A couple weeks back there arrived in the mail with a thump Arts America, a 540-page tome offering a guide to the arts in 20 American cities. Among them is Pittsburgh.

"Steeltown, U.S.A" (as the book calls us) didn't make the editors' cut of "major" destinations (New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C.). But we do show up among 15 secondary towns, right there with Atlanta and Boston and Philadelphia.

Yeah, NYC gets 94 pages of entries and we get 12. But so do Houston and Baltimore. And Minneapolis/St. Paul only gets 16 ... but who's counting, anyway?

Indeed, books like this one, published by Las Vegas-based Huntington Press, always feel like occasions to see how your town stacks up.

It's no less fun than remarkable to see an established performance troupe that seems to get better almost every time out. But that's what it feels like is happening with Attack Theatre.

The group's latest combines the sophistication they've taught audiences to expect with a good deal of accessibility and humor. And it reaffirms Attack's position as surely the Pittsburgh performance group most committed to incorporating live music into its shows.

Last weekend's performances were notable for being the first in Attack's new space, in the Pittsburgh Opera's headquarters, in the Strip. The actual studio is on the second floor; the first-floor performance space (which the Opera has been renting out for shows and events) is splendid, big and high-ceilinged.

The work was set by Attack co-founders Peter Kope and Michele de la Reza on a company featuring them, Liz Chang, Dane Toney and Ashley Williams, with live original music performed by Dave Eggar, Charles Palmer and Tom Pirozzi.

Act one suggested a series of encounters, performed by various combinations of dancers, typically intense and affecting. Especially memorable was a trio featuring Kope, Toney and Williams, all in close, bodies folding over each other, with a surprising sequence of erotic pairings.

You oughtn't need a reason beyond Leonard Berstein's stunningly crafty and melodic score to see this stage musical based on Voltaire's classic.

The witty lyrics, by poet Richard Wilbur and others (including Stephen Sondheim) don't hurt, of course, nor does director Karla Boos' cheeky deployment of the venue, a former Bloomfield auto-body shop, for all sorts of sight gags. (A big laugh last Friday went to the toy-car-styled shopping cart in which Cunegonde, played by Nicole Kaplan, was pushed about the stage while singing the show-stopper "Glitter and Be Gay.")

And let's put in a word for the fine cast -- and for a theater company that cares enough about this broadly comic operetta's music to have it played live, in this case by a chamber orchestra led by music director Andres Cladera.

The show is good fun indeed. But all its scathingly playful piss-takes on religion, philosophy, warfare and commerce and the people who practice them made me ponder the connections between farce and satire.

Normally we assume the former to be devoid of content -- "just for laughs" -- while the other is busy getting to the root of society's ills.

But Candide is farce as satire, or vice versa, and I think where the two dovetail is in their ascription to humanity of our tendency to follow our basest instincts. Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss is an object of derision, in other words, not only because of his moony "best of all possible worlds" philosophy, nor because of his desire to hump the servant girl, but because he pretends the former justifies the latter.

Innocents Candide and Cunegonde, meanwhile, believe in their own coupling that they adhere to Panglossian dictums, when in fact they're merely following the impulses of young people everywhere. And the rest of the comedy is occasioned by soldiers dragooning the hapless Candide, or raping the hapless Cunegonde; various proper clergymen having their way with Cunegonde; and pretty much everyone else (except for our young protagonists and the boringly content denizens of El Dorado) abusing their power at every turn to satisfy lust, greed or, better still, both.

In farce, the lecher pursuing his lechery is funny; in satire, he's contempible.

It's a play about a video game about killing zombies, but don't be fooled. Bricolage's production of Jennifer Haley's inventive script is as striking a show as I've seen this year.

One key to its success is a risky choice by director Matt M. Morrow and the Bricolage cast and crew: Most of the dialogue, and most of the action, are rendered in highly stylized terms. From Scene 1 on, all the actors (a cast of four and a off-stage voice) speak in the halting, nearly affectless tones of video-game characters. Their gestures are similarly confined to a limited range. And to top it off, the actors generally face not each other, but offstage somewhere -- mostly toward the audience.

In theater, you can get away with a lot of things you can't on film, where photo-realism is requisite even if you're depicting Mordor or something.

Sunday was a good day to catch up with some of the temporary exhibits. Digital to Daguerreotype: Photographs of People is one you should try to see. (It closes Jan. 31.). CP ran Robert Isenberg's consideration of the show back in August (www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A66865), but it's worth re-emphasizing that this historical survey consisting of dozens of images is also a fine tribute to generations of Pittsburgh shooters.

