Stray
Printer's Devil Theatre, 860-7163. Through June 30.

Stray begins with a young girl waking up. This pregnant teenager tries to tell her older sister what she was dreaming, but complains that her tongue won't work: "Sometimes I can't talk at all...." As it turns out, the talk of this script is the best thing about it. Playwright-director Heidi Schreck has penned some lovely lyric passages, like when the night is described as having "a strange smell... like a person on an animal...." The dream is "as smooth as two peeled stones." Some images are laugh-out-loud silly, as when the sister's sleepwalking is compared to a monster, or rather--more ominously--a chicken, or rather--horrors!--a chicken named Helen!

Shortly after May (the teenager) moves into her sister Isa's apartment, Ellie--a singer Isa meets when she stumbles into a lesbian bar--moves in, too. Then a character named "Girl" moves in. Then, having walked across the country for three days to find her, May's boyfriend Frank moves in. These five characters circle around and bump into each other emotionally. They hope, fear, and expect that one another will leave. Each is a kind of innocent; each is also a kind of user. Maybe this play is about how much we use people. Or about being afraid of losing someone you think you love, even when that person is mean to you. Maybe it's about the lengths we will go to create family. Or about feeling like a stray cat begging to get inside.

Though the story's resolution is murky, there's some very good acting. Alissa Ford portrays the pregnant May as both an exuberant child and a trapped, pacing animal. A couple of times Tricia Rodley's comic finesse as Isa made me hold my stomach from laughing so hard. On the other hand, Tina Kunz's Ellie didn't have the nasty sizzle of the stay-out-all-night, heartbreak bad girl. As beautiful and clever as much of this script is, it doesn't yet resolve the story of these characters.