nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

The Bacchae by Euripides is about the god Dionysus' violent and irrational victory over the Theban king Pentheus. It's a primitive cautionary tale about knowing your place in the cosmos; as Metropolitan Playhouse artistic director Alex Roe puts it (describing the company's current season of plays), "Who Do You Think You Are?"—here asked by Dionysus of the paltry mortal who dares defy him.

Roe has created a new adaptation of the classic play, and it's now on at the Metropolitan's intimate East Village space. He's called it Bacchus, and for good reason; in his version, the god isn't merely making an example of a non-believer: it's personal.

Bacchus follows Euripides faithfully. Dionysus disguises himself as a young worker in Thebes in order to better incite the populace to take part in his Bacchic rituals. The local king, Pentheus, refuses to acknowledge the god's power, however; for this he is punished with a brutal death—torn apart by the ecstatic worshippers, led by his own mother, Agave, who mistakes her son for a wild lion and tears his head from his body.

Roe's Bacchus is a primal and rather fatalistic interpretation at odds with other modern adaptations: though his Agave is horrified by what she's done, the predominant theme of the play is not the danger of doing the gods' bidding but the danger of not doing it: in the power struggle between humankind and the universe, the universe always wins. It's a potent and unsettling approach to the work.

Roe's staging dazzles. The god Dionysus is portrayed with an almost carnal rawness by Matt Daniels, who looks unearthly with glittery gold skin and a pair of treacherous-looking horns. Roe has another actor (Annette Previti) portray the man Dionysus turns himself into, allowing for both spirit and manifestation to interact with the mortals, which is enormously effective. Roe likewise has Dionysus imbue the three members of the chorus with traits that transform them into pivotal characters in the narrative (the last one being Agave), reinforcing his theme that the gods, not the mortals, are in command.

Bad Women is a retelling of the stories of several heroines/villainesses from Greek mythology. The eponymous subjects are Clytemnestra (who killed her husband Agamemnon after he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis); Cassandra (who defied the god Apollo and was punished by being turned into a prophetess believed by no one); Deianeira (wife to Heracles, whom she inadvertently murdered with a lethal love potion); Agave (from The Bakkhai, who tore her son limb from limb in a dionysic frenzy); Phaedra (who fell in love with her step-son Hippolytus and, when he failed to requite it, had him killed); and Medea (who, of course, murdered her husband's new bride and children).

A lethal and not-altogether familiar bunch; their stories juxtapose compellingly though unevenly in this highly theatrical, avant-garde performance piece. Their timeless, epic struggles with lovers, rivals, and deities are recounted by actors portraying them and by a chorus of five contemporary teenage girls, who gossip about them as though they were high school chums or favorite movie stars. The piece happens in several "movements," beginning with a sort of prologue staged with presentational artifice in which we meet most of the characters, and then continuing with monologues, simultaneous dialogues (usually between one of the Bad Women and one of the young gossips), and montages in which characters drift through one another's stories, not interacting exactly, but clearly aware of one another.

All of the action ranges freely through the performance space. The audience is, in fact, seated all around the room, and the various scenes and vignettes play out in every corner of the auditorium, so that sometimes the actors are literally inches away and other times you need to crane your head to see them behind or even above you.

At one point, each of the eleven actors speaks, in character, to a small segment of the audience. They all speak at once, each telling her own story to their tiny crowd of listeners. You never miss a word. It's a marvelously effective moment.

Other stuff works, though less magically; and other stuff went right over my head. I don't know, for example, why two of the Bad Women are played by men (Jack Wetherall is Phaedra; Will Badgett is Clytemnestra)—I'm pretty sure it's not simply a random gesture. Similarly, I didn't get a handle on why the Prologue fails to introduce us to Agave (who is present) and Cassandra (who is not). Again, I'm sure there's a reason, but I couldn't make it out.

Nevertheless, I got meaning from Bad Women. I think creators Tina Shepard and Sidney Goldfarb want to remind us that these epic tales all pit human beings against their best intentions, and that in every case not only does humanity lose out, but observers who could have stopped these women from committing their heinous crimes failed to do anything at all. There's some resonance in that message that helps explain why mythology endures.

The Irish Repertory Theater’s intimate drama Bailegangáire (meaning “the town without laughter”) tells a quiet, melancholy story about the value of storytelling. Soft-featured and senile, Mommo spins out a strange tale from her bed, as granddaughters Mary and Dolly pour out a vodka bottle, along with years of accumulated heartache. Mary believes that their family is cursed, and decides that forcing Mommo to finish her story will lift the curse. And so the trio stay awake late into the night, as Mommo recounts a contest in a rural pub that would decide who is the “best laugher” in the land. A pub regular wins the competition by laughing himself to death; his opponent sadly returns home with his wife—Mommo—where they discover that their grandson has died in a fire. With this new understanding of their family’s tragedy, the girls and Mommo fall asleep in the bed together.

Bailegangáire is a still piece that runs deep, and it might bore viewers who believe that drama equals action. Tom Murphy, the playwright and director, has written a play of ideas in the manner of fellow Irishmen Yeats and Beckett, full of desperation and lyric beauty. He grounds his play with prosaic touches like making tea and changing bedsheets. Pauline Flanagan gives a subtle and layered performance as Mommo: she commands the stage from a recumbent position, modulating her presence using only Murphy’s words and her own voice. She tells parts of her story to imaginary grandchildren in a melodic lilt, but when she addresses her adult granddaughters, her voice rasps with the frustrations of age. Flanagan’s performance is hypnotic, a voice from a dream world. She is the play’s soul, keeping her audience engaged even when the play gets bogged down in its own words.

Murphy begins the play in the middle of the story; he leaves the audience to find its own feet. This might alienate some patrons, but others will be flattered that the playwright trusts their intelligence. Murphy and his company occasionally misstep, but they tell their stories with thought and understanding.

Ballad of Yachiyo, by Philip Kan Gotanda, has one of the hoariest stories since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The company of the Tooth & Nil Theatre throws itself so wholly into its production that they almost manage to make it work, but with a script this ridiculous, they’re fighting a losing battle. Yachiyo, a young and intelligent maiden brought up in the rigid subculture of Hawaii’s Japanese-American community around the first World War, finds love in the arms of a married potter, Hiro Takamura. Aside from his art, however, Hiro doesn’t give a damn about anything, including his shrewish wife; this is supposed to be sexy. When Yachiyo discovers that she’s pregnant, she drowns herself; this is supposed to be noble.

Such bald melodrama must possess two attributes to be worthwhile. First, it must move past its own clichés to demonstrate human passion at its most irrepressible (this is why, say, Wuthering Heights still holds up). Ballad of Yachiyo shows only that sexism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism, coincidence and venal people can combine to crush a poor innocent Japanese-American girl’s soul, which is a pretty stacked deck. Theater should be past the point of milking tragedy out of pregnant girls killing themselves for love and loneliness; Ibsen proved that over a century ago.

The second attribute that melodrama needs to entertain is a pitch-perfect production. Director Laura Somers and producer Laura Maxwell Scott have done a notable job at providing it on a tiny off-Off-Broadway budget, and their efforts show through the play’s holes. The performances are all very earnest, especially Yoshiro Kono’s as Yachiyo’s warm, sad father and Bina Chauhan as the gamine Yachiyo, all wide eyes and demure posture. Musician Daniel Nyohaku Soergel underscores every scene with live Japanese music, or Shakuhachi; his mellow groove settles a hush over the theater long before the play begins. Eliza Brown’s set, comprised of several bamboo flats, captures the roughness and desperation of a world that leaves Yachiyo out at sea.

And making something out of nothing, Sabrina Braswell contributes an incredibly textured lighting design with about a dozen lights. She shifts tone drastically between scenes, which supplies the actors with atmospheric contrasts when Somers lets the pace drift. She employs shadows that give a ragtime dancehall its dangerous seediness, and furnishes the potting shed and kiln with a heat that helps show why Yachiyo falls for Hiro when the playwright fails to. Her skill keeps the audience watching even when they know where the plot is headed.

Generally, it should be the artistic team’s job to supplement the playwright’s script; here, they prop it up. Based on their production values, Tooth & Nil seems like a capable company who could bring compelling shows to life. But there isn’t enough of a play in Ballad of Yachiyo for them to really show off their talent.

The first act of Baptizing Adam, the new play by David Allyn at the Phil Bosakowski Theatre, promises a tantalizing, intriguing collision between a gay, Jewish hedonist and a born-again Christian who claims to be straight. Adam, the Jewish one, and Jack, the straight one, meet cute in a gym and are  immediately attracted to one another; despite all the obvious reasons not to, they decide to have a cup of coffee together. Adam is looking for Mr. Right (or Mr. Right Now, as they say). Jack is looking for students for his Bible Study Group. Adam says he'll come to a meeting if Jack kisses him, and before you can say "repressed homosexual," Jack and Adam are heading for the bathtub where Jack will perform the act that gives the play its title—and will go in for some baptizing, if you will, of his own.

