The first thing you need to know before you go to the Solo Performance Festival at the Theatre Off Jackson is that while the Theatre Off Jackson is at 7th and Jackson, one block up at 8th and Jackson sit two of the ID's most-loved restaurants: Green Leaf offers Vietnamese cuisine and the Szechuan Noodle Bowl, Chinese. The second thing is that the Green Leaf is remodeling and isn't open, so get that out of your head right now.

Yoga Bitch, by Seattle's Suzanne Morrison, has one more show this Saturday, the 15th (with Giant Invisible Robot, by Ontario's Jayson McDonald). It's a story about the time Suzanne fled her temp job to take a 2-month course in Bali on how to be a yoga teacher. Depending how familiar you are with yoga people in your own life, it's a more or less predictable skewering of yoga's floating-on-a-cloud side (there's a blender exorcism) and its U.S. industry side (there's a building your yoga studio brand presentation from a marketing consultant). Though not a born comedian, Morrison has a girl-next-door air and a funny, plastic face that she puts on while discussing the health benefits of urine-drinking that makes Yoga Bitch an engaging series of wry chuckles. This should be a light, fast-paced show--but instead it goes at least 20 minutes too long as she struggles to find deeper meaning, something about holding on or letting go of a relationship. Since this "heavy" stuff doesn't really come from the heart of her Bali experience, it never really catches on. Nor do you learn what happened to her relationship with yoga, though from the yoga poses she wriggles into, we suppose she's still at it. One thing we'd mention to her director, Jean Michelle Gregory, is that since the theater seats look down on the sunken stage, having Morrison sit on the floor for long periods means that you spend that time trying to look through the back of the head of the person in front of you.

In contrast, Giant Invisible Robot doesn't tell you about a trip; it is a trip. Jayson McDonald plays a B-movie scientist and general, a lonely kid, a small-talk-challenged adult, a vampy, messy-eater upstairs neighbor, a condescending therapist, and a giant invisible robot. It's hilarious because over-the-top and free-form as it is (the scientist says "FWAP!" as he hits a map with his imaginary pointer), there's a disturbing reality underlying it all. It opens with the lonely kid Russel's paraphrased version of Star Wars, as seen over a drive-in's fence, and the obsessions and misunderstandings of little boys come through clearly long before you realize that Darth Vader is far from a random boyhood reference. Some of the characters are real, some are imaginary, and you hear from them all with no editorial framing, at blazing speed. McDonald's body language and posture transform on the fly, giving us the best example of what multiple personality might be like that we've seen live. (The other used-to-be-great personality-cycler out there, Robin Williams, could learn a thing or two about keeping comedy real from McDonald.) At just $15, it's an amazing show.