Body/Courage Danielle Pinnock started hating her body in junior high. Her adolescence and early adulthood were full of diets and self-loathing. A few years ago, she started interviewing other people about how they felt about her bodies and transformed the interviews into a series of monologues. The subjects encompassed a wide range of ages, races, genders, and nationalities, and Pinnock embodied them all with skill, empathy, and humor. Now, in the project’s final incarnation, Pinnock has interwoven the monologues with her own story to show all the different ways people can feel uncomfortable in their own skin. The project helped her come to peace with herself. She hopes it will do the same for her audience. Her fantastic performance(s) and good humor far outweigh any preachiness. —Aimee Levitt

The Glass Menagerie Hans Fleischmann’s 2012 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s semiautobiographical masterpiece at Mary-Arrchie Theatre was a study in dramaturgy gone right, as is this luminous revival with the Hypocrites. In a gut-wrenching performance as the narrator, Tom—reimagined as a broken soul murmuring to himself in the gutter—Fleischmann (who also directed) goes from gnawing regret about the family he left behind to something resembling full-blown psychosis. This exceptional production’s fine cast also features Joanne Dubach as Laura; haunting scenic and lighting design by Grant Sabin and Matt Gawryk and an original, never-intrusive score by Daniel Knox re-create the fractured, dreamlike experience Williams so poetically describes. Every bold choice amplifies every one of the play’s subtleties, making this—to my mind, at least—the definitive Glass Menagerie. —Dan Jakes

The Things We Keep This new drama by Mark Boergers jumps around in time to show how brothers Rob and Tom and their cousin, Evelyn, are shaped by their dealings with their aunt, Marie, an artist whose pack-rat tendencies eventually tip into hoarding. At the center of the story is a shared secret that paradoxically strengthens and corrodes the family’s ties. But too much remains vague and unarticulated about the characters and their motivations (especially Marie’s) for the changes in their behavior to cohere. A dark turn in the play’s second half feels like sheer authorial imposition. The cast of Natalie Sallee’s staging for the Arc Theatre manage to make the script’s sometimes lofty language sound natural, but the production is morose even when it’s supposed to be light. —Zac Thompson