Mid-winter grab bag Mixing it up in Portsmouth BY MEGAN GRUMBLING

Last week, whilst baiting hooks for Ridiculous Ideas for Portland, a visionary co-worker at my night-job suggested instituting something for the theater/music/literary scene that he called Due Process: One regular evening a month, or a season, when local artists of various stripes could perform new works and works-in-development for an audience. It’s often a welcome change of pace, especially to mid-winter sensibilities, to mix up a show’s media a little, and exposing new local works to the spotlight is always a good idea.

Broadly speaking, this is what the New Hampshire Theatre Project offers with their Mid-Winter Showcase, a little miscellany of forms performed by some of their teaching artists at Portsmouth’s intimate year-old West End Studio Theatre. It’s a chance for these workshop leaders and mentors to, as artistic director Genevieve Aichele puts it, strut their own stuff. Among their performances on Islington Street this weekend will be a poetry reading, several jazz numbers, and production of a new play.

Kicking off the evening this Friday and Saturday will be a reading by poet Lysa James (who did not appear in the show I attended) from her manuscript In All the Benevolent Directions. A New Hampshire poet who works with the NH State Arts in Education program, she’s been published in several national literary journals and has taught classes and workshops across New Hampshire. She’ll be taking the place of James Patrick Kelly, a prize-winning sci-fi writer who gave an entertaining reading last weekend (and will again this Sunday) of his story Itsy Bitsy Spider. Can poet James top a narrative in which citizens of the future can opt to live in a virtual theme-community called " Strawberry Fields, " where the ice-cream man sells butterscotch Yellow Submarine-on-a-stick and interior design favors bean-bag chairs? Her collection sounds far-reaching enough to stand a chance.

The headlining act is What My Daughter Wants, a new and rather sentimental one-act by award-winning New Hampshire playwright and actor Scarlett Ridgway-Savage. Kate Kirkwood plays an ebullient Woman at three stages of life: Sixteen, as a teenager obsessed with boys and the idea of being a movie star in California; 45, as a single mom and caterer; and 75, still fiery but dealing with loss. Supporting Kirkwood’s gusto-rich performance are Christy Cloutier Holmes and Larry Vigus, who both show quite convincing range in playing all the other characters — including the Woman’s mother, daughter, best friend, blind date, father, and son-in-law. Together, they enact the Woman’s encounters with a progression of standard feminist-tinged themes and phenomena: The desire for economic independence, the trials of single parenting, the rather fraught decision to artificially inseminate at the age of 45.

Her struggle along the way to maintain independence in the face of familial discord, economic realities, and age is of course a timeless battle. But what makes great art is the ability to find new ways of presenting those recurring themes; while What My Daughter Wants has a sympathetic protagonist with plenty of spitfire, it could use a few new metaphors. When the Woman, at age 75, waxes about how she always wanted to " suck the marrow out of life, " her spunk and desire are diminished a little by how rote the expression now seems. That’s a metonym for the play’s larger problem of presenting enduring conflicts by way of a specific storyline that we as an audience have already, for the most part, endured. The performances of What My Daughter Wants are extraordinarily energetic — Kirkwood is positively buoyant, Vigus is a solid and grounding presence, and Holmes is particularly funny as the Woman’s exasperated and exasperating teenage daughter — but the play itself, at this stage in its life, feels rather tired.

In addition to giving an audience to new works themselves, events like NHTP’s Mid-Winter Showcase and Portland’s hypothetical Due Process shows are also valuable because they can let established artists give a new medium a try. That appears to be the case in actor/director Christy Cloutier Holmes’s premiere as vocalist and leader of the new C.C. Holmes Project, a four-piece jazz standards ensemble with Matthew Bradd on drums, Eric Donnelly lively at the keyboards, and adept Andrew Dow on bass. Holmes as chanteuse doesn’t have the tone, range, or inflection that she does as actress, but together the band performs warm if unambitious takes on classics like " Stormy Weather " and " God Bless the Child " at intervals throughout the evening.

Because of its intimate format and cast, the Mid-Winter Showcase will inevitably be of greatest interest to those who are familiar with the broader work of these artists within the Portsmouth area’s rich arts community. That said, what a great service to and outlet for their arts scene; what commendable risk-taking with new works and new forms; and what a super model for a city full of multi-medial artists! I salute the artists of the NHTP for their mettle, and for reaching out to include non-thespian artists in their programming. Portland would do well to take a cue.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com

Mid-Winter Showcase, an evening of performances, includes What My Daughter Wants, a one-act by Scarlett Ridgway-Savage, directed by Genevieve Aichele, with Christy Cloutier Holmes, Kate Kirkwood and Larry Vigus; jazz by the C.C. Holmes Project; poetry by Lysa James, produced by the New Hampshire Theatre Project at the West End Studio Theatre, in Portsmouth, through January 15. Call (603) 431-6644, ext. 5.