Familiar Fodder Three common premises, one that surprises

Look, over there at Woolly Mammoth: A solo show crammed full of idiosyncratic characters, centered on a delicate, damaged young narrator endowed with stubborn, secret strength—a strength that’ll see her through to a second-act triumph over an adult tormenter. Original, no?

Not especially. But if the shape of The K of D feels a tad familiar, writer Laura Schellhardt has a sharp eye for looking at a cruel world and an arresting way of putting her observations into words. Her jokes are scorpions, with sharp little stings in their tails; some of those characters might be types, but they’re indelibly sketched. Her evocative small-town vignettes will ring true to anybody who’s lived in a place like the Ohio backwater she describes (and intrigue anyone who hasn’t). And her heroine—a young girl named Charlotte, provided by love and tragedy with a frightful gift—is a singularly intriguing creation, if not a wholly singular one.

Played, like the other 14 characters in Schellhardt’s skein of unlikely yarns, by the protean Kimberly Gilbert, Charlotte’s a survivor, but only just. A twin, she’s lost her brother to a reckless driver; a daughter, she’s saddled with grotesques for parents. (Dad’s a short-tempered moron, Mom an obsessively competitive schoolteacher who shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of kids.) A loner at heart now, Charlotte still runs with the pack she and her brother once found a home in, though she seems always to be on its edges, observing.

From its somber start, The K of D travels to dark places indeed; it’s solo theater gone Southern Gothic, a Flannery O’Connor tale brought to life by one of its own characters. There’s a reincarnation, and a breathtakingly cruel death; there’s a wilding, and an act of mercy, and ultimately an act of self-defense that has the satisfying tang of revenge. And as with all such tales, there are glimmers of beauty amid the dark—flashes of charity, glimpses of grace.

Gilbert takes full advantage of the showcase Schellhardt provides her with that raft of quirky characters, shifting fluidly from one to the next, etching out distinct personalities for each. And John Vreeke’s eloquent, unfussy staging makes a moody bedsheets-and-shadows frame for a play that, with its dark-of-night climaxes and its dabblings in the supernatural, ends up feeling like a firelit campfire tale. Simple pleasures, those—and ultimately pretty satisfying, too.

Four guys, seemingly in their late 20s or early 30s, gather on their high-school football field one midnight, not having seen one another since graduation last year…oh, I get it, apparently these one-time best buds are supposed to be 18-ish. That must be why their small-scale personal dramas seem so monumental—to them, if not to the audience.

Welcome to Glory Days, a brand-new musical from Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner, two products of the Montgomery County schools. They’re 23 themselves, and while having conceived a fully formed musical—much less having workshopped it and convinced a theater to produce it—is an accomplishment for any creative team, their youth is about all that makes Glory Days unusual.

Oh, the production is handsome enough: Signature Theatre has enlisted James Kronzer to pretty up the proceedings, and he’s delivered a spare set that’s basically a rank of bleachers astride a swath of AstroTurf, all of it backed by a wall of sports-field lights. The bleachers add a little excitement, if only because Eric Schaeffer sends his actors skipping up and down ’em like musically inclined mountain goats, and there’s a certain thrill in wondering what’ll happen if somebody misses a riser. (They don’t, much to their credit.) The lights, meanwhile, work with the vaguely pop-rocky arrangements to add punch in the final bars of songs whose melodies don’t supply much on their own.

But the characters feel both bland and stock—there’s the literary-minded narrator, the inarticulate jock, the military brat who’s put his JROTC days behind him and started growing his hair. Oh, and there’s the guy who has no discernible previous identity but who comes out of the closet a third of the way through the show so the evening will have a focus. If the song that encapsulates his big surprise is pretty enough, the revelation, like the tension the show tries to build around it, feels distinctly ho-hum.

The uptempo numbers feel interchangeably, generically angular, and Blaemire hasn’t done any more musically to establish a sense of individuality than Gardiner has with his book. And the upshot—the dawning awareness that we change, and that the pressurized, hermetic friendships of high school don’t always survive the wider world—won’t feel much like 11 o’clock number material to anyone old enough to have been to a high-school reunion.

So give Blaemire and Gardiner credit—for ambition, and for an ingratiating ballad or two, and for capturing the intense narcissism of late teenagerdom. But unless your idea of catharsis is watching four middle-class white boys learn that people keep growing after “Pomp and Circumstance” plays, don’t give ’em your credit card.

Chicago-based director Mary Zimmerman gets whaled on sometimes for infusing her shows with a generic wonder, so maybe it’s a backhanded compliment to note that her Argonautika doesn’t inspire much. A (loose) account of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, the show pauses often between Iolchus and Cochis for bits of tart anti-imperialist commentary, knowing feminist irony, and generic self-referential smartassery. It’s a postmodern sort of myth, and depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing, your mileage may vary.

Zimmerman’s knack for the visual is intact, certainly: Argonautika plays out on a spare wooden box, with ropes to suggest rigging and doors that open to hint at Hades or disgorge the parade of heroes who’ll crew the Argo. Goddesses stalk through now and again, self-involved and silly, fouling things up as often as not; Lisa Tejero’s Hera gets most of the laughs, not least because her gown flares up about the shoulders when she’s offended, giving her the look of an alarmed iguana.

In fact the director’s sense of humor, refreshingly, is rather more in evidence than it was in 2004’s lyrically wistful Pericles. Check her Kraken, conjured with a sea of green cloth and two softball-size eyes, or the lurching puppet giant who, once trounced, goes shuffling woefully off stage right, barely half the man he used to be.

But Jake Suffian’s decent, relatively inert Jason, alas, makes a squishy center of attention—a deliberate choice, one gathers, so as to suggest the potentially heroic, and the potentially havoc-making, in all of us.

Things pick up a little in Act 2, with Medea all bloody from the visibly painful arrow Eros has pinned her with—and without a strong focus for the rising action, all the pissy potentates, strutting heroes, pining princesses, and snide goddesses don’t really hang together. Argonautika, alas, feels in the end like a long, slow sail to not much of anywhere.