Once again, The Next Stage, Inc. is combining its professionalism and enthusiasm for the theater to produce a show about real life issues.

Over the past six years The Next Stage, Inc., a local theater company, has been making a name for itself in Centre County. This weekend will close the company's most recent production of The Clearing, by Helen Edmundson.

"We have to do this play," is what co-artistic directors Mary Skees Young and J.D. Shuchter said when they saw another production of The Clearing in New York. The directors were drawn to the play for its difference in setting and theme from many of the productions they have done in the past.

The directors also chose to do The Clearing for its concentration on "acting, which is a big focus of ours, rather than spectacle," said Skees Young, a lecturer in English at Penn State.

The play is about the conflict between the English and the Irish after Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the 1690s. Although racial genocide is not an issue with which most people have had experience, this production manages to relate this issue to its audience.

Skees Young said the play is about ethnic cleansing. "We see it everywhere," she said.

In fact, Edmundson wrote the play in response to the social conflict in Bosnia.

Seth Brown, who plays Robert Preston in the show, agrees with the directors. Brown, a writer and editor for Penn Stater magazine, thinks The Clearing is about the hatred that causes racial conflict, and that this production brings the issues down to a "more human level."

"I think it's driven by what happens to families and communities," said Brown. "It makes you realize morality is so subjective."

Shuchter, also a lecturer of English at Penn State, said the heart of the play is "what happens to people in the middle," instead of what happens to those on opposing sides of the conflict.

The villains of the play are polar opposites and fanatics.

"We're trying to play them as people whose minds are locked and they see only the one truth and everything is black and white," said Shuchter.

"If people are watching carefully, there's a moral center to the play," he said.

Professionals, volunteers and Penn State faculty members have come together to put on this production. Four of the cast members have professional theatrical experience and the costume designer, Laura Hanchar, has worked on productions in Arizona and South Carolina in addition to State College.

Challenges the directors faced included mastering foreign accents and accurate costume design of the period. In addition to this, the execution of scene and costume changes is intricately choreographed, due to the 28 short scenes that compose the play.

In the six years since The Next Stage, Inc. was formed, it has become a definite theatrical presence in Centre County. According to Shuchter, the company "started as three friends who thought they could put on a one act."

Now, on top of mounting three main-stage productions each year, the non-profit theater company has three other branches as well.

A reader's theater series is held every other month at Webster's Bookstore Cafe,128 S. Allen St., two members of the Actors Equity give acting lessons several times each year and a children's theater troupe has been formed for public schools in and around Centre County.

The Clearing will be performed at 8 p.m. today, tomorrow and Sunday, as well as at 2 p.m. on Sunday at Fairmount Avenue School.