Time traveler

With her pale skin, unruly tresses, and intense gaze, Marianna Bassham looks like the perfect period actress.

Directors think so, too. Since Bassham's last year of graduate school at Brandeis in 2001, this rising young thespian has played everything from a ditsy daughter in the 17th-century "Tartuffe" to a doomed seamstress in the early 19th-century world of "Quills" and Ophelia in "Hamlet."

She's done her share of wenches. When she was playing a mistress of several men in "Richard III" at the Great Lakes Theater Festival , a fellow cast member dubbed her "Renaissaucy." She liked the moniker so much that it's now part of her e-mail address.

Her current role, as Ymma (pronounced EE-muh) in Moira Buffini's "Silence," actually straddles centuries. The comedy-drama, whose New England premiere opens officially at the New Repertory Theatre tonight, is set in the Dark Ages, but its language and themes have a very current ring.

"Silence" is the fourth play Rick Lombardo , New Rep's producing artistic director , has cast Bassham in.

"One reason why I love to work with her, and why she's so right for Ymma," Lombardo said before a recent rehearsal, "is that Marianna combines great strength and power at the same time she has the beauty and sexiness of a classic ingenue. But her force of person is anything but ingenue. She has to play a strong, powerful, willful 21st-century woman trapped in a 10th-century world and a 10th-century corset."

Trapped is right. Before a recent rehearsal, the 30-year-old Bassham was clumping around in boots and her costume -- a strange, long-sleeved thing that exposes her cleavage while also cruelly restraining her, with belts across her chest and waist. How 999.

In "Silence," a play based on actual characters and events, Bassham plays an outspoken noblewoman from Normandy who is banished to England by her brother. Once she's there, her sharp tongue offends King Ethelred , who forces her to marry Lord Silence, a 14-year-old boy. Despite the fact that Silence turns out to be not what he first appears -- this play is filled with start-ling revelations -- the pair bond and head off to Silence's kingdom of Cumbria. But Ethelred (played by Lewis Wheeler) decides belatedly that he wants Ymma for himself, and he takes off after them.

At this point, the play becomes a road adventure. The pair and their entourage, traveling in a little cart, flee the ruthless Ethelred and his soldiers while avoiding marauding Vikings and suffering through English weather. (Rain and snow will fall on the New Rep stage, says Lombardo.) On their journey, the little band, which includes a priest, a king's man, and a servant, discuss religion, love, and death in poetic and often comic language.

All the while Ymma's stuck in this dress. And Bassham says Ymma hates it. "She figuratively and literally tears at her clothing because it's so restrictive."

"Ymma is very aware of sexual pressure and of the male gaze and finds that despicable," says the Kent, Ohio, native. "This costume is designed so the eye goes right there, and she knows it. She's so frustrated because she has the power to rule but no one takes her seriously in that way."

In the end, Bassham says, Ymma does find her power.

The overarching themes of the play are timeless ones of identity, love, and fear, she says. Buffini, a British playwright, wrote "Silence" right before the turning of the current millennium, in the late 1990s. As Y2K approached, people were scared the world's computer systems would all fail. Ymma's gang had a different fear -- that the arrival of the millennium meant the apocalypse was at hand.

"The play gives us the distance in thinking it's a play about the Dark Ages," Lombardo says, "but it's not about that historical incident at all, it's really about what's happening now. The way [Buffini] uses the metaphor of Vikings raiding the land, it's clear she's referring to terrorists. And Ethelred is a born-again zealot. So we're dealing with current geopolitics in the guise of this play set in 999 that's about something else."

The play asks, says Lombardo, "What does it mean to be a brilliant, powerful woman in a world with a male-dominated power structure?"

Bassham is relatively new to the Boston theater scene, but she's already been cast in a wide variety of parts -- not just period ones -- including a school chum in "The Heidi Chronicles" at Gloucester Stage Company, a 14-year-old daughter in "Cooking With Elvis" at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater , and Sally Talley in the Lyric Stage Company's "Talley's Folly ."

But for right now, she has a sword to take up and someone to kill onstage. Before leaving to do the deed, she says, "The play has a very dark edge to it, but it also has very funny, beautiful passages in it. When I first read it, I started laughing out loud and was very moved a number of times. We hope to fulfill that onstage."

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com