Stagings offer artistic ardor, great rewards

Cankerblossom. What's most remarkable about Pig Iron Theatre Company's first foray into the family-theater market is its timing. This was the summer that 3-D entertainment burgeoned in popular culture. So along comes Pig Iron Theatre Company with Cankerblossom, its through-the-looking-glass visit to Flatworld, a 2-D land populated by the extraordinary cardboard puppetry of Beth Nixon (a "coconspirator" of the West Philly theater company Puppet UpRising).

Though the production contains many elements of a classical quest, it also alludes to, in no particular order, Shakespeare, Homer, film director Hiyao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), the Beatles, Eugene Ionesco, the Residents, Maurice Sendak, and probably a whole lot more. But these references are Easter eggs in a grand treasure hunt that takes its audience to the bottom of the sea, a mountaintop, and everywhere in between (literally - much of the action occurs in a place called "the In-Between").

While the wonders of this production, whether animated, sung, performed, or cut from the top of a pizza box, are many - and indeed wonderful - its story is simple: A couple drifting apart in the "round world" find themselves united to retrieve their lost baby. OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but the important thing to remember is that simplicity - remember the awesomeness of a refrigerator box? Pig Iron does! - sometimes offers the most complex rewards. - Wendy Rosenfield

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Portmanteau. Five actors enter the room where we are gathered and, one by one, they set themselves up. A female civic organizer (Kristen Bailey) unfolds a music stand and hangs a plant on it. An industrial carpetbagger (Thomas Choinacky) at this unnamed place opens a board with gambling paraphernalia.

A Czech immigrant (John Jarboe) holes up under a makeshift tent. A vacationer (Jess Hurley) sits by her open valise. A documentarian (Mary Tuomanen) makes herself a photography station.

An hour later, by the end of Applied Mechanics' production called Portmanteau, we will have walked with them all as they talk, argue, threaten, or seek one another's help. Portmanteau unfolds while we mill about at will, finding its creases and twists. Each of the characters has an agenda. Those agendas link.