Dark Ride

Open Circle Theater

Through Feb 29.
Dark Ride is a thread of thought, a broken layer cake, a set of Russian dolls endlessly yielding new weird men: a dealer in rare stones, a translator laboring over an obscure text, John Wilkes Booth (or his remains, at least, mummified and preserved). The trick of the play--whose plot is kicked up by a few oblique clues from an ancient, untranslatable text, which gives way to a play-within-a-text-within-a-postcard-within-a-television-program-within-a-lecture-within... well, it becomes a little hard to follow, but all of it builds toward an oculist convention in Mexico City--anyway, the trick is to figure out, even as the play continues to deceive you, how all the pieces fit together. You can't, really, but the cast is so on it and so convincing and so fun to watch--and funny--that it hardly matters. The show is impossibly well directed (spotty lighting notwithstanding), driven by the very real-seeming sense that these people aren't acting so much as being acted upon. And it's not just men in this show, but women, too: an intensely watchable couch potato, an aquatic enthusiast called Deep Sea Edna, and a lady who intrudes upon the already peculiar action with increasingly convoluted disquisitions on the nature of coincidence. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Two Birds and a Stone

Capitol Hill Arts Center

Through Feb 28.
No matter what its virtues, it's difficult to recommend any play as grindingly miserable as Two Birds and a Stone. Set in an imaginary war zone that strongly resembles the latest Balkan nightmare, the play is a chest-beating, hair-tearing pageant of torture, rape, and murder. All the characters are pitiable and everyone's a victim.

Nasty, brutish, and long, Two Birds (by local playwright Amy Wheeler) is an ambitious combination of war parable and poetic fantasy that delivers mixed results. With weird soundscapes and poetic flourishes, the play is thick on atmosphere and thin on story. An orphaned boy meets a pregnant woman fleeing a hellish interrogation center, and the two hide in a barn until she gives birth to her rape-fathered child. The rest is life during wartime, with a few relieving moments of playful mythology. In fact, Wheeler's best writing comes in these scraps of comic fancy, when the sun, moon, and King Carp take over the stage. Matthew Kwatinetz's impressive and roughhewn set fills the room, so the action happens above, next to, and around the audience. Director Christine Young has turned the script into a well-choreographed spectacle, disorientingly staged to great effect.

The script, however, needs a steely editor to revise the poetic flurries (some of which are way too beatnik-hokey to take seriously) and give the play some dimension. Horror, terror, horror, horror, and for what? A sense of moral anguish, apparently. A tragedy should be first and foremost a compelling story about compelling people, and a morality lesson incidentally, if at all. BRENDAN KILEY

Arthur: The Begetting

Taproot Theatre

Through March 6.
A perpetual haze hangs over the set of Arthur: The Begetting, perhaps to indicate that we are in long ago times--the late fifth century A.D., to be specific, shortly before the birth of the semi-mythological King Arthur.

The tempestuousness is at times entertaining--imagine Lord of the Rings without the landscapes and action sequences, just the summit meetings and arguments, and you'll have something of the tone of Arthur: The Begetting. The actors dig into the overwrought dialogue with big, swaggering emotions (Nolan Palmer, as Uther Pendragon, is particularly zesty). But there's just so much of it; the first hour of the play is swamped with exposition, which could have been conveyed more simply, swiftly, and concisely. Even once the story gets moving, there's still an awful lot of talk, delivered in thick, pan-United Kingdom accents (sort of an olio of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh).

To its credit, the substance of the play is more psychologically complex than your average fantasy novel--playwright Jeff Berryman isn't writing about a world where the good guys and bad guys can be sorted out by the consonants of their names. Maybe with some rigorous editing, I'd find the story more involving; as it is, I watched it all with a cold heart. BRET FETZER