The first half of the play is acted entirely by kids. The second half jumps ahead 30 years to revisit them as grownups.

A play on parenting, featuring a puppet, closes out Portland Theater Festival

The festival is staging its 3 plays in nontraditional locations, starting Thursday in a high-rise on Congress Street.

The Portland Theater Festival production is playing at The Hill Arts through Sept. 3.

Arts residency Hogfish opens "CarmXn" on Wednesday, and Portland Theatre Festival is in rehearsals for "Sanctuary City."

Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok. Directed by Bari Robinson. Scenic design by German Cárdenas Alaminos. Lighting design by Mary Lana Rice. Costume design by Savannah Irish. Sound design by Sam Rapaport and Nathan Speckman. Produced by the Portland Theater Festival, staged at The Hill Arts, Portland, ME, through September 3.

Dave Register and his creative partners are betting big on the Portland arts community and its patrons.

After staging an outdoor theater production last year – largely to flex muscles that had atrophied during the pandemic – the founder of East Shore Arts has teamed with another local organization, Mayo Street Arts, for the first Portland Theater Festival this summer.

As a welcome addition to the usual summer selection of large-scale productions around the state, the first annual Portland Theater Festival is trying hard to prove that small can still be beautiful.

The organizers have said they hope to present diverse and challenging work with a “social leaning.” Potential ticket buyers who initially might feel an urge to brace themselves after that description, though, should know that at least the first offering of the three-play festival is quite engaging and funny, while also suggesting more than a few avenues for further thought.

It was 2005, and playwright Sylvan Oswald wanted to write complex, exciting roles for transmasculine actors. But it was 2005, and Oswald didn’t know that word yet. Instead, he was inspired both by what he saw on the American stage, and what he didn’t: by the performances of venerated queer actors like Peggy Shaw and Dominique Dibbell, and by a chance encounter with actor-creator Becca Blackwell during a street performance of Circus Amok.

Though it was less than two decades ago, the mid-2000s were a starkly different moment for trans visibility in American theatre. Few institutions were making notable efforts to cast trans actors in trans roles, and trans characters that did appear onstage were often the creations of cis playwrights.

Raw yet perceptive, the 2017 script examines race in America, both past and present. The character names of Moses and Kitch are taken from an early 20th century South Carolina manifest of enslaved individuals. The story was created, in part, as a response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager in a hoodie who was shot in a gated community in 2012. Thankfully, there’s no lecturing in Nwandu’s script. Wisely taking her cue from Beckett, she lets the script’s language do its disarming and disturbing work.

The creative curators of the fledgling Portland Theater Festive have raised, with theater experiences like Pass Over, expectations that more challenging stage fare is to come.