nytheatre Archive
2002-03 Theatre Season Reviews

Playwright Michael Murphy notes in the program for The Uninvited Guest that he’s based his script on a Danish movie called The Celebration. This foreign film, he explains, possesses a “dark revelation” that is depicted through a “highly theatrical idea.” Although his play is highly theatrical, and reveals an event in the Mason family that is dark indeed, The Uninvited Guest doesn’t amount to much more than a staid family melodrama.

Melodrama isn’t necessarily bad, but when it repeats conventions instead of staging a unique series of events, it’s deadly. And that, unfortunately, is what Murphy has done. Dr. Mason has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine; he’s invited one of the committee members to dine with his extended family. Dr. Mason’s younger son, Mardy, chooses this supper to reveal that he’d been molested by Dad as a child. Daughter Katie drinks herself silly until she recalls that Daddy fondled her too. The eldest, Tyler, watches the family crumble around him but can’t bring himself to desert his father.

Murphy has a good ear for dialogue and draws distinct individuals. He should turn back to his script and rediscover what makes his story singular and authentic. Putting aside his use of conventions, Murphy’s plotting contains little dramatic hiccups. Tyler’s wife, Claire, accepts Mardy’s accusation without a shred of proof (and despite her knowledge that Mardy may have psychological problems). Later, Mardy has his father at gunpoint, but he blithely hands the weapon over without an argument. Steven McElroy’s direction fails to solve or even address problems like these. Once Mardy confronts his father in front of the gathered family and distinguished guest, the show stalls for several minutes instead of quickening in pace and action.

The cast struggles heartily with their generic roles, and nearly everyone touches their character with uniqueness. David Runco imbues Mardy with the frail edginess of the truly tortured. Rachel Lee Harris gives Katie a reeling, careening dangerous nature: she’s a good girl who wants so badly to be bad. As Tyler, Jack Garrity inspires disgust in the audience through an honest portrayal of a weak-willed man. And as Claire, Kittson O’Neill is a beacon for the Masons, a lawyer who retains moral integrity as the family’s moral compasses fail. These actors and the rest of the company strive to find the reality in this family affair, but they just can’t find enough to lift The Uninvited Guest above its cable TV script.

When I reached that place in life when I seriously began to question the value of all the stuff I was doing, I decided to start a theatre website.

But I suppose, in another time and place, I might have embarked on an expedition to the North Pole. That's what Bane Barrington decides to do in The Voyage of the Carcass, the hilarious and unexpectedly profound new comedy by Dan O'Brien. Clearly dissatisfied with the progress of his unsubstantial existence, eccentric anglophile Bane (who speaks with a pronounced British accent even though he hails from Flushing, New York) conceives a brazen and dangerous plan to journey to the North Pole by water.

Seven years later, only two other crew members remain alive on the aptly-christened boat (though Bane explains that he meant to call it the "Caracas," but the painter made a mistake). They are trapped in the ice, Bane plus ship's chaplain Elijah Kane and mute first-mate Israel. They're reduced to eating shoes and the recently deceased; there appears to be no hope of success or rescue.

Know, please—in case it's not yet clear—that The Voyage of the Carcass is, for all its tragic plot points, resolutely a comedy: a clown show, really. Bane, Kane, and Israel communicate in dizzy non-sequiturs and when they move it's mostly in slapstick manner. Bane, particularly, is a wondrous figure of foolish fun, battering the English language with weird locutions like "sledge dogs" and "persnaps" and indulging in ridiculously silly shtick such as trying to kill himself with an egg beater. Kane has amusing business with a meat cleaver. Israel does what can only be described as a miniature solo ballet at the top of Act Two, executing leaps and pliès with incongruous exuberance.

This is what people are, playwright O'Brien is telling us: a bunch of clowns, floundering around in icy water, trying to find their way to magnetic north.

Unless, of course, they find ways inside themselves to get unstuck: here's the smart, soulful core of The Voyage of the Carcass, which O'Brien gets us to in a manner that I certainly didn't see coming and that I absolutely won't reveal here. The bottom line: you will be greatly entertained by this play, and you will leave with something genuine to think about. Go see it.

O'Brien is blessed, in this production, with a director, Alyse Rothman, who skillfully and thoughtfully brings his vision to life; and with a company of three expert actors who are sharp and funny and engaging and fearless. They are Michael Anderson, decked out in yards of padding as the bloated Bane; Rebecca Harris, in male drag as Elijah Kane for a very good reason; and Chris Mason as the silent but deceptively communicative Israel. All three prove themselves deft physical comics as well as sensitive and incisive actors.

Have you ever griped about working for a large corporation? Well then you’ll probably get a big kick of The Water Coolers, the ultimate job revue. There are many funny skits, parodies, and new songs that delve into the idiosyncrasies and problems of working in an office. Although the show fails to make any big point, its moments are generally amusing.

The opening number, “Gather ’Round,” is on the clichéd side, but thankfully the show picks up soon thereafter. There are skits about typical office personas, political correctness, and computer help lines, to name a few. About half of the many songs were written specifically for the show, while the other half are parodies of known songs used in very different contexts.

The dialogue is fairly fast paced and usually droll. The original songs are much more amusing than the parodies, especially one called “P.C.” The only exceptionally good parody is “Paranoia,” sung to Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” The use of both new songs and old songs with revised lyrics feels somewhat inconsistent, better to go for one or the other. The frequent banal rhymes and near- rhymes greatly irked this aspiring composer.

The best reason to see The Water Coolers is undeniably the cast. All five of them are terrific in every way. They can all sing wonderfully (the harmony is divine) and all stay in character through the very end. Mary Grandy has a wonderful belt and great animation. Adam Mastrelli does great with his problem of being the "MOH" or Male Office Hottie. His solo number “Song of Acceptance” is definitely one of the best moments in the show, especially his adlibs to the audience. (Even though the breaking of the fourth wall all of a sudden just for one number feels a tad out of place.) Kurt Robbins shines as the “I.T. Cowboy” who miraculously fixes computers by just restarting them. Peter Brown has great comic timing and facial expressions. Finally, Elena Shaddow is adorable and lights up the stage whenever she enters. Her “inspirationary” (stationary with inspirations) thoughts are fabulously delivered and never fail to provoke a laugh.

The staging of the show is very fluid. The choreography by Timothy Albrecht is wonderful, simply wonderful--enhancing the songs and adding many degrees of hilarity.

Overall, and thanks to the dynamite cast, The Water Coolers is extremely enjoyable and guaranteed to make each audience laugh, especially ones filled with people who’ve actually had a job in an office. It's not as utterly hilarious or as pointed as it could be; yet, those who are looking for a little, fun diversion and break from office life will surely get a kick out of this show.

Shakespeare’s late plays are often called “romances,” but, in their abiding faith in coincidence and miracle, they’re closer to fairy tales. The Winter’s Tale has some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful poetry, in the service of a sober (and very complex) comedy. The characters of The Winter’s Tale are poetic vessels in emotional shapes. At Classic Stage Company, Barry Edelstein captures this elusive play with a butterfly net of a production. It’s silent, almost minimalist, and, despite a coolness in the first half, weaves a spell that lingers into the wintry night.

The play begins in the court of Sicilia, which, in this production, has a formal, 1930s-style sophistication, all pianos and champagne. Edelstein clears the stage quickly, leaving lots of empty chairs, so that the vacuum between actors establishes the tone. In these first acts, jealousy possesses Leontes, King of Sicilia, as he watches his boyhood companion, Polixenes, befriend his wife. Just as quickly, the passion leaves him, but not before it takes the lives of his wife and children—one of whom is abandoned in a forest on the coast of Bohemia.

David Strathairn, whose drooping eyes and graying hair make him practically a dictionary definition of melancholy, plays Leontes with tensed elegance. He doesn’t always get the better of his character’s monologues of dangerous emotion, or maybe the monologues don’t get the better of his character; either way, he isn’t always passionate enough for us to believe the murderous lengths that his jealousy drives him to. But Strathairn speaks the verse with such a melodious lilt that his emotions sound true to the ear.

However, the play doesn’t end with Leontes’ horrifying awakening. Shakespeare hops ahead 16 years, and shifts radically in tone. But Edelstein manages it by substituting a pastoral atmosphere of cut-off jeans and plaid flannels for the somber silk tuxedos of the first half. The stage is filled with warmth, lovers pairing and even tripling off. The cast relish some of Shakespeare’s most funny roles, particularly Tom Bloom and David Costabile as Perdita’s adoptive father and brother, and Teagle F. Bougere as Autolycus the ne’er-do-well, all three of whom make Shakespearean clowning look effortless.

The baby has been found and adopted by bumpkins. She’s grown into a beauty, Perdita, who’s caught the eye of the local prince—coincidentally, he’s Polixenes’ son. Their romance is occasion for more sublime poetry. (As usual in Shakespeare, the girl gets the better lines, and played by Elizabeth Reaser, Perdita looks and sounds as winsome as onlookers say she is.) Polixenes catches his son wooing this girl, who’s obviously his inferior: his irrational rage mirrors Leontes’. Perdita, lover, and company flee to Sicilia, where her foster-father reveals her true birth. Through their children, Leontes and Polixenes achieve a reconciliation.

And it’s here that the play moves into the realm of the fantastical: a newly-carved statue of Leontes’ late wife comes to life, and the family is made whole again. It’s a coup de theatre, stage magic, and plainly moving to any audience member who leaves skepticism at the door.

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare gives his audience tragedy, romance, bawdy, melodrama, comedy, and fantasy. Even putting aside the convolutions, this production of The Winter’s Tale isn’t always easy to follow. Edelstein seems more interested in the sound than the meaning of Shakespeare’s poetry. But this approach creates a beautiful show, full of density and pain as well as buoyancy and laughter. The closing image—of Leontes’ still-dead son—is a reminder that life’s cycles return from sadness to happiness, but that for everything that is gained, something too is lost.