And I don't just mean the usual local suspects — though W. Eugene Smith and Teenie Harris are well-represented — or Pittsburgh folks who discovered fame elsewhere (of which you get a double dose with Duane Michael's canny portrait of Andy Warhol and his ma).

There are also plenty of living, breathing contemporary locals in the mix. Charlee Brodsky contributes a couple circa-1990 street shots of life in Homestead.

Before the plays even started this past Saturday, two things jumped out about "The F-10 Play Summit," the sixth annual iteration of this locally produced festival of 10-minute plays. Both had to do with the audience at Downtown's Future Tenant Gallery.

One, it was a sell-out crowd, with more than 100 folks filling the storefront's seats, despite performances of the same program both nights preceding. Two, the crowd was on the whole much younger than Pittsburgh theater audiences in general, with lots of folks in their 20s.

Many, doubtless, were there to see plays by their friends, or to watch their friends among the (similarly youthful) actors. But if the idea to stage mini-plays was meant partly to draw audiences who wouldn't normally see theater, this outfit's done its job. And it probably doesn't hurt that: (1) your ticket gets you free beer and (2) the whole show is under an hour.

As is usually the case with festivals of one-acts, the plays themselves were a mixed bag.

Monster stories tend toward the metaphorically rich. See yesterday's post on the zombie play The Revenants, for instance; any vampire story; and, maybe best of all, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I've been reading.

But one useful take on playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of Stevenson's 1883 classic (which runs through Sun., Nov. 8) is that it's about drug addiction.

On one level, that's pretty obvious. Jekyll can't stop taking the potion that Hydes him. He experiences the transformations as blackouts; denies he's an addict; and says that fixing things is just a matter of finding the proper balance of chemicals. 

But Hatcher's theatrical approach, as realized here by director Tracy Brigden, adds intriguing twists. Jekyll (played by David Whalen) never "becomes" Hyde; he's simply replaced on stage by him.

In preparation for writing a preview piece on this show a few weeks ago, I read the script, and felt some ambivalence. It didn't have much to do with the play's premise: Two couples are trapped in a suburban basement in a town under siege by zombies, and one member of each has become undead.

Nor was my concern formal: Playwright Scott T. Barsotti (a North Hills native now living in Chicago) had crafted a tight story with clearly defined characters. Indeed, I had to tip my severed skullcap to the play's central metaphor: The undead served as stand-ins for former intimates one no longer loved. Zombie relationships, moving along but devoid of the spark of life.

Rather, I was ambivalent about the notion of what amounted to a love story set at the end of the world. Even as the surviving partners of the two couples planned dangerous forays into the zombie-infested outdoors -- and debated the heavy moral question of whether to destroy their shambolic, chained-up significant others -- we were asked to care whether they might find true happiness with one another.

The troupes' collaborative performance at the Byham this past Saturday, titled Other Suns (A Trilogy), was among the best dance performances I've ever seen, for at least two of its three movements.

The show grew out of collaborations between the San Francisco-based Jenkins company and Guangdong Modern, which is mainland China's first professional modern-dance troupe (founded 1992). The complete work's world premiere was in September, and this Pittsburgh Dance Council performance seems to have been the first time in Pittsburgh for both companies.

It was an enthralling introduction. Part one was performed by Jenkins' company, set mostly to minimalist music by composer Paul Dresher. The movement style was striking: at once big and sweeping and sensuous, with frequent flash-pauses for group tableaux that broke apart at the touch of a single dancer. The eight dancers moved through solos, duets and group passages of amazing complexity, also impressive for the near-absence of repeated movements.

Part two began with five Guangdong Modern dancers prone on the stage.

There was little in the legendary activist's talk to indicate that a half-century of battling injustice (and sometimes running for president) has discouraged him, let alone dimmed his sense of outrage.

In fact, his address (part of the school's Global Cultural Studies speaker series) was explicitly about spurring the mostly student audience to similar action.

Nader, 75, began with the story of how his law-school paper on automobile safety turned into the landmark consumer-advocacy book Unsafe At Any Speed (1965). Once he'd learned that cars were designed with marketing rather than safety in mind, Nader said, "It never occurred to me that the situation could not be changed."

"You're all capable of making similar advances" in fighting injustice, he told the packed auditorium. In fact, he added, otherwise "You are not a citizen."

Lacking the time or know-how for activism is no excuse, he said. "All social-justice movements start with people who have no power whatsoever," he said. "The difference between those people and today is, those people didn't make excuses."

In a talk titled "The Mega Corporate Destruction of Capitalism and Democracy," Nader acknowledged the many barriers to activism.