Mini Reviews

I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE

(At Bethesda Theatre through Feb. 17)

Men who don't call? Women who crave hugs? Husbands who hate to shop? Wives who can't figure out football? Finally, a show for people who fell into a crevice in Antarctica in 1957 and only recently thawed! This longish (2 1/2 -hour) musical revue arrives with the news that there are a heck of a lot of differences between guys and gals that are supposed to make the whole dating and marriage thing crack you up. The squareness is partly a function of age. The show has been running off-Broadway for 11 years. The skit-and-song show marches chronologically through the stages of male-female relationships and comes across as sexless and blandly middle-of-the-road.

-- P.M.

* THE MAIDS

(By Scena Theatre at Warehouse Theater through Sunday)

Shall the maids be played by women or men? When Jean Genet wrote this play of searing resentment and loathing in 1947, he wanted men (although he didn't get them), and that's certainly the more subversive choice. Scena Theatre, however, is making a good case for women in the company's extremely well-acted version -- a comparatively kind and gentle staging of a play that can be as harsh as a director wants to make it. It is, after all, a ferociously rebellious game of dominance and submission played by two sisters while their dreaded mistress is away. Director Gabriele Jakobi delivers this as straight class oppression, with the sisters wearing humiliating gray uniforms that look like prison garb.

-- N.P.

* THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

(At Kennedy Center Family Theater through Sunday)

One might have feared it impossible to turn Norton Juster's whimsical, pun-slinging fantasy into a satisfying song-and-dance production. But a creative team that includes Juster and celebrated lyricist Sheldon Harnick evidently turned a blind eye to the odds, crafting a musical that's nearly as witty and buoyant as the 1961 book. Tim McDonald directs the 70-minute show, which boasts a richly textured score by the late Arnold Black. As millions of readers remember, "The Phantom Tollbooth" chronicles the adventures of Milo, a chronically bored lad who wanders into a weirdly edifying fairy-tale world -- a realm where mathematics and grammar lessons are distorted through funhouse mirrors, a la "Alice in Wonderland." To fit this novelistic escapade into the frame of a one-act musical, adapters Juster and Harnick had to pare away numerous subplots, as well as several of the book's most memorable figures, such as the Humbug and the Awful Dynne. But more than enough oddball characters remain, and they're delightfully interpreted by the production's cast.

-- C.W.

SEASONAL DISORDER

(At Source Theatre through Dec. 30)

As if the holiday season isn't mortifying enough, Washington Improv Theater now wants you to share your personal foibles. Walk into the lobby of the Source Theatre for a performance of "Seasonal Disorder" -- the mistletoe-themed offering of Washington Improv's founding ensemble, Onesixtyone -- and you're handed a questionnaire card that asks you to list a hobby, a family holiday tradition, a worst gift ever given or received and other potentially humiliating information about yourself. The answers on six of the cards form the basis for an ad-libbed portrait of a fictional yuletide get-together. This being a spontaneous art form, the show must differ day to day, but the hour-long opening-night production was sluggish and -- aside from a few oddball zingers -- not terribly funny. The performance noodled around with the idea of a strained family reunion, involving estranged parents (Catherine Deadman and Dan Hodapp), gawky sons (David Johnson and Colin Murchie) and the sons' significant others (Michael Bass and Molly Murchie). Few of us would dare to improvise in public, so hats must go off to the show's actors for their courage. Still, if one performance is anything to go by, the "Seasonal Disorder" artists need to put pacing and fluidity at the top of their Christmas wish lists.

-- C.W.

* SHINING CITY

(At Studio Theatre through Sunday)

Leave it to a playwright as subtle and perceptive as Conor McPherson to give us a play as troubling and mysterious as life itself. The premise is deceptively simple: A distraught Dublin man of middle age, played by the terrific Edward Gero, seeks the help of a therapist (an appealingly ill-at-ease Donald Carrier) after his wife, Mari, has been killed in a car accident. Her death has been haunting him in more ways than one, however, for as Gero's John anxiously reveals, Mari's ghost has been popping up around the house. What transpires between John and Carrier's Ian traverses some of the usual patient-doctor give-and-take. John talks (and talks and talks), discursively filling in the outlines of his tribulations. But over the course of 90 minutes, we discover that John's monologues offer more than professional grist for Ian, who shows himself as inexperienced in navigating the turbulent channels of his own life as he is in his attempts to smooth over John's.

-- P.M.

* SPUNK

(By African Continuum Theatre Company at Atlas Performing Arts Center through Dec. 23)

George C. Wolfe's 1989 adaptation of three Zora Neale Hurston tales holds the stage like the colorfully crafted, rugged piece of folklore it is. Hurston's language is slangy and vivacious, and KenYatta Rogers's cast does well by it, especially when the drama is more taut. The first tale, "Sweat," is the story of a washerwoman and her abusive husband, and the tension between Jessica Frances Dukes and Shane Taylor smolders and flares as the characters spit flamboyantly crafted hatred at one another. The roles are reversed in the mournful third tale, "The Gilded Six-Bits," with Taylor as an aggrieved husband whose wife (Dukes again) cheats with a flashy stranger. Different cadence, different mood, same magnetic storytelling and a delight for actors who don't just seize on the jazzy words but use them to cut to the characters' hearts. Real comic beauts are provided in the hustling middle fable ("Story in Harlem Slang") by Marie Schneggenberger: a snoozing gent on a bench and a floozy attached to her man at the hips and the lips.

-- N.P.

TAMBURLAINE

(At Shakespeare Theatre -- Sidney Harman Hall through Jan. 6 )

"Tamburlaine," an epic-length portrait of a Ce ntral Asian thief transformed into a godless conqueror, makes the emphatic statement that Michael Kahn's company is becoming even more adventurous in skirting the usual classical suspects. Christopher Marlowe's two-part play is here condensed for a single evening. Marlovian scholars and lovers of standard-waving pageantry will no doubt be thrilled. For the rest of us, the three-hour production constitutes something several degrees less than thrilling. Although Marlowe's poetry is recited on the honeyed tongue of Avery Brooks's Tamburlaine and on the other voices of what feels like a cast of thousands, the play is little more than a numbingly solemn march.

-- P.M.

* WAVERLY GALLERY

(By Didactic Theatre Company at D.C. Arts Center through Saturday)

The empty white frames that festoon the set of this modest but poignant offering serve a dual purpose. First, they evoke the pictures that clutter the story's primary locale, a small Greenwich Village art gallery run by an aging former lawyer named Gladys. The vacant frames, however, also signal the gathering blankness in Gladys's mind. She has Alzheimer's disease and is gradually losing the ability to recognize even her nearest relatives. Kenneth Lonergan's 1999 play chronicles the grim progress of the disease and the devastating toll it takes on Gladys's loved ones. The two-hour drama is no light entertainment, given its unflinching focus on painful conversations and emotional outbursts, as well as real-time depiction of Gladys's tendency to repeat herself, but the play is perceptive and moving.

-- C.W.