‘Venus and Adonis’ at Gem; ‘Losing Venice’ at West Coast Ensemble; ‘Blood Is . . .’ at Beyond Baroque; “Willie’s Bar” at East West Players

Benjamin Stewart’s solo performance of Shakespeare’s epic love poem, “Venus and Adonis,” at the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s Gem Theatre, is a perfect fit with the kind of thing an interesting Shakespeare festival should do: explore all the author’s writings, not just the plays.

If another of the festival’s jobs is to introduce a new audience to and excite them about the writings, “Venus and Adonis” does that nicely. Shakespeare’s first published work, the tale of Venus’ affecting and futile attempts at seducing young Adonis is a rich sampler of Shakespeare’s comic and tragic impulses. No play of his travels such a distance from light to dark as this poem.

Stewart’s accomplishment is to retain the poetry, while making it a text for performance. He enters from the upstage shadows (designer David Palmer’s pool of light suggests a sacred space in a hostile world), and within moments, leaps headlong into this adventure in elegant verse that is shot through with erotic humor. Stewart’s Venus only accentuates the comedy since, for all her intelligence and wily experience, she ends up seeming like a woman trying to squeeze love from a rock.

Stewart makes her into a powerfully endearing character--quite a feat, considering that Shakespeare never conceived of “Venus and Adonis” for the stage. Adonis is normally tongue-tied in her presence, and we get the sense that he’s attracted but afraid of being smothered.

The actor embellishes the verse with physical accents (he gets down on his hands and knees like a wrestling referee while describing Venus tumbling with Adonis on the grass), and gives each line and word equal weight. Listen how, in the last, wrenchingly sad passages, he provides Venus with a spirit of resurrection as she absorbs the tragic loss of her would-be love. Far from poetry on a page, this is theater about a woman who knows how to survive.

Performances are at 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., until July 23. Tickets: $12; (714) 636-7213.

‘Losing Venice’

John Clifford’s mischievous exercise in theatrical time-bending and cultural imperialism is something of a trick all the way down to its title: “Losing Venice.” The Spanish Duke (Ian Buchanan) never has Venice to lose. His entourage, made up of himself, a silly poet (John Boyle) and a sober manservant (Gary Pannullo) are terrorized by pirates, then become the object of either Venetian scorn or advice. And the advice is: Get out of town.

That’s the second act. It’s obvious from the first act that there’s nothing in the Duke, from his fatuous boasts of military prowess to his Waterloo-in-bed with the Duchess (Finola Hughes), that indicates a conquistador in the making. Here, Clifford is wanly and thinly imitating Moliere.

The subsequent “Venice invasion” is meant to be seen, at least in Brian Kulick’s production at the West Coast Ensemble, as an unexpected overthrow of roles and expectations. Yet the first act’s establishing comedy is so unaccelerated, and the cast’s take on the characters so one-dimensional (except for a scene when Hughes’ Duchess shows some talent for the Machiavellian) that royal buffoons remain royal buffoons regardless of what country (or act) they’re in.

No amount of strange lighting effects (some good ones by Paul Cutone), sliding doors or surprise scenery (including set designer Mark Wendland’s truly royal costumes) changes what’s fundamentally a dull and predictable play. Kulick’s last show, “A Game of Love and Chance” at the Taper, Too also had great design, shallow acting and a shallower play in a bygone setting. Only this time, it’s without the Taper’s budget.

Performances are at 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Tickets: $15; (213) 871-1052.

‘Blood Is, Thicker Than, Water’

Jan Munroe knows how to plumb his past. His new triptych of Florida character portraits, “Blood Is, Thicker Than, Water,” at Beyond Baroque, is his second look back at his home state. But the new work is so different from his earlier “Alligator Tails,” that it could be from the other side of the world.

Some of it shows Munroe deepening as a writer. This time, he’s writing in three distinct voices: an educated, returning ex-native (Munroe himself in “Water”); a mother lost in her wild imagination (Ronnie Claire Edwards in “Thicker Than”); and an aging hunter and tall tale teller (William Lanteau in “Blood Is”). These are people in the Southern literary tradition of Eudora Welty, even of Tennessee Williams.

Some of it is strangely mundane as well, not a quality you expect from the man who wrote and directed “Notes: On Performance” and this year’s “Woodworks.” Alec Doyle’s laid-back direction, almost too content to let the words do the work, fails to lift these portraits into the realm of the memorable and push these actors to the level they’re capable of. Perhaps Munroe is his own best director.

Performances are at 681 Venice Blvd., Venice; Saturdays and Sundays, 8:30 p.m.; until July 31. Tickets: $8; (213) 822-3006.

‘Willie’s Bar’

Pour in one part thinly veiled autobiography, one part O’Neill-in-the-’80s, two fingers worth of twisted absurdist dialogue and a splash of undercarbonated theatrics and you have Paul Price’s “An Afternoon at Willie’s Bar,” at East West Players. It’s a tall glass of mostly nonsense, like an afternoon seen through a drunken stupor.

Now, drunken stupors can lead to brilliance (the “Iceman Cometh” speeches, for example), and moments of the exchanges between Bill Macy’s Stan and Mako (as--get this-- Mako ) are among the oddest, most cryptically funny duologue writing heard in any recent play. A repeated motif of a man (Ralph Brannen) making a toast he can’t complete is both funny and dumb.

The character in “The Writer” is just dumb (there are also “The Woman, “The Bartender,” “The Young Couple,” “The Old Woman”). He comes in the bar to write on his lunch break--only this isn’t his lunch break since he’s just been fired. Stan badgers him for no reason and, in the end, the Writer says that he might turn this day into a play.

The self-consciousness is neither fresh nor relevant, and Price doesn’t help his own cause as director. Macy’s acerbic performance, on the other hand, suggests another, more unpredictably cynical voice that Price would do well to listen to.

Performances are at 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., until July 24. Tickets: $10; (213) 660-0366.