Culture wars Spell #7 and Bella Donna BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

When Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7 debuted, in 1979, wars were raging on city streets. They were culture wars, and in the battles for equality that were waged, language was a weapon. Many warriors were artists, and Shange was among them. Verse-spurting commandos often appeared in her works too. Now it’s a quarter-century later, and Company One is celebrating Spell #7 (at the Boston Center for the Arts through November 20) with a fine staging of the play, which merits the label choreopoem that Shange assigned to her best-known work, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Even when its nine performers aren’t engaged in explicit choreography, Shange’s language is so musical that the ensemble can’t help but move, sway, and strut to the rhythm of her prose.

The nine African American characters — seven of them actors — are gathered in an inviting Manhattan downtown tavern. Booze is on the house if you’re short on change, and the air is thick with talk of limitations. Outside, these people struggle with futile auditions and being typecast by race. Inside, however, they proclaim, "This is our space and we are not moving."

But movement is precisely the means by which they stake their righteous claims and broadcast their identities. It’s a complex exercise given the era’s racial polarization. And inasmuch as they’re performers, the characters make their livelihoods pretending to be someone else. Unraveling this knot makes for a dynamic affair. Our host is Lou (a stern Michelle Baxter), a minstrel magician who sets the tone of the play by conjuring the historically rooted, oppressive stereotypes that society cannot seem to shake. Lou says, "Nobody gonna be made white just by a clap of my daddy’s hands."

With the mantra "colored and love it, love it and colored" pulsing like a bass line, these New Yorkers offer testimonials of struggles — in the theatrical world, on the streets, between the sheets, and in history. If you think this sounds dated, you probably consider Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone passé too. What this anniversary production reminds us about today’s world is that cultural perceptions haven’t evolved as fast as technology has.

Under Summer Williams’s direction, the Company One proceedings get a mainlined shot of sultry sass. The evening flows like a jazz concert: as an ensemble the performers are solid, but each member also steps up to solo. There’s a rent-party quality to it all, and a chemistry that crackles when the chummy posse square off for a battle of the sexes. And keep your eye out for the sarcastic speculations of Karimah S. Moreland’s Natalie on a day in the life of a white girl and for the myth-infused monologue song that Melanee Addison’s Maxine delivers to explain the devastation she suffered when she realized that, contrary to her childhood idealized image of African-Americans, her culture is susceptible to societal ills.

A different war thunders beyond the walls of Sligo General Hospital circa 1944, the setting of Devanaughn Theatre’s Bella Donna (at the Piano Factory through November 21). This play by Sligo-based John Kavanagh, which is getting its American premiere, centers on four patients in the bleak hospital under the care of a no-nonsense nun (a tart Dani Duggan). Three are American soldiers whose plane went down on neutral Irish soil. The other is a comatose local chap, Jack (Webb Tilney, deserving credit for managing a mostly stock-still unconscious presence), who’s prone to bouts of claptrap, outbursts that lighten up the pervasive grimness. Jack’s dutiful girlfriend, Maria (Alex Zielke), visits regularly and provides a welcome distraction for the cheeky, surly, laid-up soldiers as well as for the dashing American medical officer (Richard LaFrance) who arrives to bring the soldiers home. Nurse Mahon is not amenable to his interfering with her regimen, but Maria is quite is open to him.

Rose Carlson’s even-handed direction of the piece illuminates the clash between freewheeling, loudmouthed American culture and tight-lipped Irish traditions, but Kavanagh needs to cut back on the social-issues talk and the small-town gossip that clutter the script. Devanaughn’s talented actors supply robust portrayals, but that can’t save a play when the script plunges like the soldiers’ B-17 into a gooey marsh of predictability, with mechanical lines like "I’m afraid, very afraid" and "What about for once in your life admitting you’re in the grip of something?" Bella Donna, unfortunately, provides little to be in the grip of.