There are multiple points in human history when Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros would make for funny/terrifying entertainment. Unfortunately, this is one of them.

In Ionesco's 1959 play, a small French village is best by giant horned pachyderms. Or, more accurately, the citizens are, one by one, turning into beasts.

Let's just admit it. The Bible is a clusterf**k. How in the world did such a literary hodgepodge, political football, myth collection become one of the most influential – if not the most influential book – ever created? That is the mammoth question asked by playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare ask in their fascinating play The Good Book now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

For their adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair, writer Kate Hamill and director Jessica Stone do a little bit of cheating. Hamill has decided to liven things up by making this a play about a play about a novel. We are in American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater, but on stage, we're told that our actual location is "Strand Musick Hall," and the opening number tells us that seven actors are going to play all the parts for the next 2 1/2 hours.

You may enter The Jungle at the beautiful Curran theater in downtown San Francisco, but you exit in an entirely different place – mentally and emotionally speaking, that is.

The idea of immersive theater tends to bring on expectations of fun and intrigue with promises of leaving present circumstances behind and allowing yourself to be somewhere else (possibly someone else or in some other time) for just a little while. But The Jungle is different.

Nearly 20 years later, Metamorphoses returns to Berkeley Rep, this time to the Peet's Theatre. The show remains stunning – still gorgeous, still moving, still an example of theater at its sumptuous best. There are moments that are stunning, thrilling, funny and breathtaking. After Berkeley Rep, the show ended up on Broadway, where Zimmerman won a Tony.

It was with trepidation that I went to opening night of the world premiere drama Candlestick by Bennett Fisher and produced by Campo Santo, long one of the Bay Area's best incubators of new plays.

The premise is that a group of Bayview friends spend eight home games tailgating in the parking lot of Candlestick Park in its final season as home to the 49ers and its final days as a standing stadium.