"Girls and Gods" | Absurd romp through mythology

Zeus, that most Olympian of Olympians, and his hippie son, Dionysus, god of ecstasy, wine and generally getting down, have — if you're up to date on these things — a passel of illegitimate offspring between them.

Quick primer: Zeus fathered Artemis, Apollo, Athena and many more through countless liaisons with divinities, mortals, and nymphs. Dionysus — Mr. Fertility — did his bit, too, having his way with the likes of Aphrodite, Althaea and others.

Seattle playwright Scot Augustson, who has freely raided repositories of highbrow and pop mythology before with a tinkerer's eye (Dante's "Inferno" and Jean Cocteau's "Orpheus" in "Gone Are the Days"; Ed Wood in "Brent? Or Brenda?"), turns the tables on the randy immortals in "Girls and Gods, or Prometheus Unwed."

Director Carys Kresny seamlessly blends the tragic and comic in Printer's Devil Theater's crazy, poignant pastiche of the legendary and ordinary. After a couple of drinks and an encounter with an unusually attractive bull, Zeus (Allan Armstrong) and Dionysus (Stephen Hando, quite memorable) end up pregnant with who-knows-what inside them. They also get stuck in residency at the Lillian Erstwhile Home for Unwed Mothers.

There they join three single moms-to-be in non-connubial, imminent parenthood. The women (Alycia Delmore, Shannon Kipp, Peggy Gannon) have been left, much in the manner that Zeus and Dionysus routinely leave their conquests, by: the arrogant Poseidon; a charming ambassador of fate; and an abusive jock-deity.

All three of the latter characters, and several more, are played by the fascinating, exotic Brandon Simmons, whose omnipresence adds to the subconscious, stimulating mystery of the play's blurring of heaven and earth.

In Augustson's frequently funny, often sorrowful and ultimately miraculous romp through mythological references and erotic hues, the female characters — often victimized and discarded in the old stories of amorous interludes with gods — become essential.

Among these women is an archaeologist (Stacey Plum) who gets taken for granted by men, yet sets the story in motion. Other women are treated by gods as disposable, but in the end they're still standing, the links to humanity's future.

This is one of those plays where there are certain moments of arrival. Here absurdity becomes a special, funky poetry and an audience intuitively knows it.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com