Grand Magic
A Contemporary Theatre, 292-7676.
Through Nov 18.

People were leaving after the first act, and I envied them. Though the translation of this play by Italian dramatist Eduardo de Filippo--about a possessive husband whose wife disappears in a magician's trick and never returns--isn't terribly deft, the problem seemed to lie more with the sluggish pace and misdirected actors. John Procaccino seemed strangely ill-suited to play the husband, uncomfortable with the character's prickliness. I sank into my seat after intermission, bracing for two more long and dismal acts.

But then the production started to shift. With the help of a detective, the husband tracks the magician (Ken Ruta) to his tenement apartment and demands to know what became of his wife. The scene with the detective felt as oddly pointless and ill-shaped as the first act, but as the magician begins to convince the husband that he's under hypnosis--that he's still standing on the beach of the hotel where the magic show took place, that everything he's experienced since then is part of a grand experiment--the production suddenly slid into focus. Procaccino's performance became a luminous event, vulnerable and full of conflicted hope. Everything got even better in the third act, which takes place years later, as the husband sinks deeper into the delusion that he's under hypnosis and struggles to find the key that will let him awake.

The play's metaphysical aspect no doubt owes a debt to Filippo's contemporary Luigi Pirandello (playwright of Six Characters in Search of an Author), but it's a living, fluid idea in the hands of Procaccino, Ruta, and Clayton Corzatte (as a servant who cheerfully plays along with the husband's schism). The script could have used a more aggressive adaptation instead of a straightforward translation, but it has a genuine vision. It's also so rare and surprising to watch something get better as it goes along, the play is worth seeing almost for that alone. BRET FETZER

The Return to Morality
Seattle Theatre Project at Open Circle Theater, 325-6500.
Through Nov 18.

The Return to Morality could very well be one big joke. Like its protagonist, an author whose satirical paean to right-wing values ends up being taken seriously by the very audience it hopes to skewer, it's possible that playwright Jamie Pachino wrote this idiotic, embarrassing mess as an attack on clumsy polemical writing. If that were true, the only thing Seattle Theatre Project would be guilty of is staging an overlong, overwrought, and obtusely rotten play.

Instead, the audience must suffer Pachino's pitch-meeting premise as it moves through a ridiculous world of convenient, logic-bending fantasy figures. A television host laughs at an anti-Semitic joke for higher ratings, a political party chairman sets up a blackmail ring like some bad guy on Hunter, and a president is elected due to a keynote speech by a political unknown linked to abortion clinic bombings. The subtitle, "A Political Fable in Two Acts," should allow for some measure of larger-than-life theatrics; but fables make points hard to discuss in the real world. The point here seems to be that conservatives espouse values to which they don't always adhere. Really? Ya think? Anyone older than nine who hasn't had those particular scales fall from their eyes deserves to see this show as punishment.

Ironically, by reducing politics to one-dimensional monsters and soap-opera plot lines, Pachino and company are only drawing attention away from more insidious, much more plausible, and inconveniently hard-to-stage ways the political process fails its citizens. By overplaying every scene, the actors don't help, but ensure that the show's pathetic satire has no grounding in serious, skillful acting--imagine the cast of The Drew Carey Show doing an improvisational version of Network. Take the money you'd spend on this play and set it on fire. The resulting flames are smarter entertainment. TOM SPURGEON

China Doll
Northwest Asian American Theatre, 340-1049.
Through Nov 18.

For Asian women, roles in both real life and on celluloid are cheaply disappointing. That's the chief theme in this play about silent-era screen actress Anna May Wong, a Chinese American who anglicized her birth name and, as this country's first Asian female film star, tried to challenge Hollywood's prejudices.

Elizabeth Wong's play uses flashbacks and biography to tell the story; NWAAT's supple supporting cast of seven (including favorite local character actor Mark Fullerton, and an able Brandon Whitehead) plays 17 characters. Unfortunately, the legendary Anna May, a poised, powerful, and complex beauty, isn't three-dimensional in actor Seema Sueko's hands; instead, she's rather gee-whiz and high-schoolish. Sueko relies a lot on high volume to express excitement, fury, and sadness. There's just too much shouting.

The second act improves, but this script--though a Kennedy Center award-winner--lacks subtlety. It's full of clichés (Anna May: "I have wrestled the beast of my passions like a lion tamer with a whip!"), offering actors little to work with. Anna May's father, a first-generation Chinese laundry owner, has short, axiomatic lines rather too close to those in the old Charlie Chan films, so China Doll nearly reinforces the Asian stereotypes it wants to dismantle.

Another staggering point is that this script stages a friendship between Wong and Marlene Dietrich, requiring some poor actress to actually play the iconic German. And who can do that? Such scenes demand an almost filmic gauziness, but NWAAT director Jane Kaplan seemingly had no problem setting Heidi Darchuk plainly onstage and letting her run with a painful accent that crosses Barbara Walters and Elmer Fudd ("Let Mama Mawlena take cawe of you"). Though Wong's story is fascinating, be ready to stomach lots of goofs in order to hear the tale. STACEY LEVINE