• Alison Burns (center) is a standout in American Stage in the Park's production of Rent.

I admire Rent more than I like it.

I admire Jonathan Larson’s idea of translating Puccini’s La Bohème into a turn-of-the-millennium New York rock opera, in which AIDS and not TB is the disease stalking everyone, and gays, lesbians and cross-dressers surround the central hetero relationship. I admire Eric Davis’ staging of the musical, which evokes the 1990s East Village just as persuasively as his work on Hair last year (also for American Stage in the Park) brought us a 1968 Big Apple, and I admire a lot of the acting in this fine production (which I saw in a preview), from Pete Zicky’s clever portrayal of Roger to Alison Burns’ spectacular work as Maureen. If these features — inspiration, direction, acting — were all that Rent offered, it would easily be a winner.

But this is an opera — 99 percent singing and 1 percent spoken dialogue. And the music of Rent is second-rate. Or worse. And it’s a chore to hear the lot of it.

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• B. Dexter Lewis and Tia Jemison.

I first saw A Lesson Before Dying in a top-notch production at Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre more than a decade ago, and my ultimate response was: Where’s the beef? After all, this was a show that promised to show us how an innocent black man, condemned to die in the electric chair, was taught by an impassioned schoolteacher how to bear his terrible fate. But there was no lesson in Lesson — it seemed to me that the promised epiphany never appeared, and that the attitudes conveyed to our falsely-convicted hero came to little more than “Keep your head up.” Fortunately, the acting was superb, so even if the script failed to deliver, the evening still offered some satisfactions.

Well, now I’ve seen Stageworks’ new version of Romulus Linney’s play – adapted from a novel by Ernest J. Gaines – and I’m sorry to say that it’s every bit as disappointing as its predecessor. Further, the acting in the Stageworks show (which I saw in a preview) is only occasionally persuasive, so there are moments in this experience when there’s very little to hold our attention. Fortunately,

The good news for local theatergoers is that the current freeFall Theatre version of Miss Julie is first-class in every way: acting, directing, set and costume design. The bad news is, the play itself can, to moderns, feel windy and overlong (even at 90 minutes), and the class issues especially can feel irrelevant to a contemporary American (we may be a plutocracy, but we’re not an aristocracy).

Still, the pluses outdo the minuses in this fine production, directed impeccably by Eric Davis. If you don’t mind the occasional longueurs, it’s worth your attention.

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• Christine Decker and Richard B. Watson as Martha and George

Several years ago, the Polish critic Jan Kott published a book called The Theatre of Essence, and ever since then that provocative title has affected how I think of a whole class of modern play. Waiting for Godot is a play of essence, I think — the tramps Didi and Gogo represent not real hobos but a modern spiritual inscape composed of doubt and longing, terror and confusion. A play like Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also shows us the essential — in this case, pure id, animal desire, demanding, craving, shouting to be heard above the din made by the other beasts.

And after having seen the fine production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at American Stage, I’m convinced that this too belongs to the theater of essence – that its real subject is the madness that every good marriage represses, the hatred and rage and resentment that lurk somewhere south of consciousness and only surface, in most relationships, for the briefest of moments before the apologies start and “normal” functioning resumes.

If Virginia Woolf is a great play – and I think it is – then its greatness comes from its pitiless illumination of the evil beneath our best intentions, an evil which doesn’t cease to hunger for its moment. And instead of an embarrassing slip of the tongue — which is already more than most people render — George and Martha offer us three full, noisy acts of unrestrained malice. The resulting spectacle is gripping, enthralling and (nervously) very funny.