We’re in the busy theater season, so the following is another installment of reviews of October shows at D.C.-area theaters — though most of these are running well into November. Want to know what else is playing? Check out our monthly theater preview.

My Body No Choice
Review by Missy Frederick

“I believe a woman is more than a container.” It’s a testimony to the devastating ridiculousness of the current political climate that this sentence could be anything but self-evident, but it’s one of many powerful, necessary sentiments expressed in My Body No Choice playing in a limited run at Arena Stage, just before Election Day.

The project also happens to be the swan song of artistic director Molly Smith, the formidable force behind Arena Stage since 1998. For her last directed production, she’s assembled an impressive roster of female playwrights, including but not limited to Dael Orlandersmith (Until the Flood, Yellowman), Sarah Ruhl (Euridyce, In the Next Room), and V (formerly Eve Ensler) of Vagina Monologues fame, who all have quickly and urgently written monologues surrounding issues of choice (or lack thereof) around women’s bodies.

The stories of My Body No Choice will feel familiar to many in the audience, some for their universal themes (infertility struggles, anticipation before a pregnancy test’s results), or even more specific ones (that special, satisfied feeling that comes from delivering a powerful, unassailable argument isn’t only applicable to high school debate team champions). They’re also depressingly familiar, in the sense that so many women have faced the deeper horrors that My Body explores: sexual assault, poverty, domestic abuse.

Each monologue has been paired with a dynamic actress to bring it home: particularly arresting are Jennifer Mendenhall, who orates Ruhl’s amusing but ultimately chilling “An Uplifting High School Graduation Speech,” and Toni Rae Salmi, who connects comfortably with the audience as she shares “Things My Mother Told Me” by Lee Cataluna.

Smith has said My Body is as much a political protest as it is a work of art, and that’s an excellent lens through which to view it: its arguments can feel infuriatingly obvious at times, but it’s clear the entire country hasn’t gotten the message. Maybe they will before Election Day: 20 theaters and universities across the U.S. (including in areas much less blue than D.C.) will see the work staged before Nov. 6.

My Body No Choice runs through Nov. 6 at Arena Stage; running time is 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets (just $18 and starting to sell out) are available online.

Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really
Review by Nicole Hertvik

Spooky season is officially here and Rorschach Theatre is going all in with Kate Hamill’s Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really, an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 vampire thriller. In Stoker’s novel, men call the shots while the women swoon or passively offer up a jugular. Not so in this feminist adaptation, which casts women in roles originally written for men, painting vampirism as a metaphor for toxic masculinity while delivering a thoroughly entertaining piece of theater.

In director Rebecca Rovezzi’s capable hands, each of the three male characters in the script reminds us of the hurdles women face in the struggle for equality. Dr. Seward, played with upper-crust earnestness by a debonair Erik Harrison, embodies the Victorian tendency to dismiss women as delicate flowers. Ben Topa, perfectly cast as Dracula, is irresistibly charming, sexy, manipulative, and deadly — the exact opposite of his first conquest, the polite but changeable British solicitor Jonathan Harker (a talented Conor Patrick Donahue).

The remaining two-thirds of the cast features a cadre of diverse and fascinating females, including OG vampire slayer Dr. Van Helsing, played by Phoenix Cross with delicious badassery. Christina Day is a delightfully disturbing Renfield, the mental patient whose mumblings predict Dracula’s arrival, while Bri Houtman delights and surprises as the virgin ingenue and Jessica Ludd portrays reluctant vampire slayer Mina Harker as a strong, introspective intellectual.

Rorschach approaches its immersive productions as if they were art installations and this site-specific production staged in an abandoned firehouse is the perfect recipe for seasonal shivers. The mood is set outside by a bonfire and cocktails served in “blood bags,” and one inside, Sarah Markley’s period set bathes the audience in layers of intrigue. Gauzy on-stage curtains that double as doors enable creepy shadow play. Renfield’s lunatic musings are scribbled on one of the firehouse’s interior brick walls.

Sydney Moore’s substantial Victorian-era costumes have a decidedly Gothic feel, sound designer Kenny Neal’s ominous piano interludes punctuate the scene changes. For a spooky autumn outing, Rorschach Theatre’s Dracula is just the thing to stir your blood.

