“THE HEART has reasons that reason cannot know.” — Blaise Pascal

Radiance and darkness come from the same place. If the mind is the brightest place in the human body with its constant storm of electrical impulses, perhaps the human body’s darkness exists in the heart – a place of absolutely essential, tireless labor. The heart creates enough pressure in the course of its constant pumping to shoot blood out of the body up to 30 feet. It can continue pumping even after 1/3 of its muscle mass is decayed. In spite of this, what is strong and durable from within is also quite fragile from the outside. It only takes 25 to 75 watts of electricity to stop the heart from beating. Somewhere in every beat lurks the final one, pumping blood to darker veins on the other side of human consciousness.

This season promises some particularly dark moments. In May, Windfall Theatre travels into a conspicuously bleak autobiographical musical with William Finn’s A New Brain. Finn chronicled his battle with brain cancer in a musical filled with more heart and true human emotion than most musicals ever aspire. The Skylight Opera launches a completely different take on the dark side of musical theatre with a production of The Midnight Angel at the end of September. It’s the story of a wealthy 18th century woman so bored with life that she throws a lavish, decadent ball, inviting Death itself as a guest of honor. A similarly dark specter descends upon the Waukesha Civic Theatre’s Concert Series this season with Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldiers Tale. It’s a brilliantly dark piece usually performed by seven instruments. Composed in 1918, it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a deserting soldier who meets and loses his soul to the Devil. In February, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents its stage adaptation of the dense, gritty work of Russian darkness that is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The heavily intricate story of the brutal axe murder of two women will be played out sparingly. It will take a particularly deft scalpel to bring the extensive complexity of the original novel to the stage with three actors in a 90-minute show, but with the unique talents of Drew Brhel, Leah Dutchin and Mic Matarrese under the direction of Patrick Holland, Milwaukee Chamber’s Crime and Punishment could be one of the better shows on local stages this season.

Under an even deeper pall of surreal darkness, The Milwaukee Rep presents Samuel Beckett’s vision of The End next March. Mark Corkins stars in Endgame as Hamm, who sees the final curtain falling and a new one rising. Another classic tale of dystopia makes its way to Wisconsin Lutheran College’s Theatre Department with George Orwell’s 1984. The title may be out of date, but the concept of a world watched over by the all-seeing Big Brother is a very interesting choice for WLC. Earlier in the season, WLC also presents a pair of one-acts about the darker aspects of time, including playwright Susan Glaspell’s intriguing short drama Tickless Time. Written shortly after Einstein’s discovery of general relativity, Tickless Time is a drama about what happens when a couple decides to live in a self-imposed hell of a sort – a world where their only clock is the sun. In October, Allegro Productions presents the comic side of dysfunctional society with Urinetown: The Musical. A hit on Broadway some years ago, the Mark Hollman/Greg Kotis musical is set in a world where a 21-year drought has brought about a police state in which the only toilets available are run by a bureaucratic corporation that charges for every use. Somewhere between comedy and horror, Maxwell Anderson’s The Bad Seed, staged by RSVP Productions, is a strikingly bizarre story of a young girl who may very well have been born evil. In 1950’s America, a mother suspects her daughter of murdering her playmate. The play, which was turned into the strangest film of 1956, is being brought to the intimate stage of the Astor Theatre in February.