nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

Almost forty years after it first appeared in print, A Clockwork Orange still has the power to shock. Its vision of a future filled with violent crime, deadly street gangs, and the creation of a new deterrent that not only snuffs out crime, but also the human luxury of free will, is still disturbing. Godlight Theatre Company's current production of Anthony Burgess' classic (adapted by the author himself) plays up the discomfort to good result.

Alex (Kenneth King) is a sociopathic young man who heads a small gang that robs, rapes, and ultimately kills indiscriminately. Before long he's in prison, with his only chance for an early release coming in the form of an experimental treatment trial. Dr. Brodsky (Catherine Dyer) has developed a Pavlovian crime deterrent, in which subjects are programmed to be sickened by the thought of violence. After undergoing a trial treatment—during which he is forced to watch day after day of archival footage showing Nazi war crimes, concentration camp tortures, violent murders, rapes, etc.—Alex is "cured," and released back into society. Even though he still has violent urges, he can no longer act on them. It hurts too much, physically.

Manhattan Theatre Source is a terrific theater for A Clockwork Orange. It is a small, intimate black box, with seating on three sides of the stage. The audience is never more than ten feet away from the action. Director Joe Tantalo uses that to great advantage when staging the gang's mayhem. He slows the fights and the rapes down to slow-motion speed, so that the audience can take in every single bit of them. They happen so close that the audience cannot escape them, and perhaps feel like they are a part of them as well. Such intimacy adds much to the claustrophobia of Burgess's dreary, violent world.

The acting takes A Clockwork Orange's oppressiveness to another level. The production is anchored by the explosive performance of King in the lead role. Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of Alex in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation has left its mark on popular culture, and is a tough act to follow. But, follow it King does; he makes the role very much his own. In the beginning, his Alex is bulletproof: the King of the World! Nothing can stop him or his gang (whom he refers to as his "Droogs"). Once he's imprisoned, Alex has a long way to fall, and King goes there. He plays Alex's descent from self-imposed God-hood to sniveling hobo believably, and invests so much in his performance that one may even feel a little bit sorry for Alex once he hits rock bottom. The rest of the cast, all playing multiple roles, backs him up admirably.

In the years since its first performance in 1967, Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg has been revived on Broadway and in London’s West End, almost as often as some of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. Its first half is a wonderfully specific two-character metadrama that breaks conventions of theater and of propriety. Its second half, however, falls back on those very conventions. It teases its audience with its intelligence, but it offers actors two incredible roles. In this production at the Roundabout Theatre’s American Airlines Theater, the actors make the most of their chance to apply their skills.

The titular Joe Egg refers to ten-year-old brain-dead Jo (“to sit around like Joe Egg” is British slang for being lazy and bored), a “vegetable” as her father Brian caustically terms it. He and his wife Sheila blunt their pain with a black sense of humor, They recount visits to uncaring pediatricians with vaudevillian panache straight to the audience: Brian and Sheila are both so wounded that they’ve adopted masks permanently. By the end of the first half, it’s obvious that they’ve only stayed married because of their child. Part of what makes Joe Egg so clever is that, although the characters break the fourth wall, they never break character. It works like a Brechtian effect, distancing the audience from the characters so we can evaluate their choices.

The second half slips back into a cozy realism with a do-gooder friend stopping by with his wife to stage a kind of intervention. The confrontation ends with Brian attempting to euthanize his daughter, then running out on Sheila the next morning. His exit is supposed to be a grasp at true freedom, an emancipation. Sheila’s reliance on faith is a pipe dream; Brian knows when to wake up to reality. This brings up cherished modern ideals of individuality and of autonomy. But it robs Jo of her own (meager) humanity: she may not be quite alive, but she deserves to be dealt with as more than a metaphor for the diseased marriage. “Who wouldn’t do the same in Brian’s situation?” asks Nichols, “Those who condemn him are simps.” But given the realities of the situation (and the bathos of this final scene), Brian’s actions are reprehensible. For Nichols, the quality of mercy isn’t worth the strain.

It’s the lead performances, not the script, that make this production of Joe Egg worth the expense. The more famous actor, British comedian Eddie Izzard, is a very physical performer, bringing the informality and seeming improvisation of stand-up to his performance as Brian. Victoria Hamilton, as Sheila, should be a great star after this role: she’s got an ordinary beauty (like Renée Zellweger), but more important, she’s an actress whose warmth wins the audience over gradually and without showiness. Her style isn’t intellectual, but it’s not instinctive either. Instead, Hamilton follows Sheila’s thread of emotions through the play.

The rest of this production is really neither here nor there. Michael Gaston, Margaret Colin, and the reliable Dana Ivey can’t do much with their stock roles of the Bleeding-Heart, his High-Strung Wife, and the Termagant Mother-In-Law. Madeleine Martin, as Jo, is a fine child actress and earns praise for playing her character’s spastic fits with discomfiting realism. Laurence Boswell’s production does nothing to subvert the play’s inherent smugness. But fortunately, he has elicited fine performances that, at their best, seem improvised. Performances like Izzard’s and Hamilton’s can hide a script’s faults, and allow the audience to enjoy their evening.

If that's not enough to pique your interest, know that A Different Man is an intriguing, entirely engaging play, well worth a look on its own. Coles' newest play is set in a remote town in Mexico, where we meet three American expatriates, Henry, Sam, and Ronnie. Henry and Sam are middle-aged gay men with no apparent ties to anyone anywhere; as they get to know each other, over coffee at a restaurant, we learn that both are recovering from ugly break-ups, the circumstances of which are shadowy but apparently juicy. Ronnie is the young waiter from Mississippi who has just been hired by this bistro; he too is gay, and he, too, seems to have a secret in his past.

To tell you much more about A Different Man is to ruin it for you: suffice to say that Coles has devised a complicated mystery whose unraveling will keep you glued to your seat throughout. The play isn't 100% satisfying—the climax comes a little too soon, I thought—but it's involving and always entertaining. And it's refreshing (if not downright unique) in depicting the lives of two unglamorous middle-aged gay men with forthrightness and naturalism and a minimum of sensationalism or camp.

Indeed, the men who inhabit this play are fascinating creations. Henry (played by longtime Coles collaborator Anthony John Lizzul) put me in mind of a gay male Blanche DuBois, a fragile survivor, damaged by a world that doesn't quite understand him in ways that can't quite be expressed. Lizzul makes sure that we're never entirely certain if Henry is telling the truth or, as another Tennessee Williams character put it, he is giving us truth pleasantly disguised as illusion.

Sam is very much Henry's opposite—down-to-earth, rugged, and pragmatic; nothing flimsy about him, except a slipperiness that disconcerts Henry and us. Dared Wright portrays him with a common-sensical authority that makes him a commanding figure.

As interesting as these two older men are, it is Ronnie who emerges as the play's protagonist. The secrets that Sam and Henry are hiding from each other—plus some secrets about his own life—force him into a treacherous journey of discovery and self-discovery. Benincasa imbues the character with intelligence and humanity that make us care very much what happens to him. When he finds himself called upon to undertake an act of terrible betrayal, the stark pain of the act is palpable.

Coles, who directs his own work here, finds time to meditate on notions of masculinity, sexual fantasy, and power, giving A Different Man more punch than it might otherwise have. In the theatre nowadays, a brand new suspense thriller—especially one that actually is suspenseful—is a rarity. One that also delves into deeper issues amounts to something of a little miracle.

So A Different Man delivers real pleasures as entertainment and as fodder for the intellect. It also provides a terrific showcase for its actors, especially Mr. Benincasa, who we hope will continue to grow as an actor in the seasons to come.

A Girl of 16 begins in silence. A pale embryonic sack heaves and stretches, eventually revealing a nude woman. She stares out at the audience, her lips popping open and closed like a fish out of water's. And the audience stares back, registering the moment and waiting to assign it some meaning.

Such a curtain raiser establishes an atmosphere of risk, and fixes the stage as a theatrical laboratory. Over its 90-minute course, some of this avant-garde play’s risks pay off, but many don’t, maybe too many. Writer-director Aya Ogawa has a poetic eye, which isn’t the same as a dramatic one. She seems resolved to leave behind every time-honored trick of theatricality and strike out into the unknown on a mission for new methods of staging. But because she spends so much time fumbling for self-expression, she leaves her audience almost empty-handed.

What Ogawa seeks to express is the mystery of female sexuality: her play covers female adolescence and the awakening of artistic consciousness. To that end, she’s written a work inspired by a Japanese novel, Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness. But A Girl of 16 still sprawls like a novel, and might’ve benefited from more distillation. Noemi, a talented 16-year-old artist, insinuates herself into the household of her mentor’s ex-lover. Just as her mentor, at that age, had seduced the father, Noemi now seduces the son. Her affair, unlike her mentor’s, ends not in a nova of creativity but in a murder-suicide. The play sets up artistic expression as a disturbing, daemonic force, both creative and destructive. In that it also attributes these passions to female hormones, Girl is also a horror drama, a strange sister to Carrie.

Ogawa’s apparent themes come across in both her exciting ideas and her failure to impress those ideas upon her audience. She’s created a highly malleable stage space, where actors who stand a few feet apart may be distant in both place and time. Characters have doppelgangers; the failures of one generation impress themselves upon the next; hooded figures—made up like Japanese Noh stagehands—crouch under the coffee table. Ogawa fills every possible moment and space with meaning, but her portents are often more baffling than they are deliberate. Part of our frustration comes from the work’s illegibility, but an equal part comes from those moments that do work before they dissipate.

As the title character, Megin Schantz epitomizes the show’s frustrating hit-and-miss sense of risk: she expertly delivers a teenager’s clumsiness through delicate gestures that elbow up against her solid frame. But other times, it’s hard to read what she’s trying to do, physically or emotionally. This adds to the general creepiness, but it detracts from the general clarity. And the best moments have seemingly little to do with the great, shadowy skeleton of the show but shock us into a new type of sight. Deborah Wallace, as the mother of Noemi’s lover, mesmerizes by looking like June Cleaver but acting like a Grimm witch/stepmother.

Generally in A Girl of 16, the visual experiments and the fractured method of storytelling distract us from drawing anything specific out of the play. Experimentation contains its own dangers, not the least of which is self-indulgence. Audiences will be compelled by fleeting moments in A Girl of 16, and should be encouraged by Ogawa’s raw talent. Her deconstructive style, however, might work better with a classic script, something that would give her a structure to work against, rather than a work of her own construction.

I wanted to see A Last Dance for Sybil because I was curious about what's on Ossie Davis' mind. He wrote the seminal play of the Civil Rights era, Purlie Victorious; I think this is his first play since that one.

It turns out that Davis has a great deal on his mind. A Last Dance for Sybil is about a family-owned American oil company whose oil reserves are all contained in a (fictitious) African country called the Monyoghese Republic. The lease that Petrotech negotiated, presumably rather forcefully, some 99 years ago is now about to come due; Anson Cryder, the company's rising leader, and his African-American executive assistant Sybil BenCompson, travel to Africa to get the Monyoghese ruler Papa Oba to sign the renewal contract.

Papa Oba is old and ailing, however, and his son, Prince Mlolu, has very different ideas for his country's most valuable natural resource. Instead of continuing to lease the oil to the Americans, he wants to nationalize the oil fields so that the Monyoghese people will derive their full benefit. To finance this program, he and his economic advisor (an African-American named Dunlester John, who went to Howard University with Sybil years before) have devised an innovative plan to entice African-Americans to invest their savings in the fledgling nation. Sybil, meanwhile, has plans of her own, involving a merger between Petrotech and the small Harlem bank owned by her family.

Another subplot—not explored as thoroughly as the others—revolves around Sybil's alcoholic brother, Pellice, whose inability to find a niche for himself in the world seems to be derived from the assassination of their father by Dutch Schultz.

A Last Dance for Sybil takes in themes of racism, colonialism, and globalism as it follows its various storylines. The view of the world expounded here feels simplistic: Prince Mlolu's scheme, and his strategy for accomplishing it, seem particularly suspect, especially because he and his father remind us uncomfortably of too many dictators of emerging nations who enrich themselves at the expense of their countrymen.

But Davis has created some intriguing and vivid characters here, especially Pellice BenCompson, whose struggles with being a black man in America are poignant and heartfelt and reflect the only direct line from Purlie forty years ago to this play. The wily Papa Oba is given one spectacularly good scene with Sybil that dramatizes some of the many differences between African-Americans and Africans. And Prince Mlolu, his advisor Dunlester John, and even the white corporate executive Anson Cryder all capture our attention as they play out their political/economic games.

Missing, though, is the character who is supposedly at the center of all the intrigue: unfortunately, Davis doesn't seem to have a handle on Sybil. She's presented variously as the brilliant power behind Anson's throne, as a principled black activist, as a sellout to corporate America, as Anson's love interest, and as a stiflingly protective (enabling?) older sister to the troubled Pellice. Davis' point may well be that Sybil is all of these things, but the conflicts that such a personality suggests aren't explored here; she is really just a catalyst in the play that bears her name.

At the performance reviewed, the mostly formidable cast still seemed to be finding their way. Ruby Dee, the show's riveting center as Sybil, fumbled her lines too much for comfort, I'm afraid, and Herb Downer, as Dunlester John, doesn't seem to have settled on a characterization yet. Earle Hyman is impressive as Papa Oba, though, as is Arthur French as Sybil's uncle, Sylvester Potts. Count Stovall gives the most realized performance as Pellice, but the role as written is too small to do his work justice.

I don't know if New Federal Theatre and Davis plan a life for A Last Dance for Sybil after this engagement; I'm not sure that they should. But it's certainly worthwhile to give a listen to one of our theatre's foremost black voices, to find out what he's got to say about some of the genuinely important and serious issues facing his fellows in America and in Africa.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare takes advantage of the magic of theatrical illusion to perform impossible feats. “I am invisible,” says the King of Fairies, and then he is, to the mortals he shares the stage with, though not to us. Shakespeare connects the otherworldly magic to the magic of performance in this charming comedy in a number of ways, most notably in the raucous amateur theatricals of a blue-collar troupe that provides the play with a madcap climax. A third type of magic, that of love itself, completes the triangle: two pairs of lovers mix and match over the course of a night, while a queen is tricked into sex with one of the laborers, magically transformed into an ass.

Where previous productions by the excellent Aquila Theatre Company married a high concept and a (Harpo) Marxist sense of anarchy to Shakespeare’s comedy (their Comedy of Errors last summer was one of the best productions of 2002), they play Dream conventionally. What this choice gains in gravity, it loses in wonder and in comedy. Rather than trusting in the illusion of theatricality, the company falls back on an almost Victorian pictorial realism. The review that follows may sound picky; in a sense it is, but only because Aquila have proved themselves visionary interpreters of Shakespeare’s comic chaos. Their production of Dream is enjoyable and light, but it could be so much more.

The ensemble of Dream, directed by Robert Richmond and playing at the New Victory on 42nd Street, takes itself too seriously for the play. The actors perform in a grandiose manner, maybe because they’re playing primarily for children. If so, this choice is completely wrong-headed: children can sniff out condescension better than grown-ups, and they lack the sense of stuffy obligation that allows many adults to pretend they enjoy theater (and especially Shakespeare). And even if the company isn’t playing for kids, their pompous tone kills the beauty of the verse (open the script at random and marvel at the rhymed lyrics on nature) while burbling though it at such a speed that the specific meaning is also lost. Richmond’s subdued direction seems more appropriate to the less-accessible Tempest than to Dream.

If the performances lack magic, they substitute another of the play’s themes: metamorphosis. The Aquila practice of double-casting meshes well with this facet of the play. And the actors do more than play one role; they change even within their roles. When one of the lovers says, “I’ll be your spaniel,” she runs around the stage panting like a dog. And the set design, by director Richmond and artistic director Peter Meinick, supplies some of the magic that the action lacks. Instead of a covering of branches, the play’s forest is a canopy of umbrellas that glow with tiny lights. It looks enchanting, although how umbrellas fit into the play goes unexplained.

The fairies, holding court over the mortals, bind any production of Dream together. Although this production’s strongest performances are found here, so is the weakest. Lisa Carter captures the regality of the Fairy Queen Titania with a cool finesse that her debasing love shatters. Louis Butelli, as the play-stealer Puck, looks like a Technicolor djinn, with little horns and a funky walk. He’s enthralling and dangerous, motivated by a sadistic sense of humor that stops just short of permanent damage.

As the lord Oberon, however, Kenn Sabberton speaks the poetry in the style you might term “Affected British.” It’s the deadly mirror to the “Natural American” style: where the "American" tries to force the verse into sounding like realistic conversation, the "Brit" indulges in the poetry so much that he loses contact with the world. In an equally frustrating performance of another key role, Richard Willis’ wet interpretation of the clown Bottom owes more to ham-acting decisions than to his character’s egotism. He also squanders the comic potential inherent in his character’s transformation into an ass by merely braying over and over.

The generic performances of the rest of the ensemble provide a background for the evening’s magical events rather than a foreground. As often happens with Shakespearean comedy, the women (Lindsay Rae Taylor and Renata Friedman) play their roles better than the men (Ryan Conarro and Andrew Schwartz) in their roles both as lovers and as workers. The romantic scenes, in which the four lovers lose control of their affections to fairy mischief, suffer from forced jocularity, while the slapstick scenes are pleasant but not laugh-out-loud funny until the final play-within-a-play.

However, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of those evergreen scripts that’s almost impossible to misstage. It’s also perfect for young adults, with plots and humor that run from simple to complex. But Aquila’s production errs on the side of simplicity, which does a disservice to their audience and themselves. This Dream is good enough; but it’s a lapse for Aquila, who are usually better than good.

Audiences should not be surprised when descriptions of the apocalypse appear onstage these days; they should be relieved, however, that some of them are, if not tongue-in-cheek, at least hilarious in their morbidity. Playwright Mac Wellman terms our collective preoccupation the “psycho-apocalyptic urge.” In his early ’90s play A Murder of Crows, a young girl describes her vision of the end of time as a hole ripped in the sky, a change in the weather that will transform humanity into “something more murderous but more spiritual.” Sitting out the present heat wave in La Jardin del Paraiso, a small park in Alphabet City teeming with undergrowth, the audience will recognize that Wellman has transformed newspaper headlines into a miniature cartoon odyssey.

The play follows the fortunes of a Michigan family who lost its patriarch in an avalanche of radioactive chickenshit. The daughter, Suzannah, would be a normal, slightly spacey American kid except for her visions. Her mother’s at a loss for solutions; her uncle advises her to kill some frogs for release. And when her father returns from the dead to reveal that he’s a member of a government cabal of meteorologists who need her help, she does the only reasonable thing: she runs off to join a flock (or “murder”) of crows. Unfortunately, crows are as preoccupied with ridiculous beliefs and bad music as humans are.

This production has been imported from Yale’s undergraduate theater program under the aegis of the Gorilla Repertory Theatre. The acting is uneven but generally good. As the widowed mother Nella, Jessie Wiener rightly takes her time in a heavily expository opening monologue. Her slow articulation, puzzling out each thought as it comes, shows a woman more confused by grief than crippled by it. As her brother Howard, Rich Silverstein radiates the charisma of a used-car salesman as he defends his bigoted views to his sister and the audience.

Director Ryan Iverson guides his audience through Wellman’s complex absurdities with a steady sense of what the play is about. His courage in producing a play that’s so critical of America, so vicious in its satire and pessimistic in its worldview, is admirable. Wellman isn’t an optimist: his vision of our country emphasizes horribly-dressed middle-Americans who espouse murder and racism, sometimes in the same breath. Fortunately, he’s got a wicked sense of humor and a poet’s ear for language, which turns his play into a hilarious evening.

A Perfect Relationship is a charming play about two roommates, Ward and Greg, who are tricked by the same one-night stand out of their sublet Greenwich Village apartment. Though its principal characters are gay men, it feels like one of those airy screwball comedies from the 1930s, especially because we know almost as soon as the play has begun what its two leading characters do not—that they are in love with each other, and need to wind up together in the final scene.

The journey there, true to form, is the fun of the thing, as Ward and Greg battle an overbearing landlady (well, sublessor, technically), a devious "trick" named Barry (who manages to sleep with both roommates in a 24-hour period, and also to get the lease to their apartment transferred into his own name), and each other before realizing that their heretofore platonic relationship is, indeed, perfect. The landlady, Muriel, is a hoot—a free-thinker of indeterminate age who earns her livelihood by subletting apartments all over town, in which she stores various of her myriad possessions. She runs through boyfriends the way most people run through newspapers—we get to meet three different ones during the course of the play—yet she thinks nothing of interfering in Greg and Ward's lives despite the chaotic nature of her own.

Playwright Doric Wilson places these off-the-wall but likable characters in several farcical situations, to grand comic effect. The interplay between Ward and Greg—who have honestly never contemplated anything like a sexual union—is beautifully delineated, and actors Kurt Bauccio (Ward) and Frank Anthony Polito (Greg) fall into the natural rhythm of mates who have cohabited for a very long time with real felicity; their chemistry is palpable. Their characters' easy promiscuity with drugs and sex seems to fit them less comfortably; both Bauccio and Polito project an affable regularness as, respectively, an accounting teacher and travel agent that doesn't quite jive with the swinging '70s personas they're sometimes assigned here.

But their relationship—and its inevitable outcome—feels natural and timeless; though a few specific references date it, in most ways A Perfect Relationship is as fresh and relevant as a brand new play like The Last Sunday in June. People never stop behaving foolishly when it comes to matters of the heart, after all.

This production, from Wilson's company TOSOS II, is nicely directed by Mark Finley and features a smart, compact set by Michael Muccio that serves the piece  well. Eileen T'Kaye as the flamboyant landlady Muriel, Kevin Held as the sneaky Barry, and, especially, Christopher Borg as Muriel's three bizarre boyfriends-of-the-moment, complete the ensemble ably.

I admit when I agreed to see A Pure Gospel Valentine I was a little worried that it would be monotonous and way too preachy for me. I am happy to report that I was wrong. The show may have had a little too many religious undertones for my taste, but it is a show filled with gospel music, what else could you expect? Taking that as a given, I was able to sit back, relax, and actually enjoy spending time with music I would normally avoid.

The show consists of twenty gospel songs. In between the songs there is some patter, some humorous and some more serious moments. The premise of the evening is that the audience are all members of the church of gospel that is congregating on Valentine’s Day. There is the preacher and a guest soloist, and all of the church members have distinct characters they portray throughout the evening. As their characters, they spar with each other playfully and usually cheer each other on.

The best part of the evening is undeniably the singing. Wow! The entire cast is phenomenal. The voices are spectacular. They riff like there’s no tomorrow! They belt like Broadway stars! And the stage presence is intensely energetic and charismatic. They literally force the audience to clap, smile, and sing, too.

Almost all of the songs are love-themed for Valentine’s Day. The slower ones drag a little, but there are thankfully few of them. The act one finale is amazingly rousing. My favorite numbers were the pop songs that are turned into gospel. They provide a nice break from the standard fare.

