Slow Children
Bald Faced Lie, at Re-bar
1114 Howell St, 323-0388.
$12-$15. Through May 25.

Hair metal--the unholy union of Aqua Net, unitards, retards on guitars, and some of the cheesiest "music" made by man (and occasionally woman, and most often men who looked like women)--was either a giant pink zit in the evolution of rock or the last time the mainstream made decent party music, depending on how comfortable you are with rockers in shiny neon hues. Either way, that period of colorfully histrionic music is prime fodder for comedy writers and something that cannot be made fun of enough, no matter how out of the closet you are about loving Mötley Crüe.

Playwright Matthew Weiss grabs hair metal by the Spandex in Slow Children, a new "glam-metal melodrama" that had me laughing my ass off as it blew out all the '80s stereotypes to glorious extremes. Children opens in the amp-stacked apartment of a glue-sniffingly clueless pair of rock rejects. Rikki (Kirk Anderson) is a shaky-trigger-fingered bass player in shredded jean shorts with monstrous poodle hair and a quarter-life crisis on his hands. His equally '80s-coifed roommate, Timo (Skot Kurruk), is a rock slave who juggles bands with names like Fisting the Missus, and refers to himself in the third person when he's got his guitar strapped to his chest. The man who turns the pair's life around, though, is Deputy Doug Ellison (Ian Bell), a cop Rikki has left handcuffed to the pair's crates 'n' blankets couch. Children dives into the conflicted lives of these three characters: Rikki's a half-hearted musician riddled with self-doubt, Timo's an amiable guitar addict who can't get past his six-stringed fictions to save his life, and Ellison's the personality crisis-ed authority figure who struggles with his inner glam. Bring in three plot-thickening chicks (two hair-metal groupies and the cop's cop fiancée, played by Peggy Gannon, Kim Nyhous, and Karen Gruber) and you've got a twisted love triangle that only gets funnier the more it tangles--not unlike the clawed bangs of a true glam-metal survivor. JENNIFER MAERZ

Prix Fixe
On the Boards
100 W Roy St, 217-9888.
$12. Through May 4.

Prix Fixe consists of two dance-theater pieces--one, an idea (of sorts) flailing helplessly in search of expression; the other, a series of expressions (some lovely) without anything resembling a unifying idea.

Skippy-O's Dream (the title already betrays the forced wackiness to come) wants to use the theories and writings of Sir Robert Hooke (who discovered the cell) as the inspiration for some kind of performance. The result cuts back and forth between Hooke (played by Steve Pearson) expounding on science and a troupe of supposed tiny beings exploring the worlds that Hooke observed through his microscope. The tiny beings are a species of clown played with a wide-eyed spastic quality that kills any genuine humor. They enact a series of painfully precious dance numbers that left me cold, though others in the audience mustered a chuckle or two. Occasional moments of grace (at one point, Hooke climbs a ladder and plucks a book from the ceiling) were quickly quashed by cutesiness.

Phototrope suffered from some kind of framing device involving three cooks speaking different languages. What purpose they served I do not know, as they were shortly cast aside for a series of movement pieces, some performed in tandem with poems culled from various authors. Had this been presented as simply an hour of movement and poetry (both strong), I would have enjoyed it far more; but because it declared itself to be somehow cohesive, I was irritated by its failure to cohere--that, and it had five or six false endings. But along the way came some very pretty moments; my favorite was when, after loud recorded thunderclaps, the performers scurried to and fro, their bare feet on the stage sounding like raindrops. BRET FETZER

The Windhorse
The Shunpike Arts Collective, at Sand Point Naval Base
7400 Sand Point Way NE, 795-4388.
$10. Through May 11.

Generally speaking, theater artists are most creative when they work in consistent collaboration over a length of time, so that they can develop a group language and rhythm. Unfortunately, artistic collectives can also lead to a kind of mass delusion--like believing that they can ask an audience to sit on metal bleachers in a cold, cavernous, echoing room to watch an almost three-hour play and expect the audience to enjoy the experience.

The Windhorse, produced by the Shunpike Arts Collective, is a fictionalized version of the life of Genghis Khan told through lean, minimalist staging, a few songs, and colloquial American speech (an interesting choice that thankfully avoids pretentious "period" dialogue). Unfortunately, Khan's life involved warring with so many indistinguishable tribes that most of the events blur into a series of generic ups and downs, despite informational slides citing the time and place. Though the contemporary language was occasionally used to good comic effect, the characters were broad without being well defined, obscuring any sense of what they meant to each other or the world at large. The play aspires to draw parallels between Khan's era and ours, but has no clear political perspective--though the acoustical limitations of the performance space exacerbated the inexperience of much of the cast, so about a third of the dialogue was incomprehensible. Some scenes toward the end (particularly a conversation between Khan and his horse, shortly before Khan dies) start to achieve the kind of metaphoric poetry the play is reaching for--but by that point, it's two and a half hours too late.

The sincere commitment of the mostly young cast and the ambition of the production are admirable, particularly in an age when too many plays are meager domestic dramas with three or four characters--so it's frustrating that Shunpike's reach so exceeds their grasp. Something more modest, with a little less audience discomfort, would be a wise next step. BRET FETZER