David Cooper Photography Michael Ball as the dissolute Lord Porteous and Wendy Thatcher as the scandalous Lady Kitty in "The Circle." Click photo for larger image. Related article: If you go ... Shaw Festival

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario -- The advantage of the American over the Canadian dollar is shrinking toward zero, but otherwise an international theater excursion from Pittsburgh is as easy as ever. Just a five hours' drive, right up the road from Niagara Falls, lies pretty little Niagara-on-the-Lake. And intertwined with the shops on its flower-trimmed streets are the three theaters of the Shaw Festival, one of Canada's two great repertory companies.

The other, the Stratford Festival, is just two hours farther (more about that tomorrow). But the Shaw is as close as Canada gets. The 2007 offerings fill its three theaters with 10 shows over a season that started April 3 and was planned to end Oct. 28, but one early-season hit, "The Circle," has already been extended to Nov. 11.

The Shaw concentrates on works of the past 150 years -- roughly, from the lifetime of its namesake, G.B. Shaw (1856-1950), plus more recent plays that deal with that same period. This year, the bill of fare has its usual tilt toward comedy, with only Shaw's "St. Joan" and Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke" marking the tragic end of the spectrum. But most of the comedies are the thoughtful, mixed comedy/drama associated with Shaw, and even the musicals, "Mack and Mabel" and "Tristan," have tragic dimension.

On most days, there are two or three choices in both the matinee and evening slots (only Monday is totally dark), and a few days each week there's also a lunch-time slot, so with adroit planning you could cram all 10 shows into less than five full days. My own first Shaw visit was less than two days, so I have only three shows to review so far, but I'll be back soon.

'The Circle'

"The Circle" perfectly illustrates one of the Shaw's chief values, which is to explore forgotten plays from early in the century and discover what should re-enter the active canon. They've done it before with the likes of Harley Granville Barker and the lesser-known Noel Cowards, and now they're doing it with Somerset Maugham, whose "The Constant Woman" was a hit last season.

Not accidentally, this is also the kind of theater that the Shaw acting company does best: subtle period domestic drama with good parts for women.

For the audience, "The Circle," dating from 1921, provides a pleasant sort of whiplash in that we're not sure what outcome to root for and even less that Maugham will give us, and even so he adds an extra twist.

The title refers to a circular pattern over time. When he was a baby, Arnold's mother scandalously eloped with Lord Porteous. Ever since, they have lived in declasse (but very comfortable) European exile, with no contact with Arnold, who has grown up to be a stuffy MP living in a well-upholstered country showcase with a restive wife, Elizabeth.

It is Elizabeth who has insisted that Arnold's estranged mother and husband be invited for the weekend. She also invites two friends as possible buffers -- but no one counts on Arnold's wronged father showing up, too.

This could be a set-up for farce, and Maugham is certainly alive to the comic possibilities of surprise and confusion. But he is mainly interested in Elizabeth, who has a secret lover and idolizes Arnold's mother for her passionate past. Of course, it turns out not to be so romantic after all, and Arnold's father turns out to be not so noble, either, but the play still comes down to Elizabeth's decision whether to stay with her husband or follow her heart.

Master craftsman Maugham and Shaw director Neil Munro manage this with such care that you feel both ways about it. You are bound to be surprised -- just as you are over a similar decision (but dissimilar result) in "The Constant Wife" -- even though, or perhaps because, Arnold is such a bore, the kind of man whose every speech goes klunk.

I do think actor David Jansen favors that part of the character too much, just as David Schurmann is too unwilling to let us see the dark side of the father. But Moya O'Connell has wiry emotion and delicacy as Elizabeth, and although Wendy Thatcher lacks comic flash as Arnold's mother, Michael Ball's Porteous is a delicious reprobate.

Period piece it may be, but set at a time when the husband-wife double standard was undergoing attack, it still has something to say about marriage to anyone wise in its ups and downs.

