Love's Labour's Lost
Seattle Shakespeare Company at Center House Theatre
Through Feb 13.

In the first scene of Seattle Shakespeare Company's Love's Labour's Lost, the shoe situation is: one guy barefoot, two guys in socks, one guy in shoes. The guys are academics and they're splayed on the steps of a ruin, the centerpiece of this production, discussing the king's mandate that academics abstain from women and sex. The "comedy" in the show comes when four women, among them the Princess of France, all of them in small leather booties, show up in the academics' court. The actors may look gay, but the characters they play are as straight as this play is long. A drawn-out seduction ensues, involving a lot of posturing, some eavesdropping, some identity swapping, and a dance number. When the puppets come out, late in the show, you begin to wonder: When the fuck is this thing going to end? Love's Labour's Lost is one of Shakespeare's early efforts (the plot is farcical, the conflicts are shallow, the language is incantatory and grating) and, to make matters worse, this production is overeager and dull. Alban Dennis, as King Ferdinand, isn't bad. But the set looks stupid, the men's costumes appear to be an afterthought, and most of the cast is inept. The only great surprise is Max Piscioneri, the kid who plays the Spaniard's singing page, who does more in a gesture than anyone else is able to do with miles of material. He has big eyes, a pleasant voice, and the best shoes in the show. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Waiting for Lefty
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Through Feb 12.

As the audience files in and settles into the tiered compass of a theater in the round, a recording of Depression-era voices plays. The speeches are alternately prescient and dated. Governor Huey Long rails against the magnates in language that would just confuse a modern culture jammer: "Leave something for the American people to consume!" But FDR's simple, eloquent speech on the occasion of the signing of the Social Security Act engages directly with current politics. The Capitol Hill Arts Center may never end this love affair with leftist theater, but as long as its directors steer clear of naive nostalgia for the days of real worker solidarity (the flaw that plagued This Land at Hugo House this fall) and cast these little hooks of relevance into the 21st century, well, I'm for it.

And Sheila Daniels' tough, high-voltage staging doesn't leave much to complain about. The opening minutes are somewhat unfortunate--anonymous workers stride purposefully from one corner to the other as though they've been caught on the first day of an acting workshop--but the rest of the show makes terrific use of the space. The ensemble is at its best when it acts in concert (there are a few standouts, though, like Jená Cane, whose bristling fury is excellent). Daniels sweeps the actors together and scatters them to the outer edges of the stage like an expert choreographer. The pressure builds and builds, and if you're not moved to stand up and chant "strike" at the end, well, that's all right. Standing ovations are always a letdown anyway. ANNIE WAGNER

Orpheus
Open Circle Theater
Through Feb 19.

It's all well and good for an audience to be intermittently blinded by direct white spotlights and deafened by a sound that seems to have been inspired by a sonic boom (this is what happens whenever a character goes through a mirror that bridges the underworld and the living), but it would be nice if these painful intrusions actually lined up with the cues. Maybe this production of Jean Cocteau's mythopoetic epic was just too ambitious from a technical standpoint. Jeremy Catterton as Orpheus is a bundle of irritations with a conspicuous lack of charm, and you just end up feeling sorry for Eurydice (Samara Lerman, who is at least convincingly pretty) for being so hung up on him. When you're faced with a wasteland full of clocks without hands and a goofy cardboard lyre, you want some sugar to make the surrealist medicine go down. This cast can't provide it. ANNIE WAGNER

Pent Up
Annex Theatre at Union Playhouse
Through Feb 5.

The program tagline for Annex Theater's Pent Up promises "two short angry pieces by two short angry girls." What arrives onstage is not nearly so concrete. Paired on the bill are two works from the most recent Mae West Fest--Rachel Jackson's On the Virg and Jennifer Pratt's Maladaptive. The first is a fantastical theatrical dissection of notions of virginity, the second a fantastical theatrical dissection of 21st-century single-person malaise, and neither goes out of its way to make any recognizable sense. Despite fine performances from appealing actors in both shows, both On the Virg and Maladaptive score their biggest points as experimental writing. As theater, the shows remain largely closed circuits of imagery and intent. DAVID SCHMADER