No, I'm serious, I need your help, Main Street. I just made the move crosstown from the comparatively claustrophobic West End to First and Main, so I'm a stranger in a strange land right now. Let's have the goods then, why are we the hippest neighbourhood in VanCity? What is it about our lifestyle choices and world view that sets us apart? I'm looking for a little braggadocio here, neighbours. There's only a couple of things that I already know about, like the Temple and where to get a stiff morning Americano, outside of that I'm a Main St. virgin. Can anybody help me out? Where's the best late night watering hole? Take-out pizza? Video store? Pho? Best hangover eggs? And do we have to call ourselves "Soma"? Give up your secrets Mt. Pleasant!

All right, all right, you can stop the letter-writing campaign, I'm back On the Boards. I had to take a couple of weeks off to put my money where my big mouth is and throw up a play, many thanks to Meg for filling in the planks for me while I was locked in a little room telling actors what to do. You're a rock star, girl. And my gratitude to everyone who came to Riffs, we had a sold-out run, thank you very much, despite Vancouver snowing on my parade. One more play in the bank for us, what do the rest of you have going on? Let's have a look-see...uh-oh.

From the look of this promo shot and the sound of the press release, Avaler la Mer et les Poissons could be one big, melancholy sigh of a play. Théâtre la Seizième (Vancouver's all French-language, all kick-dérriere theatre company in case you didn't know) presents this "delicately feminine" work about the dynamics of the friendship between two women and their "appetite for life and their need to embrace all it offers"; thus the title, a French proverb meaning "swallow the sea and its fishes". Shouldn't it be "fish"? Either way, it's gotta be dark and sexy, it's in French.

Meta.for Theatre has made a hell of a bold choice by tackling Martin Sherman's brilliant and bleak Bent through the Remembrance Day weekend. A battering ram of a script that illuminates the sickening treatment of homosexuals by the nazis during WWII, it rocked its 1979 audiences upon its premiere with raw depictions of violence, torture, and gay love (not to mention gay sex). Its first run in Vancouver (back in 1981) lasted four months. The conciousness-inducing agenda of the work is clear, yet it has never suffered marginalization as a "queer play", residing instead squarely in the canon of important contemporary message-theatre from the get-go. Kudos are due to Meta.for for giving Vancouver another chance to experience such a seminal work.

John Patrick Shanley's body of work is ridiculously popular in actor training because he writes with alarming insight about the complicated nature of how we humans relate to one another, and how messy it almost always is. Every scene in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is an acting class staple, because our messiness is revealed to us through two characters whose social simplicity reveals massive confusion, something we can certainly all relate to. The plot is simply this: two angry, messed-up people meet in a bar, see the possibility of an end to their loneliness in one another, and take it to the bedroom. It demands connectivity with your partner, which is why everybody ends up doing it in class. Features James Bell and Jodie Dowdall (above), whom I've worked with before and thus can assure you that she is awesome.

Wajdi Mouawad. I know it's a tough one, but remember that name. I hereby declare him to be the next Really Important North American playwright. His stunning play Scorched was recently awarded Toronto's Dora award for best play, which my company couldn't get the rights to produce, and we want to, really, really badly. The Western Canadian premier of Tideline, another play by the Lebanese-Quebecois Mouawad hits the Roundhouse tonight. This is most definitely a do-not-miss production if, you know, you like watching great art.

Borderlines at the Playwrights Theatre Centre. From the press release, I'm not too sure what to write about this one, but it sounds kinda interesting. It appears to be a one-man show about...growing up...Latino? Maybe? Or about Latino family life? Or about the history of Latino-Canadians? Well, here, what do you think?

If you're in the mood for some intense theatre this week, Martin Sherman's Bent returns to Vancouver in its first professional run in 26 years. The last time it was here it broke attendance records in a four-month holdover run. Harsh and relentless, Bent deals with the treatment of gays by the Nazis in WWII, from the hedonistic underground of Berlin in the '30s to the nightmarish compound of the Dachau concentration camp. Like I said, intense.

Canadian-content alert! And another play about war! Soldier's Heart is a historical play set in post-WWI Newfoundland that deals with the struggles of a soldier to reconnect with his father despite a "horrible secret" (horrible secret alert!) that he carries with him from his time on the battlefields of France.

Goat-sexytime alert! Edward Albee's much-alerted about play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia has finally gotten a staging here in Vancouver five years after its debut. Considering that Albee could very well be America's greatest living playwright I'd say it's about time. The play is about the fallout that occurs in the household of a successful architect when his family discovers that he's been having an extra-marital affair with...a goat. No, really. A goat goat.