Do you ever eye someone suspiciously when they tell you they suffer from allergies (or irritable bowel, or ADD), and just always seem to be sick? You might find yourself in similar company with Lisa Kron (Emily Ackerman), who just doesn't understand why some people seem to get well and some (like, for example, her mother) don't.

Kron's play, Well, isn't just a play, it's an autobiographical exercise that just seems to keep getting away from her. Her mother (Nancy Robinette) keeps interrupting the action to tell her version of events; her castmates are more sympathetic with said mother than her, and a ghost from her past (Donnetta Lavina Grays) keeps literally popping up on stage to butt into the proceedings.

It all makes for a very nontraditional night of theater, and that's a very good thing. Ackerman is an enjoyable guide, particularly because she's so relatable -- her frustration with the proceedings is palpable, her "outer monologues" are hysterical. Robinette, always stellar, can grab the room with a knowing smile, and Ackerman has a versatile supporting cast backing her up, each juggling multiple roles as the action goes on.

Well's strengths are in its spontaneity and its character development. In just a short time, we learn of her mother's intriguing backstory as a de facto town activist, almost insanely committed to the idea of racial integration. We get a fleshed-out picture of the complicated relationship between mother and daughter, and even a few satisfying glimpses into the personalities of the supporting cast, who are supposed to be just mere actors but keep getting drawn out of their personas.

Some jokes are relied on a bit too heavily at times, and the play stretches a bit long to require no intermission. But Well is stuffed with amusing, unpredictable scenarios and offers a balanced treatment of the ideas it explores.

Well runs through Oct. 14 at Arena Stage. Tickets are available online.

Photo by Scott Suchman, courtesy Arena Stage.

Ah, Wilderness! is the lone comedy in Eugene O'Neill's eye-gougingly tragic catalog. It works as a sort of photo-negative of his later, bleaker masterpiece A Long Day's Journey into Night, with which it shares the setting of a "large small town" in early 20th century New England. Written in the early years of the Great Depression but set in the happier days of 1906, it’s a deliberately idyllic take on the sweet miseries of adolescence — not O’Neill’s own, mind you, which he weathered without the advantages of wealth and familial love conferred upon Richard Miller, his stand-in here. Richard, a Yale-bound high school senior, is a sweet-natured cherub of a boy; utterly inexperienced, and forever reading plays and poems that give his mother fits: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, and worst of all, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

He’s also in love, and therein lies the wafer-thin tale. Richard’s father, Nat, runs the local newspaper. His largest advertiser happens to be the father of Muriel, Richard’s beloved. The plot kicks in when the advertiser accuses Richard of attempting to seduce Muriel by sharing the aforementioned scandalous work of Persian literary genius with her. Nat stands up for his son, but he’s powerless to defend Richard from a blow more lethal than the accusation — a breakup letter from Muriel. Richard, who was kind of an emo kid to begin with, loses it and swears off love. When an upperclassman invites him along to visit what Richard later calls “a secret house of shame,” Richard shuts his ears tight against the wailings of his conscience and goes along.

It’s amusing to watch this 1933 version of 1906 from the vantage point of 2007 mainly because the extra distance compounds the effect O’Neill was going for exponentially: O’Neill intended to portray things as more innocent “back then”; nowadays, it’s difficult to believe that a 17-year-old guy raised by an order of paraplegic nuns in a sensory deprivation chamber could possibly be as clueless about sex as Richard is. (Or indeed, that anyone’s mom would be alarmed to catch her son with a copy of Hedda Gabbler — required reading my sophomore year of high school!)

Pictured: Evan Crump and Kari Ginsburg, the young lovers of Ah, Wilderness!

It’s rare to find a musical which thinks exploring adult friendships is more interesting and relevant than focusing exclusively on romantic relationships. Then again, not too many musicals move back in time, either; Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along has its share of attributes that make it not your average show.

That isn’t to say it’s a masterpiece. Merrily We Roll Along, now being staged by Eric Schaeffer at the Sondheim-loving Signature Theater, has plenty of merit, but has never secured a place in the pantheon of great Sondheim works. The focus of the piece is Franklin Shepard (Will Gartshore), a brilliant composer who sold out late in his career, picking fame and fortune over artistic integrity and losing some friends along the way. The show starts with Shepard successful but dissatisfied; it ends with him fueled with the optimism and promise of youth. At the beginning he’s been written off by those who loved him most – his writing partner, his best friend, his first wife and his second. As the show progresses, we learn how each found their way into his life.

Merrily features characters we care about, and personal dilemmas that ring true. And while audiences might like to get the titular song out of their head more quickly than they're able, the show has some wonderful musical moments here that showcase some really talented performers -- Bayla Whitten's anguished delivery of "Not A Day Goes By", Liberman's masterful, speedy take on the impossible and hilarious patter-song "Franklin Shepard Inc." Even the jaunty "Old Friends" can grow on you.

Betty Rules! is the title of a much-celebrated show for which Amy Ziff, one-third of the long-lived, D.C.-bred pop band Betty, got a Helen Hayes Award nomination last year. I didn’t see it, and I’ve never seen Betty play, so I can’t comment upon its, or their, alleged reign. But I can state with authority the following: Accident, Ziff's one-woman show that opens Theatre J’s new “Incubator Series” of works-in-progress, does not rule.

Oh, it suggests. It probably watches a lot of C-SPAN. Perhaps it even, God help us all, blogs. But rule? ‘Fraid not. It’s too meandering (though it runs only an hour), too smug, too self-congratulatory. It’s meant to be Ziff’s confessional on the precipice of eternity. But alas, she cheats: There isn’t a genuine moment of regret, or even self-doubt, in it. Whenever Ziff supposedly chides herself for a life of rock 'n' roll excess, as when she describes an office visit with an impossibly prudish and judgmental gynecologist, it just comes off as bragging.

It goes down like this: We open on — surprise! — Ziff, regarding her own fresh corpse. Some kind of bathtub mishap, apparently. Or was it? A razor was involved, so there is some ambiguity. The occasion of her demise turns out to be a marvelous opportunity for her to reflect upon her life — as a daughter, as a lover, as a small-time rock star. Projected behind her is a running tally of all the good and bad things she did before shuffling off the old mortal coil. (Good: She was a camp counselor. Bad: She never prayed.) It’s all irresistibly fascinating, especially if your name happens to be Amy Ziff.

In 1819, Ludwig van Beethoven was middle-aged, almost broke, nearly deaf, and suffering a mid-career cold streak. When music publisher Anton Diabelli asked him to remix a middling beer-hall waltz Diabelli had composed as the basis for an all-star compilation volume, Beethoven first refused, then changed his mind. Over the next three-odd years, the Maestro was intermittently obsessed with Diabelli’s tossed-off little ditty, creating not one, not two, but yes, three-and-thirty variations on a piece he had initially — apparently — thought unworthy of his attention.

Why he did this is the mystery at the center of 33 Variations, a world-premiere from Moises Kaufman, he of the great Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and the ubiquitous The Laramie Project. But whereas those plays were assembled from the testimonies of real people, often quoting their sources verbatim and at length, this is more of a conjectural work derived from Beethoven's musical sketches and a small number of his conversation books that survive from the era.

Not that this is purely a period piece. In fact, it takes Beethoven himself, nicely played by Graeme Malcolm in full Christopher-Lloyd-as-Doc-Brown mode, 25 minutes to show up. While we’re waiting, we get the beginnings of a parallel story, set in the present day, of a musicologist’s (Mary Beth Peil) journey to Beethoven’s archives in Bonn to figure out for herself why he’d been so consumed by such a seemingly minor project. (He was composing his Ninth Symphony — the immortal work of genius without which the Home Alone trailer, and perhaps Macaulay Culkin's entire career, would never have been possible — during roughly the same period.)

Katharine, the musicologist, is dying of course — there needs to be some urgency to the proceedings, right? — and while her daughter (Laura Odeh) wants her to come home and prepare for the inevitable, Mom’s having none of it.

Wait, it’s better than it sounds. The sources of conflict in Kaufman’s script may be familiar — Mom vs. mortality, daughter vs. Mom’s expectations, daughter vs. the Central Casting nice guy (an underused Greg Keller) whose overtures she resists for all the phony rom-com reasons, etc. But as with the titular variations, it’s the inventive recasting of unremarkable material that gives this production, which Kaufman also directed, its considerable charge.

Your mission, should you choose to accept: With only one week, adapt a randomly-chosen Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale into a compelling stage production.

Such was the challenge for the team over at Rorschach Theater, which will premiere its season-opening stunt on Saturday.

