nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

Mason Marzac—the only character in Take Me Out who is not a professional baseball player, and consequently our "guide" into the play—says, of a life-changing experience at a baseball game, that it was the first time he's ever agreed with a crowd. I know just what he means: there's a kind of exhilarating high that comes with letting yourself go with the flow of a friendly mob.

I also know what Marzac—who, prior to his discovery of baseball, viewed himself as a perennial outsider—is reacting to. The crowd at Take Me Out—the audience I was with; my colleagues in the critical community—have all embraced this new play with open arms. But this time, as sometimes happens, I don't agree.

I'll concede that Take Me Out is a reasonably entertaining work of theatre; I'll say up front that its depiction of baseball as near-redemptive turns me off. Playwright Richard Greenberg says some very smart things in this play, via two mouthpieces: Marzac, first, who feels exactly autobiographical, and who explains the game's appeal and mystique with awesome precision and beauty. The other character with something interesting on his mind is a Japanese pitcher named Takeshi Kawabata, who channels an otherness and loneliness that Marzac probably knows just as much about in his way.

Trouble is, the rest of Take Me Out's characters seem to exist solely for the constant false starts of Greenberg's endlessly inventive but entirely un-worked-out plot. It begins with the announcement, by popular superstar Darren Lemming, that he is gay. Lemming (and, apparently, playwright Greenberg) has the idea that this revelation will not affect his career; and it doesn't—sort of—which begs the question of why Greenberg has chosen to write about it when it turns out to be such a non-starter as a plot pivot. (Another question—why the apparently low-libido Lemming, with no ex-lover calling the Enquirer and no current lover pushing him out of the closet, even decides to make this unmotivated declaration—also remains unanswered.)

Anyway, a midyear slump among Lemming's teammates necessitates the hurried recruitment of a minor league pitching sensation, one Shane Mungitt, who is barely articulate and obviously riddled with antagonisms and prejudices, some of which originated with his witnessing, as a baby, the murder-suicide of his parents. Mungitt eventually tells the press that he hates having to shower with a "faggot" (though he will tell Lemming later on that he wasn't talking about him); this leads to all sorts of convoluted plot twists including a bogus letter of apology (written by Lemming's best friend on the team, Kippy Sunderstrom), a sexual assault in a shower, and a death that may or may not be premeditated murder. Meanwhile, Lemming's gay business manager (Marzac) blossoms as he learns to appreciate the glory of baseball.

It definitely keeps us watching, but it doesn't hold together terribly well; Greenberg's storyline is full of holes and his characters, with the possible exception of Mason Marzac, are two-dimensional at best (indeed, several of the ball players are one-dimensional: walking ignoramuses with names like Toddy Koovitz).

And just in case we aren't watching, Greenberg and his director Joe Mantello have inserted three scenes of gratuitous male nudity, in the locker room and the shower, none of which is dramatically necessary and all of which are, as far as I can tell, entirely intended to garner attention and make people gasp—as one woman did at the performance I attended—when the aforementioned Toddy first whips off his towel and parades nude, supposedly in a fit of homosexual panic, in front of Darren Lemming for the better part of five minutes.

The actors ought to get combat pay for what they're asked to do; the one whom the audience responds most to, Denis O'Hare (Marzac), is one of just two in the cast who gets to keep his clothes on throughout. O'Hare is too over-the-top in the role for my taste, but Mantello seems to have directed everybody to play broadly: even the actors in smaller roles, like Kohl Sudduth as another dopey ball player called Jason Chenier or Kevin Carroll as Darren's supposedly good friend Davey Battle, are hitting way off to the outfield when a bunt is really all that's needed.

I admit that I wish Greenberg had wanted to write a play that would have been more interesting to me: an exploration of what might actually happen if a truly beloved public figure/role model revealed that he was gay seems like a terrific idea for a provocative and challenging drama. But that's not what Take Me Out is: it is, instead, a rowdy, rangy comedy about the national pastime. The crowd seems, generally, to enjoy it.

Talking Heads is a true actors' showcase. Seven very talented actors are, at the moment, alternating in this program of monologues written by British playwright Alan Bennett; if audiences keep coming, expect many more to sign on in future months. Bennett wrote two series of Talking Heads for British television some years ago, so there's a decent amount of material for the performers and director Michael Engler to choose from. Fans of literate, character-driven theatre will not be let down.

I attended one evening of Talking Heads, which featured these pieces: "Her Big Chance," performed by Valerie Mahaffey; Daniel Davis (yes, Niles the Butler from The Nanny) in "A Chip in the Sugar"; and "Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet" with Lynn Redgrave. Each of these is actually a little one-person, one-act play, complete with set and even costume changes; though they all explore the inner reaches of loneliness, they stretch the monodrama format in unexpected and entirely welcome ways.

"Her Big Chance" is in some ways the most fun of the three, and also the most structurally playful, skipping about in time and space as an actress named Lesley recounts, to some unseen companion(s), how she happened to get her big break in a sleazy German cheapie-video. Essentially a strung-out dirty joke, the piece, for all its tangential details, is mostly about how the director manages to get Lesley out of all of her clothes and, ultimately, into his bed. What makes it amusing is that Lesley is so spectacularly serious about her craft and, at the same time, so dimly innocent about the world (the more direct though less charitable way to describe her would be to call her dumb). Alas, gloriously dumb is what Lesley is, and so we can't help but laugh at her exploits, whether she's conscientiously taking up chess because the casting director tells her that her character is supposed to be smart, or convolutedly finding a way to justify her character's onscreen nudity. Valerie Mehaffey imbues Lesley with a great deal of charm, which takes the edge off. But "Her Big Chance," though entertaining, is a bit of a guilty pleasure.

"A Chip in the Sugar," the most maudlin of the three that I saw, traces the strain in a relationship between a 70-odd-year-old lady and her middle aged son Graham, who narrates (portrayed here by Daniel Davis). Graham lives with his mother after having been institutionalized (for reasons never made clear). Their ordered existence is disrupted by the sudden appearance of one of the mother's old flames—a fellow with whom she had had a romance long ago, before she knew Graham's dad. Graham begins to feel very much the fifth wheel; nevertheless, it's not particularly a surprise when we learn that the mother's "boyfriend" is something of a fraud—this is the kind of story that has to end as it began, with mother and son once again settled, if not exactly happy, in comfortable codependency. Davis brings Graham and the other characters to life, giving each a distinct voice and set of mannerisms, and keeping us riveted throughout.

My evening of Talking Heads ended with Lynn Redgrave's bravura turn in "Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet." This tale of a middle-aged lady who finds happiness with her rather perverse chiropodist might feel dirty or pathetic in other hands, but Redgrave's jaunty, life-affirming persona makes it somehow entirely palatable. Redgrave's character, a fussy old maid called Miss Fozzard, finds herself stuck caring for her brother, who has recently had a stroke. Her only relief, it seems, comes from weekly trips to her foot doctor, whose attentions make her feel important, possibly even attractive. She soon starts to feel useful as well, as the old doctor, who is certainly unconcerned with issues of ethics or malpractice suits, begins to engage Miss Fozzard to perform certain services as well (not the ones you think: he gets her to walk on his back in her stockinged feet—chacun a son gout, as they say). Redgrave, glowing and mischievous, crafts a shrewd and self-aware eccentric from a character who could merely be unpleasant or self-involved in a performance that is nothing short of triumphant.

Depending on when you go, you will see some or all of the above and/or Kathleen Chalfant, Christine Ebersole, Brenda Wehle, and Frances Sternhagen in tales of similarly melancholy, off-kilter Brits. What they all seem to understand about Bennett's subjects is that, no matter what their circumstances, these folks are never quite sad. Which makes them, ultimately, diverting enough company for an evening out.

Molière—who is to comedy what Sophocles is to tragedy: the unsurpassed master of the genre (always excepting Shakespeare)—views human folly with a child’s simplicity. He doesn’t search for motives; his characters are drawn without irony, acting the way they do because of who they are. It’s this clarity, delightfully free from psychological realism, that makes them individuals. They interact with all the artificiality (and fun) of Sims on a home computer. Life is all play for Molière.

Molière’s characters vibrate invisibly each time they come into contact with one another. Like magnets, sometimes they draw together and other times they repulse each other. Molière mirrors their giddiness in their speech: an irresistible scheme of rhymed couplets. Tartuffe, his ageless play written in 1664, is constructed with such delicacy that it floats on a cloud of exhilaration, yet it remains grounded by comedy’s schadenfreude.

The deserving victim of Molière’s pen in Tartuffe is religious hypocrisy, known today as compassionate conservativism. In 17th century France, no less than 21st century America, con artists bent on lining their own pockets bilked Joe Average with holier-than-thou platitudes. Orgon, a widower with two nearly-grown children and a new wife almost half his age, has invited the Jesuitical Tartuffe into his home as a spiritual guide. Everyone else in the house can see that Tartuffe is a poseur, a trait that he doesn’t bother to hide. As long as Orgon is happy in his delusion, Tartuffe is happy to accept Orgon’s property, daughter, and whatever else he can get away with, including Orgon’s wife. Orgon is bound to find out, but by then it’s too late: Tartuffe legally possesses everything he owned. Only the intervention of Louis XIV himself saves Orgon, in a deus ex machina so deft and obvious that Molière has the last laugh, because it’s the perfect ending.

With one of the closest scripts that comedy has to a sure bet, how does the Roundabout’s production of Tartuffe manage to lose? Their production is far too realistic: everyone and everything looks exactly like historians supposed them to have looked in 17th-century Paris. Most of the actors perform with psychological intention, which drains their characters of their magnetic charge. And they fight the poetry the whole way through, trying to bend rhymed iambs into natural speech.

They strain against their costumes as much as they do against speaking verse. Jane Greenwood specializes in period clothing, and does a lovely job here: some of the hats rival the sinister haberdashery in Far Away downtown. But the performers look like they’re wearing costumes, not clothes.

John Lee Beatty’s sets look similarly literal in style but wholly unlived-in. Instead of making Molière’s artifice tangible, they fight against the script’s inherent spirit. They’re so realistic they’re alien, like one of those period rooms at the Met, and much too tight for the broad farce that Molière sets there. Only the final scene, outside the house, lets a little light into the space.

This final scene points toward what’s good about the Roundabout’s production. Once Tartuffe has been led off by the King’s officers, Orgon hangs back as his family files into the house. His wife waits smiling at the door and cocks her head in a motherly manner, as if to say “the game’s over, time to come inside.” Orgon looks a little forlorn as he returns to his grand house and adult responsibilities.

These two actors know which play they’re performing. Brian Bedford makes a simple choice by playing Orgon like a five-year-old who’s obsessed with his new pet. (A Tony winner for his performance in Molière’s School for Wives, he’s also the most comfortable with the verse.) He avoids the frippery of analysis that weighs down Henry Goodman’s Tartuffe. Goodman approaches this boisterous hypocrite like a method actor, with tics and pauses and in such a mild manner that he never connects with Bedford or anyone else onstage.

Kathryn Meisle, as Orgon’s wife Elmire, does relate comfortably to Bedford, providing the one magnetic charge on the Roundabout stage. Early on, she establishes a stable center that the (absent) chaos should pivot on. She provided the same excellent service for an equally unfunny comedy as Olivia in the Central Park Twelfth Night last summer. Next to her, the usually scintillating J. Smith-Cameron, as the cocky servant Dorine, looks bored and a little tired.

In fact, most of the actors look vaguely bored. And consequently most of the production is utterly bland. There’s little comedy involved, either refined or broad, and it’s all too matter-of-fact. The audience may laugh, but it sounds as obligatory as the rest of the production. Director Joe Dowling seems to have experienced a failure of nerve. He hasn’t grown his production out of Molière’s script, and instead has opted for the safe concept of a period piece. But to play Tartuffe as if people ever actually acted this way is impossible. Dowling hides the play’s theatricality in layers of rationality. This approach might work for Chekhov (a Dowling favorite at his theater in Minneapolis, the Guthrie) but it deadens the kinetic spirit of Molière.

Once upon a time, movie stars did more than twinkle light off their teeth and eyes, they glowed with luminous screen silver. Tea at Five harks back to those days, through the prism of Katharine Hepburn. The play presumes you already know about this exceptional actress. And you probably do, through classics like The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond. And those are only a few of the films that she received Best Actress Oscar nominations for (she won four out of twelve). Any play about her—much less a one-woman show that encompasses her six-decade career—requires a powerhouse to fill the part.

Kate Mulgrew (formerly Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager) deserves a commendation for her chutzpah at attempting the role. More importantly, she earns applause for holding an audience’s attention solo for two hours (including a fifteen-minute intermission to age herself by 40 years without heavy makeup). Mulgrew’s performance is helped by her doppelganger resemblance to Hepburn. But she also channels the crisp energy that made Hepburn so mesmerizing. She folds her arms over her legs like young Hepburn, she delivers insults through Parkinson’s tremors like the old Hepburn, and she keeps you watching like Hepburn regardless of age.

