The Beard of Avon
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 443-2222.
Through Dec 22.

Larry Ballard seems to have cornered the local market on gleeful wickedness, which would be tedious if he didn't attack his roles with such zest. In The Beard of Avon (Amy Freed's new play about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays), Ballard plays the educated, worldly, witty, and pansexual (at least in Freed's conception) Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan noble who many contemporary literary critics believe actually wrote Shakespeare's oeuvre. Freed's play doesn't directly address the current arguments--all based on scant evidence, no matter which side they pursue--but instead portrays the man himself, William Shaksper (Dan Donohue), a country bumpkin with high-flown dreams.

Will flees an unhappy marriage to be an actor in London, where the depraved De Vere seizes upon him to be his front--for though De Vere is an open sodomite, he disdains the idea of associating his good name with the theater. His play (Titus Andronicus) is a hit, as are published poems; soon, the entire royal court wants the newly redubbed Shakespeare to front for them as well; even Elizabeth herself (Lori Larsen, also zesty) has a private fantasy she wants paraded on the stage, a little play called The Taming of the Shrew. But what De Vere doesn't admit to his peers is that Shakespeare has a gift for verse himself, and has been giving De Vere's scripts a bit of warmth they might otherwise lack.

Like many of Freed's other works (she's also written about Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath), this play is wrestling with creative inspiration itself. The Beard of Avon's scenario isn't meant as a serious resolution to the authorship controversy, but more as a fantasia on the topic; and though the whole may not fully gel, the play takes flight when De Vere and Shaksper go head to head, fighting with and inspiring each other in turns, acting as two voices in a single consciousness--the mind of "Shakespeare." BRET FETZER

The Laramie Project
The Empty Space at the Seattle Children's Theatre, 547-7500.
Through Dec 15.

I'm getting tired of the growing post-Anna-Deavere-Smith genre of "based on interviews with real people" theatrical docudramas. I'm also losing patience with careless, one-dimensional art I'm supposed to like because I sympathize with its politics. So I had reservations about a show based on over 200 interviews that Moises Kaufman and the NYC-based Tectonic Theater Project conducted in Laramie, Wyoming after Matthew Shepard was fag-bashed to death there. Fortunately, my reservations about The Laramie Project were for naught. This script is intelligent, complex, and artful; almost every member of the nine-person ensemble cast is excellent (Shelley Reynolds, Ian Bell, Ron Simons, and Susanna Burney were fucking phenomenal); and Chay Yew's direction provides some of the most visually arresting moments of theater I've seen in Seattle in a long time.

The back of the stage is an unpainted wall that, depending on the light, can be a college classroom, a bar, a jury room, or the wide, dark, cold Wyoming sky. The only furniture in any of the three acts is a group of straight-back wooden chairs; these chairs represent, among other things, the fence Shepherd was tied to as he was beaten up, and--in a particularly horrific scene--the fists and feet and pistol used to beat him. None of the actors plays Shepard, and the script never quotes him directly. This play is about what grows up around an absence, how others see and create a person in memory--it is also less about a singular instance of brutality than about the potential for brutality in many of us. Rather than portraying the perpetrators of this crime as monsters, this script suggests that they're just pretty normal loser kids. The Laramie Project also portrays how people have to be shocked out of complacency in order to admit that we are the kind of people/town/ country where atrocities like Shepard's murder happen. REBECCA BROWN

What I Tell You in Darkness
Golden Fish Theatre at Richard Hugo House, 528-0158.
Through Dec 16.

Playwright Stuart Greenman writes beautifully. The dialogue in his new play, What I Tell You in Darkness, reveals a wealth of information about his characters with astonishing stealth and wit. Darkness is set in 1962, at the dawn of televangelism; Reverend Del Clark (Clark Sandford) runs a rinky-dink TV studio in Chicago. When Andy (Christopher Johnson) arrives, eager to spread the word, Del sees in the young man a Christian JFK--someone whose good looks will bring a larger audience to the sagging ministry, as well as fulfill the dreams that Del seems unable to manifest for himself. From there unfolds a tale of frustrated desires and betrayals that ruin the lives of pretty much everyone, while giving rise to the weird self-exposure/self-flagellation that is televangelism's gift to the modern age.

Director Cynthia White has done good work with the cast, resulting in consistent and nuanced performances--Sandford, Pamala Mijatov (as Andy's self-destructive girlfriend), and TJ Morton (as an ambitious Jim-Bakker-in-the-making) are particularly good. Unfortunately, White's visual sense is less sure; her clumsy staging doesn't rise to the challenges of Greenman's script, which demands fluid movement through a variety of locations. The clunky and interminable set changes in particular hamper the play's momentum. The first act, driven by the push and pull of Andy and Del's relationship, sustains itself. The second act--which alternates between wonderfully written scenes that don't move the play forward and scenes in which so much happens at once that it's hard to take it all in--slowly sinks. By the end, Greenman seems to have gotten so involved in his characters that he doesn't fully explore what they're trying to do, which is fuse God with television. A little more showmanship, and a little less humanity, might have actually shed more light on the world of Darkness. BRET FETZER