nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

The present administration is certainly ripe for a little satirical investigation; playwright David Johnston (Busted Jesus Comix) and his colleagues at Blue Coyote Theater Company throw their hats into the hallowed ring of presidential parody with A Bush Carol, which plays late nights at The Marquee.

The idea here is that George Dubya Bush, entertaining at the White House on Christmas Eve 2003, is suddenly visited by the ghost of Karla Faye Tucker. (Tucker, you may recall, was a double-murderer who was one of hundreds of inmates executed while Bush was governor of Texas.) Tucker conjures up for Dubya images of Christmas past, present, future, in hopes that he will see the error of his Republican ways. As you might expect, it's the people of America who wind up getting spooked: as the play's narrator intones at the end of A Bush Carol, God help us, every one.

Truth to be told, the Dickensian device doesn't work as well as we might like (and in fact Johnston is at his best weaving in unexpected, off-the-wall references to other works such as Macbeth, Pygmalion, and The Wizard of Oz). Nevertheless, the political commentary is acute and stinging. It's also very funny, though sometimes the material's ring of authenticity makes it hard to laugh. Johnston depicts Karl Rove as the administration's sinister mastermind, John Ashcroft as a demented fire-and-brimstone religious fanatic, Lynne Cheney as a controlling witch, and George Bush as an easily-manipulated bubblehead. (Supply your own cheap joke to complete this paragraph.)

Stephen Speights augments Johnston's vitriolic text with sophisticated musical-comedy-style numbers built around such unlikely premises as a game of Risk being played by Ashcroft, Cheney, Rove, and Colin Powell, or the doublethink political slogans that disguise the actual intent of the administration's legislative programs (actually two songs tackle that latter topic).

It's all performed in high style by a cast of 11 under the able direction of Gary Shrader. Sean Kenin is a hoot as the President, positively nailing the shifty, if-only-it-really-were-guileless ingenuousness that fans of A Bush Carol will recognize as their Chief Executive's persona. Darin De Paul, hairy arms and unshaven legs very apparent under signature blue suit and white stockings, is a wonderfully grotesque Barbara Bush. Tracey Gilbert and Jonna McElrath have fun making the First and Second Lady of the land more than the ciphers that they seem to be on the 6 o'clock news. Rounding out the cast are Tim McGee (Cheney), Brian Fuqua (Rove), Don Carter (Ashcroft), A-men Rasheed (Powell), Sarah Ireland (Karla Faye Tucker), and Scott Lovelady as the show's dignified-in-spite-of-it-all Narrator.

For the last nine years, The Theatre at Madison Square Garden has played host to a sweet and lively musical adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with book by Lynn Ahrens and the late Mike Ockrent, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Ahrens, direction by Ockrent, and choreography by Susan Stroman.

It's familiar: irascible Ebenezer Scrooge declares Christmas to be a humbug, tormenting his clerk Bob Cratchit for wanting December 25 off and astounding a trio of good souls who are collecting for the poor, asking whether there are not workhouses and prisons to accommodate such unfortunates; he's then visited by a succession of spirits who rehabilitate his soul in a single magical night, by showing him that he can start afresh and save himself if he will only start caring for his fellow human beings.

It's light-hearted: the ghost of Scrooge's business partner, Marley, is a Beetlejuice-ish ghoul with a macabre sense of humor; he chides Scrooge for his miserliness in a giddy, darkly comic musical number called "Link by Link" that features show-stopping make-up, special effects, and choreography. And the next two spirits that Scrooge meets—Christmas Past and Christmas Present—are a jovial pair, tempering their charge's lesson with any number of delightful song-and-dance interludes, like "Fezziwig's Annual Christmas Ball" and "Abundance and Charity."

It's spectacular: Tony Walton's set curls around the mammoth Garden stage, recreating a whole Victorian London neighborhood. William Ivey Long's costumes are plentiful and eye-filling. Projections, flying, and other effects—including a gorgeous snowstorm—abound. And Ockrent and Stroman's staging sends many of the show's several dozen cast members up and down the aisles, including a merrily cathartic ending in which the now-reformed Scrooge himself circles the audtitorium, distributing candy to kids in the audience.

And finally—despite or maybe because of its conjunction of showbizzy glitz and epic earnestness—it's good-hearted: Menken and Ahrens never fail to move me with their signature song, "God Bless Us Everyone," which encapsulates the spirit of the season with sage simplicity: "Let the stars in the sky/Remind us of man's compassion." We lose track of man's compassion too often, don't you think?

A Word About Christmas Carol Present:

The good news is that the folks at MSG have this year once again faithfully remounted their holiday show, with all the bells and whistles in mint condition and with a cast of veterans and newcomers who deliver the work gloriously. In the former category are the excellent Paul Kandel (Marley), Nick Corley (Cratchit), and Justin Brill, Gerry McIntyre, and Catherine Batcheller (as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Be, respectively). And, oh so happily in the latter category is Jim Dale, quite possibly the best Scrooge ever—certainly the finest I've seen, truly transforming from bitter loneliness to enraptured grace, and filling the vast room with genuine good feeling with each eccentric kick of his nimble legs. I know that a big silly grin planted itself on my face when Dale took center stage with the Rockette-like chorus line in "Abundance and Charity" and executed some limber dance steps: he's a grand entertainer and a convincing, lovable Scrooge.

The environmental trappings that used to spill out into the theatre lobby are mostly gone, I'm sorry to report; but there's still cotton candy and popcorn to be had, each served in a custom Christmas Carol top hat or ski cap. Plenty of wonderment for the kiddies; plenty of showmanship and authentic artfulness for the grown-ups.

Christmas Carols Yet-to-Be?:

We're told that this is the tenth and final year that A Christmas Carol will be with us at MSG. Might it return someday? I can't say (but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned up again after a hiatus); who knows what the shadows of things still to come foretell? Focus, as our hero does, on making the present holiday season brighter: you're bound to see at least one Christmas Carol this year; if you haven't seen this one, then you should. It never fails to lift my spirit and to remind me of why this tale is indeed a classic. God bless us, everyone.

Though comparatively seldom produced, Sam Shepard’s 1985 play A Lie of the Mind fits perfectly in the most familiar part of his oeuvre that, beginning with Curse of the Starving Class, explores his absurdly comic and deeply disturbing notion of America through a succession of families, frustrated and fragmented by their inability to love one another properly. For them there is only fire and ice—the equally damning alternatives of remaining within the burning cabin or freezing in the blizzard without. The older generations have picked their poisons (alcoholism, abandonment, dissociation and delusion); it is their adult children, understanding themselves exclusively in relation to their parents’ tragic resolutions, whose desperate struggles with their ferocious passion organizes these plays. In A Lie of the Mind, the abusive marriage of Jake and Beth is that brutal nucleus.

Beginning with a hysterical phone call from Jake to his younger brother Frankie confessing that he has beaten Beth to death, scenes alternate between his family (which includes his also-ran sister Sally, and his mother, Lorraine, romantically and oedipally snubbed by all the men in her life) and her family (Baylor, her deer-hunting father; Mike, her viciously overprotective brother; and her mother Meg, who cannot remember if it was she or her mother who once spent time in a mental institution). Beth, as it turns out, is still alive and is recovering from severe brain damage, a fact which Frankie sets out to ascertain as he travels to her family’s estate in the deep woods of the Northwest. What follows is a depiction of the madness Jake and Beth experience as they go through withdrawal from one another, and the effect on their families, whose disdain is palpable.

The strength of White Horse Theatre Company’s new production (it is promoted as “the first major revival in New York City” but that raises detrimental expectations) is its adeptness at culling all of the comedy from Shepard’s absurd universe. Director Cyndy A. Marion has assembled a talented cast that uniformly achieves almost every laugh there is and the effect is of watching a screwball comedy. But the hilarity is only half of the task at hand: absent is the sense that any of these characters could inflict upon one another real physical or emotional harm.

Rod Sweitzer’s Jake is not so much volatile as petulant, and his despair is placid. This not only makes implausible his violence towards Beth (Jessica Baron), but makes his scenes with Frankie (Joe MacDougall), which are contingent upon his being threatening, merely funny and at times banal. This lack of brutality, such a necessary aspect of Jake, Lorraine (Sylvia Norman), Mike (Bill Dobbins) and Baylor (Ken Trammell), deflates the tension in every scene and makes these characters, whose temperaments are almost barbaric, into a disgruntled bunch of pushovers.

The older generation comes across best. Norman and Trammell are terrific actors, not far away from being truly frightening. But it is Ellen Barry as Beth’s intimidated and confused mother, Meg, who strikes the tragicomic balance perfectly. Anchoring every scene with her startling presence, Barry gives her fellow cast members an authentically-realized Shepardian character with whom to interact.

A Lie of the Mind is a remarkable play that is ambitious to realize. It is one of Shepard’s most playful (and misunderstood) works; if treated sanctimoniously he may seem to be a parody of himself. In fact, he flirts with our expectations of what it is to be a play by Sam Shepard without losing sight of the deeply painful quagmire in which his characters sink. Marion and her company have a healthy sense of humor, finding that playfulness, though at the clear expense of the menace. However hampered by a cumbersome and unattractive set (ill-choreographed set-changes will hopefully be modified in order to put the running time under its current three and a half hours), this production does give us masterful performances such as those of Trammell, Norman and especially Barry, who make this rarely produced play a worthwhile night at the theatre.

It's not Tony and Tina's wedding, it's Sam and Leah's: interactive nuptial comedy goes Modern Orthodox Jewish in A Match Made in Manhattan, a thoroughly charming and entertaining theatre experience, playing Monday nights at the Upper West Side contemporary kosher restaurant Levana. Sam is shy on the surface with the soul of a rock musician underneath (he plays with the local band Flesh); he's the only child of the very secular Jew Morton Levine and his estranged wife, well-known radio advice personality Dr. Roz. Leah is the lovely, sweet, and determined eldest daughter of Abe and Rivky Lowenstein, observant Orthodox—he's in the fish business, while she's very visibly expecting their thirteenth child.

That's all you need to know: mingle with the wedding party and their guests and you'll learn all about everybody's business before the evening is out. You'll meet the Gitti Schwartzes, one of whom is Leah's maid of honor (desperately in search of a suitable husband) and the other of whom is a longtime family friend (in search, the one time I talked with her, of her puppy dog). You'll also spend some time with Gus Peterson, the groom's Gentile bandmate and best man, as well as Yankl Spiegleman, Sam's awkward and nerdy chavrusa (Torah study partner). There's a Rabbi, a ubiquitous wedding planner named Ronnie (who snaps impromptu photos throughout the evening), a master of ceremonies in a jester outfit, an engaging keyboardist named Mitch Kahn and a terrific singer/bandleader named Avi Kunstler.

Cousin Susan (on Sam's side) makes a couple of unexpected, very public appearances as well; and then there's the heavily accented Alex, whom nobody seems to know very much about.

