It's hard to call the one-man show Love & Taxes a good play, but it's easy to call it great standup comedy. It is standup comedy rising to the condition of art, with a fully developed story, some moments of poetry, and lots of politics.

Love & Taxes' story is about a man named Josh Kornbluth (played by a man named Josh Kornbluth). He was brought up by communist parents who were not in the habit of paying their taxes. It was their belief that the money workers gave to the government went straight into the pockets (and serviced the interests) of "the Man." After seven years of not paying his own taxes, Josh decides to abandon his parents' policy and hires a tax attorney to manage his affairs. The tax attorney turns out to be no better than a loan shark, and after some years Josh owes the government and his attorney a total of $80,000. Coupled with the ballooning debt is the pregnancy of Josh's love interest--a poor, inner-city schoolteacher who wants her man to clean up his terrible tax mess before their baby enters the world.

The little poetry that can be found in Love & Taxes is in passages that describe the close relationship Josh had with his father, and passages that express Josh's fondness for the Bay Area neighborhoods he lives in--first, the Mission District, second, Berkeley.

The show's politics, which dominate the second and better half of the performance, concern the meaning of taxes. Josh visits Washington, D.C. and chances to meet "the Man": the IRS commissioner. The encounter leads to Josh attaining an understanding of the tax system that is unusually positive. Many Americans (rich or poor, capitalist or communist), will not agree with Love & Taxes' bold conclusion. CHARLES MUDEDE

Election Show 2004
Historic University Theater
Through Oct 22.
Given how rife this year's presidential election is with fodder for riffing, it's disappointing that the comic actors of Jet City Improv turn in such a politically irrelevant show.

The conceit is fun: Pivoting on obtuse improv topics (Silly Putty, wild squirrels, ninjas, and Charles Dickens, for example), the actors attempt to find grist for their faux presidential election as they plow through debates, scandals, polls, focus groups, pundits, attack ads, and of course, a vote (cast by the audience).

With the Bush/Kerry contest looming, this setup would pack a punch if the cast's radar were tuned to hot topical shit like Abu Ghraib, the Swift Boat ads, and homeland security--using the absurdist conceit to spin comical metaphors and cast light on this year's historic election. Instead, we get a mildly funny take on the election process in general (the anti anti-Dickens TV spot was certainly funny), but nothing that specifically exploits the loaded and surely tragicomic turf of 2004. JOSH FEIT

Dead Woman Home
Pamana Theatre Project
Through Oct 3.
Dead Woman Home belongs to the solo-theater tradition popularized by Anna Deavere Smith, wherein a drama-packed event--the Crown Heights riots of 1991, the L.A. riots of 1992, to name two of Smith's examples--is explored through interviews with the event's participants, whose verbatim responses are shaped into a dramatic text to be performed with sharp idiosyncratic mimicry by the writer-performer. With Dead Woman Home, writer-performer May Nazareno gamely throws herself down the right track. Taking as her subject the August 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, Nazareno focuses on the saga of a Filipina UN aide reported dead in the blast, only to surface later, alive and well. Combining interviews with the "dead" woman's loved ones with news reports and public documents, Nazareno's text is fleshed out with sharp multimedia elements, including original music by Blair Jensen and impressive video design by Mark Ramquist. So why did the end result make me want to kill and/or die?

The fault lies with Nazareno, who earnestly connects the dots in this documentary play-by-numbers with a stunning ignorance of theatricality. Building her drama around the "mystery" of the missing woman--whose fate the audience knows from the start--is one problem; Nazareno's limited mimicry skills are another. Designating character changes with a beguiling array of attempted accents (half of which sound invented on the spot), Nazareno exerts herself to no recognizable end. The whiffs of message--war is bad, sometimes the media get it wrong--add up to nothing, leaving Dead Woman Home dead on arrival. DAVID SCHMADER