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The Last Five Years. This intimate two-person musical involves the breakup of a marriage. When Jamie and Cathy met in New York, he was an aspiring writer and she an actress. Success came for him fast, while she continued to inhabit the dreary, ego-pummeling world of auditions and summer stock — with predictable results for their relationship. The songs — solos, with one exception — reveal a triumphant Jamie noticing his effect on other women and fighting the desire to utilize it, with a sulky Cathy refusing to attend his publishing party. He resents her neediness and insecurity, she his arrogance and self-involvement. Playwright Jason Robert Brown has hit on an interesting device to make this relatively commonplace story more poignant and more complex: While Jamie relates events as they happened, Cathy reveals them backwards. At the very beginning, she weeps over Jamie's goodbye letter, and minutes later, he erupts onto the scene singing rapturously about the "shiksa goddess" he's just met. Chris Crouch and Shannan Steele are both terrific performers, brimming with energy, poised and charismatic, possessed of lovely, expressive voices. Crouch makes Jamie real and funny and quirky, and Steele is often touching as Cathy — though I wish both would avoid that awful, dissolving-into-self-pitying-tears style that's come to dominate singing in musicals these days. Still, this is an emotionally exuberant production, staged in a smooth, comfortable style, and enjoyable even though it's far from thought-provoking. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through June 29 at the Galleria Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed February 14.

Lydia. The central figure in Octavio Solis's world premiere is a brain-injured young girl who rises periodically to speak to the audience, then subsides again on her pallet in the middle of the family living room, grunting and moaning. Trapped in her stiffening body, Ceci burns with sexual desire and a longing to continue her tragically interrupted life. Her family is completely dysfunctional — and apparently was so before the car accident that damaged her. Into this charged environment comes Lydia, an illegal immigrant hired as a maid, and her arrival sets off a cascade of tumultuous events. Lydia is the sexy, healthy, confident young woman Ceci can never be, and the two young women form an instant understanding, with Lydia tending to Ceci, breaking her terrible isolation and translating her guttural howls for the others. But is Lydia ultimately a force for good or ill, a life-giver or a representative of death? The script evokes a multitude of charged ideas: the painful realities of exile and the ways in which people adjust to or are broken by it; homosexuality in a macho culture; sex as a wild, chaotic impulse that can lead to spiritual imprisonment or joyous freedom; the redemptive power of art; Vietnam; the politics of immigration as seen by those in the States either legally or illegally; and, of course, the lies and secrets that both glue families together and hurl them apart. But Lydia also has flaws. You can think up mystical or metaphorical explanations that make all the events cohere, but somewhere, somehow, at some point — and I don't mean in a literal or reductive sense — the author should give you some hint, and he simply doesn't. Solis just tosses all these charged elements together and leaves them for you to sort out, and by the end of the evening, you're begging for clarity. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company through March 1, Ricketson Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed February 14.

9 Parts of Desire. Heather Raffo is the daughter of an American woman and an Iraqi father, so she's uniquely qualified to bring the two cultures face to face in this one-woman play about the lives of Iraqi women. She herself is represented by one character, an American who feels the current war tearing at her soul and talks about the frantic worry she feels for aunts, uncles and cousins, while all around her in New York, life goes on as usual. And she ponders the fact that in America, it's well understood that a single traumatic event can distort your life forever, yet the Iraqis have faced one trauma after another: the vicious rule of Saddam Hussein, the war against Iran, the 1991 war, the years of deprivation brought on by the embargo, and now the daily violence of this second Gulf War. Based on a decade's worth of interviews, Raffo's script includes insights as revelatory as they are simple, with one woman's insights illuminating or deepening another's, their language interweaving to create a rich tapestry of female experience that communicates a sense of unity and power. On stage for two hours, Karen Slack gives a strong, beautiful, courageous performance. Presented by Curious Theatre Company through February 23, 1080 Acoma Street, 303-623-0524, www.curioustheatre.org. Reviewed January 17.