On entering St. Ann’s Warehouse for Daniel Fish’s Kramer/Fauci, the entire expanse of the building is visible. The floor is matte black, and on the far wall a bank of lights beams intensely toward the audience, replicating a high school football stadium in Texas. Although the scenic design is credited to Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin, and the lighting to Scott Zielinski, the importance is the actors, who re-create a 1993 C-SPAN interview with writer (the novel Faggots; the play The Normal Heart) and ACT UP activist Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), then known as the premier AIDS researcher in the country.

Anachronisms are a reliable source of fun and surprise in musicals, from the very casting and concept of Hamilton going back to “On any gent who wandered by, she’d pull the Theda Bara eye” (“Cleopatterer,” Leave It to Jane, 1917). But anachronisms have seldom had as strenuous a workout as the one they endure in Slam Frank, the musical at the Orpheum. The work of Joel Sinensky (book) and Andrew Fox (music and lyrics), it aims essentially to resurrect a mid-century classic, burden it with pop culture signposts from a variety of eras, reassess its relevance in these troubled times, and find it wanting. Which it does in an anything-for-a-laugh way, to the point where your sides may be sore from being poked in the ribs so relentlessly.

Warnings about the consequences of global warming come early and often in the Off-Broadway premiere of Nick Blaemire’s 2015 pop musical, Soon. But they are a false flag. This is no treatise on the fragility of the physical world. Instead, it is the study of a young woman’s psyche as she wends her way through what often feels like a traditional romantic comedy only to arrive at a surprising crisis point where she risks drowning in her own emotional meltdown.

The word belong becomes an obsession for stoker Yank (Jon Beavers) in Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape. Yank has spent his life shoveling coal on a transatlantic liner, and he is the tallest and seemingly strongest of the men doing that work in Ciarán O’Reilly’s engrossing production at the Irish Rep. Yank sees himself as the solid foundation of the entire society, but when a socialite visits the stokehold, it launches him on a downward spiral. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she could look at him only as a “hairy ape.”

In Myth, directed by Becky Baumwoll, Broken Box Mime Theater transports audiences to a distant planet where two moons illuminate an alien world of strange flora, fauna, and unexpected possibilities. Through the expressive power of the body, the adventurous company uses speculative fiction to explore how we remember, revise, and sometimes forget the histories that shape our present.

Sara Fellini’s Ectoplasm is clearly engineered for a run in October, the month when the supernatural holds sway. Following the success of Paranormal Activity on Broadway, Ectoplasm might be expected to lean into horror and jump scares, but Fellini, who also directed, structures it more like a murder mystery. Though the material is overly familiar, Ectoplasm is buoyed by good acting, interesting details, and a few surprises.

Nearly two decades after its downtown debut, Joey Arias and Basil Twist’s Arias with a Twist returns with its fusion of cabaret, puppetry, music, and performance art fully intact. Arias remains the show’s magnetic center, while Twist surrounds him with a visual world that proves this exuberant collaboration has lost none of its capacity to surprise.

In How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Jacob Ming-Trent transforms the search for a place to belong into a riveting celebration of the power of language. Directed by Tony Taccone, this solo performance draws on Shakespeare, rap, poetry, and preaching to chart one man’s journey toward reclaiming his life.

For the first two scenes of Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes, the intrigue builds carefully, as a bartender named Joey Alexander (Bubba Weiler) hangs around his cozy but empty establishment on a snowy night. He soon has a visitor, a man (Grantham Coleman) calling himself “Paul,” who hands him an envelope full of cash and an ID that identifies him otherwise: as someone named Wesley. The cash gains Wesley entrée into the back room of the dive bar—in spite of arriving long after his assigned time. “Next time don’t be late,” says Weiler’s stern Joey, adding, “12:24 is not the same as 11:30.” What is behind that door constitutes a mystery that drives the narrative of The Holes. Friedlich calls his play a “fairy tale,” but the gay-inflected twaddle that follows is a far cry from Hans Christian Andersen.

Avant-garde playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909–94) traced his love of theater to watching a Punch-and-Judy show in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens as a child. He was enthralled by the puppets that “talked, moved, clubbed each other,” and the performances represented, he wrote, “the spectacle of the world itself . . . as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth.” Igor Golyak’s Delirium, an adaptation of Ionesco’s 1962 play Délire à deux (Frenzy for Two), captures this signature blend of slapstick domestic squabbling while highlighting the human penchant for destruction and barbarity.

Marin Ireland’s Pre-Existing Condition is about the emotional aftermath of domestic violence. It is a quiet, unflashy play—75 minutes, sensitively directed by Maria Dizzia, with subtle performances from an ensemble of four—but no less devastating for its restraint. Lupita Nyong’o is outstanding as the protagonist, A: with fury, self-doubt, shame, and agony roiling beneath the surface, she strains at every moment to stay composed. The audience follows her through support groups, therapy, unhelpful family and friends, and the tentative possibility of letting herself trust again.

In Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), intellectual brilliance and unspoken longing collide as poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman confronts the love he has carried silently through a lifetime. In this rare revival, Zachary Elkind’s direction and David Greenspan’s mesmerizing performance transform Housman’s final journey into a poignant meditation on love, memory, and the price of keeping desire hidden.

French poet and avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau wrote his 1929 novella Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children) in just 17 days while recovering from an opium addiction at a clinic. In Michael Gardner’s ambitious new stage adaptation, which he also directs, Cocteau’s dark, hypnotic fable explores the dangerous power of imagination, suggesting how unbridled fantasy and obsessive isolation can transform an internal refuge into a destructive prison.

In Stephen Sheffer’s new play Lean-To, strangers camp out in the titular structure during a hike. While the setting is rendered beautifully, the drama flops due to a script full of extended silences, platitudinous conversation, and ill-conceived character behavior.

In The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God), Katie Cappiello reimagines the Virgin Mary’s origin story to examine the struggle over women’s bodies, reproduction, and who controls the narrative. Written and directed by Cappiello, this comedy brings together three women named Mary whose lives, separated by centuries, illuminate the forces of patriarchal control, violence, and repression.

Marfa, Texas, the shooting locale for the George Stevens epic film Giant 70 years ago, is known as a dot of cultural sophistication, big on minimalist art, amid hundreds of miles of Texas brush and desert. It’s also renowned for the Marfa Lights, a nocturnal phenomenon of distant brightness that can appear orange, yellow, blue, red. It’s not known as a hangout for anxious thirtysomethings yapping about politics, gender, and muddled friendships, but that’s the upshot of Very Blue Light, Daphne Silbiger’s new drama at The Tank. That it plays as well as it does is a tribute to Silbiger’s clever invocation of familiar themes, and a beguiling cast of four up-and-coming actors.

Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).

Although the renowned 20th-century poet W. H. Auden dismissed The Taming of the Shrew as “the only play of Shakespeare’s that is a complete failure,” Laura Lapidus proves there is still plenty of life in the old comedy with To Have and To Hold, her contemporary reimagining that explores sisterhood, romantic love and the difficult business of coming into one’s own. Smartly directed by Zoë Adams and featuring a top-notch ensemble, this 85-minute romp through modern romance is both deliciously entertaining and unexpectedly poignant.

Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact.