In a society where marriage was closely tied to money and social status, the sensible Elinor and sensitive Marianne Dashwood champion two distinctively different perspectives on love, womanhood and marriage. Under the masterful direction of Robert Kelley, this musical based on Jane Austen’s all-time classic abounds with the author’s signature emotional depths and hilarious sidekicks. With beautiful melodies by Tony-nominated Paul Gordon, the Dashwood sisters’ love stories come to the Bay on a gentle breeze from the rolling green hills of Regency England.

Sense & Sensibility
Opens Wed, Various Times, $25+
Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto

In 1973, the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade legalized abortion across the country. Yet, in 2022, women still have to put in so much work to have a voice over their bodily autonomy. Now, nearly 50 years later, the Los Altos Stage Company aims to show how vital Roe remains today. In her latest, writer Lisa Loomer brings to light the contradictory life experiences of lawyer Sarah Weddington and plaintiff Norma McCorvey. Through their journeys, viewers see both humor and heartache in how America looked post-Roe, and see for themselves just how much (or little) has changed.

Roe 
Opens Thu, Various Times, $20+ 
Bus Barn Theatre, Los Altos

It looks like the Grand Ole Opry has found its way to Mountain View. This weekend, the Smuin Contemporary Ballet troupe will perform their tribute to the late-great American country icon Patsy Cline. Known for tunes like “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “Crazy,” Cline built a mystique over her short eight-year career that still influences today’s younger starlets to combine the twangs of country music with pop stardom. The troupe—led by choreographer Gina Patterson and dancemaker Amy Seiwert—will take those influences to the stage for each two-hour performance.

Smuin Ballet Series 1
Thu-Sun, Various Times, $69+
Center for the Performing Arts, Mountain View

It’s nighttime in Memphis and rain is pouring. Inside the Lorraine Motel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies with a fever and sore throat. Earlier—unknowingly, hours before his death—he had given his final speech, telling the audience at Mason Temple: “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

While the speech became one of King’s most famous, we rarely think of its opening words. After being introduced by a colleague, King said, “I listened to [t]his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

As a play, The Mountaintop occupies the space between that “eloquent and generous introduction” and the man himself—between history and art, memory and truth. Specifically, The Mountaintop takes place in the hours after King’s speech and just before his death, expanding on historical events into a fictionalized encounter with a mysterious young woman. Written by Katori Hall and directed by Sinjin Jones, the current production at Mountain View’s Pear Theatre runs through Feb. 19, with a live streaming option available. The play runs in repertory with Sunset Baby, also directed by Jones, which extends the former play’s themes of civil rights into the present day.

Growing up, Jones remembers thinking, “Man, what we are reading in the context of this class doesn’t feel like enough.” Too often, history can feel like the story of larger-than-life heroes, far removed from our everyday experience. But behind the history books and speeches are imperfect people—even someone as lionized as Dr. King.

“I’ve always been interested in the stories behind the history,” Jones says. “[King] was pulled out of bed to do that speech. We don’t think about that when we think about the beauty and the awesomeness of his words. What does it take for someone to go deliver this speech in the pouring rain, exhausted and hoarse after traveling the country for so long?”

The story behind The Mountaintop mirrors the path of recent political history: it was first staged in 2009, on the heels of the election of Barack Obama, when pundits declared his presidency the culmination of Dr. King’s work (Obama himself often quoted King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”). But by the time the play premiered at The Pear in 2016, much of that hope for change seemed to have curdled.

The Mountaintop draws from history, yet takes us beyond the historical record, leaving space for recontextualization with each staging and new interpretation.

“This play really takes a hard look at the history of the future,” Jones says, adding it “has a lot to do with what I believe our context is right now. Which is to say, I feel like there’s a lot of work to do.”

Part of the work to do is realizing that history is not a passive thing, but something we must continue to struggle with and lay claim to.

“We all have to figure out how we’re going to do this work, because we don’t have a Dr. Martin Luther King,” Jones says. “The things that we thought we had moved past, maybe we haven’t moved past as far as we thought. In the last five years, that has become pretty clear—that some of the wounds we thought we’d healed were maybe just Band-Aided over.”

And while much has changed since 1968, year after year King’s words find new resonance.

“I hope audiences leave with a sense [that King] passed the baton to us,” Jones says. “Who’s going to pick up the baton?”

Here, Jones’s words invoke King’s own conclusion on that rainy night in Memphis, looking ahead at what Jones calls “the history of the future.”

“I would like to live a long life,” King told his audience. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know…that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

The Mountaintop
Through Feb 19, Various Times, $38
Pear Theatre, Mountain View

Opera San Jose’s extravagant new production of Bizet’s Carmen pairs an exciting cast and classic tale with flamenco music, world-class singing and a children’s choir, all under the reimagined stage direction of the award-winning Lilian Groag. The enduring story of one woman’s unceasing search for freedom and passion—and her tragic, operatic fall—Carmen is led by veteran conductor Joseph Marcheso, features mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz and brings the acclaimed Flamenco Society of San Jose on board for a truly vibrant production.

Carmen
Opens Sat, 7:30pm, $55+
California Theatre, San Jose

“The murder is really kind of incidental,” says Doll Piccotto. “You’ve got a body, and then there’s just a puzzle around it.”

As a director, dramaturge and certified mystery fanatic, Piccotto has a keen understanding of the era- and genre-transcending appeal of Agatha Christie. City Lights Theater’s production of Christie’s The Hollow, based on her novel of the same name, opens under Piccotto’s direction this Friday.

Piccotto is close with the author’s oeuvre, having directed The Hollow once before, as well as acted in another of Christie’s plays.

