The Homosexuals, About Face Theatre at the Biograph, extended through Aug. 21. A decade in the life of a once-naive young gay man, told via two-person flashbacks through friends and lovers. Philip Dawkins’s serio-comic world premiere is smart writing, well-acted. JA
Side Man, Ka-Tet Theatre Company at City Lit, through Aug. 20. Our hero’s parents may have been unfit to raise a child, but that’s how it was in the 1950s for big-band musicians facing extinction with the rise of rock-and-roll in Warren Leight’s nostalgic look at the jazz subculture that once ruled New York’s Greenwich Village. MSB
Sky’s the Limit (Weather Permitting), Second City e.t.c., in an open run. American aspirationalism gets spoofed with sarcastic pessimism in this great new comedy revue that unabashedly leans left with its wit and humor. SCM
The Trestle At Pope Lick Creek, Eclipse Theatre at the Greenhouse, through Sept. 4. Part social drama and part neo-gothic romance, Naomi Wallace’s eerie tale of teenagers and parents adrift in America’s mining regions during the Great Depression is a haunting caveat on our own troubled times. MSB
—By Abarbanel, Barnidge
and Morgan