Place/Settings: Berkeley: 5 - "The Black Mass Sonata" by Daniel Handler, read by Lance Gardner

Directed by Les Waters Read by Charles Shaw Robinson From a perch beyond this life, an actor observes as a group of masked people finally return to the courtyard of Berkeley Rep — to the theatre, the place we made to gather, breathe together, and share the stories that remind us of our humanity.

It's 1959, and tobacco smoke snakes across the bustling café from its prized corner table, where artists and students debate political treatises, muse on philosophy, and share thrilling new poetry.

Read by Steven Anthony Jones and BD Wong On a chilly autumn night, an old fisherman makes his way to the lake in the dark. He casts a line...and reels in the ghost he's been seeking.

Straddling the worlds of her divorced parents, Yasmine doesn't feel fully at home in either. Desperate to see her best friend in San Francisco, she embarks on the voyage across the Bay alone, exhilarated at her newfound independence.

How do you find your people in middle school — especially when you don't quite fit the mold? A girl experiments, assimilates, adapts, and journeys towards genuine self-love and community.

Bored, lost, and lonely, a teenager stumbles into a café. While eating a cup of soup, he hears a wondrously inscrutable sonata, and begins to sense that being lost might not be such a lonesome condition after all.

Sometimes music becomes indelibly linked to specific memories, invoking the people with whom we shared them. Songs by Isaac Hayes, Peter Tosh, Stevie Wonder, the Doors, the Knight Brothers, and Patti LaBelle conjure a deep friendship, one that began on a hot night in 1986 outside Leopold's Records.

Hope, fear, excitement, and a dizzying array of possibilities unspool across an expectant dad’s imagination, as he and his partner navigate medical uncertainties and rediscover each other as almost-parents.

A young oboist kisses a pianist on a street corner. At long last! But the kiss unlocks pressures, expectations, dreams, and fears. Can we learn to live with uncertainty? To ask for what we need?

A neighborhood park — its playground, sloping hillside, and basketball court; its tunnel to a rose garden and many paths — bears witness to a boy, growing up and growing old.