Provocative stuff, if a bit far-fetched. I worried about the evenness of this match-up: Jack is certainly in denial about his basic sexual nature, but is Adam really so confused about his spirituality? Nevertheless, I was willing to buy into Allyn's conceit to see where he was going to take it.

Unfortunately, he doesn't take it anywhere. Baptizing Adam's second act picks up a brand new plot thread, all about Adam's friend Karen and how he will help her deal with the rape that she suffered three years ago today. Complications ensue, involving a pair of possible peeping Toms and Karen's surprise acquisition of a revolver. But Adam and Jack's conflict is pretty much ignored; Jack turns up, for reasons never made clear, but the journeys of the man of God and the man of men are aborted, with the result that Baptizing Adam is entirely unsatisfying.

Megan Hollingshead, in the relatively thankless role of Karen, nevertheless gives the evening's most persuasive performance. Vince Gatton and Andrew Glaszek make an attractive pair of would-be lovers/combatants as Adam and Jack, but the playwright lets them—and us—down badly in failing to provide their story with an ending.

What I like best about Barbra's Wedding is that it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a warm-hearted romantic comedy about the foibles and foolishness of a couple in crisis. Most of the foolishness stems from unemployed actor Jerry Schiff's rampant insecurity; the crisis, clearly brewing for some time, comes to a head on the day of the eponymous event, the nuptials of Barbra Streisand and James Brolin, who just happen to be the Schiffs' next-door neighbors.

Playwright Daniel Stern, who is much better known as an actor (City Slickers, Home Alone), has given us here a charming if broad comedy. Sure, Barbra's Wedding has a sitcom feel, but as directed by David Warren with sure-handed sweetness at breakneck pace, and as played with requisite fervor by John Pankow and Julie White, it makes for an appealing and entertaining evening of theatre.

Barbra's Wedding starts with the sounds of news helicopters hovering above the Streisand mansion. The lights come up on the messy kitchen/living room of the dwelling next door, the Schiffs' self-described "worst house in Malibu." Jerry and Molly aren't invited to the wedding ("We didn't invite her to our wedding," Molly says philosophically) and they are attempting to cope with the circus that is playing out literally at their doorstep (Maury Povich is broadcasting from their front lawn). Jerry, who was once a second banana on a successful TV series, is upset that he's not invited and even more concerned that someone (like Maury Povich) will recognize him and realize that he's not invited. Molly, meanwhile, is hoping that she and Jerry can spend the day together and try to rekindle the spark that seems to be failing in their marriage; she's created an exotic Russian fish cake as centerpiece to what she hopes will be a memorable meal.

But Molly's aptitude for cooking is about the same as Jerry's for accepting his has-been status. The fish cake is a catastrophe, and precipitates a worse one as the couple argue about Jerry's antic preoccupation with being a non-entity in a sea of celebrity. Stern's script alternates between knowing jibes at Jerry's obsession (his most cherished possession, for example, is a photo of him with "pal" Robert Redford which turns out to be a doctored snapshot of a chance encounter at a funeral—the yarmulkes had to be airbrushed out, Molly reminds him) and satirical pokes at the contemporary American cult of fame exemplified by la Streisand's wedding (the aforementioned Povich turns out not to be wearing pants—he is, after all, photographed only from the waist up).

Eventually Jerry arrives at an inevitable nervous breakdown, and it's no surprise that Molly faithfully helps him through it. Barbra's Wedding ends blissfully espousing some nice messages: have faith in yourself, take care of your loved ones.  No surprises, except the pleasant one that the entire evening passes without a shred of irony.

Pankow and White do fine work here, keeping the laughter flowing while managing to create likable and credible characters. Neil Patel's set—a cluttered mess of a house—looks great and serves the piece ably.

Barbra's Wedding succeeds superbly as a funny, carefree entertainment; it's just the sort of show that should be in demand in these troubled times.

The events of last September 11th taught us many lessons, we hope; some of them are reflected in Barriers, Rehana Mirza's passionate, urgent new play. Tracking aspects of the lives of a Muslim Asian-American family living in New Jersey in the months following the terrorist attacks, Barriers examines issues that are very specific to this group of people as well as others that will resonate with anyone who experienced, directly or indirectly, profound loss on that tragic day. This is an important play: see it to learn something of what others have gone through, and see it to learn something about survival and moving on, without forgetting those who died.

The family at the center of Barriers was already badly damaged before 9/11: the father, Khalil, a Pakistani Muslim, is involved with another woman; the mother, Naima, a Chinese Christian who converted to Islam when she married, has become a sorrowful nag who is unsure of her identity. 28-year-old daughter Sunima lives and works in New York City and stays as far away from the family as possible; she has not yet told them about her engagement to Roger, a "white" man. 16-year-old Shehriar is a confused and sullen teenager, bruised by his parents' battling and his sister's apparent indifference.

The last member of the family, the older son Nabhil, is glimpsed only in memory. It's clear as Barriers begins that Nabhil was killed on 9/11 (we never learn the exact circumstances); his spirit stalks the family, each one clinging to his or her recollection of him at a particular, pivotal moment in time. The memories of Nabhil serve as both crutch and liability for these characters: some of what Barriers is about is how people can move away from a painful past, (hopefully) toward a more promising future.

Mostly, though, Barriers is a detailed, compassionate, eye-opening portrait of dysfunction within a crumbling family unit—dysfunction that is amplified by the ignorance and blind bigotry of people who lash out against their Muslim neighbors, equating the peaceful majority of Muslim Americans with the small number of terrorists who seem to want to destroy our country. Each of the characters in Barriers comes up against the effects of this hatred: Shehriar has dropped out of school for fear of being beaten up; Naima defiantly covers her head and body in traditional Muslim garb when she goes out shopping and winds up being taunted for it by local thugs; Khalil's ill-treatment by co-workers (who, he says, behave as though he has explosives strapped to his body), has led him to question his faith.

Mirza probably piles more melodramatic incident onto her play than she should; that said, what I love about Barriers is how viscerally it opens my White American eyes to injustices that I tend to nod my head sympathetically about and then dismiss when I hear about them on the evening news. Mirza has chosen her medium well—Barriers reaches out and grabs us—wrenches us—to teach us something valuable about the state of the world. The ending she has devised for the play (which I obviously won't reveal here) packs enormous emotional punch.

Barriers features a fine ensemble of Asian-American actors, including Jade Wu as the difficult, troubled Naima; Krishen Mehta as the conflicted father Khalil; Deepa Purohit as the daughter Sunima, trapped between two worlds, as it were; Amit Patel as Nabhil, caught forever in his family's memory; and, most impressively, Debargo Sanyal, whose pain and confusion as young Shehriar is palpable and heartbreaking. David Sajadi and Catherine Jhung appear in a couple of small roles each and register strongly. Tyler Pierce, as Roger, also does commendable work. Director Ashok Sinha paces Barriers deftly and fluidly, reinforcing the compelling nature of Mirza's narrative.

As we look for ways to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11, attending a play like Barriers might be a good idea. I was upset and disturbed by this play, in some ways for reasons that are very personal to me, and in other ways for reasons that are political, or social: there's much that's happened in this country in the past year that we cannot be proud of. Barriers offers important reminders about the aftermath, for better and worse, of that pivotal event.

Maybe if grown-ups stopped writing musicals (and movies, and TV series) in which teenagers do nothing but think about sex, real teenagers would think about something other than sex.

Actually, I suspect they do, which is why a show like Beach Radio, regardless of its actual quality, is so lame. The premise is that a group of teenagers hang out on a New Jersey beach during the summer after high school graduation, under the spell of a Dr. Ruth-like radio sex guru. Nerdy-but-cute Matt wants to have sex with self-described last virgin in New Jersey Angie. Burger King employee and all-around cool thug Tad worships Angie from afar (or, more accurately, below), but he's more likely to get action from similarly blue-collar Felice, who in turn longs for the respectability of being Matt's girlfriend. Goofy curly-headed Malcolm Culley, Jr., meanwhile, has decided to break the news that he is gay to his parents, whose chilly reaction sends him straight into the arms of hunky new guy Delos, who works at the beach snack bar. And Culley's best friend, gorgeous Nicole, wishes their relationship was more than platonic, while she copes with a new step-mother only a few years older than herself.

Well, I never believed any of it for one minute. It's hard to imagine that these kids even know each other, let alone spend all their spare time together on the beach. In the show's most idiotic number, "Totally Cool," Tad and Felice teach Matt and Angie to be bad (à la the ending of Grease). But why on earth would grounded kids like Matt and Angie waste their time with losers like Tad and Felice? Or, to put it another way, why on earth would cool, popular kids like Tad and Felice waste their time with losers like Matt and Angie?

The gang's unanimously supportive stance with openly gay (except at home) Culley is even harder to swallow.

So very little comes off as authentic in Beach Radio, including the skimpy bikinis (girls) and stylish polo shirts and shorts (boys) in which they are dressed (attributed to famous costume designer Alvin Colt). This is as shamelessly exploitative an entertainment as any Frankie & Annette movie, and with about as much wit, I'm afraid.

