THEATER A sweet, normally placid Southern working-class wifey named Nan Carter (Erin Gilley) — no relation to Jimmy, but oh how for some reason she wishes! — takes revenge on her abusive husband Kyle (Patrick Jones) with the help of two close friends, a roll of duct tape, a fresh deer carcass, and a working knowledge of the dramatic arts in Crowded Fire's world premiere of playwright Lauren Gunderson's light but witty comedy.Read more »

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FALL ARTS Puppets, fanciful forms of democracy, and disfigured villains are leitmotifs beyond the Beltway this season, as the following theater and performance highlights suggest.Read more »

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THEATER Linda Brown is a maid at the end of her tether, and tender, as the much-put-upon employee-slave of an exclusive country club. The signs are there from the moment she steps onto the stage: the circles under the young woman's eyes, her frightened stare, the desperate swigs from a ready flask, not to mention her shameless histrionic intensity as she addresses the audience about the soul-sucking richies perpetually at her back.Read more »

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THEATER The title of Matt Smith's solo show recalls a certain long-running television soap, but the tale it flags is nutty even by the guiding light of that genre. The Seattle-based writer-performer's All My Children, now running at the Berkeley Marsh, is the wry, offbeat first-person account of one solitary middle-aged man's shameless construction of a family by unconventional means — namely, stalking the children of his exes.Read more »

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arts@sfbg.com THEATER The world's largest arts festival, the now-venerable Edinburgh Festival Fringe, got its start in 1946 as a scrappy party-crasher outside the official Edinburgh International Festival. Thanks to its inspired blend of difficult-to-categorize, anything-goes performances, the Edinburgh Fringe helped create a definitive theatrical format that has since flourished in Fringe Festivals around the world. Among other things, Fringe is a catalyst for new works, new companies, and new interpretations of how theater can be made, and experienced.Read more »

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THEATER Call it one step back in the middle of a big leap forward. Intersection for the Arts and resident theater company Campo Santo marks the organization's recent move to the Chronicle Building with a hobbled world premiere adaptation of Denis Johnson's latest novel, Nobody Move. The title for Johnson's fleet, cool, and witty crime noir comes from a reggae lyric: "Nobody move, nobody get hurt." A cautionary line that sounds too prescient under the circumstances, but life moves whether we like it or not.Read more »