It’s feast or famine out there in theater land, right? Sometimes — and that, of course, means usually — you can’t even give your stuff away, and sometimes ... well, sometimes things really start to groove. Just ask Ann Marie Shea, the Worcester-based playwright who is starting the new year in a big way, with three productions — one full-length play and a couple of 10-minute shorts. On the same weekend, of course. And in different parts of the state: Her full-length play “Last Word,” which looks at the unraveling of a hotshot poet and lit professor’s life, kicks off this year’s New Works Festival, and “Old Friends, New Benefits,” a Shea short about a sudden, undeniable and inconvenient love in the over-60 set, gets a reading the following day. All of this happening while Turtle Lane Playhouse in Auburndale stages “Family Archive,”a one-act play, and as Shea prepares to take her one-act, one-woman show “Madame Secretary Frances Perkins,” about Franklin Roosevelt’s controversial secretary of labor — and Worcester native — on the road.
