The American Mercy Tour Written and performed by Michael Milligan, this is a harrowing two-parter on how and why our country has failed to protect its “huddled masses” from sickness and destitution. “All these people,” says Joe, the bankrupt and humiliated auto mechanic of part one, waving a hand at invisible bank heads and bureaucrats. “They’re just trying to make some money off my wife’s being sick.” Part two shifts to an attorney’s office, where William, an overworked doctor, contemplates a standing offer from Big Pharma to buy his small family-owned practice. Compared with Joe, William has it made: nice car, IRA, vacations in France. All the same, the accumulated pressures of 30 consultations a day are about to destroy him. Milligan is more natural as William, but there’s fury (and massive research) behind each performance. —Max Maller
The Drowsy Chaperone MadKap Productions takes on this Tony Award favorite, a “metamusical” that professes love for, and parodies, jazz age theater. Set in the apartment of Broadway superfan the Man in Chair (played by a charming and witty James Spangler), the entire show is a re-creation of his favorite musical, which he often plays on the turntable when he’s blue. Having the cast emerge from his refrigerator sets the tone for an exceedingly goofy, slapstick send-up of tuner archetypes, though the musical within the musical quickly devolves into run-of-the-mill cases of mistaken identity and misunderstanding. Standout moments come during bride Janet’s immodest performance number “Show Off” and her chaperone’s “rousing anthem to alcoholism,” a ditty called “As We Stumble Along.” —Marissa Oberlander
Nox Arca One-Act Play Festival Three young and tenacious companies inaugurate their new collective in the old Ravenswood Right Brain Project black-box space with an evening of shorts about—knock on wood—damnation. Death & Pretzels presents the most stage-ready piece with James Odin Wade’s Helmut’s Big Day, an absurdist sketch about a Renaissance border guardsman who’s lost track of which plain he’s supposed to be protecting. Toying with style, Reutan Collective’s George and the Floating Cookbook, by Felicia Basanavicius, adds up to a fairly predictable domestic ghost story. And Otherworld Theatre’s Eden of Omicon Ceti , by Nick Izzo, creates one fantastic but fleeting visual moment in the midst of its plodding sc-fi world building. All in all, it’s a night of hungry young artists flexing and warming up their creative muscles in stories seemingly still very much in development. —Dan Jakes
