Domingo Rubio, the Mexico City-based dancer currently performing with Ballet Quad Cities, is discussing his American breakthrough in 1999.

"I was with a Mexican company dancing in Los Angeles," he says, "and Gerald Arpino [artistic director of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet], he saw me dancing at my fullest. You know, I was doing big, big roles ... everything that you could do without fainting. And stuff choreographed by me - things that would suit myself. He saw those performances and wanted me for his company.

"So even though I was 33," he continues, "which is, you know, an age that you could quit, I started with Joffrey."

Thirty-three?

"It was like a good second wind," says Rubio. "I started late, and I've been catching up."

The Green Room's production of the comedic drama The Melville Boys features a great deal of charm, some dramatic heft, and more than a few laughs. Yet it's difficult to describe precisely where the charm, heft, and laughs stem from, because the show's finest moments have little to do with Norm Foster's script, and lots to do with the inflections and invention of its performers. The playwright's offering is, at best, perfectly pleasant, but the Green Room's acting quartet of Jonathan Gregoire, Andrew Harvey, Colleen Winters, and Abby Van Gerpen - under the lively direction of Donna Hare - oftentimes lends it authentic depth of feeling, and that depth results in warmer, more honest humor, and more earned sentiment, than even Foster may have anticipated.

"I did a thing recently," says Saturday Night Live performer Darrell Hammond, "when I did Tony Soprano, and, like, a flat [a piece of scenery] fell on my head as I was walking out. And I got out there, and I discovered I didn't know the dialogue - the first 30 seconds were brand new.

My Verona Productions' last stage presentation premiered almost a year ago, so you could argue that the company is simply making up for lost time with its production of Christian Krauspe's Inside Out, a play within a play within a play (within another play, if I interpreted the climactic scene correctly). Yet based on its April 10 preview performance, the author's work-in-progress is still less a play than a stoner's conceit - "What if, like, everything we say and do is being written by, like, some unseen higher power who's, like, determining our actions without, like, our knowing it?" - and holds together about as well as most stoned ramblings; a few hours and a few bags of chips later, your "insights" begin to look rather dim.