The theatre of playwright/director Enda Walsh seems quintessentially Irish, a direct heir to the Yeats-Beckett legacy of concrete onstage metaphors, linguistic gymnastics, and a dour outlook. But where the father-son duo in Purgatory and their close cousins Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot find no deliverance from suffering, at least one member of the pair in bedbound eventually finds a quiet end.

The inheritor of this happy rest goes unnamed, crippled by polio and unable to leave her bed. Beside her, vainly attempting to sleep, lies her father Max Darcy, a furniture impresario. He recounts a story, the story of his business success and failure, and when he flags, she tells her own sad tale. Through Max telling her about her past, her curse—the metaphorical one, the one that deformed her and won’t allow her to sleep— is lifted. Yet somehow Max remains awake, unsettled, and alone.

Walsh tells his characters’ stories in that logorrhea that Joyce forged from the Irish unconscious. It can prove difficult to follow, but it’s a valid and poetic way to balance the practical and everyday with the mystical and dreamlike. It serves the uniquely malformed heart of this play, even if it stretches the viewer’s focus by about ten minutes.

This isn’t just the audience’s problem: the actors also seem to tire in the final minutes. But they give such tight performances throughout that they can’t be faulted. Brían F. O’Byrne retains his listeners’ interest with the skills of a raconteur. But he’s out-performed by Jenna Lamia, a young woman with, one hopes, a full career ahead of her. She employs her face and hands—she is bedbound, so her range of movement is limited—to produce a near-autistic woman-child. Lamia is always performing and wholly expressive, full of particular tics and twitches that never overwhelm the soul within her role.

Simultaneously entrancing and off-putting, Lamia’s performance typifies the play. bedbound isn’t exactly enjoyable, even with its tentatively happy ending. The stage has an autistic quality, inspiring claustrophobia even from the audience. Set designer Klara Zieglerova’s absurd litter of furniture and Kirk Bookman’s white overhead lighting reinforce the show’s trapped, diseased feeling.

bedbound isn’t the type of play that appeals to everyone—theatregoers accustomed to the realistic tradition may resist its rich symbolic style. But the adventurous and open-minded may find in bedbound an insight into a dramatic heritage both near to and distant from their own. The Irish Repertory Theatre is dedicated to “the principle of great stories beautifully and aggressively told,” according to their mission. Enda Walsh has already started to earn praise in Britain for his elliptical but emotional work. Like Jenna Lamia, he may grow into a potent stage presence.

There is a lot to like about Prudence Wright Holmes's one-woman show, Bexley, OH(!), but its pleasures don't quite beg for deep analysis. She starts out by announcing that she is going to tell a couple of stories about her hometown of Bexley, Ohio, and for the next two hours this is exactly what she does. In addition to being about Bexley, the stories are about her coming of age, her mother and father, and Middle America during the often confusing cultural transitions of the Fifties and Sixties. It is none of it rip-roaring or eye-opening, but it is executed with a pleasant clarity and appeal.

Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, is the type of affluent, picket-fence town we're used to seeing from television sitcoms of the past. Holmes tells us that the law requires a policeman to be present at every party. There are Jews, but it's okay because they're rich. However, it doesn't take very long before we start to see some mold infesting the white bread.

The first piece, "Dr. Sam Is Under Your Bed," hangs its hat on that most American of showpieces: the high-profile homicide. In 1954, in a murder case that went on to be the inspiration for TV's "The Fugitive," a rich Cleveland doctor is wrongly accused of killing his wife, and, after serving a portion of his prison sentence, exonerated and released. Something about the depravity of the crime strikes a dissonant chord in Holmes's obsessively decent dad, and he spends the rest of his life crusading against the "monster" known as Dr. Sam, estranging his family and ruining his career in his fanatical pursuit of what he perceives to be justice. The majority of the tale transpires during Holmes' adolescence, and the story's emotional resonance comes from her rueful sense of the growing distance between herself and a man who, though never particularly warm, allows himself to retreat almost entirely into a sad kind of monomania. The beauty of the piece is that it's completely free of pathos: Holmes invites us to laugh at this strange man—not derisively, but as a tonic to his pain and isolation. In the end, the laughter stings all the more when she discovers that maybe he was a better man than a conflicted and rebellious teenage daughter might have been able to recognize at the time.

After intermission, Holmes performs "The African Violet Society," a broader piece in both humor and scope. This time, it's her mother that takes center stage: a Boston-born woman who craves acceptance in the rather limited Bexley social scene. To this end, she devotes much of her free time to the African Violet Society, a women's social club whose constantly rotating Machiavellian membership reflects its need to feel important and powerful in a world of men. Parallel to Mom's machinations within the Society are Holmes's own reservations about her budding femininity, precipitated by a college acting coach who encourages her to become more "fuckable." Finally, a thread involving Minnie, the family's black maid (who also appears as a character in the first story) brings the Civil Rights struggle and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. quite literally into the Holmes' home. Though this piece is busier and, in places, sillier than the first piece (in particular Mom's relationship with a mentally unstable friend is played for a number of queasy laughs), it is entertaining, and brings a wider range of concerns to bear on its characters' lives.

Holmes' performance throughout is as smooth and affectless as the plains of the state from which she hails. She is a likeable and trustworthy narrator, even if it's clear that she's unafraid of passing judgment on many of the people she describes. And, except for a few facile metaphors and a couple of fuzzy plot points, the writing is crisp and enjoyable, eschewing verbal flamboyance to simply tell the story as it is. Though each piece could easily stand on its own, the interconnections between the two create a real sense of community, making Bexley and its inhabitants even more familiar. It won't change the world, but Bexley, OH(!) is decidedly of the world, which is more than can be said about a lot of popular art these days.

The first words of Bill Maher's program bio tell us that he thinks of himself "first and foremost as a comedian." This is helpful, because a lot of people who see his work, on television and here on stage in Victory Begins at Home, seem to think he's a political satirist, or maybe even a political commentator, or maybe even a politician. These confused identifications have caused him to be held, publicly, to standards that a comedian shouldn't have to adhere to: he doesn't have to be consistent on issues; he just has to be funny.

Happily, Victory Begins at Home, Maher's Broadway debut, is very funny. Of course, the material will sit better with you the more you agree with it, but in general Maher is a canny and witty observer of the world he lives in, and much of what he has to say, about subjects ranging from why Al Gore lost the Presidency to why there's no such thing as a "mutual sexual fantasy" for men and women, is going to tickle a lot funny bones.

Maher's comic style has the relaxed ease of Johnny Carson, but his willingness to court controversy brings to mind the likes of Jackie Mason and even Lenny Bruce; his real forbearer is Will Rogers, another comedian who got most of his material from reading the newspaper. Most of the ground that Maher covers in Victory Begins at Home has to do with the post-9/11 world, in particular his vexation at Americans' apparent inability to learn much (or change much) about how they live their lives. He talks a lot about "why they hate us," and many of his observations on this point are right on target as far as I'm concerned: Americans are wasteful, self-absorbed, acquisitive, and willfully ignorant of other cultures. (Maher finds a much funnier way to say each of those things, however.) He punctuates his presentation with projections of made-up propaganda posters on the theatre's back wall; an early one is captioned merely "Knowledge Wins," which more or less summarizes much of his philosophy.

He also talks about, among other things, why he thinks drugs should be legalized, why he thinks  religion is bad, and why he thinks the federal government is intrusive (he explains that the tax code is designed to benefit people who want to own houses, get married, and  have children—all of which, he says, scare him to death).

It's not hard to see why, given his choice of subjects, some observers think that Maher is presenting a platform rather than performing a standup routine. But standup routine this resolutely is: when the political stuff failed to land about an hour into the show, he switched gears to talk about that time-honored laugh-getter, the battle of the sexes. The tone may not change—Maher has mastered his style, a neat meld of caustic and ingenuous—but the tenor certainly does: this guy has no intention of losing his audience.

This becomes even more apparent in the fifteen-minute talkback sessions that follow each of his shows. At the performance I attended, audience members, one after another, tried to harangue Maher into political debate, and he skillfully deflected every volley and turned it, as best he could, into a joke.

Nobody says comedy can't be relevant; indeed, that's why I enjoyed Victory Begins at Home as much as I did—I like to laugh and think at the same time. Maher is smart and he's not afraid to say things that others shy away from, and for this we must be grateful. But he also has no illusions about what he's doing on stage in his show and neither should we: let's leave the politicking to so-called public servants and the show business to pros like him.

DRAMATIST, n.

One who adapts plays from the French.

This swipe at the dire lack of originality in 19th-century American theatre is one of the hundreds of entries in Ambrose Bierce's satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce—who was born in 1842, fought in the Civil War, and disappeared in Mexico in 1914—is one of the most outspoken, uncompromising, and diabolically clever writers in American literature; in fact, he is so outspoken, uncompromising, and diabolically clever that his reputation has paled next to that of his gentler contemporary, Mark Twain. Mac Wellman, a playwright who has made a career of refuting Bierce's definition of his vocation by spewing forth original works filthy with the native dirt of America, has set out to redress this regrettable lacuna in his latest play, Bitter Bierce.

