nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

When Robert Simonson's Cafe Society premiered off-off-Broadway in 1998, I liked it so much that I included it in NYTE's first anthology of plays. Five years later, Cafe Society is getting its first New York revival at 13th Street Rep, and guess what: I still like it. This zany comedy feels as fresh and funny as ever, and its gentle, satirical pokes at contemporary yuppie culture are still smart and on-target. It's nice to have it back for an extended run at this intimate landmark theatre on the edge of Greenwich Village.

Cafe Society starts in Voulez-Vous, one of those ubiquitous Starbucks competitors that dot New York City's streets. Karen, a nice, normal, 24-year-old woman who makes her living editing theatre programs at Lincoln Center, strolls in for her daily Iced De-caf. This particular morning, however, the counter girl surprises her by asking if Karen would like to be her friend.

Abashed, nice normal Karen says yes—to her ever-lasting regret. On a return trip to Voulez-Vous, accompanied by her co-worker and pal Stacey, Karen winds up being invited to a party Lucy is giving. Of course, she says she'll attend—as long as Stacey can come too.

(I should mention here that Lucy is a preternaturally precocious fifteen; also needy, manipulative, and with an evil glint in her eye: think The Bad Seed as a teenager, working at your local McDonald's.)

So anyway, Karen and Stacey show up at Lucy's party, which turns out to be a bizarre event at which a select group of Voulez-Vous customers sit, looking for all the world like they're waiting for a bus (or a firing squad), while Lucy and her family cook up and serve the rich pastries and delicious coffee blends to which they've become addicted. Simonson mines this strange scenario for all of its comic possibilities, and then introduces two more characters—Lucy's eccentric uncle, a children's book author who is the subject of a fatwa, and his bodyguard, a congenial square sort of fellow named Sean Collins. Lucy's crush on Sean complicates matters when that gentleman asks Karen out for dinner. Their date turns into a triple date from hell (Lucy insists that one of her guests, Nathan, accompany them; and then Lucy's uncle, worried about his safety, horns in with Stacey). Nice normal Karen is transformed into anything but, as the price she has to pay for her Iced De-cafs escalates sharply and hilariously.

Cafe Society is frothy and fizzy fun; Simonson is a master of the comic non-sequitur and his dry, off-the-wall humor keeps the show lighthearted even when things turn momentarily dark in Act Two. Director Emily King offers a fine, fast-moving staging that's particularly strong in anchoring the sometimes absurd twists of the plot firmly in a very recognizable urban reality. She's ably assisted by a deft design team, notably Tom Harlan, whose simple but effective sets serve the piece superbly. The playwright is credited in the program as providing "props and certain baked goods."

As is 13th Street Rep's custom, two casts alternate (see sidebar); you need to call the theatre to find out who's playing which night. I saw the "Cast Bleu" who did a fine job bringing the play to life. Particularly strong among this group are Yvonne Wright, as a refreshingly unaffected and pragmatic Stacey; Brad Lee Thomason, who gives us an altogether likable and sympathetic take on hapless Nathan; and David Thomas Crowe and Kristian Leavy, each taking on several smaller roles with requisite panache. Alexandra Smith (Lucy) gets the evil glint in the eye just right but doesn't quite convince us that she's only fifteen years old. And Traci Hovel (Karen), though offering an appealing and proficient performance, hasn't yet mastered her character's transformation.

Cafe Society is a gleeful entertainment and it's a pleasure to see it back on the boards. Here's hoping that this engagement will lead to productions of other Simonson plays in the future.

As if it weren't already timely enough, Call It Peace: Meditations from North America opened the same weekend that an American missionary held hostage in the Philippines was killed during a rescue mission. It was the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder that inspired Anthony Pennino to write this play, but as we see, other recent events make this drama even more wrenchingly resonant that it already is.

Part of a projected trilogy about the American experience in Asia, Meditations tells the story of Rich, a journalist working for a dot-com travel company who is captured by extremists in the Philippines. He shares a tiny, squalid cell with Cal, an 18-year-old from Calgary, Canada, who was on a backpacking tour when he was taken hostage, mistaken for an American. Cal's best friend was shot and presumably killed; imprisoned now for five months, Cal is deteriorating mentally and physically, under a regimen of almost no food and water and frequent beatings by his captors.

Meditations from North America takes the shape of prison-bonding dramas like Someone Who'll Watch Over Me or Kiss of the Spider Woman, in which two very different men come to understand and care for one another under horrific circumstances. Like Spider Woman, in fact, Meditations also has a dream/story-telling element, with Rich comforting Cal with reminiscences of his relationship with his girlfriend, Abby.

But unlike those other plays, Meditations trades very much in the here and now; though it's set in a remote cell thousands of miles away, circumstances remind us that what has happened to Cal and Rich could conceivably happen to any of us in a world where the tactics of terror have thrown traditional paradigms of warfare out the window. At one point, Rich and Cal quarrel about America's position in the world, with Cal angrily stating something we've all heard many times, that U.S. meddling abroad caused the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. "No one deserves that," Rich replies fiercely.

Just as no one deserves to go through what these two men go through: there's a sanctity to human life, Pennino is telling us, and it must be preserved. What cause is ultimately more sacred? And as Pennino juxtaposes the happy and sad mundane trivialities of ordinary life with the extraordinary ordeal undergone by Rich and Cal in their prison, it becomes clear that "innocence"—whether at a personal or broader level—doesn't even enter into the argument.

Meditations from North America is raw and emotional and unpolished, which is probably why it's finally so cathartic—with it's defiantly life-affirming stance, it's the first 9/11 play I've seen that has actually helped me feel a little better. The production, appropriately spare and intimate, is first-rate, with an evocative, impressionistic set by Seo Hee Hong and effective lighting and sound design by Jason Decker. Clayton B. Hodges (Rich) and Darin Guerrasio (Cal) do remarkably effective work here, with Missy Somers offering able support as the dream-conjured figure of Abby.

The Long Twilight Struggle, the second play in Anthony Pennino's projected trilogy about the American experience in Asia, takes place during the Vietnam War era. It tells the story of Derek Bishop, a young radical writer who journeys to Saigon with a plan to write a scathing exposé of American military abuses and atrocities (think Mei Li Massacre). Instead, he winds up stuck in the city during monsoon season with nothing to do except for an occasional visit to the local bordello (think Miss Saigon), and almost no one for company save Thomas, the gentle, soft-spoken young South Vietnamese who has been assigned to be his interpreter and guide.

The Long Twilight Struggle actually takes place back home, some months after all of this, in a remote New England town where Derek has come to try to find—what?—solace, or redemption; peace. He shares quarters with Jessica, a down-to-earth nurse who is herself the widow of a Vietnam vet; and also with the ghosts of Thomas and a G.I. named John. Derek is helping Jessica rebuild an old church on the property that belonged to her husband's family. But he lives, day in and day out, with memories of what happened to him during his time in Southeast Asia, experiences that have made him question everything he thought he understood about the world and his place in it.

I guess that sounds a bit melodramatic, but I won't apologize; I'm not going to tell you what happened to Derek in Vietnam, either (you'll have to see The Long Twilight Struggle for yourself to find out). But I will disclose that Derek's relationship with Thomas called into question his sexuality—did he fall in love with his Vietnamese guide?—and his relationship with John made him doubt the firmly-held, so-called liberal, anti-establishment views that he once cherished.

Pennino's play finally takes no sides but instead reminds us, sagely, that just as all is fair in love and war, neither is any of it easy or uncomplicated. Thomas tells Derek at one point that one of the things that all people share is their differences from one another. That's a marvelous, profound thought to take away from the theatre.

Pennino and his director, Matt Freeman, handle the play's complex chronology brilliantly, providing a fluid, spare structure to the piece that ensures that we're never confused about where or when the various incidents are taking place. Four actors—Jo Benincasa (Derek), Lynda Kennedy (Jessica), Keong Sim (Thomas), and Tom Staggs (John and Benjamin, Derek's uncle)—do expert work here, bringing the provocative drama to life with sensitivity and honesty.