The band consisting of piano, drums, sax, keyboards and guitar is also great. The amount of amazing musicians on the stage is overwhelming. The staging by co-conceiver Leslie Dockery is fluid. Her choreography is catchy and lively. The costumes by Joseph Del Valle are great, simply great. There are two sets, one for each act, and they are both extremely colorful and eclectic.

The downside of the show is that it is too long and fails to end succinctly. (There are four spots where it could end, but doesn’t.) Also, some of the patter is superfluous and drags. Since the point is the songs, there should be more songs and less talking!

I would recommend this show for anyone who loves gospel music. In fact anyone who likes it. A Pure Gospel Valentine is a great show to bring families to, as well. Just be forewarned: you are going to have to clap, sing and smile!

When you enter the theatre at 13th Street Rep to see A Soldier's Death, the body of the title character is already on stage, sprawled and mutilated, one leg shattered and mostly missing. It's a startling and arresting image, one that signals the serious sense of purpose that Tom O'Neil has in this short, bleak meditation on war and death.

Death, mostly: though the horrible banality of battle is evoked at times in the piece, A Soldier's Death focuses more on the bitterness of untimely demise. The play—which is abstract and even surreal in nature—seems to take place on the top of a hill where a young soldier named Adam has just been killed. Here, he is visited by his father, mother, and younger sister, and later by two comrades whose mission it is to return his body to camp.

It could be argued, however, that the play takes place in the minds of Adam's sister Jane and fellow soldier Rawlins; the action may be seen as their imagined interactions with the now-dead Adam as they try to deal with his death. Indeed, what remains with us most strongly after the play's end are 16-year-old Jane's sense of anger and injustice at the loss of a brother she had barely come to understand or appreciate, and Rawlins' relief and guilt at having thus far been spared Adam's terrible fate.

O'Neil writes affecting dialogue, and he keeps it general enough so that the universality of his theme is preserved. Adam could be a soldier from any country , in any war; the catastrophe of his needless murder would hit his family and his platoon in exactly the same way.

Tony Pennino has staged the piece sparely and sensitively, letting the audience find comfort with the bitter, the sweet, and the strangely comic moments that O'Neil imagines. The cast is mostly fine, with particularly good performances turned in by Kyle Pierson, in the demanding role of Adam, who must lie with his damaged body twisted and distorted on stage for the entire length of the play, and Deirdre Schwiesow, as Adam's gently shell-shocked mother.

If only all of the musicals on Broadway were as lovingly and skillfully crafted as A Year with Frog & Toad, well, the world would be a better place. As it is, this delightful, warm-hearted charmer of a show is off-Broadway, at the always pleasant New Victory Theatre, for a couple of weeks that happen to coincide with the Thanksgiving holiday, which means that lots of kids on hiatus from school will have a chance to see it. Take them: this is a wonderful introduction to theatre at its magical best. (And even if you have no small fry to accompany you, but are in need of of a dose of pure, unfettered, sweet imagination—hey, go on and swallow your grown-up pride and see the show on your own. You're entitled!) [Note: A Year with Frog & Toad later moved to Broadway.]

I don't know the Arnold Lobel books on which A Year with Frog & Toad is based—too old for that, I'm afraid—but the musical they have inspired is terrific. As the title suggests, it depicts a year in the lives of Frog and Toad, two best friends who have a variety of low-key adventures, each of which teaches us a gentle life lesson. Frog is kind-hearted, generous, outgoing, and a bit of a risk-taker; while Toad is moodier and gruffer, outspoken but something of a worry-wort. They make a great pair, and as we watch them undertake such activities as planting a garden (which takes too long to satisfy impatient Toad), sled down a snowy hill (Frog falls off partway down, giving Toad a great scare), or pigging out on a batch of Toad's delicious cookies, what we're most aware of is that their fellowship is what counts most. A Year with Frog & Toad celebrates that most essential human compulsion, to reach out and care for someone else. What a lovely way to spend a couple of hours in the theatre!

The show proceeds episodically from the first stirrings of spring, heralded by the arrival (suitcases in hand) of a trio of hip birds who will bemusedly watch Frog and Toad's year unfold. In short scenes and musical numbers, authors Robert and Willie Reale bring Frog, Toad, and various of their sometimes creepy, sometimes crawly associates to joyous life. The Reales, who are brothers, and their collaborators—director David Petrarca, choreographer Daniel Pelzig, set designer Adrianne Lobel (who is Arnold Lobel's daughter), costume designer Martin Pakledinaz, and lighting designer James F. Ingalls—balance sophistication and whimsy, all the while remembering that their target audience is about four or five years old. A Year with Frog & Toad treats the children for whom it is intended with respect, and they respond in kind—the audience at the performance I attended, at least half of which needed booster seats, was attentive and enrapt throughout.

The great thing is, it's put over with such bona fide show biz know-how that the parents enjoy themselves, too. Pakledinaz's costumes are witty and original and, when appropriate, beautiful. Lobel's sets feel like giant animations of child's drawings, winningly detailed but with plenty of room for us to exercise our imaginations to fill in the blanks. The songs are simple but not simple-minded. The dancing is peppy and varied; there's even a paean to old-time vaudeville with a soft-shoe routine performed in front of the curtain by our two heroes.

The cast is splendid. Mark Linn-Baker and Jay Goede are as appealing a pair of amphibians as have ever graced the stage; Linn-Baker, as the more childlike Toad, really throws himself into his character, warts and all. (I'll give you a minute to groan over that one.) Goede, meanwhile, executes several exuberant froglike leaps with such grace that we wonder that he hasn't landed a starring role in a more mainstream musical. The supporting players—just three in number—are deft and engaging: Danielle Ferland, deadpan wonder that she is, is lovably arch as a bird, a turtle, and a mischievous squirrel; Kate Reinders scores particularly as Mouse and as Young Frog in a flashback sequence; and Frank Vlastnik very nearly stops the show as Snail, who is entrusted with delivering a Very Important Letter at the top of the show and succeeds in getting it to its destination just before the end (the Reales have given him their wittiest song, as well).

It just goes to show what talent, commitment, and a full heart can do: A Year with Frog & Toad serves up the tastiest, sweetest theatre concoction in town right now. Plus, at the end of Act One, there's the sloppiest, silliest cookie-eating scene ever. So, go: you and/or your kids are going to have a ton of fun.

The first act of Adult Entertainment, Elaine May's new comedy, is pretty funny. It begins on the set of a cable access TV show hosted by Heidi-the-Ho (read Robin Byrd), where several adult video veterans are reminiscing about the recently deceased porn director Marty Akens. After the show, Heidi and her pals—Frosty Moons, a sitcom has-been who now pays the rate as a porn performer; Vixen Fox, an enterprising younger adult movie queen; Jimbo J, an extremely well-endowed leading man; and Guy Akers, Marty's brother and unbilled collaborator—decide to produce a porn film of their own. Guy has inherited Marty's camera equipment—or at least he has a key to the garage in Newark where it's stored—and therefore will write and direct; Frosty, Vixen, Heidi, and Jimbo will star.

The group agree that they want to make porn with a difference, and that difference will be artistic pretense: Guy fashions a script around Frosty's long-ago sitcom character which allows the gang to play "real people"; Jimbo gets to wear a neck brace as one of them, which makes his day. The troupe is dissatisfied with Guy's first draft, however, and they decide to recruit a more "professional" writer, Heidi's camera man Gerry, who has a degree and, more important, delusions that he can become an auteur. Gerry quickly gets the gang down to serious business, leading them through improvs and assigning them readings by everyone from Arthur Miller to Susan Sontag.

The joke, in this Born Yesterday-meets-Deep Throat scenario, is that Frosty, Vixen, Heidi, Jimbo, and Guy become transformed as their awareness of a world beyond adult entertainment increases. Scenes depict Heidi earnestly assimilating socioeconomic facts about Hispanic domestics (to learn her motivation as a maid in the planned film) and Jimbo's tearful recitation (on Heidi's TV show) of the plot of Our Town, and they're not just funny—they're almost uplifting, reminding us that even these (baldly stereotyped) dull-witted sex workers can reach for metaphorical stars and come out the better for it.

May has a great time spoofing Byrd's show (complete with extensive prerecorded sequences, mostly aired in between scenes, which feature the motley cast performing foolish soft-core dance routines; Jeannie Berlin deadpanning as Frosty Moons on one of those strip-bar poles is priceless). She also has fun poking fun at the porn industry, or at least most people's superficial impression of what the porn industry is like, propagating numerous dirty jokes that pun on movie titles (like "Saving Ryan's Privates") and even keeping up (so to speak) a running gag about Jimbo's oversized anatomical anomaly, ever evident as a mammoth bulge in whatever skimpy outfit he happens to be wearing.

But May's assumption that all adult entertainers are (relatively) stupid and uneducated and unsophisticated—which is probably unfair and/or inaccurate—has a detrimental effect on her script. Once we've seen Jeannie Berlin play over-age dumb blonde Frosty Moons or Danny Aiello play super-furtive Guy Akers (and they do so masterfully), there's no place for them to go. And there's no place for the play to go.

Which is probably why Act Two is such a letdown: Gerry unveils a script that the now-better-educated principals judge a disappointment, various improbable and unmotivated plot complications follow, and the thing finally winds down in Jimbo's kitschy apartment, with Jimbo hopped up on acid and threatening to jump off his window ledge. We've strayed away from May's forte of sharp-edged satire and ventured right into grade-B sitcom-land. Everybody's game, but Adult Entertainment has fizzled out.

Which is a shame, because, if it's not exactly earth-shattering social commentary, the concept and impulse behind Adult Entertainment is a challenging and disarming one—taking on something that's still taboo in latent puritanical America and putting a comic, human face on it. I'm not sure what May and her director, film veteran Stanley Donen, could or should have done to solve some of the play's problems; but I am glad they took the project on. The one thing Adult Entertainment resolutely is not is smirky, smarmy faux-porn; it is, somehow, never vulgar (at least until desperation takes over at the very end).

Berlin and Aiello are comic treasures as the oldest of the six pornsters; Eric Elice as buff Jimbo, Mary Birdsong as Vixen Fox, and Linda Halaska as Heidi-the-Ho are dead-on as their earnest though broadly-sketched characters. Brandon Demery has the "straight" role, cameraman-turned-screenwriter Gerry DiMarco; he's fine, but he has much less to do than the others. Suzy Benzinger's costumes are witty and Neil Patel's fluid sets are effective. Bryan Louiselle has composed suitably cheesy music for the dance sequences.

Do not underestimate how much can happen in just a few minutes.

That's the lesson of Air Raid, the remarkable new production from National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO). This compact little play, just forty minutes long, is NAATCO's response to the war that is now a week old; what a walloping visceral response it is. Air Raid was written by Archibald MacLeish in 1938 as a radio play; it's staged here, with a keen and passionate eye, by Stephen Stout as a fully realized theatre piece. It's still framed as a radio broadcast: two announcers (Han Ong and Joel de la Fuente) narrate this taut tale of the anonymous women in an unnamed village in an unnamed country. We watch them go through the motions of their early morning and we listen to them gossip and chatter. A group of them (Lily Wong, Eileen Rivera, Gita Reddy, Jody Lin) banter over laundry. A sick woman (Geeta Citygirl) speaks sagely to her daughter.

Stout evokes Wilder and Brecht with the simplicity and directness of his staging.

