Although Portland performer Kelly Nesbitt could be called a number of things — including a clown, a writer, a designer, performance artist, a mover and a shaker — she likes the term "dabbler." And she’s in good company. One of over a dozen artists who will amaze and entertain you in the sixth annual WORKNOT, the two-month-long installation of genre-contorting art and performance housed at the SPACE Gallery, she and her comrades do a lot of wacky things, in a slew of artistic disciplines. Like Nesbitt, the local and national artists in the multi-task-force that brings us WORKNOT have their hands in a lot of different jars.

These are high times for the dabbling sensibility, says WORKNOT’s curator, the Portland printmaker and Cerberus Shoal musician Colleen Kinsella. "We live in a kind of Renaissance age right now," she says, "when everyone has to know how to do a lot of different things in order to get the work done." The work that WORKNOT will get done throughout January and February, as SPACE’s third

The twain rarely meet, it seems, when it comes to First Fridays versus opening nights in the Portland theaters. We have our gallery scene, our theater scene, and our music scene, but for the most part, the city’s various arts scenesters tend to stay comfortably within their own disciplines. But why languish in this separate-but-equal sensibility, when we might have rapprochement, integration, even brazen conjugality? The idea is elementary, but I’m still wanton for it: Theater and the other lively Portland arts must be persuaded into more frequent, more unlikely, and more intimate conspiracies.

That said, there certainly are some local precedents for such collaborative unions. One of 2005’s highlights, in terms of the gravitational pull it exercised on a broad range of local artists, was A Company of Girls’ fine A Wrinkle in Time. Joining the intrepid young actresses of this sci-fi/humanist story were the experimental musicians of Tarpigh, with an original score, as well as a collaborative vid

Well, it was a close call, but now that we’ve crossed the Stygian flood of Christmas Carols and other holiday fiascos, we can get back to the business of theater that might occasionally surprise, scandalize, and even keep us breathing.

To start with, I’m delighted to report that two of Portland’s professional houses and one community theater will be taking on works by that wonder of wit and wordplay, Tom Stoppard. In the coming year, we’ll be lavished with the shipboard farce Rough Crossing from Portland Stage (January 24-February 19); The Real Inspector Hound from the Gaslight (TBA dates in March), and the quintessential literary comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead from Mad Horse (April 13-May 7). Rough Crossing presents a theatrical crew all stuck together on a ship; when the composer’s financée is overheard getting it on with another actor, the playwrights have to think fast to keep things tidy. In

Here it is, our theatrical year: Often political, performed in increasingly common places, and studded with plenty of bright stuff.

SOCIAL WORKS

A whole slew of thespians couldn’t keep their hands out of politics and social issues, and thank god for that.

First, a couple political classics: We had the work of some timeless greats dusted off for topical renaissance, including Ariel Francoeur’s USM production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and Michael Toth’s brazenly apropos direction of Shakespeare’s brutal Titus for Two Lights.

We also saw the staging of some new scripts of simply scintillating intelligence and social import. The indefatigable members of activist theater troupe ROIL took their original voter-education show Close to Home to dozens of impromptu stages throughout Maine, in their successful call to strike down the Maine Christian Civic League’s proposed People’s Veto. Cathy Plourde

You could close your eyes and not miss a thing. Ariel’s plucky trill, Stephano and Trinculo’s sloshy bluster, Caliban’s rough petulance — the intricate language of them all rises from behind music stands, with no set, no loincloths or fairy accouterments, no trapdoors. The focus is on the words of Harlan Baker’s Prospero, Debby Paley’s Ariel, Karen Ball’s Miranda, and the rest of the gang in the eye of Shakespeare’s classic comic storm. The late masterpiece The Tempest contains some of the scurviest banter and loveliest consolations in the English language, and in the Naked Shakespeare Ensemble’s Nov. 28th reading, it was those words —not spectacles of scenery or garb — that claimed the spotlight.

This one-night-only reading of The Tempest was the latest offering of the Naked Shakespeare Ensemble, a corps of some of Portland’s most ubiquitous actors, all devoted to stripping the Bard’s work down to its fine and shapely textual sinews. Directed by Michael Howard and Michael Levine, under

With fame often comes overexposure. But in Steve Martin’s The Underpants, which he adapted from German writer Carl Sternheim’s 1910 farce Die Hosen, the fame is over exposure. Before the curtain goes up, attractive hausfrau Louise Maske has suffered a wardrobe malfunction: her bloomers fell to her ankles as she strained to watch a passing parade with the king as its main attraction. As the play opens, her blockheaded bourgeois husband, Theo, a civil servant, is berating her over the incident, whose notoriety he fears will bring the luster of scandal to his cherished dullness as a cog in the government machine and possibly lead to his unemployment and ruin.

What actually happens is that a couple of swains, captivated by the dropped drawers, show up dueling to occupy a room the Maskes have recently advertised for rent. As the romantic poet Versati sets out to seduce Louise (with the cheerleading aid of voyeuristic neighbor Gertrude), the sickly barber Cohen vows out of jealousy not