Girl Meets Girl
Northwest Actors Studio, 781-3988.
$20 Fri & Sat, $15 Sun. Through March 17.

Giving this lighthearted lesbian soap opera a bad review would be like savaging a bunch of Alzheimer's patients putting on a variety show--both easy AND wholly inappropriate. I could crack jokes about the tedious sound design (heavy on the Indigo Girls) or the exhausted symbolism of a stage draped in lavender. I could rip into the mostly amateur cast, who vacillate raggedly between nervous catatonia and a piercing tone reminiscent of enthused cheerleading--but what earthly good would that serve?

This is not art. This is a much-needed community event for lesbians and those who love them (it's also been performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Atlanta). Perpetually underrepresented in popular culture and nearly invisible in theater, lavender-lovin' ladies will, by and large, find Girl Meets Girl refreshing. The night I was there, the seats were full of dykes on date night, laughing their heads off and enjoying the saucy sex scenes, complete with gratuitous boobies and bush to boot. The energy in the room was positively giddy, and nothing the terrible play or the woefully wobbly players did could ruin their fun. So why should I? TAMARA PARIS


Fully Committed

ACT Theatre, 292-7676.
$24.50-$29.50. No closing date set.

Sam, a struggling actor, takes reservations over the phone for a chic New York restaurant that's booked months in advance. He is badgered, threatened, sweet-talked, and generally abused by the desperate people who want a table right away. Fully Committed, a comedy of stress, has been hugely popular all over the U.S.; I'm not sure why. It's sort of a tour de force--one actor plays over 30 characters--except that the script doesn't demand much beyond a facility for broad caricatures and vocal stereotypes, which R. Hamilton Wright (a fine comic actor) provides without much effort; it's a technical challenge, but not an artistic one. More troublesome, by the play's end Sam has learned to manipulate the system to achieve his own ends--in other words, he's become as much of an asshole as the callers who abuse him. Apparently we're supposed to applaud this character development because he's a nice guy who's going to spend Christmas with his father. This petty sentiment would be tolerable if Fully Committed had some genuine wit, but though there are some laughs (thanks to Wright), the script is bland and mechanical--the theatrical equivalent of a bag of potato chips. BRET FETZER


Scenes from American Life

UpRoar! Productions at Open Circle Theatre,
325-6500. $12. Through March 16.

From the potentially dull question "What is the American spirit?" UpRoar! Productions creates a one-act of short scenelets using deft dramatic strokes and truly striking thumbnail characterizations. Taken from various points in American history, most of the scenes are alive with the drama of life and struggle. Dull title aside, Maia McCarthy's script and direction avoid the PBS-historical-program tedium by focusing on the "outsider" character. So, in a scene about whores in a Virginia bordello circa 1908, the weird detail of a eunuch-like houseboy flying around in a kimono throws the entire scene off kilter in a delightful way. This country was built by crazy inventors, perverted businessmen, lunkheads, white-collar criminals, and deviants of all kinds; McCarthy reminds us that the "unified" and "good" America we've been hearing about is a cartoon that doesn't exist.

Nice touches abound. The versatile ensemble members who aren't acting onstage sit erectly along the periphery in white underclothing like pretty gargoyles, making scant sound effects with coconut halves, a kazoo, a fork and spoon. And McCarthy knows how to use silence--when actors walk to and fro without speech, playing NYC tenement dwellers, it's dreamy. STACEY LEVINE


Dirty Work
33 Fainting Spells at Richard Hugo House, 686-3243.
$15 ($25 closing night). Through March 17.

33 Fainting Spells' new piece, Dirty Work, offers an intricate inside-outing of entertainment. Tiny, private rituals--putting on a new record, eating too many donuts, lip-synching to soft rock favorites, "dancing" while seated--are rubbed into dance with obsessive joy. Dayna Hanson, Gaelen Hanson, and Peggy Piacenza lose the modern dance "expressionless expression" and grapple with the dirty beasts of age, regret, and the art of performance via the Hansons' twitchy, exuberant choreography. Besides eating copious donuts, smoking, and scratching themselves onstage, these engaging dancers holler, interpret Swedish (from Bergman's Summer Interlude), and appear as a 68-year-old man. Dayna delivers a pivotal line from Chekhov's Swan Song with the pursed lips of an aging, washed-up actor reflecting on his audience: "I'm an alien to them--they'll clap their hands for me, but really, I'm dirt." Gaelen deadpans a scary ballerina, undulating and half-naked in a decaying Swan Lake-style tutu. Piacenza's character flares between rabid sessions on the stationary bike and urgent donut consumption.

Dirty Work sloshes about, noisily, in piles of crushed pink Tab cans, producing much of the sound effects and music incidentally, from the proliferation of school-issue record players, a tiny television, and countless other scrappy objects moved about the set like characters themselves. Comprised of terribly entertaining moments (for example, Gaelen pouring a can of Tab over a bowl of Raspberry Rhapsody breakfast cereal while Piacenza flops like a seizuring ventriloquist's dummy on Dayna's lap, or Dayna's embarrassed, apologetic attempt at a duet with a record player warbling "I Can Feel a New Tomorrow"), Dirty Work generates a manic, hysterical narrative that had me giggling, wincing, and marveling all at once. The carefully observed and haunted minutiae--a pulsating dance to the crackle of a record player--resonate in our deep, dirty places. RACHEL KESSLER