It must have been coming on six o’clock, after a short Green Line ride from Comm. Ave. I alighted at the corner of our Public Garden still beautiful with greenery, water, flowers and people strolling about. Perhaps more gorgeous as the fall season was about to glow with last colors then drop to ground.

It looked especially significant to me because I was heading for Park Street to catch the Red Line home to Cambridge with thoughts to chew on, thoughts of a play I’d just seen at Boston University’s Boston Playwrights’ Theater that was also full of both hope and angst, just like the towering elms, rooted deep, but heading towards winter — would they make it to another spring?

“Eat Your Young,” a Boston University New Play Initiative production, and a new play by J.C, Pankratz, directed by Shamus and produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Theatre had punched a two-and-a-half-hour hole in my beautiful afternoon, when I could have been profitably tree gazing, people watching. But then, I wouldn’t have had Pankratz’s people to watch, a kaleidoscope of human sides, above and below the waterline, zestfully directed by Shamus, acted by an ensemble dedicated to its vital thesis — unafraid of getting their costumes dirty, ripped — just a step ahead of being eaten.

I feel like most of us sharing an ‘end times’ feeling too often these days, as we see around us a world seemingly bent on greedily devouring itself. And so, a play with the above title seemed as though it might be echoing that hungry mood with a suggestion we might before have looked at askance — and now just pass the salt.

The four youngsters in question have certainly been tenderized and flavored with all the sorry colors of careless upbringings, needs ignored. After all, who has time as we tip towards Armageddon?

‘Luckily’ for them — lost souls with barely a taste of maturity — a last-ditch effort to make them presentable to society has landed these mostly urbanite young in a sylvan retreat with hard-bitten counselors who’ve been themselves counseled at “New Frontiers and have drunk the poison down to its last sorry drops.

A spectacularly superficial training has penetrated, acidly, to the core of both the male and the female counselor who must think themselves the ‘Adam and Eve’ of a new generation tasked with screwing on the heads of their recalcitrant children — but tight.

I met the mother of ‘counselor’ Ross Beschler, at intermission and commiserated with her on her misled child. Ross’ ‘counselor ’is full to the brim with new age mandates, every one of which he’s inhaled himself, and is ‘barking’ mad.

The ‘black’ comedy — not so funny when you think about it — is concretized in the person of Ross’ ‘counselor’ actually barking as he zips in and out of the dark forest of New Frontiers, less human, more frightening each time he appears. HIs Eve’s hysteria is more contained but just as sharp in the tooth.

What’s rare and precious in “Eat Your Children,” to this reviewer, is the poignancy which the pathologies of both the institution and institutionalized are here presented.

The ‘blackness’ of this comedy has many shades to ponder, and the cast is up to those nuances to a man – and women. We cringe as the deep suffering of the different characters change from textbook pictures of maladies of the mind to human bodies, juddering and jiving from the exactions of these maladies on flesh and bone.

The earth seems to shake under our detached, onlooking theater seats, as it does tectonically, from time to time on stage, spewing up from volcanic depths minds willfully blind to other younger more vulnerable minds trapped and seeking release from social and familial violence to their unique need.

Not black and white, both sides in darkness. The question posed is: “Who will help the helpers? “Eat Your Young is such an original and visceral drama for now that we might forget the ancient Greek tragedies pointing the way before.

Closer to our own time is Macbeth’s wife, driven to murder by a lust for status, mired in pangs of guilt so sharp she wonders “Is this a dagger that I see before me?”

How about “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when ‘Big Nurse’ — nuttier by far than her wards — must be overthrown by a resourceful conspiracy to survive, perhaps to flourish outside a ‘nest’ that nurtures them to death.

Or the looming giant imagined by Goya sitting above the human strife of war eating human bodies in an age of gluttony, of blood lust.

So much we’re tempted to look away from appears again in many forms, offering yet another chance to look on, perhaps reach out.

“Eat Your Young” is yet another opportunity to scrutinize our diet, perhaps to halt mid-bite. To laugh, to think, to act.

The only opportunity I wished for was to thank the actors who played the four young counseled youth: Abacus Dean-Polacheck, Charlotte Stowe, Maez Gordon and Sunny Feldman. And to ask them how they kept their acting fires so hot, and so nuanced, for so long. To enable the audience to feel their unity as troubled young as well as the isolation of their different personalities and problematic upbringings.

Then, to scold Ross Beschler and his understudy sidekick Madeleine Bedenko for being the counselors with the leastest — to the dregs. And yet, as desperate as their wards for escape.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre was closing a very short run here in Boston, only four performances at the Boch Center Wang Theater from April 28-May 1 when my wife Madeleine and I sat together on aisle seats, row L for the Sunday matinee.

It was a gorgeously warm and sunny spring day as we walked down Tremont Street from the Park Street Red Line stop, savoring views of Boston Common budding into a feast of green as troops of students were passing us by in gossamer spring dresses with gossamer youth gaiety.

It was no sacrifice at all to enter the indoor spaces of a theater since we’d already had a very pleasant walk and Alvin Ailey Dance is always a rare, complex pleasure.

They always have so many layered artistic impressions that they always make it seem, to this writer, as though he’d have to have a suite of hands all typing at once to articulate his thoughts.

Fortunately, my unconscious came to my aid as I pillowed down to awaken with two organizing rubrics in my sleepy head: One was an old song title: “Doing the Herky Jerky.” And the other, the title of a rather gruesome children’s game: “We All Fall Down Dead.”

What put the first title in my head was a style of dance, at once gracious and staccato, the feet of the dancers taking small precise steps, then retracting their feet from those footprints as though the boards of the stage were as hot as the stage lights. As the song goes: “You put your left foot in; you take your left foot out. Doing the Herky Jerky is what it’s all about…”

Make no mistake, though, that these dancers looked anything like me and my friends as we danced the steps of the song: on stage, their agility, their cat-like quickness left “jerkiness” far behind; their feet just seem to vanish with the merest hint of a jerk.

It was mesmerizing. Sitting us up straight as we looked for the transition which, against physics, swallowed up the intervening time between multiple steps.

Then we looked for hints of motion in the hips, the chest, the angle of the head, and again found the only barest hints that prodded us to wonder how, besides endless practice, their bodies could so move as quickly as their dancer’s wills.

Then the “how?” turned to the even more intriguing question: “Why?”

Fortunately, a speaking style, of dance, of rhetoric of anything, speaks through multiple parts.

The next part of the esthetic of Alvin Ailey Dancers moved from the feet to whole limbs which often jittered from finger-tips to shoulders, from toes to head as if experiencing panic or ecstasy so complete it ran along the outsides of their bodies, only to return inside to its source: the outside was the sauce; the inside the spring, so to speak.

What capped off this speaking style for me was a common trope of returning to the floor of the stage as if drawing strength from the ‘earth’ of the boards.

Dancers who could stay aloft for moments, bird-like, often completed a connected series of flight moves unaccountably on their backs or sides in a position that for moments looked so very helpless that their next move — springing to their feet seemingly without the aid of arms or legs — looked like a miracle.

I credit this extraordinary style of dance, so eloquent of the Black experience in America of survival by cat-like quickness, hard physical work, and, above all — no pun intended — rebounding with re-doubled energy from each time their life-force is kicked to the floor below, to the artistry of choreographer Robert Battle, who was groomed for and inherited this mantle from Alvin Ailey himself.

Mr. Battle is a choreographer for this new century non-plus ultra. We await his coming to Boston with his dance troupe again.

(The next Celebrity Series of Boston presentations is “Let’s Dance Boston!” from May 11 through 15 on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. For details on this event, upcoming performances and the recently-announced 2022/23 schedule and ticket packages, visit celebrityseries.org.)

With characters that seem to echo every facet of Shakespeare’s era — boisterous, sensual, quicksilver passionate, vengeful, generous, jealous, the Lyric Stage Company’s presentation of Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will” is hilariously enjoyable. It’s impossible not to join in, tentatively, at first, even wonderingly — asking yourself, “who are these people” — then you grasp that they are not only “The Kings Men,” a company of outstandingly dedicated actors but their own men, never really off stage, and never more onstage than when they are playing, often along with Shakespeare himself, the bard’s own realistic fantasies.

A handful plus of “The Kings Men” and their women are most often gathered around a wooden trestle table. With the Globe Theatre in the background, they lean in with their elbows on the table top — except when lifting them to quaff from a full tankard — which is often.

Their situation, though liberally moistened with ale, is fraught. They are, though still experts in their craft, growing older, their voices are flagging and worse their memories crumbling at the edges. Worse yet, there seem to be no actors with the ‘chops’ or even the ethics to take their place. Several would-be actors circle around “The King’s Men” with such lack of skill, such carelessness with the Bard’s words, that these oldsters get up and berate them with no visible effect.

The younger generation, having entered another era, doesn’t “get it”. They think: ‘why not entertain people with physical antics and just some rough semblance of Shakespeare’s words with contemporary slang thrown around to fill the gaps in their study? What’s the harm? What’s the fuss?’

What, indeed is the fuss? The fact is that even the King’s Men, wilting with age, but passionate about exact adherence to their now departed friend and fellow actor’s words, need some stimulation themselves to remember exactly what he said.

And Will, deader than dead, is no longer around to gently remind them! Or better yet, just write another play!

Occasionally, but never on schedule, Will seems to again appear among his living friends, when one of them, by chance, happens to string together half a phrase, or even one of Will’s neologisms which are enough to catch the ear of one of their fellows who stand, often overturning a full mug, to completes Will’s phrase word for word until the flourishing, Shakespearean end. Everyone present applauds. And then the applause dies away to uneasy silence. What next?

Printing is in its infancy, publishing rights and copyrights are only ever honored between friends and then only when the business of profit doesn’t get firmly between friends.

So, what but love, need, and finally, will, would ever get these impecunious actors to ever expend their flagging energies, skint purses, to pursuing the hare-brained idea of, first, connecting all their individual parts together in complete dramas and then, to compile the plays into that modern novelty, popular only amongst the few literate elite? A book!

Thanks to playwright Lauren Gunderson’s ingenious invention, implausible, not to say distasteful, characters appear with entirely plausible motives for helping not only Shakespeare’s actor friends but, richly, themselves into the ‘gold’ and fame of this rare bargain.

Thanks to the split-second timing and fertile pauses of Courtney O’Connor’s direction we in the audience enjoy these implausibilities as though they don’t happen only on stage but even, though rarely, in a benevolent history rising, nobly, comically, to the occasion.

A must mention is the genius of Shakespeare’s actor-friends, who blend their thespian skills together so seamlessly the Lyric’s stage set, costumes, music, even the audience around us are all absorbed into one of the bard’s dreams, those alternate realities in which we fans would choose to dwell forever, and sometimes do — even after the curtain falls.

Last, but not least, a shout-out for the women of this cast who not only encourage and help the men to stay on point in a nearly impossible off-stage project, but cheer for the women who appear on-stage in Shakespeare’s plays — although these women are all played, of course, by their men!

Thank goodness for contemporary productions of Shakespeare like “The Book of Will” where women are tolerated — even featured! What next?

(Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will” continues through March 27 at Lyric Stage Company of Boston, 140 Clarendon St., Boston, Massachusetts. For tickets and more information, visit lyricstage.com.)

We had plenty of time as we slow-walked to the Boston Lyric Opera’s new venue, on the waterfront this time, at the Leader Bank’s Pavilion (for two performances on October 1 and 3 as part of its “Street Stage” performance at outside venues), a huge tent just a couple minutes’ walk from the Silver Line’s “Silver Way” stop — third from South Station. Grey skies and seagulls…

Who knew that not only would the venue be so accessible, but also the theme of Mascagni’s late 19th century opera, “Cavalleria Rusticana,” set in a Sicilian Village, on Easter Sunday — morning to be exact — so resonate with our own times — at least to this auditor.

At the opera’s opening, Turiddu, sung by Adam Diegal, has just returned from military service, a return which already sounds both familiar and ominous.

Turiddu is singing, lyrically, of his ardent love for Lola, which love sounds to the uninformed ear, sweet and portending only happiness. Until we learn that Lola, tiring of her engagement to Turiddu, while he serves his time, has married the village carter, Alfio.

So now, Turiddu is singing to the fact that he has not only seduced a country girl, Santuzza, in revenge for Lola’s desertion, but also has taken up again with his original love, Lola, despite the fact that she is now married, church married, to a simple carter — think a UPS guy: hard-working, known and liked by all his customers.

Turiddu’s voice, sung by Adam Diegal, is gorgeous, full-throated, hearty and masculine — to say nothing of testosterone-fueled, head-strong and deeply naive.

Besides all these advantages, is the class issue that Turiddu’s mother, Mama Lucia, pilots the village winery, second only to the church as a place to gather and celebrate; whereas Turiddu’s now rival, Alfio, has only a horse and cart, plus day after day of braving the cold and rain of a Sicilian winter as well as the torrid heat of summer and the determination all that fosters to back his exclusive claim to his wife Lola.

Santuzza, as a woman scorned, used by Turiddu as a mere dart to prick his straying love Lola’s pride, has a voice, sung by Michelle Johnson, both full-throated and honeyed, but with a sting — a beautiful, not-to-be-denied sting.

You might wonder, dear audience, who are these country hicks to play so blissfully, so ignorantly fast and loose with human love and loyalty, that even the powerful Mama Lucia is as unable to pick up the very many body pieces scattered over her village, as say an Afghani or Iraqui medic after a car bomb, or ourselves after a violent protest.

Every key and minor piece of this finely tuned and beautifully resurrected opera is so exquisite as to turn one’s mind away from the bold, blunt, totally un-beautiful headlines which harry us every day of our woeful era.

And yet, and yet, Mascagni’s opera is so stunningly prescient simply by dealing with the hearts and minds, in full song, which still walk today in an unnamed Sicilian village and — here?

Bravo!  Boston Lyric Opera, again.

(Current plans are for the Boston Lyric Opera to return in Winter 2022 with an online streaming performance of “Svadba” featuring music by Ana Sokolović and an in—house performance of “Champion: An Opera in Jazz” on May 18, 20 and 22 at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston. For more information, visit blo.org.)