There’s an unfortunate lack of surprise in the script—just as in her movies, Hepburn is a woman with the intelligence to comprehend her shortcomings, and the will to overcome them. Worse, playwright Matthew Lombardo barely manages to string Hepburn’s anecdotes together into a plot. His titular tea-time is an attempt to bring Hepburn’s family ritual into the biography, but it really means the audience must listen to Hepburn talk about china an awful lot when we’d rather hear about Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. There’s no dramatic tension in the first act—after a string of flops, will she save her career in the role of Scarlet O’Hara?— and the second act lacks even that gesture towards plot. But, just as Hepburn’s performance held the bleeding-heart fluff of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? together, Mulgrew holds Tea at Five together with consummate actorly skill.

Temporary Help, the play by David Wiltse that is the inaugural production of Revelation Theater, is an ok thriller. Consequently, I can't tell you much about it because it doesn't deserve to be spoiled; including why it's not a great thriller (though I'll try).

Here's the set-up: Karl Streber (Robert Cuccioli), borderline psychopath, runs a farm in Nebraska with his co-dependent spouse, Faye (Margaret Colin). When we meet him, Karl is stowing a freshly-killed body under the sink and Faye is keeping Sheriff Ron Stucker (William Prael) busy in the living room until he's finished. Ron wants to ask Karl about a man who used to work at the Streber farm who has since disappeared—some not too subtle foreshadowing.

In the next scene, Karl shows up at the house with the strapping (and improbably named) young man Vincent Castelnuovo-Tedesco (Chad Allen), who at first appears to be a tailor-made next victim for whatever shenanigans the Strebers are involved with, but quite soon proves his mettle as match-and-then-some for this weird couple. Playwright David Wiltse provides an intricate plot in which everybody has reason to be worried about what everybody else is doing; it's rife with psycho-sexual (sometimes homoerotic) game-playing and filled with herrings—some of them red, some not—that include abusive parents, suspicious deaths, guns, explosives, insurance policies, and other incendiary things.

It feels written (as opposed to organic) almost all the time, and the ending doesn't feel entirely earned. That said, Temporary Help is spectacularly watchable, and not in a traffic-accident way: this is a well-crafted thriller that grips us and keeps us on the edge of our seats. If the big moments elicit titters rather than gasps, well, that's disappointing; but this is certainly a plausible entertainment, and that for all of the plot's implausibilities.

The cast is fine, especially Cuccioli, who is obviously having a ball playing this lunatic—without ever going over the top, he creates a genuine menace (the little bit of butt cleavage that he flashes us in his opening scene, bending over in jeans that are too low and too tight, telegraphs much about the performance). Colin similarly has a field day as the wife who may or may not be in this thing up to her eyeballs, though her playing feels a bit mannered in the second act. Allen, buff and youthful and manic, makes Vincent the play's revving engine. Prael acquits himself nicely in the least showy role as the Sheriff.

Tess’ Last Night tells the tale of a young woman from Canada following her dream to become a children's theatre star. The show begins in Canada where Tess discovers her ancestors were in children’s theatre. She decides to drop out of college and pursue her dream to become a star and find true love. Moving to NYC, she meets Mariana and Yates who soon become her best friends/sidekicks. She lands her first audition and becomes one of the seven dwarves in a non-Disney version of "Snow White."

One night the entire cast gets so trashed, none of the other dwarves can perform, so sober Tess ends up having to play all seven dwarves, pretending she has multiple personalities. A director/writer, Griffith, falls in love with her and makes her famous, but by the end of act one is back with his ex-wife, famous star, Dahlia Price.

Act Two follows Tess as she returns, career ruined, to her roots in children’s theatre. She meets a puppeteer/writer, Cooper, who falls in love with her, but does not know about her sordid past. Eventually, she returns to NYC, and Cooper finds out the truth and dumps her. She then realizes that her mute accompanist, Edmund, has been in love with the real her from the beginning, and they live happily ever after.

The show is definitely too long and could use some serious trimming. There are many good ideas in the book by David L. Williams, but they fail to reach their potential. For example, there are many breaks of the fourth wall: there is a narrator, Gwen, who interjects many opinions during the show and demands audience participation. But as many of these self-referencing jokes fall flat as land successfully.

Similarly, the songs by Joel Weiss are amusing, yet also fail to deliver. For instance, there’s a naughty song about auditions: “If you wanna get ahead, you have to give some.” That’s clever, but Weiss fails to build on it. It doesn’t help that there are many spots where there are lyrics that do not gel—there are many imperfect rhymes, mis-stressed syllables, and cramped lines.

The cast tries really hard to make the material they’re given work. Carrie Libling as Tess does a good job in balancing her character’s many disparate emotions. Jeremy J. Sullivan as Griffith has a nice timbre to his tenor. Breanna Pine as Dahlia stops the show with her soaring soprano.

Tess' Last Night has some fun moments and some generally great ideas. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to its potential. Fortunately, though, it's still a fairly entertaining evening.

Oklahoma native Louis Broome’s new play begins with a taut overture of exposition that swiftly and energetically relates the main facts you’ll need to keep in mind over the following two hours. Young, beautiful Oklahomans Eddie (Jesse Lenat) and Emma (Tina Benko) met, married, and gave birth to two children—Houston (Adrian LaTourelle) and Dallas (Annie Parisse); and in spite of a seemingly happy existence horsing around and listening to local radio personality Cowboy Bob (Tom Wiggin) croon over the airwaves, Eddie quite unexpectedly broke a bottle one day and slashed Emma’s throat with it. Years later, Dallas is living in Seattle with her lover, Morgan (Caroline Bootle), while Houston is confined to a mental institution, paralyzed since the murder within an inner world of fantasy.

Broome and director Allison Narver lead the audience along the play’s three parallel, interconnected threads: a stylized, dreamy series of scenes in which Eddie, already strapped into the electric chair, is visited by various figures in his life; the more realistic journey of Dallas and Morgan as, years later, they arrive in Tulsa to attend to the newly homeless Houston, a victim of state budget cuts; and the continuing narrative of Houston’s cowboy dream life, in which he imagines his adventures as a novice shootist and companion to a now-mythical Cowboy Bob.

Within this framework, Broome displays a nice sense of pacing and structure, even as many plot details remain vague or unexplained; however, his true gift is for language. As some of Broome’s linguistic set pieces unfold, many of them in blank verse, one can imagine the thrill of Shakespeare’s audiences as they listened to his actors twist familiar idioms into strange, exciting shapes. In the mythical West, a series of quips revolving around an unlikely comparison between a Western sunset and Cowboy Bob’s memory of a bruise left on his keister by a rampaging bronco becomes an unlikely tour de force of dizzying wordplay. Broome also displays a wonderful facility with the evocative power of lists: take, for instance, Eddie’s dreamy rundown of all the mundane, everyday things that prevent any time spent on earth, however short, from being a waste. Or witness the ghost of Emma, when, demanding vengeance from her son like a gender-reversed King of Denmark, she lets loose a litany of epithets so fierce, fast and funny they’d shame the stripe off a polecat.

In the end, however, an unwillingness to truly reckon with the play’s darker emotions—especially the bloody murder at its heart—deprives Texarkana Waltz of the depth to which it aspires. As Eddie sits on an electric chair, awaiting his execution, we never see even a hint of the rage simmering beneath the surface that brought him to that point. His repeated excuse that he killed Emma because he was "having a bad day" is never convincing—especially when Jesse Lenat plays his lovable, courtly side to the hilt (which, it must be admitted, makes for a very pleasant, sympathetic performance). This decision keeps the play grounded at a level of wistful comedy, never exploiting the element of Elizabethan tragedy that is hinted at throughout.

In spite of this serious flaw, the dramatic structure remains quite sound until near the end, at which point the play continues for ten minutes after its natural climax. Eddie’s story is resolved in a beautifully cathartic moment, but instead of tying up all three threads at once, with the nifty coup de theatre the staging initially suggests, the play plods dutifully through the wrap-up of the cowboy saga and the more naturalistic family drama separately in turn.

But all of this is grousing, to an extent: the reason to see Texarkana Waltz is for its engaging characters, its robust humor, and its alarming virtuosity of language, all of which the actors obviously take great pleasure in bringing to life. Standing out in a uniformly splendid cast are Chuck Montgomery, whose dusty blowhard characters very nearly run off with the show, and Tom Wiggin, who inhabits various authority figures named Bob with a wit and ease perfectly suited to the goofy majesty of the mythical West.

The Alchemists, the new musical from Prospect Theater Company, has many good ingredients, but like its namesake fails to create real gold. It is set in Regency England in the romantic age, and the plot is pretty much that of a love square gone awry.

The story hinges on Anne Quintrell, an orphan who gets taken in by Stanley Auburn, Sr., the master of Foxwood Hall. Anne quickly becomes the object of affection of three of the four young men who are schooled there—Stanley, Jr., the eldest  and heir to the Hall; his brother Nicholas, a writer who uses his unrequited and unreturned love for Anne as inspiration for maudlin poetry; and Nathaniel Plum, son of a neighbor. (The fourth of these young men, Nathaniel's brother Marcus, is a fabulous painter and seems to have a thing for Stanley, Jr.)

The action keeps shifting (a little confusingly at first) between Anne's arrival at Foxwood Hall in 1807 and fifteen years later, when she is about to be wed to Stanley, Jr. Two actors play each character, one young and one older, making it even more difficult to keep everything straight.

Anyway, the plot pretty much builds around the various conflicts of love for Anne. Stanley is going to wed Anne, but neither loves each other; it’s just for convenience and for money from Auburn, Sr. However, this plan is complicated by an argument between Stanley and his father, Nicholas’s undying, foolish love for Anne, and the fact that Nathaniel is Anne's true, stubborn love.

It's a complex plot, and it makes the show feel too long—there are twenty scenes, a lot of them superfluous. But the show is not dull, it just needs some serious tightening and simplifying.

The score by Peter Mills has its moments. The highlights are "Without a Word," a duet about unspoken love for Anne and Nathaniel, "Young Man’s Prayer," a duet for Nathaniel and his younger self about Anne, and young Anne’s final ballad "In a Perfect World." However, none of the numbers really tell us anything more about the characters than we already know. More pertinent, revealing lyrics would help strengthen the piece.

The ensemble works really well together and has a certain charming chemistry.

So there is plenty to like in The Alchemists, but overall it fails to make the audience actually care about the action and the characters onstage. With some serious fine-tuning and tightening, perhaps this could be resolved, for the show tries really hard and has some good qualities.

This summer, particularly, seems like one in which New Yorkers would want to gather together in public and celebrate the struggles and ideals of the men who founded our nation. (One would hope that we'd want to do that every season of every year, actually.) Well, Kirk Wood Bromley's The American Revolution, which is now being performed by the Inverse Theater in Central Park (and, on July 4, at La Plaza Community Garden), offers precisely that opportunity. This sprawling verse play—a history along the lines of, say, Shakespeare's Henry V—provides a view of the Revolutionary War and some of the people who made it happen, both famous and anonymous, that is playful and serious and cockeyed and clear-eyed. It's a lot of fun.

The ostensible central character of Bromley's play is George Washington, the Virginia planter who reluctantly allows himself to be drafted as commander-in-chief of the fledgling United States' army and somehow manages to hold it together and defeat the British seven years later. As played here by Inverse stalwart Alan Benditt, Washington's defining characteristics are love of country and love of freedom, and it is these that carry him to victory.

But nothing is ever so simple in life, love, war, or politics: Bromley fills out his play with a rogue's gallery of supporting characters who, though less noble than the General, are far more indicative of the American Personality. Among these are the pompous and foolish General Charles Lee, who carries his dachshunds to the front on a leash and eventually manages to implicate himself in a mutinous plot against Washington; Alexander Hamilton, financial genius and Washington's aide-de-camp, who is something of a prig and a stick-in-the-mud, like Alex Keaton from "Family Ties" in uniform; and Benedict Arnold, the steely, intelligent soldier who is Washington's best man, whose ambition eventually leads him to the treachery with which his name is now synonymous.

And then there's the Rebel Mess, a quartet of disorderly soldiers from the margins of colonial society. Led by a self-appointed jackass of a captain, they include the soft-spoken scholar Tom Dodge, the frisky youngster Robert Shurtless, and the free-spirited wise guy Johnny Freeman. Cowardly, ragtag, and undisciplined, the Rebel Mess nevertheless has gumption, pride, and street-smarts (or whatever you'd call the equivalent in 18th century America). Descended dramaturgically from Falstaff and his crew, and spiritually from every American hayseed who ever outwitted a city slicker from Yankee Doodle to the Beverly Hillbillies, the Rebel Mess is America, in all its imperfect, sloppy, contradictory glory. They're the soul of the country and the soul of this play.

Hank Wagner, the open-faced, nimble actor who plays Freeman, dominates every scene he's in with his boundless energy and unbridled glee. He's joined by David Willner (Dodge), Rachel diCerbo (Shurtless), and Tom Epstein (Captain Gutbreath) in bringing this mangy, manic gang to life.

Indeed, the entire company does fine work here. Especially notable are Matt Daniels, Bob Laine, and Matt Oberg, who each take several roles here and have particular fun with the foppish Brits who are clearly The American Revolution's comic villains. (Oberg is especially memorable as a loony King George III.) Joshua Spafford brings a restraint and thoughtfulness to Benedict Arnold that helps us understand his decision to turn traitor. Carey Urban is a charming Ben Franklin, among other characters; and Catherine McNelis is a brash and exuberant Lafayette.