Last Sunday, 40 D.C. artists, many of them company members, were charged with the responsibility of turning tales like "Hansel & Gretel" into something we'd like to see on stage. Norman Allen, Randy Baker, James Hesla, Jacqueline E. Lawton, Anne M. McCaw and Gwyddion Suilebhan were given the charge of writing the tales, which will star a number of faces familiar to theatergoers.

So are we talking faithful re-tellings of our treasured childhood stories like "Cinderella"? Or Little Red Riding Hood re-imagined as a D.C. hipster? Neither, from the sound of things. The Rorschach Theater Blog warns us that "Rorschach is not Walt Disney," and that we should expect tales that are "dirty, raw and sexy." Plus, from the sound of things, we're going to be treated to some of the lesser known myths, from "Hans My Hedgehog" to "The Devil's Sooty Brother." If you don't want to be surprised before you go into the show, the blog has daily dispatches from the plays' creative staff that talk about their experiences this week.

There will be two shows on Sept. 8, at 8 and 10 p.m. Tickets are available online for $10. If you're not going to be around Saturday, wait till next year -- the group plans to reprise the effort with a whole new group of stories and performers.

Editorial disclosure: DCist contributor Jason Linkins will appear in the production.

The promise of turning over a new leaf and forming a different identity is frequently an appealing one, but sometimes it can be a necessity for survival. At least, that's how it seems to Arlie, who has just been released from prison, and plans to get through life as her better, more respectable half, Arlene.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done in Getting Out, a challenging work being produced by the frequently thought-provoking troupe, Journeymen Theater. The play's most interesting and effective conceit is having both halves of the protaganist's soul inhabited by different actresses - Tiffany Fillmore takes on the more unhinged Arlie, while Alia Faith Williams is the struggling Arlene.

Both women give such revelatory performances that we learn as much about this character from a gesture or a facial movement than we do from this explorative script by Marsha Norman. Fillmore is transformative as Arlie, vicious to the point she's almost scary; Williams has the less demonstrative but no less daunting task of conveying Arlene's more internal journey, and does so admirably. Director Deborah Kirby is smart to keep Arlie suspended above the action in a jail cell, her presence never allowing us to forget Arlene's turmoil without interfering with present developments.

The Unmentionables, Woolly Mammoth’s incendiary season-opener, boasts one of the strongest companies to tread a District stage this year. Their comic timing is both tight and loose, like a well-rehearsed but highly instinctive group of musicians. But the real star is Bruce Norris’s play itself, a screwball satire about imperialism, do-gooderism and hypocrisy. Set in equatorial West Africa, this jeremiad finds as much fault with supposedly altruistic relief workers who come to ease their troubled consciences as with the capitalists who ally themselves with despots. To call it a “black comedy” seems in questionable taste, but that’s exactly what it is — the blackest.

It’s also funny as hell. In fact, one of Norris' characters, identified only as “The Doctor,” (a droll John Livingstone Rolle) seems to have been put here simply to remind us that it’s OK to laugh at the farrago of human misery this play exposes — or it least that our respectful silence does nothing to reduce the suffering. Etienne, the African teen with whom we begin the show, takes this idea even further, telling us we’d do just as well to go home and watch TV as to sit dutifully through a serious play about the pain of an entire continent. (Kofi Owusu rocks the house in this small but pivotal role.)

In a setup that vaguely recalls Luis Bunel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the action is set over the course of a single night in the palatial home of Don (Charles H. Hyman, familiar from a million 80s TV shows, and marvelous here) and Nancy (Woolly regular Naomi Jacobson). He’s a wealthy manufacturer of something or other whose financial support props up the pseudo-democratic regime of which Aunty Mimi (Dawn Ursula) is the no-nonsense, finger-snapping representative; Nancy is his self-absorbed trophy wife. Dave (Tim Getman), a Christian missionary schoolteacher, is uncomfortable accepting Don and Nancy’s hospitality for even a single evening. But given that somebody just burned down the school where he lives and his fiancée, Jane (Marni Penning), is paralyzed by muscle spasms, he has little choice. Dave just wants to pass the night and get an early start fixing up the shack he’s found for he and Jane to live in, but Aunt Mimy takes a hard line on finding and punishing the arsonist. Events become bleaker — and more uproarious — from there.