Pershing Square Signature Center

Lauren Yee has previously explored historical clashes between Communist deologies and Western culture in The Great Leap (set in Beijing in 1971 and 1989) and Cambodian Rock Band (set in Phnom Penh in 1975 and 2008). Her new dark comedy continues that trend: Set in 1992 in St. Petersburg— née St. Petersburg, renée Petrograd, re-renée Leningrad—the play looks at the upended lives of two surveillance agents (and a pop star with a past) as they wrap their minds around free-market thinking. Teddy Bergman (KPOP) directs the production for Signature Theatre, where Yee is a resident playwright. The super cast of four comprises Adam Chanler-Berat, Steven Boyer, Rebecca Naomi Jones and (in drag as Mother Russia herself) David Turner.

Writer-director Aya Ogawa taps into the mother lode in a carnivalesque exploration of maternity that combines satirical vignettes, music and dance, bouffon-style physical theater and general chaos. Mamma mia! The production features original songs by Leyna Marika Papach and choreography by Catherine Galasso; the all-mom cast of five consists of Cindy Cheung, Maureen Sebastian, Marina Celander, Robyn Kerr and Liz Wisan.

The Elizabethan equivalent of a slasher film, Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest horror show, in which cycles of violence and revenge leave no body part unhacked: The title character serves his enemy a pie that is stuffed with the flesh of her sons, and that's just the tip of the viceberg. Broadway's favorite baddie, the deeply sonorous Patrick Page (Hadestown), stars in a production directed by Jesse Berger for his often bloody-minded classical company, Red Bull Theater.

Second Stage provides a second look at a 2007 one-act by Adam Bock (A Life) that—like his excellent 2006 play The Thugs—begins as a well-detailed workplace comedy but acquires ominous shadings as it creeps to its denouement. The razor-sharp Sarah Benson (Fairview) directs the show, which centers on the quotidian fussing of a gabby gal who works the front desk at an office of a somewhat mysterious operation. Casting for the production has not yet been announced.