For good reason: the gossip concerns, among other trivial topics, the rumor of war. Some other unnamed country is apparently planning an attack on this very place. No one believes in it; even when the warning siren sounds, the women refuse to take cover.

And then: the deafening sounds of the bombs. Darkness. A final, indelible image of a pair of young lovers (Aaron Yoo and Jennifer Chang) reaching out for one another in the last second of their lives.

Air Raid's potency creeps up on us and belies its brevity. NAATCO does well to show it to us now. Do we ever appreciate how much the world can change in just a few minutes?

If you've seen some or all of the seven short plays by David Ives gathered here under the title All in the Timing, then you know that they are smart, fast, and very, very funny. What you might not have realized—I didn't—is that some of them are also touching, affecting; even wise. Leave it to Joe Tantalo, who is rapidly becoming one of the directors whose work I most reliably admire and cherish, to discover the soul lurking beneath Ives' glib wit.

Leave it to him, too, to figure out that the snappiest way to stage an evening of ten-minute plays is also the simplest. The lights go down and ten actors march onto the tiny stage at Manhattan Theatre Source, placing themselves distinctively in the empty chairs that await them there. A searchlight scans their faces in the darkness, looking to pick out the players for the first piece. It finds them; they spring to life in their seats. And so it goes, one after another, through these seven hilarious comedies. With tiny adjustments to position, costume, and posture, the ensemble takes us to all the places Ives' cockeyed imagination can conjure: a monkey cage, a Manhattan cafe, a surreal bakery, even a restaurant in an alternate universe.

I need to tell you about these seven wonderful plays, now, each of which has something to do with that titular premise—that if we can just get the timing right, we're bound to get what we want, or need, or deserve. (The trick, Ives is telling us in these plays, is that we have to be persistent.) The evening begins with Sure Thing, in which two strangers meet in a crowded room and, through trial and error, find a way to connect and make a date for the evening. This verbal pas de deux is a maze of wrong and right turns, the bad judgment calls marked by an offstage bell that interrupts the conversation and urges the characters back on track. Kenneth King and Deanna Henson are the players.

Next is Words, Words, Words, in which three chimpanzees named Milton, Swift, and Kafka sit in a cage, attempting to prove the old saw that, given enough time, an ape left alone with a typewriter will eventually come up with Hamlet. "What is a Ham-let?" asks Swift balefully. He plots revolution and revenge while Milton rhapsodizes about the mother continent ("Paradise. Lost," he reflects) and Kafka finds herself stuck typing nothing but the letter "k" over and over again. This is an absolutely hilarious play, and Tantalo and actors Liz Caldwell, Kenneth King, and Cyrus Roxas nail it.

The Philadelphia takes place not in the city but in the state of mind named for it. Our hero, Mark, is having a rotten day; whatever he wants, he can't get. His friend Al fills him in: Mark is in a Philadelphia, and when that happens, the only way to get what you want is to ask for the opposite. (Al is blissfully in a Los Angeles; the waitress is in a Cleveland, which, she says, is like death only without the benefits.) Ryan Harrington is deliciously over-the-top as Al; JT Patton and Sophia Holman play it straight with admirable results as Mark and the waitress.

Foreplay: Or the Art of the Fugue takes us to a miniature golf course, where smooth-talking Chuck is on three different dates at three different points in his life at the same time. Structured like a fugue, we see that Chuck learns from his mistakes too late; in middle age, he is bested by a savvy teeny-bopper who not only knows all his lines, but also plays golf better than he does. Liz Caldwell is a hoot as this youngster; she's joined by the deft Kenneth King, John Porto, and David MacNiven as the three Chucks and Flannery Foster and Deanna Henson as the other two dates.

Next up is the piece that turned out to be my favorite of the evening, Degas, C'est Moi. Here, an unemployed schlemiel wakes up one morning and decides to become Edgar Degas, the dead French impressionist painter. We watch him as moves through his day—unrecognized by cabbies, passersby, and the guy at the unemployment office; but eventually there's a small moment of triumph in a cafe where a beautiful girl spots him as he doodles on a paper napkin. Our hero's adventure as a famous artist ends with a sobering dose of reality administered by his wife. Or does it? Tantalo finds the winsome, plaintive heart of this quirky fantasy and makes it soar. Ryan Harrington is delightfully earnest as the goofy protagonist, while the rest of the company brings his extraordinary day as Degas to vivid life with economy and real sensitivity.

Composer Philip Glass tries to buy a loaf of bread at a bakery in the next play, aptly titled Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread. He lands—deservedly, one might suggest—in a scene from an experimental music theatre work, where the baker and two young women sing and dance and generally behave bizarrely and it takes ten minutes to procure the desired item. Ryan Harrington, Cyrus Roxas, Liz Caldwell, and Flannery Foster have a blast performing this silly little extravaganza.

All in the Timing ends, charmingly, with The English Language, in which David MacNiven guides a man and woman (Sophia Holman and JT Patton) through the perilous chore of  trying to communicate. Their mission, they (and we) learn, is to find the right words—and the right meanings—from so very many choices. They do, finally, which is why this is such a lovely way to cap the evening.

I wish All in the Timing were running for more than just one more week; it's as delightful an evening of theatre as any I know of right now. Try to catch it. But don't despair: we hear that Tantalo and his company, Godlight Theatre, have lots of interesting stuff planned for us next season.

Since Pack of Lies (1985), I don't think I've missed a single one of Rosemary Harris's appearances on the New York stage. This has proven a  most intelligent course of action. Well, Rosemary Harris is back, in the Roundabout Theatre's revival of Edward Albee's All Over, and you do not want to miss seeing her. This is an exquisite performance, one that enlarges the work and the observer; one that reminds us why we go to the theatre anyway (to achieve catharsis, and we do, vicariously, here); one that won't be forgotten. None of this, by the way, is intended to take anything away from Harris's fine co-stars or Albee's script or anything else going on at the Gramercy Theatre. But if you need just one good reason to buy a ticket to All Over, Rosemary Harris is it.

She plays a character simply called The Wife: the stolid, stony, sardonic, self-possessed mate of an old man who lies dying in an adjacent bedroom. Waiting with her are her son and daughter, her husband's best friend, a doctor and nurse, and her husband's mistress, a woman every bit as smart and formidable as the Wife. As long as the never-seen man is dying—as long as a verb can accurately be assigned to him, as one of the characters Albee-esquely points out—the Wife knows exactly what's what.

It's at the moment of death that the Wife falls apart. This is the moment where Harris astonishes us, where everything that has come before—a full-fledged history of a woman and a kind of woman, deftly laid out in less than two hours' time—serves to inform an unfathomable abyss of pain and alienation. All Over, which seems at times like a civilized retread of earlier Albee works like Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, suddenly starts to feel like Beckett or Sartre, as the weight of the most fundamental question imaginable crushes its protagonist, right before our eyes. A woman who, we observe, always tells the truth, is trapped by a huge and insidious lie.

The play is, of course, about more than this. Familiar Albee subjects like the hypocrisies of so-called polite society and the inability of parents and children to communicate figure prominently in All Over, as does a consideration of age and aging that seems almost precocious for having been written some thirty years ago by a still-vital playwright. Michael Learned (The Mistress) and John Carter (The Best Friend) speak well and ill for the polite; Pamela Nyberg (The Daughter) and Patrick Garner (The Son) vie with Harris on the generational front; and Bill Moor (The Doctor) and, most impressively, Myra Carter (The Nurse) make the case for the elderly. Until Albee and Harris turn it on its head at its startling climax, All Over is all heightened and vaguely metaphysical parlor talk, like a Terrence Rattigan play rewritten by Werner Heisenberg (or perhaps it's a Heisenberg proof reworked by Rattigan, I don't know: this simile is getting a little weird). Fascinating, but remote—until we find, almost too late, where the humanity has been hidden.

And then it's shattering: All Over sneaks up on us; at least in this production, with Rosemary Harris so commandingly at its center. Which brings me right back to where I started, to say, finally, that if the craft of acting interests you—if you want to experience what a remarkably accomplished actor can do to a big dark room full of people—you will want to see All Over this summer.

Shakespeare hid a line in All’s Well That Ends Well—“The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together”—that serves as a mirror to both his script and the Blessed Unrest production at chashama theater. One of his notorious “problem plays,” All’s Well oscillates in tone between sweet and sour. But where many Shakespearean scholars and players used to see only problems—cramped exposition, prickly poetry, and a cynical view of human nature—20th-century directors have seen a mirror whose warp reflects reality more accurately. If the world’s as ethically murky as the title implies (it’s the 17th century equivalent of “The ends justify the means”), the proper reaction is absurd activity. So while All’s Well follows the pattern of a medieval fairy tale—its middle-class protagonist overcomes obstacles to win the hand of an aristocrat—the twist is that the protagonist is a woman, not a man. Inexplicably head-over-heels for the swinish Bertram, Helena is surprisingly focused on losing her virginity. So the play’s also rancid satire: it’s set during a battleless war, in a court whose king is ill and whose patrons are vapid buffoons. Shakespeare tells an ironic romance and slips in a crafty and intelligent look at sex and class.

Even more than Viola's does in Twelfth Night, the performance of Helena sets the tone for All’s Well. The character was claimed by G.B. Shaw as an antecedent to his own bright and dynamic females, but as played by Jessica Burr, she’s more a mother to Pirandello’s mad play-actors. Burr clowns her way through the show: initially, she’s a misfit in glasses bawling like a five-year-old over Bertram (the cloddishly handsome Matt Opatrny, whose low eyebrows are as shaggy as his fur coat). But when she cures the sick King of France and is rewarded with her choice of men, Burr’s face blooms like a sunflower as she snatches up her prize. Rather than bed her, Bertram enlists in the army, so she follows him, tricks him into sleeping with her, then fakes her own death.

In traditional systems of conduct, Helena’s actions would be borderline psychotic; here they’re merely absurd and thus akin to Pirandello and Ionesco. And of course, they work, and the ends justify the means, don’t they? But director Lucy Smith Conroy, unlike Burr, can’t find the play’s combination of comedy and cynicism, surprising (and more often baffling) us by choosing one when the other seems more suitable. The courtly language, full of superfluities, is read with Pinteresque ellipses that suggests an ironic distance between speech and thought but also slows the pace to a crawl. The clowns—Nick Konow as Parolles and Brian Turnbaugh as Lavatch—spend so much time trying to make sense that they apparently don’t realize that they embody the play’s absurdity. Conroy orchestrates soliloquies and dialogue better than group scenes: her court’s a lonely, underpopulated place. Still, once the cast separates by sex and goes to war, there’s a sense of two worlds, one male and the other female, that Helena alone bridges.

Conroy directs her designers well, however, illustrating through them the play’s thorny world. The lights exploit the strangely-shaped stage: Brian H. Scott fills the high-ceilinged space with cold light while leaving the actors in shadow, so that its emptiness complements the play’s amorality and unmotivated characters.

Finally, Conroy directs All’s Well with a cool intelligence that lacks energy. Her All’s Well presents the Problem well but not the Play, so the audience only gets shadowy glimpses of Shakespeare’s grotesque observations. Burr, like her character, straightens out a knotty script, but Conroy and the others get tangled up in Shakespeare’s mingled yarn.

I've seen Michael West in When Pigs Fly and several editions of Forbidden Broadway, so I know how talented he is, and how wickedly funny he can be when he skewers a celebrity's pretensions (his Mayor Giuliani and his Liza Minnelli, to name but two, are priceless creations). So the prospect of West doing what he seems to do best for a full evening is enticing. Unfortunately, Almost Live from the Betty Ford Clinic is a serious disappointment.

