Watching a play is the second-best way to achieve emotional catharsis, right behind writing a play about achieving emotional catharsis. Tear-stain a playbill with this deal to see upcoming main-stage performances in American Stage Theatre Co.’s 2011–12 season at the Raymond James Theatre in St. Petersburg. For $89, you get a FlexFour pass, which grants admission for four to one play, admission for two to two plays, or admission for one to four plays (up to a $188 value). The four upcoming performances include:

• 2.5 Minute Ride, running now through May 6
• A Steady Rain, running now through May 6
• Vanishing Point, running May 29–July 1
• The Foreigner, running July 18–August 19<p>

Established in 1977, American Stage Theatre Co. moved in 2009 to the brand-new Raymond James Theatre, a 182-seat auditorium ideally suited to the company’s intimate plays. In 2.5 Minute Ride, winner of the 1999 Obie Award, playwright Lisa Kron (played by Lisa Kay Powers) vividly describes a trip to an Ohio amusement park with her father, a Holocaust survivor. The performance spins universality from her personal tale of heart-stopping comedy, tragedy, and funnel cakes. Running at the same time on the main stage is A Steady Rain, a grim, gritty look at a friendship falling apart after two police officers unwittingly deliver a young boy into the hands of the serial killer from whom he’d just escaped. Vanishing Point sets to song a space-time-bending meeting between Amelia Earhart, Agatha Christie, and 20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, each of whom inexplicably disappeared at some point in their lives. Lastly, in the classic farce The Foreigner, a terminally shy man attempts to avoid conversation by pretending not to speak English, inadvertently becoming party to a flock of harebrained schemes he wasn’t meant to understand.