As I said, relax and enjoy: all of the foregoing will schmooze with you throughout the evening, treating you like a long-lost distant relative or sometime friend. Indeed, the experience of A Match Made in Manhattan is almost exactly like attending the wedding of a couple you barely know: people make an effort to make you feel you comfortable and welcome, as you slowly glean—from random chitchat and overheard conversations—some of the dramas facing Sam, Leah, and their families and friends. The main storyline here is that the Levines and Lowensteins seem to detest each other; watching them rail at one another—mostly because of their very different approaches to their common religion—is both funny and instructive. When an inevitable detente is achieved by evening's end, it almost feels cathartic.

Plus it's a Jewish wedding, so there's lots of food. Guests are treated to hors d'oeuvres before the service and a three-course meal afterward, with complimentary champagne. (Other beverages are available at the cash bar.)

And if you've never been to an Orthodox Jewish wedding—I hadn't—there's plenty to soak up and learn here, all helpfully explained by the participants as you go along. The ceremonies begin with the tish, where Sam signs the ketubah (marriage contract), and then the badeken, where Sam greets his bride and lowers the veil over her face. The wedding itself follows, under the traditional chuppah, of course, and ending with the groom breaking the glass under his right foot.

Things don't proceed smoothly, exactly: it wouldn't be interactive comedy if they did. But most of what happens is plausible and all of it is finally in the spirit of inclusion, tolerance, and joy. Perhaps best of all is the abundant music, courtesy of Kunstler and Kahn and, on the night I attended, the splendid Jewish blues musician Ruby Harris on the fiddle.

A Match Made in Manhattan is low-impact interactive theatre: no one is made to do anything they don't want to do, but neither is anyone left out. It's a fine example of this unique brand of story-telling: each audience member experiences only part of the whole story, depending on where he or she is at each moment in the evening. In feeling so much like the real thing, it reminds us how fleeting life really is—and how valuable.

Kudos to writer Michael Gurin, director Matt Okin, and creative consultant Spencer Chandler, who have put the evening together with real assurance and craft. The actors are excellent, often blending in so skillfully that we're not always sure who's one of them and who's one of us; they sustain their characters and improvise conversations with perfect strangers with astonishing ease. The ones who impressed me the most—and remember, this is based in part on whom I chanced to spend the most time with—are Deana Barone and Vincent Piazza as Leah and Sam, Caroline Langford as the eccentrically extroverted Dr. Roz and Jeff Farber as the chronically aggravated Morton Levine, Reuven Russell as the exuberant Abe Lowenstein, Christopher Lueck as the effete Ronnie, Matthew Hobby as Gus, and Ellie Dvorkin as Gitti Rochel Schwartz.

I first encountered A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was a very little boy, on the TV cartoon series Mister Magoo.  During his last year on TV, Magoo appeared in half-hour adaptations of classic works, sort of like Classics Illustrated with a near-sighted character actor taking some of the literary/dramatic canon's great roles; I don't remember who he played in Midsummer (Bottom?), but I do remember the very foolish version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" (Peter Quince whistled whenever he said "s," which made the title hilarious all by itself). And I remember really liking the fairy Puck, and thinking in my child's mind how interesting was his pronouncement: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Almost forty years later (!), here's another Midsummer, from The Storm Theatre, to delight the child that still lives somewhere inside me; a Midsummer to remind us all, with its disarming blend of wonder, wisdom, and guileless glee, what fools we mortals so often are. Director Peter Dobbins keeps the story timeless by leaving it in an ancient Athens that never was, and he keeps it magical by conjoining its twin universes of mischievously supernatural sprites and dedicatedly lovesick humans into a fairy-tale forest where the course of true love collides with something netherworldly that might be destiny or might be magic.

Driving Dobbins' Dream is the most pixilated Puck I've ever seen since the cartoon one who first made an impression on me. Portrayed—no, inhabited—by the remarkable young actor Joshua Vasquez, this is a Puck who can't stay still and, can't wait for his next adventure in service of his beloved master Oberon, King of the Fairies. Vasquez bounds and leaps all over the stage so lithely and enthusiastically that he just about convinces us he really can fly; I can only wonder what fun it must be for Ethan Flower, who plays Oberon, to have this spirited young fellow literally leap over him night after night. Never arch or knowing and without a mean bone in his body (or, it appears, any bones at all), this Puck is, well, puckish: the guiding spirit of this lighter-than-air production.

It is he, after all, who puts a love potion into the wrong Athenian's eyes, thus creating (and eventually resolving) the intersecting romantic triangles which comprise the play's human love story. Demetrius and Lysander are both in love with Hermia, Demetrius being her father's choice and Lysander being her own. Hermia's father's opposition to Lysander forces that couple to flee into the woods, pursued by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves Demetrius even as he ignores her. Puck's boss Oberon gets wind of the situation and tries to fix it by making Demetrius fall in love with Helena, but Puck accidentally enchants Lysander instead. When the error is discovered, he works the spell on Demetrius as well, so that for a brief but hilarious instant, Helena rather than Hermia is the object of both men's affection, much to her disbelief and consternation. This whole deliciously foolish roundelay is played out to perfection by Jo Benincasa (Lysander), Adriane Erdos (Hermia), Bernardo de Paula (Demetrius), and Kate Shindle (Helena), who bring the full force of their prodigious talents to show us the terrible agony that each of these passionate souls has fallen into. We, with Puck, get to laugh at their folly.

And we chuckle broadly, too, at the fellow that Puck picks out to be lover-for-a-night to Oberon's queen Titania: a weaver named Bottom who is full of himself (for no one else would be). Heading the cast of a very makeshift production of "Pyramus and Thisbe" intended to be performed at the King of Athens' wedding, Bottom finds his rehearsal interrupted when Puck turns him into the jackass that he already seems to be; and then Puck uses the aforementioned magical love portion, per Oberon's orders, to make Titania fall in love with the now- transfigured mortal, a lover's sweet revenge for a perceived indiscretion. Former football great John Riggins is spectacularly good as Bottom, a swaggering innocent whose overblown ways can't quite infuriate for their naive simple-mindedness.

Eventually, Bottom is restored to his natural state and the show goes on as planned, with fellow "rude mechanicals" making a mess out of the Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy. But here again, Dobbins' gentleness triumphs: this is undeniably an awful "Pyramus and Thisbe," but the players' impulse to make theatre is celebrated with sweetness rather than cynicism. As Bottom's co-stars, Hugh Brandon Kelly (Peter Quince), Geoffrey Warren Barnes II (Flute), Jose Sanchez (Snout), Eamon Montgomery (Snug), and Joel C. Roman (Starveling) are appealing and splendidly funny.

And of course Oberon and Titania are reconciled, too. Kelleigh Miller is a lovely fairy queen, while Ethan Flower gives us a pensive and heartfelt Oberon. If Vasquez's Puck is the propeller of this Dream, Flower's mature, melancholy spirit is its engine—and its heart and soul.

Dobbins' staging is unfailingly charming, on a simple unit set by Paul Hudson that is eloquently lit by Michael Abrams and enhanced by Skip Kennon's ethereal score. Pamela Snyder-Gallagher's witty costumes deserve special mention: among other things, she's given Bottom a character-defining big, floppy hat and Demetrius and Lysander Grecian underpants that make us smile the first time we catch a glimpse of them. This is, in every department, a most satisfying Midsummer Night's Dream. Only the most foolish of mortals would pass it up.

It would never have occurred to me to turn Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream into a Christmas play, which illustrates, I guess, why I'm a theatre reviewer while Carol Bennett Gerber, who was so inspired, is a respected theatre director. Her production, which is set in and around a giant department store during the nights before Christmas, and features Oberon as Santa and holiday trappings such as candy canes, reindeer, and an enormous snowman, is utterly delightful. It's also splendidly successful in capturing the spirit not only of this particular season but also Shakespeare's: this is as faithful a Dream as I've ever come across.

Gerber's charming notion is this: Theseus is a department store magnate (in a place called Athens); he's about to be wed to one-time business rival Hippolyta. On the eve of their nuptials, Theseus' right-hand man Egeus turns up with a complaint—his daughter Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius, whom Egeus favors, preferring instead the less well-off Lysander; Theseus orders the girl to obey her father or face death (an admittedly drastic choice, particularly coming from a mere retailer—it's the one stretch in credibility under the circumstances, but let it go). Hermia and Lysander decide to elope, and Demetrius—still in love with Hermia—follows them into the woods; he in turn is pursued by the tall, plain, woefully unconfident Helena, who loves him loudly but unrequitedly.

In the woods, Santa—who goes by Oberon here, but is otherwise the same merry, good-natured sprite that we expect—decides to give Helena a hand, ordering his head elf/fairy Puck to drop a magic ointment into Demetrius' eyes that will make him fall in love with the next person he sees, and then to arrange things so that Helena is that person. But Puck makes a mistake—mortals look pretty much alike to him, after all—and he puts the potion into Lysander's eyes, who promptly goes mad for Helena and disavows Hermia. When Oberon shows him his error, Puck enchants Demetrius, leading to the show's best scene, in which Helena fends off two ardent suitors—neither of whom she believes—while poor Hermia finds herself left out in the cold, abandoned by both of the men who, 'til yesterday, wanted to marry her.

Eventually Puck and Oberon set all right, matching up the lovers correctly; they also play a trick on Oberon's bride, Titania, using that same potion to cause her to fall in love with a man whom Puck has given the head of an ass. This man is, of course, Bottom; the daffy subplot involving him and his "Rude Mechanical" compatriots as they attempt to mount a play about Pyramus and Thisbe—to be presented to Theseus and Hippolyta at their wedding—is the sweet, sweet icing on Dream's frothy, spicy cake.

Gerber places all of the goings-on in an entirely convincing Christmas context with nary a sign of strain: this is one contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare whose seams never show. She's staged it on a mostly bare stage on which such design elements as a Christmas tree, some nifty looking reindeer, and, at one happy moment, a giant inflatable snowman, convey both place and mood; her pace is brisk if sometimes a little too indulgent to her actors. The ensemble is quite good, with G.W. Reed as a jolly, if mischievous, Santa/Oberon, Jennifer Jiles as his sexier-than-we're-used-to Mrs., and Marc Geller, romping all over the proceedings with cat-like tread and curiosity, as Puck. The smaller fairies are played, charmingly, by a trio of youngsters, Shaniqua Jeffries, Naomi Martinez, and Natalia C. Paulino.

The role of Bottom is taken by Charles E. Gerber, who bites into it heartily and seldom misses an opportunity to make his audience laugh at this dithering, good-natured fool. His fellow playmakers are just as well-cast: Sandy Moore as unassuming Tom Snout, Roger Dale Stude as the cowering Snug, Michael Jankowitz as a wryly disinterested Robin Starveling, and especially Letty Ferrer as Peaty Quince and Chad Deverman as Flute, the latter earning hoots from the audience for his hilarious drag turn as "Thisbe" in the misbegotten play-within-the-play that is one of Dream's comic high points.

As the four mismated lovers, Alexandra Devin (Hermia), Andy Laird (Lysander), Jennifer Kathryn Marshall (Helena), and Shade Vaughn (Demetrius) are appealing and funny; Marshall and Laird, particularly, bring a sly contemporary flavor to their characters without compromising them, offering a neat counterpoint to the ethereal magic all around them.

