Dame Edna may be unfamiliar to many people in the Buffalo entertainment market, but her visit to Shea’s is an historic event. Created by performer Barry Humphries in the 1950s, Dame Edna began as an Australian housewife who annihilated right-wing causes by supporting them. Over the years, she has grown in size and ambition, becoming a Dame and an international superstar in her own right. Indeed, the character is now more famous than her creator. Critic John Lahr, himself the son of great comic performer Bert Lahr, has described Barry Humphries as the greatest living clown in the world. In his biography of Humphries, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation: Backstage With Barry Humphries, Lahr describes Humphries’ unique talent and his extraordinary career, in which his character took on a life of her own, as if she were a real person. In interviews, Humphries is either himself or Edna, but will never break character, admitting to being one while embodying the other. To see Barry Humphries in person, in Buffalo, is a rare privilege, and perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity.

In Ghosts, Studio Arena Theatre has elected to take on one of the greatest and most important plays in all of dramatic literature. By the time the first lines are spoken, the dice have already been cast for tragedy to explode in Henrik Ibsen’s play. As the play begins, Mrs. Alving is commemorating the tenth anniversary of her husband’s death by building an orphanage in his memory. The late Captain Alving, it would seem, was a great man and a pillar of the community. But nothing in this play is what it seems to be on its surface. Quickly, the ghosts of Mrs. Alving’s past return to haunt her present, and the cloth of social respectability that she has spent a lifetime weaving begins to unravel. What begins as a story of duty, social propriety, and loyalty, quickly evolves into a tale of deceit, infidelity, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia. To its original 1881 audience, the play was shocking—like opening up a public sewer, one critic famously wrote.

In her one-woman show, Squeeze Box, playwright/actress Ann Randolph takes her audience on a wild ride through the world of a women’s homeless shelter and a runaway romance with an accordion player. She plays all of the characters through the twists and turns of her story, based on her own experiences working at a women’s shelter in California, and ends with a life-affirming epiphany.