Hailing appropriately from San Francisco, a city of gender and sexual experimentation, Queer Theory reduces a broad, nuanced field of scholarship to one concept—gender fluidity—and attempts to turn it into a sex comedy with mixed results. Set mostly at Berkeley, the play (which includes a couple of song-and-dance routines) centers on a gay male professor who, having just lectured on historical theories of gender reversal, suddenly finds his own gender uncontrollably switching between male and female. This confounds himself, his students and his vampy transsexual sister who also happens to be an academic. While it has plenty of amusing one-liners ("You're not a woman trapped in a man's body, you're a bottom!") and a few welcome doses of full-frontal male nudity, the show ultimately gets bogged down by the very gender confusion it's trying to send up.—Sean Kennedy

• Where: Soho Playhouse
• When: Sat, Aug 14 at 8 p.m.; Tue, Aug 17 at 10:15 p.m.; Wed, Aug 18 at 4:45 p.m.; Fri, Aug 20 at 3 p.m.; Sat, Aug 28 at noon