Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria is a fascinating play. It's a lively workplace comedy until it's an unsettling workplace drama. There's a sheen of satire to it but also reality and heart. There's a bracing boldness to it that makes its two hours fly by, and its path is never exactly what you think it will be.

Will Eno is one of the most interesting playwrights in the theaterverse. He's weird and brilliant, funny and deeply humane. Because there can be an oblique and highly theatrical quality to his work, he has often been compared to Beckett, but for me, I feel more Thornton Wilder (somewhere between The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town). He wrestles in creative and insightful and surprising ways with what it is to be alive and how we're all connected by the knowledge that none of us is getting out of here alive and that we could all probably be doing better when it comes to being aware of our lives as we're living them.

Harry Potter, known as "the boy who lived," has continuously found life on the pages of seven best-selling novels, on the screen in eight blockbuster films, in theme parks both in Florida and California and now on stage in an epic two-part, five-plus-hour play that has to be seen to be believed.

You could say that Kate Attwell's Testmatch, the world premiere play at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, is about cricket. You could also say it's about untangling the gnarly knots of history. But the impact, especially in the savvy way Attwell has constructed the play, comes from its emphasis on the deep interconnection of everything to everything.

Suzan-Lori Parks' White Noise is an intensely interesting play. Just not a very good one.

And that's surprising given that Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, has bent, molded and shaped contemporary theater to her will through sheer force of intelligence, powerful writing and the courage to configure theater as she needs it to be configured.

The mind of Caryl Churchill is an extraordinary place to spend an evening. Happily, this theater season, the Bay Area will see an abundance of Churchill, beginning with American Conservatory Theater's season-opening Top Girls from 1982.