A moving play being produced in conjunction with the community-wide Holocaust-remembrance project "Out of Darkness: Holocaust Messages for Today” (OutOfDarknessQC.com), Claudia Haas' award-winning memory drama My Brother's Gift enjoys a September 2 through 11 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, the work a moving testament to the power of art under unconscionable circumstances.

Leaving Iowa, the winning comedy currently running at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, follows Don (played by Kevin Babbitt), a middle-aged writer who reflects on vacations from his youth. In the play's present, Don travels across the cornfield states to spread his father’s ashes at his childhood home. And in a series of flashbacks, Don and his family find themselves in interesting situations with zany characters during their Midwest road trips.

During Thursday's opening-night performance and area premiere of Ride the Cyclone, Ryan J. Hurdle’s character Ricky stops at one point in his song “Space Age Bachelor Man” and says, “It gets weird now.” But oh, gentle readers, that ship sailed from the moment the lights went down.

With the Chicago Sun-Times describing Tim Clue's and Spike Manton's comedy as “simultaneously hilarious and touching,” the regional delight Leaving Iowa enjoys an August 18 through 28 run at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, the show also lauded by the Chicago Tribune as a work of “genuine charm and humility” that “lives as happily in its own warm skin as an ear of corn ripening along Interstate 80 on an August afternoon.”