Director Sean Mewshaw, and actors Dave Register and Bari Robinson inside the space at 511 Congress St. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

An empty office in a downtown high-rise. A warehouse that has been used to store tires or sailboats. A workshop for a landscape and interior design company.

These spaces will become stages this summer when the Portland Theater Festival presents three plays in three distinct venues across the city. None is actually a theater, so the crew will need to build sets and lights and seats literally from concrete floors up. To Dave Register, who launched the festival in 2021 in the parking lot behind Tandem Coffee Roasters in East Bayside, the challenges are worth the work.

“For a lot of people, particularly young people, they’re not necessarily interested in theater or it’s not their thing because when they were kids they were forced to attend a boring production of whatever in a stuffy old theater somewhere,” Register said. “The hope would be that this unconventional staging challenges some preconceptions about what theater is and totally galvanizes more enthusiasm and excitement for theatergoing.”

Mainers have long been able to find shows off the beaten path. Just recently, the Portland Shakespeare Company staged “Measure for Measure” at St. Luke’s Cathedral, and in August, Hogfish will set “The Breasts of Tiresias” at the downtown nightclub Aura. Fenix Theatre Company’s Shakespeare in Deering Oaks park and PortFringe, set this year among East Bayside’s breweries, are summer mainstays. Outside Portland, Opera in the Pines recently presented “The Crucible” at a former church in Standish, and Isle Theater Company in Deer Isle has set past shows in a quarry and on an organic vegetable farm. The COVID-19 pandemic, the busy summer schedule, the desire to attract new audiences and the crunch in the real estate market all have spurred artists to become even more creative.

‘TO QUESTION EVERYTHING’

“Artists always love to put a square peg in a round hole,” said Jessica Tomlinson, who is facilitating a Portland Theater Festival production at Cassidy Point in Portland. “That is the role of artists, to question everything. The challenge has been as Portland has grown and changed, we’ve had to become more nontraditional because there’s just not as many opportunities as there were in the past, particularly with the changing real estate market.”

All three plays will average 40 to 50 seats per show – about half the capacity of past seasons – for a more intimate experience for both the audience and the actors. Previously, the festival’s venues have included Mayo Street Arts, Mechanics’ Hall and The Hill Arts.

The season will start with “A Case for the Existence of God,” opening Thursday and running through July 7. The story follows two young men who become unlikely friends over a series of conversations about everything from getting a loan for a piece of land to the struggles of parenthood to the pitfalls of the American dream. The story is set in a small office cubicle, and Register searched all over the city before he found the right venue through real estate broker Ed Gardner.

“He said, ‘I think I’ve got the space for you. Why don’t you check out the seventh floor of my building at 511 Congress?’ ” Register said. “It’s this 10,000-square-foot, raw, empty floor with panoramic views of the city and a black canvas of a space. He said the words which you always want to hear in theater but very rarely do: ‘Do whatever you want.’ ”

Actors Bari Robinson, left, and Dave Register, rehearse “A Case for the Existence of God” inside a downtown high-rise on  June 12. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Gardner has owned the office building since 2014 and has had a couple vacant floors since a previous tenant decided to downsize. He is a longtime supporter of the arts and previously owned the building occupied by Portland Stage, so he has some knowledge about what it takes to stage a production. He gave the Portland Theater Festival carte blanche and has decided he wants to be surprised on opening night by how they transform the space.

“Taking a very untraditional space, without a fly loft, without a green room, and having an audience part of the production is, I think, going to be unique for what we generally see in typical theater settings,” Gardner said. “It’s nice to know some of these downtown buildings have the flexibility to be different venues over the course of their lives, and certainly, 511 has gone through changes over the years. I would love to continue to see different energy like this being brought into 511 Congress.”

The second play is “Dry Land” (July 18 to Aug. 4), set largely in a girl’s locker room at a Florida high school. The story follows a group of teenage swimmers as they navigate what it means to be a young woman in America. Register described it as “acerbic, witty, hilarious and also deeply vulnerable and fraught at the same time.”

‘PERFECT!’

The venue will be a new space called Light Manufacturing at Cassidy Point, where owner Cyrus Hagge has developed nearly two dozen artist studios. Tomlinson said Light Manufacturing was developed as a short-term studio, particularly for artists who might need expansive spaces for big work. (It’s 1,500 square feet and has 22-foot ceilings.) It’s not meant to be a performance venue, but Tomlinson said the team at Cassidy Point has such high respect for the Portland Theater Festival that they decided to offer the space. The large, raw warehouse appealed to Register, who said he is excited to bring the public to a place many people have passed on the road but few have visited.

“When Dave walked in, we were still literally in construction, and he was like, ‘Perfect!’ ” she said.

The third and final play of the season is “Wolf Play” (Aug. 22-Sept. 8). The plot is about a boy caught in the adoption process, and Register said it is the festival’s most ambitious project to date. The venue is the home of Kendrick & Bloom, a landscape and interior design company run by Heidi Kendrick and Peter Bloom. Both have experience designing and building sets and props for theaters, and they are interested in creating a small performance space at their large workshop on Presumpscot Street. Register described it as “your cool friend’s artsy attic.”

Bloom is the technical director for the festival, so he’s involved in turning all three settings into sets and figuring out details that might not be such big questions in a traditional theater.

“The first step is how do we get this to be a place where you can sit and watch a play?” he said. “How is the lighting going to work? In the office space, we’re renting lighting booms and lighting instruments and everything to bring into the space.”

The couple said they are excited about the festival’s approach because they share the goal of attracting more diverse audiences to theater.

“At plays that we have worked over the years, if you look around the audience, you see a lot of the same faces over and over again, and a lot of them are of a certain generation,” Kendrick said. “I think some people aren’t aware that theater can be a fun and dynamic experience. It’s more welcoming to all sorts of people who might not have been theatergoers before or maybe have never even been to a play. Some people have a stereotype that going to the theater is boring. We want to change that idea.”