Encore! Encore! Swan songs and life lessons BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Lessons learned and lessons earned — by theater troupes and audiences, respectively — abounded this year. Let’s consider 10 of them.

1) The difficult can be staged right away; the impossible takes a little longer.

As in five years in the mulling and 81/2 hours in the three alternating productions. Shakespeare’s Henriad, covering three English kings and 22 years of late-medieval English history, has rarely been staged in repertory. Artistic director Oskar Eustis and company presented this as his soaring swan song to Providence, as it turns out, since he leaves in June to helm the legendary Public Theatre in New York. Trinity Repertory Company audiences, and outlying theater-lovers who came for the occasion, were given a life-list experience with these superb performances.

2) The more the challenges, the bigger the payoff.

There are so many aspects in a comedy of manners that are just a little off, accumulating till we’re shaking our heads as much as laughing. So when a college production gets Oscar Wilde not just right but quite right, it’s a surprise as much as a delight. In the URI production of The Ideal Husband, not only were the accents kept intact, but the spirit of the play as well. Moral rectitude that could have been played for laughs as self-righteous posturing was given understanding and thereby depth by the young actors. And director Bryna Wortman made sure as much was conveyed by reactions between the lines as by the words themselves.

3) You can’t have two much of a good thing.

Leave it to Ed Shea’s 2nd Story Theatre to stage two Molière farces this year — The Learned Ladies in February, and then a nine-month break, barely enough time for us to recover, before letting loose Tartuffe, the playwright’s best-known farce. Both were done as poet Richard Wilbur’s rhymed verse translations, the gold standard for the witty, if sometimes Gaulling, comic treasure.

4) Essay ideas can be brought to life, if they vividly inhabit flesh and blood.

In a suit and tie, minding his own business in a subway, Lamar Gregory is an African-American named Clay, picked up by the lubricious Lulu, played with Biblical seductiveness by Lauren Lovett. LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman was written in the ’60s as a scathing jeremiad against racism and was promptly condemned for promoting rather than explicating violence against whites. At the Providence Black Repertory Company, director Julia Murphy and these actors gave his words wings.

5) And even a politically correct message play can reach us when it offers questions rather than answers.

NewGate Theatre’s Spinning Into Butter could have been a polemical endurance contest in the hands of amateurs. Playwright Rebecca Gilman took on a right-minded, been-there-thought-through-that yawner of a subject: racial friction on campus. Captained by Clare Blackmer as a dean under pressures and piloted around the acting shoals by director Brien Lang, the production skillfully showed us characters we sympathize with behaving unsympathetically, and vice versa. Think or swim, dude.

6) On-the-money production design can make it all clear before anyone says a word.

As befits Nilo Cruz’s MFA alma mater, the Brown staging of his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna In the Tropics was a wonder to behold even without the actors. With the elaborate set by Michael McGarty, Cruz got a belated graduation present: a Tampa cigar factory represented by a framework as airy as a birdcage. Thanks to Phillip Contic’s costume design, the inhabitants sang the lyrical script well-identified by what they wore: a smart Panama hat rather than a bare head; a light floral frock or plain brown wrapper, as was precisely suitable. And Tim Hett’s lighting was director Lowry Marshall’s close-up lens.

7) Less sure as hell can be more.

Just about everyone in the recent Gamm staging of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice could have come across as larger, as in "larger than life," than they did. Playwright Jim Cartwright provided archetypes that would have worked entertainingly enough as stereotypes. "None of that," you could hear director Judith Swift snapping. So we got a boorish mother from Wendy Overly who was smug between firestorms; a wannabe impresario from Alan Hawkridge who was no more of a lecherous blowhard than he had to be; a shy potential boyfriend out of Anthony Estrella who didn’t telegraph his reticence. And — thank you, Lord — in Casey Seymour Kim, a Little Voice who put more passion in her soft, head-averted moments in "Over the Rainbow" than Ethel Merman ever found in "The Star-Spangled Banner."

8) A play can be pure play, for goodness sake.

Perishable Theatre helped out Jordan Harrison last year with a TextPlosion staged reading of his Kid Simple: a radio play in the flesh, which went on to greater appreciation and the Humana Festival in Louisville. In Providence, Mark Lerman directed a crackerjack ensemble, with Laurabeth Greenwald adorably smart as a teenaged inventor of bizarre devices (a machine to hear dust bunnies scampering under couches, anyone?) and Wendy Overly as a narrator whose tone lurches from mellifluous to murderous. Such fun.

9) You don’t need real pearls on the costumes and a set by Eugene Lee to put on a good Shakespeare.

You don’t need real pearls on the costumes and a set by Eugene Lee to put on good Shakespeare. A horse and cart to haul around the actors will do, if the latter are talented enough. Itinerant companies used to roam the hills in the provinces, after all. In that spirit, producer Cait Colvo’s New Stage jogged around the state with a memorable production of The Winter’s Tale. It was wonderfully acted, and guided around its plot stumbling blocks by Bob Colonna, former Trinity actor and founder of the late Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre, from which many of the Bard’s best echo in memory.

10) You don’t need to fight Manhattan traffic to see a first-rate musical.

The touring production of The Producers at Providence Performing Arts Center was as good as that musical gets. (Yeah, yeah — it was Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick or nothing for you. Well, we had a great time and you’re still waiting for the movie remake to start filming next year.) Lewis J. Stadlen was a mischievous hoot as Max, having practiced the role in New York. Alan Ruck’s Leo induced as many knee-slaps as he will come January on Broadway. Production values in Providence were top-notch despite the portability. (Even actors can be folded up, after all.) Yup, gone are the days when seeing a road show meant settling for second-best.