The Amish Project The story behind Jessica Dickey’s somewhat fictionalized account (names changed, a few details altered) is horrific: a troubled middle-aged armed man invades a one-room Amish school with a vague plan to molest young girls and ends up shooting eight of them, killing five, before killing himself. But Dickey is after more than shock theater. Her solo show is a riveting meditation on evil, recovery, and the myriad paradoxes of the human psyche. Lydia Berger Gray, directed by Melanie Keller, portrays everyone in the story with remarkable range and power—the shooter, his victims, and the many poor wretches who had to carry on their lives afterward (including his emotionally wrecked widow). —Jack Helbig
Hitch*Cocktails You know how the old Hollywood thrillers would get mangled to death in the cutting room? Scenes transposed, whole plots rendered incoherent, unresolved loose threads everywhere? It was an era of many classics, but please explain to me what happens in The Lady From Shanghai. In this drunken two-act, now in its third year at the Annoyance, the same effect is brought about organically, by design, as eight actors with an onstage wet bar (they have to drink whenever a scene partner says so) get gradually more and more sloshed, lose track of the Hitchcock-style suspense story they’ve been improvising, and make hay with whatever plot points they’ve been thrown, preshow, by a randomly selected audience member. It’s good, wholesome, liver-debilitating fun. And Jason Stockdale makes a sensationally sleazy ringleader. —Max Maller
