The Waverly Gallery
The Empty Space, 547-7500. $22-$30.
Through April 6.

Much as August Wilson captures the verbal rhythms of black Americans, Kenneth Lonergan has an ear for how white people talk. In The Waverly Gallery, the white people are an atheistic/Jewish intellectual New York family grappling with a matriarch who is slipping into the chaos of Alzheimer's. Lonergan's dialogue sounds more true to contemporary speech than just about any play or film I've seen. His remarkably subtle scripts avoid the overdone "ordinariness" of most naturalistic writers (maybe it's simply that he's writing about his own class, not some painful fantasy of the folksiness of farmers or gutter dwellers). The tricks and patterns that Lonergan finds in what his characters say--their own obsessive repetitions, their self-delusions and denials--cunningly makes Alzheimer's seem more like an exaggeration of coherent consciousness than a departure from it.

This deft writing is matched by an all-around excellent cast. When Ellen and Howard Fine (Joyce Mycka-Stettler and Mark Jenkins) and their son Daniel Reed (Michael Chick) reminisce with an aspiring artist (David Gehrman) about the former vitality of Ellen's mother, Gladys (Marjorie Nelson), or when they talk around the elderly woman's increasingly out-of-sync monologues at dinner, the scenes evoke the texture of upper-middle-class family life with grace, humor, and precision. In particular, Chick's wonderfully invisible acting style makes even speeches to the audience seem natural and intimate.

The play's greatest weakness, unfortunately, is the story itself. The play depicts Gladys' inevitable decline--and the family's ineffectual attempts to cope with it--realistically enough to be as maddening for the audience as it is for the family. One is more dismayed than moved by Gladys' plight; because her sad illness is devoid of choice or will, it's more of a horror than a tragedy. What lingers is the dialogue, which is like the brushstrokes of a painting: Not what the painting depicts, yet deeply--essentially--what it's about. BRET FETZER

Circus Contraption
Sand Point Magnuson Park, 442-2004. $15.
Through April 6.

If you're anything like me, "alternative circus" conjures up tedious images of half-naked techno-pagans juggling their genital piercings in a freezing, filthy warehouse. But I'm willing to wager a two-headed fetus floating in a jar of gin that Circus Contraption will fling your coulrophobia* onto their vaudevillian jalopy and drive you down a dizzying drop past reason into sheer demented delight.

The warehouse in Sand Point that functions as their home is neither filthy nor freezing, but rather lovingly rendered through seat-of-their-baggy-striped-pants stagecraft into a comfortable and believable big top. There, to the lurching strains of a ghoulishly attired band pickled in equal parts klezmer and Cabaret, the talented troupe daintily tiptoes en pointe past cheap and easy ironic commentary and right into the open arms of the fat lady. As noble and foolhardy as tightrope walkers in a windstorm, each night they bring to life the thrilling, titillating spectacle of a circus from a distant time--complete with ringmaster, freaks, juggling, astounding acrobatics, and dancing ladies in subtly suggestive attire.

Don't get me wrong--these aren't dusty wax mannequins from an educational display at the midway museum. Darty Kangoo, the tattooed diva spinning 25 feet in the air from a shred of silk wrapped around her foot, introduces herself as "an imperious bitch." And the animal jumping--uh, rather, crawling through that hoop is an eyeless invertebrate. And Pinky D'Ambrosia, the opera diva, is warbling about "shaping pancakes" and "soaking risotto."

Certainly these moments are self-consciously surreal (my favorite: "Hello, Acrophelia--I'm just on my way to give the aardvarks their weekly shot of ketamine!"). Nonetheless, I can't help believing that they're tantalizingly close to the source, not the simulacrum. If you ask me, Tim Burton would sell what's left of his soul for just a sip of the vintage strain of vaudeville running through the veins of this anarchic troupe. TAMARA PARIS

Chooze Your Own Adventure, Book 2: Outer Space and Beyond
Re-bar, 444-4315. $10.
Through April 13.

Chooze Your Own Adventure: Book 2: Outer Space and Beyond (the sequel to last year's hit Chooze Your Own Adventure: The Cavern of Time) starts out promisingly: Troy Fischnaller swaggers around as a smug, Shatner-esque spaceship commander, leering at a tightly dressed female officer (Ingrid Ingerson) and abusing a robot engineer (Skot Kurruk). Fischnaller's slapdash but snappy attitude sets a cheerful tone for the show's fusion of sketch comedy and those books, popular in the '80s, that allowed kids to choose the direction of the plot at the bottom of every page. Unfortunately, as this parody of space opera continues, the slapdashness remains while the snap peters out.

Funny bits crop up throughout the show (including dark lord Gavin Cummins reading an intergalactic bodice-ripper; Cory Nealy's PBS-esque sales pitch for puppet porn; and a scene in which an imprisoned young space cadet, played by the ever-charming Evan Mosher, cajoles his torturer and fellow prisoners into staging a foppish drawing room comedy)--so the problem isn't so much the sketch comedy as it is the "choose your own adventure" part. Though the cast occasionally asks the audience to select plot options, it quickly becomes obvious that these choices have no real effect on the plot (and are sometimes jokingly ignored). Since half the fun of the books was taking wrong turns (which usually led to horrible death), betraying this premise is a bit like advertising a musical and leaving out the songs. Even worse, this fake audience interaction is completely wasted time, so the 90-minute show feels like two hours or more--and the sketch material itself could already use some judicious pruning. Like most movie sequels, Book 2 is eager to capitalize on a previous success but too hasty to have much substance of its own. BRET FETZER

*Coulrophobia: Fear of clowns.