Through April 17.
Based on its description as "a 'dot-comedy' based on the Beckett novella Mercier and Camier," I fully expected Boomtown to be a very tedious evening of misguided conceptual drool. To my happy surprise, it was only a sporadically tedious evening of conceptual drool masquerading as comedy. Mercer (a Mormonish naif from Ohio) and Cameron (a smug alterna-gal and Dostoyevsky fan) meet working at foodfordogs.com and, through weird strokes of venture capitalism, become partners in a "universal firewall" startup. They promptly waste their seed money as Mercer discovers cocaine, Cameron discovers Mercer's wife, Mercer rediscovers his wife, and Cameron and Mercer discover each other.

Boomtown features a fair amount of existential jack-assery, cheap local jokes, and incidental music by Pink Floyd, but there were a few moments of very good dialogue and very bad dialogue delivered with great comic instinct. If the cast and author seasoned themselves up with some sketch comedy and reunited for rewrites, Boomtown might be a very funny and insightful bit of existentialist parody. One picky gripe: Surely your strict budget could afford enough paint to give the sides of those cardboard set pieces a quick coat. Painting the audience side and leaving the rest just looks lazy. BRENDAN KILEY

Edges

RED Studio

Through April 18.
If the thought of a 45-minute "collage of kinesthetically based movement and interaction and exploration guided by a physical experience of emotion" sends chills down your spine, I share your anxiety. (That's a quote from the program of Edges, an evening of two improvisational dances created by Karl Frost and his dancers.) But to my astonishment, Ashes was fascinating; awkward, tender, and violent movement combined with snippets of dialogue and swiftly built-up characters and relationships, creating social and sexual conflicts with an almost unnerving intimacy. At one point, a woman brutally interrogated a man about his previous ex-girlfriends, pinning him to the ground and almost strangling him. Out of context, this may sound like overdone psychodrama, but it was utterly compelling, grounded by the subtle yet tangible synergy of the five performers. The second piece, Ocean Studies, didn't achieve the same emotional density (at least, not that night), but still had great moments of dancing and humor. Recommended. BRET FETZER

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill

Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center

Through April 18.
City lights are framed by a window; a jazz pianist, Ryan Smith, plays softly; the lights are low--this is the stage upon which the twilight of a brilliant career, a brilliant American personality, is to be played out. The pianist stops, walks backstage to talk with the fading star, and, after a few appeals, Billie Holiday appears with a glass of something strong in her hand. Candid Lady Day lets us know that she does not want to be here--a small and mediocre Philadelphia venue called Emerson's Bar and Grill--nor does she want to perform her most requested songs. But she soon submits to the reality of her fame and gives us what all her fans want--songs from the early days. "They should call me Lady Yesterday," she dryly says after her opening song.

Two reasons occasion the success of this play. The first is the background piano music by Ryan Smith; lyrical and confident, his style serves as a perfect counterpoint to the exhaustion and frailty of Felicia Loud's Billie Holiday, which is reason number two to see this show. Moving between performances of Holiday's popular songs and a monologue recounting a series of dark and humiliating experiences that ultimately totaled the first lady of jazz, Loud's Holiday is, at this late point in her short life, entirely damaged. To borrow and bend a phrase from Auden, Mad America has hurt her into poetry. And it is the substance of this hurt that Loud's performance captures almost too well. Go see it. CHARLES MUDEDE

Split Second

Velocity MainSpace Theater

Through April 18.
Mik Kuhlman takes what she does--short performance pieces adapted from short stories or inspired by historical figures--very seriously. She's not pretentious and can be funny, but her clear aspiration to be "more than entertainment" (as she put it in a post-show discussion) gives her performances a weightiness.

Take, for example, her version of a Raymond Carver short story called "Fat." Carver's compact, concrete sentences already walk a fine line between pithy and ponderous; Kuhlman's reading--both how she speaks the piece and how she moves her body through it, buttering dozens of slices of Wonder Bread--tips the scales. When, at the story's conclusion, it's revealed that a chance encounter will have a lasting impact on the narrator, we're not surprised. That impact was indicated from Kuhlman's first sentence. The story has been pre-digested, our expected emotional response given to us on a plate.

In contrast, another story adaptation, Red Coats, finds a perfect balance. Kuhlman portrays a 3-year-old girl clinging to her mother's red coat. Her weightiness delightfully suits the sober, serious perceptions of a child absorbing and categorizing the universe, as Kuhlman clambers up a gigantic red coat suspended from the ceiling, gripping it in a marsupial embrace, as if she were about to slip into its comforting pockets.

Split Second, despite feeling overthought, has many virtues; Kuhlman's skill, intelligence, and presence are undeniable. I just wish she would toss something off and see what happens--the result might surprise her as much as the audience. BRET FETZER