For as long as I can remember, playwright, director, and sometime Stranger theater critic Bret Fetzer has been writing and performing fairytales with a dash of bitters. His stories combine familiar themes (innocents on journeys, talking animals, magical shape-shifters) with a wry awareness that things don't always end happily ever after.

In Fetzer's fairytale world, the virtuous can be dumb, sacrifice is not always rewarded, and heroines sometimes have mixed motivations. It is as arbitrary-seeming as our own—if a lot more colorful—but it always offers the chance for transformation. One of the two tales in Story and Song, which includes musical accompaniment by Sari Breznau and Eric Padget of Future Fridays, begins with a young woman who decides it'd be "nice to be rich." She marries widower for his money and doesn't think much about the children she's getting in the bargain. But when they are devoured whole by a pair of alligators (perhaps husband and wife, perhaps brother and sister, perhaps both because, as Fetzer points out, who knows how alligators live?) the new mother searches the swamp to get them back. She brings along a book of prayer-poems by the children's biological mother—reading it, she realizes the deceased woman always loved her children but didn't always like them. This revelation seems to give the stepmother new resolve to get them back.

Between Fetzer's stories and the banjo/xylophone accompaniment, Story and Song is as easy to relax into as an evening by the fireside. It plays on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Annex Theater until Feb 26.