One of the things I love, and there are many, about our South Sound theater community is that it's big enough to allow a broad spectrum of material. Some, obviously, I like more than the rest, but that diversity means I don't have to watch Grease or Annie every year (just every other). Same goes for Grease or Thornton Wilder's 1938 classic, Our Town. Don't get me wrong, that's a great script, but from 76 years ago. Is it really still our town? Is that how we live now? Does it play as a deep rumination on modern life, or as nostalgia for a time before most of us were born? The answer depends on individual productions, though all face an uphill climb.

Then there's Will Eno, a playwright (and Pulitzer finalist) born in 1965, and cocky enough to write his own, 21st-century take on Our Town. The resulting script, Middletown, is less than four years old, so it truly is about the meaning of life in our time. Its ad copy emphasizes the arc of life from birth to death, and that's a fair summation of the play. An anti-Seinfeld, it's a show about everything. It's loaded with jokes, but none are delivered as jokes. We laugh a few seconds later, having solved a mental puzzle.

Read Christian Carvajal's full review of Middletown in the Music & Culture section.

MIDDLETOWN, 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Sept. 13, Harlequin Productions, 202 4th Ave. E., Olympia, $20-$31, 360.786.0151