E-Mail This Article to a Friend Winter stages Local theaters take a world tour BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Tiny Tim has blessed us every one, the last bundles of hay are being swept out of the mangers, and the Rockettes are looking forward to kicking back and relaxing for a bit. As you gather with friends to chat about the family dramas that unfolded around the holiday turkey, area stages are readying their own dramas — and comedies and musicals — for the winter nights ahead. And what better way to launch the festivities than with a few festivals?

Our Place Theatre Project takes up residence at the Calderwood Pavilion for its fifth African American Theatre Festival (January 18 through 30). The two-week blitz offers evenings of short plays and a few full-lengths, including George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of three Harlem-set tales by Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk, and the world premiere of Cynthia Robinson’s Ascension. There’s a focus on new playwrights and a celebration of a legend, this year’s being playwright/professor Ed Bullins, whose edgy shorts from the 1960s also get a turn in the spotlight.

Across the river, the American Repertory Theatre hosts a South African Festival (December 30 through January 30) that gives us the rare chance to survey contemporary drama created by South Africans since apartheid crumbled. Foreign Aids (January 5 through 23), a one-man multi-character cabaret about the AIDS epidemic, is performed by its author, the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys. The show inaugurates the ART’s new Zero Arrow Theatre. Meanwhile, the Loeb Drama Center hosts Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree (through January 16). Performed by the author, this multiple-character one-actor show chronicles the relationship between a white and a black family sharing a South African abode in the 1960s. After that, Tony winner John Kani presents Nothing But the Truth (January 21-30), which examines the complex dynamic between South Africans who stood up against apartheid and those who returned after living in exile.

The ART follows the festival with The Far Side of the Moon (February 4 through 27), Canadian artist Robert Lepage’s intergalactic multimedia event about the space race and two brothers. The piece, which boasts a score by Laurie Anderson, has been on stages around this planet but now makes its first landing in New England. And Crash Arts offers Anderson in the flesh; she’ll present the Boston premiere of The End of the Moon at the Cutler Majestic Theatre (January 16). A mix of travelogue, personal theory, history, and dream, the piece looks at the relationships among war, æsthetics, spirituality, and consumerism while featuring music for violin and electronics.

South Africa is only the first of many corners of the globe to be explored on area stages. Boston Theatre Works ushers us off to the bedlam of Afghanistan with Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (February 24 through March 19). Nancy E. Carroll portrays the British homebody who becomes infatuated with the ravaged city and the cultural chasms within. You can take a jaunt to France for New Repertory Theatre’s Boston premiere of Doug Wright’s Quills (January 5 through February 6). The asylum at Charenton where the censorship-flouting Marquis de Sade is imprisoned at the turn of the 18th century is the setting for Wright’s dramatic analysis of the notorious scribe’s obsessive need to write — even if it costs him his freedom. Is he an intrepid activist or mad? Austin Pendleton plays the scandalous Marquis. Zeitgeist Stage Company also probes questions of insanity with Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (February 11 through March 12), which delves into the mental-health system and patients’ status in society. But back to that world tour. The Huntington offers a taste of the East with Naomi Iizuka’s 36 Views (March 11 through April 10), which is about the conflicting motives of an art historian and a dealer, both of whom have designs on a rare, recently discovered ancient Japanese "pillow book."

How about a pop over to the Emerald Isle? Súgán Theatre, that ever-dependable purveyor of Celtic drama, adds a ray of light with The Sanctuary Lamp (February 4 through 26). A capsule description of Tom Murphy’s drama sounds like a classic joke set-up: a Jewish Englishman, a circus performer, and a woman spend the night in a church. But there’s little humor in the lyrical drama, which caused an uproar when it debuted at the Abbey Theatre in 1975. Devanaughn Theatre digs up the early shorts of an Irish icon in Voices in the Dark: 3 Plays by Samuel Beckett (February 3 through 20). Then Belgium is the setting for Wellesley Summer Theatre’s world premiere of The Book of Hours (January 7 through 22). In Laura Harrington’s World War I–set drama, villagers strive to save their library’s literary masterpieces as the German army encroaches.

Of course, no global tour would be complete without a stop in the Queen’s country. Good news for all you Anglophiles: the sampling of English drama is lush this winter. Moreover, the selections provide a chronicle of British theatrical history. Lest you forget that Shakespeare did not have the Elizabethan market totally cornered, head to the ART for Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (March 5 through 26), which will be directed by Brit director, playwright, translator, and novelist Neil Bartlett. Before young Will was dipping his quill, the 21-year-old Marlowe had marshaled history, mythology, and psychology to tell the tragic tale of Queen Dido’s obsession with Trojan War vet Aeneas. The Bard gets his turn this winter too, courtesy of Boston Theatre Works, which has Shakespeare & Company’s Jonathan Epstein blowing in the new year as Prospero in The Tempest (January 13 through February 6). Meanwhile, 18th-century comedy weighs in at the Huntington, where artistic director Nicholas Martin directs The Rivals (January 7 through February 6), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s romp through courting rituals, disguise, and financial planning. Obie winner Mary Louise Wilson stars as famed word mangler Mrs. Malaprop