By Gerry Kowarsky

SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH

11/07/2007

Whether they are looking for fantasy or realism, theatergoers can find top-flight entertainment in the recent openings of two local companies.

The fantasy is Upstream Theater's "Return of the Bedbug," a smart, funny new script by the group's artistic director, Philip Boehm. It was inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1929 satire "The Bedbug." In both plays, a wheeler-dealer named Prisypkin is frozen and brought back to life after many years in suspended animation.

Boehm's Prisypkin is frozen in the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s while changing a light bulb in a laboratory where a bedbug had just been cloned. He awakens in present-day St. Louis. The plot takes a serious turn near the end, but the production as a whole is a zany romp.

J. Samuel Davis makes Prisypkin a charming rogue with finely honed skills for surviving in the Soviet Union. Davis captures the confusion of a man who is no longer his element.

Don McClendon could not be more delightful or convincing as the pet cat of Prisypkin's American cousin. Joe Hanrahan makes the most of the opportunities for humor as both a mailman and a scientist. Kari Ely, Jane Paradise, Briston Ashe and Carl Overly, Jr. provide strong support.