The set—by Derek McLane—is a remarkable and imposing series of broad, stylized steps: they could be the marble stairs of a Greek temple, except that they feel carved out of the side of some metaphorical mountain. These larger-than life platforms are meant to represent the rolling hills of Lockerbie, Scotland; they tell us immediately that the play we're witnessing fashions itself a contemporary counterpart to the classical tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. It's an audacious notion to be sure, but one that pays off. For by the end of this powerful and wrenching production of Deborah Brevoort's The Women of Lockerbie, we achieve a kind of catharsis.

The Women of Lockerbie takes place on December 21, 1995, which—this surprised me; has it really been so long?—was the seventh anniversary of the crash of Pan Am Flight 103. You'll recall that this aircraft was blown up by terrorists in midair, its awful debris plummeting to earth in the remote town of Lockerbie in northern Scotland. In the play, an American couple, Bill and Madeleine Livingston, have journeyed here to attend a memorial service, but Maddy, spectacularly inconsolable for all these seven years, spends her visit roaming the hills, searching vainly for even the tiniest trace of her dead son Adam. Bill and Maddy's marriage has been strained to the breaking point by her boundless grieving and, we learn, his apparent inability to grieve at all: their personal crisis comes to a head tonight, and they reach an impasse.

At the same time, another crisis is brewing among the women of Lockerbie: they have been seeking to obtain the clothing left behind by 103's victims, so that they can clean it and return it to the families. This, they say, will help them heal; as we discover, they, as the witnesses to the disaster, have actually seen what the others have nightmares about: the body parts, the blood, the unidentifiable detritus of the crash. In the play's best scene, the women, represented here by a chorus of three, describe what they were doing on December 21, 1988 just before their world changed forever—and just after. One of them lost a husband and daughter to heavy metal falling unaccountably out of the sky; these women are, perhaps, the most innocent victims of all.

Now they are the caretakers of a legacy that people like Maddy and Bill lack both the immediacy and the objectivity to understand. Brevoort smartly places these two stories—both of them at once personal and universal—side by side. Her characters and her chorus speak to each other; more important, they listen to each other.

Brevoort also provides a villain, and here her work stumbles just a bit: he's a brash, stereotypically Ugly American bureaucrat, a middle manager from the State Department named George Jones sent to collect the clothing and other remains and, per agency regulations, incinerate them. He's needed as the object of the women of Lockerbie's defiance—there really would be no play without him—and he's drawn entirely without nuance or sympathy; he's a device, plain and simple. Reacting against him, Maddy goes on a rampage worthy of a Medea or an Oedipus—again, it's a bit of a strain to remember that Brevoort is dealing in big archetypes here, after the intimate revelations that have come before. But she manages her climax magnificently. The women get the clothes, and the play ends with the indelible image of them cleaning them in a stream—in silence, allowing us to reflect with them on what their achievement might mean.

Director Scott Elliott navigates the piece from peak to peak with sensitivity and intelligence. He and Brevoort never attempt to conceal the age-old structure of their play, consisting as it does of bold monologues and dialogues interspersed with choral plaints and laments by the (mostly) anonymous women. The cast is superb, led by Judith Ivey as the heartbroken mother and Larry Pine as the sadly defeated father. The chorus—Jenny Sterlin, Angela Pietropinto, and Kristen Sieh—anchors the piece with a kind of profound restraint. Adam Trese wisely plays Jones in the broad manner required. Kathleen Doyle, as Jones' spirited cleaning lady, provides a useful touch of levity in the play's mid-section.

Brevoort's script isn't without its flaws: she takes a couple of detours down interesting but ultimately blind alleys attempting to come to terms with some of the specific circumstances and causes of the tragedy she's chronicling. The Women of Lockerbie turns out not to be the place for political soul-searching; this play is at its best when it deals with what seems to be unavoidable and eternal about the human condition—our ability to hate; our capacity to kill. A drama about an endless quest for healing reminds us, finally, that we must find ways to end the violence and hatred that make this healing necessary.

I'm told that Keith Bunin, the author of the extraordinary new play The World Over, is just thirty years old. How did one so young become so wise?

For The World Over is exceeding wise: a profound, insightful, thought-provoking examination of the most fundamental aspects of our humanity. What it tells us is eternal and self-evident; we are direly in need of hearing it. For at its heart, this is a play about why we quest and why we do battle; about our noble aspiration to remember and our thuddingly stupid propensity to forget.

The World Over begins with a Geographer showing us three maps. The first, dated May 15 (the year, certainly long ago, is not stated), shows the boundaries of the two warring countries of Amaranthia and Leocadia, illuminated with images of warriors and fighting steeds and such as was the custom of old mapmakers. The third, dated May 17, is identical to the first. But the second, dated May 16, shows a single, placid land mass, identified as Adamus: a country, we are told, that existed for just a single day. How did this come to be? And what lessons might the story of Adamus teach us?

In flashbacks—colorful, thrilling, and epic—we discover the secrets of this amazing map. The tale begins with a tempest, the first of many as it turns out. Three adventurers from the kingdom of Cyrillia—a captain, a sailor, and a balladeer—put up on a remote island. (The captain explains that they are charged by their King to create an empire for him; being less hardy than other would-be conquerors, though, they favor uninhabited territory to satisfy their monarch's desire for expansion.)

In any event, on this particular island they find a man. Bedraggled, but young and vigorous, he tells them that he's called Adam, and that he has lived alone on this isle since the death of the kindly physic who brought him here as a babe. Easily persuaded to surrender his current obscure dominion to his Cyrillian rescuers, Adam is ripe to find a real kingdom of his own; so he's more than intrigued when the balladeer recounts the tale of the Lost Prince of Gildoray, who was ripped from his mother's womb and saved from certain death by a physic who secreted him on a lonely island. Adam becomes convinced that he himself must be the Lost Prince; and so he sets out on a quest to find his homeland, to rescue his mother (driven mad by the evil King), and to restore freedom to his countrymen (enslaved by the same evil King).

There is, though, a slight catch: the balladeer swears that Gildoray is a myth; he says he made up parts of the story even as he was telling it. Adam is unyielding, however, and he dedicates his life to finding this place that it seems only he alone believes to be real. His quixotic, noble journey takes him to many strange lands, where he is called upon to do remarkable things such as facing down a coolly murderous pirate called Darkly Jack; or passing a series of horrific tests to win the hand of a princess from her cruel father; or freeing a terrorized nation from the clutches of a monstrous Gryphon that subdues the people by eating their young.

Throughout, Adam prevails and his faith in the righteousness (not to mention the veracity) of his mission never wavers. So much so, that when a relentless storm at sea stands in the way of his progress, he pushes onward, against the elements... and winds up shipwrecked, separated from his beloved wife and the newborn twins she has just delivered. And Adam realizes, perhaps too late, that there may be more important things to accomplish in life than the tenacious, bloody pursuit of glory.

I won't disclose the events of Act Two—I want you to see The World Over for yourself to discover what happens to this authentic hero and how Bunin makes his story emblematic, in a sad and powerful way, of the condition of our own country and our own world in 2002. This play finally says, uncompromisingly and honestly, what so many of us are thinking—about humanity's seeming unquenchable thirst for war and violence, about our seeming eagerness to bow down to and embrace tyranny, about how willingly we give lip-service to history's great lessons without seeming to actually learn anything from them. In the end, we're left with Adam's remarkable, heart-wrenching journey, and with that map. What will we make of them?

I'd be remiss not to tell you that The World Over, in addition to being one of the finest and most important new plays to arrive in New York in several years, is also blessed with a magnificent production. Director Tim Vasen matches Bunin's narrative prowess with an engagingly imaginative staging that encapsulates the work's key themes perfectly: this is a story about stories, and what they're for, and why we gather in a dark room to tell and hear them. (If you detected traces of The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale, and any number of other classic works in my account of The World Over—well, you're right.) Every design element—the spare but inventive set by Mark Wendlend, the whimsical costumes by Ilona Somogyi, the masterful lighting of Michael Chybowski, and the thrilling soundscape of David Van Tieghem (including the most disarmingly authentic thunderstorms I can remember in the theatre)—works in tandem with Vasen's direction to support Bunin's concept.

Justin Kirk, as Adam, provides The World Over with its humane and compassionate core in a performance of mammoth intensity and integrity. Six extraordinary actors—Mia Barron, Kevin Isola, Stephen Largay, Matthew Maher, Rhea Seehorn, and James Urbaniak—portray the dozens of villains, friends, and ordinary folk that Adam encounters during his travels. They're all splendid, and realize their assignments with warmth, vigor and great humor: Urbaniak, for example, is wryly appealing as the balladeer who captures Adam's imagination so vividly at the play's beginning; Seehorn is at once comic and tragic as an Old Crone whom Adam encounters in a desert; while Barron is both sexy and pathetic as an Empress whose senses have been permanently deadened by drugs. Maher is hilarious as a suppliant slave to an evil Sultan, ostentatiously sweeping the space before the tyrant's feet as he crosses the floor. And Largay proves unforgettable as, of all things, a giant Red-Winged Hawk, who transports Adam on his back to yet another port of call in a lifetime of  endless wandering.

This Hawk observes, almost in passing, that perhaps people have only been put on earth to amuse the birds. I told you Bunin was wise: here's a play to provide what we always need—perspective.

So here's the deal: someone (Lawrence Feeney) had this wacky idea to put together two evenings—one of plays, one of musicals—where all the work is created from scratch within 24 hours, with the writers doing their thing while doing three "laps" on the Staten Island Ferry; and then a bunch of playwrights, directors, composers, lyricists, actors, and behind-the-scenes types actually agreed to make it happen, on March 13 and 14. (Note that Feeney and company had already attempted this sort of thing, on a smaller scale, with the writers riding the length of the A subway line, last year).

