Forehead of the class: Robert DaPonte plays a drug dealer with a particularly nasty backstory.

PW's Picks For The Week

Carmen, First Person Story Slams, Pounding Nails Into the Floor With My Forehead and Singles Night at the Firing Range.

Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead

You can get a shot of angst with your beer when the Madhouse Theater Company stages Eric Bogosian’s ferocious Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead at the city’s coolest theater venue, Fergie’s Pub. Taking a more-the-merrier approach to Bogosian’s solo play, director Karen DiLossi employs six actors, each performing two of the play’s 12 monologues. For added interest, DiLossi has females voice Nails’ loudest and most obnoxious male characters. Bogosian’s characters are angry at a world that screws them at every turn. Among the most memorable is a man struggling to come to terms with his own penis, and a hobo who describes his bodily secretions in unappetizingly vivid detail. Featuring the vulgar and incendiary language Bogosian is known for, Nails is an obscenity-spiked rant against a nation that grows ever more vapid and narcissistic. (J. Cooper Robb)

Carmen

Singles Night at the Firing Range

Is that a Chinese-model AK-47 with a banana clip in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Ah, Americans. Who else would consider firing deadly weapons a suitable activity for a date? But think about it—what are some the most important building blocks of attraction? A sense of adventure has to be pretty high up there. As does the ability to calmly take down would-be assailants with nicely grouped shots to the torso and pelvis. And besides, what a fun way to judge personality. (Insert your own penis gag featuring the phrases “rubber grip” and “accidental discharge” here.) An NRA-certified firearms instructor will be on hand to give lessons to newbies on “safety, stance, grip, sight alignment, etc.” And then, to quote the breathless blurb, “it’s on to the firing range where you experience the thrill of gunfire!” Plus it’ll make a nice how-I-met-your-mom story to tell the kids someday. (Dan Vidal)

First Person Story Slams

Hold on—stay with me. Please note that this first-person series eschews all the horrors associated with the dread word “reading”: the tedious ruminations on love, the tritely experimental and, most mercifully, the sadism of self-importance. At L’Etage stories aren’t read—they’re improvised. People tell real stories from their lives—the best kind. But what makes the event especially entertaining is that not everyone wins. A panel chosen from the audience judges the storytellers’ lives. Sorry, but the best sexual experience you’ve ever had actually ranks only three out of 10. Some people need to know these things. (Jeremy Butman)