All told, a lovely Dream, this; and a lovely holiday entertainment as well.

The racial divide in American culture that drives much of its plot has also placed Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in a very particular spot in the annals of the American drama. We think of it as the first play by an African American woman on Broadway; and the first play by an African American to win the New York Drama Critics Award. How about us calling it what it is: one of the great, seminal works of our theatre's golden age; a worthy and important companion to other classics like Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman?

For, racial significance aside, this is, above all, an excellent play; in this thoughtful and compassionate production, staged by Kenny Leon and featuring Audra McDonald and Phylicia Rashad in towering performances at the head of a marvelously accomplished cast, A Raisin in the Sun emerges as a fine and splendid example of the best American theatre has to offer. There's no American play in town to rival it at the moment; if you see anything on Broadway this spring, let this be it.

The story, as you may know, concerns a family living in a crowded, run-down apartment in Chicago in the late 1950s. Theoretically at its head is Walter Lee Younger, who works as a chauffeur for a rich white businessman; at 34, Walter is already beaten down though he still harbors dreams of getting his own, getting ahead. He is, indeed, the living embodiment of the Langston Hughes verse from which Hansberry borrowed her play's title:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Actually calling the shots—for now, anyway—is the family matriarch, Lena. As the play begins, she is about to receive a $10,000 check (payment of her late husband's life insurance policy), money that is catalyst for all that happens thereafter. Walter wants to use it to invest with his cronies in a liquor store, a move that Lena opposes philosophically as well as financially. Ruth, Walter's hard-working wife, suggests that Lena use the cash to take a vacation somewhere (and when Audra McDonald says the line, we understand that such a vacation would be a significant relief for Ruth as well). Lena, at first undecided about the windfall save that some of it will be set aside for her daughter Beneatha's medical school education, eventually determines to do the one thing that she believes will save her family. She makes a deposit on a house in the suburbs, one with plenty of rooms for everyone and a garden and lots of sunlight.

The house is in a white neighborhood in pre-Civil Rights, pre-integration America: a little bit of dynamite. And Lena's unilateral action cuts deeply into Walter's pride: a powder keg. How can the family survive the inevitable conflagration?

Hansberry's work is so sure and sound and wise that it's hard to believe it could have been written a woman still in her 20s; and it's uncannily prescient, too: she saw much of the future of black Americans in this play, not to mention the future of the still-colonized emerging African continent. (One of the play's subplots involves Beneatha's courting by a Nigerian student named Joseph Asagai, a brilliantly vivid character whose hope in the face of enormous odds is just magnificent.) For all of these reasons, A Raisin in the Sun is required viewing: we can learn much from Hansberry's Younger family.

Director Kenny Leon gives us the play unadorned and with loving care. Thomas Lynch's claustrophobic apartment set, the first thing we see when the curtain rises, defines the environment eloquently. Brian MacDevitt's realistic lighting and Paul Tazewell's period costumes add further evocation of time, place, and circumstance. The ensemble is exemplary, from the supporting players right up to the above-the-title stars. Alexander Mitchell, who plays Walter and Ruth's 10-year-old son Travis, is a delight—a ray of sunshine in this dingy world. David Aaron Baker, the sole white man in the company, portraying an emissary from the "Clybourne Park Improvement Association," offers an insidious blend of panicked discomfort and self-righteous bigotry. Bill Nunn is affecting in a brief turn as Walter's friend and would-be business partner Bobo, while Frank Harts is suitably annoying as another of Beneatha's suitors, a rich, snobby college student named George Murchison. As Asagai, Teagle F. Bougere is a bit of a revelation, summoning up pride, love, and profound passion in his final moments on stage that knock us just a little off balance.

Sean Combs is a more than credible Walter. His relative inexperience as an actor shows up in a few places, notably the climactic showdowns with his wife and mother—though one could argue that his inability to hold his own against these two strong-willed women, while disappointing theatrically, is ultimately true to his character's shortcomings. His chemistry with Mitchell and with Sanaa Lathan (who plays Beneatha) is palpable, by the way, allowing us to fully understand the deep familial bonds that exist among the Youngers, tensions and difficulties aside.

Lathan is striking and appealing as Beneatha; she gives this fiery but conflicted (and still immature) young woman a spark and intelligence that is appropriate and exciting.

As for Audra McDonald and Phylicia Rashad—Ruth and Lena, respectively—well, they're just spectacularly good. Their characterizations share a depth of understanding that is illuminating: they don't give us noble, hard-working, blindly loving wives and mothers; rather, they create real women—survivors of hardship, full of sadness and rage and, yes, love; shrewd beyond their meager educations, pragmatic and devout; manipulative when it suits them, courageous when they must be. There are details in these performances that are just breathtaking—McDonald's Ruth, at the ironing board, watching her husband and sister-in-law dance, with a mixture of amusement and exasperation; Rashad's Lena modeling a tacky gardening hat given her by her beloved grandchild. They're giving us authentic heroines, all the more admirable by letting us understand them, warts and all.

I cannot recommend this show enough: A Raisin in the Sun is a blazingly emotional and compelling theatrical experience that you do not want to miss.

John O'Hern calls his one-man play A Rooster in the Henhouse, but he spends most of his 85 minutes of stage time talking about the egg. This is disappointing because what's promised here—a story of how a man became (and came to prize being) a stay-at-home dad—is a rare one that deserves to be told.

But Rooster mostly recycles tired battle of the sexes generalities that we've heard zillions of times before, most recently here in the Theatre District in solo shows by Yakov Smirnoff and Rob Becker (Defending the Caveman). O'Hern focuses on his wife's pregnancy, which he describes in sometimes excruciating detail from conception to delivery Or, more accurately, from pre-conception: Lisa suddenly announces to John one evening in June that she wants to become pregnant in September. Because John and Lisa haven't had sex in six months (a subject sadly not seriously explored here), he is eager to get started.

But what O'Hern describes sounds oddly like a drone servicing his queen; he and Lisa seem to have a very strained and inequitable marriage (albeit one that has survived 18 years, according to the program). Lisa unilaterally calculates all of the details of her pregnancy, which O'Hern recounts in detached and often humorous style. He narrates the birthing classes, the gynecological visits, and the delivery itself (more excruciating detail), playing himself, his wife, and  various doctors, nurses, etc. The jokes are sometimes self-deprecating and sometimes pitched at Lisa (whom he describes, for example, as looking like the Mayor of Munchkinland at the end of her pregnancy). The show is funny, but the unresolved hostility beneath the humor always feels a bit off-putting.

Eventually, the baby is born and O'Hern spends a little time—much less than hoped for—talking about fatherhood. We sense that something lovely and spiritual happened to O'Hern as he raised and bonded with his small son; but what we hear about are gabfests with bikini-clad "other mothers" on the beach, furtive glances at nipples during breast-feeding sessions, and all the golf he was able to play when Max got old enough to start Day Care.

All in all, not much to warm the heart here, or to make us understand what O'Hern's experience really meant to him or could mean to us. Rooster is pleasant enough, but it fails to engage us, settling instead for a superficial stand-up comedy approach that retreads familiar archetypes and stereotypes to very little purpose.

To launch their new theatre company, the folks at Rasa Theater have mounted a double bill of world premieres: Abortion, a lost play by Eugene O'Neill, here adapted by Uzma Rizvi and Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, and The End of the Apurnas, a brand new comedy by Sarovar Banka. The two pieces have little in common except that they provide interesting showcases for Rasa's actors, especially the women in this ensemble. The combination nevertheless makes for an engaging and entertaining evening, and, perhaps more importantly, an auspicious debut for this promising young company.

Abortion, written in 1914, is very early O'Neill, and of interest mostly for what it reveals about the great playwright at a formative stage in his career. It tells the story of Jack Townshend, scion of a wealthy and respected family, a college football hero who is about to marry the girl of his dreams. On the day of a big parade celebrating his victories, Jack is confronted by a 16-year-old boy named Joe Murray whose sister, Nellie, has just died from complications following an abortion. Jack was her lover and paid for the botched operation; the question now is whether (how) he will pay for her death.

Racy stuff for 1914, this: one of the neat things about the script is that except for in his title O'Neill never names the procedure that killed the unfortunate Nelllie. Also of note: the Murrays are poor cityfolk, in contrast with the well-heeled Townsends, giving the piece a class issue to go with its ethical/moral one. In Jack, we can sort of see a prototype for the lost dreamers who will haunt O'Neill's later plays; in the shocking story line, we see glimmers of the sensationalism of Strange Interlude and the fervent social consciousness of All God's Chillun Got Wings. It's all here, but raw and undeveloped: this is not a particularly skillful play, though watchable for probing subjects that aren't much discussed, even today. And the ending, if not surprising, is also not inevitable—the choice that O'Neill has Jack make keeps us paying attention until Abortion's final moments.

Not having read O'Neill's original text, I'm not sure how much adapting Rizvi and Maharaj have done. The action is moved to 1855 Calcutta, with certain references shifted accordingly (for example, the anthem that opens the piece is "God Save the Queen"). The socioeconomic chasm between Jack and young Murray finds a sturdy parallel in the Indian caste system; but the play feels very American despite authentic-looking costumes and a map of colonial India hanging on the set's rear wall.

Debargo Sanyal makes a big impression as Murray; Azher Ali is stiffer and less convincing as Townsend. Meeni Naqvi, Deepa Purohit, and Chriselle Almeida all do fine work as, respectively, Nellie, Jack's fiancée Evelyn, and Jack's sister Lucy. In The End of the Apurnas these three ladies really get to shine, portraying three sisters, all named Apurna, who have decided that their mother has died. (Her very still—though not necessarily expired—body lies before them on a sofa.) Their reactions are expansive, extravagant, and very funny. Older Apurna, responsible and repressed, is ready to move on as quickly as possible. Middle Apurna, the family rebel clad in military fatigues, switches mercurially between bitter recrimination and guilty regret. Youngest Apurna, at first convinced that she killed her mother by French kissing a young man that that lady did not approve of, tearfully wants to bring her parent back to life.

Purohit, Almeida, and Naqvi make all three characters vividly individual, their same names notwithstanding. Maharaj has staged the slight script wittily, with the rest of his ensemble lined up at the back of the stage holding up picture frames, portraying generations of Apurnas past, watching over the sisters as they play out their foolish drama.

Both The End of the Apurnas and Abortion provide worthy entertainment and showcase some fine South Asian actors. All in all, an encouraging start for Rasa Theater. We'll watch with interest what they do next.

Abundance is a clear-eyed, barrier-breaking, unsettling, and ultimately optimistic new play that lives on in the mind days after you see it. The subject is money and the shame, guilt and terror that makes us reticent to talk about it. Playwright Marty Pottenger’s docudrama, constructed from four years of interviews, research, and community workshops with minimum-wage-makers and multi-millionaires, strips away that compulsive silence and engages the audience in a dialogue whether we like it or not.

