Stage Door

Believe it or not, if you schedule your theatergoing carefully enough, it is possible to see all nine--count' em--plays that are filling Harvard stages this weekend and next. For the most part, the selection is a stampede of warhorses that you've probably seen before. Still, there should be entertainment aplenty to take your mind off of the inevitable December stress--provided you don't burn yourself out rushing from play to play.

Blithe Spirit

Written by Noel Coward

Directed by David McConaughy

At the Leverett House Old Library

December 1-4 and 8-10 at 8 p.m.

ONE of the playwright's more mature romantic comedies, this is not the typical show of Cowardice. Blithe Spirit is about a man whose marriage is threatened by the ghost of his first wife.

Brighton Beach Memoirs

Written by Neil Simon

Directed by Andrew Hill and Dan Balsam

AT the Mather House TV Room

December 2 (8 p.m.), 3 (2:30 and 8 p.m.), 8-10 (8 p.m.), (10:30 p.m.)

BRIGHTON Beach Memoirs is the first play in Neil Simon's trilogy of bittersweet autobiographical comedies with alliterative Bs in the titles. The play is about the early adolescence of a boy in an extended Jewish family in Depression-era Brooklyn.

Don't Drink the Water

Written by Woody Allen

Directed by Maurie Samuels and Elliot Thomson

At the Dunster House Dining Hall

December 1-3 and 8-10 at p.m.

THE one-liners fly in Don't Drink the Water, Woody Allen's play about a family of Ugly American tourists who are held as spies behind the Iron Curtain.

Heaven Can Wait

Written by Harry Segall

Directed by Jeff Hass

At the Currier House Fishbowl

December 1-3 and 8-10 at 8 p.m.

YOU'VE seen the Warren Beatty movie. Maybe you've seen the film it was based on, the 1941 Here Comes Mr. Jordan, with Robert Montgomery and James Mason. That film was based on this light comedy about a boxer called to heaven too soon who is sent back to Earth to inhabit a new body.

Little shop of Horrors

Written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken

Directed by Jon Blackstone

At the Hasty Pudding Theater

December 1-3 and 8-10 at p.m.

THIS musical is much funnier than the diluted 1986 film based on it and about as funny as the B-grade 1960 horror flick it's based on. Little Shop of Horrors is as much a satire on the early 1960s as a gruesome tale of a carnivorous plant.

Medea

Written by Euripides

Directed by Laith Zawawi

At the Quincy House JCR

December 2,3,8,9 (8 p.m.), 3 (10:15 p.m.), 10 (7 p.m.)

TWO millenia before Joan Crawford discovered wire hangers, Euripides wrote the definitive play about a woman done wrong--who then takes it out on her kids. Director Laith Zawawi is giving Medea the "black box" treatment.

The Mikado

Written by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

Directed by Aline Slader

December 1-3 and 7-10 (8 p.m.), 3, 4, 10 (2 p.m.)

PERHAPS everyone's favorite Gilbert and Sullivan musical, The Mikado is about a young man who is so in love with a woman that he almost loses his head over her--to the blade of the Lord High Executioner.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Written by Edward Albee

Directed by Jason Rosencranz

At the Lowell House JCR

December 2, 3, 8-11 at 8 p.m.

TRY not to think of Liz and Dick as you watch Albee's famous drama, in which two couples turn sex into arguments, arguments into sex, and both into a form of high art.

Three Modern Noh Plays

Written by Yukio Mishima

Directed by Joon Lee

At the Loeb Experimental Theater

December 1-3 and 8-10 (7:30 p.m.), 3 and 10 (2:30 p.m.)

THIS traditional genre in Japanese drama gets a modern twist from famed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.