Now there's an obvious question to be asked about all this: Why? Before I saw theSTATENISLANDFERRYplays, I thought the answer might be one of the following:

     (1) To challenge and stretch ourselves as artists.
     (2) To acquire discipline by forcing ourselves to accomplish something that seems impossible in a tiny bit of time.
     (3) Because it's there (the Mount Everest response).

It turns out that the answer is indeed all of the above, but the real raison d'être, which I confess I didn't see coming, is: Because it's fun.

Lots of fun—the entertainment content and energy level in the room at theSTATENISLANDFERRYplays are both substantially higher than at any random Broadway show. No, the plays aren't perfect and yes, there is indeed a rawness to the proceedings that bespeaks the compressed production schedule. But the product is astonishingly excellent, and I think that the commitment of all these artists to a fundamentally quixotic premise is what fuels that excellence. What these folks are able to accomplish in a single day defies anybody's expectation.

The evening begins with a scene-setting tune written by Florence Yoo, who also performs it along with vocalist Elizabeth Snyder and accordionist Cristina Spiligene. All of theSTATENISLANDFERRYplays take place on the Staten Island Ferry (nifty set courtesy of Andrew Donovan); Yoo's song ends with the line "...can't wait to see what will happen."

What happens is that six playlets unfold, one after the other; though the authors and therefore the tones and styles are different, the shared setting unifies them and they do feel like scenes of a single play rather than discrete entities. First up is Tony Pennino's piece (none of them have been given names yet), a funny and fantastical comedy about a blocked playwright trying to participate in this very project. She's sidelined by a stranger who claims to be an Amazon (as in, the mythical race of warrior women of ancient times); and she's badgered by FERRYplays producer Feeney, as himself (or perhaps a slightly exaggerated version of himself—this one leaps overboard at one point to rescue a drowning boy and then fight off an attacking shark by clamping his jaws shut with duct tape).

Craig Pospisil's contribution follows, a wry account of a meeting between a depressed loud-mouth and another woman who seems to have it all. Stephen O'Rourke's delightful romantic comedy comes next; in it, a lesbian couple, Eva and Jen, who are expecting a child and preparing to move to a big house in Staten Island, quarrel about their future. The fourth scene, by Mary Humphrey Baldridge, depicts the emotional rescue of a desolate young man ("Everything is so grim," he says of post-9/11 New York. "Everything is so hard.") This one is touching and funny.

Rounding out the evening are Erica Silberman's two-man vignette about the Ferry's Captain and his sometimes confused encounter with a "fan"; and finally, David Riedy's warm-hearted and fanciful piece in which the reunion between a divorced couple is interrupted by a zealous Japanese tourist who has climbed out of the river onto the boat to take a picture of the Statue of Liberty. When this same, wet Japanese lady retrieves the unhappy ex-husband's wedding ring from the water a few minutes later, he can only say "I love New York." We know just what he means.

A celebration of the enduring foolishness and passion of New York's theatre artists, theSTATENISLANDFERRYplays proves to be a zestfully stimulating, one-of-a-kind theatre experience. A reprise of the plays and musicals happens on March 15; and a reprise of theAtrainplays is scheduled for May 19. After that, who knows what Feeney will make his playwrights do—fly in a hot air balloon, perhaps, or canter sidesaddle through Central Park?—whatever he comes up, I'll be there, and you should be too.

Amidst the rush and mania of life in New York City, do we ever stick around long enough to connect with the people in our lives? 3 O’Clock in Brooklyn, a fun, new play by Israela Margalit at the Access Theater in Tribeca, ponders this element of city life along with many others. The result is an energized, clever play that will delight you in spite of a slight overabundance of clichés.

The play’s concept is simple: seven people have all planned to meet one another at 3:00 one afternoon at an otherwise empty coffee shop in Brooklyn. Their impatience and nervousness causes them to repeatedly miss one another, as they run off to buy a newspaper, use the bathroom, look around outside, get some fresh air, etc. In the end, confrontations occur, new relationships begin to form, and the appointments take place.

Though they miss their appointments the first few times, the characters have Marty to talk to, the delightful Russian bartender who maintains an upbeat, Old World innocence against their cynicism and anxieties. Jordan Charney plays Marty with charm and an inspired musicality, allowing us to fall for him as Caroline does. Louisa Flaningam, as Caroline, does an excellent job portraying this sweet, motherly woman from another era who is lost in the world of modern love. To her, marriage was supposed to be forever.

Sharply contrasting with her are Edgar (Jesse Doran) and Bridget (Kim Zimmer). Doran delivers Edgar's caustic opinions on love, life and women with disturbing sincerity. Zimmer’s charged performance as the neurotic and frenetic Bridget is brilliant and multi-layered. She captures the shallowness of this spurned woman, and adds a level of emotion underneath that brings to life a rather caricatured role. Jeremy Webb gives a very funny performance as Jonathon, a misogynistic gay man relating his disgust about the results of his one attempt at being with a woman. Finally, Marla (Erica Piccininni), is a young idealistic woman waiting for her perfect boyfriend. Piccininni’s performance is strong in showing the passion behind Marla's opinions, but lacks some of the depth that the other characters have (though this may be partly due to the script).

The action takes place on a well-planned set designed by Maruti Evans. It's a cute little bar with a beautiful wood finish and a big gray jukebox in the corner. The generous windows around the door in the back of the set let us see the characters before they enter, giving us some quick hints about them. The timing of the entrances and exits is strong, being an essential part of the humor.

The real focus of the play is ideas—the characters are vessels for various philosophies and ideas about life and love that are filtered through their experiences. Debates arise about politics (liberal vs. conservative), gender (men vs. women), feminism across generations, music, and literature. Interestingly, the ideas make less of an impact than the witty (and sometimes surprising) arguments themselves: Margalit is less successful in swaying the audience one way or the other than in revealing character and relationships through the lively dialogue. There is a subtle sweetness to the undercurrent of attraction between Marty and Caroline; their observation of Marla’s naïve love for her boyfriend says more about love than any of the play's more intellectual exchanges. It’s touches such as this that  make 3 O'Clock in Brooklyn a play worth seeing.

Peter S. Petralia is rapidly becoming downtown theatre's premiere auteur: nobody can conjure a milieu with so much specificity and precision as he can. Three Ring, the newest play written and directed by Petralia (who is still not even thirty years old) contains the theatrical ingredients that we now recognize as his signature: open space bounded by curtains made of heavy, clear plastic; a schizophrenic soundscore and impressionistic lights that drift in and out of focus; and a non-linear script blending traditional plot and characterization with showier, experimental elements that, defying expectation and even reason, somehow manages to add up to something concrete by the evening's end.

The physical setting of Three Ring is an asylum for mentally unbalanced circus performers; but the play really takes place in the dark reaches of their minds as they contemplate, singly and together, the nature of their otherness and their concomitant loneliness. Three Ring explores what happens to people who are made to feel different, and it uses a company of sideshow performers—about as excluded and exceptional a group as you can think of in the context of theatre—to make its point. (Note that the characters are sideshow performers but the actors portraying them are not.)

So in the course of a sad though occasionally jubilant ninety minutes, we meet Philomena (Ash Bulayev), a soft-spoken hermaphrodite; Prudence (Lu Chekowsky), a take-charge type whose specialty is an exotic dance that features fire; Marco (David Sochet), a garrulous magician; Barry (Carlton Ward), a rubber-limbed acrobat; and Mitzi (Cassandra Weston), a bearded lady with a penchant for aerialism. These five inmates find themselves one morning with the dead body of their keeper, Dr. Gifford (the startlingly inert Charley Layton) on their hands. During the course of the play they try to figure out what happened to the doctor and, more significantly, what is to become of them.

Their alienation from what you and I would call normal life makes it just about impossible for them to accomplish either goal: they lack focus, for one thing; their thinking is disorganized and severely limited. But it doesn't matter, for what Petralia is really interested in here is getting inside these characters' heads, and so he has them interrupt their mandate with confessional monologues—often, interestingly, delivered by someone other than the character they are about—which give them and us some insight into how these perversely dysfunctional people got that way. These don't always work, by the way, and puzzlingly there isn't one provided for each character.

What does work are the other interludes, of performance, when each character gets a chance to do his or her "act." Some, like Ward's extraordinary tour de force in which he balances himself on a towering column of chairs or on his own shoulder, are as beautiful as they are thrilling; others, like Sochet's off-kilter demonstration of "magic," are just eerily strange. But each brings genuine release: what's clear is that the moments when these six people are doing the one thing that makes them unique are the moments when they are at peace.

Which is more or less the main idea of Three Ring; the accompanying idea—implied rather than clearly stated—is that the world doesn't want us to do the things that make us unique, which is how this quintet ended up here, in an asylum that, come to think of it, may in fact be purgatory.

This is undeniably potent, challenging theatre, although my sense is that the artists creating Three Ring get more from the mind-body-and-soul-stretching that happens here than the audience does. Nevertheless, this is a hypnotic, memorable work, tighter, more focused, and—in its way—more accessible than Petralia's previous shows. I hope it portends still greater things in the future, as this young playwright/director takes on more substantial subject matter to which to apply his singular, disorienting theatrical style.

Thunder Knocking on the Door, like Mamma Mia! on Broadway, is a musical with a preposterous book and a sloppy production that a lot of people seem to like. In both cases, infectious, beat-driven music is the attraction; here, at least, the score is original, written by the eclectic performer/composer Keb' Mo' and musician Anderson Edwards, with "additional music and lyrics" by playwright Keith Glover.