We are addressed directly by the performers, most often as co-participants in a civic dialogue group, sharing the most intimate financial facts and follies. There are intermittent episodes or mini-dramas—a lonely aged dying Caucasian billionaire and his African-American butler; a couple of philosophical garbage collectors—the which we watch not through the fourth wall, but through the screened-in patio.

If you think this sounds didactic, let me confirm your suspicions. As the lights rise, we hear the chirping of little soundbytes—statistics and aphorisms about scarcity and plentitude—delivered by five actors, who can only make these statements so compelling. (The extent of the “choreography”—that is, the organized walking—credited to Pottenger and her co-director, Steve Bailey, occurs at these times.) The mini-dramas are a bit more substantive, but they too can feel like a Public Service announcement.

But the bulk of the show, consisting of the characters in the dialogue group interacting and telling their stories, is much less homiletic. These tales go deep and the cast conjures the men and women masterfully. Thom Riviera has a facility with dialects that makes his Mexican migrant, New Jersey Rabbi, NYC sanitation worker, and Indian adjunct professor at NYU all vivid and distinct. As a petrified upper-class homemaker, Cary Barker has a well-written part and her performance is heartbreakingly human. Nikki Walker, while unconvincing as a chipper Asian undergraduate, is remarkably believable as a self-righteous lower-class African American woman who has a ferociously jubilant epiphany. Joe Gioco and Herb Downer are consistently pleasurable to watch, despite the fact that they spend most of their stage time as the millionaire master and his manservant, respectively—scenes which couple Pinteresque power-moves with a Brechtian distaste for subtext.

Pottenger is a playwright by way of performance art, which might account for the direct address, presentational style and overly-articulate activism. However her didacticism is not preachy, it’s pragmatic. She reports to us, with an infectious compassion, what she has discovered from the people to whom she has listened and proffers an array of suggestions and possibilities. By inviting us to consider how we think about our money, she lifts the taboo of discussing how we spend it.

There is a potential redemption for all of us who are worried and/or guilt-ridden by our financial choices and it begins with speaking openly to one another. The camaraderie I felt upon leaving the theatre was surprising, haunting and inspiring.

Usually a company has a reason or two when it decides to remount a classic play. What does Aquila Theatre Company want us to get from its current Agamemnon?

Alas, I left the production not at all sure. They're giving us a fairly famous pair of leading actors—Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis as Clytemnestra and her real-life husband Louis Zorich as Agamemnon. But neither of these two stirs things up very much: Zorich seems merely old and tired as the returning hero, while Dukakis fails to conjure the truly grand passion of a woman ready to challenge gods and men by savagely murdering her husband to avenge the death of her daughter.

This translation of Aeschylus' play, by co-director Peter Meineck, offers something interesting: all references to Greek mythology have been replaced with Judo-Christian equivalents, so that Zeus becomes God, Apollo an angel, and Hades hell. The mapping of western monotheist constructs onto the polytheist originals is necessarily inexact, but it's clearly deliberate, forcing us to reassess the actions and motivations of the tragedy's characters in a (somewhat) more modern context. I was fuzzy though as to whether Meineck intends an Old Testament God (Who would seem to match more nearly in spirit the fatalism that I understand to be embodied in this play) or a New Testament God, or some sort of amalgamation. In fact, this entire conceit, arresting as it is, finally proves confusing: in what way is our understanding of the piece enhanced by this notion?

Without a defining concept or a driving star performance, Agamemnon is left to succeed only as storytelling; and Meineck and his collaborator Robert Richmond succeed here only fitfully. Their designers' eyes yield some memorable stage pictures, particularly a stunning final image of Agamemnon's dead body, shrouded in blood red on the steps of the House of Atreus. Their unconventional staging techniques, which have been manifested in mostly sly or playful ways in previous productions of classics such as Much Ado About Nothing and The Importance of Being Earnest, tend here toward the stately and stylized, slowing down the pacing and, surprisingly, undermining the sense of ritual.

Miriam Laube bursts forth in an over-the-top, melodramatic reading of Cassandra that captures our attention even as it feels out of place; but the rest of the actors, with one exception, match Dukakis and Zorich in the narrowness of their emotions. The exception is Aquila stalwart Louis Butelli, whose prologue—delivered in midair in the person of a palace watchman—suggests the subtly subversive inventiveness that might have given this production a real raison d'etre.

Alice in Wonderland is very boring, which is the main reason you should not pay $50, or even half that, to see it. It's billed as "an adult musical comedy," but here the word adult connotes "dirty" rather than "mature"; and indeed the show is dirty in the sense that it's so tawdry and grungy that you feel like you need to wash up after sitting through it. It's certainly not mature—Porky's is more sophisticated, not to mention more entertaining, than this puerile trash.

For the record, it's based on a cheapie soft-porn exploitation flick from two decades back, in which Lewis Carroll's story is freely adapted to depict the so-called sexual awakening of an innocent young woman in a "wonderland" of unbridled sexual appetites. The (unbilled) author seems to be Bill Osco (who is credited as director); he was the mastermind of the movie Alice along with Flesh Gordon and something called Night Patrol.  Marketing materials promise (1) full nudity (delivered, though very occasionally) and (2) sexual situations (delivered, in alternately unfunny and humorless styles). Examples:  (1) a nude Alice is "licked clean" by two scantily clad showgirls portraying rats; (2) a guileless Alice is persuaded to give a "handjob" to The Caterpillar, whose semen is revealed to be a sticky green goo.

Just this side of pornographic and the opposite of erotic, Alice has the lifeless, going-through-the-motions aura of cut-rate grindhouse burlesque. I can't imagine who Alice's target audience is: 15-year-old boys, who might enjoy the vulgar gags about masturbation and penis size and the peekaboo glimpses at what they might call bodacious ta-tas, seldom frequent the off-Broadway theatre at fifty bucks a pop; anybody with a more sophisticated theatrical sensibility is going to be appalled by the production's dullness and shoddiness. Folks in trenchcoats seeking titillation/stimulation can find it, much cheaper and much more authentically, on the Internet.

Full disclosure: I did not stay for Act Two.

It appears that things have been thus for sometime now; and that they will be this way for the foreseeable future.

Except that when we return from Intermission—after watching Act One/Day One of this claustrophobic saga—the lackey and the painter have switched identities, by which I mean that the actor who played the lackey is now playing the painter, and vice versa. The day unfolds the same in Act Two as it did in Act One—almost. The same words are said, but sometimes by different people, with slightly different intention. And some sequences are skipped; and sometimes there's hope that something new will happen.

But at the end of All Is Almost Still, everyone is in the same place they were when we started. And it looks like the old man is about to turn into the lackey...

The production—which is a taxing 2-1/2 hours in length—is carefully staged, with a meticulously realized design (set by Nathan Heverin, lighting by Raquel Davis and Josh Bradford, and costumes by Iracel Rivero). The performances of the three actors are more hit-or-miss, with Craig Evans evidently entirely in tune with Seelig, delivering a compelling and occasionally moving turn as the lackey (who turns into the painter in Act Two). Billie James plays the painter (and then the lackey) in a more naturalistic style that feels harsher than it ought. Lawrence Merritt—a last-minute replacement as the old man—seems still to be a bit at sea.

Playwright/director Adam Seelig clearly has serious ambitions for this play, which channels the works of Beckett (via its existential structure), Ionesco (via its class-consciousness and repetitiveness), and Pinter (via its clipped poetry and silences). There are allusions to Strindberg, to the color spectrum, and, most overtly, to the Bible, especially parts of the story of Jacob (with pertinent passages quoted in the program). But despite all of the literary references—or more likely because of them—All Is Almost Still doesn't finally leave us with anything to hold onto; Seelig works hard to evoke what he views as his antecedents, but he fails to clarify what it is that he's trying to tell us. What I hope he will do in his next play is to seek more clearly a voice of his own.

A lot has changed in the world in the last four hundred years, but one thing hasn't: people still love a great story. Armed with this undeniable fact, stalwart Theater Ten Ten and  intrepid director Lynn Marie Macy give us a thoroughly delightful All's Well That Ends Well. If anybody ever called this one of Shakespeare's "problem plays," you wouldn't know it from this sparkling production. Here's a show that delights in wordplay, humor both broad and subtle, and the healing powers of love. It's a real charmer—particularly, I think, if you're new to this piece.

The program tells us that the setting is "The Rousillion, Paris, and Florence of storybook imagination," getting right to the point: this enchanting work is more fairy tale than faithful reproduction of reality. In Rousillion, a sad young woman named Helena lives with a wise and wealthy Countess; she has come here following the death of her father, a wizardly physician who left his daughter naught but some potions and powders. Helena is in love with Bertram, the Countess' dashing son, but he doesn't seem to know she exists. She finds her opportunity to win him when the King of France takes ill and it seems that none can restore his health. Helena journeys to Paris with her father's medicine bag, and convinces the King to let her try and cure him. If she fails, she surrenders her life; but if she succeeds, she will win the hand of whatever young nobleman in the kingdom she desires.

Of course, Helena makes the King well. But—and here's where things start to get interesting—when she names Bertram as her prize (in a scene that made me think, quirkily, of The Bachelorette), she is startlingly rebuffed. Bertram snobbishly will have none of her; he runs off with his pals to serve in the army of the Duke of Florence, leaving our heroine higher and drier than we or she had a right to expect.

And then the fun begins in earnest: Shakespeare takes us to Florence, where Bertram and his men go to war, giving a Malvolio-esque come-uppance to a particularly annoying specimen named Parolles in the process; here, too, Bertram woos a sweet young maiden who just happens to have been befriended by—you guessed it—Helena, and these two ladies (plus the girl's widowed mother) work up a plot to punish Bertram for his knavery that would make Portia proud. The title foretells the ending—a most satisfying one, despite (or perhaps because of) the improbabilities that litter the path toward the finish line. Helena, certainly, has earned her bounty and it's nice to see him appropriately chastened by the time the curtain falls.

It works because Macy's staging respects the magic of the thing: she's directed with a touch that's lighter than air, making the play float like gossamer before our eyes. Stuff that often lays an egg in contemporary productions of Shakespeare—the incessant punning, for example, or the complicated double-entendre-laced barbs that are the Renaissance equivalent of insult humor—work beautifully here, graceful thanks to their gently spry delivery.

Macy has also cast the play well, with a sturdy, practical, lovable Helena in the person of Laura Standley and a handsomely diffident Bertram in Dan Callaway. Lending outstanding support are Paula Hoza as the warmly maternal Countess, Duncan M. Rogers as the likewise doting King of France, Michael Gnat as Helena's booster Lord LaFeu, and Derek Devereaux as the dastardly and cowardly Parolles. Glen J. Beck and Craig A. Brown have fun as the Lords Dumain, a pair of brothers on tour of duty with Bertram; while Ellen Turkelson and Addie Brownlee feel definitive in cannily feminized versions of two important stock characters, the faithful servant (here called Rynalda) and the clownish-but-wise jester (here Mistress LaVache).

All of this fine work notwithstanding, the show is very nearly stolen by Sabrina the Yorkshire Terrier, who plays the Countess's Yorkshire Terrier (a role that has been added for this production; she's that kind of dog).

The fairy tale feel—which has its dark side, by the way: plucky heroes and heroines have to find their way through the woods before they get what they want—is reinforced by Caitlin McCleery's simple, sparkly set; Macy's and Emily Rose Parman's often whimsical costumes; David Scott's witty, netherwordly sound design; and George Gountas' lighting, which alternates between bright sunshine and spooky shadows.

So here's an All's Well That Ends Well that ends well: a definite feather in Theater Ten Ten's cap, and a delightful evening of theatre for audiences of all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes it feels like the last thing the world needs is another one-act play festival; and then along comes Makor Artsists Networks (under the auspices of the 92nd Street Y) with a premiere program called An Evening of Short Jewish Plays, a developmental project that is promised to be an annual event. On the basis of this first selection of five works, each about fifteen minutes long, Makor is doing something right; I look forward to what they come up with next.

It is the playwrights rather than the plays that are Jewish here, by the way, with only one piece dealing with a religious/cultural subject with any rigor. That one is Howie Ravikoff's engaging solo piece Cast Me, in which he addresses, with disarming forthrightness, his career-motivated name change (to Howie Marks), lucrative commercial employment as an actor having eluded him while he stuck with his actual but ethnically loaded surname. Cast Me is funny and provocative and rather charming, calling attention to an issue that we tend to think no longer exists; some sharpening and editing (particularly of the opening interactive sequence, which falls flat) may help to make Ravikoff's pertinent observations even more pointed.

Lawrence Horwitz's Broker, Broker is the funniest play on the roster, telling the story of a New Yorker who is so intimidated by his apartment broker that he runs out of the room when the latter arrives for a consultation. The broker manages to soothe his addled client sufficiently to arrange for a visit to what turns out to be the apartment of his dreams; and then the client's worst fears start to come true. Broker, Broker is clever satire, neatly executed by director Sam Zalutsky and actors Kevin Corstange and Peter Ackerman (the latter is terrific as the frightened apartment hunter).

One of the things I liked best about this Evening was its matter-of-fact informality, with actors setting up simple scenic elements and props during trim and well-oiled transitions between the plays. For Sole Man by Bruce Stutz, performers Anne Fizzard and Neil Levine simply stationed themselves on two tall chairs, scripts in hand, for a staged reading of this new piece, which is a conversation between a long-married husband and wife. She has arrived home late, with one shoe missing; it develops that on the train on the way home, a man approached her, admired her shoe, and eventually made off with it. Stutz probes the discomfiture of this event, with the husband convinced that his wife has been victimized by a sexual predator, and she not so sure. Sole Man is about a marriage in decline as much as anything else; it's an intriguing work.

Gabriel Grilli's Talk the Talk is the most experimental item on the bill, beginning with a tentative ice-breaking chat between two strangers in some unnamed public location, and rapidly escalating into a (literal) pas-de-deux that may or may not be one or the other's fantasy. The playwright himself takes the role of the pushy but ingratiating young man who initiates contact; Inna Krieger matches him nicely as the young woman who at first resists and then mounts an offensive of her own. A fun and quirky divertissement.

The final offering of the Evening also turned out to be my favorite, Ross M. Berger's sweet romantic comedy semi-colon right parenthesis. A cursory glance at the play's two characters, nicely enacted by Carmelle Arad and Ethan Krasnoo, each armed with a laptop computer, assures us that the odd-seeming title is not so odd at all: the locale is cyberspace, and we're eavesdropping on a pair of longtime chat partners preparing for their fateful first meeting. Neither, it seems, has been exactly honest about what they look like. semi-colon right parenthesis takes a warm and affectionate look at the age-old problem of insecurity in the brand-new context of cyberdating.

Short play festivals are often about surfacing new talent, and this one has certainly done its share of that, introducing us to promising new playwrights such as Berger, Ravikoff, and Horwitz. But all too often these events are a chore; thankfully this one proved to be a pleasure, with each piece supplying genuine entertainment. Kudos to all the folks who made it happen; we'll eagerly await next year's edition.

The actual genuine Carol Channing isn't doing a solo evening of song, chitchat and reminiscence at the moment, but Richard Skipper's delightful facsimile Carol Channing is: every Monday night at the Duplex. And although Skipper doesn't look exactly like Carol (though he's got the unfocused stare and the heavily lipsticked mouth exactly right), and he doesn't sing exactly like Carol (his voice is in fact more Mermanesque), he sure does make us believe that he IS Carol. Talk about channeling a personality: Skipper nails the mannerisms, attitudes, and aura of this legendary leading lady so uncannily that if Jerry Herman happened to stroll by he might have to look twice (or even three times).

Skipper gives us a lightly campy, entertaining evening, replete with signature songs ("Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," "I'm Just a Little Girl from Little Rock," "Before the Parade Passes By"), anecdotes (about George Burns, Jerry Herman, and Anita Loos), mildly bitchy humor (a reference to the star of the film Hello, Dolly—Walter Matthau), and audience interplay (the night I attended, Jana Robbins was in the house and she got lots of attention).

Indeed the interaction with the folks out front—which the real Channing always seems ripe to do, only she's stuck on stage in character, you see—yields the most goodwill. The opening number, "I Put My Hand In," occasions some impromptu pairings of audience members, while the second act climax, a cockeyed version of "Roxie" from Chicago, requires two "volunteers" to serve, briefly, as Carol's "Boys" in an onstage dance interlude. This bit, by the way, is the show's great comic idea: not since Gwen Verdon said it on the original cast recording has that bit about "I love them for loving me and they love me for loving them" come off quite so sardonically funny.

Which leads me to note that an acquaintance with the Channing oeuvre and musical theatre's golden era will enhance your enjoyment of the show, but it's not at all a prerequisite. Skipper-as-Channing puts us all at ease, including her guest star, who at the show attended was a fine young singer named Sue Matsuki.

An Evening with Carol Channing is a charmer: ninety fun-filled minutes with everybody's favorite Dolly Levi and Lorelei Lee, up close and in your face—er, I mean, personal. A hoot and a half, in my book.

Writer/director and international avant-garde figure Gerald Thomas certainly has pedigree: he directed a series of well-known Beckett productions in the 80s with members of the Living Theatre, and recently made headlines for angrily mooning the dissatisfied audience of an opera he directed in Rio. In his new show Anchorpectoris (named after a neurological term for depression), the torchbearer of a musty 60s artistic/political sensibility and the impetuous drawers-dropper jostle for prominence, with grim results. And just because Thomas is postmodern enough to refer to and analyze his tireless self-reflection doesn't make the struggle any more entertaining.

The prevailing gimmick is that all the text is lip-synched by the actors, a gambit that serves to leech the performance of whatever spontaneity it might have had. Not one but two different actors play Thomas (Stephen Nisbet and Tom Walker), with Thomas himself eerily roaming around the background and watching his work from within. A diverse group of young actors is reduced to mostly standing around and watching from behind a scrim as the dueling Thomases beat their breasts and lament the current state of the nation.

As far as content goes, Thomas repeatedly reveals, with the insufferable glee of a child genius, that George W. Bush is crooked, and that Americans
are materialistic. One especially heavy-handed scene depicts the corpse of one of Thomas's surrogates draped with an American flag as a chorus of salespeople rattle off the prices of luxury fashion accessories. There's also an embarrassing confrontational rap in which a female cast member tells the audience that if they don't like what Thomas is saying they can leave; it is a testament to the patience and politeness of the La MaMa audience that nobody did. Several lines in the script attest that Thomas is aware that he is preaching to the choir; if so, what does he expect to accomplish by making them feel like idiots?

The only moment in the show that breaks through this glib surface is an extended scene featuring Fabiana Guglielmetti as a Dead Muse who rises from the grave and unleashes a daffy kind of fury on Thomas, her admirer. Though the text she is given to mouth is nothing but a twee parody of academic folderol, the manic dancing with which she punctuates her speeches disarms and, in this otherwise static production, invigorates the audience. As a triumph of the body over the ranting, prattling mind, her appearance provides this otherwise airless show with much-appreciated breath.

There's a spectacularly arresting moment in the middle of Animal when Eugene, a 5/8-human genetics laboratory test subject, is playing with his only toy, a bright green, Kermit-ish frog puppet. Venting his frustrations, Eugene carries on a make-believe argument with the puppet, telling it that when he bangs its head on the floor it can't feel anything. "You don't have a soul," he tells the puppet, decisively closing a debate that he has, of course, really been carrying on with himself.

Welcome to Animal and to the world of Kevin Augustine. Eugene, the little boy in the genetics laboratory, is one of Augustine's remarkable creations (that's him as a baby, left, in the photo above). Though a puppet himself, we almost believe Eugene when he announces that he has a soul; we're aware, anyway, of some spark of life—call it what you will—whenever Augustine is at his controls, for the genius of this extraordinary artist is to endow his amazing creations with something very near the stuff of humanity in a way that's eerily almost-miraculous. Watch Augustine, portraying a very troubled young man named Jeff, engage in conversation with Eugene: the one is clearly manipulating the other (and Augustine's lips never stop moving no matter who's talking), and yet we're aware of two separate actors on stage.

Is it any wonder, then, that this gifted performer-writer is so preoccupied with the nature of creation? Animal, in common with the rest of Augustine's oeuvre, is at least in part about the ways that men play God—whether metaphorically, by using (abusing) other creatures in pursuit of some unilateral interest; or, as here, literally, by building living beings and then enslaving them in supposed service to humankind. For Eugene is indeed a slave: a mutant boy whose DNA has been tampered with so that he will be prone to depression. His "keepers"—presumed scientists, shrouded in black, who are as likely to threaten Eugene with a bullwhip as to strap him into some fearsome torture device masquerading as laboratory equipment—are systematically destroying his self-esteem; once he's reached rock bottom, he will be the ideal test subject for a new wonder-drug for chronic depression. His life will, theoretically, have meant something.

It's a disturbing, unsettling, and sad journey that Augustine takes us on: his preoccupations—macabre, surreal—jolt us and tug at our emotions. Yet the very definition of life, and what makes it worth living, is at the core of Animal. Jeff, who is the chronically depressed human for whom the fruits of Eugene's labors are immediately intended (and whose dream, or nightmare, Eugene's story may well be), visits Eugene frequently. At one point, he teaches him to paint, telling him to draw whatever it is that he really cares about. Eugene draws a red ball, an object that he played with as a baby—an object he later gave to a dog, another test subject that he befriended in the genetics lab. What matters, Augustine finally tells us, are the simplest acts of caring and sharing.

Of course, Augustine's artistry is what suffuses Animal with its extraordinary unique spirit. When Eugene paints the red ball, it is in fact Augustine, manipulating Eugene's tiny arm with a metal rod, who is doing the painting. It's a  delicate, painstaking, simple, and beautiful act of creation—look: we've come back to that concept again.

