Nathan Weinbender

They say you’re supposed to write what you know, and what Jeff and Hunter know best is creative desperation. They’re wannabe playwrights living in New York City, and they’ve got three weeks to produce an original one-act musical for a regional theater competition. After hitting a number of dead ends, they start to wonder if perhaps their struggle to write a play would make for a compelling play. “We could put this exact conversation into the show!” one of them observes. That’s the setup for “[title of show],” a self-referential, fourth wall-shattering comedy that details its own bumpy creation. The musical, currently running at Ella’s Cabaret Club, is very much aware it’s a musical, and its characters are always conscious there’s an audience watching them. They tweak songs already in progress. They make obscure pop culture references and then panic that the references are too obscure. One scene ends with an abrupt blackout because a character feels that it’s been going on too long.

Don’t expect to stand still and stone-faced at a Cowboy Mouth show. The New Orleans rockers, who headline Pig Out in the Park’s Lilac Stage on Sunday, demand attention with their high-energy live shows, which founding member Fred LeBlanc describes as “massive amounts of people feeling massive amounts of joy.”

“The Sunset Limited” is one of two plays written by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, and it opens at Stage Left Theater on Friday. The show centers on two men, a suicidal college professor and a reformed ex-con, at ideological odds with one another.