The problem, quite simply, is that West, who has written his own material here, doesn't know when to quit. Forbidden Broadway works because none of the parodies last very long. Here, though, the sketches go on and on and on: a bit about Carol Channing doing Hello, Dolly! door-to-door includes a video prologue, a live monologue delivered in the front row of the audience, plus a two-minute condensation of the musical. It's a clever idea (though I recall some wag suggesting it at least a decade ago); but it's not that clever. This piece, like just about all of the others, fizzles out long before West is done with it.

The concept of Almost Live is that West is dreaming/obsessing about various celebrities who are on a mythical "Betty Ford TV network." West impersonates, in addition to Channing and Minnelli, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jerry Lewis, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Liberace, Peggy Lee, and Ethel Merman (in a videotaped sketch called "Pee Wee Merman" which posits her, SCTV-style, as host of a children's show). Why these particular people, only one of whom (Minnelli) is famous for her addictions, are on Betty Ford TV is unclear.

West's subjects also date him, and the show (and its potential audience) rather severely. Except for Liza's recent comeback, none of these folks has been much in the news for a decade or more; many are, indeed, dead. Especially given the length of West's parodies, the show feels terribly mean-spirited: why pick on these people? To give one example, West portrays Ella Fitzgerald as she was at the end of her career, nearly blind and walking with great difficulty. He has her start scat-singing on the second verse of "Mack the Knife," the joke being that she's forgotten the words. What did Ella do to deserve this treatment, which amounts to ridicule?

Darned if I know; I don't expect that even those who are old enough to recognize West's cast of characters will find a whole lot to laugh at here, and this notwithstanding how funny—at first—West frequently is in these various guises. These entertainers deserve better than West gives them; come to think of it, so does West himself.

American Maccabee, the new play by James Henerson, takes place on the first night of Hannukah, 1995, at the Malibu apartment of film composer Lee Futterman. Lee is playing host on this night to his ex-wife, Gail, and his two grown sons, Ben and Zack. Ben is a businessman-on-the-rise who wants Lee to give him $50,000 to finance a real estate deal; but the deal will put underprivileged people out of their homes, so Lee is hesitant to give Ben the money. Zack, meanwhile, arrives late, his flight from Israel, where he has been living for the last six months, presumably having arrived late.

But the family soon learns different: It turns out that Zack has become a member of an Israeli military (terrorist?) organization, and that furthermore he has just carried out the assassination of a Palestinian leader who is visiting California. Practical and moral questions quickly assert themselves: what can the family do to protect Zack? And what should the family do?

Henerson has found a hot topic to write about here (indeed, hotter now, perhaps, than when he began writing the play). Unfortunately, Henerson's years as a television writer—this is his first play—undermine the work here.  It's like the difference between Death of a Salesman and "Law & Order": the one makes the small and intimate momentous, while the other makes the momentous small enough to fit into our living rooms. American Maccabee is much more like "Law & Order" than Death of a Salesman.

What Henerson does do well here is to craft believable portraits of at least three of the four family members. Lee and Gail and Ben—less than admirable exemplars of the pre- and post-Baby Boom Generation in America—are sharply drawn and entirely familiar: we know these people too well. They're played expertly by Mitchell Greenberg, Eve Austin, and Eric Alperin as a trio of self-involved, self-loathing enablers. Not particularly the kind of people we want to spend much time with, I'm afraid, but all too true-to-life. Adam Arian does his best to make Zack as credible as the other Futtermans, but Henerson has written this role more as a catalyst than a human being.

The production, directed by Ernie Barbarash, is up to Reverie Productions' usual excellent standards, with a fine unit set contributed by Dawn Robyn Petrlik, appropriate costumes by Kelly Hanson, and evocative lighting by Colin D. Young.

Chagrined stares and locked jaws mark the faces of the actors of American Magic as they take their curtain call. They look just as frustrated as the audience, because no one’s sure who’s at fault for the painful evening.

Playwright Gil Kofman? The kernel of his play—a telepathic Hindu entertainer is detained by the Feds indefinitely after a terrorist attack because he read the President’s mind at a birthday party—sounds good. But his script, some sort of avant-absurd political satire, only tells us what we already know about our government: they’re powerful and paranoid, prone to racism and sexism, and willing to let citizens die as long as the numbers are acceptable. And it’s poorly executed, so that, by the last fifteen minutes, the plot dissolves into a mess of explosions and messianic imagery.

Actors Indrajit Sarkar, Walter Murray, Sonny Perez, and Lyndsay Rose Kane? Their characters are ciphers, not people. Sarkar, as the telepath, has a likeable presence but no identity. Kane, as the lone female, strips several times and simulates sex with the plastic lust of a porn star. (Ironically, the most vivid performance is recorded: downtown theater legend Richard Foreman plays a Reagan-like president, whose madness is strangely comforting).

Designers Brian Liliethal (lights), Antonia Carew-Watts (costumes), Leon Rotherberg (sound) and Jeremiah Thies (set)? Together their designs are as much of a mess as the bombed-out boutique that the interrogation’s held in. Liliethal’s neon lights may seem like a good idea, evocative maybe of soulless consumerism, but they’re awful to look at (poor Kane, peeling under fluorescent lights). Rotherberg creates a wall of noise (helped along by Lee Ranaldo of the pre-Nirvana rockers Sonic Youth), but his work floats away into its own soundscape.

Director Matthew Wilder? He’s confronting our political problems, but he seemingly hasn’t pushed his team past first choices and initial instincts. Wilder pulls and pushes Kofman’s script, trying to get it to move. His staging lacks grounding in reality, and also the concrete metaphors of stage illusion. And for the first act, Theis’ set gives him a cramped 3x15 rectangle of stage space to work with.

The audience? We’re eager for a work that can unknot the confusions of our time. Instead we're given American Magic. We quickly become impatient, too impatient to sit though a well-intentioned but ill-conceived show. And our frustrations stifle the few sparks of creativity that flare up on the stage. 

Lots of adjectives describe this play. Angry, first and foremost; inflammatory, incendiary, provoking, disturbing, upsetting, distressing; theatrical, in places, as when Ariel Shafir thrillingly portrays both a National Guardsman and his hunting dog simultaneously. Playwright-director Robert O'Hara clearly intends to rile up the crowd with American Ma(u)l and he succeeds in doing so.

The play, set in the not-so-distant future, imagines an America where slavery is made legal once again, ostensibly to stimulate the economy (by returning to an agrarian one—a dubious premise), but actually—apparently—because white people have just been waiting for an excuse to nullify the 14th Amendment and one has finally presented itself. O'Hara posits relatively peaceful compliance with this horrific decree on the part of African Americans; his play follows particularly the life of one young black woman who is purchased by her white lover and eventually made house slave to his mother and mistress to his father (and their first born is handed over to his brother).

It is indeed shocking; O'Hara fills his play with rhetoric and imagery—a lot of it more vulgar than necessary—designed to keep us on heightened alert throughout the two-and-a-half hours of the play. A digression compares Thomas Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings to Bill Clinton's with Monica Lewinsky; another reminds us that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves only in the states that had seceded (and thus had less bite than it might have). A black college professor, now on the selling block, asks White America to think about what their mother's mother's mothers and father's father's fathers did to his ancestors.

To the extent that the play's rude activity jolts the audience out of apathy, I applaud O'Hara's tactics. But ultimately it seems to me that American Ma(u)l fails as anything beyond agitprop, because it offers no reasoned discourse to bolster its hysterical rage. Sure, slavery is immoral; sure, politicians are hypocrites. But what will be learned here?

Amour has already posted its closing notice—it will have lasted just 17 performances on Broadway—and I can't say that I blame the producers one bit. This is, indeed, one of those shows which, after you see it, the main reaction is, "How did this get to Broadway in the first place?" Not that it's so terrible—it's not, really; but it's oh-so-slight, and oh-so-precious, or it would be if director James Lapine and adapter Jeremy Sams hadn't tarted it up so coarsely. Bottom line: if you missed it, don't feel bad.

Amour is based on a French story called Le Passe-Muraille by Marcel Ayme, which translates to "The Man Who Walked Through Walls," which would be a much better title for this show than the one it ended up with. It's about a low-level postal clerk named Dusoleil who is in every way a non-entity, and who worships, from afar, the lovely but unhappy young wife of the local Prosecuting Attorney. And then one day, Dusoleil discovers that he can walk through walls. He uses this amazing power to create an alter ego for himself—Passepartout—who quickly becomes a notorious Robin Hood-like master criminal, stealing, for example, an expensive necklace from a jeweler's window as an anonymous tribute for the local lady of the evening.

Madeleine, the beautiful lady that Dusoleil loves, becomes enamored of Passepartout, which eventually leads our hero to try to rescue her (for she is locked by her evil husband in their home). This in turn leads to his arrest, and trial; at the trial the Prosecutor's misdeeds are made public and Dusoleil/Passepartout is set free, whereupon he and Madeleine have a blissful night of amour. An O. Henry-ish twist follows, ending the tale on a bittersweet note.

It is, as the foregoing hopefully demonstrates, a fairy story, albeit a contemporary one (it takes place just after World War II). It has the capacity to be charming, as does Michel Legrand's light, tinkly score, whose songs sound like music box airs (and a little more alike than one might wish). It might work as a very short chamber musical, for even at ninety minutes, Amour wears out its welcome badly. Everything takes too long to happen, by which I mean you've seen it coming at least a couple of minutes before it actually occurs.

A game ensemble of nine, led by talented Malcolm Gets as the appealingly nerdish Dusoleil, works vainly to put the thing over, but Amour proves beyond resuscitation. (I should note, though, that Christopher Fitzgerald very nearly salvages things as Dusoleil's lawyer, in the show's one delightful musical number.) Director James Lapine and librettist Jeremy Sams try to liven things up with some lame vulgarity, but it only makes things worse.

And so Amour turns out to be one of those utterly misguided productions that pop up on Broadway every so often; it reminded me of Triumph of Love and Anna Karenina for its sheer wrongheadedness at every turn.

Chris: Fog, fog, fog, all bloody time. You can’t see vhere you vas, no. Only dat ole davil, sea—she knows!

[From the harbor comes the muffled, mournful wail of steamers’ whistles.]

A group of men—weary, unshaven, dressed in gray coats and boots—faces east, the yellow morning light refreshing them as they pay homage to the sun for lifting their city from a siege. This is the chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone, the elders of Thebes, who have observed the saga of the House of Oedipus play out before them. Monuments to survival, they’ve finally reached the dawn, but together they must witness one final tragedy.

Greek theater often shows fate to be a collision of mortality and eternity. While director Niketi Kontouri has given her Antigone a modern, Eastern European setting—Theban soldiers dress in guerilla uniforms, with bandoleers, caps, and greatcoats—other elements evoke more ancient themes. The lined faces of her chorus, the live percussion and strings composed by Takis Farazis, and Yorgos Patsas’ elemental set—rock and wood as well as glass and plastic—all seem at once timeless and decaying.

Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, disobeys an edict prohibiting the proper funeral rites for her late brother, who was killed besieging Thebes. Creon, the Theban king, sees her actions as an attack on his authority and condemns her to death. The struggle between these two stubborn individuals draws in both their loved ones and the citizens of Thebes.

Lydia Koniordou plays Antigone as a woman courting martyrdom. In a prologue, she asks her sister for help in burying their brother’s body: it’s the last attempt of a desperate woman to connect with another person. When she realizes that she must act alone, Antigone cuts herself off from all humanity. Living only to fulfill the demands of her dead family and the gods, she wears the unblinking stare of the righteous. As she’s led to her doom, this gaze transforms into an almost fevered luminescence.

