By DONNA KELLYNews Chief staff Published: Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 7:06 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 7:06 a.m.

WINTER HAVEN – Three women sit bantering around a kitchen table while their husbands practice golf putting techniques in the living room — but conspicuously absent are the table, cabinets, and kitchen appliances.

Welcome to the minimalist set of, “The Smell of the Kill,” a dark comedy by Michele Lowe and the opening production of the Theatre Winter Haven Season 42 Stage Read Series.

Usually presented informally in the Ridge Art Gallery, Stage Read plays are performed using few props and costumes on a simple set by actors holding scripts. Actors are often just a stone’s throw from the audience, creating a more intimate atmosphere.

They are normally edgy, contemporary — and often award-winning — plays more suitable for the informal venue than the larger theatre.

Scripts, said Norman Small, Theatre Winter Haven’s producing director, are chosen more for their critical acclaim than theater ticket sales.

“It’s not to make the box office glow; it’s not to make an audience giddy; and it’s definitely not to make an audience larger,” Small said.

He recalls a comment he once heard, “You can do a Pulitzer-prize-winning-money-losing-season.”

“We’ve done at least a trunk full Pulitzer plays or Tony award plays — and by their nature they are not comedies,” Small said. “Most of our choices have won critical acclaim but not popular appeal.”

They are choices based on content, style, and literary worthiness.

“Consequently, the emphasis is on the text. Consider how many people would find death, AIDS, abortion or homosexuality the appropriate dessert after a meal at The Olive Garden?” Small asked.

This year the theater’s Stage Read Series tackles marriage and murder, war and sacrifice, and the effect the death of a child has on family relationships.

Theater of the imagination

“We stay in one place and read a play. It is the theater of imagination,” said Katrina Ploof, an Orlando-based director with more than 20 years of TWH productions under her belt. “I treat (a stage read) in my heart like a radio play – you can close your eyes and see.”

Ploof said theaters opt to present a play in stage read format for various reasons, including a subject matter appealing to a narrow audience, language deemed by some as offensive, and difficulty casting a full production.

She enjoys both acting and directing in the stage read format, regardless of the reason this style is used. This season, she is directing two of the theater’s stage read productions: “The Smell of the Kill” and “Miss Saigon.”

For the director of such elaborate, large-scale productions as, “The Full Monty,” “Evita,” and the “Sound of Music” – during which she had to consider intricate lighting and sound, sizable casts, and elaborate costumes – a stage read offers Ploof a chance to focus on one thing — the language.

“As a director, when you are directing a (main stage) play you shape the audience experience with what you put it in,” Ploof said. “When you take all that away in a stage read, the playwright’s style of the play becomes so potent because there’s nothing in there monkeying with it.”

This allows a different type of magic to happen — complex issues told simply through spoken word.

“You have no responsibilities except to the text,” Ploof said. “All there is the language and the power of it, and the power of that story.”

Music, melody, and passion

The theater will present, “Miss Saigon,” a musical based on Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera, “Madame Butterfly,” 7:30 p.m. March 6 and 7 on the theater’s main stage, at 210 Cypress Gardens Blvd.

Written by Claude-Michel Schnberg and Alain Boublil, the play presents the story of an Asian woman who falls in love with an American soldier during the Vietnam War. After being separated during the fall of Saigon, they spend years trying to find each other.

Ploof said the musical, which won three Tony Awards in 1991, is perfect for a stage read production. It includes six principal performers and a 30-voice chorus.

“We couldn’t cast it,” she said, explaining that a main stage production would require a large number of Asian actors not available in this area. “But in stage read you don’t need the truth in casting.”

Ploof said the music and melody drive the production, even in a stage read, but the passion and compassion with which the story is told make it come alive to the audience.

“This is Madame Butterfly,” she said. “It’s the fact of a non-asian impact on an Asian woman and what happens.”

Ploof sees the playwrights’ decision to take the “Madame Butterfly” story setting it in Vietnam.

She points out the significance of the show being in an American art form – the musical – but written by French composers.

“France occupied Vietnam prior to the war,” Ploff said. “You have this playing out in Vietnam. It’s an American war — an ugly war. It’s so swirling – its French; it’s American. It’s a surprise how the cultures slam up against each other much like they did in mid-century Vietnam.”

According to Ploof, Schnberg was inspired to write the play when he saw a photo of a woman handing her children onto an American jet plane so the child could have a better life.

“I think that the theme of sacrifice is the biggest top note of the play — what the American boys sacrifices, the Vietnamese people sacrificed, and what both governments sacrificed in both cost and lives,” Ploof said. “It’s a massive canvas and against it we paint this tiny little picture of the mother and her son, and the choice she makes.”

Laughter and tears

A family struggles to reclaim their lives after they, too, lose a child in David Lindsay-Abaire’s, “Rabbit Hole” to be held 7:30 p.m. April 3 and 4 in the Ridge Art Gallery.

In the play, Becca and Howie Corbett are struggling to adapt to life after their young son is killed in an accident. They cope with the guilt, anger, and haunting memories in very different ways.

Becca searches for peace in conversations with her mother and an unexpected confidante: the teenager involved in the accident that claimed her son.

Howie deals with his rage by contemplating a relationship with another woman.

Fins, the dean of theatre for Harrison School of the Arts and an adjunct professor of theatre at Polk State College, directed the play as a stage read last season for Lakeland Community Theatre.

“Rabbit Hole” is effective in this format, said Ilene Fins, who is direction the production.

“The audience really focuses on the written word and this play is beautifully written,” she said. “That is why I was thrilled to direct it, again.”

Fins also teaches the play each year in her directing class because of what she describes as its flawless structure.

But the theme, by design, isn’t easily defined.

“The playwright says to make sure this is not a neat and tidy play,” Fins said. “The playwright says to make sure this is not a neat and tidy play, that the audience should be left with doubt as to the family’s future.”

“I say the theme is laughter through tears may offer hope,” she added, stressing the word “may.”

Girl Power

“Smell of the Kill,” will be held 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday in the Ridge Art Gallery.

Although, “Smell of the Kill” has a cast of three, the audience only sees three women during the performance. The men are heard but not seen.

Susan Reynolds, Darien Henne, and Lauren West portray three women have had enough of their husbands’ lying, cheating, and unlawful ways. After tolerating each other’s company at monthly dinners for years, they finally engage in meaningful conversation as their husbands — played offstage by Larry Helms, Danny Villnow, and Robin Davis — enjoy male bonding time in the living room.

As the conversation becomes more intense, the women decide to repay the men for their transgressions by locking them in the meat cooler.

“They may not deserve to stay there but they do deserve to be in there. It’s nice to see people humbled once in a while,” Ploof said. “This is a girl power play.”

She laughs when asked to explain the message behind the play she describes as a very black comedy with real style.

“There’s something to be said for truth telling in marriages. These people are in the place they are in because they don’t tell the truth,” Ploof said. “If you are watching and really laughing your head off, you are thinking you need to be a little more careful about being forthcoming.”

But Ploof said there’s not a deep message burning in the play but she does appreciate the irony the date selected for its opening day.

“It’s hilariously brilliant that Norman has it happening on Valentine’s Day,” she said, inviting couples to skip the romantic dinner in favor of the theatre.

“Come on over to Theatre Winter Haven and laugh at yourself,” Ploof said with a chuckle.

Donna Kelly can be reached at .