Everyone knows the classic tale of teenage lovers whose forbidden romance leads to lying, trespassing, murder, deceit, roofies and ultimately their own untimely deaths. But have you heard it told by 19^th century Italian anarchists?

Choosing Romeo and Juliet for this year’s installment of Shakespeare in the park is all a part of a plan to make the event bigger, better and more accessible to the atypical theater crowd in Bend.

For the second year, Lay it Out Events has partnered with Bend’s Cat Call Productions to bring Portland’s Northwest Classical Theater Group (NWCTG) to town for a performance in Drake Park. Lee Perry, event director for Lay it Out Events, which is a sister company to the Source, explained that after the success of last year’s performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bringing NWCTC back was a no brainer.

1776, a Tony-award winning Broadway show about the Founding Fathers, is coming to the Tower Theatre, but there won’t be a single male on the stage.

Instead, this version of the 1969 show features an all-female cast that puts a new spin on an old story, just in time for Independence Day.

“I love to take tried-and-true pieces of theater and stand them on their ear so audiences can experience them as new,” said the show’s director, Kymberli Colbourne. “When you hear the words of John Adams coming from a woman actor, you sit up and take notice. It’s very thought provoking.”

David Mamet's Oleanna is not an easy play. It's filled with big ideas and respects the audience enough to let us find our own meaning.

Oleanna is, at heart, about feeling powerless and the lengths one will go to in order to gain some control. It's also a post-feminist fable about the impenetrable boundary of language and people’s ability to listen without ever really hearing. It's also about whatever preconceptions of gender politics you bring into the theater with you. See what I mean? Big ideas.

If you didn’t run out to see Nicole Kidman’s Academy Award-nominated performance as a grief-stricken mother in 2010’s Rabbit Hole, you can be forgiven. Not everyone, including the Academy, is interested in such weighty cinematic material as the death of a young child (Kidman did not receive the Oscar nod). But it would be a mistake to sit out Cascades Theatrical Company’s presentation of the David Lindsay-Abaire play that served as the basis for the film’s script.

In fact, after walking out of CTC’s production of Rabbit Hole, I had to let it percolate through my mind for a day. Ultimately I decided I really did like it, and I would recommend it to anyone, but with a warning: this is not a happy play. It is tragically sarcastic, but it is definitely not happy. Don't go to this play on a first date, or if you are looking for something light.