Maybe it’s because Halloween and the Day of the Dead are imminent? Whatever the reason, death hovers over most of the plays that I saw last week.

Three scripts discuss, among other things, the demise of aged parents: And Neither Have I Wings to Fly, Innocent When You Dream, and Journey to Dollywood. Meanwhile, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore examines a woman’s rendezvous with an angel of death, Hollywood Hell House dramatizes fundamentalist notions of the afterlife, and Dangerous Corner investigates an apparent suicide.

While nearly all the productions are worthwhile on at least some level, several have problematic endings. With their common motif – death – being the biggest and most problematic ending of them all, perhaps that’s not surprising.

Jane Anderson’s The Quality of Life deserves attention. As in her 1990 calling card, The Baby Dance, Anderson creates two complicated couples from apparent stereotypes: California liberals and heartland conservatives. This time, however, befitting their boomer generation, the characters are concerned about death instead of birth.

The young adult daughter of Midwesterners, Dinah (JoBeth Williams) and Bill (Scott Bakula), has been brutally murdered. Dinah’s Northern California cousin Jeannette (Laurie Metcalf) and Neil (Dennis Boutsikaris) have just seen their house destroyed by a hillside brush fire, plus Neil has terminal cancer. The two couples chat in the charred ruins of the California home, where Jeannette and Neil continue to live in a makeshift yurt and yard.

The first act is initially powered by sometimes amusing cross-cultural friction, but soon Anderson zeroes in on Neil’s decision to kill himself, soon, and Jeannette’s plan on how to cope. Although born-again Bill initially appears the least sympathetic character, his instincts about Jeannette’s options finally prove sensible, even if his reasoning is dubious. In other words, the play’s sympathies aren’t as loaded as one might initially think, although the final scene between Bill and Dinah tilts the precarious balance a little too far in a predictable but slightly implausible direction.

Anderson directs a dream cast. Each actor cuts through to the core of the characters. Of all the dramatizations of death that I saw last week, The Quality of Life moved me the most. Perhaps this is in part because its characters are more like me, and like the contemporary liberals who make up the majority of the L.A. theater audience. But it’s also because Anderson faces the essentially unknown quality of death more frankly than any of the other writers, even as her characters also find their own muted ways of embracing life.

Jeannette describes the devastation caused by their wildfire as “very end of the world.” But it’s nothing compared to the actual end-of-the-world scenario in Alex Jones’s Canned Peaches in Syrup, a Furious Theatre production in which nomadic cannibals and vegetarians are the only people left in the wake of an apocalypse.

This play has a higher death toll (three) than any of the others I saw last week, but it’s actually more about the death of the planet – and the touching attempts of its creatures to maintain some shred of human feeling, particularly through a Romeo and Juliet-style romance. The titular can of fruit, which we might dismiss today as blah compared to fresh peaches, has become a rare and precious relic in the playwright’s post-apocalyptic world. Jones is saying, amid a torrent of graphic language and violence: Count your blessings.

His play needs a better ending, and it’s sometimes reminiscent of Richard Caliban’s Famine Plays, seen earlier this year at Theatre of NOTE. But Dámaso Rodriguez’s cast is dynamite, and this grimly funny work ultimately serves as a chilling siren, warning us of what might be.