pilato, for instance, doesn't entirely get a handle on Warren's personality and it ends up seeming like the actor rather than the character who is stilted.

Other performances are all over the Midwestern map. Tolly's live-in brother, Nelson (Alexander Scally), and his equally rambunctious pal, Rudy (Joshua Bristol), are a vital part of a plot that moves into farce; even so, these two actors are so silly that we seem headed toward a live-action cartoon. And Rudy's stern father, Rev. Godwin (Roy Hammond), is an admittedly stereotypical role not helped any by this actor's hammy mannerisms and insecure delivery.

There's one more character occasionally mentioned in the script and, for that matter, listed along with the actor playing her in the playbill, but she never appears on stage. New plays obviously are entitled to cut roles and make other last-minute alterations, but it adds to the sense that this enjoyable play seems rushed as it bustlingly moves to a broad conclusion.

"Gay Deceivers" runs through Aug. 17 in the Copeland Theater of Le Clerc Hall at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, at 4701 N. Charles Street in Baltimore. Performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets are pay-as-you-can Thursday, $12 Friday and Saturday, 2 for 1 Sunday. Call 410-982-6979 or go to www.tmc.originalplays.com.

Putting four faces on 'The 'A' Word'

Abortion is such a controversial topic that any playwright tackling it surely has a pregnant pause before starting to write. Rosemary Frisino Toohey's Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry "The 'A' Word" shows how four very different women feel about the issue, thereby exposing the audience at Mobtown Players to a range of opinions.

It's a viable way to dramatically survey the topic, but it also leads to a lot of domestic furnishings being pushed around as the hard-working stagehands modify the decor whenever the play cuts from one woman's home to the next. The women never meet each other, which means the play must constantly jump from place to place.

There are so many short scenes that the play can't avoid seeming choppy as it moves each mini-narrative forward, and so be prepared to spend time in the dark between scenes.

One solution in this production directed by Caitlin Bouxsein would be to make the living room set even more generic than it already is, enabling the characters in the separate stories to quickly take their places.

Fortunately, the individual stories do move forward and the play is thematically cohesive. The playwright respects the seriousness of her subject, while also allowing for the ironic humor found in even the most serious of topics. Although some of the dialogue is glib and verges on cliche, that only slightly detracts from the persuasiveness of the writing.

Jenna (Lucia Diaz-French) is an unmarried 17-year-old girl whose pregnancy startles Mom (Ann Marie Feild). The unborn child's father is never seen and presumably is out of the picture in other ways, too.

The fierce mother-daughter arguments constitute the best writing in the play, and that emotional force is bolstered by Feild's totally convincing performance as a worried mother.

The second couple, Wendy (Wendy Gaunt) and Brian (Lawrence Griffin), already have a young son and they're surprised to learn she's pregnant again. When testing determines that she's likely to bear a child with a disability, they discuss whether this should affect her decision to go ahead with the pregnancy.

Our third couple, Traci (Lyndsay Webb) and Derek (Donnie Lewis), are unmarried and have only been together eight months; so her unexpected pregnancy leads to arguments over whether they should get married and whether she should have the child. These scenes are marred by Lewis nearly losing too many of his lines; indeed, several performances in this production need further rehearsal.

The fourth couple expands the overall discussion to the international level. Seema (Laura Savar) is a woman in India who is upset when her husband, Rajan (Praem J. Phulwani), insists that she only continue her pregnancy if they can be assured it will be a male child. If Phulwani's fine performance were to be given a grade, it deserves an "A."

"The 'A' Word" runs through Aug. 16 at Mobtown Players, at 3600 Clipper Mill Road, in Baltimore. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and students. Call 410-467-3057 or go to www.mobtownplayers.com.

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