In the intimate Alchemist Theatre located on Kinnickinnic Avenue in Bay View, Pink Banana Theatre Company finds a home—one that “encourages new and emerging artists to focus on their artistic crafts while given the opportunity to grow creativity.” This is the spirit that pervades their spring 2008 production Pink Banana One Acts: The Next Big Thing.”

Robb Smith plays an American college professor working overseas in Beirut who is captured by terrorists. Forced to take in the world around him through sound alone, the professor spends much of his time trying analyzing the social complexity of his situation. Smith has a firm grasp on the character’s intellectual side, rendering an intelligent performance that is solidly rooted in emotional reality.

Tom Griffin’s comic drama The Boys Next Door brilliantly showcases a poignant, humorous story about people with developmental disabilities. The play deftly walks the line between complexity and accessibility by treating the characters as three-dimensional human beings instead of resorting to juvenile . . .

Pain and suffering, when they transcend the vague forms of conjecture and materialize into a cold, hard fact, can shake the firmest of faiths. When Michael Chobanoff, who plays C. S. Lewis in Acacia Theatre’s production of Shadowlands, stands before the audience and declares self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation, even those unfamiliar with his life will have an inkling his complacency will be severely tested. And so it is.

The third annual Play in a Day hit the Tenth Street Theatre this past weekend. A joint project between DIY theater groups Insurgent Theatre and Alamo Basement, Play in a Day comes from the rather absurd notion of making an entire play in 24 hours complete with sets and costuming. The hope here is to blur the line between performance and process. To a certain extent the final show is merely a rehearsal for a more balanced show that will never be completed. Ideally, things feel rough and incomplete.

In 1952, scriptwriter George Axelrod scored a major success with The Seven Year Itch, a Broadway comedy about a married man whose fantasy life gets a little out of control when he meets a beautiful young woman. Decades later, Jeremy Desmon updated the story in a compelling exploration of extramarital fantasy with The Girl in the Frame.

Obesity and self-image are very serious issues in this country that rarely get directly addressed in contemporary drama. While Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig does very little to rectify this, these issues come to the center of a story so rarely that it ends up being very provocative. Renaissance Theaterworks ends its current season with the romantic drama, now through May 18.

It’s that “perfect period” in the mid-20th Century circa 1959: Eisenhower was president, Ed Sullivan was introducing a nice young man by the name of Elvis Presley to millions of viewers glued to the new medium of television, and kids, for the most part, still listened to their superiors—parents included (the ’60s are just around the corner). Perfect timing for 12-year-old Rudy Pazinski to question his catechism teachings—and life in general—at the hands, literally, of the militaristic Sister Clarissa.

Revivals of the King Arthur legend can usually be rated in terms of historical accuracy or the imagination with which they push the legend further into fantasy. Broadway Across America’s Spamalot, which ended its brief stint at the Marcus Center on May 4, gleefully defies either category. In fact, its main purpose is to offer a musical take on another version of the King Arthur story: the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Although it departs from the film at times, especially in its upbeat finale . . .

William Finn’s New Brain is an interesting adventure into the contemporary American musical. It’s a somewhat feverish collection of songs loosely centered around a thinly veiled autobiographical plot about a composer who is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Windfall Theatre closes its season with a production of the musical now through May 17.