Her opponent, Creon, is a leader who has watched other kings fall, and he wants his people to survive. After years of warfare and civil unrest, only authoritarianism can keep the peace effectively. As played by Sophoclis Peppas, Creon is battle-scarred, driven by the force of his own will. This serves well for most of the play, but Peppas doesn’t allow for Creon’s internal change when confronted by his tragic fate.

Both Koniordou and Peppas work in concert with the rest of the production, rather than dominating it. Unlike Deborah Warner’s (justly) acclaimed production of Medea at BAM last month, featuring a bravura performance by Fiona Shaw, Kontouri’s Antigone is an ensemble work. Its scope is general, taking in the destruction of two royal families rather than depicting the conflict between Antigone and Creon, its two lead characters.

Because no one actor or element stands out over the others, the production is uniformly good. This sense of unity may be because the production has been imported from Europe, where ensembles like this collaborate for years to develop cohesion. It’s a balance that suits Sophocles’ structure, which follows the tragedy by looking at several characters’ reactions rather than by scrutinizing one protagonist. And all of the actors fill their roles with a distinct presence, serving the story with utter professionalism.

However, there are other European facets that might turn off an American viewer. Kontouri has approached the play with a clinical intelligence that some might find unsuitable for such an emotional play. Antigone expects a lot from its audience, not least because it’s in modern Greek with English subtitles projected over the stage.

This production is definitely a work of art, but like any work of art, what may enthrall one viewer may leave another cold. Where most plays—and most art—work upon the brain or the heart, Antigone attempts to reach its viewers’ souls. It demands attentiveness, hypnotizing its audience with relentless theatricality and ageless truth. Antigone can be exhausting to watch, but the feeling that it leaves behind is well worth the fatigue.

Frank Cwiklik's staging of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is spectacularly good. He's set this play of Rome and Egypt in the nascent Las Vegas of the 1960s, with the triumvirate a group of mob bosses vying for control of the casino business and the Queen of the Nile now the Queen of Burlesque. Not every detail maps or parses perfectly, but the gist is clear and unassailable: this is a play about emperors who act like gangsters and gangsters who act like emperors. And it's a show about how much we, the audience, love plays like this: we love to watch violence and we love to watch sex, no matter how many "Sopranos" stars we ban from our city parades.

Cwiklik has cut Shakespeare's long, complicated play to hone in on the good parts (see previous paragraph). Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Lepidus are each proprietors of Vegas casinos who have joined together, temporarily, for mutual benefit. As the story begins, they need to deal with a coarse interloper, Pompey; and also with Antony's too-public dalliance with striptease star Cleopatra. The former problem is solved with a garrote in a steamroom; the latter is addressed by the marriage of Antony to Caesar's sister, Octavia. Antony's passion for Cleopatra is unabated, though, and will ultimately cost him his life. Caesar, meanwhile, stealthily and ruthlessly consolidates his power.

As I mentioned, the emphasis throughout is on the sensational bits: Cwiklik thinks nothing of cutting the play's most famous speech (something about age not withering nor custom staling—you've heard it elsewhere), and he is only too glad to interpolate Sinatra's rendition of "The Lady is a Tramp" as prelude to Cleopatra's death scene. This Antony and Cleopatra is all about atmosphere—the cheap noir kind, the stuff we crave in gangster flicks and smoky barrooms and glitzy Rat Pack showmanship. Practically every scene looks familiar, and it's not because you've seen another production of this play: Cwiklik meticulously recreates—with breathtaking ingenuity and panache—the whole ambience of a genre that we guiltily revel in even as we revile it.

The result is the live equivalent of a gaudy "B" movie. In the tiny, low-tech confines of The Red Room, Cwiklik manages quick-cuts, fades, split screens, montages, and even a fully staged musical number or two. This guy is—and I've said this before—a genius: there are moments of unrivaled brilliance and theatricality in this Antony and Cleoptra—scenes and tableaux where you're caught up short, enthralled and astonished by the picture you've just witnessed. The play's first act ends with an eloquent, splashy, silent depiction of carnage that, in its way, is nearly as affecting as Les Miz's barricades. A lip-synch song and dance to a Sammy Davis ditty about guns and shooting (performed with calculated bravura by an ice-cold Gerald Marsini) is the last word in bitter irony.

So a celebration of imagination and trashy storytelling becomes an expose of our appetite for same: this Antony and Cleopatra is a show that, once it hooks you, you can't take your eyes off of. The soundtrack—a collage of precisely-chosen kitsch rarities, lounge classics, underscoring and sound effects—is invaluable and masterful (it's credited to Youthquake! Studios). The ensemble of sixteen actors, many of them frequent Cwiklik collaborators, is fearless and fresh and passionately committed. Standouts include Bob Brader, who is a slimy, nasty piece of work as Caesar, and Bob Laine, soft and clownishly menacing as Pompey. Adam Swiderski (Eros, Antony's bodyguard) and Maria Hurdle (Charmian, one of Cleopatra's showgirls) each has a memorable moment just before the suicides of their respective bosses. As the titular couple, Tom Mazur and Anna Curtis get the high-strung but somehow bloodless love of this pair exactly right. (Curtis performs two striptease numbers, too; as the producers caution, this is not particularly a show for the kiddies.)

I don't usually love revisionist takes on so-called classic theatre, but I love this show. Cwiklik isn't afraid to ask if the Canon is really so canonical, and you have to respect him for that.

After a year of seeing theatre exclusively in Manhattan, I was drawn to Odyssey Theatre's production of Antony & Cleopatra because of the novelty of seeing theatre in Brooklyn. After a solid 45-minute trip from Union Square, I found myself at the Brooklyn Lyceum, a really exciting, converted venue. The performance space is massive, and with a catwalk above the stage and two long staircases hugging the exposed brick walls on either side of the stage, it is exceptionally suited for Shakespearean theater.

The play tells the story of the passionate love between Antony and Cleopatra amidst the games of imperial politics. The overly moralistic Octavius Caesar cannot accept Antony’s free-wheeling lifestyle, and this opposition comes to a head when politics require Antony to marry Caesar’s sister Octavia. A series of battles and miscommunications leads to several tragic deaths, including those of the title characters.

Both Stacee Mandeville as Cleopatra and Gilberto Ron as Antony have some strong moments. Cleopatra’s cunning playfulness comes across nicely, as does Antony's rage. They generally have good chemistry together, though I found the transitions from annoyance and flirtation to be rushed.

John Phillips is a wonderfully chilling Caesar, his performance striking an excellent balance between Caesar’s puritanical morality and political ambitions. Phillips' extensive experience with Shakespeare is obvious from his clear, easy-to-understand voice. And, though a bit too raucous at the start, Bob Harbaum’s Enobarbus is compelling both in moments of revelry and sadness.

Rachel Macklin’s direction shows a good deal of creative inspiration. Her first battle scene make clever use of the staircases as boats, followed by a wonderful stand off between the two armies (nicely choreographed by Dawn Elane) on the catwalk above. While the boats move and the soldiers battle, we see Antony’s soldier Domitius gazing into the pool of water on stage, seemingly viewing the battle through it. The director uses the pool of water creatively throughout, for bringing to life the references to water in speeches, and more simply as a water source for the soldiers to wash their faces in the morning. Another wonderful touch is the simulation of the crypt through the use of lights in boxes that seem to be summoned forth by Cleopatra’s maids.

In spite of the great potential of the space and some wonderful ideas on the part of the director, the staging seems at times to strain against the size of the space. The echoes make some speeches hard to understand, and the staircases and catwalk are rarely used. The transitions between scenes overlapped in a distracting way. Rather than using parts of the stage at different moments, some actors exit as the next group enters, and the lighting doesn’t seem to provide the focus to help this. The actors getting onto and leaving stage at the beginning and end of the long first “half” of the performance do so in darkness and silence, a directorial choice that lacks the ingenuity of other moments. Also, the costumes don’t differentiate the supporting actors' various roles, which adds a degree of confusion as the audience then needs to figure out if the actor is the messenger or the soldier this time around.

There is some wonderful artistry in this production, and I would like to see the dedication and fine-tuning that brought those moments to life applied to much more of the play.

Director Rebecca Patterson approached her production of Antony and Cleopatra with an intriguing concept: she would filter the play’s luxuriant story through the style of Indian popular cinema, aka Bollywood.  Bollywood films blend the scale of Biblical epics with grand musical dance numbers, film noir intrigue, the raw theatricality of three-hanky romances, fireball explosions and comic shenanigans.

Shakespeare, according to Patterson, seems to have had a similar drive to mesmerize through spectacle when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. Antony, who inherited the Roman Empire from Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, a descendant of Alexander the Great: they embraced their desire and lost their empires, taking their own lives rather than admitting defeat. This play, sounding out the clash between classical Rome and the sensuous Orient, leaping across the Mediterranean between scenes, staging the defeat of entire armies and navies, might be Shakespeare’s most excessive. As passionate as Romeo and Juliet, emotionally unstable as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, grand as Henry V, and gloomy as Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra is a mountain of a play. With Patterson leading the ascent, the Queen’s Company (an all-female cast, playing it straight) bravely attempts to scale its heights. But the company ultimately proves unequal to the play’s physical and emotional demands.

As Antony, DeeAnn Weir leads her troops with a military carriage that fuses a leader’s prowess with a common soldier’s amiability. Yet even though the audience can feel her emotions, it never reads her thoughts in her face or her speech: her character’s intentions and decisions remain a mystery. Maureen Porter, as Cleopatra, portrays her character with lots of energy, but she fails to inhabit the role. Like many in the cast, she plays Shakespeare as if he were Chekhov, with subtle realistic movements that deaden his rich poetic style.

Only Zainab Jah, in her several small roles, and Virginia Baeta, who plays Antony’s lieutenant Enobarbus, really seem to understand what they’re saying. Baeta could steal the show if it weren’t for her tendency to rush through her scenes: she should take her time, particularly when her character recounts the first meeting between the title characters. This monologue is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful and detailed speeches (“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne”), and it’s essential for understanding just why Cleopatra has so great a hold on Antony that he’d trade the greatest empire in human history for her love. Baeta, also the production’s dramaturg, should have a better idea of her character’s importance. But the entire cast has this problem: too often, they seem overwhelmed by the panorama of Shakespeare’s play.

And what about the Bollywood concept? It more or less is limited to an opening dance number, some furiously paced disco sitar music between scenes, and Egyptian women clad in saris and bracelets. It’s difficult to sustain an entire play—especially one of Shakespeare’s longest—with a stylistic conceit; ultimately the director must look within the script for a reason to stage her play. Patterson could have found an interesting analog to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in Bollywood, but she doesn’t seem to have any other reason to stage this monumental drama, nor does she pursue her concept to its limits. Because of this, the Queen’s Company production lacks focus and meanders.

Helen Gallagher is a two-time Tony winner; her first important role was in High Button Shoes (Jule Styne, George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Nanette Fabray, et al) back in 1947. Lola Pashalinski was a co-founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company; besides all those plays with Charles Ludlam, she's worked with JoAnn Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech—a veritable who's who of contemporary avant-garde theatre. Valda Setterfield spent a decade as one of Merce Cunningham's premier dancers, and since leaving that company has worked with the likes of Baryshnikov and Robert Wilson. In Art, Life & Show-Biz, we get to spend about 100 minutes in the company of these three women of more than usual accomplishment, and to learn—at least a little—what makes them tick. It's not just the "non fiction play" we've been promised; it's an event, and a privilege, almost by definition.

