They're not just mailing it in

Two veterans of Snappy Dance Theater who call themselves They Gotta Be Secret Agents - Bonnie Duncan and Tim Gallagher - will perform "Poste Restante" ("General Mail"), a new theater piece, in front of the Cambridge Post Office in Central Square today at 2, 4, and 7 p.m.

The piece was inspired by the US Postal Service's Dead Letter Office. "We have a little nostalgia about the role the post office had in people's lives," Duncan says. "We play with the notion of boxes and envelopes and what kind of surprises people find inside. Our evening-length version of the piece includes stop-motion animation, in which a letter folds itself into an origami bird and flies to the next mailbox."

The outdoor selections will feature acrobatics, puppetry, and theater, Duncan says. "There's a sequence in which Tim puts me in a box and mails me, and in another a puppet comes out of a box to play with us."

Duncan says she and Gallagher tried out the outdoor version last month at Somerville's ArtBeat Festival in Davis Square. "We'd been rehearsing outdoors in the grass by the Stony Brook T stop on the Orange Line and so enjoyed people's reactions - people cheering and honking their horns when they saw me balanced upside-down on Tim's shoulders - we thought it would be fun to perform a more finished piece outside. We're performing for people who don't usually get to see us, and that wild audience response is the best."

Information: www.myspace.com/theygottabesecretagents.

Notes

Up You Mighty Race Company will celebrate its eighth anniversary and the start of its residency at the Boston Center for the Arts tonight at 7:30 in the Mills Gallery. The evening includes a preview of the company's "In the Continuum," which opens Sept. 17 at the BCA Black Box Theatre. Free. 617-536-9695. . . . "Fancee Panties," a comedic musical revue featuring Mary Callanan and Carolynne Warren with special guest Kathy St. George, returns to the Stuart Street Playhouse tonight. Tickets: $30. 800-447-7400, www.telecharge.com