Howard Thoresen's outdoor staging is brisk and agile and involving, even as actors are forced to compete with all of Central Park's distractions—lovely and otherwise—for the audience's attention. The play has been, I think, both cut and revised since its original production three years ago; the changes render it both simpler and broader than I remember it. This is appropriate for an outdoor production: subtlety of action and thought are harder to project across a field than across footlights. But those in search of everything Bromley has to say about our country's founding will want to see The American Revolution again, inside.

In its first four years, the Classical Theater of Harlem has become one of the most consistently intelligent and dramatically compelling companies in New York City. The founders, Alfred Preisser and Christopher McElroen, direct timeless dramas by paying respect both to their playwrights— Euripides, Shakespeare, Ionesco—and to their audience—African-Americans, New Yorkers, Americans, human beings.

Their latest production, Jean Genêt’s The Blacks, shows an imagination and intelligence that transcends budgetary constraints and occasional shortcomings in skill. The Blacks isn’t a perfect work, but the ensemble plays it with gusto. And, as directed by McElroen, it’s as relevant a play as can be conceived in the U.S. today. It’s more visceral, more exciting, and more illuminating than the similarly themed (but more straightforward) Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom now on Broadway; it’s simply better theater.

In part, this is because Genêt, commissioned by an all-black company in 1958 France, wrote a Russian doll of a script. The outermost level of the play is about a rape/murder of a white woman by a black man. But this play is performed by an African troupe for their colonial oppressors. And this conceit is actually a front, enacted by an all-black company as a distraction for their white audience, while backstage a band of radicals puts a traitor on trial.

Beneath that, of course, is “reality” itself: the audience watching the Classical Theater of Harlem stage Genêt’s The Blacks. But—and here’s the point of Genêt’s play-within-a-play-within-a-trial-within-a-play—race is all about masks and roles. It’s as artificial as theater, and, if approached right, just as ludicrous. Genêt subtitled his work "A Clown Play," and McElroen happily takes that concept to extreme lengths. Audiences enter a black-and-white big top alternately served and teased by the black ensemble, dressed in mock-formalwear.

The furious pace of the show, its shifts from one level to another, its monochromatic chaos all find their complements in lights, sound, and dance. The most pointed music in Stefan Jacobs’ excellent sound design is comprised of old spirituals bleached out by white choirs, such as might have been heard on the old Lawrence Welk TV Show. The masks, designed in tandem with the set by Anne Lommel, and worn only by the white characters, are meticulous caricatures of types—a queen, a judge, a minister, a fop.

But it’s the actors who channel the play’s energy, mainly by adding yet another level, an improvisation on the subject of blackness. On one evening, a white patron tripped over a footlight placed along the catwalk that divides the audience: she was chastised by Archibald the M.C. (Ty Jones), who pointed out harshly that all the actors were barefooted: “White people, they always walk wherever they wanna walk!” Later in the show, a young white man was dragged onstage and bullied into shucking-and-jiving for the audience’s entertainment. It’s a humiliating set piece for everyone involved, reversing the performer-viewer inequity as well as the black-white one.

With all its shifts of reality, The Blacks sometimes becomes hard to follow. McElroen always has an idea that drives the scene, but he hasn’t always taught the actors to communicate that idea clearly. At other points, the actors become so involved in puncturing stereotypes that they lose the meaning. This frantic hilarity becomes exhausting, and a little calm would be welcome by the curtain. But at a short two hours, this production of The Blacks accomplishes something that few shows do: it’s a theatrical revelation, not divulging what is unknown but exhibiting what all have suspected.

In this production, the Classical Theater of Harlem produces as radical a play as anything far away downtown. Unlike many avant-garde companies, however, McElroen and Preisser’s company bring us along on their explorations. The Blacks—like their previous shows—isn’t theatre for its own sake: it relates directly and specifically to the world outside. It celebrates a common humanity, while addressing the problems between people with honesty. And because it does this, the audience leaves, not drained and depressed, but energized and hopeful.

The theatre is a great place to expose and explore pressing social concerns, and the state of public schools in America—in New York City specifically—is about as pressing an issue as I can think of. Christopher Colt has worked at Talent Unlimited High School for ten years, so he knows whereof he speaks in his new play The Book Bag. It's an uneven work, but both an entertaining and pertinent one. If, like me, you've been away from the school system for a few decades, you're in for a bit of a wakeup call.

Colt's protagonist and hero is Mr. P., a young, idealistic English teacher at an inner city school in NYC. We first meet him trying—unsuccessfully—to get his chaotic home room to quiet down; he can barely make himself heard among the din of walkmen, fighting, and loud conversations. When the school bell signals the end of home room, one of Mr. P.'s students, Robert, explodes in angry frustration, banging hard onto his locker door and then knocking over a chair. It turns out that Robert has lost his book bag, or more accurately he's certain that it's been stolen. Mr. P. tries to calm the boy down, and assures him he will help him get it back.

Robert seems disproportionately upset about the loss of the bag, which leads the school's Dean, the quirkily curmudgeonly Mr. K., to suspect that something valuable and dangerous was in it—to wit, a gun. Mr. P. is appalled but follows along, eventually scheduling a conference with Robert's guardian, a protective aunt named Mrs. Johnson. Here he discovers the truth about what was inside the bag—not a gun, as you have probably figured out; he also learns some facts about Robert that, had he known them, would have helped him help his student. Colt's narrative—and it does this sort of thing over and over again in The Book Bag—depicts with sad clarity one of the key reasons that the good intentions of teachers like Mr. P. are thwarted: that the artificial barriers between students and teachers—caused by factors like race, economic status, and the self-assurance that comes with being educated and secure—reinforce themselves and make the process of educating inside schools more and more difficult.

Colt is at his best expressing the giant frustrations of the school system's seemingly impotent cogs. Besides the quixotic Mr. P., his play's characters include a burnt-out Librarian who answers a student's request for information with an unlooked-for lecture about the inadequacy of the school's outdated collection of books and encyclopedias, and an overtaxed Principal who has learned that just getting through the school day is achievement enough; never mind whether anybody learns anything. To the cynical Mr. K, Colt gives perhaps the play's best speech, in which he explains why the brightest kids are better off staying away from school and instead trying to learn from educational TV at home.

The playwright does an equally vivid job portraying the System's victims. There's an affecting scene in which Robert and Sonia, an earnest teenager who is interested in him, study for an upcoming social studies test; their view of the world, constricted by lack of information and skewed mental maps, reveals surprising provincialism in the heart of our nation's biggest and most cosmopolitan city.

The Book Bag is staged in the tiny Collective: Unconscious space; director J.C. Islander copes with the space limitation by using the meagerest of sets and doing away with scene changes, both of which sometimes make it hard to follow the narrative. The actors include Tyler Ford, Stephanie Andujar, and Jason Santana, all of whom are students at the school where Colt teaches, and each of  whom does fine work here. The adult performers are spottier, with Daniel O'Brien the standout as Mr. P., capturing his character's idealism, perplexity, frustration, and especially his disenchantment with the worst aspects of the System, which are personified by Mr. K. Stuart Rudin, who plays Mr. K., is mannered and quirky and often ineffective; and Ursula Lovings, who doubles as Mrs. Johnson and the Principal, didn't yet seem comfortable in her roles at the performance attended. But Fred Backus, veteran of many a downtown production, is terrific as the harried Librarian, threatening to steal the show with his tantrum about the aging reference materials in his charge.

In this centennial year of the birth of Richard Rodgers, it's swell that the Roundabout Theatre Company has elected to revive The Boys from Syracuse. Although aspects of this production, directed by Scott Ellis, are indifferent at best, the score exemplifies the breezy, glorious work that Rodgers did with his first collaborator, Lorenz Hart. Broadway's got Oklahoma! (and Flower Drum Song on the way) to represent Rodgers' better-known later period, when he wrote musical plays with Oscar Hammerstein II. Now, for a few months, we've got one of the best of the Rodgers & Hart musical comedies brassily, giddily singing in our ear on 42nd Street.

For The Boys of Syracuse—at least as presented here—is ALL about the songs. For starters, there's one of Rodgers' most luscious waltzes, "Falling in Love with Love," set to a wry but heartfelt lyric:

Caring too much is such a juvenile fancy
Learning to trust is just for children at school

Then there's the Act One capper, "This Can't Be Love," a zesty, upbeat, swinging tune undercut by Hart's ironic sentiment:

This can't be love because I feel so well
No sobs, no sorrows, no sighs

Maybe you're familiar with the show-stopping "Sing for Your Supper," or the lilting love song "You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea." I certainly didn't know the rousing "Dear Old Syracuse," a sincere yet tongue-in-cheek ode to a town in Greece and also to a more contemporary place in upstate New York—a Rodgers & Hart specialty; or "He and She," a comic list song about immortal pairings and what became of them; or "Oh, Diogenes!" in which three neglected women concur with the ancient's finding that there's no such thing as an honest man; or "Come with Me," a buoyantly silly invitation to prison, sung by a sergeant and his corps of policemen.

The thing is, there's not a dud in the bunch: this is the young Richard Rodgers at his bountiful melodic best, and Larry Hart's wizardry with clever rhyme is at the top of its form as well. The score, all by itself, makes a visit to The Boys from Syracuse an enjoyable one.

The book, adapted by Nicky Silver from George Abbott's 1938 original, is less satisfying, however. The Boys from Syracuse is a very free-wheeling musicalization of Shakespeare' Comedy of Errors, retaining the basic plot elements about twin Antipholuses and twin Dromios separated at birth who are suddenly all together and at large on a fateful day in Ephesus. The main love story revolves around Antipholus of Syracuse and his twin brother's sister-in-law, Luciana. The main comic relief comes from the two Dromios and the wife of one of them, the sassy maid Luce. Silver's libretto provides a firm but rather visible backbone for the proceedings, and introduces some campy jokes, but provides few opportunities for the cast to really delight us the way they do when they're singing. Indeed, the book, and Scott Ellis' direction, share a listlessness that deprives the non-sung parts of the show of the joyous jolts of exuberance that the score is so full of.

Casting, too, is problematic: Tom Hewitt (Antipholus of Ephesus), Jonathan Dokuchitz (Antipholus of Syracuse), and Lauren Mitchell (Adriana) simply come across as too old for the brash, naive characters they're called upon to play; of the principals, only Erin Dilly (Luciana) really seems to be on the same wavelength as the show's creators. Chip Zien and Lee Wilkof fare better as the twin Dromios, and Toni Dibuono scores as loud, lusty Luce, especially in her duet with Zien, "What Can You Do with a Man." Best of all is Jackee Harry as the Courtesan, who puts over her gags with real verve and gets the plum assignment of delivering "Sing for Your Supper," bringing a smile to our faces at the show's climax.

Martin Pakledinaz has designed gorgeous diaphanous gowns for the ladies but strangely unflattering garments for the men. The sets (Thomas Lynch) and lighting (Donald Holder) are serviceable. Rob Ashford's choreography feels a little peremptory too, perhaps because his chorus (five men and five women) is a little smaller than might be desirable. But Don Sebesky's orchestrations are terrific; it's grand to hear these great Rodgers tunes in a Broadway theatre (David Loud is at the baton).

An article in the program quotes a reviewer of the original Boys from Syracuse proclaiming this the greatest musical comedy of its time. That may or may not be true; Syracuse certainly doesn't feel especially legendary in this incarnation. But its songs are immortal. Here's a good opportunity to hear them in their natural setting.

Screwball comedy is brought gloriously back to life in Atlantic Theater Company's charming revival of The Butter and Egg Man by George S. Kaufman. As directed by David Pittu, this cast of twelve enters the world of the play so thoroughly that you'd swear that they walked right off the screen of your favorite movie comedy of yesteryear.

When Broadway producers Joe Lehman (Tom Mardirosian) and Jack McClure (Michael McGrath) need to come up with the money to back their latest venture, they reel in Peter Jones (David Turner), a naïve Midwesterner with a fat wad of cash and a yen to get into show business. They figure Jones is harmless enough to be their "butter and egg man" (slang for a backer with deep pockets). But, when he becomes too hands-on for Lehman and McClure's comfort, things start to go kerflooey. Reversals of fortune abound, and Jones realizes that he may be in over his head. Or is he?

Pittu directs The Butter and Egg Man with confidence and brio. He obviously feels comfortable in the stylized and fast-paced world of screwball comedy, and is well-versed in its conventions, which makes the production feel both comfortably familiar and fresh. The designers are on the same wavelength, and help forge a Technicolor world that remains sunny no matter how bad the situation becomes. Costumer Bobby Frederick Tilley II has particular fun with McClure's purple jacket, Jones' green-striped suit, and Lehman's ratty black vest (all of which also speak volumes about the characters). And set designer Anna Louizos creates a versatile set that makes the most of Atlantic's theater, and serves the play well.

The cast is equally confident and skilled. As played by Mardirosian and McGrath, Lehman and McClure are the kind of dry, quick-witted schemers you wouldn't be surprised to see carousing with The Front Page's Walter Burns or Twentieth Century's Oscar Jaffe. Rosemarie Dewitt is right on target as Ms. Weston, the whipsmart secretary with a heart of gold, as is John Ellison Conlee, as another befuddled rube whose enthusiasm gets the better of him. And, as Jones, Turner comes off like the young Jimmy Stewart: sweet and sincere, and armed with the strength of his convictions and morality to carry him through, regardless of how smart he is. His is a wonderful performance.