Not, I hasten to add, for the reason you might think: writer/director Ain Gordon is careful to ensure that this is in no way an evening of stargazing. Okay, there's the occasional gossipy reference ("Jerome Robbins was mean"); but what Gordon is after, and what the audience gets, is some collective and rather raw wisdom, amassed from nearly two centuries of being alive and well over one century of making a life on the stage. Gordon wants to show us how the art of the life and the life of the art are finally one and the same: quoting from Jane Wagner's Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, he holds up a Campbell's soup can and a famous Andy Warhol painting and dares us to distinguish between the "soup" and the "art." Well, the metaphor doesn't work, precisely, but the impulse is admirable and produces an evening that, if not as transcendent or indelible as we might hope, is ineluctably compelling. Gallagher, Pashalinski, and Setterfield—to get back to the point—can't help but be interesting. When Art, Life & Show-Biz lets them talk—and it does, most of the time—we are in their thrall.

Gordon structures the evening—self-consciously, post-modernly—as a recreation of the interviews from which the material for the play is derived. The set-up is slow: getting Gordon away from his digressive stroll backward just a few months to the first session with Gallagher in her apartment takes some doing. But once he gets there, and Gallagher starts recalling her childhood and then the early years of her career, the show takes off and never slackens. The women tell their stories in alternation; or more accurately they recall, selectively, what suits them. Gallagher sketches the outlines of a career pattern that she shared with many others, from a successful first decade climbing out of the chorus and into a starring role on Broadway (in a flop, Hazel Flagg), through lean years when she couldn't even land a commercial, up to triumphant successive comebacks in Sweet Charity and the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette (for which she won a Best Actress Tony).

Pashalinski is not forthcoming about childhood and family. But she speaks with respect and genuine emotion about her theatrical mentor, Charles Ludlam (who died of AIDS about fifteen years ago); and she's coyly inarticulate about the path her work has taken her since she left the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Her best moments are her recollections of a first night out on the town in Greenwich Village in the '50s and her thoughts about what a recording of Der Rosenkavalier meant and means to her: she lets us into her soul, here, and we appreciate it.

Setterfield lays out her life more openly. She uses her time mostly to share some of the discoveries and insights that she's come to in her sixty-odd years on the planet: musings about her first dance instructor and Merce Cunningham and how to learn how to fall off a chair all demonstrate a life-embracing curiosity and sense of wonder that we should all aspire to, as far as I'm concerned. Setterfield faces down the evening's central question—how does a life lived for/as art cope with the passing of youth—by applying the intelligence and joie de vivre that has carried her through thus far. She's appearing at the Joyce next month (as she reminds us, twice). I may even go see her.

Gordon hints that some of the impetus for Art, Life & Show-Biz has been his own surprise at becoming such a grown-up at 40—friends are married; he and his partner have just bought an apartment together, and so on. Time spent in the company of such indomitable ladies has to have eased his mind some; it was a major kick for me, and I only got to stay with them for an hour and a half.

As I Lay Dying marks my introduction to the theatre work of Andrew Grosso; this talented young man, who adapted this play from William Faulkner's novel of the same name and also directed it, is definitely someone to keep an eye on. His achievement here is to make a big novel into a stageworthy drama; with one eye on storytelling and the other on economical presentation he has rather miraculously managed to do justice to a host of colorful characters and storylines in a tiny basement theatre space (a former meat locker!) with eleven actors, a rickety bed, a dozen chairs, and little else.

The story centers around the Bundren Family and their difficulties in getting the matriarch Addie, who has just died, to her burial ground in a neighboring town. Anse, the father, is lazy and a bit of a conniver; his objectives are to fulfill his promise to his late wife and then to find some money so he can buy himself some teeth. Their first son, Cash, is loyal but not very bright, as we come to understand when he allows his ignorant father to encase his broken leg in a concrete cast. The second son, Darl, is a thinker, which gets him into trouble (and eventually lands him in jail). The third son, Jewel, is brooding and argumentative. The fourth son, Vardaman, is a curious, bright little boy. Anse and Addie's only daughter, Dewey Dell, is, at seventeen, preoccupied with her own troubles, which stem from her too-free relations with neighbor boy Lafe; to get her out of trouble, he has given her ten dollars and instructions to buy something at a drug store in town.

The narrative traces the family's journey from their remote farm in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi to the metropolis of Jefferson, where Addie will be laid to rest. The journey doesn't go well: heavy rains have washed out the bridges, necessitating some dangerous maneuvering to cross the river—the cause of Cash's broken leg. Anse's poverty and cheapness ensure that the trip is uncomfortable anyway, and everyone's backwardness presents even more challenges: the Bundrens aren't dysfunctional so much as non-functional. Grosso lays out the story in neat episodes that are punctuated with useful monologues and the occasional flashback. In just over ninety minutes we live through an excruciating week-and-a-half on the road with these anti-Joads, as unheroic a clan as ever got written about.

Grosso and his actors render the tale with vivid detail; we can almost smell the rotting corpse as it is trundled along during the Bundrens' misadventures. As the older children, Tommy Schrider (Cash), Thomas Piper (Darl), Drew Cortese (Jewel), and Meg DeFoe (Dewey Dell) each create sympathetic portraits, though admittedly Piper and DeFoe have the most to work with; Cortese's character, in particular, is a little underwritten—I would have liked to know more about him. The wonderfully accomplished actress Susan O'Connor has been shrewdly cast as little Vardaman and she makes this little fellow, who innocently observes the sadness and decay around him, into the vibrant, bittersweet center of the drama.

Four actors play the many characters encountered by the Bundrens on their journey. Of these, John Thomas Waite is most impressive as a pragmatic neighbor named Vernon Tull, an elderly farmer named Gillespie, and, especially, a righteous pharmacist in the town of Mottson whose scene with the pathetic Dewey Dell is one of the strongest in the show.

As I Lay Dying, with its vaguely sensational tale of the disadvantaged as life's victims, is meaty material for Grosso and his collaborators, and they put it over with relish. A good deal of Faulkner's stunning language is preserved as well. This is hardly an obvious choice for dramatization and in some ways it feels like the inherent challenges of doing so are what made it interesting to the company—this production feels at times motivated by craft rather than genuine passion. No matter: it's an enormously successful demonstration. Grosso has earned a fan here; I will eagerly look forward to what he does next.

As Long As We Both Shall Laugh is an evening of comedy by Yakov Smirnoff. It's a likable show, featuring nearly two hours of Smirnoff's gentle, agreeable material. I gather, from observing fans in the audience, that some of it is familiar while some is brand new.

The show is structured loosely as an autobiography. The first act is about Yakov's formative years in Russia, from his childhood through his unlikely early career as a professional comedian working in a Soviet-sanctioned job on a cruise ship. Most of the jokes have to do with how bad things were over there, and they're funny but they have a sting that makes his eagerness to emigrate to the United States with his family utterly believable. Just before intermission, Yakov and his parents arrive in New York after a two-year wait for their visas—"we were traded," Smirnoff tells us, "for two tons of American wheat." It's hard to remember nowadays that thousands of people risk practically everything to get to the USA: Smirnoff's story feels good in a number of ways.

The second act is about Smirnoff's other, less successful, foray into an alien culture: his marriage to an American woman from Oregon named Linda, from whom he is now divorced. After a lean few minutes in which he recycles jokes from Defending the Caveman, Smirnoff again hits his stride talking about his Aunt Mina and Uncle Sol, who share wise and funny advice about how they've kept their 59-year marriage fresh.

Smirnoff is at his best playing the slightly confused stranger in a strange land, especially when recounting his struggles with sloppy, idiomatic American English. I liked, for example, his story about an early New York job as a bartender in which, following a vexatious request from a customer for a Screwdriver, he invents a new drink, adding milk of magnesia to the mix, called a Phillips Screwdriver.

As I said, it's gentle, good-natured stuff, delivered in a warm and inviting style by a genuinely funny and smart fellow. Performances are Sunday and Monday nights, when most Broadway shows are dark; if you've got time to spare one of these evenings, As Long As We Both Shall Laugh will provide a pleasant diversion.

Young directors often approach Shakespeare bent on making the work uniquely their own. This method usually ends up with the neophyte in a wrestling match with the script. Erica Schmidt starts off her production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It with the laudable idea that less is more. She casts only six actors and leaves her thrust stage completely bare except for a few coffee cans for footlights. But then she jacks up the speed so that what begins buoyantly ends up frenetic.

As You Like It is a lackadaisical comedy: nothing much is at stake but love, and love is foolishly fond. The play’s full of coincidences and implausibilities that Shakespeare keeps in check with whimsy. The heroine, Rosalind, might be Shakespeare’s best: she’s more friendly than Beatrice and more stable than Viola. Disguised as a boy, she woos her lover Orlando by pretending to be herself.

At certain moments, Schmidt’s team captures the play’s effortless romanticism. In one such moment, Orlando (Lorenzo Pisoni) leaps up a pillar like Douglas Fairbanks and hangs there by one foot, seemingly supported by love itself. But often the young cast seems unsure how to match their actions with the verse, and they resort to running in circles or mugging. They have more energy than they know what to do with.

This is where a more experienced director than Schmidt could channel their energy into Shakespeare’s play. But instead Schmidt finds bits of business for her actors: Lethia Nall flounces through her role as Rosalind’s sidekick Celia (with a hilariously lustful moment of love at first sight) but she also spends a lot of time unpacking a tiny tea set from a picnic basket. Bryce Dallas Howard is especially in need of a strong hand as Rosalind: although she’s naturally comfortable onstage, she doesn’t quite interact with her fellow actors. When she’s alone she bubbles over with love for Orlando and hints at a calmer and more introspective production.

Schmidt originally produced As You Like It for the New York International Fringe Festival in an abandoned lot on the Lower East Side. It still feels like a do-it-yourself show, but its raw attitude doesn’t transfer well to the Public Theater’s cavernous Martinson Hall. Schmidt herself designed the costumes, a wonderfully garish closetful of stripes and polka dots. The clothes are great to look at, but they often wear the characters rather than the other way around. Schmidt and company have packed their show with the exuberance of youth but they lack concentration, leaving As You Like It slim and dissatisfying.

The Worth Street Theater’s production of As You Like It is set in “a contemporary urban environment” and while one does not usually equate Shakespeare with rapping and Federal housing projects, it turns out that the two go quite well together.

As You Like It tells the story of the evil Duke Frederick who has banished his brother, Duke Senior, but allows his daughter, Rosalind, to remain at court since Frederick’s daughter, Celia, and Rosalind are the best of friends. Rosalind meets and falls in love with Orlando DeBoys after seeing him in a wrestling match. However, Duke Frederick then banishes Rosalind. Celia tells Rosalind that she will go with her and, along with the court fool, Touchstone, they set off to find Duke Senior, who is now living in the Forest of Arden with a small following of people. And because you can’t have a Shakespearean comedy without cross-dressing and mistaken identities, Rosalind goes out into the world in pants and a fake beard, while Celia disguises herself as a commoner and changes her name to Aliena.

Surprisingly, despite the improbability of the story and its fairy tale-like qualities, the play works quite well set in a modern day city—nothing seems out-dated or out of place. And director Jeff Cohen’s concept of rapping portions of the play is successful: the raps come in energetic bursts that invigorate the audience when the play seems to be lagging and show-off the rhythm of Shakespeare’s words.

Unfortunately, in making As You Like It realistic, the production sacrifices some of the play's humor.  It is no longer a comedic fairy tale and instead feels more like a much darker and serious drama. What would have been humorous name calling in a less realistic setting is now so tense, I expected a gang fight to erupt. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though: it does show that there is more to this far-fetched tale than one would think.

