The title is an attention-grabber, but I Stand Before You Naked has nothing to do with nudity. The name of the piece performed at the Playground at the Adrienne comes from the last of its 11 scenes, when the nine actresses who have presented the show's 10 monologues by Joyce Carol Oates come together to recite an Oates poem.

Although that scene is one of the least involving in a play that at its best packs quite an emotional wallop, the poem's opening lines - "I stand before you naked, waiting for love..." - provide a fairly accurate description of what has gone before. Taking characters and situations from her many novels, Oates presents a series of women who speak directly and honestly about themselves. Love, their pursuit or lack of it, is a recurring theme.

It's an ideal project for Theater Catalyst's Eternal Spiral Project, which is dedicated to creating theater opportunities for women. Although not all the scenes are a successful match of script and performer, the actresses and director Myra Bazell largely succeed in giving life to Oates' well-drawn, hurting characters.

Sharon Geller makes the audience feel the desperation of a lonely substitute teacher who picks up and tries to seduce one of her male students. The situation leads to an irony that makes this unhappy woman appealing, despite violating a professional and societal taboo.

Gerre Garrett strikes the right note of weirdness in her portrayal of a repressed, homely woman who safely marries a convicted serial killer who has no chance of getting out of prison. Jessica Graham's anorexic teenager draws us into her confused thoughts and turbulent emotional state as she constantly circles her next meal: a single orange spotlighted on the stage.

Maryann Elder projects a buoyancy and spirit that seem just right for a facially disfigured woman who survives by refusing to acknowledge her disfigurement. Rena Krumholz makes believable the feelings of joy, guilt, anger and resentment that a pregnant, unmarried woman expresses through imaginary, though voiced, conversations with her accusatory fetus.

Oates' most intensely imagined situation produces the most striking performance. Kirsten Quinn plays a murdered strip-club dancer who, at the opening of the scene, rises from the dead. Marked with ugly bruises, her skimpy dress stained and ripped, Quinn's dancer delivers an animated account of her character's life up to the "really bad mistake" - going off with a man she thought was really interested in her - that ended it.

Quinn's energetic performance captures the spirited recklessness; she expresses the dancer's personality graphically through solo dancing that is almost dangerously sensual. Bazell, who is best-known as a choreographer, deserves a share of the credit for the effectiveness of this dance and the other movement in her judiciously physical presentation. Some of the characters in I Stand Before You Naked are memorable. Quinn's madly gyrating corpse is downright haunting.