If you long for the days when cigar- chomping impresarios called everyone "sweetheart," and opium dens were called "hop joints," then check out The Butter and Egg Man. For sheer fun, it can't be beat.

The Mint Theater Company is getting so well-known for finding choice rarities from our theatrical archives and mounting them with care and intelligence that it must be tougher and tougher for artistic director Jonathan Bank to keep raising the bar. But he does: witness Bank's first rediscovery for the 2002-03 season, St. John Hankin's The Charity That Began At Home. This comedy-satire is a real charmer, dealing with still-timely themes with keen wit and common sense. The Mint's production, directed with flair by Gus Kaikkonen, is vivacious and lively.

The play takes place at Priors Ashton, Lady Denison's house in the country, somewhere in England during the Edwardian Era. At present, Lady Denison is hosting an odd assortment of houseguests. There's General Bonsor, a retired army general and a terrifying boor who endlessly reminisces about the old days in "Inja"; he'd be just like the foolish archetype he resembles if he weren't so apt to snap your head off if you fail to hang on his every word. Also visiting is Mrs. Horrocks, a bad-tempered woman so vulgar that she takes two pieces of pie with tea and insists on sitting in the same spot on the couch. (My companion pointed out that what passed for vulgar a century ago would scarcely raise an eyebrow nowadays; ah, for the good old days when people really had manners!)

On hand, too, are Mr. Firket, an earnest but unlucky young salesman, and Miss Triggs, a steely and affected spinster who gives German lessons to unfortunate students. And—more important to our plotline—there's also Mrs. Eversleigh, Lady Denison's sister-in-law; Hugh Verreker, a ne'er-do-well whose reputation seems to have been ruined (though we're not sure why, at least at first); and Mr. Hylton, a secular preacher whose philosophy of philanthropy is revealed to be the cause of this strange cornucopia of undesirables having descended on Lady Denison's house in the first place. Mr. Hylton, it seems, teaches that one should give others what they want, rather than what they deserve. The good-hearted but somewhat addled Lady, urged on by her spectacularly angelic daughter Margery, has interpreted this to mean inviting guests that no one else will entertain in their homes.

This venture, despite the goodness of the impulse behind it, proves disastrous. Lady Denison's visitors are disagreeable and difficult—Miss Triggs, for example, drives Margery out of her own bedroom and insists on teaching Lady Denison German because she has nothing else to occupy her time—and they manage to squabble endlessly among themselves. Worse, Margery and her mother have applied Mr. Hylton's philosophy to domestic affairs as well, hiring a butler called Soames who left his last job in disgrace. Now comes word that Soames has fathered a child with the until-now innocent lady's maid Anson, bringing scandal right into the center of the household.

But that's not all. No sooner does the General reveal some incriminating news about the layabout Hugh Verreker, then Margery bursts in with news of her own. It seems that, in order to rehabilitate Hugh, she has agreed to marry him.

Playwright St. John Hankin has a marvelous time twitting the conventions of polite society, and the kind impulses of philanthropists like Hylton and Lady Denison, as he piles on the complications to demonstrate the unsoundness of this sort of "charity." The company of twelve actors, guided by the sure hand of director Gus Kaikkonen, inhabit this world and bring it to life with real panache. Particularly effective are Lee Moore as the insufferable General, Alice White as the pompous Miss Triggs (she's found a marvelously affected accent that telegraphs the worst of her character's faults instantly), and Michele Tauber as the ill-tempered Mrs. Horrocks. Harmony Schuttler somehow makes the too-good-to-be-true Margery a believable human being, while Karl Kenzler is appealing and sympathetic as her besotted but entirely unsuitable lover, Hugh Verreker.

The Charity That Began at Home is a brightly entertaining journey back to a time when "telling it like it is" was the height of impropriety; it's enlightening to note the immense contrast between our contemporary sensibility and the Edwardian version. But I wonder if all our frankness hasn't come with a cost: how many people today behave as heroically as some of Hankin's creations ultimately do, sacrificing their own comfort for the feelings of others?

Just like you and me, all that Sparky Litman wants is a little peace, a little company, a little security. Okay, maybe his experiences are a tad unusual—he was, apparently, a CIA decoy during the Cold War—but underneath it all he's just a regular guy, trying to organize a nice party for tomorrow evening, get rid of the ants in his apartment once and for all, and determine the perfect location—according to the ancient Chinese art of Feng Shui—for his chair.

Stanley Rutherford's play The Chinese Art of Placement, currently at 78th Street Theatre Lab where it's being performed with masterful restraint by T. Scott Cunningham, takes us on a journey inside Sparky Litman's mind. This mind is—what? addled, confused; deranged? Well, it's not a typical mind, leave it at that; Sparky flashes in and out of the present, where he's dealing with the chair, the ants, and the party, taking detours to focus on fixations (death, loneliness, a girl in grade school who laughed at him when he invited her to the circus) and on his past, especially a wild ride on the Siberian railroad that culminated in a public sexual encounter with a double agent in the dining car.

Sparky's mental wanderings are compelling, no doubt about it; but I was never sure what I was supposed to understand about this man. He's distressed, to be sure; is he also insane? Maybe: one of the people he's invited to tomorrow night's shindig is Tina Turner, who, he says, will sing some of her favorite songs while the guests rotate around the room clockwise, encircling his Chi.

The resolution I kept looking for—Sparky is in a mental hospital, or Sparky is in prison because he's actual a mass murderer; something—never comes. In the end, I can only infer that Rutherford means us to take his protagonist at face value, encapsulating, perhaps in exaggerated fashion, the hopes and fears and anxieties and needs of us all. It kind of works, I guess; ultimately, though, I left The Chinese Art of Placement feeling unsatisfied, as if the last reel of the movie had been misplaced.

Cunningham is great to watch, though, and the spare design—notably Tyler Micoleau's precisely evocative lighting—is impressive. Jessica Bauman is the director.

The Cocktail Party is very long—four hours—but even though Theatre 22 doesn't boast the most comfortable seats in the world, the power of this remarkable play compels us to watch and listen for as long as the performance lasts. This existential comedy of manners by T.S. Eliot is not exactly a masterpiece, but it puts forth the profound thinking of a brilliant writer and when the play waxes philosophical—which it does a good deal of the time—the power and incisiveness of the ideas hold us spellbound. No theatre company in its right mind would dare to take on this daunting work, which is why we must be grateful to Therese Hayden and her Saturday Workshop for keeping the faith. They're giving us a rare, too brief opportunity to see a significant contribution to 20th Century dramatic literature, one that offers much food for thought about the nature of the human condition.

The Cocktail Party begins, as you might guess, at a cocktail party, where a bon vivant named Alex is telling a muddled dowager named Julia something about tigers. We never find out what this tantalizing conversational tidbit has to do with, which is entirely appropriate in this play, where the venerable drawing room comedy format is commandeered by Eliot for purposes both lofty and obscure. Instead, the talk soon turns to the host, Edward, and his missing wife, Lavinia. It's clear quite soon that Lavinia has left Edward, but he doesn't want his guests to know it; it's also clear that they're onto him, despite polite pretense to the contrary.

The guests disperse, except a mysterious man whom Edward does not know and who, for that reason, is the ideal person for him to confide his situation. Later, the guests return, one by one—nosy old Julia on the pretext of losing her spectacles; take-charge Alex, determined to make Edward some supper; a young fellow named Peter, who wants to talk to Edward about the lady he fancies, Celia; and Celia herself, who, it develops, has been Edward's lover.

None of this matters, as it turns out; and all of it matters. In the second act, Lavinia returns home and Edward seeks treatment for what he thinks is a nervous breakdown. The mysterious stranger is identified—sort of—and helps Celia to make a life-changing decision. In Act Three, two years have passed, Edward and Lavinia have reconciled, and all of the guests (save Celia) reunite.

Throughout, plot elements are plentiful; but what's important in The Cocktail Party is what the characters don't know: this is a play that trades fundamentally in the ways we can't understand each other or ourselves; the ways we are alone. The stranger, whose named is revealed to be Sir Henry Harcort-Reilly, serves as Eliot's mouthpiece, and speaks eloquently and sagely about the human condition, and he offers some strategies for coping with it. In Act One we think he might be the Devil and in Act Two we think he might be God; he may just be a very wise man. Julia, likewise, either knows nothing or knows everything. Edward, Lavinia, Peter, and Celia are trying to sort it all out. Each chooses a destiny; as Julia correctly points out at the end of the play, Lavinia and Edward choose one that involves giving cocktail parties.

I won't pretend to understand all of the allusions and symbolism contained in Eliot's text. But I will assure you that, despite the length and density of The Cocktail Party, this play is never boring and endlessly challenging. The speeches where Sir Henry offers his flashes of insight are startlingly good:

When you're dressed for a party
And are going downstairs, with everything about you
Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen
The sometimes, when you come to the bottom step
There is one step more than your feet expected
And you come down with a jolt. Just for a moment
You have the experience of being an object
At the mercy of a malevolent staircase.

And all of the dialogue—oblique, talky, far-fetched though it sometimes is (and occasionally it is all three at once)—holds the ear with its supple phrasing; these are words that demand to be heard.

This production, featuring mostly regulars from Hayden's Saturday Workshop, is still a little unsteady (at least such was the case at the performance I attended, which was the second of just eleven showings). James Stevenson heads the cast somewhat uncertainly as Sir Henry, but it must be said that he absolutely rises to the occasion for each of the important speeches. Jacqueline Brookes dazzles as Julia; and in Elizabeth Nafpaktitis there is a terrifically passionate Celia that just needs a bit more time to develop. The rest of the company is still feeling their way around their roles; but don't let this deter you from seeing the show, because they're doing the play more than justice, even as they continue learning it and its intricacies. It's brave and generous of them to attack this play so wholeheartedly, on their feet, before an audience. And so they deserve an audience to engage in Eliot's extraordinary verse drama; and so you should attend: The Cocktail Party is certainly an adventure in theatregoing unlike any other on offer in New York right now.

Oni Faida Lampley's one-woman show The Dark Kalamazoo illustrates, inadvertently, that old saw about youth being wasted on the young. When Lampley was in college, she decided to spend a year abroad in Africa. A coup d'etat in Ghana diverted her and twenty white American students to the West African nation of Sierra Leone; the group prepped for their trip in Kalazmazoo, Michigan, which is why Lampley got labeled "The Dark Kalamazoo" by her uneasy hosts.

The urgency of searching for roots on a continent so resolutely alien from one's home; the wonder and strangeness of a place so removed from one's everyday experience—these are the themes we hope Lampley's younger self will explore on her once-in-a-lifetime journey. Alas, the Lampley of twenty years ago turns out to be a spoiled, uncertain, immature young woman, and despite the surface bravery to undertake such an expedition in the first place, what young Vera (to use the name she went by in those days, which she calls her "slave name") is most earnestly in search of is escape from her mother and a man who can bring her to orgasm.

And thus The Dark Kalamazoo becomes just another Emerging Feminist On The Cusp Of Womanhood memoir, of which there are many examples in our literature and drama, albeit few with such a colorful (though ultimately underutilized) setting. Most of Vera's experiences—the acquisition of a rebellious but smart boyfriend at a dance, the cleansing naked swim that brought on a catharsis, the orgasm (!)—could have happened just about anywhere. What I missed in The Dark Kalamazoo was what Africa did to Lampley, but our young heroine was too busy being, well, young for it to have much of an impact. I wondered if Lampley had ever gone back, and if so, what she might have learned as an adult about her identity as an African-American woman.

But the story of Vera is the one Lampley has decided to tell, though I really don't know why. At times I was reminded of Jason Robert Brown's recent musical The Last Five Years, in which clearly embarrassing autobiographical details are revealed without much purpose: Lampley does the same here, and again I wonder why we need all this personal information about bowel movements and lovers' penises and mother's scotch and cigarettes.

As for the show itself, it's certainly a marathon for Lampley, who is most impressive recreating the African folk dances that seem to mean a lot to her, (though she never really explains why). There's more movement, though, than there needs to be: Lampley and her director Tom Prewitt should trust the actor and the audience to fill in some of the gaps in the storytelling with their collective imaginations. There is astonishing and wonderful musical accompaniment provided by Kevin Campbell, on what appears to a dozen or more different instruments—primal, evocative, and beautiful, which is what I hoped Lampley would give us in her tale of Africa as well.

HungerArts, a brand new theatre company, gets off to an auspicious start with their production of The Darling Family. Quite apart from their choice of an interesting and challenging play, co-founders Trevor Davis (producer), Matt McIver (director), and Josh Robinson (actor) have done a thoroughly professional job putting this work together: this show ranks among the best of off-off-Broadway, which is a significant accomplishment for a rookie troupe like this one.

They have resisted the temptation, for example, to overdo anything. Director McIver keeps action and setting spare and stark, allowing the audience and the actors to fill in the details of location and chronology as Griffiths' thoughtful, cerebral play spins forward. Lighting designer David Zeffren, similarly, makes the most of minimal effects, using subtle shifts to signal changes in time of day and locale.

