OPENING
BASH | Theatre on Fire opens its fifth-anniversary season at the Charlestown Working Theater with Neil LaBute’s triptych of one-acts in which characters reveal their most horrendous acts to unseen interlocutors. In A Gaggle of Saints, two Boston College students in evening dress recount a trip to New York for a “bash” at the Plaza Hotel that ends in a different kind of bash, the beating-to-death of a gay man. Iphigenia in Orem finds a Utah businessman cornering a strangely inert stranger in a hotel lobby at a convention for the purpose of talking his ear off. And in Medea Redux, a woman who’s been convicted of murder tells how at 13 she was seduced by her high-school English teacher. Darren Evans directs. | Charlestown Working Theater, 442 Bunker Hill St, Charlestown | 866.811.4111 | October 2-17 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs-Sat | $20; $15 Thurs
THE CARETAKER | Nora Theatre Company opens its 2009–2010 season with Harold Pinter’s 1960 enigma, in which Aston, who’s had electroshock treatment, brings the homeless and difficult Davies back to his ramshackle apartment and the two fence with each other, Aston trying to please Davies while the audience wonders why. It gets still more complicated when Aston’s younger brother, Mick, enters the picture. With John Kuntz as Aston, Michael Balcanoff as Davies, and Joe Lanza as Mick; Daniel Gidron directs. | Central Square Theater, 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 866.811.4111 | October 1–November 1 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7 pm [evening October 4] Sun | $35; $25 seniors; $20 students
CRAVINGS: SONGS OF HUNGER & SATISFACTION | “Boston’s favorite cabaret artist Belle Linda Halpern” — well, she is a favorite — “takes a funny, intriguing, and profound Jewish-American look at our constant cravings: food, sex, acceptance, fame, and true nourishment.” And while she’s at it, she’ll be preparing “the traditional Passover dish charoset.” Sabina Hamilton directs; Ron Roy is the accompanist. | Central Square Theater, 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 866.811.4111 | October 8-25 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri-Sat | 2 pm Sun | $35; $25 seniors; $20 students
THE GOOD PERSON OF SETZUAN | As part of its “Fringe Festival,” the BU School of Theatre takes on Bertolt Brecht’s fable about the title mensch, a prostitute with a heart of gold in western China who, when everyone starts taking advantage of her goodness, has to invent a not-so-nice alter ego. David Gram directs. | Boston University Theatre, Studio 210, 264 Huntington Ave, Boston | 617.933.8600 | October 10-24 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs [October 22] | 8 pm Fri [no October 23] | 2 pm [October 17 + 24] or 8 pm [October 10] Sat | 7 pm [October 11] Sun | $7
THE LARAMIE PROJECT, 10 YEARS LATER. AN EPILOGUE. | Emerson Stage and the Celebrity Series of Boston present this look back at the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, as members of the Tectonic Theater Project, which created the original play, returned to Laramie in June of 2008 for a second round of interviews, talking with Shepard’s murderer and his mother and other townspeople. The cast of this free production will include Emerson students and “prominent members of the Boston community.” | Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, Boston | 800.223.3123 | October 12 | Curtain 8 pm | Free
