Take a trip down memory lane to the ’90s in Theatre J’s newest production.

For all his success outside of it, David Mamet has done all right by Hollywood. More than all right, in fact: His screenplays for The Verdict and Wag the Dog were nominated for Oscars, and, like Woody Allen, he gets to direct his own scripts just the way he wants to because 1) he’s got such unassailable artistic cred that everybody wants to work with him, and 2) he never spends very much money….

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,…

New Yorker fiction pieces can be predictably melancholy. Sample plot: the narrator discovers a personality flaw, or flaw in her love life – “flaw” is the key word here—and the reader is left feeling seasick by the end. Luckily, a few amusing anecdotes have slipped into print along the way, and Theatre J has adapted some of these collected memoirs by Laura Shaine Cunningham into Sleeping Arrangements. Pain, failure, and all things deserving self-pity are…

MONDAY The troubled Americans of the McSweeney’s empire have built their legacy on ironic footnote deployments, mock mawkishness, and the transformation of the esoteric into the sublime. Plus some funny-ass lists and stuff. Tonight, join Evany Thomas and Dustin Long as they read from The Secret Language of Sleep and Icelander, respectively. It will be like staring into the face of God. Olsson’s Dupont Circle, 1307 19th St. NW, 7 p.m. TUESDAY Ariel Dorfman comes…

February’s theater scene brings a month of insomnia and exorcisms, dames and deaths. But before we outline the month’s offerings, allow us to say thanks to DCist reader Jeffrey, who reminded us that tickets for the Monty Python spectacular, Spamalot, coming to the National Theater in June, go on sale Februrary 26. They’ll be gone faster than you can say “shrubbery,” so mark your calendars. In the meantime, how far would you go to protect…