By Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch

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Shadowbox Live has taken advantage of its move to a new and larger space to expand its programming in welcome new directions. On Wednesday nights through November 9, they’re presenting Killer Blues, an anthology that allows some of the Shadowbox regulars to stretch and move in directions their more familiar format doesn’t allow.

While the show is billed as a “Stage 2 production,” it’s presented on the same stage as the other Shadowbox works, in a space that feels both intimate and roomy.

Killer Blues is a well-varied compilation unified by a common theme. While the first act includes a few songs, it is dominated by a long one-act with the same title as the show as a whole. In the wrong hands, Roy Berkowitz’s two-person play could have been maudlin and sentimental, but here it comes across as poignant and sharply observant. On a subway platform, a delicately balanced relationship develops between an erratic homeless woman (Julie Klein), and a depressed psychoanalyst (Tom Cardinal) going home to a loveless marriage. Klein moves flawlessly from one emotional state to another, while Cardinal finds remarkable power in stillness. Stev Guyer’s unhurried, restrained direction gives the actors room to breathe.

The second act focuses on shorter monologues, some comic and some dramatic, but all with desperate characters at their centers. Jimmy Mak carries off a cynical Charles Bukowski poem, Beer, with brash elan. Donathin Frye and Noelle Grandison aren’t so lucky with two Ferlinghetti pieces: The flowery Beat poetry hasn’t aged well, and it would be hard for anyone to make it sound natural.

Two comic monologues by Martha DeSilva round out the evening. Nikki Fagin is humorously self-deluded as a college freshman doing her utmost to persuade a professor to raise her grade, and Mary Randle as a cubicle-dweller driven to extremity by a co-worker.

The vocal numbers are variations on the blues. The choice plays to Shadowbox’s strengths, allowing singers with different vocal styles the opportunity to show off their abilities. Stephanie Shull sings a sophisticated At Last and Mary Randle an earthy, bare-bones Cold Shot. Jennifer Hahn infuses some psychedelic reverb into You Shook Me, while Nikki Fagin, moving among the audience, gives a taunting edge to Love Me Like a Man. Stev Guyer performs a powerful – if skating on the edge of self-parody – Catfish Blues, and a moving Unchain My Heart.

The blues numbers also allow for some welcome showboating by guitar players Matthew Hahn and Brent Lambert.

Andy Baker’s lighting design, particularly for the vocal numbers, is clearly meant to be appropriately moody, but sometimes is so low-key that it’s hard to see the singers, whose faces look unfortunately purple and skeletal. The singers’ costumes are glamorous, and sometimes edgy in a nightclub way, with fishnet stockings in abundance.

It’s a pleasure to see familiar Shadowbox players in this new context, which allows more depth than a typical fast-moving, light-hearted production.