This is precisely the approach that Griffiths' play calls for. The Darling Family tells the story of a young man and a slightly older woman—unnamed—who have been in a relationship for about three months when, unexpectedly, she becomes pregnant. On the surface, the play hinges entirely on the question of what happens next: will she have an abortion, or keep the child to raise as a single parent, or will he and she come together and perhaps even marry and form a family?

But that's not what The Darling Family is about. As the two protagonists work separately and together to figure out what to do, each embarks on a journey that ultimately matures them. The Darling Family is, finally, an examination of the joint and distinct soul-searches of a man and woman: painful, necessary explorations of what things mean and what things are valued that lead these characters to fuller (though still incomplete) understandings of themselves and each other. It's excruciating to watch, in a way, for its nakedness and intimacy. But by making the audience witness to a process whereby two not-quite-grown-up adults start to become accountable—spurred on by the sudden possibility of being responsible for a new life—The Darling Family emerges as a powerful, even cathartic, drama.

Griffiths structures her play as short vignettes of various kinds. Sometimes the characters narrate their stories, sometimes they interact naturalistically, sometimes they reveal dreams or thoughts in monologues. Griffiths withholds a lot of information: we don't know what She does for a living, for example, or how the two met, or what it means when He says his mother is his best friend. This technique succeeds in making the protagonists both more specific (in terms of their struggles for self-understanding) and more universal. Josh Robinson and Christina Ross perform the roles with intelligence and compassion and a kind of raw emotionality that takes us deep into each character's mind and soul as they navigate the often treacherous waters that the crisis leads them into.

This is the New York debut of The Darling Family (it has been seen in Canada). HungerArts shows good judgment in finding us this provocative and undeservedly unfamiliar play. And they show great promise with this well-crafted debut production. They're certainly a company to watch; I'll look forward to what they come up with next.

Thaddeus Phillips has performed a one-man Tempest in a kiddie pool, and he's about to do an adaptation of Henry V with toy soldiers and weapons. In The Earth's Sharp Edge, this endlessly inventive man of the theatre tells the story of his detention at an airport by a zealous (or suspicious, or both) customs inspector; and also of his recent visit to Morocco; and thirdly of Leila Khaled, a young Palestinian woman who, in 1969, hijacked a plane to Syria and (after the passengers were off of it) blew it up. Phillips and his collaborators in The Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental give us all three of these tales more or less concurrently, using every inch of the intimate Club space at La MaMa along with the contents of a few valises, half a dozen video monitors, a dozen pairs of shoes, an illuminated globe, and—most importantly—their remarkable imaginations.

The Earth's Sharp Edge is about the different maps of the world that each of us has inside our heads; more precisely, it's about appreciating the existence of these maps, and taking the time and trouble to learn about the ones that other people live by. Content and form collide, as they often do in contemporary theatre, and so the experience of seeing The Earth's Sharp Edge is itself illustrative of its central concept. The customs inspector welcomes us into the theatre (and sometimes asks audience members to provide identification or other information); he then welcomes Thaddeus Phillips, who plays Thaddeus Phillips, into the airport that his mind has fashioned within the theatre space. Our minds follow along, and in scene after scene, we take the journey through time and space that Phillips' discomfiting encounter with Customs (customs?) summons up. The long stage runway becomes, with the addition of a few chairs and many pairs of shoes, an airplane. Sand is dumped out of suitcases onto a table that morphs into a desert. More than one scene is performed in French, while another is mostly in Arabic (a lesson in the language, actually, in which the audience joins Phillips as novice students).

The point is, in the act of witnessing The Earth's Sharp Edge, and in processing what it says to us, we stretch and bend our assumptions about what theatre is supposed to be and what the world is supposed to be. Both of those leaps are the ones Phillips dearly wants us to make as we navigate his tangled account of his own time in Morocco—he went there to learn Arabic—and his second-hand narrative of (some of) the life of Leila Khaled, that hijacker I mentioned. The fact that he had a book about Khaled in his luggage when he arrived back home in post-9/11 America caused at least some of his airport difficulties; he acknowledges that she was a criminal and possibly even crazy, but reminds us that only by trying to understand her map of the world—one defined first and foremost by displacement from her native land as a girl of four—can we even attempt to understand why she did what she did.

There are moments of unparalleled loveliness in The Earth's Sharp Edge (like the conjuration of the desert I mentioned), and pungent bits of satire (like the uncanny impersonation, by a few members of the company, of airline baggage handlers). This is the kind of show where a Marrakech bazaar is evoked with just a few notes of music and the aroma of incense, where what looks at first like a realistic scene turns out to be an enactment of an instructional video, where snippets of scenes from the film Casablanca echo and reverberate at key moments. It doesn't all work and it doesn't all hold together, but the sheer ambition and vision of the thing is breathtaking. Phillips' mental map seems to have no edges at all, so boundless is his curiosity about the world. He's a splendid guide to points unknown in the theatre.

When I was in high school, we read Paul Zindel's The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in English class—it was a new play then—and I remember liking it a lot. I haven't particularly looked at it since, and until now there hasn't been a major New York production where I could see it in the theatre. So it's nice to discover that Gamma Rays, beautifully mounted by Jean Cocteau Repertory in a meticulous and thoughtful production directed by Ernest Johns, is as affecting as I remembered it. This revival—like such recent Cocteau successes as The Subject Was Roses and Talley & Son—reminds us that Edward Albee isn't the only fine U.S. playwright of his generation. American drama stays vital and vibrant even—especially—when it's not consciously explosive; then and now.

Gamma Rays is an intimate, almost claustrophobic piece about a woman who has been defeated by life and her two daughters who are searching for ways not to be. Beatrice, the mother, is intelligent and articulate, but whatever fire she once possessed has long since burnt out; widow of a hopeless husband, she survives by taking in as boarders the feeble and unwanted elderly relatives of rich people. She takes out her frustrations and bitterness on Ruth, her pretty elder daughter, and Tillie, the plainer, smarter younger child.

The girls cope as best they can. Ruth's best, unfortunately, isn't much: hazily alluded-to incidents led her to some kind of mental breakdown a few years back, and she is still wont to go into convulsions when stress and strain stretch her too far. But Tillie has found escape in the wonders of science, and with the encouragement of a supportive teacher at school she embarks on an ambitious science fair project—whose title is also the title of this play—in which she studies the ways that radiation mutates the growth of a certain exotic flowering plant.

The symbolism is a little blatant, to be sure; but Zindel gives us, in Tillie, a heroine to root for. The decaying existence of Beatrice stands in stark contrast to Tillie's naive idealism, but we understand—and so does Tillie—that defeat is not the only option: there's always a way up and out.

Gamma Rays is a tight, rich little play and Johns has staged it flawlessly. Angela Madden delivers her most effective performance yet at the Cocteau as Beatrice—sad, blowsy, angry, and bitterly defiant, she shows us the guts of this woman, letting us glimpse the occasional sparks of maternal love and even, at one point, the determined passion that once fueled her soul. Kate Holland (Tillie) and Rebecca Robinson (Ruth) are entirely sympathetic and manage the difficult feat of convincing us, unerringly, that they are teenagers. Stephanie Varveris has a funny cameo as Janice Vickery, the snobbish girl who is Tillie's main rival at the science fair. Elsie James gives a stunning, silent performance as Nanny, the sickly old woman who is Beatrice's current boarder—her palpable loneliness offers sad foreshadowing for Beatrice's likely future.

Evan Schlossberg's cluttered living room/dining room set perfectly frames the piece, and  Isobel Rubio's carefully chosen costumes define the characters with real precision. Effective lighting by David Kniep and a melancholy, discordant soundscore by Ellen Mandel also serve the production well.

This is as fine a work of theatre as we're likely to see in New York this year, yet I fear that it may get lost in the shuffle of a season that is almost certainly going to be defined by external events. Don't let it: the triumph of the human spirit, even under the most unassuming and modest of circumstances, is always worth celebrating. This production of The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds has something to teach us and the capacity to move us. It's a valuable addition to the current theatre scene.

There is much to recommend Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's new docudrama The Exonerated: fine direction, excellent acting, and the edification that comes from seeing a good story told well.

Taken verbatim from court transcripts, depositions, and interviews, The Exonerated tells the true stories of six people who were wrongly accused and convicted of murder, and spent many years after that on death row before finally being found innocent and freed.

Blank and Jensen's considerable achievement is not so much one of writing, but of editing. They have mined their source materials for what they need to tell their story—which is more about the loss of time than the morality of the death penalty—and fused everything together into a seamless, compelling whole. Not an easy task, considering the amount of material at their disposal, but one which the authors pull off beautifully.

The impact of The Exonerated is made more palpable by director Bob Balaban's decision to stage the play as a reading. Nothing stands between the actors and the audience except ten chairs and music stands, facing front. The lack of artifice helps the audience absorb the play's full weight.

The Exonerated is also served well by a splendid cast headed by Richard Dreyfuss and Jill Clayburgh. He is effectively quiet and low-key as Kerry Max Cook, a wayward Texan imprisoned for the murder of a neighbor whose apartment he'd only been in once. Clayburgh brings the proper energy and outlook to Sunny Jacobs, a hippie convicted (along with her husband) of killing two cops. David Brown, Jr. and Curtis McClarin are also powerful as Robert Earl Hayes and David Keaton, respectively, two African-American men who had the bad fortune of being African-American men in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jay O. Sanders brings an earthy, shambling grace to Gary Gauger, a farmer wrongly accused of murdering his parents, and Charles Brown shines as Delbert Tibbs, an African-American hitchhiker accused of murdering a white teenage girl. The yearning and regret they convey in telling each of their stories, and ruminating on the amount of time they had taken away from them, brings the resonance of The Exonerated home with smooth, graceful force.

David Robbins provides good support with his music and sound design, and Sara J. Tosetti's costumes are both wonderfully telling and unobtrusive.

With all of that going for it, what other examples could possibly be invoked in praising The Exonerated? At the performance I attended, several of the actual exonerated were also in attendance. Moved by their stories, my mother, who accompanied me to the show, went up and spoke to each and every single one of them without hesitation after the show. Ample proof that The Exonerated is not only a stimulating intellectual experience, but a satisfying emotional one as well.

In just a few months, New Yorkers have been treated to productions of the two most famous plays by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Theatre for a New Audience gave us Andorra, his cautionary fable about anti-Semitism and conformity, in a new translation by Michael Feingold. And now, Colleagues Theatre Company is presenting The Firebugs, in the original, literal English translation by Michael Bullock, a short but unwieldy morality play about the insidiousness of evil.

Both of these plays were failures when they premiered in New York in the early 1960s and they have barely been heard of since. My instincts tell me, having now seen them, that there's a very good reason for this.

Let's stick with The Firebugs here. It's barely 85 minutes long, including an intermission; in it, a businessman allows two arsonists to live in his attic and even supplies them the matches so they can set the city on fire. The not-at-all subtle idea is how willing people are to embrace and/or deny evil. An epilogue, in which the arsonists are revealed to be the Lord of the Underworld and Beelzebub, drives the point home lest we fail to get it.

But what are we to make of the businessman and his wife? They're supposed to be exploitative capitalists, making money on the backs of employees whom they treat poorly; but we take this on faith mostly, for there's not much clear evidence of their offenses provided in the play. Instead, they appear mainly to be feeble-minded: Frisch's manifestations of evil don't offer any sort of enticement to their victims, leaving us to wonder just why a successful, intelligent man would allow them to appropriate his attic.

Stylistically, the play feels naturalistic most of the time, and absurdist and/or Brechtian the rest of the time. It's an uneasy balance, possibly the result of miscalculation on the director's part, or perhaps necessary given the text. Direct audience address, which happens every once in a while, feels jarringly odd; a chorus of firemen stops things cold every time they appear.

Laurence Luckinbill plays the businessman, gamely, I suppose; Ruby Holbrook, as his wife, impressed me as having the rhythm of the thing pretty well mastered. Otherwise this production, from the earnest Colleagues Theatre Company, has little to recommend it.  Except, of course, a rare opportunity to get better acquainted with a writer who clearly had important things to say about the human condition. It's a shame that, on the evidence I've encountered, he lacked particular skill in saying those things well.

I think that Janusz Glowacki's The Fourth Sister is supposed to be a farce, but the production at the Vineyard Theatre, directed by Lisa Peterson, feels very dour indeed. Bizarre things—the sort that are so off-the-wall and/or painful that the only way to deal with them is to laugh at them—happen all the time in this play: A mother rushes into her downstairs neighbors' apartment to try to catch her son, who has been pushed out of a window. A woman who takes care of circus animals steals some of the tiger's lunch, with the result that the Tiger Tamer gets part of his leg bitten off. A famous ballet dancer supports himself by working as a mob boss. An inexperienced girl sells her body to a gangster for $600 to pay for her sister's abortion. A young man who works as a servant to a poor family becomes the star of an Academy Award-winning documentary.

This last conceit, by the way—which gives this play its title—is the most interesting of Glowacki's ideas. His vision is bitter and bleak: he looks at Moscow in 2002 (and, by extension, the rest of the world) and finds nothing but corruption, hypocrisy, and immorality. The Fourth Sister is a play where Hope shoots us in the face, literally.

