With a promise of puppets, dancing, political subversion and free bread, Bread & Puppet Theater’s fourth annual installment of their Boston residency attracted a crowd Friday, the second night of the “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” performance. Audience members braved the cold to come out to The Cyclorama building, part of the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, which proves to be a perfect venue for the visually arresting style of this Glover, VT based theater troupe. “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” packs a punch into an hour-and-a-half long piece, charged with director Peter Schumann’s stark anti-war message and his anti-elitist, community approach to creating art. It leaves one with an equal amount of despair and inspiration.

BOSTON/South End - This week, for the fourth winter in a row at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, the Glover, VT based Bread and Puppet Theater troupe present their subversively entertaining brand of politics and punditry.

Members of the year round Bread and Puppet collective again will be joined this week by scores of local actors and performers (a mix of pros and mostly amateurs who have been rehearsing all week at the BCA) who responded to the annual call for volunteers.

Cambridge, MA - Fresh from her triumph at the New York International Fringe Festival where she won the award for Outstanding Solo Show (what would that be, a Fringe D’Or?) and extended by popular demand, Gioia (Joya) De Cari’s new autobiographical play "Truth Values, One Girl's Romp Through M.I.T.'s Male Math Maze" continues through Sunday, September 27th at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

I was surprised to find myself at “Defending the Caveman,” – a long-running one-man comedy show written by Rob Becker that brags about looking at relationships between the genders “without taking sides.” Starring Michael Van Osch, who has been doing this since 2004, it is playing at the Wilbur Theatre through March 15. Based, as my companion put it, on “the humor of recognition,” this performance piece claims to be “the longest running solo play in Broadway history,” and has been translated into 16 languages and performed around the world by a variety of comics.

BOSTON/South End - Peter Schumann wants to ferment your brain. He’ll provide the vat filled with sourdough bread, garlic, and the crucial ingredients for political transmogrification, including subversion, corruption, and lots of symbolism. When he’s done with your grey matter, he says he’ll give it back.

Hopefully, if there's any justice left in the world, in May of this year while Reverend Jerry Falwell was waiting in Purgatory to hear whether or not he was going to heaven or hell, the entertainment wasn't anything as good as the new show by musician and playwright Deborah Henson-Conant.