Rarely seen 'Duchess' arrives on the local scene

David R. Gammons has spent months reading and re-reading John Webster's tragedy "The Duchess of Malfi." He has trimmed the long script and designed a set featuring a narrow hallway with doors mounted at each end. Audience members will be seated on either side of the stage, looking at one another as they witness the play.

"There's a wonderful sense of confrontation," Gammons says of the production, which will be presented by Actors' Shakespeare Project starting Thursday.

A bloody and violent work, "The Duchess of Malfi" is well known in academic circles but rarely produced in theaters. That could be because Webster, like so many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, is so often overshadowed by the Bard that their plays are forgotten. And it's rare for Actors' Shakespeare Project to take up a play by another author.

"It's really an exciting opportunity to do a play that is in fact a masterpiece but has rarely been done," says Gammons. "Boston audiences certainly haven't seen it, at least on a professional level, and it's really a great and fascinating play."

It is undoubtedly a cruel play, vivid in its depiction of sadistic human behavior and tragedy. Every major character meets his or her maker by the end.

The story focuses on the Duchess, a widow who decides to secretly remarry someone beneath her station - her servant. Her two brothers are against it because they stand to gain a large inheritance if she dies single, and one of her brothers even has an incestuous attraction toward her. Her marriage and the fact that she has a child are discovered, and a bloody revenge ensues.

"The characters wrestle with good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and cruelty," says Gammons. "It's really quite exciting, almost like doing a new play - but not really."

Through Feb. 1 at Midway Studios, 15 Channel Center St., Fort Point. 866-811-4111, www.actorsshakespearepro ject.org

The Nora Theatre Company is premiering a new translation of Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" at the Central Square Theater on Jan. 8.

The translation was expressly created for the company by writer George Malko, who is fluent in Russian and chose to keep Chekhov's work close to the text.

"A lot of the versions that you get in English are not translations," said director Daniel Gidron. "They are English versions of the play. George's first language is Russian, and he has an immediate connection to the original work. If you are doing a new translation, it's great to have someone who actually speaks the language."

The play is about the decline of Russian aristocracy, focusing on a quirky family's futile attempt to save its beloved orchard, to the extent that it loses the family fortune.

In Malko's "Cherry Orchard," don't expect any flowery language or lines that are "too British," said Gidron. "This one is very direct. Chekhov is very simple, it is not flowery. It has a very strong rhythm to it. It isn't at all roundabout."

The director and actors, including Annette Miller, who stars as Madame Ranyevskaya, have been tweaking, calling Malko in New York, making sure the translation actually translates. Now they are ready to hit the stage.

"We like it quite a bit," says Mimi Huntington, artistic director of the Nora. "It feels quite natural and fresh. You have to get the words off the page in the mouths of the actors to see how the words will really play. And I think it works."

Through Feb. 1 at Central Square Theater, Cambridge. 617-576-9278, www.central squaretheater.com