Through October 15 - Holding the Edge at The Marsh Berkeley. Elaine Magree's deeply moving one-woman show time-travels the audience back to the height of the AIDS crisis, one of the most devastating periods in recent Bay Area history, and to one day in particular: January 28, 1986. Space nerds like myself (and Magree) will instantly recognize that as the day of the Challenger explosion, and Magree weaves her personal experience of that tragedy into the larger narrative of the plague of AIDS. Magree was working as a hospice nurse at the time, sometimes performing multiple "death visits" in a single night, and the mix of humor and heart she brings to Holding the Edge makes it clear she must have been amazing at her job. Magree deals with the tough realities of her line of work head-on and makes no secret about her anger at Reagan for ignoring the deaths of thousands of people, but she artfully avoids getting too maudlin, for example lightening an account of a protest by teaching the audience some of the saucy chants launched by drag queens at the riot police. More than just a slice of history, Holding the Edge is an essential eye-witness account from one of the Bay Area women who by helping a few people as best she could was keeping the entire world from falling apart.