by AMY BARRATT

As usual 'round this time of year, the season is spinning out of control with too many shows for one person to see. Here's a quick look at a couple of good ones still playing and a couple recently opened.

The season is still young, but Wade in the Water, by George Boyd, has already emerged as the text to beat in the best new English play category for 2003–04. Rarely do we get to hear such poetic dialogue or see such nuanced characters as we get in Black Theatre Workshop's premiere production of Boyd's play, which has been held over to Nov. 16 at the MAI.

As the play begins, Nelson Johns, a 70-year-old former slave, is drowning. What follows is a memory play with Johns, played by Tyrone Benskin, addressing his dead wife Ella as he recalls the major events of his life.

Most of the play - a disproportionate amount perhaps, given the point Boyd eventually wants to make - focuses on Johns' life in Georgia in pre-emancipation days. Born to a slave woman, Nelson is taken into the "Big House" at an early age by "Ol' Massa," who dotes on the boy as if he were his own son, which, it turns out, he is.

Through this most privileged of slave existences we see clearly - as Nelson's masters never do - that good or ill-treatment is less of an issue than the fundamental evil of one human owning another.

In Nelson Johns, Boyd has created a wonderfully complex character. Even more impressive, though, is how each of the four other characters in the play, all portrayed by Nigel Shawn Williams, share a similar complexity. It's not seeing a black actor playing white characters that is shocking, but the fact that he doesn't resort to stereotypes. Williams manages to portray even slave owners as human beings: flawed men trapped, as we all are, within their own worldview.

This production is a must-see because of the work of those three men: Boyd, Benskin and Williams. Director Richard Donat's contribution is less obvious, and the production values appear to fall victim to a limited budget. Set designer Katka Hubacek's all-purpose trees and vines do little to enhance the play-going experience. Given the importance of water as a theme, it would have been nice to see some in the design. If that was financially impossible, I would have preferred to see the actors on an empty stage that could have been dressed up with lights and sound. (Both lighting designer Eric Mongerson and sound designer Marlon Grant feel underused here).

• Centaur's second offering of the season, Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall, is still playing and well worth the trip, mainly for the performances of two talented locals, Omari Newton and Ryan Hollyman, and one outstanding import, Ian D. Clark. It is to their credit and that of director Ken Livingstone that what is written as essentially a clash of ideologies also becomes a story about human beings. To Nov. 30 at Centaur, 288-3161.

• Founded by former BTW artistic director Kate Bligh, Temenos is currently presenting its first major production. Crave, by Sarah Kane, is "a poetic piece for four voices." At the Studio Theatre of the Monument National to Nov. 22, 871-2224.

• …et la petite araignée rouge… is an adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Devils, now playing at Théâtre La Chapelle. Transposing the action to contemporary Quebec, it is directed by Alexandre Marine and produced by his Théâtre Deuxième Réalité with recent theatre graduates from UQAM. To Nov. 23, 843-7738.

Wade In The Water runs until Nov. 16 at The Mai, 932-1104

>> Stage Listings