"The Circle" is not entirely forgotten -- I recall a starry 1989 Broadway revival with Rex Harrison and Glynis Johns as the scandalous older couple and Farley Granger as Elizabeth's father. I hope the Shaw revival gives it a burst of currency.

'The Cassilis Engagement: A Comedy for Mothers'

Also right down the Shaw's power alley is "The Cassilis Engagement," 1907, another exploration of the social politics of marriage, albeit from the mother's point of view. And like Maugham, St John Hankin skates deftly on the edge of high comedy without ever giving in.

The redoubtable Goldie Semple plays Mrs. Cassilis, an imperturbable aristocrat faced with the sudden engagement of her pride-and-joy, mama's boy Geoffrey (David Leyshon), to Ethel Borridge (Trish Lindstrom), a pretty but lower-class young woman he met on an omnibus.

You wonder how Mrs. Cassilis ever let him use a public conveyance frequented by Borridges! But she gamely invites the girl for a lengthy visit at their country estate -- and in a brilliant preemptive move, also invites her far more common, less socially attractive mother (Mary Haney).

Aristocratic friends and relatives rally around to repel the invaders, but Mrs. Cassilis follows her own counsel, killing the intended match with apparent kindness. The humor is that we root for the girl to win but also hope that she'll have the smarts to get out of a marriage that would be a form of well-padded death.

Lindstrom is both pretty and gritty as the girl who's no fool, her very purposeful walk a study in character. Haney steals the play as the vulgar mother naively desperate for respectability.

Patrick Galligan provides timely added verve as a sophisticated society gent who stirs things up, and Charlotte Gowdy is perfectly bland as the girl who will get Geoffrey in the end.

Hankin's play doesn't have the nicely maintained tension of Maugham's. But while Hankin sees the awfulness of the squirearchy, he also has a shrewd eye for 1907 realities and knows that the alternatives Ethel faces are none very pleasant. Director Christopher Newton, former festival artistic director, gives that dark undertow full weight.

'Saint Joan'

This is the Shaw Festival's third "Saint Joan." I saw the first two -- 1981 with Nora McLellan and 1993 with Mary Haney -- and just a week after seeing this one, with Tara Rosling, I have to say that the first two remain much more vivid.

Of course this is a familiar dynamic in the performing arts, where the most memorable productions are often those you saw first. And this "Saint Joan" is capable enough, especially for those who haven't yet seen one of Shaw's greatest, thorniest plays. But it does lack sizzle.

You can't specifically fault the Joan, Tara Rosling, who may be too pretty for the usual image of Joan but has a lithe intensity that is winning. She doesn't have much of the common touch, however, and her voice slips too often into pretty recitation, as though aspiring to a stained-glass attitude. Shaw's Joan is an anti-saint (for example, he has no time for her voices) or, rather, his version of a saint, which is simply someone more vivid than normal.

I do fault the general weakness of the men. Schurman, Ball and Galligan (all in "Cassilis") have the kind of authority that is sorely lacking in these undistinguished generals, courtiers and bishops. Even the capable Ben Carlson as Cauchon verges on whiney, which describes the dependable Norman Browning's Archbishop, Although the prize there goes to Peter Krantz's irritating John de Stogumber. Patrick McManus and Blair Williams are solid as Dunois and Warwick, and my sympathy goes out to poor Harry Judge, whose Dauphin can't possibly stand up to the memory of the great Heath Lamberts in the role in 1981.

Director Jackie Maxwell (festival artistic director) and designer Sue LePage have opted for a mixed setting, partly medieval, partly modern, often vaguely in-between. At one point there's a figure right out of Iraq. The point is that all the play's issues, and especially wars over faith, are current. But the result can be simply vague, except for an impressive opening forest, some gothic monoliths and Kevin LaMotte's striking lighting.

Still, Shaw's play remains one of the essentials, a timeless debate on the role of the great individual in the inevitable machine of history and a timely exploration of the attractions and delusions of nationalism. Like any "Saint Joan," this happily sends you back to read the play and its contentious preface.