A Raisin in the Sun
Intiman Theatre, 269-1900. Through May 19.

The central plot of A Raisin in the Sun portrays an urban, black, lower-class family struggling to move out of a cramped apartment into a cheap house in a resistant white neighborhood. Though this story remains sadly current, the play's vitality lies more in playwright Lorraine Hansberry's incredible eye for detail. Hansberry touches on a wide variety of sociopolitical topics--older generations struggling to educate their children, then finding their children's new attitudes threatening; the confused relationship American blacks have to Africa; hairstyles as a form of assimilation--and weaves them into the fabric of the characters' lives such that every thread is contentious and vibrant.

In its broad outlines, the story verges into melodrama--a mother (Cynthia Jones) wrestles with an unwanted pregnancy; her husband (Danny Johnson) loses the money they'd gained from his father's insurance settlement; his educated sister (Robyne Landiss Walker) struggles between two suitors, one wealthy and assimilated (Shanga Parker), the other a Nigerian intellectual (Sylvester Kamara). But Hansberry grounds everything in her subtle, difficult characters, and director Jacqueline Moscou and the uniformly excellent cast avoid the kind of bravura performances that would make hash of Hansberry's well-calibrated dialogue. The family's matriarch runs the greatest risk of sentimentality; in the hands of Venida Evans, she's complex and genuine.

It's said that women and African Americans understand more about the world than men and white people; men and white people don't need to examine their assumptions because our culture is run according to these assumptions. Maybe this is why Hansberry seems more clear-eyed than her contemporaries, such as Arthur Miller. Miller could inflate the sad fate of Willy Loman into tragedy; Hansberry knows that society would be just as happy if this family and its aspirations disappeared. Against the backdrop of this lack of illusions, the quiet moments will stick with you longer than the climactic gestures, because it's in the quiet moments that life is truly lived. BRET FETZER

The Marriage of Bette and Boo
ArtsWest, 938-0339. Through May 5.

Part domestic comedy and part painful thicket of family dysfunction, The Marriage of Bette and Boo--the play Christopher Durang once described as the one closest to him of all his works--is supported well by a generally strong cast. A series of 33 short, spare scenes, it follows a 1950-something marriage. The play is narrated by Bette and Boo's son Matt, also called Skippy, a literary type who (like an author) floats in and out of the scenes of family history from a present-day vantage point.

On the edge of surrealism, the play depicts a guilt-ridden, fragile aunt named Joan who, after failing a cello performance, is seen in most subsequent scenes hauling the instrument with her, and an obstetrician who, delivering Bette's succession of four stillborn babies, brings each swaddled infant to the family in the hospital waiting room and drops the bundle on the floor. This anger leaking through the scenes fuels the work, as does Durang's heartbreak over his father's alcoholism, his mother's nagging and disappointment, and the seeming passivity of God. As the scenes progress, Matt's relatives seem nutty; by the end of the play, Durang makes it clear that the characters' stupidity and cruelty are unbearable, but, as always in families, difficult to leave behind.

Most of the cast members inhabit their characters with gratifying gusto; in particular, the women play female masochism and suffering in disturbing, effective ways. Standouts include Seattle newcomer Gretchen Douma as Margaret Brennan, Matt's maternal grandmother, who strikes a strong balance between motherly kindness and cruelty; Karen Gruber as Soot, his paternal grandmother; Heather Harris as Joan; and Katherine Woolverton as Bette, who hits the right notes combining Bette's infantile idiocy and mature, if myopic, determination. Don Taylor as Boo's father seems rooted in his bones to the character's smiling hostility. One miscasting weakens the production, however: Justin Sund as Matt lacks the confidence and finesse to pull off this very difficult role. STACEY LEVINE

Raised in Captivity
Moonlight Theatre Company at Odd Duck Studio, 367-2174. Through May 12.

In the program notes for Moonlight Theatre's simply staged presentation of Raised in Captivity, actor Peter Weisenburger (a recent transplant from NYC) writes that "he has always wanted to work on a Nicky Silver play," and that same enthusiasm is evident in every actor's performance in this sincere, taut, but overly dramatic production.

Weisenburger plays Dylan Taylor Sinclair, a convicted murderer who has caught the epistolary fancy of Sebastian Bliss (played with Jack Nicholson-like fervor by Alex Samuels), a sexually confused, repressed New York writer. When the play opens, Sebastian's mother has been unexpectedly killed by a loose showerhead, and Sebastian travels to his childhood home, where he meets up with his twin sister Bernadette (Natalie Symons). Bernadette, whose most salient characteristic is a voice that induces migraines (a characteristic Symons portrays very effectively), wants only one thing from Sebastian: Evidence that his life is not, in fact, perfect. This will make her feel better about her own mediocre existence.

So Sebastian begins to open up, and in Nicky Silver fashion, not only is his life revealed as less than perfect, it is actually on the brink of insanity. But--also in typical Nicky Silver fashion--sanity is relative. Everyone in a Nicky Silver play rotates around his or her own center of gravity, and collisions between the characters send up sprays of loosed material. It is difficult stuff to contain, especially on a small stage, and this production gets messy, as if the parabola of the dramatic tension looped out of the director's hands. Some of the messiness is fascinating and seems to fit with the craziness of the play, but much of it feels awkward. The actors sometime sound as if they've just barely memorized the script (which may improve over time), and this stiffens both the comedic and the dramatic intention.

Perhaps the problem is with the script itself, which exhausts its cutting humor for some relatively boring platitudes in the end, and seems to exhaust even these actors' eager ambitions. TRACI VOGEL