Performing Arts

ADDISON – The Out of the Loop Festival has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Crowds were milling around WaterTower Theatre on Saturday, most of them trying to get to the silly sold-out hit Dixie's Tupperware Party. But the smaller spaces were pretty full too, and several of them housed considerable works of art.

The American Actors Company, in cooperation with Baylor University, brought in The Unseen. Craig Wright has been writing and producing great TV shows like Lost and Brothers and Sisters for a number of years, but last year he returned to his first love, the theater, to premiere this piece. At first it feels like a commentary on current politics, and perhaps that's a part of its theme. Probably, though, Mr. Wright's seminary studies are more relevant here.

The Unseen might remind you of Samuel Beckett, with its talk, talk, talk, but Mr. Wright doesn't share his predecessor's sense of meaninglessness. Two prisoners of some mysterious regime play vocabulary games to keep from despair. Steven Pounders portrays the one who obsessively dreams up theories; Stan Denman's character is more emotional, and closer to losing it. They're both superb, as is Thomas Ward as the whacked-out torturer whose empathy with his victims makes him depressed.

All three are Baylor professors who have done important work in professional Dallas theater, but The Unseen, directed by Lisa Denman, is the best we've seen from them to date.

A good play can restore your faith in theater festivals, but so can a good performance piece like It Goes Without Saying. If you hate mimes, just wait until you hear what Bill Bowers has to say about them, especially his fellow students of Marcel Marceau. And he's a mime himself. In his one-man autobiographical show, the New York-based actor takes all sorts of topics that some might find unappealing – teenage molestation, the AIDS crisis, the compulsion to pantomime – and makes them enormously entertaining and unthreatening.

Best known as the original Zazu in the Broadway company of The Lion King, Mr. Bowers ascribes his interest in mime artistry to growing up in Montana. It's silent up there in the wide open spaces, and the ethos of the culture and his family growing up in the 1950s and '60s was not to speak about much of anything important.

Mr. Bowers wrote the brilliant script himself, and Martha Banta directed. This performer can speak as well as he moves. It goes without saying that It Goes Without Saying is at once poignant and hilarious. Don't miss the final performance today at 5 p.m.

• The Out of the Loop Festival at WaterTower Theatre, Addison Theatre Centre, 15650 Addison Road, Addison, through March 16. $10 to $15, festival pass $50. 972-450-6232; www.watertowertheatre.org.

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