LEWISTON — March is a month for theater classics at Bates College.

The first of two plays to be staged, “Oleanna,” is a highly charged story of sexual harassment at a college.

With the second production, Moliere’s 1672 satire “The Learned Ladies,” the college’s theater department will honor French culture and mark the 50th anniversary of its mainstay venue, Schaeffer Theater.

“Oleanna” depicts the struggle between a professor and a student who accuses him of sexual harassment and, thereby, spoils his chances for tenure.

The 1992 play is also a commentary on the Supreme Court confirmation hearings that put Clearance Thomas, Anita Hill and the issue of sexual harassment squarely into the public eye.

“Mamet takes on provocative issues and exposes not only individual frailties and conflicts, but also the corrupting influences of organized forces in society,” said director Elizabeth Castellano, a Bates junior from New Suffolk, N.Y.

“It’s my hope that these characters will spark debate,” she said.

” ‘The Learned Ladies’ is a wonderful Moliere play. It’s got all the Moliere hallmarks — the wit, the elegance, both broad and refined humor,” said director Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater at Bates.

With intellectual pretension as its theme, the play tells the story of two young lovers, Henriette and Clitandre, whose marriage is blocked by Henriette’s mother, aunt and sister. These would-be learned ladies, who embrace a bogus kind of “intellectuality,” have been captivated by Trissotin, a pseudo-scholar and mediocre poet. The ladies want Henriette to marry this fraud instead of the handsome and commonsensical Clitandre.

“It’s a good production for students because it’s about intellectual vanity, intellectual folly, true and false values,” Andrucki said. “These are all issues that students wrestle with as they figure out what it means to be educated. It’s about finding intellectual balance.”

Andrucki has reset the play into the 1920s, an era with its own brand of intellectual absurdity. But, he said, “the play is surprisingly modern in tone at times. One project that the ladies want to do is to create a body of forbidden words that may not be uttered because people may find them offensive.”

Performances of “Oleanna” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Sunday, March 10 and 13; and at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 12, in Gannett Theater, 305 College St.

“The Learned Ladies” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 11-12 and March 18-19; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 13 and 20. Schaeffer is also located at 305 College St.

Admission to “Oleanna” is free, with first-come, first-served seating. Tickets for “The Learned Ladies” are $6, $3 for seniors and students. They are available at www.batestickets.com. For more information, call 786-6161.

The first piece presented in Schaeffer Theatre, in December of 1960 by the college’s Robinson Players, was “Tartuffe,” also by Moliere.

Built as the Little Theatre in 1960, the space was renamed in 1972 to honor Lavinia Schaeffer. Retiring that year after 38 years on the Bates faculty, Schaeffer was the moving force behind both the construction of the state-of-the-art venue and the Bates theater program as it stands today.

She brought to Bates the “Little Theater” movement, described by Andrucki as “a movement to create smaller theaters that would be suitable environments for the serious and realistic plays that came along after Ibsen.” (Hence Schaeffer’s original name.)

“These were intimate spaces for probing psychological dramas,” in contrast to the gaudier, more spectacular entertainments dominating commercial theater for much of the 20th century, Andrucki said.

“Lavinia was very much attuned to that spirit. That was the cutting edge of her generation,” he said. “She wanted to be part of it and make Bates part of it.”