Grief is very personal, and everyone processes it in their own way and in their own time. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Wake, written by Leon Ingulsbrud and Brooke Shilling, explores the contours of these stages through music, dialogue, musings, reflections, and poetry.

If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.

In his current revival of Pygmalion, director David Staller does more than remount Shaw’s 1912 comedy—he alters the play’s architecture by adding a mythic framing device led by four Olympian gods who introduce and comment on the action. This addition is not found in the published script, and theatergoers expecting a traditional revival may consider it a provocation. But Staller positions it as a reclamation rather than an invention.

Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, making its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre, defies categorization. The offbeat exploration of an agrarian California commune bordering on a cult might also defy comprehension; your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for unknowable mysteries. There is something mesmerizing about Burning Cauldron, beautifully strange and compelling, with silliness and menace existing so comfortably side by side. Who needs easy answers when the questions are this much fun?  

Although it’s probably not among the top 10 elements for a successful farce, the awkward presence of a corpse has proved comic gold in such plays as Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace and Joe Orton’s Loot. The first few moments of Messy White Gays suggest that playwright Drew Droege may have tapped into the vein as well. In darkness, a crash of breaking glass is heard, and the lights come up suddenly on two young men standing over a body. The corpse is Monty, the third in their throuple. But what ensues is more a nightmare of bad behavior than a comic soufflé.