For Wellman, Bierce is the type of writer that we need now more than ever. Hypocritical leaders; shady financial dealings that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor; a nation awash in sentimental patriotism: despite a century's interim, the world stared down by Bierce is not so remote. And Bierce stared without blinking. He spoke his mind and never looked away, in spite of knowing that, in the end, the world always wins such staring contests.

But as Wellman keenly knows, without his great talent Bierce would have been just a crank. Instead, his epigrams and his short stories are crafted with high art, his righteous fury always carefully held in check by a chilly mastery of English. Anyone can be angry, but Bierce did it with impeccable style, as Wellman is at great pains to demonstrate.

Bitter Bierce is a one-man show, and it pilfers liberally from Bierce's own oeuvre. The play is peppered with entries from The Devil's Dictionary and excerpts from stories, all spoken by Bierce himself as illustrations of a meandering autobiography. Many words and phrases are repeated; most memorably, Bierce repeatedly picks up a head of cabbage and, with increasing anger, intones: "Cabbage, noun: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head." As he describes his harrowing war experience, his painful divorce, the senseless premature deaths of his two sons, and his professional conflicts with the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt, you begin to see what he means. Within this structure, Wellman's trademark flights of linguistic fancy nonetheless proliferate, but sparingly, and always in the diction of his subject. As the play progresses, it becomes difficult to decipher which words are Wellman's and which belong to Bierce—and this is good. The fusion of Mac the maker and Ambrose the subject makes Bitter Bierce the object a fascinating thing to behold.

Wellman (who directed his own play) has a stalwart partner in actor Stephen Mellor. At first, Mellor's Bierce smacks of the drawing-room; his epigrams are clever and wry, and his delivery so deadpan as to imply indifference. As the sources of his bitterness are revealed, however, Mellor effects a subtle change that becomes more obvious with time: instead of depicting the fiery moral wit as a shield from an unkind world, he gives us a portrait of a man who is being corroded from within by his own inexorable flame. By inverting the formula and displaying the man's passion and pain in full view, Mellor has taken what could have been merely a successful academic exercise and turned it into a heartbreaking spectacle, showing the effect in human terms of a life led without concessions. To become acquainted with the life and words of Ambrose Bierce is reason enough to see the show; for it to be done with such intelligence and commitment  makes Bitter Bierce a necessity.

Sometimes the consumer advocate in me feels compelled to speak out, and this is one of them: whatever meager artistic merit Larry Pelligrini's embarrassing new show Blessing in Disguise might possess, there's no way it's worth $55. Seating is cramped and on bridge chairs in the "new" Times Square Theatre (which, though clean and shiny, still looks like what it is, which is a converted strip club). Sightlines are terrible. Ambiance is non-existent: if Pelligrini wanted an environmental production, why not set this play about a Greenwich Village drag bar in, say, a drag bar? (He might have also considered using actual drag queens.)

Quickly: the show is about five drag performers who are in danger of losing their jobs. One's old and pathetic, one's fat and pathetic, one's stoned and pathetic, one's a nymphomaniac and pathetic, and the last one is, apparently, dead. One's white, one's black, one's Hispanic, one's Southern, one's Asian.  A supposedly straight boy helps out.

During the first act—which is all I could stand to sit through—not for one second did Blessing in Disguise rise above the aforementioned clichés. In fact most of the time, it rose below them. Is that possible?

Imagine if a film noir director like John Huston had been given an hour slot on a 1950s televised theater program and you might come up with Ben Bettenbender’s Bliss. Bliss is a slice of hard-nosed realism, exploring lowlifes, love and betrayal, manslaughter and murder, regret and forgiveness. Rattlestick, an off-off-Broadway company in a small West Village space, provides New York with a little play that grapples with big moral issues.

While working at a gas station, ex-con Chick is approached by a woman with an offer: murder the man who killed her husband in exchange for sexual favors and a little cash. But instead of dispatching his target quickly, Chick, played by Robert Sedgwick with a noble stupidity (or a stupid nobility), demands that the victim justify his existence. When Chick discovers the reason that the woman wants the mark killed, he brings the woman back and, at gunpoint, asks her the same question. Their answers and evasions, and Chick’s own decisions in light of the situation, are completely human and provide a truly cathartic theatrical experience.

Bettenbender skillfully weaves his characters’ pasts into their present, especially in Chick’s long monologue about murder and prison. While some scenes do meander a bit, director Julia Gibson uses a light touch, making every element serve the action; she has listened closely to the play rather than impose ideas upon it. And all three actors (Johanna Day and Peter Jay Fernandez are Sedgwick's co-stars) define their characters by focusing on how they act, not on what they feel. Both Randall Parsons’ scenic design and Josh Epstein’s lights provide a simple setting for the action and characters rather than a spectacular distraction from them.

Unlike many plays, Bliss makes you remember that theater can be fun without being comedic (which is so rare that it might be why so many people go to the movies instead). Rattlestick has produced a mature and professional work that deserves a larger audience than their space can seat.

Many Western artists have based their works on the Buddhist tract known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, most notably the Beatles in their sitar-and-acid musing, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Like this classic song, Blue Sky Transmission grasps for the mysterious, the eternal, and the imaginative. But unlike the Beatles’ track, it doesn’t turn their common source’s abstractions and metaphors back into an edifying source of knowledge, leaving one’s soul entertained but hungry.

Of course, religious works aren’t easy to transform into theater. Their sophisticated arguments often lack that most essential element of drama: action. And the Tibetan Book of the Dead doesn’t even have the Bible’s meandering narratives. Instead, it’s meant to serve as a guidebook through the fantastical terrain of the afterlife that all mortals will navigate in the soul’s immortal attempt to escape the curse of rebirth. Staging this fanciful and utterly alien vision of the afterlife is the dramatic problem facing the company that adapted Blue Sky Transmission.

Historically, classic medieval plays like Everyman provided a similar educational translation from theology into drama. These dramas demonstrated Christian concepts to the uneducated by showing a Christian abandoned by personifications like Beauty and Knowledge and left only with Good Deeds or Charity. In a similar manner, and with a similarly imaginative theatrical sense, Blue Sky Transmission kills a protagonist in the play’s opening moments. This woman—a former Asian-American who used to be named Allison—must pass the travails and resist the temptations that beset the soul after death.

Fortunately for the company, 14th-century Tibetans described very specifically what the soul faces after death. These include gods and monsters that provide the company with ready-made characters, or more accurately, manifestations of temptations or enlightenments. For example, the White Vairochana, a convert from the far West transformed into a God of Light and Harmony, appears multi-armed out of a spinning drum to supply the wandering soul with advice. In this production, once the drum has clattered to a stop, in hops the actor (Brett Keyser, playing Vairochana with a Victorian attitude of ridiculous self-importance), positioning his arms like a Himalayan god.

Allison often reacts to such apparitions with confusion, as might be expected. But playing her, Sophia Skiles commits herself utterly to a brave performance that is unmoored from the usual concepts of character. Skiles speaks the play’s dialogue (metaphor-heavy and occasionally nonsensical) with a seriousness that brings a sense of clarity to the evening. The rest of the ensemble, however, ranges from entertaining to leaden, and often fails to communicate the meaning behind their words. The most enjoyable performers include the aforementioned Keyser and Karin Randoja, who, as a driver who shuttles souls across planes of existence, uses a malleable squeak of a voice and a swaggering bounce to create a chameleon cartoon deity.

But the most engaging element of the production is Halim El-Dabh’s musical score. It sounds unmistakably foreign, although it can’t be pinned down to any one tradition. Phrases repeat and rhythms circle upon themselves, an aural equivalent of the cycle that the Buddhist text deals with. The ensemble sings El-Dabh’s complex harmonies with a beauty that evokes the spirituality of all truly religious texts.

Even though the play contains a good deal of theatrical imagination, the staging ultimately doesn’t communicate the ideas of its source. The company often seems to be speaking in code without supplying a key. In each episode, Allison faces a mystical deity, and leaves with a new piece of information or sense of understanding. But the audience doesn’t really travel with her or inherit her wisdom. Because of this, the play lacks the sense of a journey, which is problematic when its source is a metaphysical guidebook. In America, even intellectuals are often unfamiliar with the foundations of Buddhist thought. But they are used to being introduced to new and foreign ideas, and that’s what the play fails to do.

Yuri Skujins' new play Boca is a smart, funny satire of American pop culture's love affair with the sensational and gratuitous. Like Frank Cwiklik's Antony and Cleopatra, Skujins' work subverts classic "art" to point up our fixation on society's violent underbelly, setting Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold among a sleazy band of bottom-feeders and mobsters on Florida's gulf coast. The gangsters of Boca live large, as Skujins recasts Wotan, Fricka, Freia and the rest of the epic heroes and villains from Wagner's first Ring Cycle opera as a passel of careless humans who behave as if they were, well, gods.

