100 Heartbreaks

Charlane Tucker, the protagonist of Joanna Horowitz’s one-woman musical, plays like a female version of Walk Hard’s Dewey Cox, relentlessly mining country music lore and her own hard-knock love life for comedy. On opening night, Horowitz (who wrote the script and plays the lead) drew her fair share of laughs from a Capitol Hill audience anxious to poke fun at hayseed stereotypes (the fact that there was a giant American flag hung behind the stage somehow proved hilarious). Yet while Horowitz is a confident, charismatic performer whom you want to root for, her writing rarely rises beyond low-hanging clichés, at times veering perilously close to condescension. But again, playing before an audience that likely has little familiarity with what country life is really like, it ought to do okay. A truer test of the material would be to plunk Heartbreaks on a stage in Horowitz’s native Ellensburg, where the sort of people she’s attempting to send up would be seated in the front row. MIKE SEELY 8:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Ends March 1.
Fridays, Saturdays, 8:30 p.m. Starts: Feb. 15. Continues through March 1, 2008