The 11 Best Plays to See at Bay Area Theaters This Fall

Be sure to check out our full 2025 Fall Arts Guide to live music, movies, art, theater, festivals and more in the Bay Area.

While the Bay Area’s theater ecosystem faces dire realities, companies this fall are providing an overflow of exceptional offerings. Regional world premieres, highly decorated plays, great experimental pieces and shows with proven track records mean the Bay is pulling out all the stops to lure patrons back to live performance.

Despite Bay Area theater’s challenges, if the momentum of what’s on stage this fall can be sustained, theatergoers are in for an unforgettable year. Here are 11 productions ready to make their presence felt.

‘The Hot Wing King’

New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco
Sept. 19–Oct. 19

The annual “Hot Wang Festival” is the setting for Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-winning exploration of Black masculinity, centered around Cordell Crutchfield and his talent for making incredible wings. His boyfriend Dwayne and the friends that make up “The New Wing Order” offer plenty of laughs and succulent bites as they attempt to claim the culinary crown. Director ShawnJ West is coming off a stellar production of another Pulitzer winner, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, at Palo Alto Players this past June. (NCTC’s most recent production of Ride The Cyclone, a hit with the TikTok crowd, has provided its own momentum for the 25-year-old company that specializes in LGBTQIA+ themed works.)

‘Stereophonic’

Curran Theater, San Francisco
Oct. 28–Nov. 23

What’s tougher than making a landmark album on your first try? Attempting to follow it up with a second one. Stereophonic arrives in the Bay Area as the most Tony-nominated production in history at the 2024 awards. It’s a fantastic show that combines the minutiae of recording an album (with original music from Arcade Fire’s Will Butler) with the devastation and drama that comes with it. The three hours of scintillation centers around a band self-destructing, widely considered to parallel Fleetwood Mac’s recording of the album Rumours in a Sausalito recording studio. A rare collaboration between American Conservatory Theater and BroadwaySF, this show is a must-see for music lovers, and specifically for Bay Area folks. (One of many fun regional homages? A specific shirt from a popular San Leandro sports bar.)

‘Eureka Day’

Marin Theatre, Mill Valley
Aug. 28–Sept. 21

Berkeley-based playwright Jonathan Spector’s Tony-winning play for Best Revival is returning to the Bay Area, where it got its start. Eureka Day centers around a mumps outbreak at the progressive Eureka Day School, forcing the community to reconsider the school’s liberal vaccination policy. There are no easy answers when it comes to collective public health, and the play’s prescience makes for a very sharp satire. The show premiered in 2018 at Aurora Theatre Company, a co-producer of this production. While Aurora recently announced plans to shut down and vacate their theater space in downtown Berkeley, and the bulk of the show’s original cast members will return for this production.

‘A Driving Beat’

Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Mountain View
Oct. 29–Nov. 23

A white mother and her adopted 14-year-old brown son trek across the country with many of their issues unsettled. Produced by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, written by Bay Area playwright Jordan Ramirez Puckett and directed by Jeffrey Lo, the world premiere of this three-hander drops hip-hop beats while exploring identity, family and how deep can love go.

‘The Day the Sky Turned Orange’

Z Space, San Francisco
Sept. 5–Oct. 5

As the year 2020 recedes further with each passing day, perspectives on that fraught time become more focused. Julius Ernesto Rea, Olivia Kuper Harris and David Michael Ott have crafted a new R&B and hip-hop musical that reexamines a tenuous time in the nation, while looking at one of the strangest, most compelling phenomena in Bay Area history – the sky turning completely orange on Sept. 9 due to a combination of wildfire smoke and fog. The co-production between Z Space and San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company is headed by SFBATCO co-founder Rodney Earl Jackson, Jr., who has worked tirelessly to earn SFBATCO’s reputation as a critical developer of new works.

‘Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors’

City Lights Theater Company, San Jose
Sept. 25–Oct. 19

Big laughs are in order at City Lights Theater Company in downtown San Jose, where a pipsqueak English real estate agent meets a new client — also known as the guy who’s just looking for some blood to suck. With real estate deals and vampire hunting alike taking place through the British countryside, expect blood to be served up in the South Bay.

‘Hamlet’

Marin Shakespeare Company, San Rafael
Sept. 5–21

For centuries, the story of the melancholy Danish prince has been a litmus test among serious actors who, in occupying the frenetic mind of Hamlet, speak more lines in a single play than any other Shakespeare character. Oakland Theater Project has built their reputation on being big and bold, daring and dangerous. Coming off a moving and gripping production of the rarely produced Lorraine Hansberry play Les Blancs, the company returns to one of Shakespeare’s most masterful and oft-quoted works. Taking a break from their highly adaptable space at Oakland’s Flax Art & Design building, the group heads north to San Rafael, the site of their scintillating 2024 production of Angels in America.

‘The Hills of California’

Roda Theatre, Berkeley
Oct. 31–Dec. 7

Berkeley Repertory Theatre hosts this story of four sisters’ return to their childhood home on the coast of the Irish Sea in 1976 to say goodbye to their dying mother. In a series of flashbacks, the play transports the audience to 1955, when the stern taskmaster stage mom shaped her four daughters into a singing group in the spirit of the Andrews Sisters. The memories both haunt and inspire, building a compelling and complex storyline over three acts. Loretta Greco, who was Magic Theatre’s artistic director for 12 years, returns to the Bay Area from Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company to direct Jez Butterworth’s insightful drama, which was nominated for seven Tony Awards in 2025.

‘The Motion’

Ashby Stage, Berkeley
Sept. 13–Oct. 12

Renowned Bay Area playwright Christopher Chen had his first reading of The Motion at the 2022 TheatreWorks Silicon Valley New Works Festival. In our modern world, YouTube channels like Jubilee rack up millions of views for its incendiary debates. In The Motion, the moral debate is centered around animal testing, and no one is safe from introspection — not even the audience. Shotgun Players’ founding artistic director Patrick Dooley directs Chen’s play, originally a Manhattan Theatre Club Sloan Commission in 2016.

‘Limp Wrist on the Lever’

Potrero Stage, San Francisco
Sept. 11–Oct. 4

San Francisco’s Crowded Fire doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations, and has spent years building up a reputation as a company that leans into the bold. Preston Choi’s world premiere centers the world of three queer teens inside a conversion camp, facing off against a sadistic counselor. The play asks questions of violence and tolerance, directed by California-based, nationally-known Becca Wolff.

‘Kim’s Convenience’

Toni Rembe Theater, San Francisco
Sept. 18–Oct. 19

Mr. Kim, who runs his own Toronto convenience store with his wife and children, is the focus of Ins Choi’s popular play. As the landscape of the neighborhood begins to shift, the immigrant narrative examines the dynamics between Kim and his Canadian-born children. Kim’s Convenience debuted in 2011 at the Toronto Fringe Festival before a successful series of tours and an off-Broadway run in 2017, while most know of the show through its TV adaptation that ran for five years before ending in 2021. Choi himself will play the title character during this San Francisco run.