Tennessee Williams' Southern Gothic runs Thursday through Sunday in a bare downtown Oakland warehouse until Aug. 23, with $10 pay-what-you-can seats and a critical consensus that the acting is the reason to go.

Oakland Theater Project's staging of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" plays its final stretch this week, running Thursday through Sunday until it closes Aug. 23. Performances are at the company's home inside the old FLAX art & design building, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in downtown Oakland. If you've been meaning to go, this is the window: counting tonight, there are only six performances left — Saturday, Sunday, then Thursday through Sunday of closing week.

Here's the part the reviews mostly skip. Tickets come in three tiers on the company's Orpheus page (external source, opens in a new tab): $70 for a reserved priority seat, $40 general admission (your seat is assigned when you arrive), and a pay-what-you-can option listed at $10 / $20 — or any amount at the door, subject to availability. That bottom tier is the actual move for a warehouse show where the sightlines don't shift much by price. Online sales close one hour before each performance, so if you're deciding late, your fallback is the door or a call to 510-646-1126.

The play itself is a late Williams drama — the same story filmed in 1960 as "The Fugitive Kind" with Marlon Brando — about a drifter named Val who wanders into a gossipy Southern town and unsettles everyone in it, especially Lady Torrance, the tightly wound woman running the local store. Will Detlefsen directs a cast led by Lisa Ramirez, the company's co-artistic director, as Lady, and Hunter Bryant as Val. In a review for Bay City News, carried by SFGATE, critic Jean Schiffman praised the acting and a vein of surrealism the director leans into, and noted that the company forgoes any elaborate set: the actors play a narrow runway with the audience banked on either side, leftover paint cans still lining the shelves from the building's supply-store years.

A few things worth knowing before you commit the evening. The run time is 2 hours 30 minutes with one intermission, so this is a full night out, not a quick drop-in. The content notes are real: herbal cigarettes, sudden loud sounds, violence, and racial slurs and other discriminatory language, per the company. And unless you spring for the $70 tier, seating is unreserved — general-admission spots are handed out as you arrive, which is the argument for getting there early rather than at curtain.

Getting there: the venue is a 7-to-10-minute walk from the 12th Street BART Station, which makes this an easy car-free trip. If you drive, the parking lot entrance is on 15th Street. Exact curtain times per day aren't posted on the show page as of publication — check the ticket page or box office when you book so you're not standing outside a locked door.

If I had one night this week, I'd take the pay-what-you-can tier on a weeknight, ride BART to 12th Street, and get there 20 minutes early to land a spot on the aisle before the room fills in.