nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

Eclipse, Andrea Lepcio's arresting new play, raises some provocative questions. The most intriguing of these is, given the choice between a peaceful and pristine Eden-like garden and the crazy hubbub of crowded, contemporary Manhattan Island, which would you pick? Al and Zoe, the two characters who inhabit Lepcio's sometimes fantastical, sometimes whimsical, and sometimes deadly serious play, make very different selections.

The play's set-up is as follows: Al, a high-powered consultant with a six- or seven-figure income, is rushing to a Las Vegas business meeting. He needs to link up with his assistant, Zoe, who though lower on the corporate hierarchy is clearly the brains of the operation; she is stuck on an increasingly crowded Manhattan street. Just as the two make eye contact, Zoe collides with one or more of the seemingly thousands of other New Yorkers who are rushing hither and thither—it's not entirely clear what happens next, but it's some kind of apocalyptic detonation of pedestrian rage.

Next thing Zoe and Al know, they are alone in Central Park. Completely alone: everyone else—in the world, as far as they can tell—has vanished. Al's Internet feed (on his cellphone) informs him, just before it conks out, that at the same moment, incidents like this occurred in more or less every city on the globe.

A bit of time passes, and Al and Zoe discover that their surroundings have become entirely unfamiliar. The tree she spent the night in has grown very, very tall, and lush green grass and bushes sprouting tiny berries appear in abundance. Somehow, they're in a garden—possibly The Garden—and they seem to be the only man and woman in the world. What happens next?

What's interesting about Eclipse is the way that Lepcio, who maintains a surprisingly cheerful, light tone throughout, bounces around the obvious Big Questions to make pointed observations about multitudinous little ones. As Benedick says in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, "The world must be peopled," but that imperative is only a minor consideration as Al and Zoe instead hash out the eternal power struggle of boss vs. underling and try to navigate the complicated sexual politics of a voracious heterosexual family man and an oh-so-private lesbian woman.

Lepcio also keeps us off-balance—in a good way—by juggling chronology; though I've described Al and Zoe's adventures in more or less linear fashion here, that's not at all how they play out in stage time. Al and Zoe's journeys toward their final destinations—and they do get to them: Al probably even gets to Las Vegas—happen only after gyrations through time and space that Eclipse's unconventional structure smartly emulates.

My companion and I debated, after the play, whether the events in Eclipse are "real": are we meant to take what happens here at face value, or is this just Zoe's dream? I leave that to you to decide; suffice to say that Eclipse is a fascinating and neatly challenging piece, offering lucid insights into the way we live now. Less than two years after 9/11, we seem to be taking a lot for granted again; Eclipse reminds us that doing so has far-reaching implications.

Adrienne Hurd and Dan Diggles comprise the cast of Eclipse and they both do fine work here. Kathryn Moroney is the director; the imaginative set design is by Christopher Cummings.

I literally got a pain in my neck watching Elle.  That's because from my seat, in the third row, house right, the only way to see what Elle's star Alan Cumming was doing was to twist my neck at least 90 degrees. Cumming makes his entrance at extreme house left and never strays more than about fifteen feet away; most of the time he's stuck in one spot near the theatre wall, stooped over so as to appear old. A most inconvenient state of affairs for at least half the audience, many of whom, I suspect, paid the $45 top ticket price just to see this Tony-winning star up close.

My neck-ache wasn't all, by the way: my companion's allergies acted up from the thick aroma of incense that pervaded the air at the Zipper Theatre, and both of our auditory systems got a couple of unwanted shocks from a sudden deployment of loud static at one point in the piece and a cacophonous blare of music and noise later on.

Not a pleasant experience, this Elle: I imagine there might be an interesting play in it somewhere, but from where I sat, and from what I could see and hear, director Nick Philippou and his co-producer/star Alan Cumming seem determined to make this obtuse play by Jean Genet even harder to understand than it already is. Cumming plays the Pope in a hideous white gown that reminded me of the one Glinda wears in the movie The Wizard of Oz, only this one is backless so that whenever Cumming turns around we see his bare bottom. Chad Coleman plays a Cardinal in a lovely purple Vivienne Westwood creation, atop stiletto heels. Anson Mount (and, eventually, Brian Duguay) play a photographer whose couture Westwood jacket is at least six sizes too large for him. Some of the action is projected on the rear wall of the stage. Why are these effects in effect? Your guess is as good as mine.

During the play, Mount's character arrives to photograph the Pope (who is referred to by feminine pronoun until he enters, hence the play's title). But the Pope tells the photographer that he (the Pope) doesn't exist, except as an image in the minds of others. The play may have something to do with the existence of God, but it's hard to puzzle out given the muck that this production has made of it.

I am forced to conclude from this supremely awful theatre experience that Cumming and his collaborators in his new company The Art Party have contempt for their audience (whom they force to contort their bodies) and their playwrights (whose work they distort and diminish). I've been mooned by Alan Cumming before, but I shan't be again.

Enchanted April is that rarity: a play where every single element falls perfectly into place—a show that leaves you positively glowing, reminding you why Broadway is still, sometimes, considered the pinnacle of American theatre. It is, remarkably, the very first play by Matthew Barber, and it is deftly and beautifully written. It's staged with intelligence and taste by Michael Wilson and acted with enormous assurance and sensitivity by a sublimely good ensemble. The design, by Tony Straiges (sets), Rui Rita (lighting), Jess Goldstein (costumes), Paul Huntley (wigs/hair), and John Gromada (music/sound) is appropriate and lovely. What more can we ask for?

Barber, who has based his script on the same 1922 novel that inspired a recent film, gets right to the point in his taut dramatization, having his central character, Lotty Wilton, recount for us a story she once heard. It seems that an old man has decided that he wants an acacia tree, and so he plants his walking stick in the ground as a reminder. He returns to the spot some time later, and it seems that the stick has taken root; a blossom is at its base—an acacia. It's a charming and apt parable, for Enchanted April is about planting sticks in the earth we trod everyday, and willing them to bloom.

The time is February 1922, memories of the terrible first World War still fresh in everybody's mind; the place is damp, dour, dismal London. Lotty, the dutiful unhappy wife of a solicitor named Mellersh Wilton, happens upon an advertisement in the Times for a castle on the Italian Riviera, available to let during the month of April. The promise of wisteria, sunshine, and the blue waters of the Mediterranean awakens something in Lotty, and she bolsters up her courage and approaches Rose Arnott, whom she does not know, though she has seen her at church (and who reminds her of "a disappointed Madonna"). Lotty soon convinces the wary Rose that they should go on holiday to this castle at Mezzago. Both women, for different reasons, are stuck in marital ruts; the change of air and scenery, absent their husbands, betokens rejuvenation and a kind of independence neither has known.

The rental on the Italian castle is £60, so Lotty and Rose decide to advertise themselves for two more tenants. The only responses come from Lady Caroline Bramble, a bored, beautiful and rich young socialite; and Mrs. Graves, an imperious old widow whose father, as she never tires of telling people, knew Tennyson. This unlikely foursome, against the odds to be sure, decide to take the plunge together, and as Enchanted April's first act ends, they are on their way to adventure in Italia.

And in Act Two, they have their adventure—all of them, along with Messrs. Arnott and Wilton and a young man named Antony Wilding who is the owner of the castle and winds up spending time with the ladies on an unplanned detour from Rome. But their enchanted April is no simple makeover; what they experience—thanks to Lotty's bravery and willingness to open herself up to something new and vital and unexpected—is authentic renewal. Each of these seven people is sad and stunted when we first meet them, for various and different reasons. But once they allow the sun and sea and wisteria to enlarge their perspective on the world, they blossom.

Straiges, Goldstein, and Rita provide stunning visual metaphors for what Lotty calls their "translation," with the London scenes dressed in gloomy greys and browns and accented with heavy wooden furniture. The Italian landscape, in brilliant contrast, is bright and luminous and filled with color and sound, and dotted with flowers that we very nearly can smell from our seats in the audience.

The characters win us over as they become "translated," too, in no small part due to the expert work of the actors who portray them. Jayne Atkinson is gloriously giddy and, later, effervescent as Lotty; this is to a large degree mostly her story, and Atkinson makes us care about and love this quirky woman whose intuition and determination finally make so many so happy. Molly Ringwald is very much her match as the more reserved—but surprisingly sharp-tongued and -witted—Rose. Dagmara Dominczyk exudes the requisite glamour and melancholy as poor-little-rich girl Lady Caroline, and then adds both the spirit and soul to the mixture to make her credible and sympathetic. And Elizabeth Ashley is in her element as the regal dowager Mrs. Graves, simply dripping noblesse oblige and tempering it with warmth and a mischievous intelligence.

The three men in the company make equally strong impressions: Michael Hayden is handsome and boyish and just a touch forlorn as the wealthy young landlord Antony Wilding; Michael Cumpsty goes from gruff pomposity to warm and assuring manliness as Mellersh Wilton; and Daniel Gerroll gives what I judge to be his finest performance yet as Frederick Arnott (whose alter ego, notorious romantic fiction writer Florian Ayers, has one or two secrets I have not revealed to you). The great character actress Patricia Conolly rounds out the excellent company as Wilding's housekeeper, Costanza, who speaks only Italian and yet makes herself entirely understandable not just to her guests but to everyone in the Belasco Theatre.

Enchanted April reminded me of something I sometimes forget—why I love to review theatre. What better reward than to be able to tell you this: that you will leave Enchanted April beaming and uplifted, bolstered by the notion that you might be able to grow some acacia of your own if you only make the right effort with the right stick.

Howard Casner's play Endless Night, Sweet Delight, is an ambitious blend of drama, romance, and fantasy. The main storyline concerns Oran, a young musician whose lover has recently died of AIDS. Oran hasn't gotten over the death—or, more accurately, he hasn't gotten over the way that the death has pushed some crucial issues about his self-worth and self-image to the fore. The lover, Yuri, was a dynamic record producer who helped Oran into a career as well as a stable romantic life; Oran feels unworthy and guilty that he, and not Yuri, is the one still living.

Oran journeys to a remote farm town in the American Midwest to visit his friends Coop and Bill. Here he will decide to either end it all or to return to the life Yuri helped him build. What he doesn't count on—how could he?—is that in the woods outside his friends' farmhouse, he will be visited by a handsome young ghost, Shad, who will fall in love with him. Shad—dead for some eighty years—has a story eerily parallel to Oran's. Casner's notion is that these two young men from literally different worlds will help each other find their ways to their next "lives."

It's a wonderful premise, and it mostly works. Casner paints Oran and Shad vividly, and we root for their unlikely romance to work out. Unfortunately, Endless Night, Sweet Delight bogs down at times in subplots that distract from the main theme, in particular the  troubled but underwritten relationship between Coop and Bill. I'd love to see the playwright eliminate some of this extraneous detail and sharpen the focus on his two very interesting protagonists.

The production, at Wings Theatre, is nicely directed by Robert Crest, except far too much of the action takes place far house left, causing us to crane our necks more than we comfortably care to. Michael Vaccaro is sexy and earnest and compelling as Shad, while John Warren is intense and likable as the distressed Oran.

I liked Endpapers quite a lot. It's a sophisticated, literate, well-made play about life in an independent publishing house, at a crucial moment in its history. The company is on the brink of financial catastrophe; furthermore, its founder, Joshua Maynard, is ill and preparing to retire. Having failed to convince his 27-year-old daughter Sara to take over the reigns, he must now choose a successor. The obvious candidate is Ted Giles, a slick, savvy, very smart executive with up-to-date marketing/technology/financial skills and a shark-like lack of scruples and conscience. The dark horse is Griff, a moody but ultra-dedicated editor with an obsessive need to help people. Ted calls books "product"; Griff stays up all night reading through the thousands of unsolicited submissions that are called, in the biz, "slush." Which one will be the new CEO?

It's a question that keeps us paying attention to Endpapers until the final blackout. It's also a question that is solved most satisfactorily by playwright Thomas McCormack (and one that I certainly won't answer for you here). McCormack's background is in publishing—he spent nearly forty years in that business before retiring, in 1997, as CEO of St. Martin's Press—and his expertise shows in the realistic depiction not only of a particular milieu but of the corporate office world in general. The good news is that McCormack turns out to be a crackerjack dramatist as well: though Endpapers is his first full-length play, it has a solidness and professionalism that belie that lack of experience.

McCormack is particularly adept at drawing the various characters who populate the Maynard publishing house, and director Pamela Berlin and an excellent company of actors bring them to life in vivid detail. In addition to the Maynards, Ted, and Griff, these include Grover Shively (Neil Vipond), a past-his-prime editor who was once second in command but has seemingly outlasted his usefulness to the company; Cora McCarthy (Pippa Pearthree) and Kay Carson (Beth Dixon), two tough female editors whose bitter enmity is set aside when the life of the firm is at stake (note, by the way, that these two ladies give the richest and most memorable performances in Endpapers); Sheila Berne (Shannon Burkett), Ted's attractive, quick-witted assistant, who has no illusions about her boss and means to learn as much from him as she can; and John Hope (Alex Draper), not an employee of Maynard but rather of the bank where the company's line of credit is this close to being called (and therefore a person of some consequence in the story).

William Cain is magisterial and philosophical as the elder Maynard; McCormack gives him some terrific introspective material to deliver, including a wonderfully thoughtful speech in which he ponders what you know and what you remember about your life when you arrive in heaven. Maria Thayer plays his daughter, Sara, with intelligence and authority and vulnerability. Bruce McCarty is immensely appealing as the kind but conflicted Griff, as is Tim Hopper, in a different way, as the hissably villainous Ted. Rounding out the cast are Greg Salata, who is very funny as an illiterate actor who has written a very bad and very long memoir, and Oliver Wadsworth, who is less funny as a Truman Capote-like dilettante novelist who seems out of place in this otherwise very naturalistic, down-to-earth play.

Indeed, the second act scenes involving these two authors might best be excised from Endpapers; they suggest that McCormack has some bees in his bonnet and/or axes to grind, but they don't move the plot forward at all. Instead of having us meet these two characters, McCormack could have instead given more stage time over to setting up the resolution of his story, which is entirely plausible but nevertheless pretty near impossible to anticipate.

That said, this is still a first-class entertainment. There may not be a more involving or more satisfying drama in town right now.

Based on a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner and master of magical realism, Erendira is a nearly fascinating work of the avant-garde. Directed and produced by Kristin Marting (HERE’s Executive Director) from a “close-up text” by Ruth Margraff, the play tells a story of folktale-like demeanor. Marting applies nearly every possible stage medium to tell this story: drama, dance, song, puppetry and mask, projections, and more. But it’s only half a great theater piece; at midpoint, it meanders and refuses to offer up anything new.

But for the first half, Erendira beguiles. The deep stage, white like bleached bone, has a pawnshopful of debris: shadows hide a gramophone, a tub, a television, a body. It’s a desert, we’re told, in which young and beautiful Erendira must work off her debt to her crone of a grandmother. The setting that’s established owes a debt to early Brecht, who combined faraway myth with metal modernity. There’s even a white sheet, Brecht’s signature, that serves as a screen for projections to provide an imagistic shorthand for each character. The music, performed live by Sebastian Cruz and Uri Sharlin, has a blowsy European feel that also harks back to Brecht’s collaborations with Kurt Weill.

The performances, while not explicitly alienating, also have a distanced and stylized texture. Eliza Terrazas, as Erendira, has huge green eyes that glisten when they catch the light. These eyes play against her full body. We see in her eyes that Erendira is newly a woman, not yet used to the attention that her womanhood gets. She’s got the allure of young Brigitte Bardot—poised between a sex kitten and a captivating nymph.

It’s this physicality that brings out her grandmother’s bitterness, as it has with so many evil stepmothers. As the Grandmother, Ching Valdes-Aran captivates her grandchild and the audience through force of will. She builds her character from action, not psychology: everything we need to know about her we find in her rasping bark. She literally wears her greed, pinning coins to her dress. Valdes-Aran is impossible not to watch in her strange costume, a dress so stiff that she can only move her arms and that Erendira must buckle closed.

In the show’s first half, the duo encounter men from the desert, puppets that are either human-sized skeletons with the barest hit of humanity or bodiless soldiers who pay Grandmother for Erendira’s services. Marting establishes an entrancing pace, a sense that the story is set in no time and all time. But she takes a wrong turn, somehow, when she introduces Ulises, a boy with wings and Erendira’s male counterpart. Janio Marrero, as Ulises, plays innocence fine, but he doesn’t seem to have the skill to add resonance to the archetypal feeling onstage. And although he isn’t onstage for very long, his entrance marks a shift in the play’s balance: Erendira is no longer a girl. Something has to happen.

Instead, the play continues in its rhythm, and what was hypnotic becomes narcotic. The magic of the show gradually dissipates. What before was both ancient and modern softens into vagueness. Erendira enters a convent for a time, but this episode adds little. She attempts an escape; Ulises returns; they kill Grandmother after several failed attempts, and then flee from the desert to the sea. But these are occurrences, not events. Marting seems to have wanted to create a droning pulse for the show, but she loses the beat. It’s too bad, because the first half of Erendira creates a unique sense of wonder that, if it had carried through, would have mirrored the luminous sorcery of García Márquez.

The Men of Magic—Eric Walton and Nelson Lugo—are back, with a bigger, longer, sleeker show than their premiere outing last fall. It's part of Titans Theatre Company's "Grand Illusions" season at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex in midtown, and its sly blend of comedy, sophistication, and awe-inspiring prestidigitational expertise makes it one of the city's great lesser-known, low-priced entertainment treasures.

Eric's the lean one with the shaved head and the diabolical eyebrows; Nelson's the bulkier of the two, with a full head of hair and an innocent poker face. The tension between the two, and their constantly shifting personas, is what gives their show its very real edge. In some of the routines—like the one involving an evil-looking butcher knife whose seven-inch blade is supposed to be inserted into a victim's arm without drawing blood—the dynamic feels like comedian-and-stooge, with the unflappable Walton playing Bugs Bunny to the more frenetic Lugo's Daffy Duck.

But then both performers can turn elegant and mysterious, as in the show's lovely finale, in which, in turn, each gentleman recites a poem whilst the other performs a classic magic effect in silence.

And then, in solo spots, we see perhaps our heroes' truest stripes. Walton mesmerizes and amazes by telling and re-enacting a wonderful story about how Harry Houdini beat a professional card shark at his game, the evidence—a live video feed of Walton's dextrous hands—displayed in much-larger-than-life close-up on an onstage screen. And Lugo, with that guileless open face of his, proves himself as deft as any Times Square hustler with a riveting demonstration of the shell game, again magnified live on screen—a most un-Daffy like feat.

The thing is, these two—who are both accomplished actors as well—are becoming very confident, very suave magicians, and at its best, Men of Magic can elicit bona fide "oohs" and "ahs" of astonishment from the audience: How did the pea get under that shell? How did Eric escape from the trunk and Nelson somehow get into it? A couple of the illusions get  swallowed up in the patter, notably Lugo's Batman/Houdini escape trick; but in general, these fellows are honing an act that puts them in line to be the next Penn and Teller if that's what they want to do.

But whether or not Eric and Nelson choose to forsake their acting careers for the world of sleight-of-hand, their current Men of Magic show is great fun indeed. You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll be amazed and amused.

Jonathan Marc Sherman is back on the boards in New York with the lively, thought-provoking new play Evolution. Billed as a modern morality tale, it’s part fable, part sex comedy, and part meta-theatrical romp through history and pop culture. The play is both an addition to, and a comment on, our current era’s love affair with all things fast and furious; this, combined with crackling dialogue and a fervent staging, make some of its inconsistencies forgivable.

Henry, the hapless college student around whom the story unfolds, is faced with an unnerving question by his professor: “What do you want?” Henry realizes that the answer may have nothing to do with his thesis, a study of Charles Darwin’s personal life. In an attempt, perhaps, to make this project more challenging, Henry is writing it with the cryptic omission of any word that contains the letter “e”. But as academically astute as he is, his knowledge of the world around him and the mass media that infuses it is as a newborn’s. His girlfriend, Hope, is taking him home with her to Los Angeles during a semester break. It is there, in the ultimate plastic dream factory, that Henry discovers his unlikely want. Hope’s brother, Ernie, is a drug-using ne’er-do-well waiting for his fifteen minutes of fame to begin, and in Henry he sees an opportunity to break into television. Henry is his “tabula rasa,” whose very ignorance and naiveté are the prime ingredients for fresh new programming. Our protagonist stumbles into pitching a sitcom called “Eve-olution,” and soon Hope and Darwin are ancient history.

Urban Empire has given Sherman’s play nearly everything it needs for a strong jump out of the gate, including some pitch-perfect scenic elements. Director Lizzie Gottlieb is attuned to the irony and self-referential nature of the piece, and keeps us grounded among its sudden shifts in action. Larry Block plays the Story Teller (and various other roles) with a knowing wink; Keira Naughton is a brash and dominating Hope; Josh Hamilton makes Henry’s difficult journey authentic; Peter Dinklage is more than walking subtext as Rex, the TV studio lackey; and kudos to Armando Riesco as Ernie, who tears through a speed-induced monologue with great precision. The only actor I didn’t fully believe was Ione Skye as Gina; her best moment is in a split-scene as a phone sex operator; as she talks dirty to Hope’s father (while Hope and Henry nuzzle within earshot), he casually interjects with a “Yep” or an “Uh-huh.” But as her role expands, she seems to shrink under it.

At an intermissionless ninety minutes, Evolution leaves a number of stones unturned. When Henry rushes into his new career as TV producer, Hope lets him go too easily. The idea of ambition being analogous to evolution is thrown in, but not deeply explored. And the play ends suddenly, somewhat disingenuously, without allowing the characters to wrestle much with their choices. Still, Henry’s transformation is a frightening one, and it makes this cautionary tale very real indeed. According to Ernie, Darwin is alive and well and living in your TV set; if that’s true, he’s also making an inventive guest appearance at 45 Bleecker Street.

With Face the Music, Mel Miller's Musicals Tonight! has unearthed a glitterier gem than usual. This musical comedy by Moss Hart (book) and Irving Berlin (music and lyrics), originally produced on Broadway in 1932 and probably not heard or seen since, is a delight. The songs are clever or lovely or both; the book, though dated in the way that topical satire must be, is a hoot. The staging by Thomas Mills is breezy and inventive, and the performers that Miller has brought together are just grand.

Face the Music takes place during the depths of the Great Depression, when money is so tight that presumably even the upper-crust Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers have to go to the Automat for lunch. Broadway impresario Hal Reisman is there too, when he runs into musical comedy star Kit and her boyfriend Pat. Together they hook up with Martin Van Buren Meshbesher, the only man with enough money to back their new show. Meshbesher is a cop (his money comes from one of those Little Tin Boxes that the Seabury Commission got so interested in; see Fiorello!). The show is a disaster, but a post-opening-night decision to make it smutty turns it into a hit and, somehow, saves the City treasury. And, oh yes, there's an investigation at the end, involving Seabury himself and a crooked judge.

It's complicated, foolish, and very funny. The score features a couple of standards, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" and "Soft Lights and Sweet Music." The real discovery here, though, is the rest of Berlin's work, which includes pastiches/parodies of much of what was on Broadway in the early 30s: a Helen Morgan-ish torch song called, bluntly, "Torch Song"; a Merman-esque beltfest called "You Must Be Born With It"; an Ira Gershwin-like paean to comic opera to close the show called "Investigation"; and—proving Berlin could kid himself as well as others—a rip-off of the Follies' anthem "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" entitled "My Beautiful Rhinestone Girl."

It's a swell score, and it's presented to advantage by this energetic and talented company. Particularly engaging are Nanne Puritz as Kit, big-voiced Randall Frizado as Reisman, Virginia Seidel as Meshbesher's ditzy wife, and Patrick Boyd and Vanessa Lemonides as the show's star dancing team. Stephan Stubbins and David Macaluso make strong impressions in a variety of roles. And Cynthia Collins, who is both glamorous and funny, stops the show with her rendition of "Torch Song."

Face the Music shows its age with a plethora of jokes that don't quite parse and a book so loosely and freewheelingly concocted that it makes Mamma Mia!'s look tight. But that doesn't mean it's not a pleasure to hear Moss Hart's witty words and Irving Berlin's merry melodies in the theatre. Musicals Tonight! continues to work miracles by reminding us of our rich American musical theatre tradition. Long may it wave.

Though it's only about seventy-five minutes long, Famous for Fifteen Years contains enough thematic material for at least three plays. Playwright Jamie Pachino is concerned here with Billy Harlow, a fictional celebrity artist so much like Andy Warhol as to be virtually indistinguishable from him. One of the threads of this diffuse, intriguing work is an examination of Harlow's career and circle, epitomized here by the six characters—superstar diva Venus Envy, pretender diva Holly Grail, publicist Brenda Blickstein, heiress gone-wrong Ursula DuPres, hunky gay drug dealer Mustang, addled songstress Sonny Vale—who populate Famous for Fifteen Years. Pachino wants to trace parts of her unseen hero's journey downward from visionary to sellout, as well as  to deconstruct his obsession with celebrity.

She also wants to celebrate that obsession, Chicago-like, in the sad tale of Sonny Vale, who got famous fifteen years ago for stabbing Billy and plans to become even more famous again for confessing to his murder.

Finally—and more successfully—she wants to ponder the sad aftermath of celebrity, represented here on the one hand by  the chronic has-been-hood of Holly Grail, and on the other by the confidence and self-knowledge of tending one's garden that has come to Venus Envy. There's a terrific scene inside Famous for Fifteen Years in which the two meet up in a Manhattan bistro right after Billy's funeral and compare notes, and Pachino gets to the heart of several matters instantly. If only the rest of her play were this focused and smart!

Alas, it's not: Famous for Fifteen Years suffers from a schizophrenia that it never rises above. Action flashes back and forth between 1969 and 1984 (when Billy dies) and between live action (frequently direct address monologues) and videotaped coverage of the funeral. It's inventive, sure, and often interesting; but there's too much going on here.

Director Tim Errickson does a nice job balancing all these plates in the air, and cinematographer Whitney Hamilton (and a host of guest actors) make the video portions fun and vivid. But the scattershot dramaturgy of the thing means that most of the roles are underwritten, with the result that only Christine Verleny (Venus) and Karen Sternberg (Holly) are able to create complete, intelligible characters we can care about.

Sophisticated, riveting story-telling doesn't get any better than Far and Wide, the current offering at the Mint Theater Company. This is, believe it or not, the New York premiere of a play written by Arthur Schnitzler nearly a century ago; how this smart and fascinating drama—the theatrical equivalent of a compulsive page-turner—got away is a mystery. It's here now, though, elegantly adapted and staged by Jonathan Bank and performed with sumptuous style and emotion by a splendid ensemble led by Lisa Bostnar and Hans Tester. Don't miss it: it's the most compelling new play in town.

Far and Wide takes place, mostly, in the garden of the villa of Friedrich Hofreiter, a wealthy Viennese manufacturer. The tennis court is always just beyond view, which is entirely appropriate because Schnitzler's tragicomedy is as much about the game of love as it is about anything. The subjects of this particular match are Friedrich, a natural-born charmer who is used to having his way about all of his peculiar whims, one of which is the occasional infidelity; and Genia, his devotedly faithful, enabling, understanding, unhappy wife. Early in the play we discover that Friedrich has just broken off his latest affair with Adele Natter, a neighbor, and that Genia is entirely, sadly, and resignedly aware of this fact. We also learn that a friend to both Hofreiters, a young Russian musician, has just committed suicide for unknown reasons that seem nevertheless to somehow involve Genia. And thus Schnitzler starts his plot in motion, one which will engulf the careless amorality of Friedrich and the honorable worldliness of Genia and eventually overwhelm their relationship.

Everyone in the story, at least as its been adapted here by Bank, figures in the drama. There's Hofreiter's best friend, a dispassionately clear-eyed young doctor named Franz Mauer; and there's Erna Wahl, the surprisingly determined young daughter of another of the Hofreiter's neighbors, who is the object of Mauer's unrequited affection. There's also Erna's mother, Frau Wahl; an earnest young man named Paul Kreindl; Adele Natter's cynical husband, a banker; a lieutenant named Stanzides; and a handsome young marine ensign, Otto von Aigner, who lives nearby with his mother, a retired actress, and who is about to go overseas for a three-year tour of duty. During the play's five acts, these characters get embroiled in all manner of entanglements with one another, some of which you will immediately guess and others that will startle you.

Best not to give too much away: know that Far and Wide, like life and like love, has moments of supreme wit, of high comedy, of rank foolishness, and of pure melodrama that might feel turgid if we hadn't come to care so much for these people. For there's the strength of this remarkable play, at least here, in the capable hands of adaptor-director Jonathan Bank: every individual is so well-drawn that it's impossible not to get attached to each of them. Far and Wide feels like Chekhov because it lays out its characters with such compassion that what we're reminded of most, at the end, is our own humanity; and that notwithstanding the shamelessly cold anti-hero that Schnitzler gives us here in the almost Nietzschean Friedrich.

Of course, some of the credit for this must go to the superlative actors who inhabit Schnitzler's creations. Hans Tester is, against our better impulses, enormously appealing as the bounder Friedrich; he exudes the charm and ease that suits this wholly selfish man, letting us understand how reasonable and intelligent people like the doctor or, indeed, his own wife, are drawn to him. Lisa Bostnar, too-long absent from the Mint stage, is heartbreakingly conflicted as Genia: she lets us see the many emotions going through this complicated woman's mind at every point in the play, in a performance whose extreme composure belies the raw and explosive feelings tearing away at her character's soul.

Kudos, too, to Ezra Barnes as Mauer, who gives us a surprisingly dense mass of complexity as the doctor, despite relatively little stage time; to Victoria Mack, as the steely young Erna Wahl; to James Knight, as the passionate young marine Otto; and to Lee Bryant, as his shrewd, wise old mother. Anne-Marie Cusson, as Frau Wahl, and Matt Opatrny, as Paul, also distinguish themselves, bringing genuine heft to what could be simple comic relief roles.

The design—Vicki R. Davis' set, Theresa Squire's costumes, Josh Bradford's lighting, and Stefan Jacobs' sound—are executed with the elegance and care that we have come to expect from the Mint. Far and Wide ranks among the very best work this company has done, once again proving the value of a good story, well told, in the theatre.

Far Away is only an hour long. The length may be prohibitive for the producers and inhibiting for the consumers. But it shouldn’t dissuade people from seeing Caryl Churchill’s one-act, an incredibly compact, moving, thoughtful, and above all, challenging dramatic success. Directed by Stephen Daldry for the New York Theatre Workshop, Far Away resists pedestrian theater to make a comprehensive statement about work, art, politics, and human existence.

Churchill begins her play late one night in a rural household. A child, frightened by strange noises outside, seeks comfort from her aunt Harper. The girl, Joan, soon admits that she’s seen much more than she’s let on. Frances McDormand, as Harper, contributes her maternal demeanor to the scene’s slow disclosure of horror, but it’s young Alexa Eisenstein who anchors the scene with a child’s eye that worries out the secrets she’s espied in the barn.

Compulsive program readers will notice that the second scene depicts the same character as a young woman. With a degree in artistic millinery, Joan works in a sweatshop constructing hats for parades. Over the course of this middle section, she fashions an outrageous design, falls in love with a politically radical coworker, and wins first prize in the competition.

The play that had begun as a gothic scene has evolved into a political-artistic romance, a sort of 21st century Ibsen drama. As before, Joan, now played by Marin Ireland with a child’s wonder, inborn artistic talent, and a clear love of life, slowly involves herself in what seems to be a hopeless situation.

But here too an abhorrent truth lies behind Joan’s situation. Ian MacNeil’s previous sets and Rick Fishel’s lighting have been suggestive, minimal, and shallow—a chair and desk, two worktables, a few lights to create isolation and shadow. But in an overwhelming coup de theatre, a black curtain rises and light floods the area to show the entire stage space, revealing a series of stairways traversed by gray convicts, chained, numbered, and wearing fanciful hats like those designed by Joan. Up until this moment, silence has defined Paul Arditti’s sound design; now martial music and deafening applause thunders through the auditorium. The hats are judged and both they and the prisoners led off for destruction.

Churchill pushes her dystopian fiction to its logical extremes in the final scene, a return to Harper’s farmhouse. Harper, aged into an angry, impatient old woman, spars verbally with Joan’s lover as they discuss the war that has erupted. This war is total, involving not just nation-states and terrorist cells, but alliances with animal species and plants and even inanimate objects and forces of nature.

Joan interrupts the argument, battered by the elements. She has walked from her urban home to visit those people she loves, maybe in an attempt to reconnect with people in a world where all connections have dissolved. The paranoia shows in her tired eyes. But it’s her description of the journey that shows how dire the world has become: “I didn’t know whose side the river was on, it might help me swim or it might drown me.”

With this, Churchill’s play ends. Humanity has literally returned to a primal state: no person has control over his or her fate; it lies in the hands of animistic, inhuman forces. But the play’s mysterious, foreboding atmosphere suggests that this has been the case all along. All along, Joan finds safety, comfort, and love with others, but the social panorama forces itself between them.

There is a prophetic tone to this work, written in 2000, before a War on Terror that grows and feeds upon itself. Churchill’s dramaturgy—best known through her already-classic works Cloud 9 and Top Girls—follows its own bold logic with such truth that her predictions quickly become foresight. But while her works have definite political elements, she’s no propagandist.

Director Stephen Daldry subtly underlines this in the production’s opening moments: the curtain, containing a bucolic sunset landscape painting, slowly squeaks up on rusty pulleys to reveal the farmhouse set. This touch, reminiscent of stagings by both Brecht and Beckett, stresses that we’re in a theater, watching a fiction. But as with all true art, this work is rooted solidly in our reality. Far Away takes place in a world very hard by. Far Away is a play, not a polemic. Although it offers no corrective, its insight inspires its audience to think deeply about the world they live in.

Churchill is definitely aware that capitalism drives this world’s operation, but she’s taken her own radical stand with Far Away. She refuses to apply the standard rules of thought and action for plays; this inspires a resistance to other conservative conventions in our lives. Here is a play that must be seen for its own worth, rather than through the cost-ratio of ticket price to running time. The play canvasses more of the world in one hour than most works do in three.

Fashion is, I believe, the oldest American play I have ever seen. There aren't very many older ones; certainly not many that would seem worth doing apart from their curiosity value. Fashion, which was written by Anna Cora Mowatt in 1845, is absolutely worth doing, as Alex Roe's present production at Metropolitan Playhouse indisputably proves. Not only does it offer a fascinating and unique glimpse at the American Character—a useful exercise at any time but a particularly appropriate one these days, I'd say—but it also proves to be a surprisingly modern, entertaining comedy of manners. Oh it's dated all right, but Roe and his spirited cast play it just broadly enough—big, but with no winking—to make Fashion a merry evening of theatre.

It all takes place in the too-grand-for-its-own-good home of Mr. and Mrs. Tiffany in New York City. He was once a traveling peddler who sold goods from a pack on his back; she worked in a millinery shop in the Lower East Side. Prosperity has made him into a nervous entrepreneur and her into an overblown poseur whose pretensions and extravagances have driven her husband to commit forgery in an attempt to pay the mounting bills. Mrs. Tiffany lives for Fashion; she has imported a French maid named Millenette to apprise her of all the latest trends in Parisian haute couture; she speaks an affected parlance littered with mispronounced French phrases and fawns shamelessly over Count Jolimaitre, the handsome, heavily-accented, mustachioed grandee who is wooing her giddy daughter Seraphina.

Of course, Jolimaitre is a fake; we figure this out even before Millanette telegraphs it to us when she recognizes him as her former lover, a one-time cook. The so-called Count also makes the moves on Gertrude, the plainspoken young woman who works in Mrs. Tiffany's conservatory; Gertrude, who is just about the only character in the play entirely without affectation, bungles her plan to expose Jolimaitre as a fake and winds up in hot water with Colonel Howard, the man who loves her. Oh, and I haven't mentioned Mr. Snobson, the scheming clerk who is blackmailing Mr. Tiffany, threatening to expose his boss's crimes unless he is allowed to marry Seraphina himself.

The day is saved for everyone concerned by Adam Trueman, the none-too-subtly named 72-year-old farmer who just happens to be visiting the Tiffanys when all of these convoluted occurrences occur. Trueman, in buckskin and raccoon fur hat, is the only person in the play not somehow or other enslaved by Fashion, as he is wont to remind anyone who will listen; he's the one "true American" in sight, embodying the principles of rugged individualism, honesty, hard work, and unadorned simplicity. He is, frankly, insufferable; it's absolutely fascinating to look at this presumed paragon of ante-bellum virtue and compare his values to our own.

Which is the point of Roe's revival of Fashion: his staging offers just enough wry commentary on Mowatt's play to help us focus on what it seems to have stood for. He's cast an African American actor, Henry Afro-Bradley, as Trueman, to provide a hint of irony; he's also cast the hilariously over-the-top Tod Mason as Mrs. Tiffany, who, despite the hair on his arms, performs here decidedly not as a drag artist—his vaguely brutish bravado seems entirely natural, even essential to the character (his casting feels as on target as Harvey Fierstein's in Hairspray).

The ace up Roe's casting sleeve is the remarkable Matt Daniels as Zeke, the Tiffanys' brand new Negro butler. Daniels appears to us initially in what looks like blackface makeup, which shocks; he wipes it off his face (it turns out to be coal dust) and then proceeds to behave, sans burnt cork, exactly as the white actor who played Zeke in 1845 almost certainly did, which is to say in the buffoonish, broadly comic manner of the minstrel show. This is a daring idea that works brilliantly, helping us observe both how far we've come and how far we've still to go with regard to racial and other kinds of politics here in the land of the free.

Other cast members who need to be mentioned here include Stephanie Dorian, who is a riot as Seraphina, defining this foolish young woman with an impossible braying laugh. Sean Kenin is eel-slippery as the phony French Count Jolimaitre, and Erika Bailey is smashingly earnest as heroic young Gertrude. Jon-Michael Hernandez exhibits expert comic timing in his scenes as Colonel Howard.

The set, designed by Brian Jones and the director, is terrific, with a broken-down bathtub—a metaphor if ever there was one—as its central, dominant element. It converts into Mr. Tiffany's desk and a plant stand in Mrs. Tiffany's conservatory; even more ingeniously, a pair of framed paintings on the rear wall convert into Millenette's bed. Neat.

Roe and his collaborators are to be congratulated on finding such felicitous ways to make a 158-year-old play feel accessible and modern. Of course, some of Fashion's sensibilities aren't so different from our own, which is why this is such a useful and interesting play to see.

One thing that anyone seeing Adam Rapp's new play, Faster, should know is that it doesn't make sense. Those seeking conventional cause-and-effect storytelling should go elsewhere. That doesn't mean, however, that Faster should be avoided. Quite the contrary. Those seeking riveting theater should run out to see it as soon as possible.

Set in an unnamed Midwestern city (modeled after Joliet, Illinois) during a severe drought and heat wave, Faster focuses on two small-time criminals—Kitchen (Mtume Gant) and Skram (Chris Messina)—who are preparing to sell a little girl they found down by the river. With the money, which promises to be substantial, they plan to relocate to New York City. As they wait for their buyer (Roy Thinnes) to show up, strange things begin happening. To say more would give away too much, but suffice it to say that things get biblical and apocalyptic.

The difference between Faster's two acts may be jarring to some—they are almost two different plays: the first is a language- and character-driven crime drama; the second is a symbol-laden avant-garde fest—but it's worth it: the collective impact of Faster is greater than its parts. Rapp's images and the cumulative effect of his words are  strong. The whole time I was watching Faster, I imagined that the charge I was getting from it must have been similar to the one 1960s audiences got from seeing the early work of Sam Shepard.

On the other hand, Rapp shares the young Shepard's disdain of plot, and his overactive use of symbolism. Both are disadvantages for Faster, and will either evaporate over time or become strengths for Rapp's future plays through work, practice, and experience.

The company is fortunate to have veteran Shepard director Darrell Larson on hand. The abrupt shifts in tone and thematic non-sequiturs don't scare him. Even though he doesn't help solve the play's problems, he guides everyone through them smoothly and gracefully. Larson is joined by a trio of designers who aid the play immensely. Costume designer Kaye Voyce's choice to put Kitchen and Skram in a Chicago Bears jersey and a New York Knicks jersey, respectively, speaks volumes about them. Jeff Croiter's lighting design signals strong emotional changes in a scene with the subtlest of light cues. And David Korins' set design is magnificent in its detail, use of space, and claustrophobia.

Rapp and Larson are also blessed with an extraordinary cast. In the two lead roles, Gant and Messina are electrifying. They give the kind of career-making performances that will certainly raise their stock within both the industry and the theatergoing public. Thinnes provides excellent support as the menacing, mysterious buyer, as does Robert Beitzel in the role of Skram's mute brother, Stargyll.

Even though it is short on clarity, Faster provides an emotional experience rare in today's theater, and signals the arrival of two very talented actors and a gifted playwright. Reason enough, in my book, to go right out and see it.

Michael Stock's new play Feed the Hole gets under the skin. Ostensibly about a pair of late-twentysomethings whose relationship is destroyed by his inertia and her sudden discovery of passion when she embarks on an affair, it is in fact a penetrating, piercing account of that eponymous hole that seems to lie hungry in both of its leading characters—a gaping sore, really, yearning for something vital and substantial to fill it. Stock paints a sad portrait of young adults unwilling or unable to commit to anything in their lives; whether they exemplify a whole generation, as they may, I leave to others to decide.

The play begins with Sam (short for Samantha) confiding in her boyfriend Rob that her best friend Shelly has just told her that she's having an affair. This news has untethered Sam for reasons she doesn't quite understand; as we'll discover, she has the same hole to feed that Shelly does, but she has decided, with rather unwavering determination, that Rob is the only man to fill it: their relationship teeter-totters as she tries to reshape him into the person she thinks she needs. The good news is that fundamentally Rob and Sam are on the same wavelength and he's willing to let her do just that. Their partnership, built on a shaky foundation of compromise and doubt, provides a smart contrast to Shelly's decaying one with her live-in boyfriend Brett.

For a while, it even feels like Feed the Hole is going to be a younger version of Dinner With Friends; but Stock has something different on his mind. That difference lies mostly in Brett, the promising young man-on-the-rise who, just a few years out of school, has dead-ended into an apathetic couch potato and has no idea why. The things we see Brett do—masturbate to a porn video, not decide what kind of food to order in for a late dinner, chug down a few swallows of cereal while he's getting dressed—telegraph exactly where he is in life. He's the one character in the play who doesn't know about Shelly's infidelity (at least, not until it's way too late); it's not absolutely clear that the wake-up call is going to really take.

They're interesting people that Stock is showing us, very realistic and very vivid, and we care about all of them, even though none of them seems entirely able to avoid screwing things up. For balance, the playwright also provides a pair of confidantes: John, a good-natured gay man, for the ladies; Steve, an unattached buddy type, for the men. The play proceeds in short vignettes that essentially chart the destruction of Shelly and Brett's union. The final scenes don't quite succeed in explaining everything and certainly don't provide a pat, neatly-wrapped conclusion; Stock doesn't get into the women's heads as precisely as he does the men's, which may be part of the trouble. But Feed the Hole is never less than earnestly watchable; Stock's talent for writing dialogue and creative compelling characters is formidable.

The play is directed by Karina Miller, who staged last summer's Black Thang; she hasn't solved the problem of the play's episodic-ness and things sometimes feel choppy and a bit slow as a result. But the powerful throughline of the piece stays manifest, and there are lots of terrific telling details throughout—like the way Michael Stock as Brett admires his less-than-perfect abs in a mirror that we can't see, or the natural-seeming give-and-take between Fay Wolf as Sam and Adam Reiner as Rob—that do much to enhance the script's effectiveness. Stock and Miller are willing to take chances here, too, which I admire a lot: a scene at the beginning of Act Two, for example, in which Shelly's marketing presentation at work is "acted out" by the other characters, pays off beautifully.

Feed the Hole, smart and probing, is a great introduction to a promising young playwright and theatre company (Sideway Theater, which Stock founded and runs). I will look forward to whatever these folks come up with next.

The central character of Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July is a Vietnam vet named Ken, a former anti-war activist who wasn't able to escape the draft and subsequently had both of his legs blown off while in action. Ken is so good-humored and positive, though, that you don't get any indication of this until halfway through the first act, when Ken finally stands up from behind the desk where he has spent the entire play so far and awkwardly crosses the stage grasping a pair of aluminum crutches.

By turns briskly funny and quietly moving, Fifth of July itself only gradually reveals its own infirmity: a sense of profound disappointment. As the title indicates, Wilson's characters are living in the aftermath of something big. In this case, it's the protest movement of the Sixties, and the bubble of hope for a better future that it created. The year is 1977, and though everyone in the play has survived the past to prosper materially, their dreams have languished in poverty.

It is the Fourth of July weekend, and a group of friends and relations has descended on Ken's beautiful childhood home in Lebanon, Missouri for a yearly get-together. Flourishing the grace and skill that have sustained his reputation as a fine stage actor, Robert Sean Leonard grounds the production as the play's magnanimous straight man, hiding Ken's hurt and conflicted heart beneath a graciously affable exterior. Ken shares the home with Jed (Michael Gladis), his soft-spoken lover, who has spent several years converting the grounds into a world-class garden. Several members of Ken's family are in attendance: his sister June (Jessalyn Gilsig), who used to be one of his partners in protest; June's 13-year-old daughter Shirley (Sarah Lord); and their aging Aunt Sally (Pamela Payton-Wright). Additionally, a pair of Ken and June's radical buddies have arrived: Ken's childhood chum John (David Harbour) and his industrial-heiress wife Gwen (Parker Posey), a fellow UC Berkeley alum. Rounding out the holiday group is Weston (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a dazed musician whom John has hired to help push Gwen into a singing career.

Notwithstanding the grandiosely squeamish Shirley, this assembly displays a liberality extending beyond the merely political: drugs and sex talk abound without negative comment, and the characters appear as comfortable poking at each other's foibles as they are at their own. But every group of friends has secrets, and these secrets make their inevitable appearance during the second act. However, it is not the suspense attending incipient sordidness that keeps the play afloat. Wilson has created characters so absorbing, the Signature has assembled a cast so apt, and director Jo Bonney has staged their interactions so well that just getting to know them is drama enough. Though the entire ensemble is uniformly effective, having already highlighted Leonard I'll name some more names. Parker Posey brings all the charms of her film work to the potentially scene-stealing role of Gwen, a gleefully neurotic rich girl—it is to her credit that, despite the audience's eagerness to lap her up, she refuses to teeter over into pure loopiness, playing Gwen as a woman who remains self-aware and intelligent despite her excesses. As her husband John, David Harbour becomes a big, red-faced wedge of cheese, easy to dismiss but easier still to forgive. Ebon Moss-Bachrach's eager stoner is a painfully accurate depiction of how a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Finally, as a brashly self-dramatizing adolescent, Sarah Lord is the age of 13 personified. As Shirley informs her forebears at the end of the play, their devotion to the future of America was not plied in vain.

In the end, the characters' conflicts are not so much with each other as they are with their times. Despite the futility that they feel, it becomes clear that life itself can be a form of action, crutches and all. For any American today who fears that her country is taking a wrong turn, Fifth of July summons familiar sentiments. And when these sentiments are summoned so artfully and humanely, it is indeed a consolation.

If Filthy Stinking Rich had been developed in the manner that most plays are, it would still arouse interest: though its theme—that love, not money, is what leads to happiness—is well-worn, its story, about a group of young New Yorkers whose destinies intertwine, manages to be resonant and entertaining at the same time.

The play introduces us to Francine, a fast-track Wall Street executive, and her bland but unscrupulous assistant Paul; and to Brian and Jessie, a pair of slightly-at-sea artists who happen to be in the same art history class at college. When Francine and Paul travel to Florida to close a Big Deal, they bump into Nancy, an old friend of Francine's, who becomes the catalyst for romance, intrigue, and the eventual encounter among all five of the play's characters at a Manhattan art gallery. To give away much more would spoil things; suffice to say that the climactic scene, in which the play's title characters (Francine and Paul) blithely humiliate its heroic characters (Brian and Jessie) has rare potency. And the denouement that follows proves entirely satisfying.

But, as I suggested earlier, Filthy Stinking Rich was not developed in the customary way; and its genesis makes it all the more striking and, I believe, informs and enhances each performance. Robert Davenport, the director, worked with five actors to improvise the entire piece, using techniques similar to the ones pioneered by British playmaker Mike Leigh. I'm told that there still is no script: just "beats" that each actor/character supplies at every show. The arc and the plot don't vary, but the individual moments do: the result has a rich texture, and a spontaneity and immediacy that might otherwise be absent.

David Guion (Brian), Krsitin DiSpaltro (Jessie), and Rasmus Johansen (Paul) really seem to inhabit their roles—they play with a naturalness that is palpable. Julia Dion (Francine) and Melissa Guion (Nancy) have created characters who feel more formulaic than the others; Francine, in particular, is too much the stereotypical repressed bitch-boss lady of countless films and TV shows. (The stereotyping is true to a lesser extent of the other four characters as well; there are places in Filthy Stinking Rich where it feels like the actors are improvising a movie about these people instead of a real-life scene.)

That impression notwithstanding, this is a noteworthy bit of theatre. Director Davenport (who has provided a slickly functional set with minimal fuss) is clearly on to a valuable way to create plays, one that engages his actors and his audiences in a rather special way. He calls his company Happy Accident Theater, which is apt: I look forward to the next happy accident that he and his collaborators come up with.

The new Flower Drum Song begins in Mao's China, in 1960, where a young woman named Mei-Li celebrates the joys of daily life: "A hundred million miracles are happening every day/And those who say they don't agree/Are those who do not hear or see." Mao's soldiers arrest her father and he dies in jail. Mei-Li, carrying only her father's cherished flower drum, escapes to America. When she and her fellow refugees catch sight of San Francisco and its welcoming Chinatown arch, they sing another chorus of their song. Oscar Hammerstein II's heartfelt meditation on the true miracles of everyday existence is transformed into an anthem of liberty and hope. I think he would approve.

In fact, I think Hammerstein would have liked what David Henry Hwang (librettist) and Robert Longbottom (director-choreographer) have done with Flower Drum Song, the musical comedy he wrote in 1958 with Richard Rodgers, from a novel by C.Y. Lee. No one would call Flower Drum Song Rodgers & Hammerstein's best effort (well, actually someone did, in last Sunday's New York Times' letters to the editor, but this writer is, I am sure, in the minority). But the show contains some lovely songs—the aforementioned "A Hundred Million Miracles," along with "I Enjoy Being a Girl," "Sunday," "Don't Marry Me," "Love Look Away," "You Are Beautiful," and "I Am Going to Like It Here"—which are stunningly orchestrated by Don Sebesky and sung beautifully by an immensely talented and assured company. And the themes that Hwang has brought to the fore in his long but effective new book—about preserving one's culture, about the nature of the Chinese immigrant experience, about the freedom to follow your heart, about respecting your parents and your children—these are entirely true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the best works created by Rodgers & Hammerstein.

So we have here an entirely different yet somehow remarkably faithful revival ("revisal" is the moniker being floated by the producers, actually). It's a show to respect and also to like, a lot. It's splendid family entertainment, reminiscent of that authentic golden age (when I was a youngster myself), when the business of musical theatre was to enchant its audience with song and dance.

The storyline of Flower Drum Song now focuses firmly on Mei-Li, who arrives, after that Prologue I told you about, in the home of her father's best friend, Master Wang. Wang owns a theatre on Grant Avenue where he produces Chinese opera six nights a week and where his Americanized son, Ta, stages "nightclub night" once a week. Mei-Li is immediately taken with Ta; but Ta has eyes only for glamorous Linda Low, the singer/stripper who stars in his show.

The arrival of Madame Liang, Linda's new agent, changes everything: She re-names the theatre the Club Chop Suey and turns it into a chic cabaret catering to the American tourists in San Francisco's Chinatown. Wang is at first appalled by this transformation, but his own itch for stardom soon changes his mind. He crashes the show on opening night, performing a rowdy comic number called "Gliding Through My Memoree," and it's not long before he becomes the star of the Chop Suey in the caricatured persona of Uncle Sammy Fong.

Now it's Ta's turn to be appalled. He begins to return to his Chinese roots, studying the Opera traditions that he once spurned and learning to appreciate them and the traditional woman—Mei-Li—that fate has brought to him.

Hwang has skillfully integrated the Rodgers & Hammerstein songs into his new book. "Sunday" becomes a tentative love song for Ta and Mei-Li (a la "People Will Say We're in Love" in Oklahoma!). The comic number "Don't Marry Me" is now a blissful romantic duet for Wang and Madame Liang, staged by Longbottom with a nod to Gigi's "I Remember It Well." "Fan Tan Fannie," a throwaway in the original production, becomes the centerpiece of the show's niftiest production number (see photo at the top of this page).

In addition to accommodating the tuneful score, Hwang's book contains some nice touches of its own. I love that Linda Low and Madame Liang are such independent, self-reliant women. And I love that Hwang doesn't judge—and doesn't ask us to judge—the actions of either Ta or his father. The second act opens with a comic number ("Chop Suey") that straddles a fine line between parody and something like minstrelsy: is Wang-as-Sammy Fong "selling out" or is he following his heart? Hwang leaves that up to us, but reminds us that the man who must live with the choice is an intelligent, worldly, thinking man who has not made this decision lightly. Hwang respects all of his characters; they're a nice lot to spend time with. Too few current musicals can make such a claim.

As for the actors playing them, they're a stellar bunch. Lea Salonga is a sympathetic and steadfast Mei-Li, and her voice is as strong and clear as it was a decade ago when she was Miss Saigon.  Her leading man, Jose Llana, acts and sings his role beautifully, especially the honestly impassioned "Like a God" near the show's conclusion. As the older couple, Randall Duk Kim and Jodi Long are superb, offering characterizations that are somehow nuanced and larger-than-life at the same time, and putting over their songs with bona fide star quality. Broadway veteran Alvin Ing is warm and delightful as Ta's Uncle Chin.

The production is as easy on the eye as it is on the ear, too. Robin Wagner's sets are lovely, applying the simplicity of Eastern theatrical traditions with style and skill. Gregg Barnes' costumes are appropriate and gorgeous, ranging from richly detailed robes for the Chinese Opera scenes to Madame Liang's spectacularly chic wardrobe. Natasha Katz's lighting complements both winningly.

In the end—a happy one, as you have no doubt guessed—the full company assembles on stage in glorious reds, again extolling the hundred million miracles that Hammerstein understood so well. Thanks to the excellent work of the creators of the new Flower Drum Song, for two-and-a-half hours, we get to witness one more.

The showcase is still the most popular and effective way to highlight the skills and talents of artistically homeless actors. But when the actors are especially skilled or in concert with their material, it’s the play that becomes illuminated and we begin to see ourselves showcased in its events. This nearly happens with the third of four pieces that smatter theatre ensemble has chosen to produce, which nearly makes Four Play a vital evening of grass-roots theatre.

Peter Tolan’s Pillow Talk is a Simon-esque two-hander that’s as light as it is watchable. Two college friends are traveling cross-country; one of them has a grandmother with a mobile home, which serves as an overnight pit-stop that tests the young men’s bond in unlikely ways. This is about as air-tight as situation comedy gets: quick-moving, thematically focused, and tightly directed by Kevin Monk. The play’s homophobic undercurrent is simply charmed away by Ledger Free and Nick Mouyiaris, who wisely attend to their respective neuroses.

After Loyal, a new play by Robyn Burland, is a somewhat scattered and circular study of two high-school girls and their warped families. We see the girls’ stories cleverly reenacted, but these asides wind up sidetracking us from the girls’ friendship. The relevance of the main setting (a golf course) and the time period (the mid-80’s) also escaped me.

The most interesting and deeply charged piece is also the most out of place. Like a well-dressed person at a nude beach, Pinter’s The Lovers is remarkable here not only for its disjunction but also for its concealments. A married couple talks politely to each other about the affairs each is having; we soon discover, however, that this is no simple infidelity. Jealousy and betrayal are favorite concerns of Pinter’s, and The Lovers explores them with all the requisite oddness and economy. Christina Cass as Sarah and Dan Patrick Brady as Richard play with an understated viciousness, ably assisted by director Lise McDermott. In time, these actors may relax enough to locate the dark center of this difficult drama.

Both Cass and Brady return for the evening’s closer, she less successfully as writer, he less vocally as actor. Bachelorette is a party scene that would challenge the most conscientious director. Characters dash in and out, some in various stages of undress (you’ve seen one nude beach...), while various throughlines are tried out and randomly discarded. The performers don’t seem to mind the clumsy dialogue and abrupt tonal changes, though, and Kathryn Gayner is particularly solid as Janie.

Abingdon’s small studio space doesn’t allow for much spectacle, but those ubiquitous modular boxes are used creatively. Three TV monitors hang above the stage and quickly become tangential. As their name seems to beg, smatter has given us only a smattering of their talent, and Four Play is at least one brave move short of a climax.

Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is about a 48-year-old short-order cook and a 41-year-old waitress (they work in the same restaurant) who spend the night together. When we meet them, it's already the wee hours of the morning; their first date (dinner and a movie) was sufficiently successful that Frankie invited Johnny home, where they make love for the first time. They're just finishing up, so to speak, when the curtain rises. What we see, more or less in real-time over the course of the two-act play, is what happens next.

What happens next is defined, mostly, by Johnny's determination to make Frankie fall in love with him—not quite at first sight, but certainly at first long look, which not surprisingly makes Frankie a bit uncomfortable. Johnny is so convinced that Frankie is the woman for him that he thinks nothing of proposing marriage (and a family) while the two banter and bicker about their lives, their fears, their wants, their looks, and assorted other topics. Frankie is vulnerable and mistrustful and self-protective, with an armor built up of insecurities and hurts from prior relationships. Johnny is persistent and oddly confident and often downright relentless.

We like them both, of course, which is what sustains the cat-and-mouse plot of the play. Romantically inclined folk will be rooting for them to get together from minute one. As for me, I had trouble becoming invested in the thing: Johnny's behavior borders on the psychotic, and when Frankie threatens, at one point, to call a cop ("I want to stop worrying I'm trapped in my own apartment with a fucking maniac.'), I was totally with her.

McNally's hand is everywhere. The dialogue and situation ring true, as far as it goes, but specific incidents and specific words always feel very written to me. His ordinary Joe/Jane protagonists talk with the articulate relish of Edward Albee characters, considering their words the way connoisseurs order wine. And the arc of their evening—bounded, importantly, by events in a building across the street and by a God-like radio deejay who interrupts the pair at opportune moments—is too precise, too ordered, too dramatically sound to feel organic or genuine. I never believed in this world for a minute, notwithstanding a terrific messy apartment set (by John Lee Beatty), evocative natural lighting (by Brian MacDevitt), or the totally naked bodies of the two actors. We're not eavesdropping on raw, intimate moments here; we're being beguiled by a fairy tale. The fact that the prince and princess are supposedly working-class schlemiels make it feel comforting, perhaps. But there's nothing real about Frankie, Johnny, or the Clair de Lune where they find themselves.

A different cast might have made a difference: it's hard to believe that buff Stanley Tucci or slim Edie Falco would complain about "skinny people" (as Frankie and Johnny do at one point in the play). Tucci doesn't convince us that he is a cook or a lonely guy; Falco fares better, though my companion pointed out that her role gives her more opportunities than his to stretch one's acting chops.

There's nothing wrong with Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune: I suspect it will give a lot of stargazers some real pleasure this summer and fall. And the dialogue is certainly funny, and the romantic spirit that infuses it is certainly lovely. But don't expect to get terribly caught up in this little tale: there's gossamer aplenty here, but little of substance to hold onto.

Walking out of the Anspacher Theatre, it occurred to me that Fucking A might be dated: the social-economic-political concerns of Suzan-Lori Parks' play—which was written in 2000—somehow felt less pressing to me, so preoccupied am I with foreign affairs these days. And then, I got on the N train and right by the doors lay a homeless man, bundled up from head to toe, asleep on the floor of the car. And I thought: forgive me: the problems of the impoverished never go away. Maybe now more than ever we need a play like this to remind us.

Fucking A is described by Parks as a "riff" on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. In the play, Hester Smith is the poor, illiterate mother of a young son who, after stealing some food from the rich family Hester works for, is sent away to prison for some indeterminate (lengthy) amount of time. Hester then faces a choice between jail and a career as an abortionist; she chooses the latter as a sad but honest way to earn money to buy her son's freedom. Abortionists, in this "small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere" where Fucking A takes place, are branded with an "A" on their chests, to identify them as undesirables and also as a sort of licensing scheme, to keep women in trouble from putting their fates in the hands of unskilled charlatans.

It's a tough world that Parks creates in this play, different than—but scarily reminiscent of—our own. It's ruled by a callow Mayor who is concerned above all with public image and personal pleasure, in that order; his wife, the First Lady (whose money helped get him where he is) has been unable to conceive an heir for him, and is consequently severely out of favor. Some more of the details Parks provides about the half-colonial, half-apocalyptic landscape of Fucking A: few people can read and write; a corrupt prison system, run by something called the "Freedom Fund," extorts money from families in exchange for visitation privileges; bands of hunters, eager for the reward money, pursue criminals and escaped convicts with barbaric brutality.

Director Michael Greif finds Brechtian resonance in all this: above the playing area, in big backwards wooden letters, is the slogan FREEDOM IS NOT FREE. LCD signs above the stage announce the ten songs that Parks has included in her play, each of which illustrates and illuminates some aspect of socioeconomic hierarchy.

Women speak a second language at times in the play, mostly when they're talking about their reproductive systems (which, in a story about an abortionist, happens fairly frequently). What they say is translated on those signs overhead; are they saying things that the men who control this town are afraid of? (I actually formed a theory that Parks' selection for this play of a title that is unprintable in most mainstream publications might be an ironic commentary on this point, forcing the media to say something it wants to censor. I'm not sure if I still think so, but there it is, for anyone who wants to jump on it, pro or con.)

Hester spends the first act of the play making payments to the Freedom Fund in order to have a picnic with her son, who has now been in prison for twenty years. It does not surprise us when it turns out that the inmate sent to her is an imposter; we know that Hester's son, scarily now called "Monster," has escaped from prison and has set out to seduce the First Lady in order to get enough money to finance his disappearance. But it surprises Hester terribly, for she has lived her life, circumstances notwithstanding, honestly and simply. The betrayal sears hatred in her heart, right under the branded "A" that she must always keep uncovered, and fuels events that, in Act Two, lead inevitably to tragedy.

That tragedy is the one that comes from humans who have forgotten, or given up, their humanity. The Scarlet Letter is all about religious hypocrisy, but there is no God in Fucking A and no religion save the pursuit of money. Parks isn't exploring anything different here than she did in In the Blood or Topdog/Underdog, but by placing her story in an alien world she might actually hit home harder than ever.

Greif's staging at the Public Theater is taut and stirring, touching us in spite of the Brechtian trappings. The central performances of S. Epatha Merkerson as Hester and Mos Def as Monster are heartbreakingly effective; so, too, is Daphne Rubin-Vega's riveting portrayal of Hester's best friend Canary, a compassionate yet pragmatic woman who is the mistress of the Mayor. Bobby Cannavale is chillingly transparent as the Mayor, while Michole Briana White makes an unexpectedly complex woman of his First Lady. Susan Blommaert, Peter Gerety, Jo-Jo Gonzalez, Jesse Lenat, Manu Narayan, and Chandler Parker—all at the top of their form—complete the ensemble.

Fucking A is socially conscious drama; it's also riveting theatre—no matter what you make of the machinations of Parks' plotting, once the tragic climax arrives, the work is shattering. As long as haves and have-nots persist—and what is the cause of most of the suffering in the world, now and ever, if not that?—we need a Fucking A to remind us of our humanity.

The chances are excellent that you've never seen Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna before; my research turns up no professional NYC productions in the past 25 years or so. Happily, NAATCO—the National Asian American Theatre Co.—is rectifying this situation, and you should immediately take advantage of their generosity and see Fuenteovejuna, because it's a riveting, important play; and this staging, by David Herskovits, of a new adaptation by NAATCO artistic director Mia Katigabak, more than does it justice.

Funeteovejuna was written in 1619 and so not surprisingly feels very much a Renaissance play. There's a pair of lovers, Laurencia and Frondoso, who spend time early on pretending not to care for each other; there's a scene, later, where Laurencia's father, Esteban (who is also Mayor of the village of Fuenteovejuna), toys with his daughter, pretending to want her to marry someone else, even though he fully intends Frondoso for his son-in-law. There are two other young women, Pascuala and Jacinta, who philosophize about love with a serious-minded peasant called Mengo, so solemn that he feels comic.

But all of this is mere dressing; Fuenteovejuna is really concerned with weightier matters than these. For around all of these young people is a town, one that is currently being terrorized by a renegade Commander named Fernan Gomez de Guzman. The Commander has his way with the young women of the village as he pleases; he thinks nothing of killing or torturing any who oppose his whims. Gomez's soldiers gang-rape Jacinta, and when the outraged Mengo tries to defend her honor, he is brutally beaten. Eventually, the Commander commits one atrocity too many, raping Laurencia right after her wedding to Frondoso. The act is so ugly and so brazen—the Mayor's daughter, on her wedding day!—that at last the townspeople are jolted into action.

Katigbak and Herskovits render the rebellion as bloody and vicious as anything we have seen the Commander do—a kind of retribution, to be sure, but also a reminder that humanity's thirst for vengeance is bitter and awful. What happens next, though, is what makes Fuenteovejuna such a compelling work. An investigation into the murder of the Commander is ordered by the King and Queen (Ferdinand and Isabella; the play is set at the end of the 15th century). But when anyone in the town is asked who did it, he or she always replies—even on the rack—"Fuenteovejuna."

Katigbak's adaptation is loose and contemporary, which makes the piece very accessible. Herskovits builds on this, with lots of self-referential asides (such as characters' interaction with the on-stage soundman, Hugo); there may, in fact, be too much of it—I'm not sure that I needed as much remove from the action as Herskovits seems to want to give me. The large ensemble of twenty actors is excellent, with some of the standouts being Joel Carino as put-upon Mengo, Mel Duane Gionson as the gentle and usually wise Mayor, Tomi Peirano as the victimized Jacinta, and Joel de la Fuente and Lydia Gaston as the young lovers Frondoso and Laurencia.

The play leaves us with intriguing questions that are also, alas, rather timely: Would a village (nation) today have the courage to overthrow a dictator and stand united in the face of any opposition? When, if ever, is it morally acceptable for a nation to murder its leader (who presumably is at least protecting the citizenry even if also oppressing them)? From the comfortable distance of 21st century democracy, the situation faced by the people of Fuenteovejuna ought to feel remote, but events as recent as last week's "referendum" in Iraq remind us otherwise. Here's a play that can teach us something about the world we live in, even though it's almost 400 years old.

My sister, who is very astute, made an interesting point when I spoke with her on the telephone a couple of months ago. She was talking about the barrage of images that come at us from our TV screen: we push the remote and we see, randomly, an infomercial about hair care, a news report about a terrorist attack, a 50-year-old sitcom, a scene from a bloody war film. Her question was, how does the mind process all this complicated and conflicting data—how do we know which images are real and which are not? When deliberate fabrication and supposedly objective reality and the many hazy gradients in between all emanate from the same trusty box in the living room, how do we make sense of our world?

I bring this up because, as zeitgeist themes will, my sister's very important concern turns out to be the focus of Fundamental, the new multimedia performance work by theater et al. I say multimedia somewhat advisedly, because though Fundamental blends, rather seamlessly, live action with video and sound, it does so entirely to emulate the one medium, TV, that so dominates our existence. Across the front of the stage are three blank television monitors, inside of which much of the performance plays out: the main difference between this show and life is that, whether we like it or not, director Brian Rogers has control of the remote. The images that flash in front of us for the just-over-an-hour running time of this program have been carefully selected by him.

So what content have Rogers and his collaborators decide to feed us? All sorts of things: commercials for cosmetics, news footage from the former Yugoslavia, wrestling matches between "Jihad Joe" and "Private Pain," snippets of John Edward's "Crossing Over" show, helpful instructions about liposuction and other forms of plastic surgery, scary video games, "close-ups" of Jihad Joe swearing that he will not deliberately throw his next wrestling match, excerpts from actual writings of Jerry Falwell, a suicide bomber, and the mastermind of the Columbine massacre, George Bush musing on the "quiet anger" that he sensed in America after the 9/11 attacks. And much, much, much more: I defy anyone to catch even 75% of the material that cascades in front of us at a single viewing of Fundamental.

Framing it all is a simulated call-in radio talk show hosted—live, ironically enough—by a post-modern shock jock called Dave the Rave; he comments on some of what happens on stage the way we all do in our own living rooms, suggesting—scarily and potently—that in our inert, hyperbolic anomie we are exactly like him, which is to say raging (not quietly angry!) but utterly impotent. Meanwhile, all this stuff that could be true or could be fake—all fastidiously recreated and obviously not "real" here in the theatre; more irony—bombards away at us. As my sister says, how do we process this?

But there's even more going on here. Much of what's shown to us has to do with what we believe at a far deeper level. A Muslim fundamentalist justifies blowing himself up in a car as a way to get to heaven; Jerry Falwell spews intolerant hate speech as an alternative; TV spiritualist-or-charlatan John Edward rejoins with messages from Up Above to grieving loved ones. Rogers is making us stare at all these conflicting images so that we can confront them. What do we need this for? What's the difference between believing that wrestling isn't fixed and believing that Allah will embrace you for killing a few American infidels?

This is, as I hope you can tell, a powerful, challenging, thought-provoking show; a moderated discussion following the performance I attended generated debate that actually lasted longer than Fundamental's running time. (Not to mention the discussion that followed on the way home and after, long into the night.) Fundamental is the most exciting kind of theatre there is: it stimulates thought and discussion, on a variety of significant subjects. It has a strong point of view but offers no real answers: Rogers and his company are interested in making us look hard and critically about certain phenomena in our lives that seem to be especially important these days. They succeed admirably.

Fundamental is performed by a high-energy cast that includes Sekou Campbell, Jennifer Lee Dudek, David A. Green (as the acerbic Dave the Rave), Gary Hennion (who is chilling in several of his characterizations, notably the Islamic suicide bomber and a kid playing a grossly violent video game), Mikéah Jennings, Sheila Lewandowski (who channels John Edward with eerie felicity), James Morss, Emily Mitchell, and Paula Wilson. The complicated and largely successful design is by Rogers himself (sets), Garin Marschall (lighting), Ann Warren (sound and music), and E. Shura Pollatsek (costumes); the nearly continuous video, a montage of fragments from every corner of the satellite dish, is by David Chikhladze and Nathan Thompson. All of these artists are to be commended for bringing this remarkable and provocative work to the stage.

Fundamental suffers from sensory overload: segments about professional debunker James Randi and Waco cult leader David Koresh, noted in the program, completely eluded me during the performance. I wonder, too, whether Dave the Rave's running commentary distanced me more than it should from the proceedings. These are small quibbles, however; Fundamental has to be as massive and out-of-control as the medium that is its target in order to accomplish its objectives.

In the end, the issues raised by this incisive, intelligent performance more than compensate for any of Fundamental's small imperfections. This is theatre that is absolutely worth seeing. Bravo to theater et al for having the guts and the brains to bring it to us.

Shawn B. Hirabayashi's new play Funny is about a young woman named Alice who hires a hit man to kill her roommate, Delia. This decision—which Alice regrets just before the hit man arrives to do the job—sets off a strange chain of events that culminates in Alice and the hit man journeying to Papua New Guinea, where she feels better about things but he eventually dies of malaria, his arms locked tightly around her. Noting, as the play does early on, that a butterfly flapping its wings can set off a hurricane a hemisphere away, it's probable to conclude that Alice's decision also somehow causes the death of Delia's mother and the dissolution of Delia's romance with a young man named Giovanni Forrest, who tracks Alice down in New Guinea and, later, winds up in a disturbed state at a co-op in Alaska (which we know because Giovanni narrates the play).

If all of this sounds confusing, it's because it is. Funny is an intriguing, enormously watchable play. But I left it not at all sure what the playwright was trying to tell me. Alice's midlife crisis is compelling, as far as it goes, but we don't really have much information about her that allows us to fully understand it: she seems to be suffering from a bout of bad karma (she's having trouble with doors), but we don't have much more to go on—certainly not enough to explain a not-that-sudden plan to kill her best friend.

The trip to New Guinea is similarly perplexing, especially because set designer Miranda Hardy has (masterfully) placed New Guinea in Alice's apartment: sofa and all are still intact, just covered with dense foliage. Is Alice dreaming? Is Hirabayashi being surreal? I was never sure; likewise, I couldn't tell if the most outlandish bits (like the hit man's rigor mortis death grip on Alice) were meant to be scarily funny or just scary.

Funny feels like a 9/11 play: it occurred to me that Alice and Delia's encounters with gigantic life-altering (and life-and-death) situations might be metaphors for the WTC catastrophe. The very different ways the two women cope with them—one retreats into a kind of lunacy, while the other retrenches, gets stronger, and survives—offer lessons, maybe, for dealing with the worst in life.

Funny is directed by Julie Hamberg, and features a cast of four. Ivanna Cullinan plays Alice and against the odds she makes her very sympathetic. Jacqueline Mazarella, as Delia, communicates hurt and anguish with tremendous resonance. Erik Kever Ryle is likable as Giovanni, while Jeremy Brisiel is both funny and touching as the hit man.