Cherry Cherry Lemon

Theatre Off Jackson

Through May 13.

Listening to other people talk about love and sex can be grindingly dull, but this remount of Keri Healey's 2001 hit is raucous and sensitive enough to keep your attention. The play is strongest when its conversations veer between romance and other subjects—from workaday dreariness to ailing parents to other people's pregnancies—revealing how tightly our romantic lives are laced to everything else. It's thrilling to eavesdrop on the women talking about their flings, boyfriends, and ex-husbands over cups of tea and bottles of beer—and it's dirty. (The title comes from a lewd scorecard Keira keeps on her one-night stand with a sailor.) The three-person ensemble is very good: Kate Czajkowski knocks it out of the park as a shy but passionate divorcée venturing back into the dating world and Keira McDonald revs it up as Kate's bold, sexually adventurous friend. The live guitar accompaniment, by Eric Branner, sets the mood—it's hard to imagine the play without it.

Healey's script isn't flawless. It's occasionally overwritten, as in Keira's description of walking into a nightclub: "A wave of nausea abates as I relent and begin to move with the crowd." But it compensates for its weak patches in spades with wit, insight, and smokin' one-liners about first dates, mornings after, and sex with small penises: "It's not like he was throwing a hot dog down a hallway—I kegel!" At a brisk one hour, Cherry Cherry Lemon emulates its prime obsession: It is alternately tender, vigorous, and shamelessly funny, leaving us gratified, maybe a little bit raw, and wanting more. BRENDAN KILEY

Rounding Third

Intiman Theatre

Through May 14.

Sports is a ripe, relatively unexplored field for theater—it's got driven personalities, odd rituals, reversals of fortune, oodles of Americana, and it's a cross-marketing gold mine. Existing sports plays all seem to be about baseball (perhaps because of its reputation as a civilized sport) and they are learn-and-grow morality tales, as if playwrights are too busy justifying their interest in sports to exploit their inherent drama. Needless to say, the theatrical equivalent of Caddyshack remains unwritten.

Rounding Third is a baseball play straight out of the cookie cutter: Two Little League dads meet in a bar. One is Don (never Donald); one is Michael (never Mike). Don drinks beer; Michael drinks bottled water. Don paints houses; Michael is a suit. Long-time coach Don insists that winning is everything; new assistant coach Michael thinks fair play is its own reward. Don knows a lot about baseball; Michael doesn't know dick.

Once you understand they are The Odd Couple of Little League (a fact established in the first five minutes of the two-act play), there's nowhere left to go. Rounding Third is a strict learn-and-grow play. I didn't even learn anything new about baseball. The play is a dud and the audience knew it, except for one guy with a piercing, whooping laugh who, I'm guessing, coaches Little League. Or is playwright Richard Dresser's brother—or, better yet, a hired laugh provocateur. Hey, there's an idea! I sit through unfunny plays all the time! I announce myself open for business at very reasonable prices. BRENDAN KILEY

La Bête

ArtsWest

Through April 29.

David Hirson's talky homage to Molière begins with a pantomime about dusting, which would have been diverting had I known what I'd soon wish desperately to be diverted from. Here's a thought: If you're writing a play, and you want to demonstrate that one character is a blowhard and the other is a wit, let the wit interrupt the blowhard with the occasional scathing retort. Wild, silent attempts to stab the blowhard with fine silver will not suffice. In La Bête, Elomire (Beth A. Cooper) is the wit paradoxically inclined to mute physical attack; she's the leader of a theater troupe under the patronage of Prince Conti (Gavin Cummins). Valere (Nick DeSantis) is the colorful, frizzy-haired blowhard—a street performer whom the Prince has forcibly inserted into Elomire's (and our) company. The first act presents the meeting between Elomire and Valere, which soon turns into Valere squawking in rhyming couplets, without interruption, for about 45 minutes. There are amusing moments ("naive enthusiasm," apparently, "begets a sort of logorrheic spasm"), but the point of Valere's pompous soliloquizing is to annoy the audience. It works.

Prince Conti instructs Elomire to give Valere a chance and the entire company joins in a performance of Valere's hit, a tendentious playlet about the tragic triumph of beauty over substance. Meanwhile, the audience is asked to ponder a timeless problem for all humanity (or, at least, to theater people): the choice between lucrative mediocrity (Valere) and noncommercial genius (Elomire). But, like most conversations regarding mediocrity and excellence, the evidence is scant. Valere's play-within-the-play is a meditation on Hirson's own themes—scoff at the character and you scoff at the playwright—while Elomire's work is brazenly absent. The real choice in La Bête is not between mediocrity and genius. It's far more pragmatic: Would you rather bank on reputed genius or decide for yourself? ANNIE WAGNER