BRIEFLY . . .

The Bowery Theatre has swung its first guest Equity contract. The guest will be none other than the theater’s new artistic director, Equity actor Ralph Elias, who will play Lord Byron in Howard Brenton’s “Bloody Poetry,” playing Sept. 29-Nov. 6. The play is about George Gordon Byron and Perry Bysshe Shelley, 19th-Century English poets whose love lives make those on conventional soap operas look tame.