.Weekender: The Top Five Things to Do Over the Next Three Days in the East Bay

Happy Friday, beautiful people. Get your weekend on with help from our critics.

Jacqueline Luckett, Eva Tuschman, and Erin Van Rheenan
Seventh in the popular annual series, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 offers tales of lunch with a Japanese mobster, delivering a “Best Testicles” trophy in rural Serbia, camel rides, nudity, and many more adventures in Brazil, India, Cuba, Guyana, Syria, Ireland, Cambodia, and beyond. Contributors Jacqueline Luckett, Eva Tuschman, and Erin Van Rheenan bring it all back home to Books Inc. (1760 Fourth St., Berkeley) on Friday, June 3. 7 p.m., free. 510-525-7777 or BooksInc.net. — Stefanie Kalem

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The Care of Trees
For all its intellectual pretensions and wildly disparate themes — the shortcomings of language, disease as metaphor, environmentalism, philosophy and law, psychoanalysis, memory, the transience of nature — Shotgun Players’ latest is, at its heart, a rather traditional romantic folk tale. But don’t worry, folks: It’s not quite as Seventies as it sounds. The story is about a single relationship that starts off idyllic but runs into a seemingly intractable problem. The two characters, Travis Dekalb (played by a savagely handsome Patrick Russell) and Georgia Swift (the sinuous Liz Sklar) have enough onstage chemistry to make their love scenes extremely sensual, and their arguments frustratingly realistic. They speak in a loopy, elliptical language that’s supposed to highlight its own deficiencies. Videography by Ian Winters and a soundscape by Jake Rodriguez enhance Nina Ball’s elaborate, tree-house set design. And, fittingly, tree metaphors abound. Through June 26 at The Ashby Stage (1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley). $17-$26. 510-841-6500 or ShotgunPlayers.org — Rachel Swan

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