THEATER REVIEW: "Watership Down" ★★★ Through June 19 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; Tickets: $32-$35 at 773-761-4477 or www.lifelinetheatre.com

Staging Richard Adams' wonderful 1972 novel “Watership Down” requires actors to play rabbits. Mercifully, though, the intense new dramatic adaptation at the Lifeline Theatre well understands that these creatures in the story have nothing in common with the Easter Bunny. Ears and fluff have no place in a rabbit world born of a trickster's spirit and built at the cost of lapine blood.

That earthy, robust quality — coupled with a trio of gripping, passionate, richly realized performances from Paul S. Holmquist as Hazel, Christopher M. Walsh as Bigwig and, especially, Scott T. Barsotti as the clairvoyant Fiver — are what ensures that Katie McLean Hainsworth's modestly staged production will greatly please fans of what is surely one of the great fantasy novels of the 20th century. At various points in its complex narrative about a diverse group of rabbits who flee their ill-fated burrow, embark on a perilous, mutually supportive journey, and strive to create a utopian community of their own, “Watership Down” conveys a variety of different messages.

There's a deep-seated ecological message (rabbits who forget their responsibilities and fight the natural order of things don't do so well), as well as warnings about the dangers of warrens run by the Owsla, a kind of rabbit secret police, and warrens that are tended (and set with snares) by humans — and where the well-fed rabbits grow fat and lazy and become hopelessly philosophical about the terrible price they must pay for all that lettuce.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Arnie the Doughnut" ★★★ Through May 15 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; Running time: 1 hour; Tickets: $12 at 773-761-4477 or www.lifelinetheatre.com

After encountering some cuddly chicken or perky pig at a kids show, I'm familiar with getting an uneasy feeling at that night's dinner table. It goes with the job. But I never thought I'd be beset by moral qualms at Dunkin' Donuts.

And yet there I was this morning, staring down in my paper bag and pondering the souls of the delectable, fat-and-sugar creations therein. One of them, I thought, could be Arnie.

Arnie, or, to give him his full due, Arnie the Doughnut, is the hero of the charming little show of the same name at the Lifeline Theatre. This is a full-on, dead-serious musical for the kindergarten set (give or take a couple of years), replete with a singing jelly doughnut, a French cruller chanteuse and, of course, the overachieving man himself, bedecked in chocolate and sprinkles but suffused with angst.

New theater reviews in the Tribune this week:

Kerry Reid gives ★★★ to "The Moonstone" (Through March 27 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes; Tickets: $32-$35 at 773-761-4477 or lifelinetheatre.com).

"This isn’t a thrill-a-minute ride," she writes, "but a cozy immersion in the tropes that would later dominate the world of mystery writers: strange visitors, double-dealing relatives, and eccentric detectives." Read the full review here.

Nina Metz likewise gives ★★★ to "Trouble in Mind" (Through March 20 by The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark St.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $28 at 866-811-4111 or theartistichome.org).

The 1955 backstage drama by the groundbreaking black playwright Alice Childress shows "she was nothing if not incisive about the way stereotypes can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," writes Metz. "She also had a heck of a sense of humor. ... The play is also hilariously savage in its portrayal of theater artists as prima donas. They arrive to work on an anti-lynching play — a mixed-race cast led by a white director — and as they dig in, a veteran actress named Wiletta (played with real wit and verve by Velma Austin) begins to question the veracity of her character’s choices. She’s been down this road before and she’s reached her breaking point. “All I did was holler, ‘Lawd have mercy!’ for two hours.” Read the full review here.

THEATER REVIEW: "Wuthering Heights" ★★ Through Oct. 31 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes; Tickets: $32-35 at 773-761-4477 or www.lifelinetheatre.com

When you see Cathy Earnshaw — Emily Bronte's Yorkshire lass in heat — traipse across the moors to press her fevered brow at her lover's windowpane, you have to brace for the screeching sound of Kate Bush in your head.

“Heathcliff, it's me, Cathy,” you hear in your skull, as one of the more egregious rhymes of the late 1970s comes flooding back. “I'm so cold, let me in, in at your window.”

Well, fans of the Bronte brand of gothic romance find the stuttering Bush's “Wuthering Heights” reductive — and, no, the lyric does not actually feature in the new Lifeline Theatre adaptation of the classic yarn — but the creepy chanteuse pretty much nailed the central theme. Bronte's Cathy has a dream she lands in heaven, only to find herself miserable. She'd rather be with her lost love at Wuthering Heights. You can't deny the aching soul and flesh. That's what was on the remarkable Bronte sisters' minds as they sat in their quiet, cold parsonage, scribbling away about the handsome, dangerous occupants of brooding mansions in the mist.