Among a very large cast, two actors in particular stand out with exceptional performances. Daniel Ahearn, playing both Duke Frederick and Duke Senior, makes them both seem incredibly natural and life-like. And as the rapping Amiens (a follower of Duke Senior), David Brown Jr. does a tremendous job of keeping the play alive and energetic, despite the heat and the length of the show.

The Worth Street Theater’s production of As You Like It proves Shakespeare’s timelessness. It succeeds in showing how very little has actually changed since Shakespeare’s time: the Forest of Arden may now be the Forest of Arden Housing Project, but the thoughts and realities of life are still the same.

In its advertisement, Atelier bills itself as both “an original play” and “a collaborative workshop performance.” Its director, Jennifer Wineman, conceived of it as an attempt to stage paintings, specifically those of Pierre Alechinsky, a late 20th-century European artist. Naturally, developing static images into the physical and temporal medium of performance requires a suspension of standard rules for both the artists and the audience. Rather than sketch out Alechinsky’s biography, Atelier is an impressionistic reaction to his work, formally developed over a seven-week period by Wineman, a six-person cast, and a dramaturg. This approach may frustrate audiences who are unfamiliar with Alechinsky’s art, but it allows the piece to stand on its own merits, with only the occasional stumble.

Atelier is built around scenes of abstract movement, during which the actors seem to replicate paintings with their bodies by spinning, freezing poses, and forming geometric shapes. These moments are stylistically reminiscent of modern dance, set to free jazz, Arabian chants, modern blues, and other funky international music genres. These scenes are beautiful in and of themselves, conveying an emotional earnestness, but they’re often too obscure to clearly communicate ideas. Lines like “Think of the dashboard of any New York City cab” create a similar problem, giving a description that lacks specificity.

To provide some structure, the cast takes the roles of three pairs of characters: two artists, two figures from one of Alechinsky’s canvases, and two children who react to an Alechinsky exhibition. These scenes explore the relationships between producing art, being art, and viewing art. They’re also hilarious, reminding the audience that what makes art worthwhile are the people behind and in front of it.

The actors make Atelier accessible by visibly enjoying themselves, and they impart its ideas with a fresh-faced honesty that isn’t usually associated with conceptual performance pieces. Layna Fisher, as a grimacing figure named Sourpuss, is constantly entertaining as she skulks and skitters, working her body into positions like crimped hair. But the cast works as a unit, with no one performer upstaging another. This balance is depicted halfway through the piece in what is its most stunningly graphic moment: the entire cast piles atop one another to reach a red light bulb, with contemporary Moroccan dance music lending an urgency to their efforts. The light snaps out just before one person grasps it.

As an exercise in synesthesia, Atelier doesn’t quite work: the audience doesn’t come away with an understanding of the paintings or the painter. But despite the dance segments and the program information, the play isn’t really about Alechinsky. Instead, it’s about creating art and reacting to art. Strangely, this theme was admirably reinforced after the show had ended, in a talk-back session with dramaturg Laura Roemer. The discussion lasted almost as long as the play, providing the evening with a kind of second act. After all, Atelier proposes that the viewer’s reaction to a piece is as important as the artist’s creation of that piece. By respecting her viewers enough to give them center stage at the October 18 performance, Wineman created a true “collaborative workshop performance.” And whereas most art fails to act on the beliefs that it depicts, she and her company—perhaps inadvertently, but nevertheless successfully—created a truly collaborative work.

Gloria: Try one of the little striped ones, Mums.
Mr. Babcock: Say, these are tasty.
Mrs. Upson: What are they, dear?
Auntie Mame: Just plain old pickled rattlesnake.

Tired of plain old rattlesnake? Ready to stretch yourself, to—dare I say—open a new window? Then I suggest that you spend an evening with Auntie Mayhem, Mame Dennis' worthy successor, the retired drag queen presiding over the least traditional family that I can remember coming across in all my years of theatre-going. With his live-in boyfriend Bobo, his lifelong best pal (and still-working drag queen) Charlotte, and their three gay/transgendered teenage children, Auntie Mayhem is adding courses to the banquet known as life that Auntie Mame probably never dreamed even existed. And, while Auntie Mayhem and her remarkable brood don't exactly travel in the same circles as the Dennis clan, they would be right at home at one Mame's famous cocktail parties, because like all the people Mame cared about they are enthusiastically and unapologetically just exactly who they are.

Which is why Auntie Mayhem is so important for you to see. The Babcocks and Upsons of this world aren't going to cotton to this new play by David Pumo, I'm afraid, though they're the ones who probably most need to see it. On the other hand, you don't have to be familiar with Auntie Mame, on which this play is lovingly modeled, to appreciate this smart, sassy, gently subversive little comedy-drama (though you may not understand the references that I have liberally sprinkled into this review; sorry).

Auntie Mayhem tells the story of Felony Mayhem, a gay man in middle-age (or near it) who was once a drag performer but is now what can best be described as a housewife, living in an apartment in Manhattan with his long-term partner/lover Bobo. Felony's oldest and dearest friend is Charlotte (né Charles), who still earns a living—and apparently a reasonably lucrative one—doing his drag act at gay clubs. He lives with his grandmother out in Riverdale, but most mornings after work he crashes on Felony and Bobo's futon in their living room.

But we don't know any of this when we first meet Felony: he arrives in his apartment late one night with a young hustler named Dennis, apparently intent on paying the young man for sex. This turns out not to be the case, however: Felony is trying to teach Dennis a lesson because he stole his bag a couple of nights ago at a club. But when Felony learns that Dennis has nowhere to go—he's been rejected by his family and, because he's gay, he's constantly harassed in juvenile group homes and on the street—Felony decides to take the young man in. And, despite some initial reservations from Bobo, it's not long before Dennis' photo is proudly displayed on the shelf next to Bobo and Felony's bed.

Then Dennis meets Ivan, a troubled gay youth who has also been kicked out of his house, this time by his mother's thuggish new boyfriend. Dennis has told Isaac all about his "Auntie Mayhem," it seems, and so the family grows yet again. A third child turns up shortly thereafter, this one a transgendered Hispanic kid named Epiphany.

Hardly your average teenagers, the young people whom Auntie Mayhem brings into her home—and saves from the streets—bring new dimensions to the word "marginalized." I think just about all of us believe that everybody in the world ought to have a family, meaning a place of stability and nurturing and unconditional love. Auntie Mayhem is about someone who actually practices what most people merely preach: without feeling gushily saintlike, Felony Mayhem is the most heroic leading man in town.

But playwright Pumo doesn't stop there—he creates a genuine family out of these six unlikely individuals. Bobo steps quietly but assuredly into the role of father (there's a scene where he teaches Dennis how to tie a tie that's gently touching). And even Charlotte, who loves children as much as her prototype Vera Charles did (which is to say, not at all), takes Ivan under her wing when she learns that the young man wants to be a dancer. Bobo and Mayhem's household is really unconventional, but it's got rules (like no high heels on the bed) and it's filled with love. This family's got great values; they're just not your typical family.

Auntie Mayhem is produced by The Fourth Unity, which has done a wonderful job mounting the play. All six actors do outstanding work, with Isaac Calpito (as Ivan) stopping the show with a high-energy rap number and Jimmy Hurley wringing more laughs than you think are possible out of the over-the-top diva Charlotte. Henry Alberto makes a strong impression in the show's smallest role, Epiphany, while Randy Aaron (as Dennis) convincingly changes from a scared young street kid to a self-assured college man. Ivan Davila and Moe Bertran anchor the piece beautifully as Uncle Bobo and Auntie Mayhem. The production is directed fluidly by Donna Jean Fogel and features above-off-off-Broadway quality sets (by Lea Umberger) and costumes (uncredited, but they're great). Auntie Mayhem is clearly a labor of love, and the good feelings it engenders really engulf the audience.

The loud, proud characters of Auntie Mayhem don't usually get to star in their own plays; Pumo is pushing most of us well beyond our comfort zones here. But don't let that deter you: Auntie Mayhem is, finally, a grand celebration of humanity, in all its flavors. Nothing neat or wholesome about it, but when is there ever?

This review is brought to you by the letter Q.

Q is for Avenue Q, a fresh, silly Sesame Street parody running at the Vineyard Theater, presented by Vineyard in cooperation with The New Group. These two companies are among the vanguard of young, hip theaters that are invigorating American theater. Together they’ve produced a show targeted directly at young, hip audiences. It’s a musical for the post-college and pre-parental, the generation whose viewing habits are characterized by playfulness and a short-attention span. Which means those adults whose viewing habits were defined by Sesame Street.

Avenue Q takes place a long subway ride from Manhattan, way out in Brooklyn or Queens. It’s a street inhabited by recent college grads, guys trying to break into the comedy business and gals teaching kindergarten. It’s also populated by monsters with fuzzy orange skin or purple hair, just like Sesame Street. But the denizens of Sesame Street teach children about sharing and sing that it’s not easy being green; these folks teach adults about one-night stands and sing that they’re not wearing underwear today.

Where Sesame Street looks like Brooklyn Heights, Avenue Q looks like the rest of Brooklyn. Metal bars cover the windows, kids have tagged walls with spray paint, the window flowers need water, there’s aluminum siding on some of the buildings, and trash bags lie on the ground instead of in the garbage cans. But there’s a neighborly atmosphere, just like on Sesame Street.

Out at the boroughs’ edges, apparently, real people are living with puppets. There’s no attempt to hide that these characters are made out of fabric and yarn, which gives the audience room to observe the performers’ skills. In fact, several of the performers and designers worked in Jim Henson’s company at one time, and every member of the cast brings his or her foam-and-felt creations to life. The best is Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who shows an impressive vocal talent, both in songs and acting. In one scene, she steers a jazzy tramp with foam breasts spilling out of her dress through a steamy nightclub number. Minutes later she maneuvers a mousy girl through a duet in a love ballad. At one point these two characters converse: it’s a moment of real comic artistry in a frothy show.

Of course, there are humans on Avenue Q too, among them a mixed-race couple whose wedding is a hybrid of Japanese and Jewish customs. As on Sesame Street, celebrities play their part: the super on Avenue Q is “Gary Coleman”—actually Natalie Venetia Belcon playing the star of the popular ’80s show Diff’rent Strokes. On Avenue Q, Gary’s just another surly ex-child actor who spreads wisdom around like a funky brother. His/her big number, “You Can Be As Loud As The Hell You Want (When You’re Making Love),” is a soul-steeped showstopper.

Really, every one of the songs, composed and written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, have the same funky ’70s rhythms that made Sesame Street so impressive and contemporary thirty years ago. And of course, everybody on Avenue Q gets a song or two to teach the audience a lesson. In the most hilarious ones, like “The Internet Is For Porn,” they’re teaching us ideas that no one has bothered to explain or admitted to before. And the lyrics measure up to the old Sesame Street records, with catchy choruses like “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes!”

Avenue Q is at its best when it plays up the subversive streak (like a doctor’s remark at a hospital bed that the puppet’s head fell off in the ambulance, but they’ve reattached it). There are two entirely negligible plots that the creators must have felt were needed, but they’d have been better off stringing together a series of vaudeville routines and songs the way that Sesame Street always did. In fact, these two plots (one about a love affair between two puppets and the other about a puppet who can’t admit he’s gay) play out the sort of conventional stories that the more enjoyable parts of the show skewer. But this pothole barely registers. Audiences will leave Avenue Q feeling like kids again, and, lucky them, they can grab a beer to talk about the lessons they’ve learned.