Dinner with Friends
A Contemporary Theatre, 292-7676.
Through July 1.

Maybe this would mean more to me if I were married. Exceedingly comfortable couple Gabe and Karen (John Procaccino and Janet Zarish) invite their dear friends Beth and Tom (Kristin Flanders and Mark Chamberlin) over for dinner. Only Beth shows up, and between the main meal and dessert she reveals that Tom has left her for another woman. Gabe and Karen are stunned; this goes against everything they ever thought about Tom. For the rest of the play, they're forced to examine their friendship with him, what they thought they knew about Tom and Beth's marriage, the assumptions they've made about their own marriage... and as Dinner with Friends went on, I found it hard to muster up much concern.

My apathy had nothing to do with the capable cast members, who projected a wonderful sense of intimacy. The design and direction were solid, though I'm weary of hydraulic scene changes. The scenes skillfully evoked the comforts and complications of domesticity (Gabe and Karen use food to communicate and to avoid difficult topics; Tom and Beth let their vicious fights lead to vicious but intense sex). The scenes and dialogue reveal character with nuance and delicacy. But the characters aren't especially smart and what's happened to them isn't unusual. More crucially, the crux of the drama isn't Tom and Beth's divorce, it's Gabe and Karen's resistance to the positive changes that Tom and Beth go through after divorcing--and frankly, the angst of stasis left me cold. Dinner with Friends wrestles determinedly with the human desire that everyone be just like you, but the script doesn't have the emotional scope to make that seem compelling and sad instead of just meager and pathetic. BRET FETZER

Pterodactyls
Seattle Theatre Project at the Union Garage,
325-6500. Through June 30.

The good news: Pterodactyls is an astute, fun, and well-written play, fraught with keen insight and dotted with clever and effective symbolism. It is a fun and disturbing "black comedy" (always gotta love one of those) that moves fluidly from slapstickish humor to pessimistic social commentary, dips its toe in the waters of poetic irony, and even flirts with absurdism. It is, in my opinion, the best play ever to emerge from the tortured typewriter of Nicky Silver. The bad news: The production just isn't all that good.

Pterodactyls tells the story of the decline and fall of the Duncan family, a typically "dysfunctional" (oh, how I loathe that term) clan of drunks, sexually addicted fags, drug addicts, money-grubbing social climbers, and schizoids who, eventually and unsurprisingly, bring about their own destruction. Pretty fertile material to work with. But although this production as a whole is ambitious, it is definitely out of its depth. The efforts of the players seem well-intended but sophomoric: Situations, lines, and plot twists that have the power to bring the house down with laughter or, conversely, disturb and devastate, fall flat to a one, all skimmed over too quickly in the unmodulated manner that is the hallmark of the fledgling actor. And no one among the players has the oh-so-important emotional grasp of, or connection to, his or her respective character-- motivations and exchanges seem sadly canned, and characters are one-dimensional and caricaturish. Brilliant, funny, or moving line after brilliant, funny, or moving line flies by one after the other, each unappreciated and barely noticed, lacking the emotional or comedic punch necessary to drive it home. I couldn't help thinking what a dazzling gem this script could have produced in the hands of a better-weathered cast and crew. ADRIAN RYAN

Keeley & Du
Stepping Stone Productions at Nippon Kan Theatre,
781-3905. Through June 30.

Strident and dumb is no way to go through life, especially for a work of art. All by its lonesome, Jane Martin's Keeley & Du risks further damage to the nation's already single-digit IQ on issues relating to abortion. Martin's plot is straight from the secondary story on an episode of In the Heat of the Night: As a working-class woman named Keeley makes her way to an abortion clinic, she's kidnapped by pro-life radicals and chained in a basement, where they intend to force her to carry to term. In between loony lectures about the horrors of abortion from a creepy ringleader pastor, Keeley tenuously connects with her primary caregiver and nurse, the Jean Stapleton-like Du. As the profane-but-headstrong young waitress and the doughy-but-kindhearted matron begin to bond like escapees from a Horton Foote film festival, one settles in for a shrill but predictable load of hooey, complete with the older woman doing the younger woman's hair. Then Martin takes it up a lunatic notch by having Keeley subjected to a bizarre reconciliation attempt with her rapist ex-husband. At that point, you don't have to be a Joan Crawford fan to guess where it's all going to end.

For all I know, Martin may be absolutely right that the fight over abortion comes down to patriarchal control issues. I don't know politics, but I know a bad play when I see one. Ambitious subject matter calls for exacting technique applied with the courage of conviction, not a comfortable rehash of dramatic devices further loaded for effect. There's a thin line between exploring contemporary issues through drama and exploiting them for drama's sake, and what side of the line you end up on has less to do with intentions than you might think. Bloody sheets shouldn't be just another killer visual. TOM SPURGEON