Wednesday marked the 2007 vernal equinox, heralding spring and a new arts season. Before signing off on winter, however, a word about performing arts, past, present and future.

First, the past. “Winter: All Premieres,” dazzled like an ice field under the noonday sun. Oregon Ballet Theatre presented four performances of their new-to-them program during March, deepening their repertoire while showcasing some of the Portland company's young, magnetic dancers.

The evening's first piece, “Blue Rose” by Helgi Tomasson, was a light and airy souffle of a dance. Inventive lifts and complex combinations appeared effortless; ballerina Yuka Iino's arabesque could have been drawn with a straight edge but her smile was all curves, easily charming audiences all the way to the last row of the Keller Auditorium's balcony.

“Ash,” by the great New York City Ballet veteran Peter Martins, is an astounding dance requiring advanced musicality, intense concentration, and near Olympic physical prowess. The OBT company of dancers addressed this ballet the way the Williams' sisters address a tennis match - lightning transitions and awe-inspiring leaps, crammed into an elaborate, music-driven canon of movements that left the company flushed and victorious.

During a brief, audience reception following the March 10 performance, OBT Artistic Director Christopher Stowell spoke briefly about the third ballet, “Through Eden's Gates,” a world premiere for his father, choreographer Kent Stowell. Sometimes frisky, always complex, this ballet featured ragtime music and an intriguing stage set of multicolored metal bars that looked a bit like pick-up sticks, giving the dancers, according to Christopher Stowell, “a world to live in.”

It's escape from her world that is needed by Nora, in Ingmar Bergman's classic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's “A Doll's House.” Presently onstage in North Bend at the Waterfront Players venue in Pony Village Mall, “Nora” offers an abbreviated glimpse of one of the foundation stones of Western theater.

During a show that runs just shy of two hours, we are voyeurs in a home on the verge of domestic collapse. Five actors take the stage, transforming the warm and comfortable Victorian-era setting into an arena of accusation and missed opportunity.

Wavey Shaver plays Nora, presenting Ibsen's heroine as a fait accompli: all the buildup, background, and transitions written by Ibsen and cut by Bergman, are present in Shaver's performance. She offers flights of emotion, endearing gestures, manipulative behaviors and a coquettish tarantella.

And in the end, she shows us a determination to make her own way in the world, in an act as difficult for her in 1879 as it would be for the character played by Meryl Streep, 100 years later, in the film “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

So let us time travel into the future, now, to the summer of 2008, when another of Ibsen's troublesome women will find herself onstage. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently announced that “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler,” written by Coos Bay native Jeff Whitty, will be performed in the Angus Bowmer Theater next season.

When I contacted him, Whitty was kind enough to forward the latest version of his “Hedda” to my home computer. This time around, the 2004 Tony Award winner (“Avenue Q”) explores the places where literary characters might find themselves, following their own, final curtain.

Tumbling through time with Mammy, Medea, and others, Whitty's Hedda discovers that there is a price to be paid for altering a playwright's work. She is a character out of sync with her script, and in that way is most unlike her creator.

Jeff Whitty knows what he's doing. His writing is imaginative and astute. His play is sly, funny and honest, and promises a future of fresh, new work.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for the Ballyhoo! page of The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.