He’s a bisexual who likes Kierkegaard, Mahler, Joan Didion and writing personal ads. She’s a freelance writer who keeps answering the ads he writes, even though he drives her nutty. Together, they’re Beyond Therapy. Gerry Gerringer directs the Christopher Durang comedy, on stage at Actors’ Theatre through March 21.

The show explores relationships between lovers, friends and therapists. In the spirit of the therapist’s couch, Gerringer was kind enough to answer a few questions for Weekend Santa Cruz….

It was a collection of empty whiskey bottles that led to the creation of the physical theater piece You Don’t Know Jack, appearing at The 418 Project. No, not because members of The Carpetbag Brigade were drinking while putting together this fractured fairy tale combining “Jack in the Beanstalk” with an alcoholic ghost, post-traumatic stress disorder and a dysfunctional family.

During an improv exercise, five Carpetbag Brigaders went out in the New Mexico sun looking for objects that inspire. The year was 2007 and the Bay Area group was doing a retreat with Wise Fool, a New Mexico arts organization with roots in puppetry. When all five members came back with empty whiskey bottles, inspiration struck Carpetbag Brigade founder and artistic director Jay Ruby….
(Photo by Jesse Olsen)

Robert Frost once said that “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Students from Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School will be bringing their thoughts to life with emotion the first week in March, when they perform as part of Willing Suspension Armchair Theatre.

The students have been working on the show with poet Gary Young, who was recently named the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Young teaches at UC Santa Cruz. In 2009, he received the Shelley Memorial Award. Though busy teaching, writing and running Greenhouse Review Press, Young agreed to answer five questions for Weekend Santa Cruz….

How strange the change from major to minor. It casts dark shadows on brightly colored tunes. Passions rise. Hearts yearn. “Some songs just get incredibly beautiful,” said Rhan Wilson, the brain behind the first-ever An Altared Valentine’s, February 14 at Kuumbwa.

Wilson, creator of Altared Christmas, brings his gift of reinterpretation to odes of love, transforming them into new works with the change of a key. “When we put it against this darker, passionate music, sometimes it increases the beauty and sometimes it brings out the lyrics and gets kind of funny…”

Just outside Bookshop Santa Cruz, the man in the bowler sits frozen in time and space, his hands stilled as he plays a saw. Marghe McMahon’s 1978 sculpture of local legend Tom Scribner is a landmark of Pacific Avenue. It’s also the inspiration for Richard Bennett’s “The Saw Player,” one of the 10-minute plays being performed as part of Actors’ Theatre’s 8 Tens @ Eight through February 14.

The play takes the form of an imagined conversation between a sculptress, Lee played by Anna Hinde, and her subject, Sam played by Rick Kuhn. The two connect through the process of creating an artwork.

In troubled times, artists have always stepped up to the philanthropic plate. Live Aid, Farm Aid, “We Are the World.” Maybe it’s because the arts bring hope, and those who have hope care enough to spread it around. Which brings us to the First Friday Art Tour on February 5, the scene of two very different charity efforts in Santa Cruz — one to help Haitian earthquake victims and one to help bring arts to local schools…

Songlike. That’s what the word “ariose” means. An apt name for Santa Cruz’s Ariose Singers, whose voices will be raised this weekend in music both ancient and modern. The 18-member group performs their winter a capella concert, An Evening of Snow, January 23 and 24 at Aptos’ Resurrection Church. The concert will include pieces by Samuel Barber, J.S. Bach, Francis Poulenc, Juan del Encina and Juan Vásquez….

Every month, Willing Suspension Armchair Theater celebrates the written word by turning it into spoken word. Without sets, costumes or stage directions, the group performs readers’ theater, bringing audiences themed selections from literature.

This month, director Karen Schamberg presents An Evening of Claireity: Works by Claire Braz-Valentine. The evening celebrates the prose, poetry and plays of the internationally-produced writer, who lived in Santa Cruz until 2001. The show previews January 19 at Capitola Book Cafe before moving to Actors’ Theatre for two nights….

A photographer whose portraits of Klu Klux Klan members haunt. A set designer whose work adds character to musicals and plays. A book printer who combines old-fashioned letterpress techniques with digital tools. A woman who works in words and wax.

There are five words that link Terri Garland, William “Skip” Epperson, Felicia Rice and Daniella Woolf to one another: Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship artists. Selected works by the 2008-09 fellows are on display through March 14 at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) at The McPherson Center in downtown Santa Cruz….

(At left, William “Skip” Epperson is among the artists exhibited. Photo by r.r. jones.)

The altered sound of a wine glass inspired Sayaka Yabuki’s latest piece, “Water and Wine.” The composition, which combines a chamber ensemble with live looping, has its world premiere January 15 as part of New Music Works’ first Night of the Emerging Composers at UC Santa Cruz’s Music Center Recital Hall. Also on the program are the world premieres of Remy Le Boeuf’s “The Third Elegy” and Stan Poplin’s “Detour,” along with Noah Meites’ “Bioskop.”

The four movements of “Water and Wine” take the listener on a 15-minute journey through liquid sound — from the frozen essence of Movement I to the boiling turbulence of the last movement — using violin, theremin, musical glasses, vibraphone, double bass, trumpet, percussion and looping….