Onstage spotlight: 'Anna Bella Eema'

Opening: Lisa D'Amour is one of the nation's "it" playwrights -- the Obie winner is one of the recipients of this year's Steinberg Award, which carries a $50,000 cash prize, even as her play, "Detroit," is getting ready to open on Broadway. Before her building acclaim, D'Amour was a resident of the Twin Cities and an active member of the Playwrights' Center, writing for such companies as Ten Thousand Things and Children's Theatre. D'Amour is known for exploring quirky characters, which is exactly what she does in "Anna Bella Eema." The play is about a 10-year-old girl who turns to her imagination to help her through a crisis. Her mother's trailer, on the margins of a town, is in the way of an intended highway. Maren Ward depicts the mother and Jaime Kleiman plays the girl in this production directed by Genevieve Bennett. --ROHAN PRESTON

Monday: Christopher Walker, a celebrated modern dancer and choreographer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, is one of the headliners of a music and dance event celebrating the Caribbean nation. Walker, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be joined by inventive musician Douglas Ewart and Macalester College professor and novelist Marlon James ("The Book of Night Women") in an event whose soundtrack includes reggae, calypso and mento. --ROHAN PRESTON

Opening: 20% Theatre opens its season with this play about a transgender woman who wants to fly a rocket into space. "Betty" gets together with a single father and a lonely surgeon and the three of them explore friendship. It is a new work, built on poetic realism and fantasy, by Lisa Meyers, a playwright who has enrolled in the University of Iowa's MFA program. Claire Avitabile and Nicole Wilder direct the production, which features Melanie Wehrmacher, Joe Swanson and Shannon Troy Jones. --GRAYDON ROYCE