But the show itself—original though it, too, may be—is utter nonsense: something about a supernatural being called Marvell Thunder who is the voice of the Blues, from its origins in the Delta of the Nile thousands of years ago (or is it the Delta of the Mississippi, hundreds of years ago?). Now, you'd think that being the spiritual guardian of an oppressed people's history would be a good thing, but Thunder is definitely a bad guy, vowing revenge against the family of the now-dead mere mortal who defeated him in a "cuttin' contest" some years ago.  (A "cuttin' contest" is where two musicians do battle to prove who's the better blues guitarist.)

Anyhoo, Thunder invades the home of Good Sister Dupree, widow of the fellow who beat him, and challenges her blind daughter Glory to a new cuttin' contest. But first, he restores her sight (Glory became blind in a traffic accident after her lover abandoned her at the altar). It seems for a while like this is going to turn into a Rainmaker kind of thing, where the stranger helps the repressed woman find her inner strength, but then suddenly Glory's brother Jaguar emerges as the main character, replacing Thunder in his supernatural role as the spirit of the Blues.

I've left stuff out, but believe me, none of it helps the plot make a lick of sense. In the program note, Glover talks about the play's music being born in the Mississippi Delta, but for some reason he has set Thunder in Bessemer, Alabama, hundreds of miles away. It takes place very specifically in 1966, though for no discernible reason. I thought perhaps Glover would make a connection between the lives of his African-American characters at the dawn of the Civil Rights Era and the music that helped empower them, but he does not.

The set, by Eugene Lee, makes even less sense than the book, with what appears to be a handicapped access ramp leading to its second floor and a fourth wall that characters walk through with astonishing regularity. I read one review that chalked this up to "magic realism." Give me a break.

The five talented actors who comprise the cast are the least of the show's worries, especially elegant, classy Leslie Uggams, who plays Good Sister. One wonders, though, why Chuck Cooper and Michael McElroy consented to speak lines that sound like they might have been written for the slaves in Gone with the Wind, particularly when their female counterparts speak with nary a trace of dialect.

Thwak! is an utterly appropriate title for a slapstick evening spent with Australia's Umbilical Brothers. Not only does it prepare the casual viewer for the highly visceral pleasures of the performance, but it also foreshadows the onomatopoeic shtick that is the duo's trademark.

The basic set-up is this: Shane Dundas (the bald one) is "Sound Man," creating a live wall of sound effects to accompany the physical comedy of his partner David Collins (the haired one, a.k.a. "Move Boy"). As David perplexedly admits at one point, the idea is to bring mime into the 21st century by… adding sound. Though admittedly counterintuitive, the results are comedically lush. This becomes apparent early on: when David runs a microphone across his scalp, his offstage collaborator creates an aural rendition of the multitude of thoughts inhabiting the various areas of David's head, gliding among them like a hand turning a radio dial. When some of David's more unsavory imaginings are caught red-handed (something involving otters and hand lotion), they escape by taking a fantastic journey through his dumbfounded body, accompanied by all sorts of queasy organic sloshing and scatological tomfoolery.

It's a testament to the pair's free-ranging imagination that this bit somehow evolves into a sequence in which a lovable (and invisible) dog accidentally fetches a tossed grenade, which is then hurled violently into the air to explode somewhere over the audience's heads. Though the Brothers take great pains to demonstrate, via a slo-mo replay, that the imaginary dog was not in fact harmed (it was replaced surreptitiously by a fake imaginary dog), it still serves as a perfect illustration of their humor: fast, loud, and gleefully crude.

However, no comedy duo can be great without a relationship to underlie their antics, and the Umbilical Brothers are no exception. It's clear early on that David is unhappy being the silent partner, and constantly exhorts Shane (the pair's de facto straight man) to let him have a go at the microphone. Not only does Shane refuse to comply, he uses his weapon of choice to tease and torment his hapless mate. This is nowhere more apparent than an extended sequence in which David wants to perform a barbecue routine, but Shane insists on introducing a relentlessly buzzing fly to the proceedings. The machinations employed by David and Shane to kill and revive the fly, respectively, build up to a dizzying pinnacle of surreal comedy before being capped off by an unexpectedly and hysterically grim payoff.

It's around this time that David inevitably manages to steal the microphone. All varieties of clownish one-upmanship ensue as the microphone—a phallic symbol of masculine power if ever there was one—repeatedly switches hands. As this conflict develops, the Sound Man/Move Boy distinction begins to break down—though they have their specialties, it turns out that each of them is about as proficient behind the mike as he is at flailing around like a drunken baboon. But even when David tries to transform the performance into a cabaret showcase for his own smooth vocal stylings (replete with autobiographical patter and shiny dinner jacket), the chaos continues to deepen and widen, and the duo's prowess remains as sharp as ever. The physicality is tight even when wild, and the sound effects are nearly supernatural in their range and specificity—I had no idea human mouths could make such noises! Their timing and precision are truly staggering throughout. One suspects they call themselves the Umbilical Brothers because they've been honing these routines since the womb. (They haven't; it turns out they're not brothers at all, just real good friends.) The sheer craftsmanship of their buffoonery is reason enough to see the show— the fact that their material is also fist-bitingly funny pushes them headlong into the realm of comic sublimity.

Though the New Victory is known primarily for its family fare, this show is the equivalent of a high-fructose breakfast cereal that comes in neon colors; families more comfortable with cultural bran flakes be warned. For those more indulgent towards anarchy, however, the sugar buzz is of a very high quality.

The idea behind Emanuel Bocchieri's new production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is that this play, which we generally think of as a tragedy of revenge, is actually barbed social commentary. My Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature wouldn't agree ("The play exhibits an eloquent and glowing sympathy for the lovers"), but Bocchieri's staging actually convinced me: it's hard to imagine that I'll be able to watch this play with a straight face again.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore tells the story of the incestuous love of Giovanni, a well-to-do student, and Annabella, his sister. Annabella is being wooed by Soranzo (her father's choice), as well as the foolish Bergetto. Bergetto is accidentally slain by Soranzo's enemy Grimaldi, and Annabella eventually weds Soranzo. But when Soranzo discovers that Annabella is pregnant (though he doesn't know Giovanni is the father), he becomes enraged. Giovanni avenges Annabella's honor by killing her and then Soranzo; and then Giovanni is murdered by Soranzo's servant Vasques and a team of hired banditti.

I've left things out; this is an immensely complicated story, the gist of which is that revenge never solves anything. It is this lily-livered moral, delivered against a baroque backdrop of violence and illicit sex, that Bocchieri goes after here: Whore, at least as presented here, feels like a 17th century version of Duel in the Sun or "Dynasty"—melodramatic mush that is as irresistibly watchable as it is trashy. There's not a single character in the piece who isn't on some level duplicitous, manipulative, or hypocritical, with the possible exceptions of Bergetto and his servant Poggio, who are idiots.

Bocchieri points up the ludicrous sanctimony of Whore by playing most of its first half in commedia dell'arte style. Actors are masked (or at least nosed—see photo above); actions are broad; fights are slapstick; passions are wrought large, for comic effect. For the play's final scenes, this device is mostly dropped, and Bocchieri lets the horrifying events speak for themselves. The result is uneven: I was more conscious of the director's commenting on the piece itself (and the revenge tragedy form) instead of his criticism of the people depicted in the play. By transforming Whore's characters into almost meta-theatrical types, Bocchieri distances us from them; the parallels that I think he intends us to see between them and us become more instead of less obscure.

That said, this is a spectacularly ambitious production for off-off-Broadway, with a cast of twenty, live musical accompaniment, and a nearly three-hour running time. I attended the second preview and it's likely that some of the unevenness of that performance has been smoothed out. But I suspect that some of the characterizations will remain problematic, most notably Danny Dempsey's turn as Giovanni, conceived by Bocchieri as a spoiled rich frat boy but rendered as a vacuous and overgrown kid (he reminded me of no one so much as Sherman, Mr. Peabody's "boy" on the old "Rocky & Bullwinkle" cartoons).

More successful are Michael Weiss and Ben Sandomir, who are hilarious as the clueless Bergetto and Poggio; Kevin Kaine, pompous and self-righteous as Soranzo: Ian Tabatchnick, menacingly villainous as Soranzo's right-hand Vasques; and Anne Winkles, who is an impressively interesting and independent-minded Annabella.

Tommy Tune: White Tie and Tails is sheer, sublime joy from beginning to end. Tune is going to go down in history as the multi-award winning director/choreographer of shows like Nine, Grand Hotel, and The Will Rogers Follies. But anybody who's seen his work knows that he's a song-and-dance man at heart, and were it not for his height (6'6") and his birth year (1939, about ten years too late), he would surely have wound up in the pantheon that includes Astaire and Kelly.

But at nearly 64 years of age—and a blessedly fit and boyish sexagenarian he is, silvery hair notwithstanding—Tune is in a place where he can do whatever he wants in his career, and for a little while anyway he's decided to share his gifts with the New York audience at the new Little Shubert Theatre. Again thinking back on the shows he's helped create over the years, it's evident that Tune has style and elegance to spare, and these, along with his talent, his high-spirited energy, and his unbridled eagerness to entertain the crowd, make White Tie and Tails a treat.

It starts off rather gently, with an understated rendition of Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn & Bobby Worth's "Same Old Song and Dance." A fun but still low-key "Tap Your Troubles Away" (from Mack and Mabel, by Jerry Herman) follows; this number introduces us to Tune's supporting cast, the remarkably deft trio of performers known as the Manhattan Rhythm Kings. Then more Astaire-inflected minimalism to Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again" and a medley of songs about dancing; and then, as if a cork has popped somewhere, Tune's unabashed effervescence is unleashed in a deliciously lively "Puttin' on the Ritz." Tentative smiles turn to big goofy grins that stay put on our faces until Tune is finished with us, more than an hour later.

