Decease, I Insist: A Funerarial Comedy Near the end of Mass St. Productions’ hour-long, death-centric sketch comedy show, a dull bar mitzvah peps up when octogenarian DJ Yaya arrives, cranking the EDM and reminiscing about how hard she partied while Nazis decimated her hometown, her only dream to become a “4.5-star DJ on Yelp.” It’s appalling, and appallingly funny, and one of the rare moments when this five-person ensemble sticks its collective neck out. The rest of the sketches range from clever (a self-absorbed monarch desperately searching for the proper beheading outfit) to puzzling (radio actors making their own banal sound effects). Under Sophie Duntley’s direction, the male performers are often overly tentative, while the two women (Rebecca Escobedo and Katie Ruppert) regularly tear things up. —Justin Hayford
Engage! A Choose-Your-Own Sci-Fight Show One audience volunteer and a big, fluffy four-sided die determine the plot twists in this adventure quasi-comedy from Stellar Productions. In the right hands, onstage parlor games over seemingly nonexistent stakes can be real hoot—but not when they amount to tests of basic motor skills, as they do here. Challenges include removing huge, clearly marked cables from hooks on a board, fitting Tetris-style blocks into a much larger box, and sticking red and blue plugs into their corresponding red and blue outlets. The backs of cereal boxes are more engaging. Making things worse, the “spoof” story based on recent sci-fi fare like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Guardians of the Galaxy is less send-up than flat imitation, one aimed at an unclear demographic. Is this for kids? —Dan Jakes
Life in 35mm: An Improvised Documentary I’ve gotten a handful of laughs from comedian Jordan Wilson every time I’ve seen him onstage, and he and Mark Walsh provide some inventive, go-with-the-flow long-form storytelling here. Good improvisers like these can roll with almost anything; wild-card collaborators aren’t one of them. As a whole, this particular Annoyance troupe lets wigs and inscrutable character swerves work the jokes for them, and at the performance I attended, the seemingly straightforward suggestion of “space” resulted in an insurmountable number of dropped story cues. I suspect that’s partly why the set felt so short, ending without much resolution. —Dan Jakes
Monticello Local labor attorney Thomas R. Geoghegan’s play, receiving its world premiere from Aurora Theater Works, Inc., imagines a meeting between a dying Thomas Jefferson and a college-age Edgar Allen Poe on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826. In debt and despondent over the state of the nation, Jefferson is being pressured to buttress the institution of slavery by renouncing the equality of all men he championed in the Declaration. Complicating matters are Sally Hemings and other slaves on the property with whom the master is intimately involved. What does Poe have to do with any of this? Not much, and it doesn’t help that the script is peppered with jokey references to his future classics like “The Raven.” Geoghegan means his play as a call to action in another age of crisis but does his cause no favors by throwing together two important historical figures for an imaginary chat. The most affecting moment by far comes at the very end, when Sally Hemings reads the Declaration in full. —Dmitry Samarov
A Puppet Playdate With Grandma D Is your avatar elderly and blue? Young, a thumb-sucker, and faintly violet? A sparkly fluffy quadruped in a tutu? With a minimal cast, Pride Arts Center Theatre for Young Audiences’ Puppet Playdate With Grandma D presents a world of types in a single room at Grandma D’s house (she’s the blue puppet). In the tradition of Nickelodeon kids’ show Blue’s Clues, our narrator and nonpuppet intermediary is a white male everyman mysteriously given the same name as a certain mohawked pro wrestler of color. But if he identifies as Mr. T, it’s OK; as we learned in the first week’s reading, Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, and Shelagh McNicolas’s whitewashed, conflict-free picture book of transgender self-discovery I Am Jazz, the word of the day is “acceptance.” Clocking in at a slim 20 minutes with a new reading each week, Puppet Playdate seems well-intentioned but also telegraphs disappointing cultural norms. —Irene Hsiao