Best Evening of Comedy

First came Patty Dobrowolski and Nancy Cranbourne in Mrs. Schwartz and Dober, a series of overlapping improvised monologues about the actresses’ lives, including Cranbourne’s bitter-comic re-enactment of her mother’s increasing dementia and her own incomprehension. Then there was the truly mind-boggling Ed: The World Made Dress, written and performed by Michelle Spenser Ellsworth. The dress is a movable, functional, nonfunctional piece of sculpture worn by Spencer — even though it must weigh a ton. It contains everything that matters to her, she says, including a paintball gun and a spice rack, and it can be transformed into a confessional booth, a movie screen, a uterus — whatever Ellsworth can conceptualize and the audience imagine. This theater piece is significant, quirky, open to endless interpretation, and purely brilliant.