I think it could work if the tone felt desperately antic, as in Ionesco's The Chairs; Glowacki seems to be writing about a world gone haywire, beyond anything reason can explain. But Peterson and her company feel resolutely grounded, so that the tragedy is all that registers, especially in the play's second act, when the playwright really piles the misfortune on his hapless characters. I kept looking for the place where it would be okay to laugh, to find a bit of release, but it never came.

Of course that could well be the point of The Fourth Sister.

In any event, it's not the easiest play to sit through, and at 2-1/2 hours in length, it starts to feel relentless near the end. Alicia Goranson plays the sister who is both the plot's catalyst and victim and thus is required to carry the play mostly by herself, which is a strain; it's also unfortunate because she's surrounded by talented actors like Jessica Hecht and Lee Pace and Steven Rattazzi who wind up with very little to do. Jase Blankfort is brilliant in the too-brief finale of Act One, pursuing a plot thread that Glowacki mercilessly discards. Suzanne Shepherd, as an archetypal Russian peasant, nails her characterization and winds up stealing the show.

I very much respect and admire what A.R. Gurney is trying to do in The Fourth Wall. It takes place in what used to be called a well-appointed home, belonging to an upper middle class, middle-aged, married couple. The wife, Peggy, has decorated the one room that we can see such that one of the walls is completely empty; all of the furniture is oriented to face the wall, so that the room looks like a stage set. Peggy has come to believe that there are people beyond this blank fourth wall; she has reconfigured this room and now intends to reconfigure her life in order to reach and touch those people. Enough sitting home in comfortable complacency, she and her playwright are telling us. Connect with the real world and do something to make a difference!

It's a truly commendable notion and a neat metaphor. If only it worked; if only Gurney supplied something genuinely substantive beneath the noble surface. For though Peggy rails sharply against President Bush and the greedy Republicans who are exploiting the poor and ruining the environment, her plan of action—a journey to Washington to tell them all off—seems singularly lacking in content. Gurney needs to give his heroine something to fight for, not just something to be against; as it is, she's hard to understand as anything other than a fool, and not even a quixotic one at that, because she doesn't seem to believe in anything specific.

As for the fourth wall metaphor, it becomes a device that traps and eventually ensnares the playwright. Everyone in the play—that would be Peggy, her husband Roger, their rich, shallow and ultra-chic friend Julia, and a drama professor named Floyd—is aware of the fourth wall and behaves as if they know they're in a play. Gurney and director David Saint make them do things that acknowledge the presence of an audience watching them—for example, Julia has a long scene that exploits and parodies theatre conventions pertaining to a character alone on stage: she flips through a magazine, arranges her coiffure, then finally hits a note on the piano and bursts into a Cole Porter song. She's entirely aware of the artifice and what it signifies; yet she and the others steadfastly disbelieve that we're out there. This takes us to a metaphysical place that's beyond the scope of the simple wake-up call The Fourth Wall is fashioned to be. Gurney is laboring in Odets' territory, after all, not Pirandello's: we're supposed to leave the theatre shouting "Strike! Strike!" But the inconsistencies of his premise just make us scratch our heads.

Saint's production contains other elements that work against this objective. James Youmans' set isn't stage-y enough to convey the artificiality that Peggy is supposed to be rebelling against. And some of the performances don't quite gel: Sandy Duncan, endearing and sprightly as ever, doesn't show us the conflict that must be brewing inside Peggy—the characterization is pert but superficial (though Duncan's moments performing snippets of Cole Porter are indeed to be cherished). Susan Sullivan, as Julia, seems to be channeling some mannered archetype—Eve Arden meets Kitty Carlisle, by way of Lauren Bacall?—in a turn that feels jarringly studied. Charles Kimbrough is at ease as befuddled husband Roger, though, and David Pittu has fun with the play's least convincing character, Floyd the drama professor, whom Roger calls upon to try to save the day.

That impulse—using an egghead academician to send up the pretensions of contemporary theatre "artists"—is precisely indicative of the lazy thinking that undermines The Fourth Wall. Gurney time and again takes the course of least resistance—a joke about how dumb Bush is, a snappy one-liner about how cool and unfeeling New Yorkers are, a self-aware song break to send up the vacuity and phoniness of too much contemporary drama. As a result, The Fourth Wall feels, too much of the time, too much like the very things it says it deplores. Peggy—and Gurney—are shouting for something genuine to save them from their lives. If only they would really take the dangerous leap into uncharted territory—wow! what they both might actually accomplish!

I saw Edward Albee's The Goat for the second time the day before Senator Robert Torricelli dropped out of his re-election campaign. (Torricelli's credibility had been seriously compromised by various unsavory scandals.) I bring this up for a reason: The Goat, at least as it is currently being performed by Sally Field and Bill Irwin, is about the new American Tragedy, which is exemplified by Torricelli's career. We live in an age where good men who do good things decide somehow that moral standards do not apply to them; suddenly they find themselves—like the Senator, like our last President, like far too many other powerful people—shirking the values that they know matter. And they can't seem to stop. And on some level, they don't seem to understand why they should care.

In The Goat, Bill Irwin plays a man named Martin who, at fifty, has reached what should be the absolute pinnacle of his life. He is happily married—really happily, I mean—with a gay son whom he doesn't completely understand but who nevertheless makes him proud. He has just won an award for his work as an architect that is the highest honor his profession bestows, and he has just received a multi-million dollar commission to build some kind of "city of the future." He's on top; but more than that, he's genuinely admirable—a man of accomplishment and integrity and good character: a hero.

Unfortunately, like Oedipus and a whole slew of other heroes, Martin has a tragic flaw. It's not so much that he has been, for the past six months, carrying on a love affair with a goat named Sylvia. (Though that's pretty bad.) No, the tragic part really is that Martin doesn't seem able to understand why it's bad. This is a very, very smart man who can't comprehend that he has caused irreparable harm to himself, his family, and to everyone else who depends upon him. No, scratch that: he comprehends. He just can't be accountable: he can't see the justice in the devastation. Like I said, somewhere, something in his wiring short-circuited: the principles that he used to know and respect—the ones that required him to be responsible for the consequences of his actions—have stopped mattering.

His wife, Stevie, remains clear-eyed: she does understand the catastrophe that Martin's indiscretion has wrought. This is especially true with Sally Field in the role, giving a performance of astonishing emotional intensity that is literally unparalleled in New York right now. Field shows us not just the ways that Martin's affair has destroyed her life and her family—though she gives us that with naked, awesome pain. Searingly, she points up the real tragedy at the heart of The Goat, and by extension of the world we live in: the implosion of a righteous man who has lost his way. Field achieves the tragic arc that Albee has envisioned, making the play's horrifying, nearly apocalyptic conclusion inevitable.

In so doing, I should add, she and Irwin eliminate many of the layers of complexity and perplexity that Albee also (I think) intends. The enigmatic discourse that made The Goat feel like, as one of its own characters alludes, "Big Alice," is in the background now. The play is less funny, too: when Irwin-as-Martin tells his friend Ross that the noise he hears might be the Eumenides, it's not just an esoteric throw-away line. He means it.

So The Goat is less than it might be, here; and also much more than I originally thought it was. The Goat is as astutely observant of the zeitgeist as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was, and Field and Irwin's performances clarify that brilliantly. No one who cares about drama, or the world, should miss them.

Jean Cocteau Repertory’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest is the kind one would expect from a good regional company: it’s handsomely designed, and skillfully done without being inspired (or inspiring), but it is funny. The latter is what tips the scale in the production’s favor.

Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy of manners runneth over with mistaken identities and deus ex machina twists of fate. Prim-and-proper Jack (Michael Surabian) loves the equally prim-and-proper Gwendolyn (Carey Van Driest). Carefree Algernon (Jason Crowl) loves Cecily (Amanda Jones). But, both Gwendolyn and Cecily love Ernest. Who’s Ernest, you ask? Well, both Jack and Algernon are Ernest. Then again, neither of them is Ernest. Confused yet? That’s the point, in this comedy in which both men try to pose as someone they aren’t in order to win over the women they love.

The cast performs without passion, but most of them know their craft. They understand the mechanics of comedy—including timing, silence, and stillness—execute them well, and get their laughs. In a play like Earnest, that lives and dies by wit more than by soul, that’s more than half the battle won.

Crowl is particularly good as Algernon. He carries a twinkle in his eye throughout, and is the only cast member to suggest that there may be something more going on underneath his surface. The other actors—adopting heavy British affectation—also succeed, but to varying degrees.  Only Angela Madden falls short of the mark. Her performance as Lady Bracknell is a misfire. Madden, who appears to be much younger than the matriarchal Bracknell, relies heavily on a heap of old age makeup, and a litany of external characteristics. Instead of endowing these externals with Bracknell’s imperiousness, she hopes that the externals will indicate Bracknell’s imperiousness. An admirable gamble, but one that makes it clear she’s in over her head.

Director Ernest Johns understands comedy as well as his actors do, and creates good stage pictures that illuminate both the play, and the relationships in it. Set designer Roman Tatarowicz and costume designer Robin I. Shane both do beautiful work. Tatarowicz’s revolving set is a model of ingenuity, and Shane’s costumes evoke the elegance—and hilarity—of late nineteenth/early twentieth century England perfectly.

This Earnest is a fine way to pass an evening, and have some good laughs. It leaves a pleasant glow lingering in its wake, nothing more, nothing less.

Revivals allow audiences to judge a present work against its own past. The Island, remounted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was a seminal play of the 1970s: a public airing of apartheid, which was then a dirty little secret. Now, three decades later, its original creators, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, are revisiting their script (created in collaboration with master playwright Athol Fugard) for the last time. The play’s political dimension has become a part of history, but its human drama remains current.

So much of this play’s immediacy is provided by these two actors, Kani and Ntshona. They act out the fates of two men serving life terms on Robben Island, a once-notorious South African prison for blacks. Their lives consist of pointless menial labor—the play opens with each digging on the beach and dumping his wheelbarrow of dirt into the other’s hole. Kani and Ntshona lack props and a setting, but they punctuate their movements with the sounds of their shovels, the buzzing of flies, and muttered curses. The audience watches, hypnotized, waiting for the play to begin in earnest, slowly realizing that their wordless exhaustion is more dramatic than verbal description.

When the words start, the play deflates only a little. The world of John Kani and Winston Ntshona is circumscribed by their cell, a small ten-by-ten concrete island on BAM’s deep Harvey Theater stage. To fill the space as well as the time, they tell stories and thus spirit a bit of autonomy away from their captors. Their speech, and through it their shared imagination, allows them a sliver of freedom. Like Waiting for Godot, this play isn’t about action, it’s about interaction. John and Winston's face down injustice with casual confidence in their production of Antigone for the prison authorities. With their play-within-a-play, they demonstrate the actions of power and inequity.

Ntshona and Kani have worked together for decades, and they act with the practiced skill of two masters. Onstage, their relationship is intimate, almost romantic. The performances are extraordinary. Both seem somehow larger-than-life: they gather the audience’s attention to themselves. Their gestures are realistic and yet visible from the balcony seats. Ntshona has a face round with wisdom and the thinking of an innocent. His face lights up like a child’s when he grasps an idea. Kani’s features are long and his attitude morose, but his soul has survived his imprisonment. Together, they employ a comic timing that offsets the play’s weight.

The climax of the (too) short play is their performance of Antigone. It’s here that the politics of The Island draw close to our own. Kani’s King Kreon proclaims that the purpose of good government is to make its citizens “happy and fat,” even if that means practicing tyranny upon them. The sentiment seems shamefully close to our own government’s homeland policies. Ntshona’s Antigone articulates what so many have recently failed to say: that civilization requires cooperation rather than competition, that laws that favor the powerful are immoral laws, that the abuse of power is a kind of terrorism, that the most powerful are often the most cowardly. And most importantly, that those who suffer unjustly are “strange and cold, lost between life and death forever.” The Island is no mere revival: it’s chilling how contemporary it is.

James Thiérrée, the young creator and star of The Junebug Symphony, seems to be able to do just about anything: in the course of this 85-minute show, he dances, clowns, plays the violin while rollerblading, leaps onto a giant rolling beach ball, and transforms himself into a garish Spanish lady and a superhero whose armor is made out of cutlery and serving trays. The one thing that he can't do—but clearly wishes he could—is fly, which is why the show's most beautiful moments are filled with Thiérrée's efforts to defy gravity, swinging first on a chandelier (supported by a bungee cord) and later, spectacularly, on a trapeze.

Obviously conceived to showcase these many astonishing talents, The Junebug Symphony is hard to describe. It's a blend of circus, mime, broad physical comedy, and new vaudeville; Thiérrée's influences  include Cirque de Soleil, Bill Irwin, Bugs Bunny, and all of the great silent movie clowns, especially Chaplin, who was Thiérrée's grandfather. (You can see the resemblance most in the mop of unruly black hair that crown's Thiérrée's lithe, muscular frame.) Thiérrée spends most of the show in a pair of bright white pajamas, the notion being that all of the bizarre goings-on are part of some wondrous, vivid dream. Indeed, The Junebug Symphony mostly feels surreal and/or ethereal, what with a man's limbs falling off as he tries to get out of bed at one moment, and a woman walking in and out of her portrait at another. Shameless sight gags—many of them quite funny—are interspersed with feats of daring, creating a magical mélange depicting an exhilarating, cartoonish world that the child in us wishes could be real.

