Although its script is a great deal funnier than you might be expecting, the profound senses of heartbreak and loss that fuel David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole tend to sneak up on you and hit like waves, knocking you off balance and leaving you somewhat shaken. Anyone attending the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's current presentation of the playwright's family drama is advised to bring tissues. (Unless you go the route I did, and surreptitiously dry your cheeks during scene-change blackouts.) Yet there's something else you might also want to bring, something I hadn't anticipated through a mere reading of this Pulitzer Prize-winner: a bib.

If you can't pull off grandeur in a show that's pretty much known for grandeur, you're much better off shooting for ingenuity and invention. So, for those curious how the modestly scaled Clinton Area Showboat Theatre was going to house the extravagantly scaled Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the happy answer is: with considerable wit and smarts, thank you.

David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama, one year after winning a Best Actress Tony Award for Sex & the City star Cynthia Nixon. A movie adaptation is currently being filmed, starring Academy Award winners Nicole Kidman and Dianne Wiest.

When Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre opens its presentation of Lindsay-Abaire's acclaimed play on August 13, it will feature popular local performers Jessica Nicol, Denise Yoder, and Susan Perrin-Sallak, and boast direction by Bryan Tank, much admired for his work in such Quad City Music Guild productions as Jekyll & Hyde, Evita, and the recent All Shook Up.

And, as Tank himself understands, Richmond Hill's Rabbit Hole is still no slam dunk.

Neil LaBute's Bash - the debut presentation from the newly formed Phoenix Theatre Company - finds three of the author's short plays performed in succession, and in the middle of its first offering, actor Chris White rises from his chair, walks to its back, removes his suit coat, and then sits down again. In movie parlance, this is what would be known as Bash's "action scene."