A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch Punch, the vindictive wife-beating hand puppet, comes to life as a masked, strutting scoundrel in the House Theatre’s A Comedical Tragedy for Mister Punch. So do his traditional friends: not just Judy but the dog, the baby, the clown, the crocodile, and the prostitute Pretty Polly (Echaka Agba). Kara Silverman has set her play in 18th-century London, where Pietro (Adrian Danzig), an immigrant puppeteer, must flee the swinging cudgel of a towering constable (the delightful Will Casey) just to eke out daily bread for himself and his sidekick, the urchin Charlotte. Sarah Cartwright is spot-on in the role, sweeping her hair out of her eyes with just the right finger, cocking her shoulders at somehow the perfect Hogarthian angle to hump a too-big bag. Izumi Inaba’s costumes and Jesse Mooney-Bullock’s puppet bodies and masks are finely imagined; Shade Murray directed, and Kevin O’Donnell is behind the sound design and music. —Max Maller
I Know What You Sang Last Summer Improv comedy relies on instincts, as do the laughs. Therefore I’m going with my gut: I Know What You Sang Last Summer is funny as hell, not least because the cast of this improvised musical horror-movie spoof have a knack for drumming up topical references, sustaining them, and bringing them to a fulfilling conclusion. A short 60 minutes is all the players need to formulate a simple scenario based on one of four horror subgenres (slasher, creature, demon, or zombie) and a title suggested by the audience. In my case, the show revolved around a pair of precocious grade-schoolers who wind up lost in a haunted forest while searching for the three-fingered “hoppity-hop”; even better was the group of hapless ghouls who meet their fate at the hands of Rihanna and Drake. It may sound like sophomoric high jinks, but take my word for it: the humor is legit. —Matt de la Peña
True West Kudos to actors Kevin Viol and Joseph Wiens—and to director James Yost and fight choreographer Christina Gorman—for their handling of the harrowing yet comically extreme stage violence in Shattered Globe Theatre’s new production of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play. Viol and Wiens play two brothers—very different men bonded by a traumatic shared family history—drunkenly trying to churn out a screenplay for a Hollywood western even though the movie industry has given up on the genre. Smaller, younger, submissive Austin (Viol) is a screenwriter; burly, volatile, dominant Lee (Wiens) is a drifter and part-time thief, recently returned to suburban LA after a mysterious, perhaps mystical sojourn in the Mojave Desert. As director Yost suggests in his program note, the characters may be seen as different aspects of the same person—perhaps the playwright himself, trying to reconcile his conflicting impulses as professional artist and rebellious outlaw. What once felt potent as a meditation on the decline of America’s “Wild West” heritage today feels as out of date as the portable manual typewriter on which Austin taps out his script. But it’s still catnip for actors, and Viol and Wiens have a field day. —Albert Williams
