Act 1 DeSales University Theatres graceful production of Lynn Nottages "Intimate Apparel," is painfully honest, heartrending and ultimately still hopeful.

The touching drama is on the Main Stage of the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts in Center Valley through Oct. 8.

Taking place in New York in 1905, 35-year-old Esther, played with endless stoic strength by Maya Marino Cappello, is a black woman who has been working as a seamstress for 18 years. While other women around her marry and leave, Esther sews lingerie for a variety of clients from wealthy white housewives to prostitutes. She saves money in a quilt and dreams of opening a beauty parlor where black women would be treated like ladies.

Hilarious performances make Cedar Crest Colleges Department of Performing Arts "Ruthless! The Musical" a riotously uproarious evening of theater.

The darkly funny musical, on the stage of Samuels Theater, 100 College Drive, Allentown, through Oct. 1, is a spot-on parody of show business Broadway musicals, such as "Gypsy" and "Mame." There are plenty of shout-outs to other musicals from "A Chorus Line" style line-up to a joke about dancing gang members from "West Side Story."

An original comedy that is humorously quirky with unexpected twists, is being presented by Crowded Kitchen Players at Between the Lines Studio Theatre in Allentown through Oct. 1.

"The Spectre of Death" follows an aging and over-the-hill heavy metal band as they prepare for what they hope will be a comeback concert.

Playwright and composer Charlie Barnett was inspired by real life shock metal band GWAR which was known for their elaborate and grotesque costumes and which had mainstream success in the 1990s. In the show, the band also wears costumes and masks when they perform.

"The Laramie Project" approaches a horrific hate crime by examining the many people who lived in the very ordinary town in which it happened. At Civics Theatre514, this at times excruciatingly painful, at times surprisingly funny play, is always profoundly moving under the deft direction of Williams Sanders and Rae Labadie. "The Laramie Project" is at Civics Theatre 514, 514 N. 19th St., Allentown through through Sept. 24.

The play centers around the brutal 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was robbed, beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming.