In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp, two women—Carla (Amy Forsyth) and Heather (Colby Minifie)—meet at an outdoor café. Carla arrives first. Heavily pregnant, she lights a cigarette and, even seated, has a swagger about her. When Heather enters and sees Carla, she launches into nervous small talk, which Carla swats away with silence. The initial tension seems to stem from Carla’s dour and angry demeanor, but as the play unfolds, the core conflict revolves around their shared past, future consequences, and a morally difficult proposition.

Rare is the musical that begins with an undescended testicle. But that’s the opening parry of Fixing Frankie, by Joe Langworth (book and lyrics) and Steve Marzullo (music). More than the troubled hero’s scrotum needs fixing, and Langworth and Marzullo take him down some curious byways, piling on unnecessary details and side stories. Ultimately, though, Frankie’s healing is a touching little story, if one that could use a little touching up.

Actor Ari’el Stachel commands the stage in Other, his uproarious and vulnerable one-man show about the lifelong struggle to fit in. Directed by Tony Taccone, Stachel mines identity and anxiety for both laughter and truth.

Holocaust historians have documented how heroes and heroines, Jews and Gentiles, put themselves at mortal risk to rescue others—but of those who have escaped, how many would re-enter a war zone and twice court danger? Hannah Szenesh, the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater’s one-woman musical drama, written and directed by David Schechter, is a sweeping testimony to the talent and courage of one such heroine.

“Art,” Oscar Wilde pithily postulated, “is useless.” Susannah Dalton’s The Importance of Doing Art directly challenges this aesthetic maxim. Far from being futile, the comedy asserts, art’s true purpose is to serve as an allurement for single-male schlubs and slacker underachievers to attract beautiful, sexually available women. Simply put, art is a chick magnet.

“You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” The sentiment, bellowed by Hamm to his servant Clov in the Druid Theatre’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s postapocalyptic Endgame, is freshly relatable to a U.S. audience. Under Garry Hynes’s direction, this Endgame is full of laughs—both she and the ensemble fully grasp the idea expressed by Hamm’s trash-bin-residing mother, Nell, that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”—but it achieves this tone by leaning into, rather than shying away from, the play’s relentless bleakness.