Adams, one half of Fellow Travelers Performance Group, has made a specialty of exploring – in text, music, and dance – issues of specific interest to women. This particular program was her first foray into a whole evening's worth of solo work. She doesn't quite have enough material for a consistently satisfying show, but even the rather modest two-part video piece titled Project Earth demonstrates a skilled use of the parameters she sets for herself. In the first video, she has a man on a ladder pours thick paint on her as she keeps turning around her axis. The spreading goo shapes itself into continents and promontories around the contours of her body until she begins to look like a planet in the making. For the second video, she selected texts by environmentalist David Brower and worked with videographer Mike Griffith to create a personal manifesto on humankind's relation to nature.

For the evening's highlight, one has to wait until the end. The premiere of The Beast, fluidly directed by Krissy Keefer, shows Adams at her best. She knows how to write and deliver text, and she choreographs to convincingly expand the emotional implications of her subject matter. The musical choices, a collage of material she put together with partner Ken James, compliments this very satisfying piece of solo drama.

The Beast examines a woman's roller-coaster journey of coming to terms with the fact that "maybe I was not meant to have children." The beast snarls louder and louder, driving the character to distraction as she explores the options that modern medicine has to offer. Adams's account of tests, diagnoses, and remedies – pills, acupuncture, and hot water are the most benign mentioned – is both hilarious and painful. As she rails against (and sometimes laughs at) becoming part of this baby-producing technology, she also powerfully articulates the desperation, pain, and sense of failure her character goes through. Sometimes she spits out lines with blind fury.

Dressed in a simple white tunic and pants, Adams utilizes only one prop: a black wire office chair that she rides, cuddles up to, attacks, and uses to represent locations for action. The Beast starts out with Adams happily prattling about children; it ends with her facing the audience, acknowledging her womanhood and uniqueness. After moving through all of the operatic registers, the piece ends on a single clear note: "I am a woman like any other. Like no other."

Adams's A Short History of Decay seems unfinished but promising enough to make one look forward to a more completed version. History is also part of the Dante-inspired Inferno Project. Here, Adams portrays a woman who obsessively carves a slowly constricting circle in the earth with what looks like some sort of plow. Over and over she confesses, "I regret that I hit the dog." What she does and what she says only underline the inanity – and inescapable aspect – of her situation. Dressed in a musty Victorian gown, Adams plays this character with a rather light touch. In Seung-yon Seny Lee's excellent, evocative score for the piece, ominously rolling thunder suggests the approach of a calamity.