nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

Bad Dates, a monologue about a 40-year-old restaurateur returning to the dating scene after a decade of single motherhood, doesn’t tell its audience anything that’s not found in girl-searches-for-romance-in-the-big-city books like Bridget Jones’ Diary, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, or their televised equivalent, Sex and the City. But women (and men) don’t read those books looking for deep insight, we read them for comforting diversion. And that’s what Bad Dates supplies: an evening of amusement, in no small part because of Julie White’s charismatic turn as Haley.

Haley, a New Yorker from Texas, relates informal little horror stories to the audience from her shoe-strewn bedroom (designed by Derek McLane). Along the way, she tells us about her daughter, her restaurant, her reasons for leaving Texas and her hopes for the future. Part of Haley’s appeal, as written by Theresa Rebeck, is that she loves life so much that she can’t dislike the losers she dates. It’s a welcome change from the snarkiness of most tales of dating.

White makes Haley appealing from opening moment on, touching up her pre-menopausal sexiness with gamine insecurities. She not only times the jokes perfectly, but she trails a little giggle afterwards and shakes her curly red hair, laughing at the situation along with us. She’s like a plush-toy version of Lily Tomlin: the same relaxed drawl, the same casual familiarity. White’s so endearing that she neatly sidesteps the question of why, in such a realistic show, Haley would seem to talk to the wall.

Rebeck constructs a tight little comedy out of Haley’s misadventures, adding an intrigue with the mob and a Buddhist lawyer to give the play a structure on which to hang Haley’s dating anecdotes. Rebeck obviously revels in coincidence and happenstance; she’s plainly an optimist about life and love. Bad Dates has been arranged with graceful artifice: every piece fits together. No matter how ludicrous it gets, the plot never seems manipulative because it’s so pleasurable. Although it’s not the deepest show in town, taken for what it is Bad Dates might be one of the most charming.

Parody is surely one of the most misused, misunderstood and hotly debated (that is, in the discourse of literary criticism) categorical terms since the dawn of postmodernism. Often used synonymously with satire, spoof, and takeoff, “parody” is most usefully defined, from my perspective, by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon as “repetition with critical distance.” Not merely a point of departure for goofy or caustic observations, the form is a vehicle for exploring and exposing the ironic “difference at the heart of similarity” between one work of art and another; an inevitable dialogue between the present and the past, which, whether it be affectionate, scathing or both, must be pleasurable and illuminating.

Theatre Askew’s Bald Diva! The Ionesco Parody Your Mother Warned You About! is exactly that. Playwright David Koteles and director Jason Jacobs (who co-conceived this play with Jamee Freedus) show us contemporary urban gay culture via the lens of Ionesco’s 1950 absurdist masterpiece, The Bald Soprano. Like Soprano, which is a hilarious satire of post-World War II complacency set in a middle-class British couple’s middle-class British interior, so Diva takes place in the Chelsea living room of an archetypal gay couple in the post-AIDS present.

Neither obsequious, nor competitive, nor opportunistic with Ionesco’s text, the creators of Diva have made a bold choice and have patiently and thoroughly followed through. Sitting in for Mr. and Mrs. Smith are Tim and Jim Jackson-Smith, who rhetorically orate to one another the particulars of their gym-going, Will and Grace-watching, apple-martini-swilling lives, occasionally interrupted by their trenchcoated houseboy, Mary, who believes himself to be Angela Lansbury. Shortly they are joined by Craig and Greg Tyler-Martin, a not-so-dissimilar gay couple who are late for the dinner date because they have been waiting outside the front door without buzzing or ringing the doorbell. The climax nears when a terribly sexy Fire Chief arrives to see if there are any fires he might be able to put out.

First off, this production is a lot of fun. Erik Flatmo’s set design is vibrant and witty as are Daniel Urlie’s costumes, Charles Foster’s lighting and the music (with sound design by cast members Jerry Marsini and Matthew Pritchard, and compositions by Pritchard and Isam Rum)—the cumulative effect can only be described as “fabulous.” The play’s greatest strength is the excellent opportunities it affords its actors, and what a startlingly attractive and grotesque bunch they are. As the Smiths, Tim Cusack and Jerry Marsini inaugurate us into this heightened world with equal parts charm, precision and stamina—their expressions of delight, indignation, ostentation and jealousy are as piercingly memorable as if they were a series of sculptures.

