Requiem at the Pink Flamingo Bar
Theatre Babylon, 720-1942.
Through July 14.

This play is about important stuff: a father's death and a son's difficulty letting his father rest; the death of a community; and the conflicting claims of biological and chosen families. The titular Pink Flamingo is a gay bar before l990, when bars were one of the main places gays and lesbians came together to form communities. When owner Frank (Philip Clarke) dies of AIDS, he leaves the bar to his son, Tommy (Scott Simpson). Fresh out of college with a business degree and engaged to Susie (Terisa Greenan), Tommy wants to turn the Flamingo into a sports bar.

Jay Irwin turns in the best performance as George, a beefy, huge-hearted, dress-wearing bear of a bartender. Irwin can do camp, but he's also remarkably strong and compassionate. The night I saw the show, it took the other actors a while to warm to their parts as George, Frank's lesbian business partner JoAnn (Kate Bortner), and Frank's distraught ex-lover Rob (Brad Cook) try to convince Tommy that the Pink Flamingo is not just a bar but a home for homos. Intriguingly, this play subverts the oft-told story about the conflict between queers and straights; here the younger generation is uptight and conservative while the older one asks for acceptance. Playwright William Ratcliffe sympathizes with these characters but clutters his main story with three too many characters from the "next world." Because much of this story is about Tommy's difficulty in resolving the love and resentment he feels for his father, it works to have the spirit of dead Frank hover around his mixed-up son--but when spirits Blue, Green, and Red swirl around commenting on the action (sometimes in churchy Latin), both the stage and the story suffer. REBECCA BROWN

Let My Enemy Live Long!
A Contemporary Theatre, 292-7676.
Through July 8.

From the press clips, you'd think Tanya Shaffer's one-woman show is an impressive, introspective performance piece about travel. The San Francisco Examiner called the 90-minute show "bright" and "thought-provoking." I'm not sure when the last time that standing among a boatload of praying Muslims in Central Mali and chirping loudly, "I'm an agnostic-leaning-towards-atheist Jew!" was an indication of discerning intelligence, but that certainly hasn't held Shaffer back. This narrative about the white California native's journey in a pinasse, or large canoe, up the Niger River with a bunch of locals is patently not thought-provoking. Shaffer can do a good accent and she's built the entire performance upon this stage trick, swimming in and out of characterizations of African acquaintances on her ill-fated journey to Timbuktu.

While travel writing can be powerful (see In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin), Shaffer's gee-whiz routine is embarrassing. She only superficially answers the question of why she fled her life in the States, and her revelations are either naive or far too obvious to be engaging. For instance, after wondering if her new African friends genuinely like her, she delivers the realization that no friendship can ever be founded on altruistic or "pure motives," especially when one friend has money and the other doesn't. Duh.

Crouched in the canoe, madly scribbling in her spiral notebook because she experiences life most authentically when writing about it, Shaffer is transparent, fairly self-indulgent, and bafflingly icky. (When I saw the program note that Shaffer is a contributor to Salon.com--the veritable rancho de cutesy, safe, and quippy feature articles--and Chicken Soup for the Traveler's Soul, it all began to make sense.) She always comes out looking good or better than the people around her; the truth, when traveling somewhere as unfamiliar as Africa, is never so easy and palatable. STACEY LEVINE

Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22
The Empty Space Theatre, 547-7500.
Through July 15.

For a play about the joys and absurdities of the scientific process, Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22 displays little faith in dramatic discovery. Jacques de Vaucanson seeks to prove divine order by creating a mechanical duck; he gets the idea from a chance--or divinely inspired--meeting with Lazzaro Spallanzani, who later in life attempts to control his experiments with artificial insemination by putting male frogs into tight, semen-blocking pants. These are fine comic ideas. Yet because playwright Glen Berger introduces each concept in an almost matter-of-fact fashion, the onus is on the cast and director to create a narrative rhythm out of Berger's delicate reiterations of theme. Empty Space's production screws this up royally: In its hands, Berger's concentric circles of thematic development become half-assed riffing on a single idea made dull by overexposure. Worse, the show's pacing is deadly, flogging any expectation of a comedic payoff right out of the audience.

The personal stories that serve as romantic contrast to Berger's science riffs are equally mishandled. Dramatic turning points are telegraphed like Godzilla bearing down on Tokyo. By indulging themselves in a smorgasbord of actorly approaches to text, director Dan Fields and the cast destroy any unity of purpose on stage. Eric Ray Anderson's consistent, manic turn as the semen-obsessed Spallanzani comes closest to reminding the audience that the play was written to be funny. Burton Curtis twitches and pines (along with an increasingly uncomfortable audience) as the romantically tragic Vaucanson, a fine enough performance that, for all it connects with his fellow actors, could have taken place in a test tube. The rest of the cast is adequate to awful; one actor shouts his lines like a grocery clerk seeking a price check.

It may take a scientist to explain how a play about a robot duck and frogs in silky pants can be made this excruciating to watch. TOM SPURGEON