The Merchant of Venice
Seattle Shakespeare Company at Seattle Center, 733-8222.
Through March 4.

Director Paul Mitri and the Seattle Shakespeare Company make two stellar choices in their staging of the famed comedy of bigotry The Merchant of Venice. The first is to place the show in the American West. This allows the actors to play the comedy extremely broadly as twanging, bow-legged, audience-friendly stereotypes. In addition, the American frontier forced an excruciating economic co-dependence between different races that fueled resentment and a fevered intolerance. The citizens of Mitri's "Venice City, California" hate the Jewish moneylender Shylock because he's necessary as much as because he's different.

Second, by allowing David S. Klein to spit and snarl his way through a flat-out nasty portrait of Shakespeare's most controversial character, the director and company avoid bringing half- answers to a "problem play." Klein's performance gives the show a toxic through-line. Every mention of Shylock's hardships achieves greater poignancy against that dark backdrop, while the occasional intolerant asides made by noble characters stab the audience in the heart.

The cast settles comfortably around Klein. Particularly effective are Olga Sanchez and Kelly Kitchens as dream woman Portia and her servant/confidante Nerissa. Their ease with one another and graceful attention to character nuance endear them to an audience eager to see their story end well. Kevin Mesher and Ryan Spickard rip into smaller roles with Shatnerian glee, while Paul Stetler and Reginald Jackson make fine romantic leads, at times brave and other times lost. Only James Lapan as Antonio lacks charisma, despite gunfighter imagery that makes his mysterious, much-loved merchant larger than life. His bland performance nearly robs The Merchant of Venice of a necessary rooting interest, particularly during a much-too-loosely directed courtroom climax. Fortunately, Shakespeare's effulgent wit and romantic heart, even in the shadow of his most irredeemable monster, allow for a final, satisfying ride into the sunset. Yee-haw! TOM SPURGEON

Being Inside
Inertia Theatre Company at the Green Lake Bathhouse Theater, 860-1897.
Through Feb 25.

Before you groan at the prospect of another autobiographical theater piece, consider that the author and director of this show is 24 and that the piece is very heavily about its own process: When a teenager in a close-knit family finds out that his father has Alzheimer's dementia, he freaks out, loses part of his youth to his father's deterioration, but rallies his strength and his family by writing a theater thesis that expresses the familial cataclysm onstage. Being Inside is that sort of bare, unabashed theater of personal catharsis, right down to the fact that the playwright's mother sits cheerfully in the box office before the show doling out mints, and his sin-beautiful teenage brother hovers around the merchandise table lending a hand. Some theatergoers naturally will not be interested in this type of self-reflexive family affair, but I found it well and good, especially because the one-act piece is visually captivating and unencumbered by the ego that usually slays these kinds of things.

Despite a few elements that mark Being Inside as student work (like looking to dictionary definitions of "dementia" and "love"), author/ director Joseph Baker somehow makes its abstract movement and fragmentary speeches feel purposeful, organic, and in line with the subject. I thought Baker's choice of using three women, dressed in costumes both ethereal and earthy, to portray parts of himself was near-brilliant; I can't recall any contemporary male playwright who's allowed a female to speak for him. The effect is startling. Baker grounds his visual/verbal abstractions with bits of film that address the health issue of dementia, sociology-class style, but this show's metaphoric conceit--what it's like to be inside someone else's mind--plays out interestingly. He presents mental tugs of war between various parts of his psyche, but his vision is generous, and includes us all. STACEY LEVINE

21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com
The Speakeasy Backroom, 444-4336.
Through March 3.

Performer Mike Daisey's timing is undeniably comic. Not only did he premiere his one-person show about his two years as an acolyte of Amazon.com a single day after the expiration of his non-disclosure agreement, but he will doubtlessly profit from the Internet retailer's unceremonious mass sacking a mere week before his show's opening. Let's do the math: Thirteen hundred bitter ex-employees suddenly left with time to kill--divided by the Speakeasy's 50-seat theater--gives us a whopping 26 shows. Assuming he'll do three shows a week, we arrive at an overwhelming two straight months of sold-out shows. Obviously Daisey learned a valuable lesson during his e-commerce schooling--cash out when your stock is high.

Daisey, a veteran of the sketch comedy group Up in Your Grill and numerous other solo shows, has a bone to pick with Jeff Bezos, the megalomaniacal founder of the floundering company, and he's more than happy to share. Smartly set on a deconstructed stage, which conjures the exposed-duct décor so common in dot-com startups (as Daisey puts it, "We're so busy making money, we don't even have time to cover our ducts"), the show, much like the New Economy itself, has wonderful highs but sadly some frustrating lows.

At close to two hours, Daisey's engaging though rambling tale about climbing up a corporate ladder of lies from the grim basement of customer service to the sun-drenched glamour of "biz dev" would benefit from a substantial trimming or at least the courtesy of an intermission. Maybe he should heed one of his own jokes and use a standard dot-com mind- control method. Trapping educated, over-worked optimists in their cubicles (or their theater seats) is simple--if you can't offer options (or a chance to stretch their legs), an endless supply of sugary soda and squishy bagels will keep 'em fat, happy, and distracted from an increasingly uncomfortable truth. TAMARA PARIS