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.

Oars up! Oars out! We're going adventuring.

The first thrill of our adventure is the sheer delight of seeing 10 women on stage – 10! – in the American Conservatory Theater production of Men on Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus now at The Strand Theater. How often do we get to see that many marvelous women on a stage together? Hardly ever.

Playwright Lucas Hnath imagines what happened to Nora after she stepped through that door in the audaciously titled A Doll's House, Part 2, which opens the Berkeley Repertory Theatre season in a razor-sharp, vital and funny production directed by Les Waters.

There's something so comforting and so terrifying about family. That dichotomy is captured perfectly in Stephen Karam's The Humans, the Tony Award-winning drama that is now touring the country. The superb production is at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season.

It's a rare enough occurrence these days for a play to go on tour, but to have one this entertaining and unsettling is even more reason for celebration (side note: there are almost four times as many producers listed as actors). Karam's play does something extraordinary by trying to be ultra-ordinary.