During the hour, Tune captivates us with a dreamily heartfelt "New York at Christmas," a sunny take on the Beatles' "When I'm 64," a thrillingly moody tap ballet to "Shanghai Lil," and a winningly upbeat "I Can't Be Bothered Now" (a song Tune first performed twenty years ago in My One and Only; he does it here seated on a not-too-tall stool, but the dancing feet never stop). The Manhattan Rhythm Kings perform a terrific jazzy "Fascinating Rhythm" and, with Tune, harmonize admirably in barbershop-quartet fashion to "It's You" (from The Music Man). Tune and the Kings sell, sell, sell during a vaudeville number that includes old standards like "When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabama" and they glide, glide, glide through a Gershwin medley featuring "Nice Work if You Can Get It," "Shall We Dance," and a blissful, near-definitive rendering of "They Can't Take That Away from Me."

And just when you think it can't possibly get any better, Tune dazzles with a finale that's entirely unexpected: "Nowadays/Honey Rag," of all things, from Chicago; sung as it must be without a trace of irony, and danced with effortless panache: the ultimate in cynical showmanship transformed into purest gossamer as Tune makes this mad, manic Charleston feel as easy and natural as a stroll in the park.

Maybe White Tie and Tails and its hard-working star try too hard to ingratiate themselves (there's a section where Tune sits on the side of the stage and chats with audience members that may or may not feature a plant); maybe the glitter on Tune's dancing shoes is too Vegas-y for some. But the outright pleasure he and his colleagues take in performing their hearts out is absolutely genuine: you can't fake joy. All he wants to do is make the audience forget their troubles for a little while. He succeeds.

White Tie and Tails is a class act all the way: in addition to the endlessly versatile Manhattan Rhythm Kings, Tune is backed by a fine orchestra conducted by Michael Biagi, who also proves himself  a deft accompanist on piano on Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Lovely, evocative lighting by Natasha Katz; spare, understated sound by Peter Fitzgerald; and some nifty background projections—notably a magical Christmas scene—by Wendall K. Harrington all add much to the evening's charm.

Lest you think vaudeville is dead, be advised that a hearty band of performers is keeping it very much alive, and they have been for some time. Trav S.D.'s American Vaudeville Theatre has been a downtown fixture for several years now, on and off; now it's where it really belongs, in Times Square, at the chashama space that has been appropriated this autumn by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus to present a variety of Variety. Mr. S.D.'s show, which plays on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons, is an homage to the old-time five-a-day, when a passel of performers united by nothing other than a shameless and unquenchable desire to entertain and to stay alive formed the bill at countless theatres across the country. (Mr. S.D. is writing a book about this vibrant entertainment form, not so incidentally, which will be published in 2004.)

American Vaudeville Theatre is a modest undertaking, about an hour in length and featuring no famous names. I understand that each show is different, so the lineup you encounter will likely be different from the one I saw, though undoubtedly some of the acts will be the same. On the night I showed up, the opening act was The Haskell Brothers, a team of knockabout clowns who did a very silly sketch about a pair of French soldiers, one of whom is dying in a ditch from a wound to his femur (pronounced "fee-muuuur" with exaggerated Frenchness by elder brother Timothy Haskell, who is the Abbott half of this comedy team; younger brother Aaron is the childlike jester Costello counterpart). Up next was a very strange gentleman who called himself Salvador Dali, though I'm pretty sure he was not actually the late surrealist painter; he did an extremely bad mentalist routine with real panache. Song-and-dance man Danny Weizmann followed, scoring with clever patter that featured his Jewish grandfather's capsule reviews of movies. The final act was a charming short video by Sara Lamm whose subject was a surprisingly cooperative white kitty cat.

The glue between and around all of this is Mr. S.D. himself, who as emcee-raconteur is clearly the evening's top banana (if I may mix in a burlesque metaphor). With painted-on eyeglasses like Bobby Clark's, an enormous black greasepaint moustache like Groucho's, and a vaguely misanthropic persona like Frank Fay's, Mr. S.D. is the very embodiment of the medium whose revival he finds himself right in the center of. He delivers monologues full of polysyllabic nonsense and attempts, with the aid of two very adept stooges (Jeff Lewonczyk and Hope Cartelli—and I mean "stooges" in the most complimentary way) to fumble through a terrible magic trick and, later, the worst Christmas song ever written (it's billed that way, and it is). The shtick is corny and possibly authentic; I thought it was mostly pretty funny, but then I'm a big Trav S.D. fan.

Vaudeville always promised something for everyone; the idea is that if you don't like this act, you're sure to like the next one. American Vaudeville Theatre focuses on comedy, but don't be surprised if a juggler or magician turns up on the bill when you're in attendance. (Note that when I was there, we even got an animal act—sort of.) Keep expectations humble and you will be well-rewarded.

There is a uniquely American form of religion, one that transcends class, race, and creed, as any truly American ideology must. The Great American Religion is a peculiarly apostate form of Christianity, whose followers believe in extreme positions: the individual’s personal relationship to divinity, material wealth as a fair reward for hard work, and the rural paradise and industrial apocalypse. Its disciples are a diverse bunch: Nixon on his knees before Lincoln’s portrait during the Watergate hearings of 1973, but also William Jennings Bryan earning the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, John Ford’s The Searchers: these are the gospels of the American Faith.

Adam Rapp’s latest play, Trueblinka, late nights at the Maverick Theater, suggests that he is an acolyte of this faith. The play opens with a scene of silent prayer before a row of white crosses hanging on a black wall. What develops is a gothic tale of an American family whose faith consumes their souls. Rilthe Klieg, the matriarch of the troubled family, has taken over the household’s ceramic crucifix factory after an accident has left her husband deranged. She runs the family with clockwork precision, but the pendulum has started to swing away from her.

Each night, like a fairy tale out of the heartland, two of her children sneak down to the kiln in the basement to incinerate their most prized possessions. Ephesia and Avis both find escape routes from this hell: she takes off with a local defrocked clergyman after a botched abortion, and he falls in love with another boy on the JV basketball team. Does it have that Hollywood happy ending? This is an American story, so escape is one possibility, but punishment is another.

For the truly faithful, there’s nothing as evil as hypocrisy: Trueblinka is compelling theater because none of its characters is a hypocrite. Each interaction reveals a new side to the characters’ personalities and to the action. This is partly due to Rapp’s gift for language: each line sounds casual while still effectively communicating information about character, plot, and theme. Scenes hop from place to place and skip over time to tell the story, following the doctrine that efficiency is next to godliness. But the script loses steam in the final twenty minutes, when it finds that it has to compress too many events into its climax. The play becomes overdramatic, losing the truth of its convictions.

Several of the actors give powerful and nuanced performances. Gretchen Cleeveley dominates the stage as Ephesia; her eyes are windows, clearly displaying how deep her emotions run (fear, curiosity, boredom, anger) despite the calluses on her soul. Barbara Eda-Young as Rilthe and Andrew Garmen as the holy man Smallwood humanize their petty malevolences, deepening roles that come perilously close to backwoods characterizations.

For the most part, Rapp and director Simon Hammerstein avoid danger, producing an inherently moral work, a kind of dysfunctional family passion play. Trueblinka is exciting theater when it preaches the American Faith; it has echoes of The Scarlet Letter, The Night of the Hunter, and Highway 61 Revisited. But Rapp gives his play a novelistic breadth rather than a dramatic one, and compresses too many events into its evening. At these points, the script feels like a draft rather than a final product. Rapp strives and overreaches himself, as Americans will; but he forces his audience to look at their culture.

I'll begin this review by telling you that I have never read Mitch Albom's book Tuesdays with Morrie, nor have I seen the TV movie based on it. I came to the stage Morrie with little in the way of expectations, and was extremely gratified to discover how resonant and thoughtful it turned out to be.

As you may know, Tuesdays with Morrie tells the true story of how Albom, a successful sports journalist, reconnected with Morrie Schwartz, his former sociology professor. In college, Morrie was Mitch's favorite teacher and mentor; though Mitch promised he would stay in touch afterward, circumstances and the business of life prevented him from doing so. It wasn't until sixteen years later that Mitch saw Morrie again, following a chance viewing of an episode of "Nightline" on which Morrie was the guest. Morrie, you see, was now dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he had decided to share his experiences with a nationwide audience.

Mitch, who lived in Detroit, made what he thought would be a single valedictory visit to his old prof in Boston. But something clicked: a symbiosis that had been real but dormant renewed itself, and Mitch departed with the promise of a return trip every Tuesday until Morrie was gone. This time, Mitch kept his promise; he also faithfully recorded what transpired on those eponymous Tuesdays. The result was his book and is now this play, which Albom co-wrote with Jeffrey Hatcher.

It's a play, mostly, about friendship, and about dying, and therefore about living. Mitch views the weekly chats as an opportunity to learn something from someone older and wiser—how many of us would be so resourceful?—and Morrie, lifelong teacher that he is, does not disappoint. There's some pat profundity dispensed, but what's worthwhile here is the way that the minutiae of existence is captured, lovingly and intelligently and entirely unsentimentally. Hatcher and Albom don't make either of their characters perfect; in fact, Morrie does several things that Mitch is entitled to be angry about, (and as portrayed uncompromisingly by the great actor Alvin Epstein, Morrie doesn't even try to be adorable when he does them). Tuesdays with Morrie emerges as a portrait of a teacher and student—surrogate father and son, perhaps—who learn from the ways they can help each other live their lives. Sure, the younger one learns more than the older one—that's the way things work. Mitch fulfills his side of the bargain, so to speak, by passing on what he found out to the rest of us.

