Gabriel

A handsome, amnesiac stranger threatens to upset the tenous balance of the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands in Moira Buffini’s powerful 1997 drama. In the skillful hands of director David Esbjornson and his committed cast—led by the excellent Lisa Emery as a compromised Englishwoman and Zach Grenier as a cultivated German officer—Buffini’s heightened language never tumbles into portentousness. And while the company keeps the characters admirably complex, the play’s humane ambiguity does not slip into moral evasion.—Adam Feldman