Pacific Science Center, 634-9018. $12.
Through Aug 25.
Take Bill Nye, the Nutty Professor (Jerry, not Eddie), and the geeky-cool speech and debate team captain you had a major crush on in high school. Throw 'em in a blender and you've got John Kaufmann--and a pretty good idea of what to expect from Starball, Kaufmann's new show at the Pacific Science Center's Smith Planetarium. Singular in its own self-consciously giddy weirdness, Starball is not a play per se, but a surreal mélange of science, musical revue, ersatz Jungian dream analysis, and improvised Irish drinking songs.
The "experience" is gleefully orchestrated by a suspender-and-bow-tied Mr. Kaufmann (your charismatically goofy "conductor") and his high-spirited, accordion-playing "proxy" (Dan Dennis). The audience gathers at the Science Center's ticket gate and is led to Kaufmann's "clearing" (the planetarium) where he--in what is part monologue, part improv, part audience-interactive astronomy class--explores the night sky, the mythology behind constellations, and various other cosmic minutiae.
But Starball boasts as much poetry as science. At the get-go, audience members are required to pencil down a recent, vivid dream. These are gathered in an old shoeshine box (Starball delights in small, eccentric details), picked at random, and read aloud. Led by Kaufmann, the audience develops a detailed myth featuring the dream's themes and images (e.g., a spaniel sitting in a bucket), and then, via a laser pointer and some great leaps of imagination, creates new, personalized constellations on the planetarium ceiling based on the dreams. Then everyone makes up a saucy song about the dream and moves on to the next. Most of this takes place in the dark, and audience participation is mandatory. (I got to play the Earth. I rotated on my axis and everything.)
Starball is a quirky and pointy-headed adventure, sexy in an odd and indescribable way, and would probably require psilocybin to get any more surreal. I loved it. ADRIAN RYAN.
Nickel and Dimed
Intiman Theatre, 269-1900. $27-$42.
Through Aug 25.
In order to discover whether the optimistic premise of welfare reform had any value, the marvelous political writer Barbara Ehrenreich undertook a socio-scientific journalistic experiment on a grand scale: She entered the minimum-wage workforce to see if she could make the most basic ends meet. The resulting book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, found Ehrenreich, with her trademark directness, cutting through the cant and rhetoric to the terrible paradox of the working poor: They work like dogs, and still barely survive. Now Intiman director Bartlett Sher and playwright Joan Holden have turned this book into a play--a puzzling proposition, when you consider the conflicting aims of political writing and dramatic theater.
To translate Ehrenreich's story to the stage, Holden has rendered the story of a social experiment as the personal journey of a character named Barbara--specifically, who this Barbara is when stripped of achievements, education, things. As a play, Nickel and Dimed is not without power, but it feels thin, less substantial. Actress Sharon Lockwood plays Barbara like a frenetic standup routine, with a little too much ba-da-boom in her witty asides to the audience. The power of Ehrenreich's writing lay in the combination of accumulated detail with social analysis, which Holden's play leaves to the end in a kind of brickbat finale.
You are left with the larger, more uncomfortable question of who this play is for and what it can accomplish. Will the usual Harper's-reading, NPR-listening liberals congratulate themselves for having sat through something difficult, and then slip into the nights of their well-fed lives? How do you translate a play wrapped impenetrably in good intentions into actual policy change? It's harder than you think. The night I saw Nickel and Dimed, I happened to find myself sitting next to Mayor Greg Nickels, and although I wanted terribly much to ask him what he might do about poverty in Seattle, I didn't. I slipped into the night with everyone else. EMILY HALL
Speechless
Bald Faced Lie
at Empty Space Theatre, 325-6500. $15-$19.
Through Aug 24.
Comedies have a much bigger burden to bear than dramas. While serious productions can pull you in with compelling story lines and character development, comedies face the far more difficult job of making you laugh. With Speechless, local comedy theater troupe Bald Faced Lie attempts to raise the bar on humor even higher, with a series of vignettes that try to crack the comedy code without the use of the English language. After a short introduction in Spanish, the play refrains from using language entirely, instead mixing grunts, groans, laughter, and pantomime to tell stories where words no longer work.
While the lofty idea is an interesting one, unfortunately its execution isn't particularly funny. Most of the jokes rely on exaggerations of overused comedic tricks (attempts to hide your naughty bits, banana peels, farting, nose picking) instead of using silence to do something a little cleverer. The skits that upped the ante (such as one involving the inner thoughts of dinner-party guests) were few and far between, making Speechless feel like a bunch of gags strung together without much thought. Although the acting was solid, the punch lines were so simple that watching the play was like watching children's theater (albeit with a little T&A). JENNIFER MAERZ
