King Richard III wilts in the heat, but there’s fizz in The Gin Game and Cups

You get a sticker when you pony up at the gate of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. That makes sense. The annual to-do in Southmoreland Park is more like voting or giving blood than spending a night at the theater. It’s one of those civic responsibilities that people feel good about doing. And if the show is a washout, well, at least that sticker stands as evidence of your values.

The show is rarely a washout under director Sidonie Garrett. But this year’s King Richard III comes close. It suffers from sluggish pacing and too many scenes with declaiming nobles arranged in stiff dioramas. Before one discussion, the men of the court lug out their own chairs and arrange them as though they’re about to tape an episode of KCPT Channel 19’s Ruckus. Hoods and headpieces cover so much of the actresses’ faces that it becomes tough to tell who’s who. Even the set — for years a festival highlight — is drab. Just flat walls and industrial-sized doors are spaced in a way that suggests medieval storage units for rent.

At times, the show is saved by Bruce Roach’s inventive performance as the titular lump of foul deformity. The actor gamely tangles his limbs and staggers about; his gift for brainy comedy fits when his Richard finds himself performing for others. Onstage alone, though, his famous eruptions of spleen become stand-up patter, full of mimcry, mincing and the odd touch of Groucho. Roach never musters the rage that the role demands. By the time he’s stabbed at Bosworth Field, he seems not a wretched tyrant but a Puck or an Ariel who’s in over his head.

Much of the cast is excellent, especially Merle Moores, Cinnamon Schultz, Jason Chanos and Robert Gibby Brand. Brand makes the murder of Clarence the evening’s most potent scene. On occasion, the great Kathleen Warfel storms through as Queen Margaret. The hell she rains down blasts away all else, until she blows offstage again.

Janet Henry, a comic actress and dancer, is both bombshell and firecracker. Proportioned like a pinup princess, Henry is a quick-witted comic performer with more voices than Sybil and her own peculiar, fluttery timing. In recent small shows (including a scandalous turn as Sarah Palin at the Fishtank), Henry has proved herself deft at being daft.

The smart folks at Theater League have given Henry a one-woman show in which to romp with Cups at the Unicorn Theatre, with often delicious results.

The show itself is as inventive as Henry. Joni Sheram’s autobiographical script is a familiar traipse through the changin’ times and turnin’ seasons of the boomers, complete with stops at the drive-in, the summer of love, and the late-breaking realization that maybe the parents they rebelled against were right all along. Henry even has to grouse about “young women today.” But what’s different in Cups is that Sheram organizes the show around which bra her heroine wore when, moving from a training bra to one of those feats of engineering known to grandmas.

Henry, playing a woman named Nora, hangs out in that theatrical place that’s not a place, this one helpfully stocked with every bra she has ever worn. She tries them on over her dress and muses about them and the memories they suggest. She dishes a lot of jokes: A front-clasp number that used to fool boys comes from “the department of home-gland security”; recalling a conversation with her mother, she sighs a very modern whatever, then adds, “I probably didn’t say whatever. I said whatever whatever was in the 1950s.” Henry’s airy delivery puffs the weak jokes into crowd-pleasers and the strong ones into knee-slappers.

Director Fred Goodson has guided Henry to a strong performance, but the show needs work on its transitions. Sheram’s script lurches from tone to tone and from subject to subject. Scenes end abruptly, with pop music blasting between them, and Henry’s Nora doesn’t always fully express whatever thought she’s trying to put across. We’ve moved on to the next thing with no conclusion, as though, in the middle of writing about Cups, I’ve started talking about The Gin Game.

Martin Tanner Productions’ estimable show The Gin Game might be this week’s least flashy production, but it’s certainly the most fulfilling. Allan Hazlett and Bonita Hanson play Weller and Fonsia, respectively, nursing-home shut-ins who connect and quarrel over hands of gin rummy. Both leads stir. Hazlett’s gradual revelation of the rage that grips Weller’s heart is matched by Hanson’s subtle examination of Fonsia’s pride and loneliness — and, most important, her attraction to bad men.

The actors, directed by Andy Garrison, play cards briskly, as if the universe depends upon the outcome. (For cardplayers, the universe probably does.) As always, I wish D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script didn’t hold all its revelations until the busy final scene. Still, it’s like an expertly planed piece of theatrical carpentry, and Hazlett and Hanson act their guts out.