Shelley Regner and Richard Baird in "The Maltese Falcon."                                   Photo by Aaron Rumley

            North Coast Repertory Theatre’s world-premiere production of “The Maltese Falcon” written by Matthew Salazar-Thompson is a parody of the Dashiell Hammett novel and, more so, the 1941 film adaptation that starred Humphrey Bogart as San Francisco shamus Sam Spade. So to understand and appreciate what is being parodied, you’d best know one or the other.
            That doesn’t mean this animated romp directed by Todd Nielsen can’t be enjoyed strictly on the strength of its physical comedy, well-timed sound effects (thank you, Foley artist Liam Sullivan) and lots and lots of similes and metaphors. But because this production runs nearly two and a half hours with intermission (the first act alone is 75 or more minutes’ long) knowing the source material that Salazar-Thompson, Nielsen and the game cast is winking at will make the time in your seat pass more swiftly.
            Personally speaking, I know the John Huston-directed film adaptation of “The Maltese Falcon” very well, and having read the novel I also know that many of Hammett’s cleverest lines were used verbatim in that movie. (There’s also a 1930s film of “The Maltese Falcon” that admittedly I’ve never seen.) Many of those clever lines and hard-boiled aphorisms are in the NC Rep stage show, though this production still felt long to me. A little too much exposition for one thing, even if that very exposition is meta-mocked by the actors delivering it. The 1941 movie never drags and clocks in at an economical and satisfying 100 minutes.
            This stage production stars Richard Baird as Spade, and from the jump he’s having a ball with the role, never taking himself too seriously but also faithfully speaking the grittiest of the detective’s banter as written by Hammett. (Huston wrote the screenplay for the Bogart film.)
            The other actor in the proceedings who plays only one part is Shelley Regner as femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Her North Coast Rep debut is a big winner. She’s every bit the dangerous beauty that Mary Astor was opposite Bogie and, like Baird, she’s deft with the play’s parody of and tribute to its source material.
            A busy ensemble of Regina Fernandez, Louis Lotorto and Daniel A. Stevens handles not only the other principal parts in the mystery of the black bird (Spade’s secretary Effie, Miles Archer’s widow Iva, partners in crime Kasper Gutman and Joel Cairo, gunsel Wilmer Cook, et al) but all the stage play, pantomimes and prop manipulations that help tell the story of the dingus that Spade ultimately dubs “the stuff dreams are made of.”
            What’s most successful about this production is the cast and crew’s ingenuity in effecting a romantic and dangerous ‘30s San Francisco by simply moving a few props and partitions around. Physical touches like spray-canning fog, or creating the illusion of a moving cab or cable car, are creative and amusing. Sound design and music composed by Ian Scot give the setting the period atmosphere and noir shadings required. Sound and visual effects are also utilized to get laughs. This is, remember, a comic take on a classic.
            Here and there playwright Salazar-Thompson departs from the Hammett novel and/or Huston screenplay, and that’s as it should be. I’ve endured more than a few stage adaptations of well-known films that basically tried to reproduce them in a different medium … with dubious results.
            A staple on Turner Classic Movies and a treasured gem of film noir, the 1941 “The Maltese Falcon” flick is assured of cultural immortality. To try and duplicate it is folly. To have fun with it while respecting it at the same time, and doing so onstage, is just fine. Case closed.
            “The Maltese Falcon” runs through April 5 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

 Jessica John and Francis Gercke in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"              Photo by Michael Mackie