The play could possibly do with some trimming, and yet I still felt we didn't see enough of Thomas and Derek's budding relationship to make his sexual confusion entirely compelling. But The Long Twilight Struggle's other key thematic ideas—about faith, ideology, and duty—resonate strongly and intensely.

Encumbered, a cinematic image—a bellows camera stands alone center stage, itself lit, itself the subject, a device of capture. This is how begins the new musical, Call the Children Home, which has just opened at Primary Stages. Captured is the only way to describe the characters, each tied by a past secret or secret desire, secrets which reveal themselves perhaps too readily yet which nonetheless drive the action.

The story centers on... at first blush you would expect on the "main character" Madame Mary Robards... yet the story is not of an industriously repentant prostitute trying to find true love amidst the seedy sex-trade world, but a more complicated ensemble story hopeless in its hoping, not so much a tragedy of unexcused redemption, but of persistently ill-fated individuals.

In a St Louis cathouse, a patron tries to pilfer sadistic liberties with the woman who runs the establishment, Madame Agnes DuMaurier (Tamara Tunie), and is shot dead. DuMaurier, with the help of her consort cohorts, Pia (Angela Robinson) and Blondie (Sophia Salguero) and piano man Professor (Eugene Fleming), flees to New Orleans, changes her name to Madame Mary Robards, and opens a new place of business in Storyville, the cauldron where, from the unique mixing of African and European flavors spiced with human lust, was cooked jazz.

All Mary wants is the stability of a settled brothel and the chance for a better life, which may or may not include true love. However, the group is plagued by everything from a corrupt New Orleans Boss, Mr. Anderson (Julian Gamble) to transportation construction to good-ole bad luck. To complicate matters, Mary's illegitimate daughter (Christiane Noll), abandoned to nuns seventeen years ago, shows up in secret to follow in her mother's footsteps and becomes the belle of the brothel, Kathleen, the Golden Girl; a local photographer, Papa (Caesar Samayoa), falls madly, dare I say again hopelessly, in love with Kathleen; and the St Louis dead man's brother, Henry Hitchcock (Sean McDermott), enters in the guise of Mary's man-savior to reek revenge on the group.

In the preceding two paragraphs are the indications of where the production strays. Although, I can see, and highly appreciate, the less common structural approach of weaving many stories to fortify one theme, the weight of each must be meticulously balanced, and Call the Children Home, teeters between a linear classical structure with too many subplots and an uneven ensemble piece. I was left with the feeling of being led through innumerably forked roads, only to be end up slightly short of a circle. Of course, it must be added that the work has the earmarks of being one in progress, and it is unfortunate that author Thomas Babe is no longer with us, for what we must accept as the final incarnation may very well not be what the author had intended. (J.D. Myers is credited with additional book material.)

Offsetting the story's cohesion and development problems are Mildred Kayden's musical score and the valiant efforts of many of the actors. The use of upbeat period pieces representative of the burgeoning Jazz Age and its glorified future displays a marked juxtaposition to the story's downward pitch. Also, musicians William McDaniel (piano), Ken Crutchfield (drums) and Endre Rice (trumpet) do a fabulous job of enveloping the production in its own world while masking their own existence. As for the performers, Tamara Tunie as Mary Robards is captivating from the first note—a poignant mix of hope and sadness. All the time knowing that Mary is doomed, you are nonetheless compelled to hope, even when she could not. Mr Fleming—as is his character, Professor Hill—is the rock on which this production rests, and his loyalty, strength and understanding, immediately palpable, are the only true indications of love within the world of the show. Angela Robinson and Sophia Salguero add life and vivacity as the self-realized harlots Pia and Blondie. Caesar Samayoa exemplifies range in performance talent as Papa, a singing, dancing, brooding fool. Christiane Noll as Kathleen adds a sullied touch of innocence in both her characterization and voice, and Sean McDermott as the subversively psychotic Hitchcock displays the musical talents for which he is becoming well-reputed.

Overall, Call the Children Home, exercises the imagination by recalling a period marked by hope yet daunted by social reality, and Primary Stages is certainly to be commended on taking this second venture into the off-Broadway musical.

The first few minutes of Can't Let Go are really funny. The Connelly Theatre's big red curtain opens to reveal office worker Beth (Rebecca Luker) being given a survey about her workplace habits by an awkward inquisitor named Bill (Brian Hutchinson). Her hesitations and measured answers offer a portrait of perpetual office paranoia, in which taking too much time for lunch can get you fired. The spectacle of Beth watching Bill watching her watching herself is subtle and engaging, and creates big expectations for what's to come. Moments later, in the play's first (and last) comedic surprise, Bill reveals he's not conducting a poll at all, but that he's actually in love with Beth and was just looking for an excuse to talk to her. Despite a subsequent handful of inspired moments and clever lines, Keith Reddin's new play never rises to the potential of these first five minutes.

Soon after Beth has dealt with the pathologically naïve Bill, she is visited in turn by her boss, Mr. Hopper (a fatuous blowhard played with heart by Greg Stuhr) and her harpy-ish lesbian co-worker Marjorie (Cheyenne Casebier, making the best of a tired stereotype). When both of them reveal that they love her as well, uncontrollably and, as far as the script is concerned, inexplicably, a rigidly absurd scenario unfolds in which the three admirers ply their suits with little success while Beth helplessly languishes under the unwanted attention. When her boyfriend Phil (Glenn Fleshler) arrives to rescue her from her predicament, he adds to her troubles by revealing that he wants to become a woman.

The ensuing antics, which never begin to approach the giddiness of chaos, inevitably resemble the homely love child of Ionesco and Dilbert, bereft of the perversity that fuels both forebears. For every amusing sequence such as the one where Marjorie encourages Beth to embrace alcoholism as a solution to her woes, there are four or five tired jokes that we've already heard a thousand times before. Do we really need to be told again that men who watch Star Trek are unsuccessful with women? Is there any more humor to be squeezed from shrewish women who decide that anyone with a penis is evil? If the answer to either of these questions is "yes," they'll have to wait for another play to provide a more convincing argument.

Though the performers never quite transcend the facile tone of the material, they are all admirably committed to it for what it is. Luker, taking a downtown detour from musical theatre stardom, displays an appealing calm in the center of the storm; on the other hand, she's enough of a cipher that it's difficult to understand why she's so ardently pursued by so many. It's Hutchison's Bill who emerges as the most successful performance: an accounting drone struck poetic with emotion, he transforms vapid banality into deadpan delicacy, brushing up against a little beauty along the way. Each character gets to dance and lip-sync to a song at some point in the show, and they all seem to be having fun. Christine Suarez choreographs them with wit and fluency, but the conceit becomes very tired, very quickly.

Despite some engaging if repetitive staging by director Carl Forsman, Can't Let Go remains a conundrum. Simultaneously anemic and overstuffed, it runs the risk of being downsized in today's cutthroat theatre environment. Even if it's tolerated by the current management, I don't expect it to be promoted anytime soon.

Art is an almost mystical substitution of a representation—a daub of paint, a word, an actor—for its counterpart in reality. Some artists perceive this as a shamanistic element of their craft: James Joyce wrote his daughter Lucia into his impenetrable masterpiece Finnegan's Wake in part to cure her insanity. The writer of Ulysses believed that his daughter had inherited his genius. But his psyche produced a stream-of-consciousness, whereas hers was swamped by a flood of consciousness. Lucia’s mind spoke in linguistic wordplay that echoed her father’s style, but at such a volume that it drowned out reality.

Cara Lucia, by the avant-garde troupe Mabou Mines, splits Lucia into a trinity: Old Lucia (Ruth Maleczech), aged 65 and trapped by her own faculties of reason, Young Lucia (Clove Galilee), a 25-year-old belle, and Issy (Rosemary Fine), her literary reflection in the Wake. Old Lucia dreams, blissfully and painfully, of her past as a high-strung nymphet, sitting in Ezra Pound’s lap and flirting with Samuel Beckett, while her fictional counterpart intrudes into these memories.

Certainly, writer/director Sharon Fogarty has been inspired by James Joyce’s view of art as a kind of sympathetic magic, and she applies every theatrical tool to conjuring Lucia Joyce. Jim Clayburgh’s lights and shadows provide the murk of the unconscious. But his set (with rolling screens and TVs, like his work for the Wooster Group), while gorgeous and magical, represents each character’s psyche too straightforwardly: Old Lucia rides a floating chair, Young Lucia is tethered by a rope, and Issy stands in a Plexiglas box. Julie Archer’s computer projections are more interesting, washing the stage with limpid visuals that resist correspondence.

The three actors set Lucia loose from the confines of her mind. Maleczech, a grande dame of downtown theater, burbles happily through her part, showing her character’s age and mind in a childlike performance that cuts against her raspy voice. Clove Galilee, with her round face, looks uncannily like young Maleczech might’ve. Despite her sexual hunger for artistic men, her Lucia’s really driven by the search for herself. Rosemary Fine’s Issy, a chorus to the two Lucias, sneaks out of her box to sow confusion like one of Alice’s guides in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat or the Caterpillar. Together the women recreate the mind of Lucia Joyce through an arrangement of abstract movements. They don’t always connect to the designers’ environment, but their 3-in-1 performance gives Lucia a semblance of unity. This woman, who might’ve been another Virginia Woolf or T.S. Eliot if her mind had held together, finally gets her chance to impress an artistic reality upon the mind of an audience.

Carmilla is a multi-media opera based on the novella by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu. It has been revived at LaMaMa so a new generation can experience one of this company's seminal productions. The show combines music and visual art to create this world of a vampire seductress.

The basic plot of the show is pretty simple. The main character is Laura. She lives at home with her father, her step-mother and maid. One day, a mysterious mistress whom Laura has seen many times in her dreams, Carmilla, arrives injured at the door. They take her in, and Laura and Carmilla become best friends, and soon a little more than that. Throughout their budding relationship, there are many hints that Carmilla might be a vampire. She has an averse reaction to a cross, she keeps talking about immortality, and she superstitiously buys an amulet from the local merchant, Montebank. Eventually Laura is won over and becomes a vampire herself.

The show is almost completely sung-through. The score resembles that of most twentieth-century operas—there is much recitative because the libretto is very conversational. There are a few standalone arias, which prove to be the highlights of the score. Throughout the show, scene titles, drawings, pictures, captions, explanations and more are projected on a huge screen, adding another dimension to the work.

The cast is almost identical to the original cast from 1970. They are all very good. N. C. Heikin is stunning as Carmilla. She brings a scary exoticism to the role. She handles the difficult music very aptly, switching from belting to coloratura tones in the blink of an eye. Margaret Benczak is excellent as the innocent Laura. John Kelly is very humorous as the bumbling salesman Montebank. Finally, Don Arrington, Camille Tibaldeo and Audrey Lavine round out the ensemble nicely.

There are definitely some good things about the show. Keeping in mind that it is historical and was the first multi-media show ever, one can overlook some of the obsolete technology. The score feels a little too disjointed and atonal, but is wonderfully performed by the cast and the orchestra. The show also feels a little too long for the material, but interest and attention is kept until close to the end.

Overall, I would recommend Carmilla to anyone who is intrigued by the term multi-media opera for it definitely represents this genre quite well.

Catcall is a multimedia theatre piece about, principally, the ways people objectify each other and themselves. Developed and performed by a cast of four men and four women under the direction of Rebecca Ramirez, the show uses material collected from interviews with New Yorkers of all sizes, ages, ethnicities, etc., dealing with issues like body types, body image, sexual turn-ons, and—most frequently—the eponymous one of catcalling. We meet catcallers and catcallees, people who like to be catcalled and people who wish they were catcalled more; and we hear surprisingly personal testimony from these individuals, who whistle or get whistled at, solely on the basis of how someone looks.

The show, which is just a shade over an hour in length, features recreations of these interviews, which are often videotaped live and projected on the theatre's rear wall. Interspersed among these are scenes and vignettes, mostly movement-based, which present examples of catcalling behavior or emotions/feelings of the individuals involved. For example, there's a brief dance interlude in which the four men appear as wild animals chasing, ogling and/or bothering the four women. These segments vary in effectiveness but are all generally quite entertaining.

Behind the players, seen on the real wall of the theatre, is a near-continuous display of projections of images culled from photographs and from every form of media imaginable. These remind us, palpably, of our contemporary obsession with how we look; however much we deplore objectification, its reinforcement in advertising and popular culture is rampant and apparently unstoppable.

For me, Catcall is most successful in getting the audience into the heads of the dozens of witnesses whose stories comprise its text. The issues reviewed in Catcall aren't subjects that I think about very often, so the opportunity here to immerse myself deeply in them proves interesting and worthwhile. If there are no particularly revelatory moments in the piece, there are nevertheless some surprising and intimate ones: it's amazing what people will reveal about themselves to strangers. And if the slant of the show is inevitably feminist—virtually all of the objectifying in this show is done by men, of women—Catcall smartly celebrates the diversity of contemporary America and pulls back from judging any of its interviewees.

The eight performers—who are joined, briefly, by actor Paul Nicholls in a clever cameo—work hard to bring the many stories told here to life.

This spring and summer, New York Theatre Workshop is offering audiences a series of plays that look at the American family and how it has evolved over the last seventy-five years or so. In Cavedweller, Kate Moira Ryan's dramatization of a book by Dorothy Allison, we meet as fractured and fractious a clan as can be imagined. The matriarch is Delia Byrd, a prematurely middle-aged woman in her mid-thirties. She fled her hometown of Cayro, Georgia a dozen years ago to escape an abusive husband named Clint Windsor who by all accounts was perhaps just days away from killing her. With him, she also left behind two infant daughters, Dede and Amanda, who, when we meet them as teenagers, are respectively a recklessly rebellious goodtime girl and an obsessively pious and proselytizing Christian.

Delia found her way to California and a new life as lead singer with a rock band; she also found a new man, Randall Pritchard, whom she never married but with whom she had a daughter, Cissy. Randall's lifestyle—and Delia's, for a time—was all about booze, drugs, and rock & roll. Now Randall has died in a car wreck while under the influence, and Delia has decided that the only way back to life is to reunite with the daughters she has not seen in more than a decade. Cavedweller is about, mostly, the stitching together of a genuine family out of the torn fabric of wasted and disrupted lives.

Almost in spite of itself, Ryan's script works beautifully to tell a story that could be movie-of-the-week inspirational or daytime-drama mawkish but somehow instead feels authentic and honest. I think this is because Cavedweller zeroes in so sharply on the key relationships among mother and daughters. Delia's frustration and ineffectuality is tempered by love that feels both desperate and deep; she is willing, after all, to move in with Clint and tend to him as he dies messily of cancer of the spine, just to regain custody of her two older daughters.

Even more affecting (and effective) is the burgeoning bond among Dede, Amanda, and Cissy. None of these three is the least bit happy to participate in Delia's experiment in homemaking; all harbor all sorts of complicated and often conflicting feelings of hatred, fear, abandonment, and confusion as they have tried to cope, each in her own way, with loss of mother and father and family stability during their troubled formative years. But familiarity breeds the opposite of contempt; a kind of truce evolves and then real compassion and camaraderie, against the odds. It's how families really cope and flourish, and it's lovingly presented here.

Ryan selects other incidents that provide useful contrast. We meet Delia's best friend, a smart and successful black woman named Rosemary who seems to have everything figured out, except she drinks too much and has casual affairs with much younger men so maybe she's not so well put-together as we thought; at any rate, she's Delia confessor and advisor and, though she swears at the play's beginning that she never will, she journeys to Delia's childhood home in the heart of Dixie to lend a hand.

We also watch Delia's rehabilitation in the eyes of a community that wrote her off as a demon years ago. She supports herself at first by cleaning houses, and then, thanks to an old friend of her mother's, takes over the local beauty parlor. Neighbor ladies like Gillian Wynchester champion her as the best thing to happen to Cayro since Little Piggy's Drive Thru Barbecue. Delia also establishes ties with the local deputy sheriff, Emmet Tyler, who has also recently lost a spouse to cancer; there's a possibility of something approaching romance for the pair as the story winds down.

Cissy's discovery of cave exploration, which is important enough to give the story its title, is less well-developed here, as are the adventures of the more grown-up Dede and Amanda (five years elapse between Acts One and Two). In fact, Cavedweller loses much of its potency once Delia has negotiated the reclamation of her family; stuff happens, but it feels beside the point: the emotional arc of the play has already been completed.

Ryan includes narration, presumably from the novel, to serve as transitions between scenes, but director Michael Greif hasn't found a particularly elegant way to use them. Greif's staging is otherwise quite fine, though, striking a balance between the episodic, almost panoramic sweep of the story and its intimate themes. The show's design is spare but satisfactory, with Jennifer Tipton's lighting the most conspicuous and memorable element. The eight members of the ensemble work well together, with particular noteworthy performances turned in by Adriane Lenox as Rosemary, Shannon Burkett as Amanda, and Lynne McCollough as eight different ladies of the small Georgia town. Deirdre O'Connell is the play's sometimes sturdy, sometimes shaky center as Delia and she's immensely sympathetic, though like the script itself she runs out of steam about halfway through the second act.

I liked Cavedweller quite a lot: like its heroine, it's open-hearted and well-intentioned, clumsy but sincere. Its message of familial resilience and fortitude, under the worst of circumstances, is genuine and welcome.

Chauncey's First Day of School is an amusing, short satirical comedy by David Bell about the sorry state of learning and youth in America today. Actually, that makes Chauncey sound much more serious or portentous that it is: this is a free-wheeling—and scattershot—one-act in which no target is immune from pointed attack and no cow is too sacred to be spared. Bell pokes fun at violence in schools, the drug problem, stereotypes of Asian-Americans, Ritalin, teenage horror movies, bureaucracy, governmental budget crunches, stereotypes of Hispanic-Americans, Born Again fundamentalists, teen pregnancy, and much, much more. Chauncey actually runs out of steam before its 50-minute running time is over, but there's no doubt that Bell is a talented comic writer (see also my review of his What the F**k?, currently playing at The Duplex).

The premise of Chauncey's First Day of School is right there in its title. Chauncey Lindsley Chitenton Hossenfeffer Shortbread III, an oh-so-proper little English boy, has just arrived in America with his mum, ready to begin his new life in the land of the free. But life at Shady Sunshine Middle School isn't exactly what he was expecting. He's assigned to the English-speaking classroom (only five students!) where Miss Howsajelly is in uncertain charge (her predecessor has disappeared; she says he's in jail). Chauncey's classmates are a pregnant religious fanatic named Pansy Sue Turnbuckle; Posie Clinton, a super-wired, hyperactive Ritalin addict; Tommy Turner, the school thug, who looks and acts at least eighteen and is the father of Pansy's unborn child as well as the bane of cowering Posie's existence; and Missy Futon, an Asian kid whose only English is, apparently, "Hi!" Classroom activities—which don't ever include anything like learning—are interrupted frequently by the voice of Principal Turnstile, over the P.A. system, with announcements about such subjects as how students may obtain desks (from Ikea, for a fee—budget cuts, you understand).

Chauncey's day is indeed eventful: Tommy threatens the class with a gun and eventually winds up trying to seduce Miss Howsajelly (admittedly, the seduction is mutual). Posie actually gets killed and Missy, Pansy, and Chauncey are assigned the job of disposing of the body; later Posie comes back to haunt Miss Howsajelly, taunting her with the words "I know what you did last summer," which turn out to be a plot point in addition to an obvious joke. There's much ado about some cocaine which may in fact be laced with poison; and then there's the ruckus caused when Chauncey tries to escape from this awful place and finds himself assaulted by dogs and barbed wire.

The action is broad and coarse and over-the-top; Bell's satiric bite is ultra-sharp at first, as he offers fresh and timely observations about topics like school prayer and our country's sometimes off-kilter educational priorities. As the play wears on, though, Bell's jokes feel more random and forced, and much of Chauncey's humor eventually devolves into sex-and-drugs jokes that are unfunny and ineffective. You get the feeling that Bell has run out of ideas—Chauncey might work better as a 20-minute play than as a 50-minute one, because Bell doesn't seem to have that much to say about his subject that's fresh and interesting.

The production is directed with manic energy by Pamela Rosenberger, and acted with enormous enthusiasm by a company that includes the wonderfully deadpan Jeff Riebe in the title role and dry, sly Rochele Tillman as Missy Futon, the kid with the most interesting secret in the class. Geany Masai gets to deliver some of the show's funniest lives over the loudspeaker as the unseen Principal Turnstile. The set is wittily designed by Max Ryan and includes some eye-catching and humorous schoolhouse accoutrements.

In recent years, many plays, films, and novels have been set during the second World War. That bygone era saw a unified America, a consensus unlike any time in the nation’s history before or since. It seems congenial to stories of warfare, sacrifice, and loss. But few of those stories have been set on the home front, even though it offers a unique perspective on such subjects as the American collective, the role of women in the workforce, and the need for tolerance in a democracy.

Only a handful of works with that backdrop have distinguished themselves, such as Penny Marshall’s comedy A League of Their Own and Michel Chabon’s recent Pulitzer-winner The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay. Like those works, Julie Jensen’s Cheat both wants to tap into American nostalgia and to explode that era’s stereotypes. The play follows factory worker Roxy through several discussions with her best friend, her husband, and her ex-boyfriend’s mother, Reva, who was also her lover. When the boyfriend discovered their relationship, he joined the army; during the play he dies in the Battle of the Bulge. Roxy, broken-hearted, trapped in a loveless marriage, and pregnant, frantically searches for a way out of her desperate situation.

Cheat sounds melodramatic, but it’s not: it’s too ordinary to reach those emotional heights. The scenes are structured poorly, going on too long and revealing too much or not enough. The dialogue sounds anachronistic: computer networks “go down,” not industrial machinery. Cheat is quiet and sad, desperate to mean something, but it doesn’t get much deeper than mournful platitudes.

Joan Vail Thorne’s direction blunts some of these problems by enlivening the stage with expressionistic touches. She’s filled the blackouts between scenes with the shadow of a sexless factory worker moving mechanically to the sound of machinery. And David P. Gordon’s set replicates this with steel girders at oblique angles and coppery-colored metal ladders, suggesting a style vaguely reminiscent of WPA-funded art. The pair creates a visual fusion of men and machinery that Diego Rivera would have recognized.

Karen Young plays it safe as Reva by doing more with less, letting the audience read emotions into her “older” but still beautiful face. And Kevin O’Rourke, who plays Roxy’s husband D-Dubb, fills out an underwritten role so that he’s the most lovable person in the play. On the other hand, Lucy Deakins doesn’t make much of Roxy, although she could be forgiven, with lines like “I just wish we could live that day over again!” It’s a pity that Thorne didn’t wish this for her actors, whose body language is as anachronistic as their lines.

The characters in Cheat feel intensely erotic emotions, but the actors’ bodies don’t suggest this at all. Cheat is a “nice” play. It’s too sincere, too sentimental (another of Roxy’s lines: “I’d go to war for love!”). When the play tries to impart wisdom, it lacks insight (“There will always be another war!”). With another war brewing today, the themes of the home front could capture audiences’ interest with only a little effort. But Cheat misses the extreme emotion that wartime brings; the audience wants to care, but the script cheats them out of it.

No one but Mel Miller and Musicals Tonight! would have revived Chee-Chee. No one else should. This strange musical comedy, written by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Herbert Fields, ran for a month in 1928 and then disappeared; now that we can see it, it's clear why that was the case. Chee-Chee is not uninteresting, but it certainly isn't good. Indeed, it's probably the worst show any of its illustrious creators every worked on. A price-y Encores presentation is far more than Chee-Chee merits; but a cozy two-week stint at the 99-seat 14th Street Y main stage is entirely appropriate: musical theatre diehards will want to take advantage of this unique opportunity to see this weird curiosity.

Chee-Chee takes place in Imperial China, apparently in the recent past, and tells the extremely convoluted story of Li-Pi-Siao, the Grand Eunuch, and his two willful children. (Children, you say? Conveniently, this Eunuch had a family before he earned his office.) Li-Pi-Siao's daughter, Li-Li-Wee, seeks romance and eventually finds it with Prince Tao-Tee, son of the emperor. His son, Li-Pi-Tchou, who is married to the flighty but beautiful Chee-Chee, wants to avoid becoming his father's successor, with all that that would entail. A Candide-like series of adventures befall these young lovers as they attempt to escape the Grand Eunuch, after which a badly beaten Li-Pi-Tchou gives in. A happy ending is nevertheless managed.

Critic George Jean Nathan said that Chee-Chee tried to be a dirty joke but succeeded only in being tedious, and his assessment seems pretty much on target. The dirty joke in particular is that Chee-Chee lets each of the various villains who do battle with Li-Pi-Tchou have sex with her in order to spare her husband's life. Alas, it's not a very funny joke: Chee-Chee is also filled with moribund clichés and stereotypes that might have passed muster 75 years ago but fall flat today.

The score, which should be the show's saving grace, isn't—mostly because Rodgers & Hart were playing around with form, attempting something like a modern-day sung-through piece on the order of, say, Les Miserables. So there are just a few songs, per se; most of the music is little snippets of recitative or lengthy musical scenes (designated, operetta-like, with titles like "Entrance of the Grand Eunuch" and "Finaletto, Scene 1"). None of it struck me as particularly distinguished, and certainly none of it has had any sort of life outside the show. Li-Pi-Tchou and Chee-Chee have a love song, "I Must Love You," that's reasonably pretty, and a trio called "Singing a Love Song," sung rather incongruously by three of Chee-Chee's "conquests" offers some pleasing harmonies (rendered nicely in this production by Jerry Rago, Alan Ariano, and Colin Stokes).

So why on earth would I suggest anyone see this thing? Well, for starters, for the simple novelty value: you won't see it again in your lifetime, I'll wager, and despite its problems it's still a Rodgers-Hart-Fields show—though Hart seemed to be mostly at sea, it's clear that Rodgers was learning (and would continue to learn) from what he was experimenting with here.

There's also the cast, which is mostly sublime. In addition to the aforementioned threesome, Chee-Chee features excellent work by Kati Kuroda (as the Grand Eunuch), Hazel Anne Raymundo (as the winsome daughter), Doug Wynn (as the loving but harassed prince), Yasu Suzuki (as a monk with the charming name of Radiance and Felicity), and an energetic ensemble (notably Jason Lowenthal and Jason Robinson, who liven things up every chance they get). Only the leading couple (Diane Veronica Phelan as Chee-Chee and Steven Eng as Li-Pi-Tchou) disappoint, and that may be Rodgers, Hart & Fields' fault more than theirs—these characters are probably unplayable.

If you decide to see Chee-Chee, expect to have your patience tried quite a bit—this is a creaky vehicle, even by 1928 standards. So go with low expectations and a sense of adventure. You'll be rewarded with an enthusiastic, talented company (singing without all that unnatural amplification that's the norm even off-Broadway these days), a hard-working accompanist (James Stenborg, who apparently also helped restore this lost score), and the unique ability to boast that you were one of the thousand or so people who saw Chee-Chee in this century.

As holiday musicals go, I can't think of many places I'd rather spend Christmas than with the Crawfords. The extended family of film star Joan, as outrageously imagined by the merrily campy gang at Artfull Circle Theatre, includes not only her kiddies Christina and Christopher, but also such luminous diva visitors as Hedda Hopper, Gloria Swanson, Ethel Merman, Carmen Miranda, the Andrews Sisters, Hattie McDaniel, and Judy Garland. Diva-in-training Shirley Temple turns up as well, as does Joan's arch-rival Bette Davis; you'll even catch a glimpse of couturiere-to-the-stars Edith Head making some last minute adjustments to one of La Crawford's costumes.

Such is the giddy, silly, dare-I-say gay world of Christmas with the Crawfords, a family yuletide extravaganza where a passel of honestly talented female impersonators decked out in fabulous costumes (and wigs and hats) give audiences a grand old time as they roast Mommie Dearest, quote old movie dialogue ad infinitum, and perform lots of festive holiday tunes with more pizzazz and style than any dozen rockettes. The musical numbers are sassy and jubilant and, perhaps surprisingly, winningly sincere (well, okay—Crawford's re-lyriced dirge to "Silent Night" isn't; but everything else is). Merman belts out Jerry Herman's "We Need a Little Christmas," Carmen Miranda coochie-cooches and sashays through "Feliz Navidad" (what else?), the Crawford kiddies have fun with "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," Davis (decked out in Baby Jane drag) does an impeccably timed "Santa Claus is Coming to Town,"  and Gloria Swanson (looking rather as she did at the end of Sunset Boulevard) performs an eclectic medley of carols that all seem to climax with the chorus from "Angels We Have Heard On High" (think about it). The Andrews Sisters lend their inimitable 3-part harmony style to "Deck the Halls" and a delicious novelty tune called (I guess) "I'll Spend Hanukkah in Santa Monica." Garland gives us "Winter Wonderland" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." And McDaniel, still in costume as Gone with the Wind's Mammy (and still clutching her Oscar, too), stops the show with a rousing "O Holy Night."

All are impersonated with spectacular panache. Joe Levesque and Jason Scott are a hoot as the mischievous Crawford children. Trauma Flintstone, Brant Kaiwi, and Mark Sargent, last seen in New York in The Andrews Sisters' Hollywood Canteen, again portray Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne with hilarious felicity; Flintstone also does a dead-on (whacked-out) Swanson, Kaiwi is effervescent fun as Carmen Miranda, and Sargent is as brash and likable a Merman as you could hope for. Actual woman Kate Botello is uncannily good as Garland, singing the songs beautifully while at the same time subtly kidding her subject—all the strange mannerisms of the older Judy are exploited expertly. The real find, for me at least, is Sade Pendarvis, the big-voiced phenomenon who gives life and luster to McDaniel and Davis.

Chris March, the genius who designs everybody's costumes and headgear (including a show-stopping chapeau for himself as Hedda Hopper) is a walking sight gag as a literally larger-than-life Shirley Temple.

And I haven't forgotten our star: Joey Arias, who seems to be all shoulder pads and gangly legs (okay: and flaring nostrils), is divinely Mommie Dearest, trying so hard to be respectable and beloved and failing at every turn because the people around her—especially her kids—keep on disappointing her. The pretext for the evening, I should mention, is that Joan is trying to stage a comeback (having recently been labeled "box office poison" by Hollywood's powers-that-be) by hosting powerful columnist Hopper's Christmas radio show in the living room of her Brentwood mansion. But her next-door neighbor Gary Cooper is having a shindig of his own, and all these stars keep passing through the Crawford home on their way to his party.

Arias recreates, mercilessly, Crawford's dreadful talkie debut (in, I think, The Hollywood Revue; I just saw this number in That's Entertainment and I have to tell you that Arias has nailed it).

It's all in fun, and the performers and audience eat it up. The more you know about Hollywood in the 40s—and the more old movie dialogue you know by heart—the better; Christmas with the Crawfords is funnier when you appreciate its targets. But for all the swipes at the stars of yesteryear, the holiday cheer is absolutely for real in this show—you'll leave Christmas with the Crawfords brimming with the glad tidings of the season.

The fear of God or anything else is not the beginning of wisdom. Better to have doubt. Doubt leads to investigation, and that's the beginning of wisdom.

Class Mothers '68 is a charming showcase for Priscilla Lopez, an actress who first won acclaim a quarter-century ago as the original Morales in A Chorus Line. Lopez plays six very different women in this solo play by Eric H. Weinberger, whose conceit is that these ladies are all participants in a musical tribute to their children, who are graduating seniors at a fancy New York City private school.

Lopez portrays: Harriet Jacoby, a bossy take-charge type whose current grievance is that she's in charge of the banquet committee instead of the musical entertainment; Nilda Mercado, a hard-working Puerto Rican immigrant who is in charge of making the costumes; Lee Drake, a chic alcoholic who is currently juggling two wealthy suitors; Rosemarie Spitzer, the mousy wife of a successful sculptor; Gretel Gesslauer, a Holocaust survivor; and Myrna Feintuch, a very self-reliant single mother who is in charge of the parents' show. Lopez makes each of these women distinct and, with the possible exception of Lee, sympathetic despite her flaws. When we see each of them break into musical numbers at the show's finale (parodies of popular '60s tunes like "MacArthur Park" and "Stop! In the Name of Love"), we're genuinely pleased that they get these little moments in the spotlight.

But Weisberger doesn't ultimately provide Lopez with much meat in his script. He's set his play in 1968, but he uses that eventful historical moment mostly for local color: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are eluded to, for example, but no real connection to the time is made. Similarly, except for a recurring (rather sad) theme of children eager to escape from their parents' clutches, Class Mothers doesn't deal much with the relationships between these women and their offspring. Weinberger presses familiar buttons—one of the kids is gay, one of the mothers is promiscuous, and so on—but he fails to make a case for why, finally, we should care about these characters.

Jeremy Dobrish's direction is brisk and the transitions between scenes, thanks to the  ingenious contributions of  designers Beowulf Boritt (sets), Daniel Lawson (costumes), and Bobby H. Grayson (hair), are winningly seamless.

The subtitle of Tony Abatemarco's solo play Cologne is "The Ways Evil Enters the World"—a useful notation, focusing us on what the writer/performer clearly sees as the key theme of this gripping tale of growing up and coming out. A climactic moment in the piece comes when its young protagonist—also named Tony, obviously the actor thirty years ago—finds himself trapped into offering up his neighbor and sometime sex partner as bait/sacrifice to a gang of rabid gay bashers.

It's a horrifying moment, but different only in degree from the sort of offhand apathy that too many of us have been guilty of when we fail to call out a friend who tells an ethnic joke, or when we stand silent as someone betrays their latent bigotry with an offensive label. Such is the commonplace evil that Abatemarco wants to remind us of in Cologne, and he's absolutely right to do so. But I fear that this work, which deals directly and explicitly with the experiences of a promiscuous gay teenager in the pre-Stonewall era, is too much a matter of preaching to the choir: the people who most need to hear Abatemarco's message of tolerance almost certainly never will.

I suspect that, subtitle aside, the real objective of Cologne is some kind of catharsis. Abatemarco distances himself—and the audience—from the story by narrating it in third person and describing the sex (of which there is a good deal) in clinical, bloodless terms. (There is no romance or love in this story.) Nevertheless, the journey that the young Tony takes during this tale is harrowing and absorbing and finally sort-of redemptive: we watch and listen as he grows from a horny, physically impressive fifteen year old diddling around with neighbors and letting himself get picked up by strange men along the highway, to a young man dancing with another young man his own age, unconstrained and unafraid, in a Boston bar on the weekend of the Stonewall riots. Tony's history hardly feels typical, and yet the release and jubilation at the end of the play, when at last he finds a place where being gay isn't something that must be hidden, will certainly resonate with lots of outsiders.

Abatemarco is a vivid, accomplished storyteller, holding the audience in thrall for the entire ninety minutes or so of his show. Some of the staging (by David Schweizer) feels a bit precious; for some reason certain portions of the show are executed with unrealistic light and stylized movements. A busy soundtrack of '60s classics from the Beatles, the Supremes and others pinpoints time and mood precisely.

Columbia, the Germ of the Ocean, the historical travesty from the pen of Trav S.D., is a throwback to good old-fashioned burlesque. No, not the kind where ladies take all their clothes off; really old-fashioned burlesque, as practiced by Weber & Fields and their contemporaries in the early part of the 20th century. The formula was: start with a familiar story, take every liberty with it you can think of, poke fun at topical and classical targets, and mix vigorously. Mr. S.D. has done exactly this in his conscientiously silly retelling of the story of Christopher Columbus. There's even a moral, sort of.

In this version, Columbus is a woman—Columbia, who looks like a Neapolitan street singer (well, street-something), with several bunches of grapes hanging from her belt, and a Chico Marx accent (and Chico's tendency to mangle the English language with terrible puns). She persuades Isabella and Ferdinand to let her try out her crazy theory of sailing west to India, and then embarks on a series of four voyages, during which she discovers the Isle of the Kerouacs (who introduce her to the local psychedelic drug of choice, which becomes a big hit in Spain); the Isle of Cannibals (who are talked into the culinary practice associated with their name by a megalomaniacal former Inquisitor named Father Lothario); and, incidentally, love with her first mate, Rivera.

Columbia's plot is convoluted by design, so as to provide room for all manner of shtick, shameless jokes, sight gags, and the occasional pointed satirical barb. I found enough of these funny to leave the theatre in a good mood (though admittedly the laugh quotient, and the pacing, should both probably be turned up a notch). The ensemble is spotty, with expert comic performances turned in by Julia Pearlstein in the title role, Tim Cusack as her nemesis Father Lothario, Daniel Kleinfeld as Bladeo, King of the Kerouacs, and Edward Einhorn as a Cannibal King so low-key he's practically not there. Others in the company are less successful, however. Mr. S.D. is hilarious as military mastermind Don Travo and in cameos as a Kerouac and a Cannibal.

Most of the characters in Trevor Griffiths' Comedians are trying to become professional performers; so it's entirely appropriate that director Scott Elliott has filled his revival of this play with so many bona-fide scene stealers. There is, first of all, David McCallum, who you may recall from the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and who has recently become one something of a living treasure on the New York stage. He shows up near the end of Act One as the story's antagonist and shakes things up royally.

Then there's a gentleman named Gordon Connell, who has been doing shows for decades and decades; he turns up before the lights even go down for Act Two as the earnest but rhythmically-challenged pianist who will be charged with providing accompaniment to the fledgling stand-up comics who are the play's leading characters. To watch and listen as Connell deftly mangles "Yesterday," "The Girl from Ipanema," and other favorites of bygone days is to witness the assured understated comic brilliance of a master; he very nearly steals the show right out from under McCallum (not to mention Jim Dale, who I haven't even gotten to yet)—without uttering a single word.

Mr. Dale, I must now tell you, is the quiet center of Comedians. He plays Eddie Waters, a one-time comedy performer who could have been great, only he retired young and decided instead to teach aspiring stand-up comics like the members of the class who are the focus of this play. Near the end of the play, Waters relates the events that made him give up his own career, and Dale makes the most of the moment, turning a speech that could be trite into a starkly honest and human confession. We're used to seeing Dale, who has starred on Broadway in shows like Barnum and Me and My Girl, gamboling around the stage, inducing waves of audience laughter; here, as the benevolent eye of a hurricane of explosive would-be comedians, he is as compelling as ever.

Raul Esparza, Allen Corduner, Jamie Harris, Max Baker, David Lansbury, and James Beecher portray Eddie's students. They're a disparate lot, united only by their burning ambition to hit the big time in stand-up comedy. Corduner plays a hard-boiled, middle-aged Jewish fellow named Sammy Samuels who trades too much on his ethnicity. Harris and Baker play Ged and Phil Murray, brothers who work together as a double act; Harris makes us understand immediately that Ged is the naturally funny one, while Baker communicates clearly the ways that humor-impaired Phil nevertheless maintains the upper hand in their relationship. Lansbury is George McBrain, a congenial, glad-hander who has a joke for every occasion; I love the way he makes George a regular (and very plausible) guy in spite of the obsessive bids for attention. Beecher is a sad, down-on-his-luck Irishman called Mick Connor. And Esparza is Gethin Price, a diamond-in-the-rough whose hero worship of Eddie has explosive results.

After weeks of instruction under Eddie's wing, they're due on this night to make their onstage debuts (hence the pianist I told you about). McCallum's character, Bert Challenor, is the agent who will be on hand to judge them and possibly offer some of them their first big break. He and Eddie have opposite views of what comedy is about, however, and as soon as the students figure this out, several of them scurry to make adjustments to their acts to try to win Challenor's favor.

Griffiths plays the story out in yeoman  fashion: the central conflicts—selling out vs. remaining true to your principles; the desire to uplift and enlarge vs. the urge to ridicule and destroy—are clearly delineated and cleanly stated. So Comedians is solid but unsurprising: the magic comes from the interplay among the characters, and this cast keeps us engaged and involved throughout. The weak link is Esparza, who—though enormously watchable—hasn't crystallized his relationship to Dale's character yet (that may change with time). And, problematically, his stand-up "performance" in Act Two isn't the electrifying show-stopper it needs to be.

But the rest of the Comedians are terrific. And I almost forgot: William Duell, who has made something of a career playing maintenance men (he was, memorably, Continental Congress custodian Andrew McNair in 1776), is splendid as the school caretaker. Watch him tackle, for what you know is the millionth time, the erasure of some naughty words on the classroom blackboard: now that's a comedian.

The Aquila Theatre Company’s Comedy of Errors is an almost unbelievably entertaining production of Shakespeare’s most ludicrous comedy. Where most productions of Shakespeare’s plays respect the Bard so much that the staging is superfluous, this Anglo-American company rightly uses Shakespeare’s words as a starting point for completely theatrical entertainment. In a play grounded in the most farcical elements of drama, they turn it into a cartoon. This is Shakespeare, Bugs Bunny-style.

Like the designers behind all great Shakespearean productions, director Robert Richmond and his team fashion an entire world rather than just decorating scenery. The play’s setting, the Turkish town of Ephesus, is packed to excess: the courtesan spills out of her cleavage, the town magistrate struts around in a crisp white uniform with gleaming gold medals. The action plays in front of a comic-book Casbah, with a yellow stall kept by a seedy fez-capped merchant; a Peter Lorre impression wouldn’t be out of place.

This ridiculous backdrop wouldn’t fit with a more serious script, but Shakespeare himself plays it anything but straight (in Comedy he even explains why it’s good to go bald). The main characters are twins, separated at birth and sharing the same name, Antipholus, and the same apparel. Each is attended by another divided set of twins, both named Dromio. Shakespeare sets loose these two pairs of identical twins in the bazaar, and keeps them apart until the climax for maximum chaos. Confusions multiply as each servant bumps into the wrong master, as money starts changing hands, and as women—wives, sisters-in-law, and courtesans—get involved.

To compound this narrative free-for-all, the company employs only eight actors to play fifteen roles. Naturally, one actor plays both Antipholuses and another doubles as the two Dromios. But their characterizations are as simple as the storyline is convoluted: one master-servant pair sports enormous eyeglasses and ridiculous English accents, and the other pairing doesn’t. Mark Saturno, as the Antipholus twins, resembles two opposing boxers, giving one character a brawling swagger and the other a swift-footed sureness. As both Dromios, Louis Butelli packs every moment with comic bits. Unlike many Shakespearean actors playing the fool’s role, he doesn’t make you feel obliged to laugh. He’s that rarity in America: a completely physical actor who also can communicate Elizabethan prose.

While the rest of the cast doesn’t get to show off as much, every member shines. Mira Kingsley, as a gawky romantic sister-in-law, plays her role as a girl just waiting for the right man to slide her thick glasses off and exclaim, “Why, you’re beautiful!”; she falls in love with one Antipholus in a dream-like dance right out of a ’30s musical. Alex Webb gets several juicy roles, including a maniacal sorcerer who casts spells by wiggling his fingers and supplying his own sound effects. But most importantly, the company works as an ensemble: when Webb’s doctor can’t control Antipholus with magic, the entire company joins in, twiddling fingers and babbling sound effects.

The Aquila Theatre Company has a gift for wedding stagecraft with Shakespeare, and here they’ve found a perfect match for their off-the-wall stylization. They pop the bubble of bardolatry—unthinking praise of Shakespeare—by taking the playwright at his words rather than reading into them. They take their lead from Shakespeare’s text, but like a talented dancer, they match him step for step. When the twins finally meet in Comedy’s exposition-heavy climax, the audience has become so engaged by Aquila’s farce that they don’t feel cheated that the twins never literally face each other. It’s the climactic instance of visual and verbal delights coming together in a truly Shakespearean way, and all for the audience’s benefit.

To anyone who's had one of the little buggers scurry around their home (meaning the vast majority of New Yorkers), a show displaying fierce affection for a cockroach might seem like a poor idea. Be forewarned: this review will require you to set aside your entomological prejudices and cock an ear to a roach worth regarding.

No, I'm not talking about that hack Gregor Samsa, but one of his contemporaries. In 1916, newspaperman Don Marquis began a recurring feature in his column in New York's Evening Sun: trapped overnight in the office, a cockroach named Archy began writing free verse by jumping on Marquis's typewriter keys one at a time. (He couldn't reach the shift key, so capitals were out of the question.) For the next two decades, Archy waxed poetic on everything from the misadventures of his alley cat friend Mehitabel to Prohibition to the fate of man in a lonely universe—all with unflagging humor and insight.

In a warm, invigorating production that doesn't allow the ups and downs of Marquis's creations to languish as merely a cute conceit, the Mettawee River Theatre Company presents a musical anthology of Marquis's work. Archy, Mehitabel and friends confront some of the eternal themes of life on this earth, relevant to everyone from ants to emperors: loneliness, pain, cosmic confusion. And though the verse is given center stage (exquisitely accompanied by the jazz duo of Neal Kirkwood and Harry Mann), it shares the billing with the beautiful visuals of designer and director Ralph Lee. From the tilting, vertiginous cityscape of a set to expressively detailed puppets that bring the characters to life, Lee's designs expand and enrich Marquis's miniature urban fantasias in their translation to the stage.

All of this is expertly inhabited by a sharp cast of actor/puppeteers. Tom Marion's Archy is the consummate New Yorker: cranky, good-hearted, and keenly aware of his own importance. (And when a wild South American tarantula arrives to start picking a fight, he knows to get out of the way and leave the fighting to the rats.) Margi Sharp presents Mehitabel as a sad, tough survivor whose hard-won independence and chin-up refrain of "toujours gai, toujours gai" never quite conceal her melancholy spirit. Rounding out the group are Sam Zuckerman and George Drance, who deftly bring to life such characters as Freddy the Rat, a bumptious flea, a family of beds, and, most breathtakingly, an Egyptian sarcophagus from the Met.

This is a show that can truly boast that it's perfect for all ages: the puppets and wordplay will thrill youngsters, while its more adult elements are too subtle to bother them. But in the end, the darker side of Marquis's imagination is integral to the show. As Archy himself tells an overly cheerful cricket:

i listen to you
and know why shakespeare
killed off mercutio so
early in the play it is only
hamlet that can
find material for five acts

In Connections, by Vernon Church, a Long Island sexpot points out that any man she dates has to be more interesting than her vibrator. Unless you really enjoy this kind of faux-sexy sitcom humor, you’ll find little to laugh about in this stereotype-driven comedy. Connections follows recent divorcee Victor as he logs on to the world of Internet dating. As he stumbles through date after ludicrous date in the same coffee shop, he can’t see that Loli, the student of abnormal psychology who serves him espressos, has fallen for him. The play takes a creepy turn when he becomes addicted to the Internet, but Loli’s tough love (she’s a psych student, remember?) soon helps him recover.

Director Laurence Shanet and his cast gamely try to amuse the audience, but Church’s script doesn’t give them much to work with. Fortunately for this production, Loli is played by Shellee Nicols with a charm that transcends the script’s clichés. Her fellow actors smile through their laugh lines and hope for the best; some brighten their brief moments by pushing their characters to the limits of absurdity. The set design, by Fay Torres-Yap via Ikea, is as sanitized as the script, but Omayra Pabon’s eclectic outfits provide some hipster character.

There's plenty to admire and enjoy in Bash Halow's new play Cooper Savage. For starters, he's created a marvelous trio of  female characters, who for color and outspokenness and garrulous eccentricity are pretty much unmatched this side of a Tennessee Williams play. There's Grandma, proudly 97 and even more proudly a thorn in the side of the daughter who supports her: a shameless old woman who lives on candy and chatter, sort of a malevolent version of Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, thirty years later and confined to a wheelchair. Rebecca Hoodwin sinks her teeth into this delicious role and never lets go—she's a howl and a half as the old stinker.

At the other end of the age spectrum are Theresa Tiths and Tracy Moody, two very different young college women whose paths intersect but don't collide in Cooper Savage. Theresa—overweight and overeager—has decided she's fallen head over heels in love with one of her fellow students, a shy boy named Jeffrey. As embodied here by Amy Bizjak she's hilariously voracious: watch her libido run away with her during a not-too-subtle seduction of her intended in a local pub. Tracy, on the other hand, is blonde and buxom and fresh-faced and not terribly bright. When we first meet her, she's very visibly pregnant with the child of a sailor stationed far away; but she has very little trouble falling for Randy, the young boarder (also a college student) who rents a room in the house where Tracy works as a sort of housekeeper. Shay Gines scores the show's third comic triumph with her lovably dizzy, earthy, sexy performance.

It's not all laughs, though, in Cooper Savage. Jeffrey (Theresa's amour, remember) is intensely in love with Randy, too. Making things worse is the fact that Randy is boarding at Jeffrey's house: Cooper, Jeffrey's mother, is landlady to Randy and boss to the hapless Tracy. She's also the hard-boiled, sharp-tongued daughter of Grandma, and the victim of a long-ago unhappy romance with Tracy's father. Now Cooper raises horses and represses her sorrows with cynicism and hard work.

The entanglements—among Randy, Jeffrey, Theresa, and Tracy—mostly turn out badly, I'm afraid, which is jarring because so much of the first seven-eighths or so of Cooper Savage is so funny. Allusions to the plays of Tennessee Williams and, less pointedly, William Inge, abound, suggesting the unrequited universe that Halow means to traffic in. Ultimately Jeffrey emerges as the play's sad protagonist, while Randy develops into a Golden Boy Gone Sour a la Chance Wayne of Night of the Iguana. Cooper herself, meanwhile, remains resolutely underwritten despite the fact that the play is named after her.

So Cooper Savage, filled with wonderful, playable characters and terrific, eccentric dialogue, doesn't finally quite work. Halow is defeated, I think, by his ambition here: he's really trying to create a Southern Gothic romance, but he hasn't quite mastered the genre's requirements. Give him time, though: he will.

The production, staged by the talented young director Blake Lawrence, is largely successful. I've told you about the excellent work of three members of the cast; let me add now that Jeff Branson fits the bill perfectly as sexy, enigmatic Randy, and that both Luis Villabon (Jeffrey) and Susan Finch (Cooper) work hard to create satisfying characters as well. Design is efficient but spare. In places, the show seemed to pull its punches—especially in the comic love-making scenes involving Theresa and Jeffrey on one side of the stage and Randy and Tracy on the other (is it because the show is being produced in a church?).

At the beginning of the performance of Corner Wars that I attended, Theatre for a New Generation artistic director Mel Williams (who is also the play's director) sat on the edge of the stage and talked to us a little about the issues in the play we were about to see. The Philadelphia neighborhood depicted in it—a sad blighted place dominated by competing groups of youthful drug dealers—is not the norm, Williams explained. But it's real, he continued, and its kind exists in cities all over the United States. And so, as Arthur Miller once wrote, attention must be paid.

I love that Williams did this: the play his company has brought to us has a message that is urgent and important and its creators want to engage us right away, to get us thinking about it. What better purpose for theatre could there possibly be?

Corner Wars begins with a prologue that introduces us to its characters and their milieu. The scene is an open-air crack cocaine market in front of an abandoned building in North Philadelphia. We watch as teenage dealers and their only slightly older "bosses" make swift and silent connections with customers of all kinds; the local cop patrols the beat and mostly looks the other way; youngsters—even younger than the dealers—try to break in: are they curious about what's going on here, or are they looking to earn some money for themselves? The entire sequence is continuously choreographed to a hip-hop mix—there is no dialogue—that makes it feel like a contemporary update of West Side Story.

But Riff and Bernardo never dreamed of streets this mean. We meet the core workers at this particular drug emporium, all of them pursuing the American Dream in the only way that seems available to them: Jah and Jay, who are in charge of the operation; Kareem, Jay's impulsive younger brother, who serves as lookout and carrier; Dex, who works here to support his dreams of being the greatest graffitti artist ever; Chris, a troubled youth whose mother is having serious money problems; and Brody, who is trying to pass his GED exam so he can go to college. Brody's older brother, Troy, used to work here as well, but he's been in jail for the past couple years and is hoping not to return.

Playwright Tim Dowlin makes all of these guys three-dimensional, interesting, and sympathetic—they are not your standard issue thugs from the 'hood. There's a great scene in the middle of Act One in which Jah, Jay, Dex, and Chris actually relax for a few minutes and have an impromptu poetry slam right on the sidewalk, and you feel the genuine pleasure and fun they take in showing off their verbal dexterity: no urgent message here, just four guys goofing around and releasing some teenage energy—they could be playing air guitars or dribbling basketballs instead, and indeed they bounce effortlessly into a discussion of last night's game on TV almost before they've finished their rapping.

So when things get really ugly, we sit up and take notice. Dowlin's plot developments may feel melodramatic, but they're ripped directly from the six o'clock news: a rival dealer sets up shop a block away, leading to a confrontation that ends with some unnecessary gunfire; five young men are killed. In Act Two come all kinds of consequences: a coked-out regular customer, intimidated by detectives, gives the cops Jay's name. Meanwhile, Chris uncovers some painful information about his mother, leading to an awful and bloody climax. You may want to settle into cynical detachment—you see it coming, but what can you do about it?—but Dowlin's almost naive emotionalism, along with Williams' intimate, raw staging, should coax you into investment in what's going on. Let yourself be shocked by what you see on that stage. And think about why it happened; and keep thinking about it.

Corner Wars is Dowlin's first play and his inexperience is evident in places, but it doesn't in any way keep this from being a powerful theatre experience. It's an almost dauntingly ambitious piece, as well: there are sixteen characters plus about a dozen credited non-speaking "extras." Some of the standouts in the large cast include Cornell McIntosh (Brody), Joel Holiday (Chris), Omar Evans (Dex), Christopher Williams (Jah), Ray Thomas (Troy), and Ramon Aponte (Raul, the beat cop); but everyone in the company serves the piece well.

This is my first exposure to the work of Theatre for a New Generation, but it won't be my last. I salute them for putting up a show like this, one that raises fundamental and important questions about a contemporary social problem that is too much overlooked. Corner Wars isn't just a passive drama—it's a call to action. Give it your attention.

Crowns, based on a book of photographs and reminiscences by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry, tells the stories of African-American ladies and their Sunday Church Hats. Adapted and directed by Regina Taylor, it's a spiritual but free-wheeling celebration, with monologues and vignettes about these women interwoven with heartfelt gospel singing and the occasional church sermon. Indeed, to the extent that Crowns takes place somewhere, it's inside a church, where three different services—a morning service, a funeral, and a baptism—are loosely enacted. Crowns offers a glimpse into the hearts and minds of its characters, a group of sharp, sassy women who know that the things that are important to them—family, religion, self-esteem, Sunday hats—are sacred.

They're brought to life by a vibrant and talented ensemble. Ebony Jo-Ann plays the matriarch figure with sage authority; Lynda Gravatt plays the self-proclaimed "Hat Queen" with vigorous panache. Harriett D. Foy and (at the performance reviewed) Meena T. Jahi represent a younger generation with intelligence and glamour—the kind you're born with, not the kind you get out of magazines. Lillias White, meanwhile, is her usual larger-than-life self, letting loose with a raw and joyous rendition of "His Eye is on the Sparrow" that momentarily halts the proceedings. Carmen Ruby Floyd is appealing as the young emigrant from Brooklyn who serves as receptor to the stories all these ladies tell.

Versatile Lawrence Clayton takes a variety of male roles, from local pastor to suitor to exasperated husband ("You ain't got but one head!").

Crowns is pretty much just them and the remarkable women whose stories are brought to life. And, oh yes—the hats—dozens of them (created by Emilio Sosa) displayed on outsized hat stands that dominate Riccardo Hernandez' simple set. They serve as a focus—for pride, for memory, and for celebration.

Crowns evokes a community and a sense of community, but it is surprisingly not inclusive—I found it difficult to be moved by the proceedings and to share in the obvious joy of the performers because the society it depicts is so far removed from my experience. No matter: there's still plenty to gather from this unique work of theatre.