Rorschach Theatre’s Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really runs through November 6 at The Firehouse at the Parks at Walter Reed. Tickets are $10 to $45. Runtime is two hours and 30 minutes with one intermission.

Elegies: A Song Cycle
Review by Missy Frederick

Elegies: A Song Cycle packs an impressive 26 numbers into its brisk, just under 90-minute running time, and due to the sheer emotional heaviness of the piece, it’s probably about all an audience could handle. Inspired by (but not entirely focused on) the events of 9/11, grief and goodbye are woven thematically through most of the musical numbers, sung deftly by an impressive sextet that director Christina A. Coakley has assembled.

Composer William Finn (Falsettos, A New Brain) has a talent for balancing the absurd with the devastating, and Keegan Theatre’s Elegies isn’t all straightforward sadness. Harrison Smith in particular commits to a kind of unhinged enthusiasm as he works his way through numbers like “Fred,” an ode to a man excessively obsessed with chickens, and “My Dogs,” which loopily explores how the canines this one man loves keep dying on him.

As a revue, the challenge of Elegies is finding a way to emotionally connect with those characters we’re only getting to know through as little as a three-minute song. Often this succeeds, especially when Finn revels in specificity: I now feel like I’ve been a fly on the wall during John Loughney’s wryly delivered “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving,” and felt that lump in my throat growing as Katie McManus reminisced about her years spent raising children and developing friendships on “14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts.” Interestingly, the more universal the number, the more bland it tends to be: songs like “Infinite Joy” and even the mournfully set-up “Anytime (I Am There)” don’t pack the same wallop as the songs clearly devoted to distinct scenarios.

The events of Sept. 11 loom over Elegies until its final moments, where a man caught in the towers (Ben Clark, promising and underused here) and his wife at home (Brigid Wallace) hauntingly trade perspectives. “The ending’s not the story,” we’re reassured in the man’s final moments, and it’s a powerful truth Elegies leaves us with.

Elegies: A Song Cycle runs through Nov. 20 at KeeganTheatre. Runtime is just under 90 minutes. Tickets ($60) are available online.

Fade
Review by Nicole Hertvik

Abel and Lucia don’t have much in common. But don’t tell that to Lucia. Born in Mexico to a wealthy family, and recently brought in as the “diversity hire” on a team of television writers in L.A., Lucia is hungry for a connection to her native country and native tongue.

Abel, a Mexican American janitor who works in the building, is the closest thing she’s got. So Lucia attempts to befriend him through a series of missteps and assumptions that reveal the nuanced experiences and backgrounds of Latinx people living in the United States.

Unexpected Stage Company’s no-frills production of Fade rests largely on the shoulders of two very capable actors. As Lucia, Camila Calderón uses physical humor and comedy to embody the well-off, college-educated Mexican who is blithely unaware of her privileged status as she struggles to be seen as more than a token by her white colleagues. But Michael Burgos is the true centerpiece of the production. As Abel, the L.A.-born grandchild of Mexican immigrants, Burgos gives a layered performance that sneaks up on you with its subtlety, leaving you wanting to know more about Abel’s complicated past and admiring his ability to tell it like it is.

Tanya Saracho’s script, which showcases the pitfalls of cultural assumptions in personal relationships, is a winner, though several references to life in Trump’s America do feel a bit dated. (Fade was originally published in 2017.) Dylan Arredondo’s direction keeps the focus squarely on the burgeoning relationship between Lucia and Abel, although the pace of the production lags a bit towards the end.

All of the action takes place in Lucia’s office, where Simone Schneeberg’s modest set features a black sofa and a Formica desk. A playlist of songs by Mexican and other Latinx artists adds layers to the ambiance (sound design by Matthew Mills) and simple lighting by Jozef Orisich rounds out the modest production. Unexpected Stage Company performs at the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation Building, a lovely space nestled in the woods of Bethesda, making for a satisfying and thought-provoking theater experience off the beaten path.

Fade runs through November 13 at Unexpected Stage Company. Tickets are $12 to $35. Runtime is 90 minutes with no intermission.