Opening
Nights

PAngels in America: Perestroika

Cornish Playhouse, 201 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 441-7178. $25 and up. 
See intiman.org for complete schedule. Ends Sept. 21.

VeeShapeThe messier, more action-packed second half of Tony Kushner’s epic now arrives with a whole panel of angels, talking Mormon statues, even worse sickness, and death. “Are we doomed?” asks Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World’s Oldest Bolshevik (Anne Allgood) in the opening scene. Yes, things have gone from bad to dire, but that’s a good thing for this production, especially its younger cast members.

VeeShapePart I’s rather unconvincing flirtation between runaway lover Louis (Quinn Franzen) and closeted Mormon Republican Joe (Ty Boice) has morphed into a full-blown affair, with substantial sexual heat and nudity. Likewise, the AIDS-afflicted Prior gains depth from Adam Standley, who awkwardly stepped in and out of his illness in Millennium Approaches. And the unraveling housewife Harper—abandoned by Joe—finally finds a hard, defiant voice in Alex Highsmith’s performance. The intensity of Perestroika benefits them all; as stakes rise and their characters fall, these performers meet the challenge.

Similarly, the comedy of Part I (still ongoing), slightly off-key at times, shifts into a darker, more bitter brand of humor. Charles Leggett’s even more masterful Roy Cohn drops fewer jokes and shows more pain, yet without losing his Reaganite clarity. Leggett brings an almost-human edge to this vile man, particularly in the scene where Cohn blesses Joe and learns that his protege is gay, too. If not sadness exactly, there’s an ever-so-slight bewilderment, a hope lost. As Belize, nurse and friend to Prior, Timothy McCuen Piggee continues to hit just the right blend of fast-talking queen and world-weary gravitas. (Quibbles? Sure—I prefer Meryl Streep’s creepy ghost of Ethel Rosenberg in the HBO adaptation to Allgood’s no-nonsense, quotidian specter; though I do love the latter’s wry Mormon mother.)

Getting a twitchy viewer like me to sit through such a long show, and raptly, is a feat. The tight acting propels the plot forward, with each scene building momentum, so that even Kushner’s metaphysical-intellectual passages are entertaining (thanks also to Marya Sea Kaminski’s well-played Angel). Credit ultimately belongs to director Andrew Russell for this fast-paced, well-oiled production. Otherwise, the four-hour Perestroika could’ve felt like a millennium. Nicole Sprinkle

PBlack Comedy

Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave., 800-838-3006, strawshop.org. $18–$36. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Sept. 20.

VeeShapeEnglish playwright Peter Shaffer is well known for his powerhouse, stage-filling ’70s works Amadeus and Equus. Back in 1965, this one-act farce was a hit, though Shaffer later said that “there really was no play, merely a convention.”

VeeShapeBlack Comedy opens in complete darkness, which at first seems disconcerting and gimmicky. We can only hear the action until Brindsley Miller’s apartment suffers a short circuit. The stage lights up for us, but it’s a blackout for Brindsley and his guests. (Shaffer borrows the device from Chinese opera.) The blown fuse betokens disaster for struggling artist Brindsley (Richard Nguyen Sloniker) and his paltry apartment on what ought to be an important occasion: meeting his spoiled fiancee’s father and an important art collector. Complicating matters further, he and fiancee Carol (Brenda Joyner) have “borrowed” his neighbor’s furniture, guaranteeing a future twist in this comedy of errors.

Soon to arrive are Carol’s father, the stuffy Colonel Melkett (Michael Patten); the rich collector; an electrician (MJ Sieber); and other unannounced guests. Thence follows mistaken identities, drunken rants by a teetotalling spinster (Emily Chisholm), inappropriate father/daughter groping, and the arrival of Brindsley’s cruel ex-lover (Allison Strickland).

Black Comedy is anything but a dark comedy, providing ribald revelry for the audience and mass confusion for the characters onstage. After a slow start, it devolves into havoc, yet ends deftly (if arbitrarily), as if amused by itself. Director Kelly Kitchens brings to her Strawberry Theatre Workshop cast a comedic synergy that evokes tears of laughter. (The performance is paired with a quick-paced, witty curtain-opener featuring Strickland and Sieber: Sure Thing, by David Ives.) Irfan Shariff

PWaiting for Godot

ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, 
seattleshakespeare.org. $25–$48. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sat. plus matinees. Ends Sept. 21.

VeeShapeIf you were looking for the play that most comprehensively distills the gestalt of the human condition, you’d probably settle on either Hamlet or Samuel Beckett’s 1953 absurdist tragicomedy about two guys (Estragon and Vladimir) waiting for the arrival of a third (Godot, here rhyming with the second half of “avocado”). Seattle Shakespeare Company, which four years ago cast Darragh Kennan as the best Hamlet I’m likely to see, now transposes this thespian cruise missile to another existentially impotent role—that of Estragon, aka Gogo, whose mind and feet are failing him. He and Vladimir (aka Didi, played by Todd Jefferson Moore) pass several days as painfully as the kidney stones Didi squeezes into a bucket offstage. The line “Nothing to be done” hangs in the air, as does the famous motif of giving birth directly into the grave. But where Hamlet’s despair is a lonely affair, Didi and Gogo’s push-me-pull-you dynamics define both the hell and the solace of friendship.

VeeShapeBeckett isn’t shy about inflicting the kind of tedium on audiences that his characters have to endure. But he also gives us slick lazzi opportunities, a few tender gestures, and merciful interludes with Pozzo, played past the hilt by the captivating Chris Ensweiler as a wide-eyed, craven psychopath. A nod to commedia dell’arte, Pozzo delights in flaunting his wealth and degrading his slave Lucky (Jim Hamerlinck, pale as driftwood).

The heavy makeup, Robertson Witmer’s sound design, Roberta Russell’s dramatic lighting, and Craig Wollam’s spare, red-curtained proscenium set—over which a pancake moon is hoisted by crank—all culminate in an unapologetic aura of “life’s a stage” theatricality. (George Mount directs.)

Despite the lumpy camaraderie of Moore and Kennan, the greatest emotional effects emerge between Didi and the unnamed boy (Alex Silva) Godot sends to postpone the meeting. Seated on the far right side, I felt grateful to have a view of Moore’s face poisoned by the few words from this pint-sized messenger of nihilism. Unlike Gogo, Didi is cursed with the awareness that life is brutish and capricious; and verily, there is nothing to be done. Margaret Friedman

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