“The best part about being onstage in an Agatha Christie play is hearing people whispering to each other about who did it. Someone will come into the green room and say ‘Okay, everyone thinks Edward did it tonight!’ Suddenly, in that last scene, you feel this wave of realization echo across the audience.”

Piccotto tells Metro that the red herrings and unexpected twists of Christie’s novels caused a stir in her day. Her narration in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made guessing the culprit so difficult that readers wrote into newspapers accusing the author of “cheating.”

Christie was no stranger to causing stirs. In 1926, she disappeared in a case that might sound familiar to fans of Gone Girl. Following the discovery of her husband’s affair, Christie went missing for 11 days, her car found at the bottom of a cliff. After much media frenzy, she was located in a hotel spa—in a room she’d booked under her husband’s mistress’s name. The situation was chalked up to stress-related “amnesia,” but one has to wonder if the author’s stories of betrayal and revenge may, at times, have been inspired by her own life.

Tension in The Hollow builds from a tangled web of relationships centered around the Angkatell family, whose idyllic weekend reunion at their country home comes to a brutal halt at the end of Act 1, with one member of the love hexagon dead and another found unexpectedly holding a gun.

Clearly something of a rebel against expectations of her time (Piccotto excitedly reveals Christie was one of the first English people to go surfing), Christie also wrote complex and multilayered women. The extended family centered in The Hollow includes “sensitive, bohemian artist” Henrietta, her cousin Midge, determined to stay financially independent from her family, and spacey Lady Angkatell, who often knows more than she lets on. These plot-driving ladies stand out—both in the context of the era she lived and wrote in, and on stage, where there’s still a dearth of female roles.

Silicon Valley Shakespeare, whom Piccotto has worked with since 2004, meets this dearth with their biannual all-female production. In a 2017 production of Hamlet, Piccotto played antagonist Claudius opposite Anne Yumi Kobori (now The Hollow’s Henrietta) in the title role.

“People came up to me after the show to say ‘I never thought about it like that!’ Women have a different take on things. I didn’t think of myself as a villain—I’m just trying to be a good stepdad! I mean, he truly believes he’d be the better king!”

The philosophy translates well into The Hollow, where each person in the house has potential motivations for the murder. Her conflicted, “completely imperfect” characters manage to stir empathy for the audience, even as each one falls under suspicion.

In recent years, a gruesome grandchild of the murder mystery and the procedural—true crime—has exploded in popularity, especially among women. Even adaptations of classic detective stories like Christie’s have gotten grittier and darker to match the desensitized modern palate.

“One thing I like about her stage plays is they’re written with tongue planted firmly in cheek. There’s always something a little goofy and campy, that makes it more of a cozy mystery. No one wants to see a dead body on stage for a very long time.”

Regardless of one’s aesthetic taste for fear and gore, piecing together the clues of a crime brings a sense of gratified discovery in a world where the constant inundation of conflicting information can be stupefying.

“Everything is laid out for you. She gives you everything. Even if you don’t figure it out, looking back you can put each piece together and find the solution. It’s satisfying because there’s a clear answer.”

The Hollow
Opens Thu, 8pm, $25+
City Lights Theatre, San Jose

Detroit-born playwright Dominique Morisseau has not only earned two OBIE Awards and a MacArthur Genius Grant for her portrayals of Black lives in the city she calls home, her credits also include the book for Temptations jukebox musical Ain’t Too Proud and a co-production on the TV series Shameless. Mountain View’s Pear Theatre presents a run of Morisseau’s 2013 drama Sunset Baby, which follows a former “legendary” Black activist’s attempt to build a relationship with his estranged daughter after the death of his wife. Sunset Baby runs parallel with Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, both directed by Sinjin Jones.

Sunset Baby
Opens Sat, Various Times, $38+
Pear Theatre, Mountain View

Real history and unreal characters bring real laughs. Jaclyn Backhaus’s MEN ON BOATS recounts real-life explorer John Wesley Powell’s 1869 traversal of the Colorado River with a cast of female and non-binary actors. For fans of Hamilton who wish they’d made fun of the founding fathers a bit more, Backhaus’s cross-gender versions of historical figures make for biting satire of the US’s obsession with figures of discovery and conquest—or, one could say, Man-ifest Destiny. Palo Alto Players offers a “Pick Your Price Night” one evening before the official opening, and the Feb. 10 performance also includes a talkback with the director and cast.

Men on Boats
Opens Fri, Various Times, $30+
Lucie Stern Theater, Palo Alto

In a career spanning over half a century, Katharine Hepburn made history as an icon of stage, screen and style. Kate, the Unexamined Life takes a more intimate look at the Hollywood legend, luminously channeled by Janis Stevens in this one-woman show. Playwright Rick Foster wrote the role with his longtime collaborator in mind, and Stevens has since performed Kate at theaters around the country to rave reviews. Set on New Year’s Eve of 1999, the play captures Hepburn at 92—four years from the end of her life—reflecting on the pinnacles and struggles of her career, her loves, and her legacy.

Janis Stephens
Fri, 8pm $32+
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

Everyone deserves a sweet treat—and the chocolatey goodness of Willy Wonka hits just the right spot. Opening this Tuesday, the Center for Performing Arts hosts the new musical Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, a wacky journey of delights through Wonka’s illustrious factory. Performances will include hit Broadway songs from the original film (shout-out to Gene Wilder), including “Pure Imagination” and “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket,” as well as a new score from the songwriters behind Hairspray.

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
Tue, Various Times, $29
Center for the Performing Arts, San Jose