E-Mail This Article to a Friend Gay apparel Suddenly Last Summer, The Breadwinner, Hairspray BY CAROLYN CLAY

The so-called gay sensibility moves from tortured to ebullient, from cawing rabble to bubble-gum pop, on area stages this week. Trinity Repertory Company offers a compelling revival of Tennessee Williams’s florid 1958 confessional, Suddenly Last Summer (through November 6). Merrimack Repertory Theatre unearths The Breadwinner (through October 30), a recently "rediscovered" 1931 work by the closeted M. Somerset Maugham. And Broadway in Boston proves with the second coming of Hairspray (at the Opera House through October 16) that, here in the 21st century, it’s not only far from shocking but positively G-rated to sprinkle a little polymorphous perversity on one’s theatrical entertainment.

Suddenly Last Summer, set in 1935, was written as Williams was undergoing Freudian analysis. It’s not only a portrait of the artist as both devourer and victim but also a deeply personal work, in which the playwright sentences an unseen alter ego to a violent end while wishfully saving his cherished sister from the lobotomy that 20 years earlier had silenced the sexual ravings that appalled the Williams siblings’ genteel dragon of a mother. The 80-minute one-act (which was originally presented as the heftier portion of a double bill called Garden District) is an important work in the Williams canon that, though made into a 1959 film, is not often revived. That’s partly because, for something so lurid of language, it’s as static as it is melodramatic. Even the climax consists of a long, revelatory speech the play has built toward while trying to repress. Nonetheless, when Suddenly Last Summer distressed some of its original audience with its lyrical evocation of unspeakable violence, critic Harold Clurman pointed out that literary greats from Euripides to Shakespeare had conjured greater gore. He might have added that the Greeks confined it — as here — to the riveting arias of the messengers.

Mrs. Violet Venable, the play’s indomitable New Orleans doyenne, is determined to shoot the messenger. Her adored "poet" son, Sebastian, has met a nasty death while traveling with his young cousin, Catherine, who has returned from sun-drenched Spain in hysterics. Catherine’s feverish tale of Sebastian’s demise does not suit Mom at all — involving, as it does, the savage revenge of the impoverished boys upon whom Sebastian preyed sexually. Mrs. V. has invited a young doctor in need of financial assistance to listen with her to the possibly crazed Catherine’s account and, if necessary, "cut this hideous story out of her brain!"

Mark Sutch directs the wisely subdued, well-acted Trinity production, which nods to Williams’s hothouse metaphors without sinking under their weight. The script repeatedly alludes to mayhem in nature, and Williams calls for such garden flora as "massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still blistening with undried blood." Instead, designer Fritz Szabo provides the façade of a stately manse and a patio surrounded by tropical greenery. Veteran actor Barbara Meek creates a formidable, but not monstrous, Mrs. Venable. And white-clad Miriam Silverman, her gestures a graceful swirl of agitation, makes the white-hot most of her long conjuration of the garish afternoon when Sebastian met his end near the beach that had been his sexual snacking ground.

In The Breadwinner, the bones children are looking to pick clean are their progenitors’. This elegantly subversive if ultimately belabored comedy opens with a quartet of privileged teens lolling about an English drawing room in their tennis whites while proposing euthanasia for anyone over 40. The 18-year-old scion of the Battle household is particularly irked that his father, who has attained that age after which "they’re only in the way and life can’t be any pleasure to them," insists on retaining control of the money. One might assume that author Maugham, having been 57 when The Breadwinner debuted, was more of Confucius’s view that youth should be filial. And sure enough, his stockbroker title character, having been touted by wife and children as the dullest thing since "dreary" old World War I, shows up with a surprise up his starched sleeve.

The production is a collaboration of MRT with New York–based Keen Company, which recently presented The Breadwinner Off Broadway. Keen artistic director Carl Forsman is also credited with finding the little-known work by the author of The Constant Wife, Of Human Bondage, and The Razor’s Edge. Maugham is mercilessly unromantic, and here he makes comic hay of the unruffled, perfectly civil way in which the stockbroker, having narrowly escaped financial ruin but decided nonetheless to escape his existence, rebuts all the presumed sentiments of comfortable suburban family life. His children bore him, his wife bores him, and his job bores him, declares this ultimate borer before chucking it all. He is not the only member of Maugham’s upper crust to do so, though the defection of The Breadwinner’s Charles Battle is more abrupt and less explicable than that of characters in The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge. But the play is a satire that does not so much explore the yearning for an authentic life as use it as a device. Once Charlie has dropped his bombshell, the comedy devolves into a series of broad vignettes in which one character after another tries to dissuade him from his plan to hit the road like Jack Kerouac in a top hat.

The play unfolds on Nathan Heverin’s handsome set, with parquet floors and gold-framed windows, and Forsman keeps things moving. The English accents are in and out — and disparate, which seems wrong for such an inbred group. But there’s a sharp performance by Jennifer Van Dyck as the wife’s chic, vain vamp of a cousin. Joe Delafield is all petulant outrage as the affronted heir. And Jack Gilpin is masterful in the title role, his facial expressions a precise mix of unflappability and incredulity. Maugham is famous for calling himself first among second-raters, and The Breadwinner is second-rate Maugham. Still, it’s a surprisingly modern artifact. And like chocolate, it’s perfectly delicious until you get sick of it.

For John Waters, the 1988 film Hairspray may have been a dip into the mainstream, but its celebration of energetic, optimistic avoirdupois and racial harmony in the era of Dick Clark is refreshingly eccentric stuff for a Broadway musical — even for a winking Day-Glo cartoon like the Tony-winning Hairspray. Buoyed by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s tongue-in-cheek book and tunes by Marc Shaiman that evoke memories from Dion to Motown, it’s seen here in a bright, serviceable staging. Unfortunately, it’s marred by sound enhancement that puts a blare on everything and makes the oft-clever lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman difficult to understand. Still, it’s hard not to get caught up in the relentless efforts of chunky Baltimore teen Tracy Turnblad to penetrate and then integrate the local American Bandstand equivalent, The Corny Collins Show; win its resident Elvis wannabe, and get her big basso drag queen of a mom unplugged from the iron and out of the house.

The two-dimensional scenery looks a bit as if it came out of Barbie’s Dream House, and the villainous characters work too hard. But Keala Settle is a sparkplug as Tracy, for whom dancing is a fierce if bouncy act of will. J.P. Dougherty makes "simple housewife of indeterminate girth" Edna not a grotesque but a warm, plausible, somewhat worn-down woman; "Timeless to Me," her old-time vaudeville turn with Jim J. Bullock’s good-natured Wilbur (a spindly fork to her ample platter), brings down the house. Aaron Tveit is a fluid Link Larkin, whose attentions turn Tracy catatonic on the hilarious "I Can Hear the Bells." Former Harlette Charlotte Crossley nails Motormouth Maybelle’s blues anthem, "I Know Where I’ve Been." And Caissie Levy and Alan Mingo Jr. are appealing as the second bananas whose subplot combines interracial love at first sight with Rapunzel.