Two moments in the piece resonated with me deeply. Early in the play, Morrie talks about his initial reaction when he was informed that he had an incurable disease. To prepare for imminent death, he explains, he found solace in the Buddhist notion of asking every morning whether this might be the last morning, and if so, is he ready to go. As Morrie rightly points out to Mitch, we are indeed all dying, it's just that some of us are further along than others; living fully and without regret is a sensible prescription in this post-9/11 world of ours.

Later, as Morrie's health fails and Mitch must confront an inevitable final Tuesday, questions of when and how to say goodbye arise. Morrie and Mitch are smart enough to seize the opportunity when they can to say some important things that usually go unsaid. I thought back to my own father's death and what had and had not transpired between us. I can report that nothing important went unspoken; but I was glad to revisit territory I hadn't been to in years.

So Tuesdays with Morrie did me some good: it put me in touch with some fundamental life issues and offered sound perspectives on how to deal with them. Is it brilliant drama? Probably not; but it's terrifically involving theatre, and it's affectingly, incontestably human.

Jon Tenney is an engaging narrator as the somewhat inscrutable Mitch; and I've already told you that Alvin Epstein is quite good as the smart but irascible Morrie. David Esbjornson, the director, serves the piece well by mostly never getting in its way; ditto the design team. Playwrights Hatcher and Albom have done an admirable job in locating something essential in a book that I now plan to read. I found it in the local Barnes & Noble in the "Self-Help" section. If theatre can't offer us some of that, then I don't know what it's for.

Surf’s up in this summer’s production of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte. The play’s set, designed by Walt Spangler, is one enormous undulating blue wave, complete with a matching blue shipwreck full of booty. With the wave frozen vividly at its crest, it’s more a sculpture than an area to stage the play. In fact, aside from the opening moments, when a storm strands the heroine Viola on the shores of Illyria, the set bears no relationship to Shakespeare’s script.

This beautiful stage encapsulates everything that is both good and bad about the latest offering of Shakespeare in the Park. Miguel Angel Huidor’s sumptuous costumes and Michael Chybowski’s colorful lighting make the actors look pretty, but they don’t define the character, place or time of each scene or the play as a whole. The sound, designed by Acme Sound Partners, with peppy guitar by Duncan Sheik, plays across many emotional scales, but rarely matches the scene and cuts in and out abruptly. It all looks and sounds great, but nothing performs its job.

Likewise with the actors. As Viola, a girl disguised as a boy, Julia Stiles strides around with mannish confidence, but she misses the character’s articulate charm. And she often stands poker-faced while other characters speak, as if waiting off-camera. The myriad stars—Christopher Lloyd, Oliver Platt, Jimmy Smits, Zach Braff—give one-note performances, although they do sound their notes well. Kristen Johnson (of "Third Rock from the Sun") stands out by balancing cunning wit and romantic sincerity in her relatively small role as the bawdy maid Maria. And stage actress Kathryn Meisle outshines everyone else as Maria’s mistress, the Countess Olivia, by showing that her character’s passion is actually a subtle form of narcissism that she must shed to find true, selfless love.

As with the other elements in this production, director Brian Kulick lets the poetry overshadow the plot. Fortunately, the ensemble (even Stiles) speaks the verse with “a mellifluous voice,” and Twelfth Night contains some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful writing. Every character, from the Duke to the gardener, relishes words. Why say “Write something outrageous to make him angry,” when “Taunt him with a license of ink!” sounds so much better? But beneath all these wonderful words is a tender, somewhat melancholy romantic comedy, one of Shakespeare’s finest and most popular stories, and good storytelling is what this production lacks.

The basic problem is that Kulick hasn’t really staged a play, or even a series of scenes. There’s no continuity from one act to the next: characters change like chameleons, depending on their situation. The melancholy jester Feste, played by Michael Potts, shifts from smart and snappy to dumb and mopey in a few minutes. There’s a listless feel to the movement onstage, as if the actors have been ignored while Kulick worked with the designers. One or two scenes come alive—a late-night drinking party, for instance—but most moments drown in the slow pace. In short, this production of Twelfth Night is a wipeout.

The only thing that the twelve plays being produced under this umbrella title by Yankee Rep have in common is their set—you guessed it, two chairs and a table. They're being presented in three evenings of four plays apiece; the second assortment, which I reviewed, features some interesting above-average writing that, if representative of the whole festival, speaks well for the Yanks.

Serious Trouble, first and best on the bill, is a taut, ironic fable by Mitch Coleman. As it opens, we meet Pickett, a brilliant powder keg of a young man—the kind you often find in the works of David Mamet and Neil LaBute—and Arthur, a mentally disabled younger fellow who is supposedly in Pickett's charge. We discover quickly that Pickett has killed someone—not for the first time—and dispatched Arthur to display the body in a park, with a note that will help the authorities understand that this is the work of a mysterious master criminal. Pickett craves fame, you see; but he hasn't figured on Arthur botching the job, especially in the particular way that he has done so. For Arthur has lost the original note, and recopied it onto a piece of paper that turns out to be Pickett's resume.

Coleman builds the symbiotic relationship between these two beautifully, and then supplies a couple of surprise twists that I will not give away here. I will tell you that the play's ending is absolutely satisfying, with Pickett getting exactly what he deserves. Gary Ray Bugarcic directs, with Regge Allan Bruce, Darrin Fitzgerald, and a sometimes too-over-the-top Mathew E. Kelly (as Pickett) in the cast.

William Borden's Reunion and Linda Holland Rothkopf's The Airport Encounter both deal with meetings of old acquaintances in public places (the first is set at a 30-year high school reunion; the second takes place at an airport and involves a psychotherapist and his ex-patient ). Borden's piece is the more interesting of the two, juxtaposing shared memories with sometimes quite opposite realities in its story of a now-middle-aged "Class Geek" and "Class Slut." Both plays were marred, though, by some strange acting choices that made it hard to gauge the authors' precise intent.

Dressing on the Side, by Terese Pampellonne, is about two old friends who meet for lunch at a hoity-toity restaurant to talk about, among other things, the upcoming wedding of one of them. A lot of Pampellonne's dialogue rings very true, but the relationship between these two women, especially as played somewhat antagonistically by Jennifer Ostrega and Jennifer Ryan Logue, doesn't always feel plausible. I wondered, too, about Pampellonne's ending, which seems to favor superficiality over integrity. But Dressing on the Side is nevertheless a commendable little comedy, and it features the evening's funniest performance in Karl Itzkowitz's snobby waiter. 

Remember being a teenager? Remember being bored and depressed? Remember being old enough to know something’s wrong, but too young to actually do anything about it? Now do you want to relive all of this? You can, at Nosedive Productions’ staging of James Comtois’s new one-act, Two Parties. You will hear the self-absorbed lad (Greg Foro) go off on a tirade about how parents just don’t understand as he bogarts the joint at every turn, never missing a beat. You will see the wet blanket (Sabrina Gwyne Howells) who is tired of being asked why she’s not drinking, finally succumb to peer-pressure in a few desperate, dramatic chugs. You will even smell the marijuana (hopefully, for stage purposes, the fake kind) that has been provided by the twentysomething fellow (Patrick Shearer) who still hangs out with the teenagers, much to his perplexed shame. You will see this, and much more besides.

If I’m making the play sound melodramatic and cliché-ridden, it’s not. Joey (Dustin Sullivan), the host, has invited his friends over for the night mostly to lure Jenny (Sharon Eisman), the girl he likes, into his home. Apparently this happens all the time, and everybody’s sick of it without really knowing why—they’re supposed to be having fun, after all. For the most part, director Pete Boisvert uses Comtois’ dialogue to create a world that rings painfully true. The actors are close enough to their teens to remember in vivid detail the futility bred by such social gatherings, and, as an audience member, I am young enough to feel their pain. If I sound ambivalent, I am; the portrait is so true to life that it borders on the unpleasant. But this is all part of the plan, and along the way there are some good passages of writing. In particular, a protracted speech by Jenny, in which she laments Joey’s unwillingness to court her directly, parses the nebulous nature of teen courtship in a funny and successful way.

Unfortunately, there are a number of stylistic flourishes that, in attempting to comment upon the main action, end up working against it. A number of dance and lip-sync sequences come across as more hollow and distracting than the cheeky fun they are meant to convey. A bizarre and leaden framing device posits Joey’s parents (Wry Lachlan and Eve Sorel) as reluctant revelers going to a boss’s soiree (ostensibly the second party of the title), speaking all of their lines in a turgid iambic pentameter that challenges the sharpness of the more naturalistic dialogue.

Other devices are intermittently more successful. At various moments, characters enter into reveries of seminal 1980s cinema (The Goonies, The Breakfast Club, etc.), and then return to the reality around them to find their friends staring at them, aghast. For a moment the fantasy and the reality became indistinguishable, which begs the question of whether or not the play is meant to be taken at face value, or as a comment on the way teenagers form themselves based on their conceptions of the culture around them. That it’s not quite one and not quite the other is what makes Two Parties worth a second glance.

In Two Rooms, a woman from the State Department declares to the wife of a hostage: “The Crusades are here again.” The point is jarring: have we truly been pulled into another medieval-style Crusade? What choices can we make now, as a country and as individuals? This is the central question of Two Rooms, now at Atlantic 453.

Two Rooms switches between a cell in Beirut, where an American professor is being held hostage, and a study in the professor’s American home, where his wife, Lainie, keeps vigil. When a journalist approaches her to publicize her story—and expose the government’s unwillingness to rescue her husband—Lainie struggles to take some control over her situation. Lee Blessing’s play is a close look at political action and the power that one person can have in a global situation. This conflict is expressed in emotional terms to give the audience a complex morality play with a touch of Brechtian ambiguity. Even though Blessing wrote the play in 1988, it remains a terrifyingly relevant drama filled with insight and emotion.