Sharing the stage with Thiérrée are three splendid performers—the supple contortionist Raphaelle Boitel, whose transformation into a spider is unforgettable; soprano-actress Uma Ysamat, who provides much comic relief as that lady in the painting; and an engaging young acrobat named Magnus Jakobsson, who does several amusing "mirror" bits with Thiérrée and gets his own blissfully silly juggling solo late in the program.

A witty design complements the show, including a wardrobe that blasts loud music whenever it's opened, an opera singer's skirt that seems to house a piano and other musical instruments, and a door whose in- and out-sides are constantly shifting.

The Junebug Symphony is at the New Victory Theatre and indeed provides a treat for kids as well as adults. It's a fine introduction to a remarkable young performer who, I expect, we will be seeing more of in the future.

The Last Carburetor is Leon Chase's first play, and it's a spectacularly impressive debut. It's being presented, in a brief return engagement, by Overlap Productions at Access Theatre, and even though the air conditioning isn't great and you have to walk up three steep flights of stairs, unless those pose real health hazards to you I advise you to get over there right away. That's because The Last Carburetor is the most exciting theatre I've seen in months: explosive, profanely funny, palpably potent theatre that gets the adrenalin pumping and the juices flowing.

The Last Carburetor takes place in a suburb of Detroit, in the rundown house of a rundown family. The patriarch, Doug, is a Vietnam vet who never really recovered from the War; his prize possession, a 1970 Barracuda, sits in ruins in the garage, victim of an accident that we're never entirely sure wasn't on purpose. Doug's wife is gone, probably for good. His daughter, Ayla, is weeks away from finishing college, while his younger son, Josh, works as a bounty hunter and lives on his love-hate relationship with Doug and his fixation on the wrecked Barracuda.

The play proper begins with the return home of Keith, Doug's elder son. Away for six or seven years, with a good job and a presumably devoted girlfriend in California, Keith has suddenly turned up in a nearby ditch. Josh and Doug have brought him to the house, where they learn that Keith has walked away, literally, from his life in California, for reasons that he can't articulate and that his brother and father can't fathom (but, very much to the playwright's credit, we completely understand).

Doug, who is pretty much irreparably damaged, what with the steel mill having closed down fifteen years ago and his wife gone and all, decides to host a reunion and invites Ayla to join the family for the weekend. This she does, along with her Asian-American boyfriend Willie, with the expected explosive, cathartic consequences.

The Last Carburetor is very much in the Sam Shepard mode, with its warring brothers, absent mother, far-gone father, and a gigantic symbol of decaying Americana offstage in the garage. There's even what feels like a tongue-in-cheek homage to the master, a box of melting popsicles on the kitchen counter in Act Two.  The piece ultimately plays itself in the violent, vaguely surreal way that it inevitably must, which is unfortunate because Chase's voice is so rich and original.

Nevertheless, there's plenty here to admire. Chase has a splendid eye and ear for character, and he writes this dysfunctional crew with incisiveness and genuine wit:

JOSH: Ignoramus. Didn’t you ever see the Three Stooges?
WILLIE: Yeah! I used to love those guys!
AYLA: You did not!
WILLIE: Every Sunday morning, when I was a kid…
DOUG: You remember, Josh, you used to try and poke your brother in the eyes...
AYLA: Excuse me, we are not having a Three Stooges conversation.
WILLIE: What? You didn’t like them?
JOSH: Keith liked Larry.

The Last Carburetor is funny and also profound, especially in its depiction of desperate, troubled Keith, who has discovered that there's nothing in his life that he cares for and come home to learn that what he thought he left behind isn't there.

Susanna L. Harris has staged the play with the outsized audacity that the piece deserves (transitions are a bit awkward, though). The six-member cast is on the money, bringing Chase's creations to vivid, complicated life. Susan O'Connor does her usual emotionally charged work as Ayla, defining, especially, the relationship with big brother Keith with enormous specificity. The standout in the company is Paul Witte, as Josh, showing us the easy, practiced surface of this man and the frustration and menace underneath. Sardonically bitter and honest, Josh is a powder keg waiting to explode, and when he does, near the end of the play, Witte gives us a climax at once memorable and devastating.

The Last Carburetor is just the thing to lift you out of the summer doldrums—it's theatre that jolts and prods and eventually works its way under your skin. You'll be thinking about these characters for days.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair seems an unlikely heroine for a comic fantasia, yet here she is, leading lady and—against the odds—most admirable character in this dazzling, liberating new play by David Foley. The "facts" about Madalyn (as reported by Foley) are, among others, that she was a famous American atheist whose lawsuit led to the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional; that she set herself up as the very vocal head of several non-profit organizations that presumably championed the causes of atheism and free thought; that she was, for a while, the self-proclaimed "most hated woman in America"; that she embezzled a great deal of money from the charities she headed up; and that she disappeared, with her son and granddaughter, all fugitives from justice, when she was about 80 years old.

All of which figure in Foley's amazing play, which is otherwise entirely fabrication. But that doesn't make The Last Days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, in Exile dishonest: on the contrary, it reveals much truth about the human condition, and as it explores its subject matter it does so in an uncompromising, audacious, and brave manner. Some might say that Foley is out to shock and/or offend, but that's a superficial reading of his work; like his title character, he's out to embrace and defend the unembraceable and indefensible. If it's about anything at all, The Last Days is about the human right—need—imperative—to keep on questing: to search beyond all we've been told and all we've been given, to try to figure out what stuff means for ourselves.

It's also, lest we get too solemn-minded, an enormously funny, profane, and irreverent work of theatre.

Foley places Madalyn on a remote South Seas island, in touch somehow with the million embezzled dollars but out of reach, she hopes, of the rest of her past. With her are her son Mort and her granddaughter Rita (who is the offspring of Madalyn's other son, Jim, a fundamentalist Christian preacher who is now Madalyn's most virulent enemy). Mort, especially as portrayed here by Frank Ensenberger, brings spinelessness to heretofore unforeseen heights; Rita (Katie Byxbe Pessin, in a brilliant turn that should bring her all manner of acclaim and offers) is dour and passionless: think Lilith from "Cheers" without the sense of humor. As for Madalyn herself, well, she's eighty years old and riddled with arthritis, diabetes, and various other ailments, but when something's afoot she's a veritable freight train of indomitability. Julia McLaughlin, in a truly towering performance, captures it all for us: the ego, the energy, the temperament, and the self-doubt that necessarily goes hand-in-hand with brazen self-invention. She also shows us Madalyn's honestly curious, questing soul, which is the thing that draws us to her and the thing that, in Foley's world anyway, will be her salvation and her downfall.

The island is inhabited by a tribe led by a soft-spoken gentleman called Omolu (Ben Wang), who ingratiates himself to his demanding, wealthy guests with a sly mix of Uncle Tom-ish cowtowing and vaguely terrifying native-ritual otherness. Wang is marvelous in this role: watch him as he tells Madalyn's son, with ever so much reticence, that he is, um, King of this island. Omulu's son, Hank (the appealing Marc Santa Maria), is an idealistic Marxist revolutionary in the making, and so naturally in this universe he and Rita fall for each other at first sight.

The play's other characters are Madalyn's son Jim (Dared Wright, as scary a preacher as you've ever seen) and a Ghost, in various guises, played by Arlen Dean Snyder.

The turns and leaps of the plot are savory and so I won't disclose much more. Just this: that Omolu makes Madalyn feel very welcome, so much so that godless she decrees it a paradise. Bear in mind what happens to people in paradise.

The expert direction, by the way, is by Samuel Buggeln. The spiffy set is the creation of Lucio Seixas.

The problem with The Last Sunday in June, the likable and immensely interesting new play by Jonathan Tolins, is that it contains too many ideas: there's enough intriguing, introspective material here about what it means to be gay in 2003 to accommodate three or four plays. At the center of this comedy-drama, which takes its title from the more-or-less official date of New York City's Gay Pride Celebration, is the story of Michael and Tom, a gay couple of long-standing (seven years) who are about to move out of the city and into a house in the suburbs. Though the two men seem devoted enough to each other and to the idea of eternal bliss forever in the country, the strains on their relationship are nevertheless evident: Michael wants to go to Pottery Barn to buy new lamps, while Tom prefers to entertain friends who have come to watch the Gay Pride Parade from Michael and Tom's centrally-located Christopher Street apartment.

Their relationship continues to unravel as assorted friends and ex-lovers drop by; but each also brings his own perspective about the gay lifestyle—whatever that is: indeed, one of the strengths of Tolins' work is the way it debunks the notion of a single meaning to that term, even as its characters try to work one out. In contrast to the steadfastly coupled (monogamist?) Michael and Tom are Joe, a much younger recent arrival to town, who is eagerly embracing all of the social and sexual choices offered to him by the big city; Brad, a caustic best-friend type who seems to be forever on the make, notwithstanding his medical condition (HIV+) and his low self-esteem; Charles, a generation older than our protagonists, a presumably mature and comfortable survivor of the Gay Liberation Movement who nevertheless feels a lot like a refugee from The Boys in the Band; and James, Tom's former lover who has come to feel more and more of an outcast in the gay world. It is James who serves as catalyst for the play's most compelling plot twist, as he announces to Tom and the others that he has decided to marry a woman, so that he can at least have companionship as he nears middle age.

It certainly qualifies as an interesting development; if only Tolins had developed James into a more three-dimensional character (and seemed to like him a little better—he comes off, at least as portrayed here by Mark Setlock, as insufferably nasty and self-absorbed) this storyline might have given Last Sunday the depth of Tolins' earlier work The Twilight of the Golds, which mined similarly provoking territory with its story of a gay man whose sister aborts an unborn child she knows will also be gay.

But James' situation is just one of several considered here; after an "intervention" in which Tom and his friends try to talk James' fiancée out of the upcoming marriage, it is cast aside and the growing rift between Tom and Michael again takes center stage. And competing for Tolins' and the audience's attention is a device that could also all by itself be framework for a different play—the post-modern notion that the men "know" that they are characters in a "gay play," which sets the most stereotypically campy of them (Brad, Charles, and Joe) onto flights of fancy that poke fun at the gay theatrical canon from Boys in the Band to Party. It's cute, but it's self-conscious, and it derails Tolins' sturdier play ideas.

It also points up the artifice of Last Sunday's structure (which I concede may be the point, but it still hurts the piece). Tolins has an opportunity here to offer an intelligent, reflective look at the lives of gay men in the post-AIDS, post-9/11 world, and in places his play feels like the warm, messy Chekhovian comedy that might have accomplished just that. But the play-within-a-play device necessarily makes the characters types instead of real people who actually know and care about each other.

Last Sunday is directed by Trip Cullman, who punches up the jokes at the expense of the characters' relationships. Similarly, the eight actors fare best when they're called upon to be arch and/or witty, with Arnie Burton perhaps the standout as the wry Brad.

The Last Sunday in June is not unentertaining, but it feels hollow, and it didn't need to—Tolins has proven before he has the smarts and the courage to tackle provocative issues in the theatre. But his work this time around is disappointingly diffuse, even slight.

The place: a bombed out synagogue in the center of Kabul, Afghanistan. The time: shortly after September 11, 2001, just as the American-led war against the Taliban is beginning. A prosperous-looking, surprisingly nonchalant man arrives on a Friday night, seeking out the company of fellow Jews and ready to celebrate the Sabbath. He is greeted—warily, reluctantly—by an old man in a turban who informs this stranger that he is the only Jew in Kabul. What's more, he doesn't particularly want any company.

So begins Josh Greenfield's wise and urgent new play, The Last Two Jews of Kabul. It's inspired by an incident reported in the New York Times last year—apparently there actually were exactly two Jews living in the Afghan capital in 2002—but Greenfield eschews the vaguely sensational facts of that story and instead invents his own plot to reveal deeper truths about humanity and civilization. His two Jews—the younger stranger is called Wolf, the older one is called Abram—are together only a few minutes when a bomb hits the synagogue. Wolf, unused to the rigors of warfare, is buried under debris which injures his ankle. And thus this ill-matched pair are forced to live together.

What we will question, soon, is just how ill-matched they really are. Wolf claims to be from Israel, explaining his dark complexion with the assertion that his parents were Yemenites. He has with him a large and heavy valise—locked—and he is entirely unforthcoming when asked what his business in Kabul is. Abram, meanwhile, says that he is the last survivor of what was once a thriving community of Afghan Jews. All the rest are gone, driven away or killed by decades of  perpetual invasion and war, most recently the persecution by the Taliban. He survives by telling fortunes to Afghan women; he is left alone, he says, because how dangerous can just one Jew be?

Two Jews, however, would seem to be something else again. Wolf, brazenly playing music on his portable CD player even though Abram warns against it, is discovered by the Taliban and led away.  When he returns, slightly the worse for wear but in no way defeated, he proposes something quite astonishing to Abram: he wants to go into business with him, exploiting the central location (and presumably eventual high real estate value) of the synagogue, and exploiting their Jewish "otherness" (and some less desirable aspects of the Jewish stereotype). He reveals what's in his suitcase (though I won't, of course), and The Two Jews of Kabul takes the first of several wonderful, surreal leaps—homage, I'd say, to the desperate apocalyptic battiness of Ionesco, which is, don't you think, entirely appropriate.

