Intiman Playhouse
Through Nov 20.
If this clumsy production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town is what Intiman's five-year classic play initiative, pompously titled "The American Cycle," is going to be about, I want none of it. The decision to cast minor television-celebrity Tom Skerritt in the role of the Stage Manager may rake in the box-office cash, but it also rakes the rest of the cast over blistering coals. Skerritt can barely keep his lines straight, much less convince us that he can conjure infinitely detailed worlds and usher the dead into the realm of the living. His is the only artificially amplified voice, and as his mumbled monologues boom in from a distant speaker, the Stage Manager begins to rival town drunk Simon Stimson (Larry Paulsen) in his air of anxiety and utter bewilderment. Skerritt is awful, and the ensemble suffers for it.
The race-neutral casting of the ensemble tends to whitewash the text of the play. You'd think that the choice to invoke a "multicultural" citizenry would be accompanied by some sort of emphasis on the play's mild references to prejudice--but the Stage Manager's ethnically weighted descriptions of the various churches in Grover's Corners are played for laughs. When the Stage Manager blithely announces that the women of the town endure housework without complaint, we watch with our own eyes as those women cheerfully obey his narrative authority. The bleak subordination of the bright young Emily (Celia Keenan-Bolger) to her fiancé, a half-wit athlete named George (Joaqu'n Torres), fails to inform the tragedy of Emily's later death in childbirth. In his glossy multiculturalism, director Bartlett Sher inflames the universalizing impulse of Wilder's small-town play, and refuses us the critical distance that might place this literary work in the rich context of American history. ANNIE WAGNER
Romance/Romance
ArtsWest
Through Oct 30.
In fin-de-siécle Vienna, a host of unsentimental wits looked coolly but sympathetically on the illusions and cruelties of class and romance. A story by Arthur Schnitzler, one of the period's best writers, provides the source material for the first half of the two-in-one musical comedy Romance/Romance at ArtsWest. A wealthy young man, bored by the parties and easy morals of his peers, disguises himself as a member of the lower class and wanders the streets looking for innocent love. Unbeknownst to him, the charming young woman he meets is herself a lady of means seeking a tryst untainted by wealth. They delight each other with their mutual lies, fooling themselves as much as each other, relishing the romance of poverty and starvation. Sprightly, stylish, and featuring some lovely melodies, the piece has a cunning balance of noble ideals and uncomfortable realities. Performers Nick DeSantis and particularly Katie Foster smoothly mix yearning and cynicism while singing superbly.
You should then leave at intermission, because the second act is a banal, sub-Updike story of bourgeois near-infidelity in the Hamptons. BRET FETZER
Family Stories
Live Girls! Theater
Through Oct 30.
Does the concept of family have any meaning when it's every man for himself? Family Stories, a new play by Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanovic, pursues this question through the story of four children in late-'90s Belgrade who enact family life in ways by turn comical, bizarre, revelatory, and deeply sad. The play is structured around the children "playing house." Each successive invention of the family becomes more complex and adult, though one element always stays the same: at the end of each game, the "child"--played winningly and convincingly by Merlin Whitehawk as 10-year-old Adrija--kills his "parents," 12-year-old Vojin (Jeffrey Grimm, whose slim frame swims in his oversized father-pants) and 11-year-old Milena (the shrill, histrionic Erin Knight). The cycle repeats, with Adrija shooting his parents, strangling them, burning them, choking them, until finally he packs a bag and tells them he is leaving Belgrade, killing them with grief.
This last iteration of the family story is the most realistic and the most poignant, paralleling the citizen's relationship to a war-torn country with the child's relationship to his parents: the necessary abandonment of the old ways in order to progress. But by the time the play finally gets around to this point, the constant cycling through the reinventions of the dysfunctional family has leached away any emotional resonance that might have been present in the very sad ending to a very sad play. KATE PREUSSER
Kentucky Ghosts
Northwest Actors Studio
Through Oct 31.
This mildly entertaining production cobbles together an endless series of ghost stories, adapted from tales of the supernatural gathered by anthropologist Lynwood Montell of Western Kentucky University. The play flows neatly from one narrator to the next, helped along by inventive but essentially motiveless lighting design. There's no real order to the jumble of similar narratives, other than that Act I is mostly preoccupied with indoor hauntings and Act II with outdoor ones. The cyclical form does away with any sense of overarching suspense, making the stories creepy but--with one thrillingly timed exception--not particularly frightening.
Troy Mink is superb playing an array of distracted or dull Kentuckians who have to be prodded to tell what they've seen; his narratives are all the more captivating for their reluctant delivery. The rest of the ensemble is capable, if a little geographically caricatured--I found myself wishing just one of them could scrape together a pair of shoes. ANNIE WAGNER