While Propinquity Productions deserves credit for reviving the script, their production is uneven. In Lainie’s confrontations with the journalist and with the State Department liaison, director Steve Bebout has forgone tension. Too often, his blocking merely involves characters sizing each other up. And he’s directed the supporting cast to see their characters in black-and-white terms—their costumes are colored accordingly—but the journalist (Matty D. Stuart) lacks the persuasive charisma necessary to manipulate his subjects, and the government worker (Katie Northlich) is too hardened to her work, confusing her more sensitive scenes. Guy Camilleri, as Lainie’s captive husband, is only allowed to communicate through imaginary letters to his wife; he renders the character’s emotions vividly but doesn’t handle the descriptive imagery as well.

But when other elements fail, Christine Fall, as Lainie, drives the play. She guides her character’s wide swings from despair to hope with graceful control; her face seems to age as her decisions wear her down. And she negotiates an angry monologue on birds and hope impressively, finding the words her character would naturally choose rather than underlining the speech’s symbolic relationship to the play. In many tender moments, Fall rises to Blessing’s material, rendering her character’s heartache and pain in the lines on her face.

To the company’s further credit, the production never forgets that the audience understands Lainie’s dilemma far better than Blessing could’ve imagined. In a kind of memoriam, the stage space is defined by two gray obelisks, evoking the Twin Towers. Two Rooms plays out our anxieties with intelligence and emotional honesty, which is all an audience can ask for. That the production doesn’t always live up to its script is regrettable, but in this case it succeeds well enough.

Do you know how you would react if your children disappeared in the dead of night? Would you put your faith in God and man and remain steadfastly optimistic like the Smarts? Would you be devastated and disconsolate like the Levys? Or would you, before anything else, call your lawyer and frustrate the efforts of the police like the Ramseys? However we might react, let's hope we're never in a position to find out; otherwise, we might be no better off than Eileen Maloney, whose son and daughter have vanished from their urban bedroom in Neal Bell's play, Two Small Bodies.

It is a 1970s summer in New York City. Sweltering heat… blackouts… murders… gas lines… Howard Beach… the Yankees… the Son of Sam. In a dingy, rundown apartment sits Eileen Maloney (Annie Edgerton)—a mid-30s cocktail waitress as broken-down as her immediate surroundings. Hovering over her in the hovel is Lt. Brann (Steve Herman), an NYPD homicide detective who is  there to gather data relating to the mid-night disappearance of Eileen's two young children from the place where they sleep.

From the start, Brann is suspicious of Eileen's seemingly jaded—or perhaps even callous—indifference to her children's welfare or whereabouts. Eileen explains that she and her husband are divorced and that a contentious custody battle is under way. The ex-husband's claim of maternal unfitness stems mostly from two factors: He wants Eileen back, and he resents her rampant promiscuity in the wake of their divorce.

Despite his sense of moral outrage toward this, at best, dubious caregiver and, at worst, prime suspect, Brann finds himself surfeit with ambivalence in light of the incipient attraction he feels for the effete and evanescing beauty he has in captivity. Likewise, Eileen is torn between her contempt for the prosaic nature of his flat-footed ways and the brooding masculinity he secretes like so many pheromones.

And that is the play's conflict and the central source of its tense dynamism. The derision-laced animal attraction is rendered palpably and powerfully here by playwright Bell, whose accomplishments to date include an Obie for sustained achievement in playwriting. Bell deftly manages through the patina of grit and cynicism that suffuses the canvas to make us give a damn about these two and the fate of their impossible attraction—to say nothing of keeping us tightly gripped by the prospect of Eileen's guilt or innocence.

To these ends, look to the direction of Scott Darby as a significant asset. Darby keeps the tension—both sexual and felonious—high throughout the show and obviously has worked quite scrupulously with the actors, especially Edgerton, to tweak the performances to dramatic ripeness.

Edgerton, meanwhile, sells her goods with aplomb and dexterity as she keeps us neatly on the edge between contempt for a potentially murderous slut and fascinated sympathy for a woe-begotten urban castaway. It's a demanding role, but Edgerton and Darby make sure it works. The only criticism about the characterization I can plumb is that Eileen Maloney really needs to smoke.

The only other disappointment is of a slightly more substantial nature, however. The tone of the play vacillates nicely between gnawing tension and fever-pitch drama, but come the denouement, I was anticipating for a radical tone shift that I feel never came. In a play whose ambit is so high stakes, service to the conclusion kind of demands a shift in tempo and energy to distinguish with clarity the difference between the text's pseudo-truths and sleight-of-hand (Eileen likes to play head games) and the cold-sober reality that remains after the veneers of pretense have been utterly stripped away.

The fulfillment of this requires some rewriting by Bell on the final scene and some assiduous loving care from Darby to make sure it's realized. Overall, though, Two Small Bodies is a commendable piece of work that makes us willing to look at the abyss of a soul from which we might otherwise avert our eyes.

Eve Adamson, the director of this superbly realized revival of Uncle Vanya, says in her program note that "nothing really" happens in Chekhov's plays. She's toying with us. In this one and all the others, what happens is that life happens; the genius of these works—the reason they still feel fresh while so many other hundred-year-old plays do not—is the extraordinary depth of understanding that Chekhov had of human beings. His works are about people, people who think the way real people think and behave the way real people behave.

Now think about that for a minute. The most essential human quality is consciousness—that sense that each of us is the leading character in our own story. What Chekhov does—what director Adamson has done here—is to place nine of those stories on stage and let them play out simultaneously. We become witness not just to a single perspective on events and actions, but to nine perspectives. Everything everyone says and does makes sense to them, though not necessarily to anyone else. Indeed, I'm not convinced that they're really saying out loud everything we hear them say; I think that oftentimes Chekhov is letting us be privy to their private thoughts.

So when Professor Serebriakov announces that he's decided to sell the estate, it's clear to us that this decision in no way constitutes an attack on his enraged brother-in-law Vanya: he has simply figured out what would be most convenient for himself, without regard to anyone else's interest. Vanya's explosive reaction—he tries to shoot the Professor—makes sense to us at the same time, the result of years of repressed resentment and anger.

This ability to make everyone's point of view accessible, even sympathetic, is the gift of Chekhov's work. By having inner and external lives coexist on stage, he is able to touch us profoundly. (He is also able to make us laugh, by uncovering our foibles and follies along with our hopes and desires.) Adamson understands all of this, and in her staging, she simplifies simplifies simplifies so that nothing gets between us and the raw honesty of the characters: we laugh and we cry, with them and at them.

John Murrell's unadorned, easy, colloquial translation of the play serves Adamson's intentions beautifully, as does Robert Klingelhoefer's stark, unrealistic set, whose principal elements are a pair of black Plexiglas sheets—a literal version of that mirror that Hamlet talked about. Here, the characters in Uncle Vanya interact naturalistically and at the same time live firmly inside their own heads.

The actors create this dual universe in transcendent fashion. At the center—surprisingly, perhaps; or perhaps not—is Elise Stone's Elena, the captivatingly indolent soul who is catalyst for the tempests that propel Uncle Vanya's action. Just watch her make her first entrance gliding across the stage, her back to the audience the whole time: she's here and she's not here and she's aware that she's coming across that way and she's glad for it and she's sorry about it. Arrayed around her (though I wouldn't quite say they form a triangle) are Harris Berlinsky as Vanya and Craig Smith as Astrov. These two men are the ones galvanized by Elena's presence: they sense in her the things they fear are missing from lives that heretofore felt reasonably complete albeit unexamined; they intuit that she is a kindred spirit, which is why the casting of the three Cocteau acting company anchors in these particular roles is so canny. Berlinsky and Smith inhabit their roles, and the chemistry they share on stage is palpable: we sense the history that these two men share, and it helps us understand that the disintegrations they suffer at Elena's idle hands matter, even though they are only temporary.

Amanda Jones (Sonya), Christopher Black (Waffles), Eileen Glenn (Marina), Marlene May (Maria), and Brian Lee Huyhn (Yefim) form the rest of the household circle. They're less directly involved in the plays' central crises, but they nevertheless each have at least one telling moment when we comprehend what things mean to them. Jones' Sonya is particularly compelling, particularly in the final scene when she gives voice to Chekhov's familiar theme of redemption through work, which here feels like a subconscious mantra: If I say this enough times, she seems to be telling us, maybe I'll really believe it.

Angus Hepburn is the quintessential outsider as Professor Serebriakov, entirely out of place on the estate; he's the only character who actually gets what he wants, departing for the city of Kharkov in the play's final scene. He's also the least interesting character in many ways; or perhaps just the character that Chekhov seems least interested in: who cares about him?—he gets what he wants. It's the rest of us who are the stuff of drama, heroes and heroines of ordinary lives filled with desperation and detail and not much else.

And that, finally, is what happens in Uncle Vanya: intimate glimpses at what makes us homo sapiens tick: existence in all its giddy, grand triviality. It's funny, it's sad, it's wise, it's moving; it's involving in the thrilling sense of getting seriously wrapped up, for better or worse, with nine strangers for at least a little while. This is the best kind of theatre, as far as I'm concerned; and not incidentally one of our most invaluable theatre companies at their best.

Even the third time around, Underneath the Lintel remains a rich and rewarding theatre experience. This one-man play, written by Glen Berger, directed by Randy White, and currently performed by David Chandler, is a treasure trove. The mystery that propels it—which will not be revealed here—has the capacity to engross even if you know how it comes out; like a great detective story, Lintel offers enormous satisfaction in its ingenious plotting and the way that clues and hints are laid out in advance of a climactic unveiling.

But there's more to Underneath the Lintel than its terrific story, and that's what makes it worth coming back to. I need to digress long enough to tell you something about the show, and then I'll talk about why this play is one of our contemporary theatre's little miracles—one that I can proudly state that I recognized as soon as I saw it.

