First up was The Cripple of Inishmaan a co-production of Druid Theatre Company and Atlantic Theater Company. If you’re familiar with Martin McDonagh’s work (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore,  The Lonesome West, A Skull in Connemara and The Pillowman on stage; In Bruges and Six Shooter on film), you know that despite his often grim (and frequently grisly) subject matter, he is, no kidding, one of the funniest playwrights working today. And Cripple is vintage McDonagh. The dialogue is crisp, the jokes are rapier sharp and, under Gerry Hynes’s direction at Atlantic, the cast is sublime.

A few days later we caught Enter Laughing at The York Theatre Company, which had an initial run in early fall and is being reprised through March 8. This musical, with a book by Joseph Stein and music and lyrics by Stan Daniels, is based on the play by Joseph Stein from the novel by Carl Reiner, is a classic screwball comedy, made for laughs and unashamedly played for laughs.

What struck me on both occasions is how truly wonderful the Off Broadway experience can be, particularly at a skillfully produced and performed comedy. It’s really something to sit in the dark, laughing and hearing everyone around you laughing at the same thing. The sound and energy just buoy you, and it’s extraordinary to feel the energy cascading back and forth between performers and audience, each propelling the other. Movies, even really funny ones, just can’t deliver the same punch, can they?

Luckily they love theatre and were very good sports about devoting most of their evenings to our professional preoccupation. Also, luckily, all the things we saw were truly wonderful. (Phew! It would’ve been awful to make out-of-towners sit through a bunch of stinkeroos.)

First, we took them to Almost an Evening, for what happened to be F. Murray Abraham’s final performance. The cast and crew were also kind enough to include them in the champagne toast that followed. Let me tell you, there’s something supremely satisfying about introducing your family to an Academy Award winner, who also happens to be extremely charming and funny. That’s just cool!

On Tuesday, we were over at the Cherry Lane Theatre (which we love) to see a workshop performance of one of the company’s Mentor Project plays. Do you know about Mentor Project? It’s Artistic Director Angelina Fiordellisi’s ten-year-old program that matches emerging playwrights with masters of the craft. Over the course of a single season, three established artists are each paired with a mentee to work on one play. Each work is given a staged reading and a workshop presentation in CLT’s Studio space. Past mentors have included Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, Jules Feiffer, Wendy Wasserstein, Theresa Rebeck and Lynn Nottage.

We saw a performance of Jailbait by Deidre O’Connor, directed by Suzanne Agins and mentored by Michael Weller. I had seen the reading and liked it very much, and I’m thrilled to tell you we were all truly impressed by what we saw on the stage last week. O’Connor’s dialogue is pitch perfect and her characters are deftly and lovingly drawn. It’s the kind of smart, honest theatre that you know is being made in New York, in little theatres, in basements, in rehearsal studios and studio apartments, but that rarely gets noticed amidst the hullaballoo.

Our next outing rocketed us from the humble to defiantly lavaloovanal: We took in a performance of Boeing Boeing. I ponied up the bucks for 7th row seats on the aisle–hey, you only take your sister to a boffo B’way show once in a while, right? Anyway, the show is, on its merits, pretty pukey. It’s a Sizzlin’ Sixties Sexcapade that definitely shows its years, BUT the production values are so high, the cast is so polished, and–most importantly–is so obviously having the time of their lives that it just doesn’t matter. I mean it, the joy radiating from the stage is palpable. The post-curtain/pre-bow samba–which has exactly nothing to do with the plot–is clearly there just to let this group of goof balls burn off a little excess joy before punching out for the night. It’s fun, it’s cwaaazy, it’s as one review has it: a nutball comedy. Go for the laffs.

Finally, we walked over to the Atlantic Theater Company for a preview of Conor McPerson’s Port Authority, which opened last night. Expertly acted by Brian D’Arcy James, John Gallagher and the incomparable Jim Norton under the direction of Henry Wishcamper, Port Authority grabbed me in the first thirty seconds and never let go. Read Brantley’s review here. It’s a series of monologues by three Irishmen, one young, one middle aged, one old. Each tells the story of a love that never was, a victim of passivity, fear or simple bad timing. It’s haunting and wrenching, mesmerizing and strips the theatrical experience to its bones. It’s essential, and I mean that literally, for certainly the first drama resided in the stories we told around the fire, our faces gilded by its glow and the night wrapped tight around us. That’s how Port Authority feels: intimate and painful and achingly human.

Anywhoo, my sister and her husband were thoroughly charmed by all of last week’s theatrical hocus pocus. Their enthusiasm reminded us just how fortunate we are to see so much shockingly great theater every single blessed day of the week! (In case we were starting to take it for granted.)