Mark Cofta’s theater picks: From Puck to Anna Karenina

Love and drama square off in March theater, with serious drama outpacing plays about romantic love — but those romances are big.

Love and cleverness with Shakespeare and Wilde

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Arden Theatre Company (March 2 through April 9) includes the line, "The course of true love never did run smooth" — and a crazy plot about fairies meddling in romances to prove it. Matt Pfeiffer directs a cast featuring Rachel Camp, Taysha Canales, Sean Close, and Brandon Pierce as the young lovers and Mary Tuomanen as Puck, the precocious fairy.

Quintessence Theatre Group runs Love's Labour's Lost (March 15 through April 21), which features a royal couple and four more romantic pairings in an early Shakespeare comedy. It's part of a "love and longing" repertory opposite John Ford's rarely seen revenge tragedy The Broken Heart (March 29 through April 23), both directed by Alexander Burns and featuring the same actors in both plays.

Oscar Wilde's witty, airy The Importance of Being Earnest at the Walnut Street Theatre (March 14 through April 30) features two young couples played by Alanna Smith, Lauren Sowa, Jake Blouch, and Daniel Frederick, and some of the cleverest lines ever written.

Famously unusual lives

The Resident Ensemble Players at the University of Delaware revive Bernard Pomerance's 1979 Tony Award winner The Elephant Man (March 2 through 19), about real Victorian Joseph (John) Merrick, whose deformities made him a freak and an outcast but didn't squash his intelligent spirit.

In a similar vein, the rarely seen 1997 musical Sideshow, receiving its area professional premiere at the Media Theatre (March 8 through 26), is Bill Russell and Henry Krieger's story based on real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, who also survived freak shows but pursued both a vaudeville career and separate marriages.

‘Coriolanus’ and three premieres

Shakespeare's timely political drama Coriolanus plays at the Lantern Theater (March 9 through April 16), featuring Robert Lyons in the title role as a war hero caught up in class conflicts in when Rome was a young republic, directed by Charles McMahon.

Some newer and smaller dramas are featured in March as well. Simpatico Theater Project's Ironbound (March 15 through April 2) explores a Polish immigrant's struggles in Martyna Majok's area premiere, directed by Harriet Power and starring Julianna Zinkel.

ReVamp Collective, a young company with the catchy motto "resetting the woman default," premieres Philadelphia playwright Kristen M. Scatton's new drama Jimmy Gorski Is Dead (March 14 through 25). Directed by Carly Bodnar, it concerns the effect a heroin addict's death has on the three people closest to him.

EgoPo Classic Theater completes its Russian Masters season with Anna (March 29 through April 16), innovative director Brenna Geffers and her cast's adaptation of Tolstoy's massive novel Anna Karenina, performed as if by a fly-by-night traveling company.