Animal features three other puppeteers (they play the masked scientists I mentioned earlier), who provide invaluable support: Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith, David Michael Friend, Jessica Scott. Ditto Animal's designers, who help Augustine achieve his particular vision: David Evans Morris (the stark set, a maze of walls and door frames evoking the genetics laboratory and the confused inner reaches of Jeff's psyche),  Andrew Hill (the moody lighting), Sean McFaul (the eerie, ephemeral soundscape), and Michael Oberle (appropriate costumes, not just for Augustine and the puppeteers, but perhaps also for the puppets?).

It all makes for a melancholy, alien, and unforgettable world—a place where a little boy's ingenuity, figuring out how to climb up to the window ledge where his dog is sitting, becomes a thing of incomparable beauty. The images that Augustine creates will haunt you for days. I don't know anybody who is doing theatre quite like this. this is indisputably a work of theatre that demands to be experienced.

Animal Farm begins with the usual curtain speech about turning off cell phones, etc.—only it's delivered by our narrator for the evening, a scruffy and overlarge rat, who brings one of his little rat paws up to his mouth, clears his throat, and welcomes us grandly to the show.

This rat—incarnated by the masterful young actor Aaron Mostkoff Unger and a splendidly realistic puppet-on-wheels designed by Emily DeCola and Eric Wright—proves the ideal guide into this timely, terrific musical adaptation of George Orwell's famous story. And a fitting one, as well: with its saucer-eyed puppets and masks and pastoral farm setting superimposed on a nearly Brechtian parable, this Animal Farm is, in many ways, the anti-Lion King: it makes sense that the rodent in charge is a rat instead of a mouse.

Animal Farm tells the story of a group of livestock living on a farm in England who decide to rebel against their human masters. After they succeed in overthrowing Farmer Jones, they form a utopian socialist-styled government, in which all animals have a say in what goes on (determined via democratic vote in Sunday morning meetings); their credo is "All Animals Are Equal." At first, their de facto leader is the idealistic pig Snowball, but it's not long before two other pigs, Napoleon and Squealer, have turned the animals against Snowball and managed to install themselves as dictators, bolstered by a "secret police" of trained hunting dogs. Conditions deteriorate for the general population until one day Benjamin the Donkey, one of the few non-pigs who can read, discovers that the credo has been revised: "All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others."

Orwell's parallel was originally to Stalin, who corrupted the communist ideal into fascism. What's most interesting about Peter Hall's adaptation is how much more universal Animal Farm's ideas turn out to be: as treacherous and insidious as Napoleon and Squealer are, it's clear that the animals, thanks to their ignorance, apathy and willingness to blindly follow leaders, are ultimately culpable for their own sad circumstances. Director David Travis and his colleagues at Synapse Productions are making a pointed political statement by producing this show at this particular moment: free people can only stay free by actively participating in the ways they are governed.

So Animal Farm is hugely pertinent right now; this excellent production makes it must-see theatre. The design—the puppets, the simple but effective set (Adrian W. Jones), and the clever, evocative costumes (Jenny Mannis)—are expertly wrought. Travis' staging is crisp and sharp and energetic. And the performers are superb: the aforementioned Unger embodies ratness in thought and deed as he narrates the tale with a kind of sardonic resignation and scoots behind his awesomely mobile puppet. Nelson Lugo manages to impersonate a whole flock of sheep adeptly, and Connie Hall and Ceili Clemens deliver likewise believable pairs of hens and cows, respectively. Timothy McCracken is ardent and likable as the doomed Snowball, while Ben Masur is slick and slippery as the great communicator Squealer. Darius Stone is almost terrifying as Napoleon, particularly in a second act Music Hall-flavored turn delivering his self-satisfied, self-pitying musical number, "Runt of the Litter." As the horses, Jenny Mercein, Meg MacCary, and Kelly McAllister are excellent; McAllister, who plays Boxer, the big lumbering workhorse who becomes Napoleon's most fervent supporter, is a study in labored but misdirected good intention. Rounding out the ensemble are Scott Hitz (several roles, including the very funny Minimus, a pig poet) and Francis Kelly (fine as Benjamin the Donkey and Old Major, the boar who starts the animals' rebellion in the first place).

Animal Farm is necessary theatre. It engages us, and forces us to look at the way our world operates. Take your friends, your kids, your parents, your students, and then be sure to think and talk about what you've all seen and discovered.

Lisa D'Amour's Anna Bella Eema is a contemporary fairy tale in which a little girl journeys from an isolated childhood to the hopeful, if melancholy,  brink of adulthood. Because it's a fairy tale, the characters include a magical raccoon, owl, and fox who are actually fantastical transmogrifications of the girl's mother, as well as a spectral child (the title character) created out of mud by the girl's active imaginings.

Because it's contemporary, the challenges our young heroine must face down include her agoraphobic, probably insane mother, who has barricaded her little family within a dilapidated trailer; the construction workers who are trying to convert the one-time trailer park to a new interstate highway (one of whom is the Frankenstein Monster—see preceding paragraph); and her own impending adolescence: Anna Bella Eema is nothing if not forthright about its themes, with the girl's first menstrual blood among the numerous fluids and organs that take on symbolic purpose here.

The play is staged by Katie Pearl in story-theatre style, with three actresses stationed at little tables armed with assorted found objects that they use to narrate and illustrate the tale (except when it's not: long stretches in the middle are acted out rather than narrated, breaching the evening's rules of engagement for no apparent reason).

Now, I find this kind of theatre purposeless: I left not knowing why D'Amour wanted to tell me this story, or why Pearl chose to tell it in this artifice-laden manner. That said, it's clear to me that others respond viscerally to this sort of experience, which is great: that's why we have lots of different kinds of theatre.

Gretchen Lee Krich, Monica Appleby, and April Matthis prove superb technicians performing the roles of mother, daughter, and magical mud child, respectively. And D'Amour is clearly a talented writer: there are striking passages and themes sprinkled throughout that really made me sit up and take notice. But mostly, Anna Bella Eema felt alien to me: its stylized storytelling methods are as far-removed from my own experience as its heroine's strange lurching toward adulthood.

The "Anna" of Anna in the Tropics is Tolstoy's Karenina; but the Russian author who I was reminded of over and over again in Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize play is Chekhov. For though Anna in the Tropics has an eventful plot—including an adulterous affair echoing its namesake's and a fairly spectacular crime of passion—for me the real drama comes in the piece's still moments, in a pair of gorgeous scenes where we watch the workers at a small cigar factory listen to their lector read from Tolstoy's novel. Nothing happens and everything happens as the romantic story works its way into the hearts and minds of Cruz's characters; setting off a tiny, silent catharsis in each uplifted soul.

A lector, I should explain, is a gentleman hired to read to the workers at a factory, helping to educate them and also to relieve the tedium of preparing the seemingly endless supply of dried tobacco leaves and then rolling them into handmade cigars. Lectors were, we are told, the rule in Cuban cigar factories before automation made it impossible for workers to hear them; their existence is just one of several beautifully civilized, now obsolete customs celebrated in this quietly wise play.

Anna takes place in Tampa, Florida, in 1929, at a small but prosperous family-run cigar factory. The father, Santiago, is nominally in command, but it's clear from the outset that his wife Ofelia calls the shots here; it is she who has hired the smooth and charismatic Juan Julian as the firm's new lector—a not entirely popular decision, as the previous lector ran off with the wife of Santiago's step-brother Cheché. Juan's arrival catalyzes reactions among the family members: from Cheché, who wants to modernize the factory and for whom the lector is an antiquated vestige of the old country; from Marela, the younger daughter, for whom the lector and his stories offer release from a drab and unromantic life; from Conchita, the elder daughter, who feels trapped in a dying marriage and quickly allows herself to be seduced by the lector into an adulterous affair; and from Palomo, Conchita's husband, who understands what's going on and refuses to lose his wife to a stranger.

Eventually, Santiago is inspired by Juan's reading to create a new cigar brand, "Karenina"; he gets Marela a Russian-style costume and has her pose for the advertisements and cigar bands, and, in the play's loveliest scene, the family momentarily set aside their preoccupations to celebrate the birth of the new blend. Everyday white linen work clothes are exchanged for brilliant colors; everyone gets a little tipsy on rum; the first "Karenina" cigar is passed from person to person for an inaugural smoke. As each member of the family takes his or her ritual puffs in revelatory signature fashion, the strength of their bond exerts itself; and so the explosion that follows this joyously serene party is all the more affecting. The world spins forward intractably; the factory and its inhabitants lurch along with it, wiser, perhaps, for comprehending what's lost and what's gained in the process.

Anna in the Tropics has been mounted exquisitely for Broadway by a team of producers headed by Roger Berlind and Daryl Roth, who have lavished care and attention in every department. Emily Mann's staging is simple, spare, and elegant: it's as filled with stillness as with action, unrushed without being slow. Mann allows us to drink in every moment along with the characters: whether we're focusing on one or the other of the women as they absorb Juan Julian's stirring narration of the Tolstoy novel, or we're admiring them in their colorful party dresses, Mann gives us the time and space to really feel—to really experience—the emotions and moods of the play. Anna's design is similarly evocative, from Robert Brill's stark unit set to Peter Kaczorwoski's artfully suggestive lighting to, especially, Anita Yavich's stunningly appropriate costumes. (The clothes Yavich has created for Ofelia, Marela, and Conchita to wear at the cigar launch celebration are both exquisite and expressive of character—very nearly show-stoppers in their understated way.)

All seven members of the cast are praiseworthy. Jimmy Smits is seductive and just the right amount enigmatic as the lector Juan Julian, while David Zayas and John Ortiz manifest different kinds of simmering frustration as, respectively, the explosive Cheché and the more bottled-up Palomo. Victor Argo's Santiago, meanwhile, is a shrewd combination of boiled-over machismo and henpecked pragmatism. Vanessa Aspillaga and Daphne Rubin-Vega offer a study in contrast as the dreamy, insecure Marela and the calculating risk-taker Conchita; they give us two young women to care about and root for as we watch them soak up Tolstoy's romance, the one soaring with it on a flight of fancy, the other weighing and balancing it against her own, less exotic experience. As their mother, Priscilla Lopez gives the play its anchor, in a performance of rare intelligence and warmth: her spirit—and her groundedness—are what linger with us as we exit the theatre.

Gentle and violent, intimate and epic, Anna in the Tropics is as compelling and involving a play as we have in New York at the moment. It's also among the most well-produced: this is theatre of the highest caliber.

Mac Wellman’s Antigone (as hauntingly personified by Dierdre O'Connell) is burnt out—her words are few and elliptical, her delivery is deadpan, and her outlook is grim. She appears to have had many unfavorable run-ins with bull-headed authority, and the latest—violating King Creon’s forbiddance to entombing her brother, considered a traitor— is particularly grave: she is condemned to be buried alive. Such a lack of faith in one’s leaders (not to mention their civic and corporate constituents) is not unusual these days—put her in contemporary dress and she could be criticizing the current administration after the death of her brother, a Bush-sent soldier, on an unaired episode of Nightline.