The play is remarkably faithful to its source material. It starts in a strip club in Boca Raton, where seedy lowlife Alan (described by other characters as a "dwarf") is ogling a trio of lovely ecdysiasts. They take turns taunting this despicable fellow, arousing his ire; after they've gotten his goat, they turn briefly regretful and reveal that they are sitting on a huge money-making scam, namely a box full of stolen credit card receipts and other goodies required to perpetrate massive identity theft: a Ring of metaphorical Gold, if you will. Alan's interest is piqued, and when the strippers tell him that he must renounce love in order to control the Ring, he loses no time in doing so.

Magically, Alan becomes the kingpin of his dreams. The girls appeal to SuperSleaze lawyer Larry to recover the box; at the same time, Larry's crony Martin, a crime figure of unspecified nature, recognizes that the receipts could solve his current pressing problem. It seems that Martin hired two Rastafarian contractors, a pair of brothers named Neville and Nestor, to build the mansion of his dreams along the Florida coast. Suffering, as he puts it, from "a negative cash flow situation," Martin has promised the brothers his wife's sister Heather as payment for their labors. (Not that the Jamaicans are interested in the lady per se: she owns controlling interest in a prosperous cosmetics company; the profits from her purveyance of eternal youth are what they're after.) Martin's wife Rachel—not to mention Heather—is understandably disturbed about the arrangement. So when Martin hears about the identity theft scam from Larry, he latches onto it immediately, offering it as lucrative substitute for Heather's business empire to Neville and Nestor.

If you know the plot of Das Rheingold then you can see how cleverly Skujins has built his parallel tale. You also can figure out exactly what happens next. (If you don't know the story, sorry—I'm not telling any more; you have to see Boca for yourself.) Skujins artfully blends the mythic concepts of the original with the homely, plausible details of the various scams and criminal acts devised and committed by Alan, Martin, and their colleagues. At the same time, he parodies broadly and skillfully modern noir like Reservoir Dogs and "The Sopranos," with plenty of gratuitous (and obviously bogus) violence, tons of profanity, and an almost blissful equal-opportunity propensity for ethnic slurs. Skujins defuses the nastiness with wit and good-natured silliness throughout: Caucasian Darius Stone and African-American Tony Jackson are cast as a pair of Cuban brothers, for example.

Skujins has staged his script nicely, letting his excellent ensemble carry the piece with over-the-top bravura. Darius Stone is appropriately toad-like as the reprehensible Alan, while Tony Jackson is a cowering mess as his put-upon brother Manuel. Bill Coelius and Matthew Maher get the insidious hypocrisy of Larry and Martin exactly right, and still find plenty of opportunities for comic moments. Tonya Canada and Greig Sergeant are deliciously high-strung as the Rastafarians; Canada, Anushka Carter, and Nella Vinci play the three strippers with seedy panache, and Carter and Vinci are dead-on as Rachel and Heather, as well.

The script could use a little tightening: even at just eighty minutes long, some of the exposition drags. And the mapping of details from Das Rheingold is so on-the-money that I wished for a neater solution to the climactic events when Martin and Larry trick Alan out of the Ring—perhaps a transformation based in cyberspace could be effected. Note that these are really just quibbles on my part—Boca is terrifically entertaining (wait 'til you see who Skujins casts as earth goddess Erda, the deus-ex-machina who wraps the story up).  I look forward to the three logical (illogical?) sequels that are hopefully brewing in Skujins' inventive imagination.

Boobs! the Musical is a revue of Ruth Wallis’ greatest naughty hits. The songs are juxtaposed with mostly clever skits which set them up in hilarious ways. The show overall really works and is a really good time.

Ruth Wallis was a songwriter in the 1940s-60s. She is known for her sexy, saucy and satiric “party songs.” Boobs! the Musical presents many of her witty gems in new, innovative ways. The book by Steve Mackes and Michael Whaley includes many surprises. Approximately twenty-one songs are sung, almost all taken out of context in unpredictable ways.

The off-the-wall skits are wonderfully designed to exemplify the song performed. There are no limits. One song is even sung by actors dressed as a cat and a dog. There are political jibes, Sondheim references, running gags, and even Mary Poppins!

The songs have stood the test of time. The many euphemisms and double-entendres are played out to their fullest. The highlights of the show are “The Dingy Song” which was Wallis’s first million-seller, the title song “Boobs” and “Drill ‘Em All.” The songs are all pleasantly and intelligently naughty. "The Dingy Song," for example, is about a guy with the best dingy the girl has ever seen.

The cast (Kristy Cates, Robert Hunt, Max Perlman, J. Brandon Savage, Jenny-Lynn Suckling and Rebecca Young) is very good and very funny. All six have their chance to shine and have pretty good voices. They really bring the material to life.

The direction by Donna Drake is extremely well-done. Every gag that can be made is made. The show moves very quickly because of the shifting flats designed by Eric Harriz. As one number fades behind one, the other one opens to reveal the next scene. It works beautifully. The musical staging by Lawrence Leritz is also great and never fails to pass up a laugh. Finally, the big, gorgeous and colorful costumes designed by Robert Pease and J. Kevin Draves are just amazing. Some of them have hidden compartments which never fail to delight.

Boobs! the Musical kind of feels like an R-rated Free to Be... You and Me. It is extremely fun with many unexpected surprises. Any fan of inventive lewdness will certainly enjoy going to see it. As is said in the show, “a nipple a day keeps the dentist away!”

Book of Days, the play by Lanford Wilson that has taken three years to come to New York City, is about a young woman living in a small town in the American Midwest who discovers that a terrible crime has been committed. Gradually, she comes to understand something much more disturbing and insidious, that the powerful people in this town are in denial or engaged in a cover-up or both, and that the criminal will never be punished. Wilson juxtaposes with this story another one, in which this same young woman is playing the title role in a community theatre production of Saint Joan; as Joan railed against the corrupt judges who had already decided her fate even before she appeared at her trial, so too does Ruth Hoch search vainly and increasingly desperately for an honest ear to hear her testimony.

Wilson wrote Book of Days in 1998-99, and while I recognize that the willful ignorance by powerful institutions of things like truth and justice is nothing new, this play nevertheless feels oddly prescient in this year of Enron and Catholic Church scandals and post-9/11 revelations about the CIA and FBI. Book of Days, on one level a scary cautionary tale about the ways that apathy and complacency give us the society we deserve, is spectacularly timely in 2002. Wilson is sounding an urgent alarm here; he deserves at least to be heard.

As Book of Days' first act leisurely unfolds, we meet a passel of idiosyncratic but sympathetic characters: Ruth, actress by night and bookkeeper by day, at the cheese factory run by the richest man in town, Walt Bates; her husband, Len, is the manager there, and is working hard to convince Walt to let him develop and market high-quality cheese, converting the business from a pre-processing plant for food conglomerates like Kraft to a bona fide manufacturer of a product Walt and Len can be proud of. Walt's wife, Sharon, lives for her husband and the Church; their son, James, good-looking, popular, and lazy, has finally passed the Bar Exam and is about to run for local political office. Though James' pretty wife, LouAnn, used to be a cheerleader, he is still on the prowl, as we discover when he makes a pass at Ginger Reed, the assistant director of the Saint Joan production that Ruth is starring in. Ginger's boss on the show is Boyd Middleton, a Tony-nominated director from the Coast whose career seems to have slumped. Other characters: Len's mother, former hippie-turned-college dean Martha, bright and still idealistic in spite of everything; Bobby Groves, the decent, well-liked fundamentalist preacher at the town's church; Conroy Atkins, the town's affable Sheriff; and Earl Hill, another employee at Walt's factory, the wild card—a man with a dark side, who is obviously jealous of Len's success.

It is Earl who finds the dead body that sets in motion the murder mystery that, briefly, Book of Days turns into. But by Act Two, the rug has been pulled completely out from under us, as Ruth's quest for truth and justice—for their own sake, mind you—collides with the needs and desires of the town's biggest stakeholders. What seemed simple at first becomes tangled in a chain of momentous events that some would call conspiracy and others would call the righteous preservation of the status quo. An atmosphere of rumor, threat, and betrayal descends upon the town. Some are accused and some are forgiven; some prevail and some are driven away. Ruth doesn't burn at the stake—we live in a civilized world, thank you very much. But Wilson delivers an ending that, depending upon your views about certain political and religious and social issues, has the capacity to inflame and/or to enrage.

The play unfolds on a set (by John Lee Beatty) that looks like a high school gymnasium; it begins with actors speaking directly to the audience about Dublin, Missouri, the mythical but archetypal town where it takes place; the "director" stops the action from time to time to interject an observation or replay a scene. We recognize the allusions to Our Town; Wilson lulls us into believing we have our bearings—the same way that his protagonist, Ruth Hoch, feels comfortable and safe and at home in Dublin. It took me a couple of days to fully understand how cannily Book of Days is constructed: Wilson gives us Grover's Corners and then cruelly yanks it away so that we can experience, viscerally and organically, the same progression of bewilderment, disenchantment, disaffection, and despair that Ruth goes through. Because Dublin is Our Town—the town we make by our silent assent, if through no other means.

Potent and ultimately incendiary as Wilson's script is, Book of Days would not touch and move us were it not provided with the splendid production on view here. Director Marshall W. Mason has staged the work flawlessly and has cast it with perhaps the strongest ensemble on any New York stage. Miriam Shor is luminous as Ruth, the play's heroine and conscience; she's matched by the remarkable Matthew Rauch as her honestly loving husband Len. I must also single out the actors who play the four older characters in the piece—Jonathan Hogan (Boyd Middleton), Nancy Snyder (Sharon), Susan Kellermann (Martha), and Jim Haynie (Walt)—each of whom does extraordinary work.

Book of Days is a polemical play; but to do it justice I must conclude by telling you that it's also a deeply meditative one. Wilson has Martha say:

Slopping barefoot and naked through the rain and mud at Woodstock. For what? To make our country free! Liberation! And look at what the Perforated Generation has done with it.

And he has Sharon say:

Most people, city people—I think they don't know what this country is. All those people criticizing America. They'd be completely different people is they could really see this country.

In the end, Book of Days is a portrait of the country that Martha and Sharon are both talking about. Call to action, call to judgment, or something in between, Book of Days is challenging and provocative writing in the best and purest American tradition, that's for sure, and it demands to be seen, and heard, and thought about.

Let’s get it out of the way now: David Mamet is an Important Playwright. He’s one of the few contemporary Americans whose plays might stand the test of centuries. People who don’t see theater have heard of him. He’s smart but not over-intellectual. His plays display an insight into both the contemporary world and universal truths, communicated through simple American speech. David Mamet is the top of the theater heap.

Mamet is also notorious for his masculine themes and writing style. So Boston Marriage represents an exciting step forward for the master: it’s entirely about women and their role in society, both with and without men. And the Public Theater has taken advantage of this rare opportunity by giving two of the best contemporary stage actresses the chance to work on a new play by a playwright whose skill with characterization is comparable to Chekhov’s.

Kate Burton plays Anna, a rich Boston socialite who prefers women but derives the funds for her lifestyle from a rich man, including a well-appointed art nouveau apartment (Walt Spangler’s sumptuous drawing room set). Her lifestyle includes Claire (Martha Plimpton), who has upset their arrangement thanks to her infatuation with a naïve teenage girl.

The women snipe at each other with the casual cruelty of old lovers, hiding their emotions behind a veneer of upper-class propriety. It’s an example of what the play calls the “fig leaf,” the acknowledged façade that masks but doesn’t hide what’s behind it. Their words camouflage their emotions, both from each other and from themselves. Mamet provides a third character, their Scottish maid Catherine (played hilariously by Arden Myrin in her New York debut), whose emotional nakedness contrasts with the ladies’ propriety.

This makes Boston Marriage sound more serious that it really is. In fact, it’s a frothy minor play by a major playwright, almost a whimsical stylistic game. Mamet has written in the manner of the old “well-made play”: it takes place in the 1890s and resembles works of that era. It’s set in a drawing room, the plot’s complication hinges on a prop and a coincidence, and the dialogue is filled with bon mots that Oscar Wilde would’ve wished he’d said (and did say, in at least one case). The women use a ludicrously rococo style of speech: “How better than good” exclaims one, early on.

But certain aspects of the play make Mamet look a little lazy. A line like “The engine of the world is betrayal, and we are sentenced to strive with the world” encapsulates the sardonic world view that we’ve known since American Buffalo, but it’s also a mixed metaphor that the younger Mamet would have edited out. The final act meanders to a finish, losing its farcical touch when the women lower their masks, making a weightier point that love is a compromise. Karen Kohlhaas’ otherwise fine direction fails to straighten out this shift.

The biggest problem, however, is that Claire and Anna are indistinguishable as individuals. This may be a deliberate choice on Mamet’s part—it’s an axiom of romantic farce that lovers are interchangeable—but it leaves Burton and Plimpton with little to create from. In this, Burton does much more, using a withering gaze and flamboyant gestures to supplement her acid tongue; her Anna is a drama queen. Plimpton struggles to define Claire, and seems to be on the right track by emphasizing her more poetic soul. But because her Claire is more sincere than Anna, she doesn’t get to have as much fun.

It may be that by writing for women, Mamet is guilty of a failure of aspiration. He demonstrates that the sorority of womanhood possesses just as much antagonism and competition as the fraternities of Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. His women are cunning, manipulative liars, just as his men are. But Boston Marriage is definitely a farce, one that reaches idiocy of "I Love Lucy" proportions in its final act. It lacks the gravity, and the sharp characters, of Mamet’s masculine plays, and while it gives its audience a fun evening, it might be less than what they expect. 

Chiori Miyagawa's new play, Broken Morning, is a powerful and important work of theatre. It's described as a "poetic dialectic," which is precisely what it is, about the prison industry, specifically Death Row. Miyagawa takes us into the heads of various inmates awaiting execution, their families, prison workers, and victims, creating a riveting and thought-provoking montage of humanity in crisis. Broken Morning reminds us that a person—even one who takes the lives of others—is still a person; it reminds us, too, that the capacity to kill—or at least the capacity to dehumanize others to the point where killing them might be possible—exists within all of us.

Broken Morning is also about a system, and a society, that brings about murder and that condones it in the form of capital punishment. It's not explicitly a polemic against the death penalty; rather, it's a meditation on what the death penalty means and what it does to people. Miyagawa's genius in this play is to present so many perspectives on her subject: Broken Morning offers no answers, but it puts the important questions into sharp focus. You will leave the theatre thinking differently about this issue than when you came in—Miyagawa provides potent food for thought in this remarkable work. Broken Morning is theatre as mirror: it's about who we are, and if we see and listen carefully, we will discover a piece of uncomfortable truth; perhaps we'll change.

Miyagawa created this extraordinary play by first conducting interviews with inmates, guards, family members, and victims in and around the Hunstsville, Texas State Prison. Broken Morning is fiction, but it's based on those meetings; it's documentary theatre, but it's never about the interviewer or the actor and always firmly about its subject: Miyagawa is rigorous in maintaining her focus on the people she talked to. They're a fascinating, diverse lot: Death Row prisoners like Mark, a glib black man who swears he's never experienced racism and swears, also, that he didn't do it; Edward, a Hispanic inmate who is both family man and drug addict; Paul, another black man who is in for a brutal robbery/murder and is now most concerned about his wife's future security; and Jane, Caucasian 40-year-old mother of a college-bound teenager who is being raised by her lawyer and his wife.

We also get to know some of those close to these folks, like Jane's sixteen-year-old son Chris, and Paul's probably-not-as-naive-as-she-seems wife Diane. And we meet some of the people who work at the prison: the Chaplain; a new recruit who doesn't seem to favor the death penalty named Officer Kelly; and the stalwart Captain Green, who has conscientiously worked his way up through the Texas penal system to become head of Death Row at Huntsville. Green's daughter, Laura, also works at the prison; we observe her on duty and, in flashback, on dates with a nerdy college student named Tim—who will eventually become a murderer.

To complete the circle, Miyagawa gives us Sheila and Anne, two women whose children have been murdered senselessly and randomly.

Through all these diverse sets of eyes we look at an issue that at first glance seems clear-cut; and in the course of Broken Morning's seventy-five minutes, we come to understand how complicated and insoluble it actually is. Jane has devoted her sixteen years in prison to making a genuinely good life for her son, and seems to have succeeded; Chris loves his mother and will be forever wounded when she's finally taken from him; Tim is a nobody schlemiel who one day finds that he's capable of killing somebody; Captain Green is a loving family man who sees the prisoners in his charge as something less than human; Officer Kelly wants to treat the inmates who are about to die with something approaching humanity; Sheila wonders why Death Row prisoners get to play basketball while she can barely make ends meet working as a waitress at IHOP.

The thing is, every one of these characters is absolutely right, in their own way. Broken Morning's triumph is letting all of them be heard, clearly.

Director Sonoko Kawahara proves the perfect collaborator for Miyagawa here. She's staged the play on the sparest, starkest of terms, letting the characters' voices propel  everything that happens on stage. She has shrewdly cast just four diverse actors in the play's two dozen roles, and she's assigned them without regard to race or gender or age, so that Brian Nishii plays 16-year-old Chris and Tim's father and an African-American librarian, among others, while Sophia Skiles portrays the grieving mother Anne and the prison Chaplain and a sour racist white inmate named Walter. For once this strategy is not mere gimmickry but entirely essential: Broken Morning shows us that the thing that makes us murder and the thing that makes us punish murderers transcends ethnicity and race and gender. (Not necessarily class, however: Captain Green observes that everyone on Death Row is poor, and that certainly signifies something.)

