This acrobatic adaptation of Rapunzel opens with a clipped rendition of the classic fairy tale, performed by musician John Osebold at a jaunty pace that belies the tale's grisly content. Then, at the characters' insistence, he slowly plucks out a new beginning for the story. In this version, which was inspired by Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, the wicked enchantress (Esther Edelman) is just a midwife, and her lover Rapunzel (Amy Rider) has moved in with her to avoid an arranged marriage and to learn to identify herbs. The interloping prince (David Godsey) is a bit of a brat, but both the midwife and her apprentice find him cute enough to sleep with. Meanwhile, everyone conveys their frustrations and passions by scooting up or tumbling down or cocooning themselves in cascades of strong, flexible fabric, or "tissu."

Although the tale still contains vestiges of the sinister narrative it's based on (after being secured in the tower, Rapunzel's speech regresses to cheerful, echolalic bursts), recasting Rapunzel as a mundane romantic triangle mostly flattens out the story. When the characters are on the ground, the staging is similarly uninventive. The three stations that initially set the scene--the girl's igloo-like skirt, the prince's ribbed crossbow, and the midwife's nest/cauldron--are taken too literally as locations, and abandoned as soon as the action is confined to the downstage tower.

What's wonderful about this show, though, is that the minute you've tired of the unimaginative action on the ground, the characters take to the ribbons of fabric and express their everyday joys and despairs midair. (A sequence involving a spurned lover is especially affecting.) The score that accompanies these acrobatics is inventive, varied, and evocative. Your mind may still wander--how much better might this production have been if the story were still cruel and familiar, rather than "radical" and dull--but your eyes and ears will be beguiled. ANNIE WAGNER

Biro

Empty Space Theatre

Through April 23.
I go to one-man shows expecting to be either transfixed or bored out of my mind, so it's a surprise when a solo performance leaves me feeling neutral. Biro certainly begins strikingly. The title character, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and royal-blue Keds, emerges in a rectangle of light. A Ugandan refugee who's come to the U.S. for access to antiretroviral drugs and to earn money to send to his child, Biro (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) finds himself in Texas, struggling with alcoholism, imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and facing deportation. To the credit of Mwine, who also wrote and directed the piece, Biro's initial troubles feel accessible, even understated. It's easy to let his immediate situation recede as he describes the life that led him to this hostile place.

But as the show progresses, and Biro's life is silhouetted against such larger-than-life figures as dictators Idi Amin, Milton Abote, and Fidel Castro, and such ur-narratives as the sweeping march of HIV/AIDS, Mwine's wry story is overpowered. His characters are backdrop--literally, images projected onto a huge, white cloth--and they don't truly participate in the history they're meant to represent. Though Mwine has a stunning facility with accents, his vocal characterizations can be grating. (A callous, nasal principal and a wise, nasal uncle seem to be the same person.) You'll learn a lot from Biro, but the experience will leave you unmoved. ANNIE WAGNER

Northwest New Works Festival

On the Boards

Run ended.
The second weekend of NWNW at On the Boards was a strong, focused showcase of performance experiments that began with theater and ended with dance. Macha Monkey previewed their Cowgirl Play, a comic, self-consciously low-budget Western with singing cowgirls, a clumsy desperado, and sweet guitar picking by songwriter Rick Miller. Next came Portland's Joe van Appen, who performed a hypnotizing series of monologues from his Ridilin Chic. He snapped through a kaleidoscope of deluded, degenerate characters, from unmanageably stoned boys in a mall to a madman fantasizing about conquering the asylum to a late-night TV watcher communing with the flesh on the screen. Ridilin Chic is weird and sharp and I hope the full production gets a Seattle showing.

Dance dominated the second half of the program, striking a nice balance between narrative choreography and more imagistic work. SOM Performance's …and a cycle was a slow, minimal work from the latter, stage-picture camp. Three women repeated small, simple movements to looped ukulele, electronica, and scraping noises, evoking a moody, hollow sadness. Fence, by wilkes.barber, was at the character-driven end of the spectrum. A man and a woman developed a relationship through a movable frame of wire fencing. The symbolism was a little heavy-handed but the dancing was compelling and wilkes.barber's computer musician Heather Perkins kept her laptop in a bright red barbecue--a simple image that made my night. BRENDAN KILEY