Nine so fine
From seamstresses to the fringe, our town and the rest of the Bay's theater gets atomic.

By Robert Avila

The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy Playwright Octavio Solis (Bethlehem; Santo y Santos) and longtime collaborators Campo Santo present the world premiere of Solis's latest, a neighborhood story based on the "Latino Bonnie and Clyde," whose Mission District crime spree ran from the late '80s to the early '90s. Well researched and deeply grounded in Campo Santo's gutsy, roots-oriented theatrical style, with Solis's instinct for the poetry of the margins, a kick-ass cast, and an original score by San Francisco's Beth Custer, it's simply a must-see. Oct. 26-Nov. 21, Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. Call for times and prices. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle Mark Jackson returns from a working sojourn in Berlin to direct the American Conservatory Theater Master of Fine Arts program production of Bertolt Brecht's play. Not only do ACT's masters productions receive top-notch care, but also Jackson, formerly artistic director of Art Street Theater and the playwright-director behind 2003's extraordinary The Death of Meyerhold, has spent the past year advancing his studies of Meyerhold's biomechanics and his own highly developed physical brand of theater, so that one can reasonably expect interesting things from his fresh essaying of Brecht's lively epic theater form. Sept. 29-Oct. 15, Zeum Theater, Fourth and Howard, SF. Call for times and prices. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.

Intimate Apparel Last year Lynn Nottage received Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle for this subtle but mesmerizing little play about a quietly lovelorn African American seamstress in 1905 New York. The Bay Area's first glimpse of this new work from the author of, among other plays, Crumbs from the Table of Joy comes via TheatreWorks, one of the country's best regional theaters, in a production helmed by Anthony J. Haney. Aug. 24-Sept. 18, call for times, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mountain View. $20-$54. (650) 903-6000, www.theatreworks.org.

Our Town Local boy Thornton Wilder (Berkeley High class of 1915) made good – real good – with this groundbreaking, irresistibly moving metadrama for all times and places. Directed by California Shakespeare Theater's Jonathan Moscone and featuring an enticing ensemble cast (led by Barbara Oliver as Stage Manager), Our Town opens Berkeley Rep's new season. After SF Playhouse's fine production last year, it's especially exciting to see one of the big theaters take up this classic play, for a fresh look at what might be anachronistically called blue-state values. (Side note: The Berkeley Fire Fighters Association will host a "Three-Alarm Barbeque" preceding Sept. 17's matinee to raise much-needed funds for the Rep's scene shop, destroyed in a fire earlier this year.) Sept. 9-Oct. 23, call for times, Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk. $20-$55. (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org.

The Overcoat Based on Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol's short story about a poor man who gets a new winter coat, and featuring the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling's internationally acclaimed creation takes its San Francisco bow at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Stage, with a 22-person cast and a two-story mechanical set inspired by the likes of Chaplin and Fritz Lang. More high spectacle of a darkly exhilarating kind coming your way. Aug. 25-Sept. 25, call for times, Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. $12-80. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.

Owners With plays like A Number and Far Away, British playwright Caryl Churchill has been turning out exquisite, chilling little works of perfectly honed eloquence, spare but highly imaginative design, dark outrage, and cool intensity. Shotgun Players' production of Owners, Churchill's first professional production for the stage, is a rare chance to revisit her early work of more than three decades past. And helmed by artistic director Patrick Dooley, it promises to hold up quite well. It's a theatrically shrewd, sardonic, and politically radical look at ownership, in property and lives, among an intimate set of men and women, speculators and renters, would-be murderers and failed suicides, go-getters and couldn't-give-a-damners. Sept. 6-Oct. 9, Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk. Call for times and prices. (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org.

Phaedra This is playwright-actor-director Matthew Maguire's take on Racine – hip, hilarious, beautifully written, and heavily combustible – presented in a Bay Area premiere by Last Planet Theatre, a bold company in the very nice habit of introducing Bay Area audiences to some of the best but inexplicably overlooked modern drama. Maguire's version of the Hippolytus myth follows the currents of desire through lines of incest, money, and power in the devastating vacuity of American dreaming. Oct. 20-Nov. 13, Last Planet Theatre, 351 Turk, SF. Call for times and prices. (415) 440-3505, www.lastplanetheatre.com.

The Price Aurora Theatre's new season is dedicated to the memory of the late Arthur Miller and opens with one of the playwright's last major successes, The Price. An engrossing psychological drama, its 1968 Broadway premiere registered the conflicts, contradictions, and costs of the Vietnam era in the meeting of two long-estranged brothers, scions of a once wealthy family ruined by the Great Depression, who've come together in a cluttered attic to sort through their late father's possessions. It's an intimate and dramatically intense work that sounds like ideal Aurora fare. Sept. 2-Oct. 9., Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. (except Sept. 4, 2 p.m. only), Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. $28-$45. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org.

SF Fringe Festival Among the international network of edgy theater festivals called "fringe," SF's ranks with the largest in North America. A veritable bingefest, it yearly draws acts from far-flung fringe fests like Toronto's, New York's, Prague's, and mothership Edinburgh's, in addition to showcasing lots of weird Bay Area talent. This year's unjuried – and hence unpredictable – dish of drama, physical theater, solo performance, comedy, improv, dance, and whatnot promises werewolves, Chinese clowning, sperm warfare, evil CEOs, more mini-musicals (the next Urinetown?), queer sass, atrocious lounge acts, and at least three stories about your mom – each of more than 40 shows comes in under an hour, under $10, and under the radar. Sept. 7-18. For complete information go to www.sffringe.org.