FALL PREVIEW : Our Picks for the Best of the Coming Fall Season : <i> Calendar critics make their picks for the fall season’s best bets in pop music, jazz, stage, music and dance and the visual arts. : </i> : STAGE

The Westwood Playhouse will play host to what could be the solo highlight of a still-sketchy fall season when British actress Eileen Atkins delivers her uncommon performance as the lecturing Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own,” starting Oct. 16. This will follow close on the heels of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, together again--at last--in “Together Again” (Sept. 20-Oct.13). Another notable solo, Rick Reynolds’ autobiographical paean to being ordinary, “Only the Truth Is Funny,” will open Sept. 15 at the Canon Theatre.

“Henceforward,” one of Alan Ayckbourn’s funniest, showiest and most technically demanding social satires, will be at the Mark Taper Forum (opening Nov. 14), following another potentially strong entry: George C. Wolfe’s enlarged version of “Spunk” (Sept. 26), an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston stories that Wolfe launched as a spicy reading at the Taper’s Itchey Foot Cabaret in 1989.

In Pasadena, the California Music Theatre is moving from the Civic Auditorium to more intimate quarters at the Raymond Theatre and fans of Van Johnson can catch up with him there in “Show Boat” (Sept. 11). Nearby, the Pasadena Playhouse will play host to the good-time “Forever Plaid” (Sept. 22), a musical spoof of ‘50s male harmony singing groups that was a runaway hit at San Diego’s Old Globe (where it returns Nov. 1), while “Solitary Confinement,” a new comedy thriller from Rupert Holmes (“Accomplice”), takes the stage Nov. 24.

If the Los Angeles Theatre Center gets its funding together and stays alive, look for its usual varied menu in which notables might be Frank Pugliesi’s “Aven’ U Boys,” a play about growing up with urban havoc (Nov. 21) and John Fleck’s commissioned piece, “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell” (Dec.10).

Do we need one more revival of “Hello Dolly!”? Only if it can be different, such as the non-traditional one planned at Long Beach Civic Light Opera with Nell Carter heading a multiracial cast (Oct. 5).

In San Diego, it’s Sada Thompson starring in George Kelly’s “The Show Off” (Old Globe, Sept. 12). And the La Jolla Playhouse season ends with a potentially intriguing reworking of a musical by Mel Marvin and John Bishop based on “Elmer Gantry” that played Ford’s Theater in Washington in 1988. It opens Oct. 20.

At South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” will be staged (Sept. 6) by that shavian master, Martin Benson, to be followed by the world premiere (Oct. 25) of “The Extra Man,” Richard Greenberg’s look at guilt and redemption in the ‘90s.

Next door at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Raul Julia and Sheena Easton star in “Man of La Mancha” (Dec. 23), with an earlier date at the Hollywood Pantages starting Nov. 26. Preceding that, Marla Gibbs will star at the Pantages in a new comedy by Don Evans about a country girl and a city slicker called “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” (Sept. 10); Ron Milner directs. And the unstoppable San Francisco Mime Troupe will swing through the Southland with “Back to Normal” about the Persian Gulf War (Sept. 7 and 8 only, Santa Monica Pier), and “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle: A New Jack Revisionist ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ” (San Diego Repertory Theatre, opening Oct. 16).

The season’s Christmas bonus: Joan Collins in “Private Lives” (Wilshire Theatre, opening Dec. 17), bound to draw legions of the fascinated and the merely curious.