Taking risks paid off for mid-tier companies

Yet this fall, during a stint as interim theater critic, it was in those theaters that I found some of the most original, adventurous, or flat-out entertaining productions, from SpeakEasy’s “Reckless’’ and “The Savannah Disputation’’ to Company One’s “The Overwhelming,’’ Zeitgeist’s “Lady,’’ and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre productions of Ronan Noone’s “Little Black Dress’’ and John Kuntz’s “The Salt Girl.’’

When coupled with strong productions of Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone’’ at the Lyric Stage Company, David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow’’ at New Repertory Theatre, and Israel Horovitz’s “Sins of the Mother’’ at Gloucester Stage Company, it was hard to miss the ambition, impact, and sheer centrality of small-to-mid-tier theaters.

This is not just notable but heartening. Touring productions of Broadway shows come and go, but just as a sturdy middle class is essential to a healthy economy, so a robust nucleus of mid-tier theaters is vital to a strong theater scene. It gives theater professionals what most of them hunger for - consistent opportunities to do good and meaningful work - and it gives audiences the opportunity to see that work.

It’s not all blue skies, of course. In this recession, how could it be? North Shore Music Theatre sent a chill through the community when it shut its doors this year, although a Rhode Island theater owner recently bought the Beverly-based theater and hopes to reopen it in the spring. Out in Lenox, Shakespeare & Company has battled a severe financial crisis that at one point threatened its ability to meet its payroll.

On the artistic front, too, there remains plenty of room for improvement. While it’s fine to boast of local premieres of plays by significant out-of-town playwrights like Craig Lucas (“Reckless’’) or Evan Smith (“Savannah Disputation’’), I’d like to see Boston’s theaters step up their efforts to find and showcase the work of more local playwrights like Lydia Diamond, Noone, and Horovitz.

Diversity in casting, or the lack thereof, also continues to be an issue. Except for Company One’s production of J.T. Rogers’s Rwanda drama “The Overwhelming,’’ the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of August Wilson’s “Fences,’’ and the American Repertory Theater’s “Best of Both Worlds,’’ I saw few African-Americans on stage (or in the seats) this season. One way for theaters to diversify their audiences is to diversify their productions.

On the plus side, theaters seem willing to test audiences with quirky or challenging plays, such as John Kuntz’s “Salt Girl,’’ a harrowing descent into one man’s anguish over the sister he lost and the life he lived. Creatively, the bar was raised when Diane Paulus began her tenure as artistic director at the ART and immediately made “immersive’’ a byword, thrusting the audience into up-close-and-personal confrontations with two ingenious Shakespeare adaptations, “The Donkey Show’’ and “Sleep No More.’’

“The only safe thing is to take a chance,’’ Elaine May once said. And indeed, in this environment, playing it safe - as, for instance, New Rep did by pulling the stodgy “Mister Roberts’’ out of mothballs to open its season - tends to backfire.

The establishment of strong mid-tier companies means good things not just for audiences but also for the local actors, directors, set designers, costumers, sound and lighting specialists, choreographers, and dialect coaches who are more likely to find steady work there than in traveling productions.

Equally important, though, are the artistic challenges that these theater professionals are finding at these theaters, where they can set free their imaginations and their energy.

For “Reckless,’’ set designer Cristina Todesco created a topsy-turvy world that offered a visual correlative to the chaotic events engulfing the show’s heroine. In an artful and haunting coda to “Little Black Dress,’’ lighting designer Nikki Pierce restored Amy, the desolate central character, to the world of glittering fantasy from which she had been brutally wrenched. For “The Salt Girl,’’ director David R. Gammons established a hallucinatory mood that kept us engrossingly off-balance, partly with the help of a set (designed by Gammons) that featured two dozen TV sets stacked, floor-to-ceiling, on which flickered a host of unsettling images.

“The Salt Girl’’ was the most memorable of several notable solo shows in late 2009. At the other end of the spectrum was Maureen McGovern’s “A Long and Winding Road,’’ a cozy one-woman musical tour of the baby-boomer generational experience presented by the Huntington Theatre Company. “Road’’ was thin and superficial whenever McGovern tried to play pop historian, but quite enjoyable when she settled into her more accustomed role of cabaret singer.

Speaking of which: Longtime Boston cabaret fave Belle Linda Halpern tried her hand at a solo show at Central Square Theater with “Cravings: Songs of Hunger & Satisfaction,’’ a heartfelt paean to food as the key ingredient to love, whether of the romantic or familial kind. With “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze,’’ presented by Underground Railway Theater at Central Square Theater, Gioia De Cari played 30 different characters, creating a portrait of MIT as a place utterly bewildered by the presence of women.

Taken together, the solo shows by Kuntz, McGovern, Halpern, and De Cari illustrated the range of personal expression and statement-making that is possible within the form.

Let me close with a harrumph: During this four-month stint in the critic’s chair, I’ve been surprised by how often plays begin 10 to 15 minutes late. Really, what’s the deal, people? You are doing the on-time audience members a disservice by making them wait till the latecomers finally stroll down the aisle.

Tardy starts have become such a routine part of the Boston theatergoing experience that when I went to Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven earlier this month to see Athol Fugard’s “Have You Seen Us?,’’ I was startled when it actually . . . started on time. What a concept!

So, having done so many big things right in 2009, Boston-area theaters should make a New Year’s resolution to get their act together and do this little thing right in 2010.

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.