Welcome to a preview of this week's theater section! Christopher already posted about this one, a review of Black Watch by the National Theater of Scotland at the Paramount:

It is an intimate show, and the cavernous Paramount Theater has reduced its seating capacity from 3,000 to 419 for the occasion. The audience sits on the stage, just feet away from 10 tightly wound actors who spring from a Scottish barroom to Iraqi battlefields and back again. During one transition, soldiers are birthed from the inside of a pool table, cutting its red felt open from below with a long blade and standing back-to-back on its top with long guns in hand, nervously scanning the audience.

There's also Assisted Living at ACT Theater:

Assisted Living, a world-premiere play by Seattle writer Katie Forgette, opens in an assisted-living facility that is actually a lightly veneered prison: bars on the windows, linoleum trim, dull gray-blue tile, cheap office furniture, and a photo of a smiling President Dick Cheney. This is the near future, where the economy is on the verge of collapse, and senior citizens have to pay for any medical treatment that might be even obliquely related to their former lifestyles (such as eating). They also have to pay for “toiletries,” including colostomy bags.

And a trailer-park Taming of the Shrew at Seattle Shakespeare Company:

The only problem I had with the comedy—other than Kate's earnest "submit to your husbands" speech, which I guess can't be helped—came from its setting. I understand the allure of launching a redneck revamp of Shrew... Hey, it's a trailer park! People are wacky! But such a production has to be careful to avoid abjectly mocking the poor. There's no need to use poor people for comic relief, especially when the production is no longer launched in a park (i.e., free! Accessible!) but costs $40 a ticket in a rich city that gets the vapors at the very mention of affordable-housing aPodments, let alone trailer parks.