Portentous and subversive, this Antigone is the perfect fusion of dangerous words and a spirited performance that gives them ghost. Fully titled Antigone: As Played and Danced by Three Fates on Their Way to Becoming the Three Graces, Wellman’s play is a pre-Sophoclean take on the tragedy; the three fates (though in Big Dance Theatre’s exciting production, there are four, which is a little confusing) will eventually, we are told, guide the great playwright’s hand many years later. Jay Ryan’s lighting and Joanne Howard’s sets suggest a vast, empty catacomb and the muses (Nancy Ellis, Molly Hickok, O’Connell, and Rebecca Wisocky) are creatures part-fairy, part-housefly. The effect is magically disorienting. Is this before the dawn of time or a place where time has stopped? Is this what it’s like to be buried alive?

The only contact with the external world is a stout, white-bearded man, (not coincidentally) resembling Father Time, islanded in a tiny disc jockey booth to one extreme side, where he deejays world music (a little Serbian rock, Japanese pop, occasionally Elvis); infrequently and unreliably he’ll offer a prop or aid in the narration. Alternately involved and oblivious, Leroy Logan is very funny as this, Nature’s complement to the all-too-human Creon, played with gleeful and defensive officiousness by Wisocky. Hickok and Ellis lend ample support as ensemble members, but do not distinguish themselves in their numerous character roles.

However, all five performers do wonders with Cynthia Hopkins’ songs, which are as beautifully oblique as Wellman’s text. Director Paul Lazar and choreographer Annie B-Parson are expert storytellers—their staging is graceful, fluent and weightless, as astronauts in an anti-gravity chamber.

But it is, appropriately, O’Connell—a soul gravid with too much truth, already caught between the dead and the living—who supplies the antidotal weight. It is both consolatory and chilling to watch this struggle. Her wisdom exceeds, to a shocking degree, that of her country’s leader.

Some things never change.

Everybody wants to murder Arden of Faversham. Okay, not quite everybody—just his wife, Alice; her lover, Mosby; Arden's manservant, Michael, who is promised the hand of Mosby's sister if he does the deed; Greene, whom Arden has swindled out of some land; and Black Will and Shakebag, a pair of ruffians who are employed as hit men by both Greene and Mistress Arden.

And yet, with a stageful of highly motivated characters out to get him, Arden repeatedly fails to die; that's the key to the high-spirited hijinks of Arden of Faversham (or, more formally, The Lamentable and True Tragedie of Master Arden of Faversham), which is being given a rare staging at Metropolitan Playhouse.  This play—entirely new to me, though it was written more than four hundred years ago by "an author or authors unknown"—is delightful: an authentic black farce, the kind of thing Blake Edwards would have written if he had been a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Indeed, the Shakespearean influence is absolutely palpable in Arden, with bawdy bits of wordplay and higher-flown flights of poetic fancy popping up from time to time, as if the playwright felt obligated to stick to formula.

But it's the intricate comic plotting that's of interest here, along with a ticklishly mordant sensibility that feels surprisingly modern for an English Renaissance play. Arden is a thoroughly reprehensible fellow—cowardly, snobbish, avaricious, and possessive—so we never feel too sorry for him. But those who would snuff him out are so nakedly self-possessed in their motives that we don't find much empathy for any of them either. Everybody in the play is so foolishly inept that it's impossible to take any of them seriously. In Arden, we laugh merrily at, not with, a passel of hilariously exaggerated creations.

These folk occasion some splendid comic acting by the eight-person ensemble, most of whom will be familiar to you if you frequent the Metropolitan. Tod Mason is agreeably snotty, snivelly, and childlike as the pompous pain-in-the-butt that is the title character; he's particularly funny doing double- and triple-takes trying to figure out whether his wife, at any given moment, is lying or telling the truth vis-à-vis her rumored affair with Mosby. As said wife, Teresa Kelsey is terrific, an exasperated lioness surrounded by boobs. Carter Jackson is spot-on as her handsome but rather vacant boy toy, Mosby, while Andrew Firda is a riot as the single- and simple-minded Michael, nibbling dopily on animal crackers as events large and trivial overwhelm him. Chris Glenn shines as both Black Will and Shakebag; he has a fight scene with himself that is one of Arden's comic highlights. Playing it straight, more or less, are Jim DiBiasio as Greene and Jason Alan Griffin, exhibiting outsized steadfastness as Franklin, Arden's loyal (and apparently only) supporter. John Blaylock plays all other characters called for in the story, a clever conceit on the part of director Alex Roe.

Roe's work, by the way, is excellent. Without undermining his text or calling undue attention, he has peppered the production with witty, light-hearted anachronisms—those animal crackers, for example, or a stuffed animal clutched tightly in Arden's paws when he is suddenly awakened in the middle of the night. He's abetted by a crackerjack design team—Leigh Henderson on sets, Douglas Filomena on lights, and especially Melissa Estro on costumes, whose work is delicious (check out the bedtime attire she provides for the title character).

So, kudos to Roe and Metropolitan Playhouse for serving up this delectable, little-known romp. Arden of Faversham is a treat, from start to finish.

"Everybody's got the right to be happy," sings the Proprietor at the start of Assassins; a man whose singularly American business is to sells guns to people who want to shoot a president. There's irony here, of course; and the slight distortion of Jefferson's phrase is interesting (recall that he talked about an "inalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness"—emphasis mine). Later, after the stories of nine successful or would-be assassins have been played out and reviewed, the same character sings:

And it didn't mean a nickel,
You just shed a little blood,
And a lot of people shed a  lot of tears.
Yes, you made a little moment
And you stirred a little mud—

But it didn't fix the stomach
And you've drunk your final Bud,
And it didn't help the workers
And it didn't heal the country
And it didn't make them listen
And they never said, "We're sorry"—

Incisive, economic writing like this is why Stephen Sondheim is revered as our foremost theatre composer-lyricist. But wait a minute; let's parse these words. "Heal the country"—that refers to John Wilkes Booth, I guess; "Help the workers" alludes to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who killed President McKinley. "Fix the stomach"?—that's about Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant who missed when he fired at Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the program tells us that he blamed his chronic stomach pains "on the capitalist system that forced his father to put him to work at age six."

Are Booth and Czolgosz the same as Zangara? As Lee Harvey Oswald, whose motives for shooting John F. Kennedy (if, indeed, he really did shoot him) are still unknown? As John Hinckley, the mentally ill young man who tried to kill Ronald Reagan to impress a movie star?

Assassins gives all of these more-or-less notorious folks a little moment in the sun, so to speak; and then—most un-Americanly, I'd say—concludes that they're all alike: losers and buffoons who shot to kill only for the attention. Sondheim reductively speculates that Booth killed Lincoln because he thought he'd "get applause"; book-writer John Weidman, much more puzzlingly and disturbingly, gives us a Dallas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963 where Lee Harvey Oswald is egged on to his deed by the ghosts and specters of past and future assassins, who tell him "Without you, we're just footnotes in a history book."

I had hoped for some clearer thinking in this show, and some more arresting insights.  I was aware of the breaking of a taboo—this would seem to be a fairly inappropriate topic for musicalization, after all; Weidman certainly crosses the boundaries of good taste when, for example, he has Gerald Ford trip, Chevy Chase-like, over a bunch of bullets that have just been dropped by Sara Jane Moore. But I don't think that shock value is the main idea of Assassins; but at the end of the show, I was entirely unsure what the authors wanted me to understand (except, possibly, that 20th century assassins are shallower than 19th century assassins).

Nor, unhappily, was I particularly entertained. There are a few striking musical numbers in Assassins, but its book is relentlessly facile, going for easy laughs at the expense of its admittedly unadmirable characters in scene after repetitive scene. The production strikes me as unimpressive, squandering the talents of some performers (Marc Kudisch, Anne L. Nathan, Jeffrey Kuhn—all terrific, but with practically nothing to do), while indulging the shameless (if crowd-pleasing) scenery-chewing of others (worst offenders: Denis O'Hare and Michael Cerveris). Neil Patrick Harris, inexplicably doubling as Oswald and the show's narrator (the "Balladeer"), sings pleasantly but without any apparent feel for what he's saying. Only James Barbour, as Czolgosz, creates a credible character. The set—a tall, seriously underused mass of stairs and scaffolding that covers almost all of the Studio 54 stage—forces the action onto a small playing area; director Joe Mantello copes, as he did in Wicked, with minimal, unimaginative blocking.

It all makes for a long and—here's the really disappointing part—unengaging two hours. At his best, which is to say a lot of the time, Sondheim reveals truth with startling clarity; that's what any great artist does. But there are no a-ha! moments in Assassins; just a lot of ho-hum ones.

Assyrian Monkey Fantasy is a program of two monologues written and performed by Assurbanipal Babilla. Now, Mr. Babilla is originally from Iran (his first theatre work was in Teheran, before the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s); he's a courtly-looking gentleman with a disarmingly cherubic face and a big bushy white moustache.

Which makes it all the more remarkable how full-bloodedly and viscerally he is able to transform himself into Dora Dewberry, the subject of the first (and, by far, the stronger) of the two pieces that comprise this show. Dora is a Movie Star, voraciously and all-encompassingly; of a certain age, she is fading but by no means ebbing. She lives by (and on) the notion that all the world is a stage, boldly dramatizing every moment of an existence now decidedly less glamorous than (a) it once was and (b) she imagines it to be. This is a woman who allows a band of house burglars to tie her to her bed and have their way with her because it makes a good movie (and indeed, we learn near the end of her discourse with us that a TV film is planned, with Dora playing herself--should be a nifty comeback).  Think Dietrich as Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, with a dash of Courtney Love's post-everything rebel-punk attitude.

She's delicious good company, and Babilla incarnates her with impressive, unflinching panache. He revels in his creation and she in turn revels in being created: artifice worn openly and artfully on the actor's sleeve. It makes for a crisp, engaging, and congenially salacious experience, abetted by Babilla's prose and plotting, both of which are as lush and excessive as Miss Dewberry herself.

After intermission, Babilla returns to the stage in an entirely different persona, that of a middle-aged Iranian immigrant living in semi-squalor in a Brooklyn apartment. This fellow, an illegal alien whose every move is governed by blind fear of the INS, relates a story about his across-the-street neighbors, an elderly American couple, who pay him an unexpected visit, reacting to some things they've seen through his curtainless window. To tell you much more would spoil Babilla's surprise; suffice to say that they have come not to deport him. Told in the same eccentric language and style as Dora's, this tale feels a bit labored (and isn't helped much by the fact that Babilla has clearly not yet mastered all of its intricacies: call this one a work-in-progress).

Fans and students of fine acting will certainly want to catch Assyrian Monkey Fantasy; those in search of an eccentric, rollicking yarn will be satisfied customers, too.

My American Heritage Dictionary neutrally defines the word "audit" as "An examination of records or financial accounts to check their accuracy." Americans who file tax returns know another connotation: "Audit" is what the IRS does, and it's more than just mere examination—we think of it (rightly or wrongly) as something at once exhaustive, calculated, and intrusive; there's a voyeuristic element at play here, despite the coldness of the term. It's this sense of voyeurism that director/co-creator Brian Rogers conjures in his staging of the new theatre piece Audit, a multimedia performance work with text by Ryan Vemmer that looks at the causes and effects of the human urge to assign a value (often monetary) to the elements of our lives.

