Best place to embrace turning 30

The Lyric Stage Company of Boston gets too old to trust this season, having come a long way since its days as a second-floor Beacon Hill walk-up with founding producing and artistic directors Polly Hogan and Ron Ritchell directing the plays, taking the tickets, and popping the popcorn. Current artistic director Spiro Veloudos, presiding over his sixth season at the troupe's "Boston's Off-Broadway" digs on Clarendon Street, pays homage to Hogan and Ritchell by including one of their repeat favorites, Noël Coward's Private Lives, as part of the anniversary season. Other points of interest include the 2001 Off-Broadway musical based on the movie The Spitfire Grill, and the post-9/11 play The Mercy Seat, by the always-unsettling Neil LaBute. Certainly there are worse things than turning 30, especially when you consider what is for so many small professional theater companies the alternative.

Lyric Stage Company of Boston, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, (617) 437-7172.