Greenfield sprinkles wisdom throughout his play, which by the way is mostly comic despite the dour subject matter. Abram reminds Wolf of the intractability of war and councils Wolf to keep a low profile and try to blend in in order to keep the peace and be left alone. Wolf counters with his own world view that business is invincible and essential: commerce, he says, will outlast any tower.

Throughout the play, we wonder whether Abram and Wolf are, in fact, Jewish. Abram fumbles with his Hebrew prayers and pleads poor memory when asked to locate the graves of his family in the cemetery that abuts the synagogue. Wolf's Israeli citizenship seems utterly bogus and gives no signs of devotion to Jewish practices. So are they or aren't they? I don't think I'm giving anything away when I tell you that the play teaches us that it finally doesn't matter: wherever we place our faith, it is our fellow humans with whom we must find a way to live in peace.

What I admire most about The Last Two Jews of Kabul is its urgency; when you see it, you'll understand that Greenfield clearly felt compelled to write it. That sense of mission keeps us riveted. The production at La MaMa is spare but effective. It's directed by George Ferencz on a terrifically evocative set designed by Tom Lee. George Drance (Wolf) and Jerry Matz (Abram) do outstanding work as the title characters.

The top two reasons to see The Look of Love are a pair of exciting young performers who raised the temperature of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre every time they walked out on stage and who received sustained, enthusiastic ovations from the audience when the evening was through. Their names are Desmond Richardson and Capathia Jenkins, and although they've both been seen on Broadway before (he in Fosse, she in The Civil Wars), The Look of Love ought to be the breakthrough moment their careers have been waiting for. Richardson sizzles in a solo dance to "Wives and Lovers" (and, later, is equally impressive partnering leggy Shannon Lewis in the same number); his athletic leaps exude pure happiness in a danced (but not sung) "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," a duet with Eugene Fleming.

As for Jenkins, she's a powerhouse singer with a clear, gorgeous voice that does stunning justice to pretty ballads like "Walk on By" and "This Girl's in Love with You" (also a duet with Fleming) and the title song. But give her something with real emotional texture to it like "Make It Easy on Yourself" and she's in her element. Jenkins is a fine singing actress with superb command of a remarkable instrument, and when she gets juiced up, real electricity flows. (Note to the producers of the upcoming Broadway revival of Dreamgirls: here's your Effie.)

The foregoing is not meant to imply, by the way, that the rest of The Look of Love's capable company aren't doing good work here—they are; they just don't give off the same kind of sparks. The Look of Love, conceived by director Scott Ellis, choreographer Ann Reinking, conductor David Loud, and writer David Thompson, is a musical revue of the songs of Burt Bacharach and his lyricist Hal David, and it's only hit or miss, I'm afraid, but not because the cast doesn't give it their all. Bacharach's catalog includes one theatre score—for Promises, Promises, from which five selections are performed here; most of his output was written for vinyl (that's what we called pop music in those days) or movies (title themes, not integrated scores), and as a result, the majority of the twenty-nine numbers in The Look of Love are more mood-setting than character-exploring, which makes for enjoyable background music but lightweight musical theatre.

That said, there are some genuinely fine moments in this show, among them a witty and energetic musical number built around one of the more obscure offerings, a piece called  "Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa," which is performed with good-natured sex appeal by Rachelle Rak and a randy quartet consisting of Kevin Ceballo, Jonathan Dokuchitz, Eugene Fleming, and Desmond Richardson. Dokuchitz scores nicely with a straightforward rendition of "A House Is Not a Home," and Liz Callaway pleases her fans with well-sung performances of "Alfie" and "Knowing When to Leave." Two pit singers, Farah Alvin and Nikki Renee Daniels, emerge briefly to do the theme from "Casino Royale" all by themselves, to enthusiastic audience approval.

Other bits fall flat, their inventiveness notwithstanding: "What's New Pussycat," staged a la Fosse (specifically Cabaret's "Mein Herr") feels a little more vulgar than it needs to; "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," in a contemporary, mostly a cappella arrangement for quartet, is disappointing; and numbers like "Wishin' and Hopin'" and "Promise Her Anything," prominently featuring pretty women in very short skirts, feel sleazily Vegas-y. But again, material that doesn't have much depth offers Ellis and Reinking and Loud few options: how many different ways can you stage songs that basically say all they're going to say in their first line?

The design scheme is just as uneven as the rest of the production, with an ugly unit set by Derek McLane that looks like a cross between Smokey Joe's Cafe's hip urban streetscape and Nine's elevated runway, and costumes by Martin Pakledinaz that range from chic duds for the guys to unbecoming peasant blouses for Jenkins. Howell Binkley's lighting is pretty to look at, though, and Brian Ronan's sound system is not too loud (a good thing), though it is muddy in places (a bad thing).

When you peruse the program before the show starts, you won't recognize all the titles, but if you're at least 35 years old, I suspect you'll have heard almost every song in The Look of Love at some point in your life, and that familiarity is pleasing—it's nice to hear "There's Always Something There to Remind Me" and "I Say a Little Prayer" in the theatre. My personal Bacharach favorite, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," didn't make it into this revue, but lots of nice stuff did. This is a diverting stroll down memory lane, jazzed by the occasional jolts of bona fide star power provided by Mr. Richardson and Ms. Jenkins.

Arby McFay, the manic, coke-snorting, heroically optimistic center of Marc Morales' ambitious new play with music The Lounge, was a champion lip-syncher back in the '80s. That was a time when places like the eponymous setting for this show were the last word in hip, frequented by the biggest names and introducing the hottest new talent in an atmosphere of high-energy, drug-filled haze. Back then, all Arby ever dreamed of was to headline in a place like The Lounge.

Now, two decades later, The Lounge is still here and Arby has his wish: he's the Emcee of this once-grand nightspot. But the bright lights have faded—a lot. Today, The Lounge is home to a boozed-up pop star who was a one-hit wonder some years back, a stoned wannabe rock singer and his stand-up comic girlfriend, and an overgrown high school geek named Melvin who fancies himself some sort of latter-day beat poet. Behind the bar is Chung Lee, a Caucasian who adopted an Asian-sounding name, pretty much for the hell of it. And, oh yes, there's also Helen and Stew, two very large cockroaches who have decided that they want to get into show business.

Arby rules over this roost with the vigor and steadfast belief of Madam Rose overseeing the terrible Toreadorables in Gypsy. So when a young and eager singer named Ashley shows up looking for a job, Arby is elated: perhaps she will be the one to turn this place around, and the thing that has eluded him all his life—stardom—will be within his grasp.

Such is the world of The Lounge. Writer-director Morales, whose last play was Galaxy Video, does a spectacular job evoking its ambiance and its melancholy—the losers who inhabit it never feel pathetic and the sadness that pervades their lives is tinged with loss but not despair. The need for connection and the drive to entertain are what propel these people, and Morales and his cast render them with sensitivity and compassion.

The Lounge defies easy categorization, deftly blending scenes of the performers at work with scenes of them back- and offstage. The musical numbers are the best thing about the show right now (though you sense that won't be true when Morales finishes his work), especially the lip-synching routines, which are performed by the incomparable Joseph Langham as Arby with fearless bravura and which have been choreographed and lit by Morales to kitschy perfection. When Langham tears into Barry Manilow's "Copacabana"—looking like nothing so much as a deranged, giant muppet—he manages to kid Arby and Manilow at the same time, but the over-the-top commitment of it defines Arby with telegraphic precision. (Note to Langham and Morales: I've been humming "Copacabana" for a week now. Thanks a lot.)

The rest of the company never gets to the euphoric high of Langham's Arby in his glitzy element. But Christopher Frankie DiGennaro has some choice comic moments as the eccentric bartender Chung Lee, and Roxane Policare (as one-time star Jenny Sweet), Yamille Penagos (as ambitious newcomer Ashley), Charley Layton (as Melvin the poet) and Laurice Fattal (as the resident comedienne, Terry) all bring conviction and moxie to roles that are still somewhat underwritten. Aaron Berk looks and acts the part as rock singer Robby, but his singing is less effective. Jennifer Lieberman and John Fukuda round out the cast as the giant cockroaches, humorously attired in costumes designed by Genevieve Jezick.

The Lounge still feels unfinished at this point. Specifics of plot are too often cliched: most of the characters come off as types rather than three-dimensional people. Morales has a lot on his mind and he puts a good deal of it into his script, so that references to 9/11, for example, come at us entirely from out of the blue: a sharpening of focus is necessary. But there's a wonderful play, or musical, buried in here, and it will be worth Morales' time to finish shaping and refining it.

The Irish, being among the world’s great storytellers, wrote some of the most poetic and lasting drama of the 20th century. John Keane was no exception; his language is rich with lyricism, his characters detailed and carefully observed. A renowned Irish actor, Des Keogh, was sufficiently compelled to adapt some of Keane’s writings for the stage, and the result is a one-person “play” called The Love Hungry Farmer. While Keogh is a graceful and intelligent performer, this farmer left me starved for acute dramatic action.

I've put the word “play” in quotes here because I’m not sure this is one. I admit that when I go to theatre I have certain expectations, and one thing I expect is some semblance of plot. I also enjoy having my expectations subverted, but Keogh (as adaptor) has given me neither plot nor a creative alternative to plot, and so I’m left with a series of remembered stories that never develop beyond the colloquial.

Keogh portrays John Bosco McLane, a lonely “chastitute” from the Irish countryside who’s remained a virgin his entire life. More than once, McLane blames his sexual misfortune on an “evil genie” that seems bent on foiling his exploits. And to his credit, Keogh (as actor) doesn’t forsake his character’s bitterness for laughs. We hear about McLane’s matchmaker who keeps procuring the wrong women; we hear about his friend Brady, who suddenly appears as they go to a dance; we hear about a back-seat car ride that ends in humiliation, which gives the evening its most painful moment. The problem, despite some attempts at reenactment, is that all we do is hear about things. The stakes are low from the beginning, and we, as an audience bearing witness, begin to feel unnecessary.

The piece’s final note is decidedly nihilistic. This struck me as too little, too late, especially considering that everything we’ve been told (or overheard) is, in fact, an entry in McLane’s diary. Why, then, had I worked so hard to involve myself in such a passive and insular conceit? What can we glean from this archeological dig of a minor cultural archetype? Perhaps that he’s not so minor after all, and deserves a genuine play in which to hunger.

The trees are finally budding, unleashing everybody’s inner romantic fool, not only into the parks but onto the stage. Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance—first produced in 1686 and now performed by the all-female Queen’s Company—is a comedy of intrigue, which is a scholarly term for romantic comedies where the women’s schemes are as clever as the men’s. This convention lets women disguise themselves, encourages men to cuckold other men, and allows for more sex per act. Intellectually, The Lucky Chance is about love and desire overwhelming law and contract… but it’s springtime: time to leave the intellect at home.

In large part, The Lucky Chance charms because it’s blatantly formulaic. It’s better than most Hollywood romances only because it’s got two plots instead of one and because it’s frank about the Siamese-twin relationship between sex and romance. Belmour, exiled for murder, returns to London in disguise as the nephew to Leticia’s rich old fiancé. Meanwhile, his best friend Gayman has spent all his money wooing Julia, only to see another rich old man acquire her. The boys and the girls find ways to fool the old men, both out of sex and money, and they end the play just before foreplay.

Director Rebecca Patterson stages this rowdiness in perhaps the only reasonable way: by keeping the pace up and not worrying about the absurdities. She loves stuffing actors into the proscenium’s edges to make out and eavesdrop. And she stages several unscripted moments through a dumbshow with economy, as wordless bursts of madcap. She furnishes an atmosphere for the lovers to dish out the raunch uninhibitedly. Marissa Yoo’s lighting is soft and low, giving the characters a sexy atmosphere for seduction; Sarah Iams’ costumes leave the actors barefoot and bosomy; and the set, provided by the y-chromosomed Jeremy Woodward, leaves the stage open for chasing and grabbing. The music, however—an unfortunate choice of anachronistic ’80s pop that gestures towards innocence and sincerity—sticks out sorely from the hot-and-heavy ribaldry.

The cast, meanwhile, looks infectiously like they’re enjoying themselves. DeeAnn Weir seems the most comfortable with the 17th-century style, supplying Gayman with a swordsman’s grace, a courtier’s flamboyance, a trickster’s leer, and a fake beard. Opposite her, Jena Necrason plays up Julia’s carnality so much that she paws her own breasts when there’s no one else doing it. And Ami Shukla, as Leticia, has a sunshine smile and an intelligent femininity that Behn would applaud. She’s especially artful at displaying Leticia’s confidence, throwing furniture between herself and the old lechers without insulting them. Next to this demonstrative trio, Virginia Baeta flirts with irrelevancy as Belmore: she’s subdued, even when a scheme to bed Leticia has her pretending to be a ghost.

Behn wrote The Lucky Chance in broad strokes, and when the Queen’s Company stages the play similarly, they do justice to her comedic talents. So it’s not too great a complaint to say that Patterson directs with a loose hand. If the story were any more complex, we’d have a hard time following it, but it’s not and we don’t. Instead, we get just enough of the meaning to follow the lovers’ intrigues. Patterson and company don’t pull us along, they bring us on a ride. Which is fine: it’s nice that somebody’s noticed that Spring has arrived.