By Robert Avila

The Persians Aurora Theatre's season opener is Aeschylus's drama in the West Coast premiere of a new translation by playwright-actress Ellen McLaughlin. A success in its New York debut, this fresh and relevant version is directed by the sure hand of Aurora cofounder Barbara Oliver. Sept. 3-Oct. 10, Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. $28-$40. (510) 843-4822.

The Secret in the Wings Director Mary Zimmerman (Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Metamorphoses) returns to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre with her adaptation of European fairy tales, whose darker sides get a full airing in her vivid staging. Sept. 3-Oct. 17, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk. $39-$43. Call for times. (510) 647-2949.

Dog Act The Shotgun Players and director Kent Nicholson premiere a new play by Liz Duffy Adams, a humorous but sharp-eyed futuristic tale/tail of a vaudevillian and her dog getting by in the interstices of a collapsed civilization. Adams, a young New York playwright, has proved popular with small theaters in the Bay Area. Crowded Fire, which staged her Train Play in 2002, launches her first full-blown musical in the spring, All the Truth in the World, which, like Dog Act before it, was in development at this year's Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Sept. 4-19, 8 p.m., Thick House, 1695 18th St., S.F. Donation requested. (415) 401-8081; Sept. 23-Oct. 10, Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk. Donation requested. (510) 841-6500.

Beggar's Holiday The Marin Theatre Company leads off its season with the only Broadway musical ever scored by great jazz composer Duke Ellington, in the world premiere of an all-new adaptation of Beggar's Holiday, by Dale Wasserman (Man of La Mancha). Inspired by John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, the story takes place in a Southern city where a blind beggar dreams himself the leader of all the waterfront denizens. Artistic director Lee Sankowich has assembled a first-rate production team, including musical director Donald York and choreographer Richard Gibbs. Sept. 9-Oct. 10, Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.; call for additional matinees, Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley. $28-$46. (415) 388-5208.

The Designated Mourner Last Planet Theatre began its life in 1998 with an audacious act for a small, untested company (make that for any company): a festival of four Wallace Shawn plays in repertory. And among those not driven prematurely to the exits by the more graphic material, it was well received; when the playwright flew out to see it, there was no reason not to consider it a rousing success. Seven productions later, Last Planet returns to Shawn to inaugurate the city's latest theater space, the group's namesake new home, at the "Tender" edge of the theater district. As for the play, its three-character, first-person description of the collapse of a marriage and the coincident liquidation of the left intelligentsia amid a vaguely perceived coup and a creeping totalitarian state resonates with ... well. Shawn, anyway, is in good hands. Sept. 24-Oct. 17, Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m., Last Planet Theatre, 351 Turk, S.F. $10-$25. (415) 440-3505.

Laura's Bush Jane Martin's new play, like Tony Kushner's latest, imagines the first lady as a good woman trapped in the den of a brute (yeah, sure). Martin's work has the advantage of being potentially a lot funnier and comes to Brava! just before the election. Oct. 6-31, Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m., Brava! for Women in the Arts, 2781 24th St., S.F. $14-$18. (415) 641-7657.

Eurydice Berkeley Repertory Theatre extends the Greek theme in downtown Berkeley with a hip, modern version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as seen from the perspective of the latter. Les Waters directs this Bay Area premiere by acclaimed young playwright Sarah Ruhl. Oct. 15-Nov. 14, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk. $39-$55. Call for times. (510) 647-2949.

Fist of Roses Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda's new work, an exploration of the cycle of male violence against women, represents a radical departure from the character-driven dramas he's built his reputation on. In collaboration with Campo Santo, choreographer Erika Shuch, and composer Tommy Shepherd, Gotanda directs a five-man cast in a work that ingeniously weaves language, movement, and music into an organic concatenation of patterned response and ungovernable rage that simultaneously highlights and dissolves the personalities we would normally be focusing on. In the process, the questions the play asks go deeper and the answers come back with a force that's nearly visceral. Oct. 27-Nov. 22, Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 445 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311.

'The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets'

Robert Wilson has loomed over the theatrical avant-garde for three decades, but his work rarely gets mounted in the Bay Area, and then only in limited runs. Internationally acclaimed for his vast, arrestingly beautiful dreamscapes with titles like The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin and Einstein on the Beach (his seminal collaboration with Philip Glass), Wilson channels his talents as a director, designer, writer, sculptor, painter, and architect into one-of-a-kind productions more like "operas" (his preferred term) than anything else in their prodigious synthesis of the arts. But Wilson's aesthetic ambitions have routinely priced this big-thinking American right out of most theaters in the United States, sending him into semi-exile in Europe, where support for the arts is robust enough to cradle his enormous and unconventional schemes.

That trend ends this week (at least temporarily) as American Conservatory Theater presents the U.S. premiere of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, Wilson's 1991 collaboration with musician-songwriter Tom Waits and beat legend William S. Burroughs. Originally produced in German for Hamburg's Thalia Theater, this wry musical fable – conceived as an "homage to German Expressionism" and loosely modeled after the German folktale that inspired Carl Maria von Weber's popular 19th-century opera Der Freischutz – concerns a young clerk so eager to marry the woodsman's daughter that he strikes a Faustian deal with the devil in order to become an expert hunter and win the old man's respect. The devil is naturally happy to oblige, and with the usual consequences. The new English-language version features pop icon and songstress Marianne Faithfull in the role of the devil, Pegleg, and Matt McGrath as the smitten clerk, Wilhelm.

The most anticipated theater event of the season is also the production's only North American run before heading off to Sydney. Time to make whatever pact you need to and cast yourself some magic tickets. Aug. 26-Sept. 26, American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $20-$80. Call for times. (415) 749-2ACT, www.act.sfbay.org.

San Francisco Fringe Festival

Forty-five plays, 12 days, and eight theaters can only add up to one thing: the 13th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival. And at $8 a pop (less with a pass), credible numerologists will tell you this augurs well. Attendees at the country's longest-running fringe festival can expect ample amounts of comedy, surrealism, absurdity, true confessions, and seat-of-your-pants improvisation, most of it onstage. One of the best parts of the festival is the sheer risk taking: going in blind and laying down 60 minutes of your life at the foot of the stage like an animal sacrifice; basing your decision on something as flimsy as an enigmatic title (Rabbit Causes Dog, for instance), or as seductive as a premonition, or as sensible as proximity to a bar. But just in case, here are some (among many) pretty sure bets: seriously, soberly weird group Banana Bag and Bodice, creators of last year's much lauded Sandwich, have something in store called The Young War; Liebe Wetzel's mesmerizing found-object puppetry troupe, Lunatique Fantastique, celebrates the art of aging in Reframing the Hourglass; African American comedy improv group Oui Be Negroes actually knows what it's doing when it doesn't know what it's doing; ditto for clowns Jane Chen and Joan Mankin in The Chinese Clown Cabaret; Ed Holmes's Subhuman: True Tales from Beneath the Sea doubly strikes me as worthwhile (premonition, near bar); and Christian Cagigal returns with last year's popular Magic @ the Fringe, billed as no-fuss and "a little gory." Sept. 8-19. For complete information go to sffringe.org.