            Edward Albee’s cynical history professor George, who in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” devises passive-aggressive “games” such as “Get the Guests” and “Hump the Hostess,” might appreciate a suggestion for a drinking game that would work like this: Every time George or his equally combative spouse Martha downs a fresh cocktail, take a shot.
            But, no, I don’t endorse drinking games; and besides, for all the booze that infuses Albee’s most famous work (now more than 60 years old), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is not about alcoholism. At least not completely about alcoholism.
            There is poison in the 23-year marriage between the at-once sodden and incendiary George and Martha, but the more times I see Albee’s play the clearer it becomes that it’s not all contained in a bottle.
            From its beginnings a producing company that resolutely embraces emotionally explosive classic theater (“August: Osage County,” last year’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” et al), Backyard Renaissance Theatre Co. has now taken on “Virginia Woolf.” Its artistic director Francis Gercke (who also co-directs this production with Coleman Ray Clark) and its executive director Jessica John are co-starring as George and Martha. Drew Bradford and Megan Carmitchel complete the cast as Nick and Honey, the younger marrieds who find themselves embroiled in George and Martha’s not-so-private war.
            As with its notable production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Backyard has with “Virginia Woolf” instilled a play set decades ago with a contemporary feel. No matter that the set of George and Martha’s ‘60s New England cottage living room (accomplished in minute detail by Chad Ryan) is equipped with a typewriter, a globe and what used to be called a hi-fi. The more urgent interpersonal aspects of this long night’s journey into hell could be witnessed today: two mutually loathing – and self-loathing -- combatants in a toxic marriage emboldened by drink to perform for an unwary younger couple. It’s an atmosphere heavy with brickbats and manipulations, a domestic arena rife with baiting and flirting and hectoring. I don’t know – do “grownups” still spend evenings together boozing from a bottomless bar or is that a suburban trope of the 1960s?
            It’s Albee’s words, however, prolific of rhythm and language, searing with assault, that sustain nearly 64 years after his play bowed on Broadway. Embedded in all the recriminations and salvos of “Virginia Woolf” are expressions of regret and often cruelty that, alas, human beings have not outgrown nor risen above in the years since. Academics, as revealed here, find downright hilarious the tweaking of the child’s refrain “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” into a literary reference, but have they ever come down from their ivory towers?
            “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is a marathon of melodrama – three acts, three hours, two intermissions. Albee titled his acts consecutively “Fun and Games” (no subtle irony there), “Walpurgisnacht” (a nod to a folkloric gathering of witches) and “The Exorcism.” Each ends in a devastating manner. The last brings a drained sense of relief if not genuine catharsis.
            Co-directors Clark and Gercke give Albee’s exhaustive narrative lots of room while aptly emphasizing its most timely blasts and blow-ups. If there’s slack it’s in the George-and-Nick engagements, the likes of which dominate the second act. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is most potent when George and Martha are at it; Nick and Honey are more than bystanders – they are victimized.
            As written, George has more to say than Martha does over the course of three acts, but to me she is the complex and crucial figure. The daughter of the president of the college that employs her husband, Martha’s is a misspent life marked by disappointments and delusion and festering self-destruction. As movingly portrayed by Jessica John, though, and witnessed most in the final act, there’s a frailty there that almost begs sympathy. John’s performance, reeling between coarse and broken, mirrors that of Elizabeth Taylor’s presence in the 1962 film adaptation of “Virginia Woolf” more than any Martha I’ve seen onstage.
            At the opening of the story, said to be at around 2 in the morning, a weary George claims to be not up for company at all, and ready to drop (well, maybe after a drink). As it turns out, no one in the play has more stamina than does George, and Gercke is up to the physical demands. Not only does George become a tireless spouter of taunt and invective, but he’s a prankster often in motion and, as Martha pushes his buttons all the harder, ever on attack. Gercke can get loud -- it’s startling even in a shout-fest like “Virginia Woolf” -- and his George never seems to get as drunk as John’s Martha; but then George could be working off the booze with all his manic gamesmanship.
            Drew Bradford’s is a fully realized Nick, wholly believable as an ex-jock who also has brains but is susceptible to the vicious games his host and hostess play. He holds his own and reacts with equal restraint and incredulity in his confrontations with Gercke’s bullying George. Albee’s Honey character is more substantive than she seems on the surface, and Megan Carmitchel finds that substance given her few opportunities here. She’s shown herself, at Backyard and elsewhere, to be an actor who can intuitively navigate both lead and supporting dramatic roles.
            It shouldn’t be overlooked that this staging benefits from timely intrusions of sounds designed by Kamila Nunez and intermittent music composed by Evan Hart Marsh. Costume designer Brenna Maienschein, too, has attired Martha in three different outfits, each boldly reflective of her mood, with the last in funereal black.
            Each time I see “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I imagine afterward what George and Martha – and Nick and Honey, too – might be experiencing the next day or even a few sleep-it-off hours in the wake of this awful evening.
            Better not to think about it.
            “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” runs through March 26 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown.

Summer Broyhill (left) and Marti Gobel in "Straddle."                                                  Photo by Xingyu She

            If you look up “straddle” in a dictionary it may say something like “a gesture between two people, of intimacy or possibly of dominance.”
            The back-and-forth between those two dynamics makes for a simmering undercurrent in Diversionary Theatre’s world-premiere production of Harrison David Rivers’ “Straddle.”
            For the first 10 to 15 minutes of this one-act co-conceived and directed by Diversionary’s Sherri Eden Barber, a long-married lesbian couple, Dodie (Summer Broyhill) and Vida (Marti Gobel), go a lot further than straddling each other in a fancy hotel room. I’ve seen some explicit depictions of sexual activity onstage before, but none that I recall as explicit as this. It makes a production I saw earlier this year, the quasi-graphic staging of Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter” by OnWord Theatre (of which Gobel is a co-founder), look like a Disney Channel special.
            But just as two lovers’ hunger and infatuation are apt to become two marrieds’ tension and anxiety, Dodie and Vida’s fun is interrupted by the reality of having kids at home being looked after by Grandma or, more disruptive, by a veiled accusation. What took Dodie so long getting a bucket of ice for the room, Vida challenges. “Truth or truth?” is a recurring ultimatum in “Straddle.”
            For just about all of the play’s 80 minutes Dodie and Vida alternate between being physically magnetized by each other (pretty impressive after 14 years of marriage!) and being at odds. Most of the latter is incited by Vida, who seems unable to sustain the spirit of play that her wife is enjoying the hell out of.
            There’s a truce when Dodie lights up a joint and the two proceed to get high. It’s quite funny, but how many times have I seen this old device onstage?
            Nothing in “Straddle’s” first hour prepares you for its confrontational, soul-baring, truth-telling windup. The less said about it here the more it will surprise and maybe enlighten you later.
            Broyhill, who brings to mind Geena Davis, gets to play with the most comedy in “Straddle,” whether it’s ordering hotel food while high or haplessly kicking in a door. Gobel is right there with her, comedy-wise, during the weed-smoking scene, but there’s gravitas in her portrayal of Vida, believable as lover, wife, mother and, eventually, a woman who is willing to share all, painful as all can be.
            The hotel room designed by McKenna Perry is contemporary and appointed in the way that “hip” hotel rooms can be, and designer Annelise Schultz-Salazar has lit the furnishing and mirrors for passionate proceedings. The focal point on the stage is the bed. You probably figured that.
            “Straddle” is sexier and sultrier than it is meaningful, and aside from learning that the two women met at a laundromat I’d like to have learned more about them BEFORE they met, something that could provide added perspective on who they’ve become together. To this end, “Straddle” is more voyeuristic than revelatory.
            “Straddle” runs through March at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights.