nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

The Bible, the Great Depression and gay themes collide in Sacrifice to Eros. Written by Fred Timm, the play chronicles the story of the Westfield family in rural Wisconsin during the height of the Great Depression. In a plot mirroring the Biblical story of the prodigal son, John Westfield’s final wish is to see his son Jesse, who left the farm three years ago. The family hopes that Jesse will return and take up his responsibilities on the family farm. As the plot unwinds, it becomes clear that Jesse’s reason for self-exile is his homosexuality, which he doesn’t feel he can admit to his family. His return eventually leads to a confrontation between the family members over familial responsibility and acceptance.

The play's greatest strength is its ability to evoke the setting. The accents come through beautifully, and the characters’ activities on stage such as weeding the garden, taking off boots, or bringing out glasses of water constantly create the atmosphere of family life on a farm. Jeffrey Collins-Harper’s simple set is nestled into the corner of the theatre and is made up of a farmhouse porch in pastel colors surrounded by potted plants. The simple colors reflect the legend-like feel of the play. The passage of time, which is such an important element in the play, is nicely illustrated with the lighting design by Spike.

The most intriguing character is crazy Aunt Edna, played by Carolee. Aunt Edna is an old woman who has moved from a mental hospital to live on the farm with her brother’s family. She focuses her energies on tending her garden, practicing her apparent worship of the Greek gods, and meddling in the lives of the others. Her purpose is to be the voice that is not bound by tradition. What makes this character intriguing is not her predictable role in the plot, but rather the enthusiasm which keeps her strong when facing off against the ignorance of her family.

Robert Glenn Decker’s portrayal of the prodigal son, Jesse manages to capture the repression of the character. His coldness toward the family’s hospitality and concern makes his final decision all the more poignant.

The most developed relationship on stage is that of Jesse’s brother Cliff and his wife Rita. Both Jennifer McCabe as Rita and Don Clark Williams as Cliff give excellent performances as the struggling couple. The weariness of their life hangs heavily upon them in the first few scenes, but underneath this tiredness there is a reservoir of strength that you can see the characters draw upon at crucial moments.

Even so, the strong relationship between Rita and Cliff cannot completely justify Cliff’s fast change in opinion. A few days after the discovery of his brother’s sexual orientation, Rita gives him a talk about acceptance in the family, drawing a parallel with his family accepting her in spite of her promiscuous past. It’s a great speech, but not enough for him to go from complete disapproval to grudging acceptance. In fact, the real transformation takes place off stage after Cliff and Rita’s talk. To deny the audience the chance to witness this pivotal change undermines its sincerity.

Sacrifice to Eros works well in evoking its setting and the lives of some of its characters. Still, more development of the script in terms of character development could make the play much more impressive.

I'm not sure, when all is said and done, that any single performance of the 2002-03 theatre season will prove as memorable as Al Pacino's in Salome: The Reading. A star is, after all, a star; and a star on turbo-throttle—as the over-the-top and scene-stealing Pacino is here—is irresistible.

You will notice, though, that I haven't said anything like "brilliant," or even "good": the word that came to mind, when the hundred-minute workout that is Salome: The Reading was over with, was grotesque. This is, as you almost certainly know, Oscar Wilde's once-controversial play about King Herod and his lecherous desire for his step-daughter Salome. His lust drives him to promise her anything if she will just dance for him; she complies, but demands the head of Herod's prisoner, John the Baptist (here called Jokanaan) as her price.

Herod is a wonderfully complicated character, the sum of several intriguing dichotomies. He lusts after Salome and knows he should not; he is respected as a just ruler, but punishes his enemies barbarically; he has imprisoned the prophet Jokanaan, but fears him deeply. Such contradictions make it understandable why an actor like Pacino might want to play him (twice; Pacino starred as Herod for Circle in the Square back in the '90s, too). Unfortunately, what's delivered here is in no way the intelligent, measured portrayal that we have the right to expect from one of our leading actors. Instead, we get a calculatedly attention-grabbing caricature of a weak-willed loudmouth; think Gilbert Gottried crossed with Pacino's own played-for-laughs villain in Dick Tracy. It's big, and it's entertaining in its way, but this performance sheds no light on why Herod does what he does, or what his actions mean to audiences today. Why is Pacino doing this?

He's not, by the way, alone in turning this—let's face it—mediocre and overwrought play into something rather silly. Marisa Tomei, in the title role, plays Salome as a spoiled sitcom teenager, half valley girl, half princess. Her dance of the seven veils (sans veils, I should add; this is a minimalist reading, remember) runs the gamut of intensity, as someone once said, from A to B. Chris Messina overacts as shamelessly as Pacino in the play's opening (he plays a young Syrian captain in love with Salome); and Timothy Doyle is embarrassingly effeminate as the page in whom the captain confides. Only Dianne Wiest, dignified and unmoved as Salome's mother, and David Strathairn, believably passionate as Jokanaan, deliver credible performances.

Estelle Parsons' staging is stark, presumably to allow us to use our imaginations to amplify Wilde's ideas and poetry. Trouble is, the poetry is fitfully awful and the ideas are never much developed. Without an anchoring concept from, say, its leading man, Salome seems destined to flail, and so it does here.

Ingenious scenery, catchy music, relevant lyrics, intriguing lighting, professional actors, and free tickets. Sarah, Plain and Tall is showing kids how amazing and accessible theatre can be.

I went into Sarah, Plain and Tall with absolutely no expectations. When I saw that the theatre was filled with noisy, small children and that I, although only sixteen, was one of the oldest people there, I was convinced that not only was the show going to be intolerable, but the atmosphere as well. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Sarah, Plain and Tall takes place in the late 1800s and is the story of a “peculiar” and spirited woman, Sarah, who would rather wear pants and go fishing than constrict her breathing with a corset and spend her time looking for a prospective husband. She begins writing to Jacob, a widowed Kansas farmer, and eventually decides to leave her beloved Maine to stay with him and his two children for a month.

While the story may be simple and straightforward, it is never sappy or clichéd. Director Joe Calarco uses every production aspect at his disposal—costumes, sound, props, lighting, and music—to support and enhance the show, without ever detracting from the story. The musical score is quite appealing and memorable (I caught myself humming it later) and the lighting is subtle but also very effective. The set is exceedingly creative and no piece of it serves only a single purpose. A window in one scene becomes a chicken coop in the next. Sarah, Plain and Tall engages the imagination but it is never a stretch to grasp what is going on. The cast, consisting of Becca Ayers, Kenneth Boys, Herndon Lackey, Kate Wetherhead, Debra Wiseman, and John Lloyd Young all do fine work, especially Wetherhead and Young who, although adults, play small children so well, you never even notice anything is unusual.

Perhaps the best thing about the show, though, is the creators’ attitude. The show is never patronizing to its audience or “dumbed-down.” The actors approach the show seriously and professionally. This stance is totally unlike any other kids' theatre I’ve ever seen. And in turn, the young people responded by being an amazingly receptive and respectful audience. At the end of the show the applause was deafening.

TheatreWorksUSA is a pioneer of children’s theatre and I really hope it continues producing the same kind of enjoyable, inviting, high quality work. Sarah, Plain and Tall is beautifully realized and an example of well-done, well-directed, well-thought-out theatre. I honestly don’t think a better production of this story can be done.

Lots of lives deserve to be the subjects of biographical one-person shows, but there's a lot to be said about George Burns' being the quintessential one. He lived to be a hundred years old, and his century coincided almost exactly with the 20th, marking him as observer and partaker of just about everything that makes Americans what they are today. Burns' story was the classic American rags to riches tale, starting in New York City's Lower East Side in a tenement shared with his immigrant parents and ten brothers and sisters, and ending at the top of his profession in Hollywood and Las Vegas. Most important, his life was lived on stage, making this particular dramatic form—so often a strained and clumsy fit for biography—exactly apropos. Burns, after all, talked to audiences—from the vaudeville stage, from the radio mike, from the silver screen, from the TV screen—all his days.

So what could be more natural than George Burns telling his life story in a one-man show? Say Goodnight Gracie, which features master impressionist (and masterful actor) Frank Gorshin as the late, great entertainer, is Burns' belated Broadway debut. If you have ever seen Burns perform, or have read any of his books, then you will know just what to expect: shrewd, dry anecdotes about all those decades in show business and savvy analysis of how comedy works, omnipresent cigar in hand, and all in the service of a beautiful love story, the one Burns lived with his leading lady on- and off-stage, Gracie Allen. Her comic genius (and his—he was the one who invented that dizzy persona, remember) is illustrated amply in excerpts from many Burns & Allen routines from the 20s right up to the 50s.

And oh yes, he'll even sing a little. George Burns loved to sing.

Say Goodnight Gracie has been put together with loving care by author Rupert Holmes, who seamlessly integrates the terrific one-liners and sketches with countless anecdotes from Burns' memoirs, all presented in a straightforward chronological framework. The idea is that Burns, just passed away, is auditioning to join Gracie in heaven (and don't worry, Burns certainly sees the irony in the star of three Oh, God! movies auditioning for the Real One). The device would be constrictive if the subject weren't so darned interesting: Burns lived through, after all, every major form of entertainment from vaude to video (as Variety once put it) and beyond; he even helped invent some of them. Anyone interested in the history of American pop culture is going to be fascinated by what's revealed here.

And anyone who's in the mood to laugh is going to have a field day. Gorshin as Burns is delightfully dry telling his stories; but the big belly laughs are reserved for his co-stars (as in Burns' own life—remember, he was the straight man). Didi Conn impersonates Gracie (voice only); and then we get to see and hear the real thing in invaluable clips from Burns & Allen films and TV broadcasts. Jack Benny, Burns' lifelong best friend, also makes a few appearances. There's not a better supporting cast anywhere on Broadway.

What can I say?—this trip down memory lane is an honest-to-goodness pleasure. I started smiling as soon as Gorshin got revved up, and I didn't stop until the curtain call (though I may have had a tear or two in my eye as well by then—this show manages to touch us without being mushy or sentimental). Kudos to Gorshin, who proves himself every bit the grand showman that his subject was, and to director John Tillinger, who stages the show with sensitivity and style.

And now, all that's left for me to do is Say Goodnight, Gracie.

Goodnight.

T.R. Knight more than held his own with a stageful of theatre pros in last season's revival of Noises Off (he played Tim, the harried stage manager). In Scattergood, Knight's co-star is the formidable Brian Murray, and he proves himself every bit that worthy veteran's match. Notwithstanding his hangdog looks and his affably inarticulate stage persona, Knight is emerging as one of the rising stars of his generation.

He certainly deserves a more plausible vehicle than this one. Scattergood, written by an Irish émigré playwright named Anto Howard, tells the story of Brendan Hillard, a painfully shy young man (who seems to be some kind of budding poetic genius) who becomes enamored with the chivalric code of medieval knights—so much so that, guided by a like-minded professor, he sets out to establish his own nobility by sacrificing his love for Miss Regan, a comely fellow student.

Most of Scattergood takes place in the professor's office, where Brendan reports—tentatively at first, then more spiritedly—the progress of his non-romance. Miss Regan writes ardent, exciting missives to Brendan which fuel these discussions, along with memories of Scattergood's own long-ago doomed love affair with a married woman. Scattergood encourages Brendan to place Honor above love, lust, and whatever other urges he might be feeling, and the younger man eagerly complies.

The real world eventually intrudes on this quixotic pair, though in a way that I didn't anticipate and, alas, that I didn't buy: Howard's second act is unconvincing psychologically, at least to me. That said, the larger-than-life academic Scattergood provides a meaty role for the eminently watchable Murray, who bites into it with gusto in one of his trademark irascible-lovable performances. And, as already noted, young Brendan offers the excellent Knight another chance to demonstrate his particular talents to the theatregoing public. I am looking forward to whatever he decides to do next.

As theatre critic, I can provide the service of encouraging self-produced new talent, or experienced talent that’s been overlooked. And when I sit down to watch a play, I always hope for the best. But I sometimes get needlessly beaten up for my efforts. By its title, Scrambled Eggs, Bagels, and Other Acts of Love led me to believe that at least one of these things would be deeply or wittily explored; as it is, Richard Brennan’s play (and production) is a scrambled something that seems to give up on itself even before the audience does.

The four actors involved (Brennan plays David and serves as director) engage in a series of unmotivated transgressions that culminate, at one point, in a strobe-lit orgy scene. The dialogue is peppered with innuendo, and there is plenty of skin and random dancing. It’s sort of like an R-rated, bisexual “Three’s Company” episode, plus one, minus hilarity. By the time two of the characters are being judged in an awkward and contrived penis competition, I was completely lost.

CK (Peter Downey) and Paul (Jesse May) show up unexpectedly at David’s apartment. Then Cheryl (Nicole DiGaetano) enters with a key, though she doesn’t live there. Then she starts kissing all of them. She seems to be with Paul now, though she used to date David, who winds up with CK. Some expensive china is broken offstage. CK does a strip tease. Penises are judged. These games are played with surface attitude, but none of the players are in any jeopardy of producing a genuine feeling in themselves or in us.

On the level of character, Scrambled Eggs... is both baffling and predictable; however, in the second act, the plot becomes even more confusing. A now-pregnant Cheryl appears, whom David wants to hurt for reasons that I’m sure make sense to him. Jump ahead, or rather back, to the next scene, where we find ourselves in a continuation of the previous Act. It’s as if Brennan couldn’t think of an ending, so he tried to sidestep one altogether.

Explaining to CK, a struggling actor, why he attends the often dreadful productions CK is in, David says, “It is, after all, a learning experience for them, isn’t it?” We, their dutiful audience, can only hope so.

Screaming in the Wilderness begins with Nadine, a young and ambitious television journalist, sniffing out the story that she decides will win her credibility and longevity in her dog-eat-dog profession. She has heard a young priest, Father James Allen, proclaim to his congregation that he is Christ; shortly thereafter, she learns that a terminally ill child has supposedly been "healed" by him. She latches onto Father James with a tenacity that quickly borders on obsession; though she tells us over and over that Walter Cronkite is her role model, she repeatedly finds herself resorting to dubious and deceitful tactics to get her next scoop.

One of the things she does is sneak into the Cathedral where Father James has been sequestered by the higher-ups in the Church hierarchy (who are, unsurprisingly, very concerned about his claims). Once inside, she scores an interview with the Archduke's secretary, a woman named Jane who, coincidentally enough, is also Father James' estranged sister. Jane tells Nadine about her strange childhood, growing up with James in a remote West Virginia town under the weird but watchful eye of their single mother Mary (!) who appears convinced that her son is indeed the second coming of Jesus Christ. In a flashback, we witness the fateful night when young James' destiny was apparently sealed, but the scene ends before its climax, so painful is the memory to Jane.

Playwright Vanda withholds revelation until the very last moments of the piece, meanwhile progressing through what turns out to be a mire of intriguing but increasingly disparate plot elements. Archduke Fuller wants to get Father James psychiatric help and remove him from the Church, but his opportunistic assistant, Subregent Dillaway, sees a fortune to be made in phony miracles and Father James dolls and plots a coup. Nadine is haunted by memories of an emotionally distant mother and seeks consolation in an enigmatic father figure named Mordecai. Father James is visited by a blind woman and winds up making love to her on the Cathedral altar, with Nadine fortuitously nearby with a camera to record the event for the tabloids (this is the reason for the photo at the top of this page, by the way). Later, a marketing wiz named Ricky Day teaches Dillaway about merchandising and Nadine has a strange dream in which she dances with four "primitives" and cathartically starts to speak in tongues.

As you might guess, the throughline—not to mention the compelling mystery of what happened to James when he was a boy—gets swallowed up by the morass of plot: sometimes a writer just has too many ideas for her own good. What I took to be the central theme of Screaming in the Wilderness—whether Nadine (or anyone) is capable of recognizing a miracle when she sees one—simply gets lost in the shuffle. It's a shame, because that theme (and a few of the other, seemingly tangential ones posited in the play, such as the hypocrisy of the Church and the Media) are worth exploring. What's more, Vanda has real talent in creating intriguing characters and giving them interesting and tantalizing things to say.

Director Steven McElroy doesn't solve all of the script's problems, but I love the way he's double-, triple-, and quadruple-cast the show: each of these actors performs a single function that's spread among his or her characters, so that (for example) Danielle Quisenbury portrays both Jane and the Archduke, who are the two people in the play who want to help and protect Father James. Quisenbury is excellent; so is Gerald Downey, who projects James' quiet conviction with real assurance, and Tom Dusenbury, who balances Subregent Dallaway's sleazy opportunism with a nice hint of reverence.  The set (by Carter Inskeep) and the lighting (by Jason Marin) are quite good, especially given the off-off-Broadway budget; Trevor McGinness' costumes, which allow Dusenbury to transform himself from a priest to a middle-aged lady with a couple of simple adjustments to his attire, are often ingenious.

So there's a lot worth praising in Screaming in the Wilderness, which is why I kept rooting for it to be better. I still think it can be: some judicious pruning and thoughtful focusing are in order, but there's a fine play buried in here. I encourage Vanda and her colleagues at Emerging Artists Theatre Company to take a second look.

Second Chances, a new play with music by Michael Gurin and Matt Okin, tells the story of Sam Levine, a young American man living in Israel. He has journeyed back to the United States—Los Angeles, in particular—to be with his father, who has just been shot in the head in an accident on a freeway. Sam and his father are badly estranged, but Sam's conscience and religion tell him he must come to see the old man before he dies—to comfort the sick, he tells himself, and to honor his parent.

Bob Lee (né Erwin Levine) is in no mood to die, however, and in even less of a mood to be comforted or honored by a child he hasn't talked to in twelve years and whom he only carelessly cared for prior to that. Bob is a very successful and very cynical film director—his current big hit is a disaster movie spinoff of "Gilligan's Island"—and he finds that he has little in common with Sam, who left a lucrative job on Wall Street to find purpose and faith in the Holy Land, where he now works as an auto mechanic. Sam is studying Orthodox Judaism, which is particularly irksome to Bob, who has not practiced his religion in decades.

In a series of short, tight scenes, playwrights Gurin and Okin sketch out a reconciliation between the two men, mostly achieved through the father's rediscovery of ritual and faith that had eluded him for too long. Though at one point Sam tells Bob that he can honor his father even if he doesn't agree with his father's spirituality, Second Chances ultimately posits redemption in the practice of religion. The play feels more uncompromising than I would wish it to be, mainly because we have so little information about why Bob departed from Judaism in the first place. Without an understanding of what drove Bob away from his heritage and his God, we have to take it on faith that his sudden reversal, in late middle age, is genuine and valued. But of course, taking things on faith is precisely what Second Chances is about.

Spencer Chandler, whose work at Folksbiene Theatre has consistently been excellent, achieves the same high standard with his performance here as Sam—a layered, compassionate portrayal of a man trying to rescue himself from family conflict and resentment. Neil Levine is magisterial as Bob, and also scores impressively in two choice comic turns at the beginning and end of the play as a pair of cannily wise "prophets" who sit next to Sam on his flights to and from Los Angeles.

The play's themes of devotion and faith are reinforced by several songs by Avi Kunstler which he sings (sometimes with Chandler) in between scenes. They provide an appropriately uplifting soundtrack for this simple but effective tale of reconciliation with family and God.

In Service, their current evening of thematically linked one-act plays, The Drilling Company addresses the nature of service. The production started its life as a reaction to 9/11 ("It caused us to ask, who was serving who and why," states the Artistic Director in the press release), but examines all kinds of service. Eight writers weigh in with their take on the theme, and the results, while uneven, are entertaining overall.

The best entries here are all funny and have no lofty aspirations. In Mutant Sex Party by Edward Manning, a john gets off on hearing a male prostitute tell him what an evil piece of crap he is. Carol Scudder's A Perfect World concerns a rich society woman's vision of government-sanctioned volunteer slavery ("They go to a booth and sign up--just like the army!" she explains). La Mouche by Stephen Bittrich offers a new riff on the there's-a-fly-in-my-soup scenario with an over-accommodating waiter & maitre'd team. Best of all is Brian Dykstra's Service Order, in which an out-of-service staircase becomes the catalyst for a comic war of status and semantics in the workplace. All four feature good writing and good acting.

The more serious-minded plays—Down Here by Melody Cooper, McIntyre's by Suzanne Bradbeer (which are the evening's two 9/11 stories), Kuwait by Vincent Delaney, and The Tram by P. Kevin Strader—don't work nearly as well, either because they strive too hard for significance, or because they strain plausibility.

Jerry Browning's light design and Chris Webb's sound design are both good, but Maruti Evans's set design is all kinds of wrong. His modern-looking standing wall/door unit only fits Service Order, which takes place in a modern office. The rest of the plays—which are set in a variety of locations ranging from a military interrogation room to a Times Square bar—are served badly by it.

The entire cast—Richarda Abrams, Lizabeth Allen, Scott Baker, Hamilton Clancy, Robert Colston, James Davies, Tom Demenkoff, Bill Green, Carol Halstead, Matthew Healy, Karen Kitz, John Lewis, Bradford Olson, Erik Van Wyck, Stacy Wallace, Ali Cassandra Webster, and Rob A. Wilson—is good. They are a talented and sincere group of actors. Even though some of the material is equally good, it’s the cast's efforts that hold Service together and make it a worthwhile production.

Good theatre makes me happy. Great theatre makes me sweat. I have a theory about this: Theatre that meets or surpasses standards I store in my cerebral cortex amuses me, validates my opinions, assures me that I haven’t wasted time better spent on That 70s Show reruns. But every once in awhile an event comes along that, while fully engaging my higher cognitive realms, simultaneously bypasses them and starts firing up my amygdala. This theatre I feel in every ganglia, gland and capillary of my body. That’s the kind of theatre David Greenspan’s extraordinary new play She Stoops to Comedy is. Stop reading this review, go to the sidebar at left and order a ticket, no make that10 tickets, right now. Go on. This show deserves to sell out its entire run, be extended into perpetuity, and provide Greenspan with a nice nest egg so that he can go on making his idiosyncratic theatre, which, if you ask me, this town desperately needs. Not since Charles Ludlam have we had an artist with his depth of feeling, comic flair and ability to juggle multiple tiaras.  And like Ludlam he also stars in his own plays.

This dazzling tour de force, the theatrical equivalent of a triple axle for ice skaters, also serves its purpose in generating meaning in the performance since the play is about, among things, how theatre gets made. The other things it’s about include, at last count, the fluidity of gender, the slipperiness of identity, the slipperiness of language, the revisions we make in the stories of our life, the eternal conflict among theatre artists between the stage and film, the Gordion knots at the heart of homosexual AND heterosexual couplings, the lies we tell each other to maintain and even reinvigorate our relationships, the often circuitous ways in which we uncover hidden abilities and talents, new love, old love, the sorry state of gay theatre, how AIDS has disappeared from our discourse, and the urgent need we have to love each other and work together to create a better world. There are probably about 20 other things it’s also about that I’ve absorbed on the cellular level but haven’t even begun to process in the ol’ meat computer.

Richard Foreman has famously said that Gertrude Stein is his mother and Bertolt Brecht is his father (artistically, at least). The same can be said of Greenspan. But where Foreman is the bitterly brooding son of this family, given to fits of hysteria, Greenspan is the gregarious people-pleaser, given to outbursts of vintage movie dialogue. Like Foreman’s his language circles around itself, but the effect is more like a pleasant stroll around the neighborhood where one keeps noticing previously hidden details in buildings you’ve seen dozens of times rather than a manic descent through rings of hell. And unlike Foreman, Greenspan isn’t afraid of constructing a good, rip-roaring plot—the details of which I’ll attempt to summarize here. Not an easy task given its complexity. Although that’s yet another idea in the play: the futility of trying to reconstruct memory, of ever knowing "what really happened."

Alexandra Page (Greenspan), an actress of some renown, has reached an impasse in her career and her life. Her younger girlfriend, Alison Rose (Marissa Copeland), has left New York for the summer to appear as Rosalind (note the anagram) in a Maine production of As You Like It. Alison’s Celia in the production is the theatre star Jayne Summerhouse (E. Katherine Kerr). Alex knows that Jayne has always had a thing for Alison and, aware of the peculiar erotic charge summer stock has for actors, is understandably anxious about losing her girlfriend to a more successful rival. Partly to keep an eye on her partner, partly in an attempt to breathe new life into her career, she decides to audition for the role of Orlando.

At the start of the play Alexandra’s friend Kay Fein (also played by Kerr) is paying her a visit while she prepares to meet with the director. To complicate the plot even further, Kay, who is sometimes an archeologist, sometimes a lighting designer, is also Jayne’s ex-lover. As their conversation unspools, not only does Kay’s profession keep shifting but so does the year and Alexandra’s career history. From the start, Greenspan’s text keeps pushing us to the epistemological edge; everything we think we know about these people is going to be multiplied, then undermined. Far from an exercise in futility, this philosophical workout feels liberating; all of these possible pasts imply potential futures, any one of which can be chosen.

Alexandra emerges from the bathroom in "drag," and of course, it’s merely Greenspan in an ordinary shirt and pair of khakis. "Her" drag pseudonym is Harry, a bad pun that Greenspan somehow magically manages to get to pay off every time it’s (s[he’s]) introduced. At the audition Alison and Harry meet and chemistry immediately starts bubbling between them. The director, Hal Stewart (Philip Tabor), an independent film director dabbling in theatre, stays true to his celluloid roots and casts Harry based solely on the sparks given off at this first meeting. Herein lies another joke, Harry’s (Alexandra’s [Greenspan’s]) theatrical artifice outsmarts and trumps Hal’s movie-director obsession with "realness."

Now, as the structure of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies demands, the play shifts from the city to Arden or in this case, Maine, and the romantic/erotic entanglements begin to ensnare all of the characters. In addition to the characters already mentioned there is Eve Addaman (Mia Barron), Hal’s girlfriend and stage manager who, as it turns out, is the real brains of the operation, and Simon Lanquish (T. Ryder Smith), introduced by Jayne as silent Simon. Soon Simon is chasing Alexandra, thinking she’s a man; Jayne is chasing Alison; Alison is flirting openly with Alex, even though she’s not really attracted to "men"; and Alex is shyly courting her own girlfriend in the guise of a man. When Kay Fein drops in on our merry band, we know it’s only a matter of time before Kerr will have to play a seduction scene with herself.

And she does, stopping the show cold with her bravura solo depiction of the confrontation and reconciliation between Kay and Jayne. But this moment is just the center diamond in a jewel that sparkles with multiple-hued facets. The entire cast performs at the highest level of comic intensity, emotional honesty, and ensemble esprit de corps. But even among equals some are more equal than others. In addition to the incomparable Kerr, the playwright gives two of the cast acting moments that theatre folk salivate for. One is for himself at the end of play. Offstage, unseen, he plays a scene with Alison, now home from her trip into the Maine woods. Harry is gone, and now back in New York, Alexandra has reemerged. She is dressing, and merely with his voice Greenspan creates the illusion of gender illusion, for when he emerges he is merely himself, nothing more, nothing less. And of course, this is exactly what Alexandra has learned to be during the course of the play. The second is for Smith, to whom Greenspan gives a stunning monologue from the point of view of the alcoholic, aging, HIV-positive gay actor. How many clichés is that? Which is the point, as Simon rages against all of the structures, literary and societal, that keep gay men isolated, addicted, and afraid. This moment, shocking in its rabid intensity amidst all of the frivolity, reminds us that underneath the mirth there is a well of loneliness in all of us that no amount of laughter can ever fill. It’s the voice of "silent" Simon and T. Ryder Smith that seeps into my blood and haunts me as I write this.

With She Stoops to Conquer, The Pearl Theatre Company once again demonstrates why a classic play is a classic. If you've never before seen this Oliver Goldsmith comedy, then I suggest that you immediately call for tickets: you're in for a delightful time. And if you know the play, go ahead and see it again. Under the lively, very physical direction of Chuck Hudson, the Pearl's ensemble sparkles and shines in this witty, merry production.

Take, to start, Christopher Moore. He plays Charles Marlow, a rich and callow young man who is something of a ladykiller—so long as the killee is not, technically, a lady. Set a serving wench in front of him and he's smooth as silk; but with young women of his own class he's a cringing, tongue-tied nitwit. Moore manages the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy of this young man brilliantly. Watch him turn on the charm with a young woman whom he thinks is a barmaid, and then watch him literally swoon in the presence of the lady he's supposed to marry. Moore's performance is a comic tour de force—and I haven't even told you about the sweet deception perpetrated on his character by others in the play, whereby he believes he's at an inn, but he is in fact at the home of his intended fiancée.

That particular mix-up causes all manner of comic consequences. Charles insults his prospective father-in-law, Mr. Hardcastle, treating him abruptly and insolently as a common innkeeper. Moore's total collapse when Charles learns of this particular error is another high point of the show.

Consider, next, John Camera, who has the role of the aforementioned Mr. Hardcastle. He, too, spends most of the play in a haze as to what's going on, but as Camera plays him he does so with such good-natured conviviality that we can't help but be charmed. Hardcastle's vivacious, headstrong daughter Kate—Charles' intended—is portrayed in equally engaging manner by Celeste Ciulla, whose natural intelligence and knowing smile make her a heroine to root for, even as she stoops (as the title has it) to somewhat devious means to win over the bashful rogue she has set her cap on.

New Pearl company member Scott Whitehurst, meanwhile, dazzles as Charles' friend George Hastings, quite the perfect fop. George has come to woo Kate's cousin Constance (a fluttery but pragmatic Eunice Wong), but he doesn't really want her unless her inheritance of a casket full of jewels comes with her. These are in the custody of Constance's aunt and guardian Mrs. Hardcastle (Kate's mother, impersonated here with just the right amount of vanity and foolishness by Sally Kemp).

And then there's Mrs. Hardcastle's mischievous son from a previous marriage, Tony Lumpkin. Jay Stratton captures Tony's selfishness and essential good-heartedness, and he also gets the sheer joy of Tony's impish, playful troublemaking (it is Tony, for example, who convinces Charles Marlow that he's at an inn, and later in the play, it is Tony who manages to steal his cousin Constance's jewels out from his mother's watchful gaze not once but twice). Tony's zesty exuberance propels the entire play—it's hard not to be infected by it as the various characters' silly shenanigans reach their peak at the evening's climax.

Several servants round out the cast list: a flirtatious serving girl called Bett Bouncer (Mary Molloy); attendants to Marlow and Hardcastle (both played by Stewart Carrico); Diggory, an addled and somewhat pretentious outside man imported indoors by Hardcastle (Dominic Cuskern); and a sweetly gentle fellow called Roger who keeps wanting to put his hands in pockets (John Livingstone Rolle in a very amusing performance). And Pearl regular Edward Seamon is on hand in a couple of roles, too, notably Marlow's long-suffering father Sir Charles.

All in all, they're delightful company to be in for the 2-3/4 hours or so that She Stoops to Conquer holds forth. Goldsmith's play is old but it feels modern in ways that Shakespeare's don't: this is the prototype for sitcom, and the sits don't get much more com than they do here. See She Stoops to Conquer, and prepare to sit back, relax, and laugh a lot.

Many plays have baffled their first audiences when they were simply ahead of their time. The initial productions of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata and Yeats’ Purgatory—both essential works of the 20th century—were derided for their unconventional conceptions of human existence and puzzling dramatic structures. Denis Johnson’s new play Shoppers Carried By Escalators Into The Flames resembles these classic works in its unconventional style and enigmatic plot. Shoppers is flawed and imperfect, but it’s audacious. It’s drama for the bold theatergoer, written and performed by bold artists.

The play begins in Sam Shepard territory: a white-trash home in modern California, a cursed family looking for salvation. Mark Cassandra (called "Cass") has returned to the family home to sober up and join Alcoholics Anonymous. He is the inheritor of the family legacy, seeking to exorcise the ghost of a horrifying past: long ago, Cass’s mother ran over her newborn baby in a psychotic act of premeditated murder. Soon other siblings arrive, the most formidable being Bro, who declares that Cass is beginning to resemble their father. Cass’s dazed father, as portrayed by Will Patton, is a man whose personality has faded into a gray mush. As Cass, Michael Shannon bears out this prediction by moving with a drifter’s listless hunch. Meanwhile, other family members fumble to make connections but fail: in the show’s high point, Cass’s sister Marigold watches her father watch television.

Shoppers shines because of its fresh, bizarre story. Its characters have been defined by their setbacks: they contribute to the sense of doom by acting as if there’s no success like failure. But where apocalyptic plays foreshadow the end of the world, this play confounds expectations: its world has already ended. It derives its pessimism from a peculiarly postmodern atmosphere of American religion. The members of this family are sinners in the hands of an angry god, a Protestant god of damnation rather than of salvation, the god depicted by Melville and Faulkner. The world outside the plywood-walled Cassandra home seems as if it’s burst into flames: when some secondary characters leave the house, they see fiery angels descending from a burning sky. The Cassandra family shrugs it off as a “trick of the light” that occurs “nine days out of ten.”

This strange religious tone is embodied by the onstage television, voiced with hilarious glee by James Urbaniak. At first it announces that 26 shopping malls have burned up in the past year—underground shopping malls, implying that the titular escalators are ferrying American consumers into hell. But soon the TV begins talking back to its viewers, eventually announcing that it is “the everlasting God of Violence.” Bro shoots and kills it, but it rises from the dead—life everlasting.

Denis Johnson, a well-known novelist and short story writer, has previously received acclaim for his collection Jesus’ Son. His works portray America as a hallucinatory vision, an energetic, holy failure. But even those who enjoy his other works may find problems with this script. The second act is as loose as the first act is tight. Bro’s ex-wife and Marigold’s ex-boyfriend get married in the Cassandra living room, but why? And the late entrance of Bro’s simpleton girlfriend, Marcie—dressed as a Hindu goddess, including blue skin; she explains that she’s received a “spiritual makeover”—suggests a cleansing, but her arrival saves no one.

The production sometimes seems disjointed, as if some actors are in an altogether different show than others. Where most of the actors give nuanced, naturalistic performances that highlight the absurdity of the world around them, Adam Trese, as Bro, merely stomps and blusters. Even though he’s the play’s villain, he never hones his performance into something hard and frightening. His character gets the last word in the play (something about the entire family—the entire country?—being pioneers and ghosts), but Trese underplays this speech so that we miss its import. The play seems to need another revision and another staging. In its present form, it’s an incredible work, but incredibly flawed. Regardless, Shoppers Carried By Escalators Into The Flames is not superficial; certainly it’s a radically different form of theatre, but the decision of whether it is worthwhile art must be left to the viewer.

Showtune is a revue of Jerry Herman songs. There are almost fifty songs performed in a little under two hours by a cast of six and a pianist. The show has its moments, but unfortunately does not live up to its fullest potential.

Showtune consists of groups of songs that form a sort of tableau. For instance, ballads are placed together and cheer up songs are together, etc. There is a battle of the sexes through song, as well as a montage saluting the movies. The show ends with torch songs building up to a climax.

Basically Showtune is enjoyable, but not spectacular. The best part is, of course, the songs, because Jerry Herman is undeniably an astonishing songwriter. The show works best when it decides to rip the songs completely out of their original contexts. In fact, a good chunk of Act Two is like that, and it proves to be the much more entertaining act. The highlight is definitely "Bosom Buddies," reworked as a duet for Dolly and Mame.

The songs chosen are most of the well-known songs, which is a shame, although the inclusion of some songs from A Day in Hollywood/ A Night in the Ukraine is really cool. It would have been extremely nice to hear some more really obscure songs, as well as ones that were cut out of town or even ones that never made it into a show. For example, "Shalom" is the only song from Milk and Honey ever used ever, as is "I’ll Be Here Tomorrow" from The Grand Tour. (I happen to own both recordings and can vouch for the fact that there are some other great gems not used.)

The cast is adequate but not amazing. Of course, it is really hard to fill the shoes of Bernadette Peters and Angela Lansbury, but it's much more noticeable here because many of their songs are included here in pretty much the original arrangements. Nevertheless, the company wins over the audience; in fact, at the performance I saw, they received a standing ovation, so why argue with that?

The direction, choreography, set, costumes, etc, are all fine actually. I guess that’s the best word to describe the show: fine. It’s nice to hear so many Jerry Herman tunes even if the renditions aren’t always up to par. If you’re a Jerry fan, I think you’ll enjoy the show regardless, so go see Showtune and open a new window because the best of times is now!

A cold, murky night on the northern coast of early 19th century Britain. Indistinct faces bob up out of the murky night like ghostly apparitions. Indoors, people huddle together for warmth, frowning at each other’s loneliness. A petty businessman appears from London, stinking of eccentricity. A storm-tossed American ship offloads its bovine and slave cargoes; both go missing. This almost anonymous setting witnesses a quiet but hypnotic story in Signals of Distress, a meditation on moral ambiguity. The work is based on a novel by British writer Jim Crace. But Joshua Carlebach and The Flying Machine have transformed it completely into a theater piece: it’s inconceivable as anything else.

Abetted by a reeling live fiddle and Theresa Squire’s period costumes, the company creates a sense of an epoch out of sheer theatrical illusion. They work upon the mind’s eye, eschewing a set for a few planks of wood. Scrims separate the audience from the action, giving the impression of a half-shared memory, or a vision reflected in the water. The actors draw their parts with physical traits and mime rather than psychology, which lends the show an archaic feeling, like a melodrama from a bygone era. The play is peopled by melodramatic characters too, like the oily balding malefactor and the rugged American sea captain. But the characters deepen as they encounter reverses and either stand resolute or compromise themselves. The play follows a kind of Victorian pattern of pious moralism, expressed by the visitor from London as “Should we transgress, there’s a second action that follows from the first.”

This small outsider, Aymer Smith, is the play’s sad center. It is he who frees the slave and yet is too cowardly to confess it. Whether this action is truly a transgression is something the play leaves open, but its consequences are profound. Aymer, played by Richard Crawford, is one of those lonely, inept persons who looks for friendship but can’t register other people’s reactions. He is a piece of driftwood in the open sea. And as in the saltwater tales of Melville and O’Neill, the sea is a dangerous place that either swallows a man or completely alters him before spitting him back onto the shore. Signals of Distress resembles its driftwood protagonist, transfigured by the ocean’s power into something ineffable, alien, and utterly beautiful.

Eleventh century English history isn't the most obvious source material for a comedy, but Moira Buffini has mined it quite successfully in her generally delightful play Silence. The title character is Silence of Cumbria, a 14-year-old Viking lord who has been ordered by Ethelred, the King of England, to marry the French noblewoman Ymma of Normandy. Ymma is at least twice Silence's age and objects fairly strenuously to the match, which she views as a punishment and which has forced her to leave her beloved homeland for the colder, damper, and less "civilized" England.

Nevertheless, the marriage takes place, overseen by Roger, the earnest young priest who has been given the task of converting Silence to Christianity. Also present are Agnes, Ymma's dutiful but high-spirited maid, and Eadric Longshaft, one of Ethelred's chief warriors, who believes he has seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in Ymma's presence.

Harsh words pass between Ymma and Ethelred, with two results. First, Ymma, believing that her disrespect might cost her her life, decides to flee immediately to Cumbria, abetted by Agnes, Roger, and Eadric (and of course accompanied by her young spouse Silence). But, second, Ethelred finds that Ymma's fiery nature has aroused in him a genuine (and unexpected) passion. He sets out to make her his own, determined to kill every Viking he sees on his way to Cumbria—including her husband, Silence.

And so begins a journey that will prove remarkably eventful for all concerned. Rigid bonds based on class, religion, and gender are all tested and broken as all six characters set out in search of both security and freedom. Silence is mostly a tongue-in-cheek adventure story, but playwright Buffini does touch on some serious issues here, particularly as cowardly, weak-willed Ethelred discovers the (illusory) transformative power of brute force and terror.

Silence's first act sails along brightly and cleverly, but things bog down somewhat in Act Two, as the play's themes get mired both in the characters' messy relationships and the dictates of the historical record. But this is mostly a very entertaining play, and Buffini delivers a socko surprise that will delight you even as it makes you feel foolish for not having seen it coming.

The six accomplished actors who comprise the Silence ensemble include Matthew Maher, who is very funny as the sometimes perplexed, sometimes bullying Ethelred; Abigail Savage, very convincing in what used to be called a trouser role as young Lord Silence; Jessica Chandlee Smith, as the vivacious young maid Agnes; Jessica Claire, as the hot-tempered, sharp-tongued Ymma; Jens Martin Krummel, serious and steadfast as Eadric; and Chan Casey, who is both hilarious and sweetly sympathetic as poor put-upon Roger.

Sleep Awake is the work of a young playwright, Jesse Alick, and it feels like one. It's brimming with notions, conceptual and stylistic; it's angry and raw and very naive; it's much too long and it portends (I hope) better, more focused work by this writer who is clearly long on both intellect and talent.

It's an interesting, frustrating muddle of a play. It begins with three college-age New Yorkers (think Friends for Gen Y) moving to a new apartment in Brooklyn: Cameron (19 years old, gay, proudly pierced); Eve (works at an Upper West Side salon, possibly in love with Cameron); and Kyle (straight, in college, something of a slacker). Their daily existence—going to work or school that doesn't interest them; smoking marijuana—is suddenly discombobulated by two overwhelming events. First, Cameron is diagnosed with AIDS. Second, the twin towers are demolished on September 11th.

Sleep Awake, through a hodgepodge of dramatic devices, tries to sift through the wreckage of plague and war to find something of value for its young protagonists to live for. Alick's ideas tend toward the philosophical, so Sleep Awake includes a Buddhist dream sequence and several discussions among its characters that feel like the ones you had with your college roommate at two o'clock in the morning.  Alick is heavily influenced by Angels in America, and indeed several scenes from that play seem to be replayed here. He's trying to make sense out of a world that doesn't make sense.

One hopes he will eventually succeed; he does not in this play, because he keeps stumbling over his overreaching ideas and ambitions, pushing hard to say more without ever finally saying anything substantive at all. Director Zachary R. Mannheimer matches the playwright in terms of experimentation, and some of their ideas, such as having a chorus comment, sometimes in verse, on what's going in the play, work pretty well. Mannheimer does a good job maneuvering in the Milagro Theatre's difficult space. And he keeps us paying attention despite the more than 2-1/2-hour length of Sleep Awake.

Alick stars as Cameron; Sleep Awake is billed as autobiographical and one wonders just how much of it is fact-based and if he's actually as young as his character (just 22). He's joined by eight other actors of varying experience; the most successful is certainly Teresa Castracane, who turns in the show's most fully-developed performance as Cameron's pragmatic but empathetic therapist.

The inspiration for Ronnie Larsen's new play Sleeping with Straight Men actually happened. A man named Scott Amedure appeared on a daytime TV talk show and revealed on the air that he had a crush on another man. The surprised love object responded by shooting and killing his secret admirer.

That incident raised, at least for a while, a whole bunch of questions. Was the talk show, whose pandering production staff became catalyst for a crime, in some way responsible? Is there some justification for a  man to kill as a result of what he perceived as deep, scarring embarrassment on national television? Was the victim, by revealing his feelings in such a blatantly public way, somehow asking for trouble? And while we're at it, what sort of people go on these talk shows, anyway?

These and other possibly unanswerable queries are at the crux of Sleeping with Straight Men. But though the play does a credible job suggesting how this true-to-life scenario may have come about, it is less effective in sorting out responsibility for the tragic outcome.

To his credit, Larsen, who both wrote and directed this play, actually achieves something like tragedy here. What's missing—and it's woefully needed—is some kind of perspective on the case. Sleeping with Straight Men, finally, has no point of view about a very provocative dilemma. Lacking that, it falls apart as drama and fails as satire (or social criticism, or whatever Larsen intended it to be).

But the first hour or so of Sleeping with Straight Men is both pointed and entertaining; if you know Larsen from his earlier New York work (Making Porn, Ten Naked Men, Peep Show) then you will be pleasantly surprised by the relative sophistication and surefooted dramatic structure of this new piece. The idea is that Stanley, a malcontent gay man stuck in the Midwestern heartland, decides to go after his "big break" by appearing on the "Jill Johnson Show" and declaring his love for Lee, the handsome, resolutely straight waiter whom he has a crush on. In deft, swift, crosscut scenes, we meet Stanley's loving but passive mother and his (platonic) boyfriend, a female impersonator known only as Sally; both are aghast at Stanley's decision. We also meet Lee's girlfriend, Karen, who is surprised and disturbed that he is going to appear on TV to meet an unknown admirer (whom they both presume to be female, of course). Larsen and his actors—Jared Scott as Stanley, Aaron Wimmer as Lee—show us the desperation and ego that drive these two men to do something potentially humiliating and foolish.

At the same time, we meet Jill Johnson herself, the hostess of the fateful talk show, and her ambitious and rather cold-hearted staffers, producer Judy and man Friday Brian. Cynicism and hypocrisy are, unsurprisingly, rife in this world, but Larsen and especially Mink Stole, disinterested and disengaged as Jill, make those qualities feel refreshingly organic—a neat trick.

It all makes for a congenially funny and engrossing little tale as Lee and Stanley arrive, in high style, in the Big Apple for their TV debut. And then, almost immediately, Sleeping with Straight Men runs out of steam. Larsen follows the TV appearance with a long, turgid scene in which a supposedly drunk Lee more or less seduces the willing Stanley into the wish-fulfilling act of the title; it's staged half as soft porn and half as a joke and succeeds as neither. And then, too briefly, the play reaches its climax with the commission of the crime: we've been primed for it, but nothing in the script hints at what we ought to think or do about it. Entirely unsatisfying.

At its best, as when Hedda Lettuce (as Stanley's pal, Sally) lip-synchs Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" after homophobic Lee finds out who his secret admirer is on national TV, Sleeping with Straight Men manages the fine line between broad satire and brittle social commentary. But it loses its way in the overlong sex scene and never recovers.

Mink Stole gives the most accomplished performance of the evening as Jill Johnson—she's got real presence, and our attention never wavers when she's around. Jared Scott and Hedda Lettuce are fun and generally appealing as Stanley and Sally; Aaron Wimmer is suitably uptight as Lee.

There's frank talk about gay sex and a glimpse of frontal male nudity, if that sort of thing bothers you. And the Maverick Theatre remains one of the least user-friendly houses in town, with a supporting beam that obstructs the view from just about every seat in the center section. Consider yourself warned on both fronts.

Slut is an energized new musical about the intricacies and complications of love, focusing mostly on the story of a young prodigy, his girlfriend, and his best friend. The first act is wonderfully engaging, but the second act fails to measure up to the brilliance of the first.

Dan is a scientific genius whose lack of social prowess is made up for by his best friend, Adam, a wild player. At Dan’s 25th birthday party, fully orchestrated by Adam, each has something important to tell the other. Dan plans to propose to his girlfriend Delia later that night when she arrives; Adam recently got a boat from his father, and wants Dan to join him in following their lifelong dream of sailing round the world. Elsewhere, Delia breaks down while performing at a wedding party and admits to having cheated on Dan. When the two finally meet up, Delia mistakes the gravity of Dan’s tone (as he is about to propose) for him having discovered her infidelity, and she makes up excuses and leaves before he can pop the question. After an odd encounter with an imaginary Jonas Salk, Dan is coerced by Adam into joining him for a wild night out on the town. In spite of his resistance, Dan is indoctrinated into the libido-driven, alcohol-enhanced nighttime prowling of the guys. The first act ends with the complications all having come to a head—we learn that Delia cheated on Dan with Adam on a drunken night, and that Adam loves Delia. Dan kicks them both out of his life.

The first act is an absolute joy to watch. The changes between scenes are fluid (twice in the show, the bartender pounds the whiskey bottle onto the bar, which causes the action to freeze and then to shift, which I thought was a lovely effect). The performances are sound and the songs are highly enjoyable; I was completely engaged and eagerly awaiting the next event or surprise twist. Jason Lowenthal (Adam) and Josh Tyson (Dan) give impressive performances full of energy and depth. Playing several roles including the irrepressible pirate Scurvy Jack, Jeff Hiller is a hilarious presence on the stage.

The songs range from terribly funny to regretful and sad, though I wish that they had resisted the unfortunate tendency to dilute the more serious moments with unnecessary comic twists. The music follows a broad range of styles, ranging from sea shanty to Spanish guitar to good old rock & roll. Each song stands out in some way from the others, making it a very musically dynamic show.

I was also impressed by the simple but wonderfully wrought set design—a bar stocked beyond imagination with shelves upon shelves of bottles of all sorts. It is a highly appropriate backdrop for a show in which alcohol is such a major player.

After such an overwhelmingly wonderful start, though, I was disappointed by the much weaker second act. One year has passed, and there have been dramatic shifts in the characters' lives. Dan is now a macho slut with a suave reputation among the ladies to match; Adam is a struggling (and not very successful) father attempting to raise his baby with no apparent help; and Delia is working on a record deal. These changes offer significant opportunities for plot and character exploration. Sadly, the second act is half the length of the first, allowing only a surface take on it all at best. In the end, I was left feeling unsettled, the relationships among the three main characters never having been satisfactorily explained.

Still, Slut is a very fun show. With further development, it could become truly amazing.

I think a case can be made that children represent the ideal theatregoing audience. Not yet calcified by years of etiquette training into utter silence and boredom, they are capable of responding to real situations in real time. They follow the action closely, and automatically use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. They are unafraid of laughing, asking questions, and expressing emotions. And they will brook no condescension—anyone who has performed in front of a couple of hundred restless children knows that they will accept nothing less than a bond of complete honesty and respect.

This is all by way of prelude to saying that, with their touring production of Snow White (now playing at the New Victory Theatre), the members of London's Tall Stories Theatre Company have a consummate knowledge of their audience and talents perfectly suited to pleasing it.

Three performers play all the roles, and each of them is spot-on. The characters are familiar, but director Olivia Jacobs makes each of them a bit more complex than you might remember. As the Queen, Hilda Gardner isn't the cold monster that we all remember from the Disney version (who ever believed that she was the fairest in the land?); instead, she is a pretty young woman who allows herself to become vain, taking pleasure in her vanity until it makes her paranoid. Nicola Harrison's Snow White is not a stock ingénue who takes innocent pleasure in serving her height-challenged hosts, but rather a headstrong princess thrust unwillingly into an outside world she doesn't particularly like or understand. (It also becomes clear by the end that in certain fundamental ways she may be dangerously similar to the Queen.)

Adam Bampton-Smith gets the flashiest parts: in addition to playing the Huntsman and Prince Charming, he portrays all seven dwarves. And rather than the roly-poly nice guys we all grew up with, these dwarves (Brigadier, Snuggly, Barry, etc.) are well-intentioned if self-interested guys who are only too pleased to have a woman around the house who can do their dirty work. That each one of these dwarves has a distinct personality and physicality is testament to Bampton-Smith's skills.

When not playing a specific character, the three actors alternate as narrators and chorus, telling parts of the story directly to the audience and filling up the space as servants, wedding guests, and so on. This extra layer of theatricality helps the audience become more fully involved with the story as it unfolds. Far from being alienated by such tricks of narrative, the young people around me seemed very comfortable with the idea of the actors jumping into and out of character, further illustrating the formidable capacity of their developing imaginations.

Much children's entertainment these days seems to think that in order to hold the attention of its constituency it must present a barrage of recognizable pop-culture images from various sources. Though this production is fully aware of its antecedents, it sees no need to do anything other than tell the story on its own terms. There is much comedy here, but the fairy tale is not fractured—it's presented with consistent grace throughout, never descending into shrillness or sensation, even during the story's darker moments. And the darkness isn't flinched from. Going back to the original pre-Grimm telling of the story, the Queen is not Snow White's wicked stepmother, but rather a natural mother who, out of jealousy, commands the murder of her child. And though we see the Queen greedily ingesting what she believes to be the heart and liver of her dead daughter, the mimed scene is staged with such panache and glee that, though you are consistently aware of its grisliness, it is never a true nightmare. (It helps that we already know Snow White is still alive and well.) Other scenes, such as a later comic interlude featuring two dimwitted servants making silly jokes with Snow White's spellbound body, both deepen and question our assumptions of the original story even as they move it forward towards its conclusion.

Perhaps this is more analysis than a straightforward hour-long telling of a familiar story requires. But it's just so nice to see something done so simply and so well! And, much more importantly, the kids in the audience seemed to agree.

In a city brimming with scrappy, innovative new theatre companies, Clubbed Thumb has carved a deep niche with decidedly left-of-center plays that are always lovingly produced. Now in its seventh year, the Thumb has gained momentum with its annual festival of new work, which has this time gifted us with Ann Marie Healy’s quirky, heartfelt Somewhere Someplace Else. Healy owes a lot to the absurdists, Pinter most perceptibly, and with this piece she strikes a difficult balance between the familiar confines of an urban subsistence and the quiet longing that is both its wellspring and its byproduct. The tone is so specific that, in lesser hands, the whole enterprise could seem banal or trivial. But director Annie Dorsen and her cast seem to approach the play with a tuning rod of unfailing pitch, which discovers both the positive and negative areas of its drama.

Ronny has come for an ostensibly short visit to her sister Jeannine, who lives in the smallest apartment in New York. As designed by David Korins, the set is built on a moving platform that floats precariously in the dark vastness of the Ohio Theatre; the actors, then, wait offstage in full or partial view of the audience. The effect is marvelous in its simplicity, and as the sisters sob to themselves (which they do often), we sense the walls closing in on them. Jeannine is the rebel of the two, the black sheep who’s traded her Minnesota home for a few faux friends and an ill-conceived bohemian lifestyle. Ronny is equally lost, but she’s tied to a conservative, emotionally absent husband who pops in on business trips. Lost, that is, until she meets neighbor B.G., a man she can really sing about.

There are no fireworks, here. No grand confrontations between spouses and lovers. Only short exchanges stretched taut with forced politeness and romantic odes sung into a tiny bathroom mirror. As her relationship with B.G. grows, Ronny walks a razor’s edge of guilt and barely reconciled lust. He is many things, if not everything, her husband Lance is not: he's new to her, and dangerous in a mostly playful way. The scenes progress like a voyeur’s snapshots, the set rotating between each to further expose Ronny’s frailty and her gathering sense of self.

Somewhere Someplace Else is a play about unlikely love, and the idea that a kind of happiness may reside in its abdication. Healy’s characters are scaled down to purely human size, as Mara Stephens’ Ronny makes palpably clear. With her deadpan delivery and long, birdlike posture, Stephens is perfectly suited to the role. Laura Heisler plays against her with just the right amount of disgruntled rivalry as Jeannine; Andrew Weems makes B.G. a pleasingly down-home hunk, and Todd Cerveris is a furtive and tightly wrapped Lance. There’s no wasted space in this latest offering from Clubbed Thumb, and, like its predecessors, it deserves your close attention.

David Drake, who is probably best-known for his one-man show The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, was born David Lynn Drakula, Jr. He has spent a lot of time recently researching his roots; that surname of his certainly hints at some illustrious and/or notorious ancestors, and indeed Drake has uncovered evidence that his lineage goes back to Vlad Drakul, also known as Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian warrior king whose ruthlessness eventually gave rise to the Dracula legend that Bram Stoker made so very famous.

This is the impetus for Son of Drakula, Drake's new solo show. For two-and-a-half hours, Drake relates the story of his journey to Romania to the World Dracula Congress, in search of new information to validate his hopes for a sexy branch on his family tree. From there he went to Croatia, to meet an authentic Drakula relative whose family survived the recent catastrophes in the former Yugoslavia. Interspersed with this account, Drake relates snippets of childhood memories of his parents, who divorced when he was seven.

All of this must matter to Drake a lot, and there are intriguing themes hinted at throughout Son of Drakula. But the show doesn't finally add up. We learn very little about the father-son relationship promised by the title. The Dracula Congress stories are often amusing but they prove unsatisfyingly inconclusive; they have the feel of anecdotes on which Drake has been dining out for a while already. The most affecting material deals with Drake's visit with his Croatian relatives, but there's no emotional connection to what he talks about. I sensed that his cousins were deeply affected by this family reunion, but I never got a sense of what Drake was feeling (or feels now). A performance art-y ending in which Drake takes off all his clothes to recreate a redemptive swim in the Adriatic comes off as arbitrary and gratuitous.

Son of Drakula is certainly entertaining in places (though it's about a half-hour too long). Drake's versatility as actor, mimic, and writer is abundantly clear. But a piece this blatantly personal needs to be more purposeful, I think. Otherwise we merely wonder why the performer is telling it to us.

In Spanish Girl, a college student named Bucky gets an unexpected visit—and unexpected news—from Skyler, the mature but needy fifteen-year-old-girl with whom he had an affair the previous summer. Bucky was a counselor and Skyler was one of the campers and he knows he should have known better... but he had a torrid though brief affair with the girl, following which he clumsily tried to break up with her by taking up with another camper, Ingrid, the Spanish girl of the play's title.

Now Bucky is back at school, in the cozy attic room that he shares with his slightly nerdy roommate Chet. He's also back under the thumb of Jolene, his demanding, utterly pragmatic girlfriend. She's talked him into coming to the Fall Formal against his will (she's the Social Chairperson). Skyler and Spanish Girl are far behind him, Bucky thinks.

But of course he's wrong: no sooner has Bucky left for the dance than Skyler turns up, having walked from the bus station to be with the man she loves. You've probably guessed that the news she bears is that she's pregnant; Chet, horrified, frantically tries to get rid of and/or hide Skyler before Bucky returns, fearful that his friend will fall under Skyler's spell once more. Of course, Bucky comes back, discovers Skyler is there and what she has to tell him. And of course, Jolene turns up soon after, and finds herself forced to take charge of the situation and set things right.

What's interesting about all of this is that Spanish Girl, which deals with a very serious set of circumstances, is as flippant and featherweight as an episode of "Will and Grace." Though they are sketched by playwright Hunt Holman with great specificity and naturalness, none of Spanish Girl's four characters behaves even remotely realistically. Chet, faced with the dilemma of what to do with his roommate's pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend, does everything except what you or I would do; similarly, Jolene, whose biggest problem seems to be whether anybody shows up at the college dance tonight, handles the unexpected crisis involving her boyfriend's impending fatherhood with the disinterested aplomb of an experienced hostage negotiator.

I don't think Holman means us to believe that people really act like these likable plastic creations of his. I think Spanish Girl is cautionary satire about what happens when people who don't think anything has any value or meaning carry that paradigm to its logical (if far-fetched) extreme.

I could be wrong, though; I don't think Holman, or his director Erica Schmidt, have provided a sufficient number of clues as to intention; it's possible, in fact, that Holman and Schmidt each think the play is about something different. As satiric fable, I find that Spanish Girl works pretty well. As naturalistic drama—another possibility, I must concede—it's pretty scary.

The four young actors who comprise the cast play for zany charm and perkiness and they're all quite wonderful. Nate Mooney (Chet) and Joey Kern (Bucky) get the ingratiating, goofy awkwardness of late adolescence exactly right: watch Kern look down at his feet in discomfort or Mooney approach the task of tying a tie with horror—they capture the age perfectly. Jana Williamson is their equal as the formidable Jolene, winning laughs even with her back to the audience as she tries to fashion Chet's hair into something presentable. Ari Graynor is very much the preternaturally precocious teen as Skyler—a little bit terrified, a whole lot terrifying.

Michelle Malavet's set, which features a slanted roof and a ladder-type staircase leading down, is exactly the sort of cool room that college kids like Chet and Bucky would want to live in. Costumes (by Juman Malouf), lighting (by Shelly Sabel), and sound (by Bart Fasbender) all contribute mightily to the play's ambiance.

I liked Spanish Girl; if I'm reading it accurately, it's a shrewd and witty indictment of America's empty sitcom values (and perhaps, one hopes, in danger of becoming dated). It certainly indicates real talent on the part of its relatively untested playwright; I'll be interested in seeing what he comes up with next.

Someone once said of the French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine, “It is not reality which [he] paints but the hallucinations which reality provokes.” I begin there, because I think Adam Rapp is becoming a kind of rock 'n' roll Celine for the low-rent suburban set. I was lucky enough to catch his Finer Noble Gases in Louisville last summer and, like that play, Stone Cold Dead Serious is a gritty, funny, surreal journey through extreme psychic landscapes. His characters don’t banter much; they scream, fart, puke, drool, and kick their angst with reckless immediacy, even when it seems no one else is listening. Rapp begins his stories on familiar ground (in this case, a small house dominated by an ever-glowing television set), but he soon follows his imagination into uncharted territory, and we are obliged to join him.

Dad is discovered half-asleep and fully drunk as QVC network voices hawk merchandise. The son, Wynne, enters and helps Dad diaper himself. Homeless daughter Shaylee sneaks in looking for drug money, and she’s willing to sexually service her brother to get it. Just another weekday morning at Linda Ledbetter’s, long-suffering wife and mother to the other three.

Wynne is not your average teenage slacker, however; he’s been perfecting his skill at a samurai video game in preparation for its live-action equivalent. The contest has a purse of one million dollars, with which he would assist his struggling family. But it means that he must kill three sword-wielding opponents in an all-too-real ceremony broadcast from an undisclosed New York location. And so Wynne leaves, holding his parents at bay with a tazer gun and spouting cryptic Japanese maxims.

Now we are in the belly of the proverbial beast. Wynne meets his on-line girlfriend, the mute Sharice, in a rat-infested hotel room on the Lower East Side. She will be his partner in the blood sport. Meanwhile, Shaylee has been hospitalized after slashing her wrists and descending the stairs in a strikingly ghost-like fashion. From her bed she watches Wynne go into battle, the outcome of which is no less meaningful for its expectedness. The focus of the play shifts then, as the family watches the contest as if it were the finals for American Idol. They cheer, they jeer; they are brought together by it. Only Shaylee seems to realize the actual danger.

There’s a lot going on here, perhaps too much for the story to hold. Wynne’s idealism is its driving force, before he crashes on the steep banks of the entertainment media. Nobility is co-opted by corporate sponsors, and murder, you know, is just murder. I didn’t fully believe the central conceit, only because the world of the play is familiar enough that I wondered: Where are the cops? And could a skinny Midwestern kid really defeat a trio of highly trained warriors? But Rapp understands the mythos of the underclass, and he’s true to his own ironic analysis; no one emerges with only one answer, or only one message.

Stone Cold Dead Serious moves along like a burning glacier, splitting up here and sinking down there. The cast navigates this peril with great skill, forming a likable ensemble. Betsy Aidem does double-duty as Linda and the Snake Lady, a long-term hotel resident with a prophetic pet. Guy Boyd portrays the father with a wrenching pathos (and superbly-controlled flatulence); he also plays a cutlery salesman with a taste for young hitchhikers. Gretchen Cleevely is wonderfully spirited as both Shaylee and Sharice, and Matthew Stadelmann invests Wynne with an earnest fanaticism. Carolyn Cantor has plugged into the play’s emotional core, and her direction is informed, detailed, and generous. Her scene changes, too, are the most creative I’ve seen in a long while. And a special mention must go to David Korins, who has transformed the Chashama Theatre into four distinct sets of Off-Broadway quality.

It is astounding how different the shows of today are from those written a century ago. Watching Stop! Look! Listen!, which first played on Broadway in 1915, is like looking into a time capsule. The show is enjoyable and has entertaining moments, yet feels incredibly and understandably antiquated.

The plot is extremely predictable and archetypal. There is an ingenue in a show who quits to take a trip to Hawaii with her elderly stage-door Johnny. Her money-hungry, bossy mother comes in tow, as does his handsome young son. By the end of the first act, the ingenue has fallen for the handsome son, and by the end of Act Three the old couple has wound up together. A subplot involves the search for a replacement for the show's star. The producer, writer, and composer travel to Hawaii because of the “boom” created by a chorus girl’s new agent. He tricks them into coming to Hawaii to "discover" this girl, who actually lives just a block from the theater.

Thus, basically, the entire cast ends up in Honolulu (there is of course a song about the hula) and then sing about how ragtime is the new music of the country. It’s actually rather confusing where that finale came from! There’s also a random patriotic number on the boat cruise about leaving the USA (back then Hawaii was yet to be a state!). Most of the songs, which were written by Irving Berlin and include several standards, feel loosely strung together in a very contrived plot.

The production itself, from Musicals Tonight!, is very well done. The staging flows nicely; the harmony sounds great. The cast is very good, sings really well, and they all do nice jobs with the material they are given. The highlight of the show is the showstopping “I Love a Piano” which is probably the most famous song from the show. Most especially clever is the use of the script binders as props and prop holders. Also, there are cute signs that depict where each scene takes place, which is a nice, non-expensive touch.

The show for me is like a history lesson. It is fascinating to see how far theatre has come in nearly a century. The show is worth seeing just for this, in my opinion. The songs are well-performed and are beautifully Berlin. The plot may be a bit lacking, but it is an ancestor of modern form. It is truly commendable that Musicals Tonight! resurrects old shows that would never otherwise be presented. I personally look forward to the rest of their season.

At one point in Straight-Jacket, Richard Day's funny satire of 1950s Hollywood, talent manager Jerry (Brianna Hansen) tells her top client, a closeted gay matinee idol named Guy Stone (Peter Stewart), "Feelings are like treasures, so bury them." Her advice is funny and poignant because Jerry, an equally closeted lesbian, is urging Guy to ignore his feelings for screenwriter Rich Foster (Adam Raynen) in favor of a bright future in Tinseltown. The line also serves as the theme for Straight-Jacket, which is currently receiving an entertaining, but shaky, production at 13th Street Repertory Company.

Adding to Guy's problems are his wife, Sally Olsen (Gyda Arber), a wholesome small-town girl who doesn't know he's gay, and studio boss, Saul Ornstein (Jason Godbey), who won't give him the coveted title role in his production of "Ben-Hur" unless the star weds. Of course, Guy leads such a charmed life he doesn't think he has any problems. "Everything always goes my way," he tells everyone. But, things don't go his way for much longer, and soon he's faced with the age-old dilemma of choosing between love or his career.

If any of this sounds like you've seen it before, you probably have, and will not be surprised by the outcome. But that doesn't stop Day from being very funny and clever. "No babies! The Russians have the bomb!" is Guy's excuse to Sally for not wanting children. Later, when she asks Saul if he thinks Guy will like Sally's surprise gift of an electric organ, he replies, "Will guy like a masculine organ? I think so." The imaginary rimshots fly fast and furious in Straight-Jacket, and, for the most part, are justified.

The cast has a good time, especially the women. As Sally, Arber is both adorable and pathetic in her adoration for Guy. When she reads the headlines of their very public nuptials—"Guy Stone Marries Ordinary Nobody"—she beams as if she's just won the lottery, then hums "When You Wish Upon a Star." Hansen has a lot of fun with, and brings a good amount of groundedness, to Jerry, the play's "straight man" (no pun intended, I swear). Stewart makes Guy's shallowness endearing. Raynen does a nice job of fleshing out Rick, the play's moral center (and, I assume, the author's mouthpiece). As Saul, Godbey shows an affinity and love for shtick, even if he hasn't quite mastered it yet. And Michael Shen does a good job in a variety of roles.

Director Robert Kreis, however, stages Straight-Jacket a little too haphazardly. The jokes and the bits are not invested in heavily enough. The throwaway lines and gags are often thrown a little too far away. The result often feels like the production has been under-rehearsed, and that, in order to compensate for that, it tries too hard.

There's also a distracting disparity between the appropriateness of some costumes, props, and hairstyles, and the inappropriateness of others. Modern times seem to clash often with the 1950s setting. Which is frustrating, because the many things that the designers get right just punctuate the few things they bungle. And, the stage crew still needs to practice their scene changes. But, based on the length of the play's run, they ought to be running like clockwork in no time.

The playwright and the actors overcome these obstacles, though, and turn Straight-Jacket into a very worthwhile evening at the theater.

Take two parts mid-life crisis, one part lonely schoolteacher, add a pinch of theoretical physics, and mix liberally in the bottomless beaker of the live event. What you’ll get is something like Jacqueline Reingold’s new play String Fever, a charming, funny, ultimately benign study of one woman’s struggle with the big four-oh. And while the ingredients are combustible enough, they seldom collide in the most dynamic ways. This despite a crisp, nearly flawless staging by director Mary B. Robinson and an energetic cast.

Lily, played with delightful bemusement by Cynthia Nixon, is turning 40; a violin instructor with a suicidal father and a phobic ex-boyfriend, she meets and quickly falls for Frank, a physics professor who seems to know a lot about string theory. Strings, we learn, may form the fabric of multi- dimensional space-time. They are the cool new way to unify all the physical principles into one. Trouble is, no one can prove they exist; not yet, anyway. But Lily is banking on them as a way to tie together the various strands of her wobbly world. What’s 40, after all, in the vast scheme of the quantifiable universe?

This is an unstable premise for a life, and we see disasters approach our heroine from quite a distance. It’s an intriguing premise for a play, of course, but it begins to feel superimposed. Even the birthday is more convenient device than dramatic catalyst. Lily talks to us about mirror symmetry and electrons, but the analogies are either forced or made redundant by her interactions with other characters. These include Janey, the steady best friend, and Gisli, an Icelandic comic who videotapes hilariously absurd messages to Lily. There’s also a lot of illness going around, both mental and material; at one point, Gisli and Matthew (the ex)  happen to meet at a horse ranch for people suffering nervous breakdowns. Multi-dimensions, indeed!

As episodic theatre, String Fever gently nudges us away from serious emotional involvement with its frequent scene changes. At times the episodes have a cumulative effect, particularly when Frank is involved. Lily’s confrontation with Matthew, though, is the real heart of the play. Here is where needs are finally ripped open, if not met, and Lily boils over when she learns that Matthew has also been cracking the science books. “Physics is mine!” she rails, in a desperate attempt to separate herself from him. But her pet theories prove more complex than she’d thought, allowing the strings to unravel around a loosely dramatized concept.

There is much to engage with and to enjoy. Reingold’s language is surprising, inventive, and unique. Her characters are endearing collections of foibles, each trying to make their problems compute to something meaningful. David Thornton is riveting as Matthew, a man skating on the thin surface of his life; and Evan Handler’s Gisli, the unofficial conscience of  the play, masks his self-hatred with impeccable comic timing. But there’s that lack of collision, still, that makes certain events seem casual rather than causal. Perhaps Lily would find more solace, and a better metaphor, in good old-fashioned chaos theory.

It's eighty years old, but it's sturdy and smart and resonant and remarkably fresh: Sun-Up, a genuinely "lost" play from American drama's formative years being given its first New York production in decades by the Metropolitan Playhouse, proves itself a classic. Sun-Up is about war and peace and mothers and sons; it's about standing up for what you believe in and finding the strength to forgive your enemies. It's a major find, whether you're a theatre scholar or a theatre lover; in the political climate in which we currently find ourselves, it's even more potently must-see theatre. I'd go so far as to say that Sun-Up may well be the most significant dramatic revival in New York this season. Make plans to visit Metropolitan Playhouse immediately.

(Now, while you're dialing the phone, I'll tell you that I'm not entirely disinterested in this piece: it was I who recommended it to Metropolitan's artistic director, Alex Roe. I am thrilled and gratified to discover that a play that I read and loved a few years ago proves so vital and exciting on its feet—credit being due, obviously, to the excellent creative team that Roe assembled to bring Sun-Up to life. All that notwithstanding, I am confident that my present enthusiasm would be in no way diminished had I not been the one to put the bug in Roe's ear about this heretofore lost treasure.)

Sun-Up takes place in the remote cabin of Liza Cagle, somewhere in the mountains of western North Carolina, miles from anywhere. It's 1917, and Liza, widow of a moonshiner who was killed years ago by a federal revenue agent, lives modestly with her son Rufe. As the play begins, two important events are about to take place. First, Rufe is going to ask his pretty neighbor Emmy Todd to be his wife, and though she's also been asked by the local Sheriff, Jim Weeks, there's no doubt that she will accept Rufe's offer.

Second, Rufe needs to tell his mother that he has registered for the draft, and that he's decided to go off to fight in World War I. This is more momentous even than you might think, because Widow Cagle's distrust of governments and laws is particularly virulent. What's more, even Rufe, with his rudimentary education, has only the vaguest of ideas of what this war is about—he's been convinced by the recruiters that he needs to serve in order to protect his home and his womenfolk from the Germans, but he has no idea who the Germans are; France, he reckons, must be somewhere near Asheville, forty miles away.

In the play's second act, Rufe weds Emmy and leaves for the war on the same day. Widow Cagle doesn't agree with Rufe's decision to go, but she entirely respects his impulse to do what he thinks is right. Emmy and her brother Bud, who pretty much worships Rufe as a hero anyway, are proud and not a little scared. We watch them bid Rufe goodbye; the fear in their eyes is more about the unknown place he's going to than the prospect he won't come back.

Sun-Up's final act takes place about five months later, in the midst of a bitter February snowstorm. A deserter has been traced to the Cagle cabin. Sheriff Weeks thinks it might be Rufe, but it is instead a stranger who the Widow defiantly hides from his pursuers. Events transpire, excitingly, and the Widow arrives at a point where she has to consider what's more important, her pride or her humanity. She concludes, in the play's powerful final scene, that "it's lovin' them all that counts."

I understand that in 1923, upon Sun-Up's original presentation, it was the deprivation of the uneducated mountain folk that made the greatest impression on audiences (resulting in substantial fundraising and other activities in support of public education in North Carolina and elsewhere). The remoteness of the characters still moves us, but so does their self-reliance and their fundamental honesty; playwright Lula Vollmer transcends the specifics of her work's time and place by creating people and situations with such great compassion and truth. Today, Sun-Up feels mostly like a play about war, and which ever side of the issue you stand on you will find fuel for your beliefs in this wise and canny work. You'll also find lessons on isolationism, the right to dissent, and the ways that governments try to control the governed; you'll discover, too, some wise and enduring notions of humility and bravery and love.

The production at Metropolitan is spectacularly good—as fine as anything I've seen there or, for that matter, in any off-off-Broadway house in New York. Director Mahayana Landowne has staged the play with unaffected simplicity, on a splendidly evocative set by Brian Jones, with appropriate costumes by Noelle Pasatieri and expert lighting by Douglas Filomena. The company of eight actors does outstanding work here, led by Ruthanne Gereghty as the stoic, indomitable but fundamentally loving Widow Cagle. The rest of the cast is Sarah Dandridge (Emmy), Roy Bacon (Emmy's father, Pap Todd), John Summerour (Bud), Joe Plummer (Rufe), Scott Ebersold (the Stranger), Tom Richter (Sheriff Weeks), and T.I. Moore (the Preacher). Together they give us moments that are profoundly affecting, like the time when, right after Rufe and Emmy's wedding, the Cagles and Todds hear a distant rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner." "It's church music, ain't it Preacher," asks Widow Cagle; we understand, as the assemblage listens, that they've never heard it before.

This is a play that works its powerful and particular magic in unexpected ways, and on several levels. It makes for a rich and rewarding theatre experience.

Rob Reese—actor, writer, director, improv teacher, and world traveler—can now add Ultimate Capitalist to his impressive curriculum vitae. In Survivor: Vietnam!, his new parody of a certain very popular reality TV show, now running late nights at People's Improv Theatre, he gives the world the consumer product that it's been waiting for. It's called "Wipe 'N Go, the completely disposable two step cleaning system": all you need to do is open the package and then throw it away and you're done (see, two steps).

I give away just this one of Reese's dead-on satirical barbs to show you how on-target his writing is. In two hilarious, brilliantly-crafted "commercials," Reese both deconstructs and fires cautionary warning shots at the state of marketing (and consumer gullibility) in America today (he presses some other buttons as well). Performed simply at two microphones by Reese and Jason Evans, they're neat gems of comic wisdom, all by themselves worth the price of admission to this subversive little show.

Which is not to imply that the rest of Survivor: Vietnam! isn't worth your time. It is, but as sometimes happens in the world of TV, the commercials really are the best part. The premise of Survivor: Vietnam! is that a desperate network has set its newest reality show in the midst of the Vietnam War. Never mind the fact that this war ended some thirty years ago; the media honchos have thoughtfully recreated it, bombing raids and all. Oh, but this time a lot of the Viet Cong are portrayed by beautiful models in skimpy bathing suits.

Reese gives us six rather typical contestants to rough it through combat for a chance at a multi-million dollar prize. There's ditzy vegan Julia (Julia Motyka), naive student Mike (Marcus Bonnée), vaguely lascivious warrior Orf (Daniel Berman), militant feminist Erica (Eric Brenner, in extremely unconvincing drag), and a married couple, controlling Angela (Angela DiGenarro) and her doormat of a husband, Darryl (Darryl Reilly). Egged on by annoyingly chipper host Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon (Nitra Guiterrez), they are made to play "games" like a version of Russian Roulette involving six beer cans (one of the cans has been pre-shaken so it will explode when smashed against someone's head). The women are also encouraged to lift their t-shirts frequently. It's just like TV.

Of course, even as his spot-on parody of this or that reality show goes its merry way, Reese has something a bit darker up his sleeve. Eventually, the remaining survivors find themselves up against authentic danger, perpetrated by an exec-gone-mad named Kurtz. They (and we) wind up in Conrad country, exploring the limits to man's capacity for exploitation and evil (or, more accurately, the apparent lack of such limits) as Survivor morphs into Apocalypse Now.

Not that things get too serious: the finale is a silly, slapstick combat-chase sequence that feels as much like Keystone Kops as anything; Reese's primary objective is to keep us laughing, and he succeeds. Especially with those two commercial interruptions.

The company is fearless and enthusiastic and maintain the requisite high energy level to put over the gags. The staging is simple and minimalist, as befits a director whose roots are in the world of improv; don't worry, you've seen enough of the kind of TV this show is parodying to fill in all the blanks in your mind's eye.

Survivor: Vietnam! runs Saturday nights at midnight, which is an appropriate hour for this kind of gleeful subversion. It's scheduled through May 31st only, but hopefully a longer life is in the cards.