When you take your seat at Soho Playhouse, you'll notice two things that immediately point to the structure of this surprising play. To your right is a classroom-style chalkboard, on which is written, in very large print, "An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences." To your left is a screen, on which, as you expect, will be projected a variety of slides—some of those aforementioned evidences, in fact. Before the lights go down, a rumpled and slightly sad-looking fellow walks onto the stage, a battered old valise in one hand and a couple of oversized reference books in the other: more evidences.

Evidences of what, you are asking, quite reasonably. Well, of course I can't tell you precisely—you must see Underneath the Lintel to find out. I will say this: this gentleman is a librarian by profession, from a small town in Holland. One day, in the course of his daily routine, he came upon a Baedeker travel guide in the library's book return slot that was 113 years overdue. Checked out in 1873, it found its way back in 1986. Who would return a book more than a century late? Intrigued, our hero searches for clues to the borrower's identity. He finds, inside the tattered volume, serving as a bookmark, a laundry claim ticket from London, England dated 1906. And library records give as the address of the transgressor a post office box in China.

Well, of course he's hooked; and so is the audience. What follows is part travelogue/part suspense drama/part philosophical roller-coaster ride as the intrepid librarian sets out to discover the identity of this mystery man. He proves a life, he tells us, and justifies another (his own) in the process, the "evidences" that he used to piece together this puzzle bearing tangible witness to both lives—lives that might otherwise have been forgotten or proven meaningless.

Which brings me back to my original thesis, which is that Underneath the Lintel, beyond the provocative mystery at its core, brims with insight and wisdom; it's worth seeing more than once because its message only gets deeper and denser each time around. This is a play that asks what life is worth and what life is for: Berger reminds us that wars and disasters kill millions of humans at a time and no one blinks an eye; yet each of those human lives mattered to somebody, or seemed to. Does each of our existences boil down, finally, to scratching on a wall, as Lintel's hero does as one point in the play, "I was here"?

Berger also trades in more spiritual questions. To solve any mystery takes not just facts, but also faith—we can have all the evidences in the world, but without an interpretative model to explain them, we ultimately won't have anything to believe in. Lintel is most fundamentally about finding that something to believe in: I think Berger may view this act as the most essential human one there is.

So there is much to nourish the head, the heart, and the soul in this remarkable play. Randy White's straightforward staging remains definitive, as far as I'm concerned. David Chandler, who is the current performer of Lintel, is exceptionally good; his work conveys deep and enormous understanding of the play's text and themes.

I called Lintel a miracle earlier in this review: that's an allusion to something in the script, but it's also quite true from a practical standpoint—more than a year after its opening, Underneath the Lintel is itself still here, working its particular magic on audiences seven times a week. Such endurance bespeaks something special. If you haven't seen Lintel, you should; and if you have, go again. I bet something unseen will be awakened within you as you watch this deceptively simple fable unfold.

Artificial intelligence research is concerned, in part, with the question of what constitutes a life. So, too, is Singularity's United States project. This ambitious series of documentary theatre pieces seeks to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary by bringing the lives of un-celebrated people to the stage. Director Jon Schumacher and his colleagues Christy A. Meyer and Ellen Shanman have chosen their subjects astutely this time around (there have been three previous United States presentations): Works and Progress concerns three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. These three individuals—Ph.D. students Jessica Banks and Aaron Edsinger and project leader Cynthia Breazeal—spend most of their days trying to figure out what makes humans human. Which is precisely what actor-playwrights like Meyer, Schumacher, and Shanman do, which is one reason why Works and Progress is such compelling, necessary theatre.

It's also theatre about theatre: the leap that Schumacher and company make in successfully presenting their live "docudrama" is to maintain the artifice of the situation. What we see on stage is an unapologetic recreation of interviews that the show's creative team had with its three subjects. By preserving the unnaturalness of their encounters with Banks, Edsinger, and Breazeal, the United States team paradoxically heightens their work's authenticity. The awkward pauses, the self-conscious self-editing, the strangeness of the very act of explaining oneself to someone else—all of these add enormously to our understanding of the play's protagonists. Works and Progress places Banks, Edsinger, and Breazeal under the same kind of microscope that they use to scrutinize humankind every day: how recursively meta-theatrically cool is that?

Okay, I fear I've gotten a bit ahead of myself. In Works and Progress, we meet three AI researchers on their home turf, at the MIT lab. Meyer plays Jessica, an artist who has gravitated to making robots because she genuinely wants to understand the architecture of human existence. Schumacher plays Aaron, an archetypal flathead who loves to build software and hardware that model human life and behavior. Sharman plays Cynthia, the more experienced project leader who is spearheading the creation of "Kismet," a robot that emulates emotion through gestures and facial "expressions." The play, which lasts about an hour, is structured almost exactly like a verité documentary film, in which we "jumpcut" back and forth among "footage" of the three participants—sometimes at work, sometimes "candid"; sometimes alone, sometimes in groups—to get an impressionistic but vivid sense of who they are and what they do.

Only it's not a video; and it's not really these three people, but actors portraying them. As I said, it's theatre that reveals much about its subjects, with the added bonus of also revealing something important about process, as it necessarily adds and then strips away that layer of artifice that comes with live performance.

Works and Progress would be intriguing, I think, no matter who its subjects were. But, whether by luck or by design, Schumacher and his collaborators have fixed on an inherently fascinating (not to mention timely and important) set of subjects: what these people do—building robots—is, prima facie, really interesting. When Jessica talks about her current research, in which she is attempting to animate muscle-like material with a high voltage of electricity; and when Cynthia talks, matter-of-factly, about the commonplaces of cloning plants and animals, we realize that the imaginings of Mary Shelley are not so fantastic.

So Works and Progress pulls off an impressive double play: it's terrific theatre because its characters and stories are compelling and worthy, and it's terrific theatre because it so neatly and meaningfully meshes content and form. Either way, it's terrific theatre. It's also, as theatre must be, ephemeral: there are just three performances left. Book now.

The six plays that comprise Unresolved are each approaches to the management of grief. Most were written as a direct response to the events of 9/11, focusing on the tragic personal losses shared by the survivors. How you will take to these plays depends, I think, on where you are in your own recovery process. What they offer audiences is a public way to mourn and take comfort in the wake of the devastation.

I went to Urban Cowboy with low expectations. Musicals based on movies—or movicals, as some call them—just keep on coming. I’ve seen some that are great, like The Producers, some that were pretty good, like The Full Monty, and some that were not so good, like Footloose. Urban Cowboy looked to me like it would be another Footloose—a big movie from the early eighties turned into a show which, in the parlance of the times, sucked. Another reason for the low expectations was the negative press the show has received, apparently in buckets, after its first performance a few days ago. At one point, the producer had posted closing notices, then withdrew them.

There was a lot of bad mojo floating over this cowboy. But I try to keep an open mind, and I love musicals, so I figured, what the heck? And I was very happy that I decided to go. Is it a great musical? No. Will it stay with me, like the first production I ever saw of Sweeney Todd? No. Did I enjoy myself, hoot and holler, and find myself transported to an exciting place where everyone seems determined to have a good time? Absolutely.

The show is just plain fun, nothing more, nothing less. It’s the typical boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy rides a mechanical bull and gets girl back story, set in a Houston bar that seems one step away from the Kit Kat Club in Cabaret. In Houston, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the band—well, they aren’t exactly beautiful, but they play some great music, and they play it beautifully. It would have been nice to have seen, in the story, a little more of the reasons behind everyone’s desperate need to let loose and party; but given the times we live in, I don’t think it was all that hard to understand people wanting to go out and get away from all the nasty things that go on in real life.

Lonny Price directs the show at a fast and furious pace that fits the nervous energy you would find in a bar full of horny young Texans. The performance of the chorus alone is worth the price of admission. They are one of the best ensembles in a musical I have ever seen. They give off an infectious exuberance that pours onto the stage and spills over into the seats, filling most of the audience with nothing but pure, unadulterated glee. Each performer has style, amazing dancing ability, a fine voice, and, best of all, a sense of joy. Joy at flying across the stage as if on wings, at singing songs that belong in a honky tonk bar, at being alive.

The choreography, by Melinda Roy, is just as exuberant, at times hot and steamy, at others soft and subtle. Mostly the former, which is as it should be, given that there is a lot of sexual tension in the story, and that's conveyed quite emphatically through the dancers, who seem to revel in gyrating their hips and groping each other in a sort of clean orgy of motion. I got the feeling of being at a hoedown, or some great party where everyone was whooping it up with wild abandon, and it was difficult not to jump up on stage and dance along with all those magnificent cowboys and cowgirls.

The best performance of the evening is delivered by Jenn Colella, who plays Sissy, or, as the people behind me called her, “The Debra Winger part.” Colella is a true triple threat. She is one of those rare actresses who, when she sings a song, seems to be simply letting her inner feelings come out. Her voice is perfect for the songs, and she moves like an angry lioness. Every scene she was in, I found myself watching her every move. She has “it”: Presence. Talent. Passion. The same cannot be said of Matt Cavenaugh, who plays Bud, or “The John Travolta part”. Cavenaugh hits all the notes, and is certainly a very handsome leading man, but when he sings, there's no sense that he's connecting with anyone else in the show. Sally Mayes, as Aunt Corene, is excellent: her performance let me forget I was in a theatre and instead lose myself in the world of the play.

The music is pretty good—a bunch of country songs written by a bunch of country music stars, including Clint Black, Charlie Daniels, and Shania Twain. While the mix of music by these country stars adds a feeling of authenticity to the score, using so many different songwriters has a mixed effect. All the songs seem to come out of a juke box at a bar, and not out of the minds and hearts of the characters. I would love to have seen more variety within the country music style, lettin