Piledriver!
Joe Boston Productions at
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Through Aug 26.

Killer Karl Kramer the Kraut was a real person—a Canadian and privately gay professional wrestler in the 1970s who toured with a WWF-style road show on the back roads of Alberta. The rest of the characters in Piledriver! are extrapolations: Harvey (the ref and Kramer's lover), Rock "The Cock" Hardd (a young gay hotshot), Randy Rage (the straight poster boy), and Rage's wife, Angie.

The five take their one-ring circus through the Northwest, drinking, fucking, and fighting. Piledriver! is a behind-the-scenes showbiz story, with sexual politics and star power launching some characters off the deep end. It also inverts the implicit homoeroticism and explicit homophobia in professional wrestling. In the ring, it's all machismo and grunting, but once the match is over, the '70s gay coding spills out of the closet: Judy Garland, Stonewall, Maria Callas, and spots of wit that inevitably go over the heads of the dunderheaded straight characters. Peter Dylan O'Connor (Rage), John Kaufmann (Rock), Timothy Hyland (Karl), and director Andy Jensen are reprising their roles from the 2003 production by Bald Faced Lie, with newcomers Charles Leggett (Harvey) and Jená Cane (Angie Rage).

The actors are capable and the wrestling is pretty badass, with the requisite kicking, choking, and slamming. (According to the press release, the mat action was so lively the set collapsed during the final preview.) The play is about the fakery and politics behind the wrestling, inoculating the less convincing fight choreography from criticism—we can enjoy the athleticism and, when the action looks too staged, take ironic pleasure from being in on the secret. But for all the fun, there is a hollowness at the heart of Piledriver!. Three quarters of the script is bantamweight drama—sex, banter, and wrestling—which depends on the investment of a big, rowdy audience to give it lift. (Piledriver!'s 2003 production was at Re-bar, where, one imagines, the booze and barroom atmosphere facilitated heckling and howling at the actors.) For whatever reason, there were only a dozen or so people the night I attended. We did the best we could, cheering and booing on cue, but it was awkward, self-conscious work. BRENDAN KILEY

Heretic Links
Experimental Theatre Project at
Richard Hugo House
Through Aug 26.

Heretic Links is a comedy about some very unfunny subjects. A satirical reconstruction of an actual inquisitorial court case, the play recounts the exploits of one Catharina Linck (Kayti Barnett, cute as a button), a woman accused of masquerading as a man and marrying another woman. Armed with a swaggering charm, a Tony Danza accent, and an obscenely large "leather sausage" down the pants, she flounders awkwardly through her idea of manhood: a perpetually unemployed wife beater ("I'm the husband, so I can beat you if I please; everybody says so") whose fake organ proves too bendy to satisfy. A few thousand penis jokes later, Catharina finds herself and her gender on trial before the wiggy, repressed pervs of the inquisitorial court, who sentence her to a decidedly unhilarious death.

A tiresome blend of earnest and goofy, Heretic Links takes its lack of seriousness very seriously. The nonstop buffoonery is overeager, unfocused—like a summer-camp skit—and, for most of the play, obscures the message rather than illuminating it. In fact, it wasn't until the inquisitor said explicitly, "I'll do my best to make sure the Inquisition never ends" (wiiiink!), and solemn cast members held up recent Times and P-I gay-marriage headlines, that I sort of got it. And "it" isn't even that complicated.

Satire is hard to pull off—it needs edge and self-awareness and perfect pitch. Maybe Heretic Links could be whittled and polished into something meaningful. Maybe the comedy could be merged with the message. Maybe I'm just incredibly dumb. But all the maybes in the world can't make a bad joke funny, and funny Heretic Links is not. LINDY WEST

Black Water
Off-Center Opera at
Center House Theatre
Through Aug 27.

Black Water is a contemporary American opera in pedestrian English, with lines like "I had no trouble finding your place, Buffy" and a solo about picnic foods crowned by a triumphant tribute to Häagen-Dazs. You don't hear such contemporary brand-name dropping at Seattle Opera (product placement! think of the revenue!), but a burgeoning operatic fringe scene is striking out into new(ish) territory.

The libretto, by Joyce Carol Oates, is about a senator who drunkenly drives away from a party and off a dock. He survives; his young passenger doesn't. The music, by John Duffy, is thoroughly American, a combination of Broadway show tunes, swinging clarinets, and merry, Sousa pomp. The first act is devoted to the party (tennis matches, cocktails) and the senator's courtship with his future manslaughter victim. Then, at intermission, I left. I like the idea of fringe opera, but this one didn't hold my attention. Fringe theater isn't just the Rep writ small—it's a lower-stakes playground where artists trade higher production values for the freedom to wander in weird directions, looking for things unexpected and awesome. Black Water is a wobbly, pared-down emulation of its bigger-budgeted brothers—contemporariness and ice-cream references aside, the production doesn't take any adventurous leaps. But, if Seattle opera sustains its conservatism and demand for a fringe scene, I look forward to more innovation—and arias about hot dogs and beer. BRENDAN KILEY