As the audience is ushered into the playing area at the Chocolate Factory Theatre—a big open room that looks like exactly what it is, a big, renovated loft—we pass by the actors who will appear in the show. They're arrayed in the entranceway, standing stone-still as statues, inviting us and daring us to stare at them. Stare we will, once we're seated; the actors portray the members of three households (three per house). We watch them live out ordinary day after ordinary day, observing them through "walls" that are real to them but that don't exist for us, at work and at play in three identical "homes" created by designer Garin Marschall—skeletal representations that include Venetian blinds, some window frames, a few chairs, and exactly three kitchen implements. The actors mime waking, brushing teeth, shaving, urinating, defecating, eating, reading, chatting, sleeping; our eyes roam around the stage, taking in goings-on at House Number 1, then Number 2, then Number 3. Sometimes we catch the inhabitants peering through the blinds at their neighbors.

This re-creation/deconstruction of daily living is Audit's great triumph. Rogers and his cast supply some details and leave out others; the daily "performance" is enacted over and over again, to repeated voiceover dialogue/narration; monotonous routine broken by tiny variations. The audience serves as witness and, yes, auditor, piecing things together and figuring out what it might all be worth. It's fascinating and, often, strangely beautiful.

Less successful is the device of an onstage "Auditor," an underling to an omniscient boss whom the program identifies as "Agent of the Laws of Human Nature." His job is to literally "audit" the lives of these nine people. He measures and quantifies whatever he can—age, height, weight, breast size, and so on; mostly, though, he's concerned with those things to which he can assign a monetary value. He observes the events of these random lives and tallies amounts on his calculator; slowly he comes to understand that a human life cannot be fully expressed in terms of dollars and cents. It's a valid point, of course, but not one that's much in dispute, at least not in the context of this piece, what with Rogers' direction and large portions of Vemmer's deliberately sketchy text underscoring that same theme over and over again.

There is another thread—one that unfortunately fades away as Audit progresses—that suggests some of the political potency that the work's creators may have intended. One of the elements of the non-stop, looping soundtrack that Vemmer and Rogers have devised for Audit is an intermittent newscast, the subject of which is always mankind's propensity for destruction. Fear factor and body count escalate with each iteration; near the middle of the show, for example, we are told that some publicly-sanctioned organization is experimenting with using corpses as an energy source. Embedded here is compelling counterpoint to the question, "How much is a life worth?" But this tantalizing line of inquiry isn't finally much explored.

But by laying out the issues of value and worth so nakedly, and especially—via Rogers' intriguing staging—forcing the audience to confront the most rudimentary components of our shared humanity, Audit has real weight. theater et al, the producing company of Audit, has always existed artistically at the edges, or frontlines, of experimental theatre; in their spacious new home in Long Island City, Queens, they are now literally removed from the mainstream (i.e., Manhattan) as well. The journeys that your visit to Audit will take you on—the artistic one (into the world of the play) and the physical one (by subway, just 15 minutes from Times Square)—are just the things to awaken an adventurous spirit.

I have two problems with the New Group's revival of Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon: one is the play; the other is the production.

The play is narrated by Lemon, a young British woman dying of an unspecified disease. At the very beginning Lemon seems cute and demure as, with her prim accent, she tells the audience her thoughts about fruit juice and loneliness, but soon she begins to muse upon the logistical efficiency of the Nazis, and the audience begins to feel queasy. Before long she's telling stories about her Aunt Dan, a sexy family friend from America who teaches at Oxford and gradually reveals rabidly far-Right political beliefs. As we get deeper into the play, and Lemon tells us stories relayed to her by Aunt Dan from people in Dan's distant past, the ethical barbarities mount, until we wait in horror for what's to come next.

All of this serves not so much as narrative than as continuum. When do these people begin to disgust you? The earlier on they disgust you, the worse off you are, since it turns out that Shawn presents these monsters as a mirror to show us how ugly we are. Obviously written from an anguished, conflicted standpoint, the true focus of Aunt Dan and Lemon is the struggle within each audience member between our inward beliefs and our outward actions.

On one level there's something compelling about this, like rubbernecking at a moral car crash, but on another it's just plain tiresome. The play is all about shaking up progressive-thinking people; Shawn makes us feel a certain way, then shows us that we're hypocrites for feeling that way. He achieves this—hence his reputation for brilliance—but it's an inherently pessimistic view of the world, and pessimism leaves me cold; I have trouble taking such single-mindedness seriously. With no glimmer of hope, the play proves to be little more than a conversation piece designed to aggravate liberal guilt—which I already have enough of, thank you. I can't help thinking that there's got to be more to life, and, therefore, to theatre.

Still, I believe that in expert hands this could all be quite effective, creeping up on you insidiously, sinking in its claws before you have a chance to squirm. But the New Group's staging, under the helm of Scott Elliott, is clumsy and forced. The painful set pieces—a family argument; a long, awkward sex scene lathered with dread—come through loud and clear, but the ligaments holding them together are weak. Shawn's text is very writerly, and for the most part the actors can't make it sound otherwise, creating a disjoint that makes it hard to see these characters as mirrors of ourselves. The prime example is Kristen Johnston, who, in the pivotal role of Aunt Dan, doesn't seem to quite believe what she's saying; it's as if she's just trying to get a rise out of everyone.

Luckily, Lili Taylor's Lemon fares better, guiding us through the play with a sweet façade irreparably marred by perverted innocence. But all her hard work isn't enough to save the show. Elliott's decision to place the entire cast onstage for most of the play creates a heavy air of dead waiting that distracts from the words being spoken. The inert bodies absorbing all the offensive blather from the sidelines, along with the rich red curtains surrounding the stage and the intentionally dim lighting (courtesy of Jason Lyons) all reinforce the impression that we're trapped in an opium den listening to all the self-important provocateurs from college go on and on and on… A more exquisite directorial touch could have helped Aunt Dan and Lemon overcome its artful cynicism and raise some interesting questions. Instead, this production is just plain cynical, and left me feeling the same way.

There was an episode on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show where Mary was dating a much younger man. Mary and Rhoda, well into their thirties by this time, go to a party thrown by the boyfriend, who was just a year or two out of college; they stick out like sore thumbs among his friends who are happily drinking cheap wine out of plastic cups. As the evening wanes, Mary realizes she and her younger boyfriend need to break up. He asks her why, and in reply she asks him how he's enjoying the party. "I'm having a great time," he says. "Aren't you?" "No, I'm not," says Mary. She goes on to explain: We're at the same party and we're having different times. That's why we have to break up.

Why am I telling you this? Because that's me at Avenue Q: I'm at a party with hundreds of people who all seem to be having a great time. And I'm not.

The biggest surprise for me about this plucky little musical is how entirely Broadway it turns out to be. It's spectacularly well-crafted, brimming with professionalism in every department from set to lighting to performance to staging to (especially) the less traditional elements of puppetry and video/animation. Not only that, Avenue Q is thematically and formatically kin to such current musical hits as Urinetown, Mamma Mia!, and The Producers, merrily pushing the political correctness envelope while giddily entertaining its audience with laugh-a-minute humor.

What it shares most with those other shows is defiant non-reality: framed as a Sesame Street parody, Avenue Q takes place in a mythical outer-borough New York City neighborhood populated by people, puppets, and monsters who are learning life's hard lessons together as they try to scrape by and survive adulthood. The denizens of this scattershot community include Princeton, a naive puppet just out of college who has no idea what he wants to do with his life, and Kate Monster, another puppet, who works as a kindergarten teaching assistant but really wants to open her own school for monsters (this ethnic group apparently has been the victim of systemic discrimination). These two are the leads, and their on-again, off-again romance propels the show's plot. Living in the same building with them are Christmas Eve, a Japanese immigrant with two Master's Degrees who can't find satisfying work; Brian, her bear-like boyfriend, a wannabe stand-up comic; Rod, a buttoned-up closeted homosexual puppet who works as a stockbroker; Nicky, Rod's roommate, another puppet, whose profession is unclear; and Trekkie Monster (who looks and sounds suspiciously like Cookie Monster), a misanthropic miser who spends most of his time, apparently, looking at porn on the Internet. The building's super is Gary Coleman—yes, that Gary Coleman, from Different Strokes (but he's played by a woman, so there's no confusion that he is actually the real Gary Coleman).

This cross-section of humanity/puppetdom explore important lessons in growing up, in skit-like scenes and songs that make Avenue Q feel more like a revue than a book musical. Lots of ground gets covered: homophobia and self-hatred (Nicky tries to reassure Rod in "If You Were Gay"; Rod eventually rebuts with the self-deluding "My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada"); bigotry, stereotypes, and political correctness  ("Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"); sex ("You Can Be As Loud As the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love)"). The score—indeed the entire show—is relentlessly funny, stringing gag after gag in which characters say and do stuff that is generally viewed as inappropriate (think South Park). Lots of comic mileage is gotten from having adorable cloth creatures that look like Muppets say bad words or, at one point, engage in simulated intercourse (lots of positions).

There's lots to laugh at, but not a lot of genuine wit here;  I was always keenly aware of an absence of perspective and heart. A big second act musical number is called "I Wish I Could Go Back to College," and there's the key to the thing: Avenue Q is all pre-adult self-indulgence; I like to be engaged at the theatre on a more grown-up level.

So, call me a fuddy-duddy, but I never got into the jokey spirit of Avenue Q: what some people see as carefree, others view as irresponsible. I also never understood why the puppets don't have lower bodies, or why the puppeteers appear, post-modernly, in full view throughout the performance. These puppeteers, all veterans of the Jim Henson Company (which has inserted a program notice denying any responsibility for or connection with Avenue Q), are terrific, by the way: John Tartaglia is delightfully engaging as both Princeton and Rod; Stephanie D'Abruzzo is suitably spunky as Kate Monster and over-the-top vampish as Lucy The Slut, who emerges momentarily as the Other Woman; Rick Lyon is wondrously dextrous in numerous guises (he's also the puppet designer); and Jennifer Barnhart seems to be quite a talent as well, though perversely she mostly only works puppets rather than speaking or singing for them. The human actors are excellent as well: Jordan Gelber (Brian) is charming though he has the least to do; Ann Harada is funny and crowd-pleasing as Christmas Eve; and Natalie Venetia Belcon turns in what I think is the show's finest performance as Gary Coleman, turning a caricature and a running gag into an authentically funny presence.

Avenue Q has a chipper, clever score by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, which is exactly right because this is a chipper, clever show. Jason Moore's staging is just about perfect. (Ken Roberson's choreography is less impressive, but then again, how much can legless puppets dance?) Jeff Whitty's book wants to be darker than the rest of the material, I think: it provides no pat, happy, or easy endings, though you probably won't notice as you enjoy the empty, chirpy platitudes of the upbeat finale, "For Now." All of the clichés that Avenue Q eagerly assaults and makes fun of somehow wind up affirmed: the sense of subverting the subversion is nearly palpable.