By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Teatro Live turns 42 next season with a four-comedy line-up that returns to one of the company’s most popular, widely travelled, plays. And the theatrical journey inside and out- of Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 Pith! is germane to the 2023-34 theme, too: “imagination, adventure, discovery.”

In fact the November to July season opens with “a concert event” devoted to “what it means to travel,” through time and space, across decades and oceans. Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, which runs Nov. 23 to 26 and Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Varscona, takes the final line of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s to heart, as Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Teatro’s co-artistic director with Belinda Cornish, notes. “Three Teatro faves” will be in the cast, he promises. But the casting hasn’t been finalized yet

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Pith!, which hasn’t been seen here for a decade since its 2013 Teatro revival starring Andrew MacDonald-Smith, is a theatrical tribute to transforming power of the imagination. It’s back Feb. 9 to 25, in a production directed by the playwright, with MacDonald-Smith, now the company’s co-artistic director with Belinda Cornish, returning to the role of the traveller Jack Vail. “Now’s the time for positivity and imagination,” as MacDonald-Smith says.

He’s the insouciant vagabond who arrives in Providence R.I. in 1931 from Venezuela and changes the gloom-steeped life of a widow by engaging her to undertake an imaginary journey. Virginia, the widow in question will be played by Kristin Johnston (who appeared in Teatro’s Deathtrap this past season). The maid role originated by Leona Brausen has yet to be cast.

Cornish directs The Oculist’s Holiday, a 2009 Lemoine romantic comedy catalyzed by a holiday adventure in which a Canadian schoolteacher arrives in Lausanne, meets an American eye doctor, and has her vision of the world changed. “I’m excited, and nervous,” says Cornish. “It’s such a funny play, a beautiful play, a delicate play, just remarkable.” Her production May 30 to June 16, stars Beth Graham, last seen at Teatro in the signature Lemoine comedy Cocktails at Pam’s.

The season finale next July (11 to 28) is Noel Coward’s sparkly, starchy 1930 comedy of romantic dysfunction Private Lives. And, in a unique piece of casting, Teatro’s co-artistic directors will play the sparring couple. “I find it particularly hilarious,” says Cornish, “the idea of artistic directors battling it out in a tear-down drag-out comedy … when does that every happen?” The production marks the Teatro debut of director Max Rubin, Theatre Yes’s new artistic director (along with Ruth Alexander).

“His productions are so clever and funny and thoughtful — every moment is thought through,” she says of Rubin. “And (she laughs) he’s British; he truly understands that sensibility, those restrictive and quirky social mores…. Brits together! Oh, the dry sardonic humour that will be flying in rehearsal.”

“I hope Max really lets us go to it and duke it out… We’ll emerge battered and bloody, but smiling!” The rest of Rubin’s cast remains to be announced.

Meanwhile Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, this season’s finale, continues through July 30 at the Varscona.

Tickets and subscriptions: teatroq.com, with “anti-procrastination savings” if booked before Sept. 1.