Beirut-based performer Rabih Mroué has been making work since 1990, but this is his first (and long-overdue) US tour. Though he insists he’s an artist not an activist, his research-based performances are routinely banned by the Lebanese government. In Employee, which the New York Times compared to work by the Wooster Group, Mroué uses his obsessive personal archive of newspaper clippings to follow the story of a disappeared bureaucrat and the conflicting ways government officials try to spin the story. (On the Boards, 100 W Roy St, www.ontheboards.org, 8 pm, $25)