The Fillet of Solo Festival, co-produced by Lifeline Theatre and Live Bait Theater, enters its third week of shows this weekend. Read Nina Metz's review for the Tribune, including the shows "The Half-Life of Magic" by Julie Ganey (left) and "Strapped" by Caitlin Parrish.

The annual festival of monologues and solo works continues through Aug. 21 at various venues; go to www.lifelinetheatre.com for more information.

"War with the Newts" runs through June 20 at the Kathleen Mullady Theatre on the Loyola campus; $25-$40 at 847-475-1875 and www.nexttheatre.org . Joseph Wycoff, left, Steve Pickering and Eddie Bennet star in the adaptation by Jason Loewith.

"Neverwhere" runs through June 20 at Lifeline Theatre; $20 at 773-761-4477 and www.lifelinetheatre.com

“Science Fiction/Double Feature,” goes the opening song to “The Rocky Horror Show,” the campy British stage musical. But while the sadly unfilled promise of seeing androids fighting Brad and Janet has captivated ever since 1973, science fiction and fantasy can be tricky, tricky genres in the theater.

For one thing, it's tough to do justice to, say, “The War of the Worlds” on an off-Loop budget. For another, sci-fi tends to attract unusually conversant and intense fans ready to take any errant image or omission (or post-show review) to task. Conversely, a good number of core theatergoers don't like sci-fi or fantasy-based material at all, viewing it as mere plot-based pulp that doesn't warrant serious dramatic treatment. Thus it's ghetto-ized into a sub-category.

But I think the biggest difficulty with adapting sci-fi and fantasy stories to the stage is that the genres encourage us to create elaborate imaginative worlds inside our head. When you read “Slaughterhouse Five” or “20,000 Leagues under the Sea” in the privacy of your own space, you come up with a distinctive mental picture. That can fight with someone else's vision.

THEATER REVIEW: "Neverwhere"

In “Neverwhere,” Neil Gaiman posits a second, subterranean London where real shepherds tend Shepherd's Bush, an earl dominates Earl's Court, and actual angels frolic in Islington. I don't know if they'd have the same trouble with a parliamentary election in Gaiman's creepy parallel universe of London Below, but if head to Lifeline Theatre, you can get a taste of a fantastical world populated, as one of its denizens says, “by those who fell through the cracks.”

Actually, Robert Kauzlaric's adaptation and Paul S. Holmquist's epic production combine at Lifeline to offer rather more than a taste. More like a full-on banquet of the senses.

Theatricalizing Gaiman is a tricky business, especially in one of Chicago's smaller theaters. His fans are fervent, feasting on the metaphors and existential truisms that his fantasy fiction kicks out. Furthermore, his all-embracing alternate universes encourage you to sketch them out in your head. If you read Gaiman's “Coraline” before you saw the movie, you'll know what I mean.

THEATER REVIEW: "Mrs. Caliban" ★★½  Through March 28 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes; Tickets: $30 at 773-761-4477 and www.lifelinetheatre.com

In William Shakespeare's “Richard III,” there's a notoriously tricky-to-act scene wherein Lady Anne allows herself to be seduced by the nasty man with a hump, even though she knows he just killed her beloved. That scene came to mind at Lifeline Theatre on Sunday, when a bored housewife named Dorothy jumped into the sack with a bald-headed green monster who had just invaded her home.

Now, as “Wicked” so richly proved, verdant makeup does not negate sexual appeal. But in this particular instance, we're not just talking a fellow with a green face, but also a partly reptilian body and a taste for munching on cardboard boxes. And, if the news reports that Dorothy hears on her radio are to be believed, this escaped monster kills people who get in his way.

Sure, Dorothy is in a dead marriage and looking for a little excitement. And the monster is misunderstood. But still. However sexually hungry one might be, a little more pre-coital information-gathering is usually required for dalliances with human-reptilian hybrids.

These days, the brave, handsome prince and the sweet, courtly princess are endangered species. In Lifeline’s new children’s show (for ages 5 and older), the princess prefers to do the sword work herself, and the prince would rather study math than complete any requisite feats of daring-do.

Such fairy tale revisionism in the hourlong musical “The Last of the Dragons” isn’t limited to characters with two legs. Heck, even the dragon fights back against the notion that his kind are all aggressive candidates for slaying. This beast argues that a lot of nastiness could have been prevented if only generations of knights had chatted before they swung.

The first clue is the way the expansive rigging of the good ship Hispaniola so overwhelms the Lifeline Theatre stage, it threatens to sail out onto the Red Line tracks on the other side of the wall. It would probably move faster than the CTA, too. The second is the serious, bewigged faces of the men describing the mutinous horrors wrought by Long John Silver and his motley crew of scurvy dogs.

And the third is the aura of perpetual adolescent adventure that permeates the salty air of the theater.

Yep, this is “Treasure Island” done right.