Yellow Heaven

Yellow Heaven. “One performer’s journey” — that’s the way, according to the old joke, you refer to a show about which you’re uncertain of the specifics. Yellow Heaven, performed by author Debi Ham, has sympathy and laughs and poignancy, as well as a cultural allusion or three. As well as a lot of “one performer’s emotional journey” goin’ on.

The program says the central character, Debi, is an “Unlikely Heroine.” She’s 10 when we first see her, and fascinated by TV vampire Barnabas Collins. She drinks Kool-Aid and pretends it's blood. When her maturing body gives her actual blood, and distressing pain, her mother — there’s no father in sight — gives her Valium and calls it “yellow heaven.”

Ham becomes different — Valium induced? — voices: Young Debi, her mother, vampire Collins (British voice), Edgar Allen Poe (Southern voice), and detective Hercule Poirot (French). Voluptuous opportunities offer themselves, scary ones, though Mom insists that ideal romance is as impossible as the life of TV’s Donna Reed.

The piece is fantastical and sympathetic, what with young Debi’s imagination, but it’s not exactly clear what does or does not happen. Is she suicidal, or just pretending? One applauds but is hesitant to draw conclusions.

A Date with Death: Hollywood Confidential. The Poolhouse Project’s world premiere promises to tell us what we haven’t heard before, about the mysterious deaths of the famous, and then delivers exactly what we might’ve expected. Imagine celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Selena, and Princess Diana shown in a procession of scenelets without much direction or energy. Just unenthusiastic dialogue plus the occasional gun going off — or body flopping over.

The director is Michael Schantz and the concept comes from Jesus Jimenez. Kristen Fogle, as Courtney Love, and Jordi Bertran, as Prince William, have enthusiastic moments. But audibility is a problem and immobile actors not picking up their cues, and non-famous “narrators” without much to say. It’s a pageant of the Already Known presented by embodiments of the All-Too-Familiar. And without, sorry to say, much in the way of illuminating detail.