OPENING
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY | Tracy Letts’s 2008 Pulitzer and Tony winner pulls into town, with Estelle Parsons re-creating her Broadway role as Violet Weston, the pill-popping matriarch of the Weston clan of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. When patriarch Beverly Weston goes missing, the family members assemble, and the skeletons that emerge include (this is just a starter list) adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest. Oh yes and there’s a suicide. Anna D. Shapiro directs. | Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston St, Boston | 800.972.ARTS | May 4-9 | Curtain 7:30 pm Tues | 7 pm Wed | 7:30 Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7:30 pm Sun | $35-$81
BLITHE SPIRIT | The Noël Coward play that takes its name from the first line of Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark” (“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!”) closes out the Lyric Stage’s season. Novelist Charles Condomine is looking for book material when he invites Madame Arcati to conduct a séance in his home, but what he gets instead is the ghost of his first wife, Elvira, who decides to stick around and critique his second marriage. Ruth, of course, can’t see or hear Elvira, so she doesn’t know who her husband’s talking to. The attractive cast includes Richard Snee, Paula Plum, Anne Gottlieb, Kathy St. George, Arthur Waldstein, Sarah deLima, Anna Waldron; Lyric artistic director Spiro Veloudos is at the helm. | Lyric Stage Company of Boston, 140 Clarendon St, Boston | 617.585.5678 | May 7–June 5 | Curtain 2 pm [May 12, June 2] + 7:30 pm Wed | 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 3 + 8 pm Sat | 3 pm [no May 30] Sun | $25-$54
THE EMANCIPATION OF MANDY & MIZ ELLIE | Local playwright and director and Company One member Lois Roach created this drama about two women who’re brought together by the Emancipation Proclamation. The story is told “through live percussion, rhythmic movement, and the songs of freedom”; the production will feature Roxbury’s OrigiNation Dance Troupe. Victoria Marsh directs. | Boston Center for the Arts, Plaza Theatre, 539 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | April 30–May 22 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Fri-Sat | 2 pm Sun | $30-$38; $30 seniors; $15 students | $18 Wednesdays
FARRAGUT NORTH | Zeitgeist Stage closes out its season with this play by Beau Willimon that promises “dirty campaign tricks, questionable journalistic practices, sex with interns — all the things that make American politics great.” Set “during a close presidential race on the eve of the Iowa caucuses,” it involves a young press secretary who “falls prey to backroom politics, manipulation from campaign veterans, and the wiles of a seductive young intern.” David J. Miller directs. | Boston Center for the Arts, Plaza Black Box Theatre, 539 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | April 30–May 22 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | 4 pm Sun | $30; $20 students, seniors
FROM PLACES UNKNOWN | 11:11 Theatre Company closes out its season with this Jennifer Du Bois play about a childless couple who take in a foreign-exchange student; she then dies — whereupon the couple develop competing stories about who she was and what it all meant. Sarah E. Farbo directs. | Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont St, Boston | 1111theatre.com | April 30–May 8 | Curtain 8 pm Thurs-Sat | 3 pm Sun | $15 advance; $17 doors