The cast does outstanding work: in addition to Nishii and Skiles, they include Margi Sharp and George Hannah (who together play all the characters in Broken Morning, with conviction and intelligence and subtlety), along with Kaipo Schwab, who narrates the play with unobtrusive curiosity, serving as guide and conscience as the piece proceeds.

Several songs, with music by Daniel Sonenberg and lyrics by Mark Campbell, supplement the play's themes movingly and perceptively.

Broken Morning is compelling storytelling of the highest order; it will cause you to ask questions, to challenge your assumptions, and to reconsider what you thought you knew about some fundamental social issues. This is theatre at its best, doing what theatre does best. It is not to be missed.

Signature Theatre Company's current revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This successfully fulfills their mission to provide "tremendous insight into the scope, context, and substance of a playwright's work, legacy, and continuing achievements." By rescuing it from the shadow of John Malkovich's scenery-chewing star turn in its original 1987 Broadway incarnation, director James Houghton and his cast finally show the world what Burn This has always been: a moving love story, and a very good play.

When Anna (Catherine Keener) and Larry's (Dallas Roberts) roommate, Robbie, dies in a freak accident, their world is turned upside down. The unfairness and randomness of life encroaches, causing them both to internally grieve. Into this picture comes Robbie's estranged brother, Pale (Edward Norton), a hard-living, foul-mouthed, workaholic live wire. He's the hand grenade thrown into their lives, who may not only come between Anna and her beau, Burton (Ty Burrell), but also makes them face their personal demons and hidden, unexpected desires.

Burn This, never regarded as one of Wilson's major works, shows the playwright working at the top of his game. His usual themes of loneliness and disillusionment pervade the play, and his mastery of language—as a conveyor of information, character, and powerful images—is in full bloom. Dialogue flows in a convincingly cause-and-effect manner, and all of his words fly plausibly from his character's lips.

Taking his cue from such a well laid-out blueprint, Houghton services Burn This with direction that is almost invisible to the casual eye. He keeps the blocking and the stage pictures remarkably natural, and free of staginess. Together with set designer Christine Jones, costume designer Jane Greenwood, lighting designer Pat Collins, and composer Loren Toolajian, Houghton has also created a physical production that matches, and enhances, the somber, contemplative mood of Wilson's play.

The biggest charge of the evening is the one provided by the actors. Wilson has always written great characters, and Burn This gives us four of them. Burrell is superb as Burton, a grown-up rich kid who has lived comfortably pain free his whole life. His self-centeredness could easily become shallow and vacuous, but Burrell makes it charming and appealing. Roberts is equally excellent as Larry, who is one of the world's most reliable stock characters: the gay roommate. Naturally, he gets all the one-liners and more than a fair share of the laughs in Burn This. However, by playing him as a real person, instead of just as a stereotype, Roberts reaps even more of the benefits inherent in Larry, and easily steals most of the scenes he's in.

Which is all the more impressive considering Norton's performance as Pale, which is fantastic. Pale, on the page, is an incredibly difficult part to play. He's a scatological loudmouth with a short fuse and a high level of unpredictability. No one in the play is ever sure what he may say or do next. But, despite his extrovert posturing, he hides his real feelings from the rest of the world. He's a character that could easily be considered unlikable and psychopathic. But, Norton makes him menacing without being insane, and attractive, funny, and intriguing without being distasteful. And, best of all, he makes it all look deceptively easy. His is a masterful performance that sets the stage on fire whenever he appears.

Thus, it's all the more disappointing to report that Keener does not operate at the same level as the rest of her castmates. Admittedly, hers is the toughest part in the play: Anna is the emotional and moral center of Burn This, and the play belongs to her. It tells the story of her journey more than anything else. Accordingly, the part requires a strong actor who can provide a lot of backbone and vulnerability. Unfortunately, Keener has neither. She possesses an elusive, unexplainable charisma that makes her infinitely watchable, but she is not acting. Her Anna does not change or progress. She is exactly the same at the beginning of the play as she is at the end of it. Keener doesn't allow anything good or bad to affect her, which prevents both the character and the audience from learning much. Her jaded, world-weary, bulletproof persona—which is incredibly effective on film—does not suit this role at all.

Despite that, Pale and Anna's scenes overflow with theatrical magic, due largely to Norton and the amount of fun he has messing with Keener. His Act I speech about the usage of "I'm sorry," and the circuitous route a tree takes as paper, will leave one's head spinning with giddy confusion, and will likely garner him a round of applause every night.

Signature's revival of Burn This not only showcases a master playwright and actor at the height of their respective powers. It also fulfills Signature's promise as a company. This is their finest production to date, and feels like both a validation and a rebirth. Go celebrate their achievement with them. You will not regret it.

"Don't ask, don't tell" hardly seems to be the most significant issue of military policy just now. Interestingly, that doesn't make Burning Blue, DMW Greer's 1995 play, which is receiving its belated New York premiere at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, any the less compelling (though it makes us wonder why it took so long for this play to get here). Burning Blue tells the story of Lt. Dan Lynch, a career navy officer on the fast track who discovers that he is love with similarly successful Lt. Matthew Blackwood. The play deals with the effect of this discovery on Lynch's lifelong best friend, another navy Lieutenant, Will Stephensen; and it demonstrates the insidiousness of "don't ask, don't tell," through the machinations of an "investigation" of Lt. Lynch that veers dangerously close to witch hunting. This is far from a perfect play, but it scores some points as social drama and a few others as eminently watchable soap opera. It's been extremely well produced, featuring an excellent cast who keep us on the edge of our seats throughout.

The play begins with a prologue depicting an incident from Lynch and Stephensen's past that reveals the depth of their (absolutely platonic) friendship as well as foreshadows an important plot point (and so I won't tell you more about it). Greer then fast-forwards to the present day, when Lynch is called into Special Agent Cokely's office to answer vague leading questions that eventually reveal themselves to be about an alleged "criminal" act committed by Lynch. That act turns out to be dancing in a gay bar in Hong Kong—there were witnesses—and Cokely, who seems hell-bent on exposing Lynch as a homosexual for a variety of personal reasons that are never quite spelled out, wants to know what other "criminal" activities Lynch has indulged in, and with whom.

As Cokely and his reluctant partner Jones play "good cop/bad cop" with Lynch, Greer jump cuts to moments from the recent past, and the story of Lynch and the three officers with whom he shared a stateroom on the USS Harry Truman—Stephensen, Blackwood, and a likable Southern aviator named Charlie Trumbo—plays out in flashback. We watch as, slowly, Lynch and Blackwood recognize and then acknowledge their growing feelings for one another, and we see it wreak havoc on their personal and professional lives. Blackwood is married and Lynch is in an unsatisfying longtime relationship with a woman; in addition, it's clear the damage that the men's love affair will do to their careers is potentially catastrophic.

Cokely continues his investigation, interrogating Stephensen, Stephensen's wife Susan, and Trumbo. By now Lynch's feelings for Blackwood are public knowledge—it is clear early on in Burning Blue that the incident instigating the whole affair is a flying accident in which Blackwood was killed. Act Two climaxes in an emotionally satisfying way, more or less, though the psychology of some of the characters—Stephensen paralyzed by anger, Lynch recovering from years of denial, and Cokely weirdly obsessive—feels less plausible than we might wish. Nevertheless the play succeeds in raising some useful issues such as the relationships between straight and gay men, sources of homophobia, tolerance, and the wasteful absurdity of "don't ask, don't tell."

The play is deftly directed by John Hickok with the taut rhythm of a suspense thriller, which Burning Blue in some ways is. The pace keeps us unflaggingly interested, even though at times the chronology and plot complexities are a bit hard to keep track of. Beowulf Boritt's set is excellent, consisting of simple set pieces—bunk beds and a pair of lockers; a comfy couch—that define location masterfully and facilitate a seamless and fluid flow of action.

All eight actors do exemplary work. Mike Doyle, as Lynch, provides the play with a sympathetic and emotionally charged center; opposite him, Chad Lowe feels authentically human as the conflicted Stephensen. Matthew Del Negro brings off a tough assignment as the near-paragon Blackwood; P. J. Brown does his best with the ill-defined Cokely, crafting a pure villain out of a troubling (and troublesome) character. Jerome Preston Bates (Jones) and Susan Porro (Blackwood's wife and Lynch's girlfriend) are convincing in smaller roles.

The standouts among the company are Sherri Parker Lee, who brings terrific intelligence and compassion to Stephensen's sensible wife, Susan, and Bill Dawes, who is brazen and charming as Charlie Trumbo, the play's most honest and likable character by a mile. (Dawes also bears the brunt of the play's frontal male nudity, apparently mandatory in gay-themed "issue" plays nowadays.)

Burning Blue isn't the clear-headed, politically challenging play that it might have been; but neither, by any means, is it a hopelessly out-of-date headline chaser. I found that I liked Burning Blue in spite of its problems: it's an entertaining and engaging work of theatre that gives us food for thought—not a bad way to spend a night out.

War is hell and very few of us would disagree. It’s good, though, to be reminded of this once in a while. The soldiers of Irwin Shaw’s first play, Bury the Dead, originally produced in 1936, have already been to hell and now want to return to the living—to look upon the living. It is as timely now as when it was written, at a time when war was looming but not yet upon us. Michael Stebbins, artistic director of Stage Door Acting Ensemble states that when he and his company decided to revive this rarely done piece, our country was at peace with no war imminent, but now, as it reaches the stage, times are very different.

Bury the Dead is a short (90 minutes) one act with no nuances, no metaphorical symbolism, no layering of meaning. Just a simple statement—each life is precious and should not be ended before its time. Shaw’s vision is straightforward using short, pointed speeches to convey great meaning. The staging, the lighting, and the sound design all work together to hammer this simple message to the audience.

The play opens with the digging of a mass grave for five soldiers. A rabbi and priest arrive to pray over the grave and a groan is heard; one by one the corpses arise. The sergeant calls for the captain, the captain calls for the generals. This cannot be allowed to happen, the world cannot find out about this. Several attempts are made to convince the corpses to return to their grave; their women are sent for and the audience is privy to each conversation. These are ordinary people, not one of them has a grand purpose that should/could change the course of the world. They want to be a part of the living so they may see the beauty that exists, see and hear the voices of others, enjoy the world around them and then they will allow themselves to be buried. As the play ends, they slowly march out of their grave to walk among the living but not interfere with them.

The production by Stage Door Acting Ensemble must be commended first for the sheer magnitude of their undertaking. By my count there are about 30 different roles in this play. A cast of nine portrays all of them and they do so seamlessly and effectively. What really makes this production work, though, is the design. The simplicity of the set (Justin Anderson) follows the original design of a raised platform, behind which is the grave and in front of which is a large space for all other action to occur. The lighting (Judith Daitsman) focuses on the scenes as they are shown and is eerily able to convey a battlefield at night, switch to blackout, switch to well lit office on once side of the stage and back again to the field. Outstanding is the sound design (Ann Warren). Blackouts are filled with the sounds of aircraft, bombings, machine gun fire—all recognizable from a modern-day war, but which one? And then there is the silence.

My only quibble (and it is just that) with the production was the insertion by the director, Benjamin Fishman, of a cartoonish quality/personality for the three generals. It’s not evident in the original and is a bit jarring. That said, the overall direction is superb. Fishman has cut a bit of the text, but one would be hard pressed to find where for it flows so very smoothly and he has assembled the perfect ensemble cast.

The quartet of plays by David Johnston that comprise Blue Coyote Theater Group's current offering, Busted Jesus Comix Plus Three More Plays!, are funny, intelligent, and compassionate; they are also splendidly acted and mounted with solid professionalism. I'm new to Johnston's and Blue Coyote's work, but count me as a major fan of both now: theatre this terrific is cause for celebration.

As the title suggests, this is an evening of four plays—three come before intermission, and the main event, Busted Jesus Comix, is presented by itself as the program's second act. Usually we're lucky if as many as half of the items on a multi-bill like this get us excited, but here the playwright and all of his collaborators manage to keep topping themselves. They begin with a nearly bare stage: just a couple of chairs constitute the entire set for A Phone Call from Washington State, Late at Night. In one of them sits Beverly (Katherine Puma), telephone in hand; standing next to the other is Larry (Robert Buckwalter), in bathrobe and slippers; it's two o'clock in the morning, New York time. Beverly is an old friend from high school and she hasn't seen or talked to Larry in nearly twenty years. But tonight she's in need of somebody who might remember the person she used to be—and might care about helping her locate that person. Their lives have diverged—she's divorced, with children, a new boyfriend, and a belief system that she says, over and over again, is not a cult; he's gay, in a stable relationship and embarking on a new career in nursing—but it turns out that Beverly has, for once, made a smart choice. I won't divulge what happens, but I will tell you that their twenty-minute conversation is funny, bittersweet, and engrossing.. Buckwalter and Puma build fully-fleshed out, sympathetic people with remarkable economy here, under the direction of Kyle Ancowitz.

Saturday With Martin is about a rich, entirely reprehensible man (Martin, played with gusto and balance by George C. Hosmer) who, ill from cancer and chemotherapy, is being cared for—just for the afternoon, mind you—by Charlie (Brian Fuqua in a seeringly complicated performance). Charlie is a good friend of Martin's handsome young lover Mark, and he's agreed to sit with Martin to give Mark a much-needed break. Again, Johnston lets us eavesdrop on a wide-ranging, intimate conversation among people who know each other very well, and again he lets his characters' humanity triumph over animosity. Ancowitz also provides the staging for this piece, which is by turns funny and touching.

Leaving Tangier takes us to a sleepy town in the South (western Virginia, I believe), where tall, effete Cooper has brought the cremated remains of Oswin Everett Pickett to be laid to rest in the family plot. Oswin was a famous, controversial, expatriate writer whose lifestyle, which included shooting parties with William Burroughs and taking pretty young men home with him in Tangier, was anathema to his conservative relatives back home. At the cemetery, Cooper (who was himself one of those pretty young men twenty-two years ago) meets Oswin's grand-niece, Rosemund; accompanied by the ineffectual preacher Reverend Besterman, she is set on giving her uncle the funeral that his will has explicitly prohibited.

What's great about Leaving Tangier is that Johnston gives Rosemund (and, by proxy, her grandmother, who is Oswin's surviving sister) not just equal time but equal weight; like life, the issues here are complicated and not subject to pat judgments. As the Reverend observes, in an unexpectedly sage moment, everyone is just trying to keep their promises. Leaving Tangier is probably the smartest and most affecting short one-act I've seen all season, especially once we meet Rosemund's younger brother Tap, who does not share his sister's narrow views of their late uncle's work. Carter Jackson is almost heartbreaking as that conflicted young man, and he's matched for potency in the work of Bruce Barton (Cooper) and Jonna McElrath (Rosemund). Nevertheless, it's Gary Shrader as the folksily homespun preacher who nearly steals the show. Shrader is also the director.

With their genuinely humanist perspective on the world and, incidentally, their gay protagonists, the foregoing pieces set the stage for the evening's climactic offering, Busted Jesus Comix. But we're in no way prepared for how far Johnston plans to push the envelope in this final piece, as he takes on, oh, maybe half of the things that are wrong with fat, complacent America in this off-the-wall, over-the-top, enormously theatrical, entirely realistic, dark satirical comic melodrama. (Sorry about all those adjectives and adverbs, but all I've got is colorful language to try to convey to you what Johnston accomplishes in this play)

Busted Jesus Comix takes place in a upscale coffee bar called Dazzle Cups (think Starbucks, but not so much that Johnston can get sued), where a young man named Marco is being interviewed for a counter job. As the Manager asks him questions, Marco flashes back to the events of the previous few months, when he was tried and convicted for obscenity in Tallahassee, Florida. What happened was, 19-year-old Marco drew a comic book, a raunchy goof called "Busted Jesus Comix" which featured, among other content, two teenage boys engaged in a variety of activities involving sex and drugs, at least one of which is generally viewed as thoroughly repugnant to just about everybody in the world. 

Marco sold his comic at the store where he worked—four copies, he tells his lawyer, plus the one purchased by the undercover agent—and thus lands himself in hot water. Johnston shows us, still in flashbacks that wrap around Marco's job interview like an increasingly scary dream, the Community Council Ladies who condemned his book on the basis of its title alone; the behaviorist psychiatrist whom Marco is ordered to see as a condition of probation; the members of a support group called "Up from the Closet," a group of gay men who attempt to sublimate their sexuality in prayers to Jesus; and Marco's older brother, Jeffrey, now born again and presumably respectable but at one time a heroin addict who was the source of much of Marco's troubles. Busted Jesus Comix would be soap opera if it weren't so uncompromising and also so even-handed; Johnston uses the tools of satire to make some barbed points about Marco's "rehabilitation," and this adds enough distance to let us see Marco as a whole human being. An unredeemed optimist, Johnston ends even this play on an up note: there's hope for the human race, in spite of everything.

Vince Gatton gives a towering performance as Marco, anchoring the play with his layered, sympathetic portrayal of this naive, sweetly goofy, terribly damaged young man. The large supporting cast is superlative; especially notable are R. Jane Casserly as the no-nonsense Dazzle Cups Manager and John Koprowski as the scary psychiatrist. Bruce Barton has a wonderfully funny moment as one of the Up from the Closet guys.

Busted Jesus Comix is not easy: Johnston uses deliberately shocking, even repellant, ideas to make his points. But there's nothing gratuitous or sensational in this play; it's good for our delicate sensibilities to be assaulted and bruised once in a while. At the same time, Busted Jesus Comix is turbo-charged satire and, perhaps against the odds, warm-hearted. It's amazing theatre, the kind that keeps you engaged and manages to pack a wallop. I love it when a play knocks me out or blows me away (or both); Johnston and his Blue Coyote colleagues go four-for-four with Busted Jesus Comix Plus Three More Plays!.