Opening This Week

Private Eyes
Private Eyes bills itself as a "dark comedy about truth, love, and salad dressing." Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont, opens Thurs, runs Thurs-Sat 8 pm, Sun 4 pm, $10

Current Runs

Vamp
Stark Raving's world premiere of Ry Herman's Vamp is funny and smart, with a gentle self-awareness that stays just the right side of too clever. The show is all the more impressive because it could've easily been awful: the plot, about a lonely script-reader who falls in love with a vampire, sounds pretty damn hackneyed. But Vamp succeeds, handling surprisingly heavy issues like abuse and emotional damage with humor and sensitivity—and all within the context of a lesbian-vampire-love-story. AH Coho Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh, 220-COHO, Thurs-Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm, $10-20

The Brain That Wouldn't Die
The Brain That Wouldn't Die follows the mishaps of Dr. Bill Cortner (T. Austin Sabel), a mad scientist-type who is working on techniques to graft body parts from one human onto another. When his girlfriend Jan (Sabra Choi) is decapitated in a car crash, Cortner rescues her head, keeping it alive until he can find a body to reattach it to. He begins cruising strip clubs, looking for the perfect body for his girlfriend's head; when he finds an unsuspecting victim (Gwen Lahti), he lures her back to his cabin to perform the surgery. Only problem is, Jan doesn't want a new body; Jan just wants to die, and maybe to kill Cortner before she goes. In the same vein as Last Rites' successful "Manos" The Hands of Fate, Brain is a spoofy, goofy good time, noteworthy for the gleeful energy with which it reaches out to its audience. AH The Miracle Theatre, 525 SE Stark, 236-7253, Thurs-Sat 8 pm, $10-12

Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Wade McCullum revisits his Drammy-winning role as Hedwig in Triangle Productions' encore run of the wildly popular musical about an East German transvestite who fronts an unsuccessful rock band. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1516 SW Alder, 241-1278, opens Thurs, runs Thurs-Sat 8 pm, $20-38