Our parents may be our first and most important teachers, but part of growing up is finding new mentors who can point us toward success in our careers. In Jonathan Tolins’ new play, “Secrets of the Trade,” set in the 1980s, a theater-obsessed suburban Jewish teenager, Andy Lipman (Noah Robbins) becomes the protege of a legendary but egotistical Broadway playwright, Martin Kerner (John Glover).

 It happened more than six decades ago, but the Shoah still haunts and possesses us. In British playwright and director Julia Pascal’s Holocaust-themed reworking of S. Anski’s surrealistic play, “The Dybbuk,” to be presented beginning next week by the Theater for the New City, the overtaking of a girl’s body by the spirit of her dead lover assumes new echoes and reverberations in the wake of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.