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FEBRUARY HOUSE (Playing at the Public Theater through June 10)

February House is an ambitious artistic experiment about an ambitious artistic experiment: An attempt by Harpers fiction editor George Davis (Julian Fleisher) to found an art commune in Brooklyn Heights in 1940. Davis’s incandescent brood of tinderbox souls included wunderkind novelist Carson McCullers (the adorable Kristen Sieh), composer Benjamin Britten (Stanley Bahorek) and his lover-muse, the tenor Peter Pears (Ken Barnett), anti-fascist firebrand Erika Mann (Stephanie Hayes), “thinking-man’s stripper” Gypsy Rose Lee (Kacie Sheik), and, as elder statesman (at 33), the revered poet W.H. Auden (Erik Lochtefeld, subtly and sustainedly wrong for a disagreeable and miswritten role).

Cock (at the Duke on 42nd Street)

John (Cory Michael Smith) has a decision to make: Does he stay with M (Jason Butler Harner), his longtime male lover? Or commit to his new girlfriend W (Amanda Quaid), the first woman he’s ever slept with? But this isn’t a drearily literal diddle on the nature of bisexuality, or even some milquetoast meditation on small-i “identity.” There’s a bigger question on the table: “Why are you telling me I have to know what I am?” asks John, not impishly, not pertinently, desperately even. “It doesn’t matter. I love him because he makes me toast in bed and he’s scared of plastic bags. I love her because she makes me feel as old as I really am.”

Lonely I'm Not (at 2nd Stage through June 3)

Paul Weitz’s Lonely I’m Not is precisely the sort of play I’m wired to despise: the tale of a mopey male genius/fuckup — damaged by the “wrong” sort of success, emotionally compartmentalized, sexually desolate yet unquestionably beddable — written in small, cartridge-like scenelets so slick and modular, they feel like they’re being ejected onto the boards by an offstage Gillette.

A great many of these plays seem to spring from the iPads of Hollywood screenwriters, and I’ve come to regard them with suspicion: Weitz’s own Trust, for example, I found muddled, miscast, and ill-tempered, a dark tale about privilege and domination awkwardly rewritten as some sort of icky wish-fulfillment scenario. That was a play with a lot on its mind but no real moral or philosophical spool to wrap it all around; the show lacked the courage to be the pitch-black downward-spiral it wanted to be.

Saint Joan (at the Access Theater at 380 Broadway through May 13)
Do you have three-plus hours for Joan of Arc, i.e., the George Bernard Shaw liberal-individualist version? Believe me, you do. And I have four actors for you: Andrus Nichols (as Joan), Tom O’Keefe, Ted Lewis, and Eric Tucker (who also directs). This doughty quartet, armed with minimal costume and light and no set to speak of, burn like meteors through Shaw’s meta-historic epic. Oh, for a muse of muslin! Without a flat or a caster, the Bedlam theater company works genuine miracles. Can the unworthy scaffold of the Access Theater bring forth so great an object? Can a cockpit that looks like it’s hosted actual cockfights hold the vast fields of France? You bet it can.

When news that Avengers co-stars Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner will star in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached Vulture's airborne hoverfortress, we put on our thinking-spandex and considered the implications for the Great White Way. While the duo will be appearing as different, non-superpowered characters, their blockbuster bona fides will be what draw many people into the theater. So just imagine what damage their other superteammates could do if they jumped onto Broadway, but fully suited! We all saw what Spider-Man did, all by his lonesome: Now think of what an entire team of slumming superheroes could accomplish and/or lay waste to!