Opening
Nights

Bethany

ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7660, 
acttheatre.org. $55 and up. 
Runs Tues.–Sun. Ends May 4.

In many ways Bethany is a traditional crime tale, with a woman pitted against unsavory forces and victimized by powers beyond her control. And yet Laura Marks’ hasty 2013 thriller is something new, presenting a fresh set of characters in a very dark, topical caricature of recession-afflicted America: a struggling single mother, a homeless vagrant, a scheming would-be motivational speaker, and a buttoned-down social worker. (Prompting them into conflict is the titular child, never seen but ever-present.)

The setting, the 2008 financial crisis, is communicated through a familiar yet unappealingly disorienting array of news reports heard during the play’s opening moments. Then we meet Crystal (Emily Chisholm) squatting in an abandoned home in a neighborhood ravaged by foreclosures. She soon encounters another squatter, Gary, a seemingly friendly homeless man (played dexterously by Darragh Kennan) who coaxes out her backstory: Crystal lost her home, and, after living in her car for a time, lost her daughter Bethany to Child Protective Services.

Crystal does have a job as a sales associate at a local Saturn dealership—an enterprise we know is doomed, as she cannot. Seeing her in driven sales mode at work is painful, her phony persona coming off as bad acting. (This is a difficult line for Chisholm to walk, but she lets Crystal’s true colors shine through in slivers of mourning and rage.) She continues peddling at home, desperately trying to convince a social worker to return her daughter, fixing up her adopted home as if it were her own, furnishing the kitchen with cheap Goodwill furniture, casting Gary as her plumber (in a rare moment of levity), and even forging a lease. To close a deal at the Saturn showroom, she goes out for drinks with smooth-talking wealth guru Charlie (Richard Ziman), hoping the seven-percent commission will provide a road back to pre-crisis security.

Crystal’s desperation is the engine of the drama, but also its flaw. With Bethany clocking in at a perhaps too-brief 80 minutes, the players—directed by John Langs—sometimes feel in a rush to enact their doom. The cast is hard-pressed to portray real characters in the vignettes one might find in a newspaper brief.

It’s unsurprising when Crystal finds she’s been the mark all along, but what is surprising is the chaos that erupts when the facades fall away, leading to a level of stage violence that, while not explicit, is terribly unsettling. We see Crystal’s real nature, along with Chisholm’s command of character, though Bethany’s savage finale also seems a kind of surrender on Marks’ part. Her play begins according to the pitiless logic of economics, but finally spins into a sort of unhinged cosmic revenge scenario. Is this just fantasy? It would be convenient to think so. Mark Baumgarten

Chaos Theory

Annex Theatre, 1122 E. Pike St., 
728-0933, annextheatre.org. $5–$20. 
8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends May 17.

Sometimes events do not have logical causes. This is considered a state of disorder, or, simply put, chaos. In local playwright Courtney Meaker’s new absurdist tragicomedy (aptly subtitled “A Play Seeking Order”), there seems to be exactly that—a series of events that don’t fit together. That doesn’t mean there isn’t exposition; in fact, Chaos Theory is replete with rather dense character development, plot twists, and pathos.

The audience is dropped, mid-despair, into the living room of Frannie (Keiko Green) as she’s coping with the loss of her lover. Her quirky friends, male-identifying Bach (Evelyn Dehais) and goofy, dim-witted Seth (Drew Highlands), attempt to pull her out of this funk by introducing her to a book on chaos theory. The result is Frannie’s shift from distraught to determined: She will find out what happened to her partner.

For Frannie, it’s easier to theorize than to admit Mack (Jana Hutchison) could’ve abandoned her. As her infatuation with chaos theory grows (and by default her friends’ fascination, too), she builds what seems to be an alternate-reality machine in her living room. Frannie, Bach, and Seth each have their motives for using this machine. (The three are so different, and so alike, that they may as well be facets of the same individual.)

We never leave Frannie’s living room. Characters enter and exit, and we see action outside the door and windows. The set and character asides give the eerie feeling of being trapped inside a sitcom (there’s even a laugh track), but there’s nothing funny about being trapped in a situation you can never escape.

Amid this absurdity, Meaker and director Pamala Mijatov force us to make sense of the action, but in the end we succumb to the hopelessness and futility of existence, love, and identity. Chaos Theory starts off gimmicky and cute, yet it ultimately makes us, and Frannie, confront the limits of common sense. Irfan Shariff

PErnest Shackleton Loves Me

Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 443-2222, seattlerep.org. $20–$45. 7:30 p.m. Tues.–Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Ends May 3.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: Let Valerie Vigoda sing! She’s a veteran lyricist and performer with the band GrooveLily and a musical-theater pro many times over. During the lion’s share of the new Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, presented by Balagan Theatre, she gets to demonstrate her proven chops. Yet in the show’s first half hour, the energetic score—music and lyrics are co-credited to her and Brendan Milburn—turns her into the quiet person at a loud party. Which would be fine if she were a guest dropping by to say hello, but Vigoda’s the host and heroine here. It’s an odd start to an otherwise successful small-scale musical.

Kat (Vigoda) is an unsuccessful opera composer saddled with a newborn in a freezing Brooklyn apartment after her baby daddy Bruce (Wade McCollum) departs to join a touring Journey cover band. Her latest indignity is being terminated from a lucrative contract scoring a computer game, leaving her with no creative outlet but an unwatched vlog. After 36 hours without sleep, she finds herself receiving mysterious online romantic overtures from her only viewer: explorer Ernest Shackleton (also McCollum). Shackleton crosses a century and a refrigerator door to be with his lady love, and Kat finds herself acting as official muse for his beleaguered Antarctic expedition.

Joe DiPietro’s script never attempts to hide the unreality of this time-travel romance, which is part of the show’s charm: Kat and Ernest behave like childhood playmates deep in a game of imagination time. Shackleton is a self-conscious caricature who seems aware of future events in his life and constantly announces his full name in a Dudley Do-Right timbre. Even Kat’s early stock-footage-happy video blogs and Skype chats with Shackleton resemble some lost episode of  ’90s children’s edutainment. A sort of foul-mouthed “Bill Nye the History Guy” spin-off, if you will.

This tight 90-minute show, directed by Lisa Peterson, features two likable leads who can sing and play banjo and violin, filling out a toe-tapping prerecorded score (don’t be surprised if you find yourself humming “We’re on Our Way” on the ride home). The effect is generally whimsical and pleasing—the other side of the coin being that the burden is largely on us to remember Kat’s stakes: identity crisis, financial desperation, and her child’s security. Shackleton’s actual story was a matter of life and death. Here, one explorer’s hell is an artist’s escape. Daniel Nash

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