I often feel like I need a bath after a Sam Shepard play, and “Buried Child” is no exception.

The specter of a dead child, a question of identity and extreme family dysfunction haunt this 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner, in shifting patterns of memory, reality and delusion.

Lisa Berger directs the bleak and creepy black comedy “Buried Child” through April 22 at New Village Arts Theatre.

In a dilapidated farmhouse somewhere in Illinois, an old man named Dodge (Jack Missett), thin and frail, sits drinking himself to death on a couch in front of a seldom-watched but flickering TV.

The American dream collides with the American immigrant dream – in more ways than one – in the world premiere of Matt Spangler’s “Tortilla Curtain.”

Based on the novel by T.C. Boyle, “Tortilla Curtain” plays through April 8 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Sam Woodhouse directs.

Delaney Mossbacher (Mike Sears), liberal nature writer for Wide Open Spaces magazine, lives in a nice gated condo community in the hills above Topanga Canyon with his go-getter Realtor wife Kyra (Lisel Gorell-Getz), dogs Picasso and Hemingway, and Siamese cat Gertrude Stein.

Cygnet Theatre scores another bull’s-eye with a truly excellent production of Jason Robert Brown’s Tony-winning “Parade.”

This musical about a sorry chapter in U.S. history – the lynching of Leo Frank by anti-Semitic hooligans in 1915 – is frighteningly relevant today.

A backlash set in after the South was defeated in the Civil War. Atlanta in particular was left devastated by Sherman's march to Savannah. Residents, left to pick up the pieces, harbored fear of and hatred for Northerners and other outsiders.

You half expect Rosencrantz – or, more likely, Guildenstern – to break into a chorus of “Alfie,” unable as they are to figure out what it’s all about.

These poor minor courtiers to the Danish throne seem to have escaped “Hamlet” and are first seen on the road to – somewhere, or maybe nowhere, perhaps even nonexistence.

While waiting for fate to reveal itself, they test the law of probability by flipping coins, defying that law with 92 consecutive heads.