OPENING
BASH | Theatre on Fire opens its fifth-anniversary season at the Charlestown Working Theater with Neil LaBute's triptych of one-acts in which characters reveal their most horrendous acts to unseen interlocutors. In A Gaggle of Saints, two Boston College students in evening dress recount a trip to New York for a "bash" at the Plaza Hotel that ends in a different kind of bash, the beating-to-death of a gay man. Iphigenia in Orem finds a Utah businessman cornering a strangely inert stranger in a hotel lobby at a convention for the purpose of talking his ear off. And in Medea Redux, a woman who's been convicted or murder tells how at 13 she was seduced by her high-school English teacher. Darren Evans directs. | Charlestown Working Theater, 442 Bunker Hill St, Charlestown | 866.811.4111 | October 2-17 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs-Sat | $20; $15 Thurs
THE CARETAKER | Nora Theatre Company opens its 2009?2010 season with Harold Pinter's 1960 enigma, in which Aston, who's had electroshock treatment, brings the homeless and difficult Davies back to his ramshackle apartment and the two fence with each other, Aston trying to please Davies while the audience wonders why. It gets still more complicated when Aston's younger brother, Mick, enters the picture. With John Kuntz as Aston, Michael Balcanoff as Davies, and Joe Lanza as Mick; Daniel Gidron directs. | Central Square Theater, 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 866.811.4111 | October 1?November 1 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7 pm [evening October 4] Sun | $35; $25 seniors; $20 students
GREAT EXPECTATIONS | 11:11 Theatre Company opens its season with something we don't recall seeing often, if at all: a stage version of Charles Dickens's classic about Pip, Magwitch, Estella, and the eternally disappointed Miss Havisham. The company collaborated on the adaptation. | Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont St, Boston |www.1111theatre.com| September 25?October 3 | Curtain 8 pm Thurs-Sat | 3 pm Sun | $15; $12 students, seniors
KING LEAR | Actors from the London Stage ? i.e., actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre and the Globe Theatre ? makes its regular visit to Boston; the price is right, and if these guys can't do Lear, who can? | Wellesley College Theatre, Houghton Chapel, 106 Central St, Wellesley |www.theatre.wellesley.edu| September 24-26 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs-Sat | Free
LITTLE BLACK DRESS | "What would you do for a string of pearls?" That's the question Irish dramatist Ronan Noone (Brendan, The Atheist) poses in his new play, and by way of answering, we're told, he "culls all the dark humor and pathos from the Kansas prairie where every girl wants to be Grace Kelly." The cast includes Jeremiah Kissel, Marianna Bassham, Karl Baker Olson, and Alex Pollock; Ari Edelson directs. | Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Comm Ave, Boston | 866.811.4111 | October 1-24 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed [October 21] + Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | 2 pm Sun | $30; $25 seniors; $10 students
