Kicking off the Kennedy Center’s CHINA: The Art of a Nation series, Two Dogs’ Opinions on Life is a laugh riot&#151if you speak Chinese. Luckily for the rest of us, the actors carry off the difficult task of parodying Chinese life in slapstick, farce, and sound effects everyone can understand.

A documentarian wants to make a film about the Devil, who has conveniently taken human form. In describing the experience, the documentarian says he expects it “to be confusing and incomplete.” So it is with Longacre Lea’s Something Past in Front of the Light.

“This is women’s territory,” proclaims one of the ladies in The Keegan Theatre’s production of Steel Magnolias, and yet there is something in its story of love and hardship that all can grasp, underneath all that hairspray.

The seven actresses enter the stage dressed all in white. And, as they speak to each other of first loves, of dancing, they dress each other and themselves in single shades, a yellow bracelet for one, a green necklace for another. A few minutes later, the Lady in Orange comes back with full-color costume, and all the colors fill in, vividly.

The press releases warning “This ain’t no Giving Tree,” the pre-show Metallica and the sign advising playgoers to “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here” prepare you for a night of mature themes. It’s too bad the very first segment of An Adult Evening with Shel Silverstein is so boring.

Before it was Vegas, the place for passionate romantic affairs was the beach. The churning tide and soft sand under warm skies does something to the body, bringing up unknown depths of longing. In The History of Kisses, writer, director and actor David Cale summons up stories and songs inspired by such scenery.

Rarely is the act of navel-gazing so entertaining and thought-provoking as it is in Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy, performed at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.