THE SAVANNAH DISPUTATION | Evan Smith’s amusing little comedy, in its Boston debut by SpeakEasy Stage Company, is a smackdown between a couple of elderly Irish Catholic sisters aptly named Mary and Margaret and the fundamentalist Christian cheerleader who shows up on their doorstep bent on conversion but gets more than she bargained for on her return visit when Mary brings in the sisters’ parish priest. Smith’s sentimental sit-com dressed up as theological disputation is nonetheless extremely funny, and the blithe narrowness of both sides is exposed in Paul Daigneault’s hilarious SpeakEasy production. Both Paula Plum’s Doubting Thomasina and Timothy Crowe’s pained intellectual of a priest are subtly played, leaving the real cat fight to Nancy E. Carroll’s scathing crank, who defends her meanness as if it were the Grail, and Carolyn Charpie’s fetching airhead of a door-to-door evangelical. | Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | Through October 17 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | $42-$47; $37-$42 students, seniors; $30 gallery seats
SLEEP NO MORE | Sandwiched between Diane Paulus’s “Midsummer Night’s Disco,” The Donkey Show, and her gospel-infused riff on The Winter’s Tale, Best of Both Worlds, is this mix of Rear Window and the Scottish play that’s presented, under the auspices of the American Repertory Theater, by the London troupe Punchdrunk in its US debut. Set off-site at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline Village, the show allows its audience to wander through an evocative installation of cinematic scenes redolent of the works of Alfred Hitchcock but triggered by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. | Old Lincoln School, 194 Boylston St, Brookline Village 617.547.8300 | Through January 3 | Curtain 7 + 7:20 + 7:40 pm Tues-Thurs + Sun | 7:20 + 7:40 + 8 pm Fri-Sat | $35-$39
STOMP | The Olivier-, Obie-, and Drama Desk Award–winning show that exploits the percussive potential of everyday objects from brooms to garbage-can lids to matchboxes is back for its — actually, we’ve lost count, but this is at least its sixth Boston appearance. We’re promised “some new surprises, with some sections of the show now updated and restructured and the addition of two new full-scale routines utilizing props like tractor-tire inner tubes and paint cans.” | Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, Boston | 800.233.3123 | Through October 18 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 5 + 9 pm Sat | 3 + 7 pm Sun | $35-$60
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW | Actors’ Shakespeare Project does not promise to gild its Bard with Donna Summer. But an earthy poetry does hold its own against the WWE-worthy fisticuffs of the Bard’s early comedy, a battle of the sexes whose sexism is better gotten around by a woman director, in this case Obie winner Melia Bensussen, who supervises the bantering and battering of Benjamin Evett’s Petruchio and Sarah Newhouse’s Kate. | Downstairs at the Garage, 38 JFK St, Cambridge | 866.811.4111 | Through November 8 | Curtain 10 am [no October 28] Wed | 10 am [no October 15] + 7:30 pm Thurs | 7:30 pm Fri | 3 pm [no October 17] + 8 pm Sat | 2 pm Sun | $47; $38 seniors; $25 students