Jeffrey James Keyes and Terrence Michael McCrossan as the Martins are necessarily vacant—docile, declawed and housebroken, too vague-minded to be anything other than kind. However, a little of this quality goes a long way, and the play moves slower when focusing on them. The arrival of the Fire Chief is well-timed and gorgeously embodied by Nathan Blew, whose friendly public servant is cocky and game. But Matthew Pritchard’s Mary is in charge of the proceedings each of the regrettably few times he graces the stage. Operating on higher voltage than an electric chair, his banal investigative observations are charged with an intrigue that is almost occult. There is so much to enjoy in this play, but his performance is worth the proverbial price of admission.

If you have never seen The Bald Soprano, you will be delighted by the theatrical ingenuity of Bald Diva! If you are familiar with this source, you will be deeply satisfied with the creators’ trust in and adroit use of Ionesco’s classic as a highly enjoyable means to an end that is, if not revelatory, certainly thought-provoking.

Sometimes, what with the plethora of big-budget Broadway shows, earnestly striving showcase productions, and edgy experimental works that are performed every week here in Manhattan, I forget what it was that I first loved about theatre. The same thing that most kids love, I imagine: the immediacy, the excitement; the costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props (as Irving Berlin put it): the thrill of watching people who simply want to put on a show. This is the impulse that propels Brooklyn Family Theatre, a non-professional (but, as far as I can see, entirely capable) company who do community theatre in Park Slope. Don't turn your nose up: their production of Barnum, taken on its own terms, is an absolute delight.

I'll talk more about those terms in just a minute; let me start, though, by saying that this is a charming, modestly-scaled rendition of a musical comedy that actually benefits from a lack of flash. Barnum tells the story of Phineas Taylor Barnum, premier American showman extraordinaire, from his early forays in glorified sideshow (promoting the supposedly 160-year-old Joice Heth as George Washington's nurse), through his international triumphs presenting General Tom Thumb and the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, up to his final and most lasting celebrity as partner (with a Mr. Bailey) in a circus that we now know as "the greatest show on earth."

Mark Bramble's sketchy book tells Barnum's story as a series of turns that are supposed to remind us of circus acts (but they feel more like livelier-than-average revue sketches). The central tension of the show, such as it is, is between Barnum and his colorful brand of humbuggery—hoodwinking audiences into believing illusions that they want to believe in, he says—and his more grounded wife Charity, who prefers order and stability. Bramble and his collaborators Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart, responsible for the buoyant music and clever lyrics, respectively, deliver a little humbug themselves in a version of Barnum's life that sticks to the basic facts in broad outline but speculates madly about the details (the big conflict at the end of Act I is whether Barnum will desert his wife to run off with Jenny Lind). No matter, Barnum is a tuneful, playful panorama of American pop culture from our great-great-grandfather's time: at its best, the score offers charmers like Tom Thumb's "Bigger Isn't Better" and the rousing march "Come Follow the Band," which entertain the pants off of the crowd without worrying too much how they fit into the book's logic.

The folks at Brooklyn Family Theatre understand this about Barnum, and co-directors Hector Coris and Phill Greenland have spent most of their time and resources making sure that the audience is entertained for two hours (and very little of their time fretting about details of plot and throughline). They've cast the show with an energetic, exuberant bunch of performers who take enormous pleasure in what they're doing; particular care is expended to make sure that the youngsters in the audience—plentiful, at the performance I attended—are having a good time.

Now here's where I manage your expectations just a bit. This is community theatre: don't look for elaborate sets and lighting (the show is performed in the sanctuary of a church); don't count on a company of actors with rosters of professional credits. On the other hand, do plan to get swept up in the sheer joy of the performance: the folks on stage and behind the scenes are clearly immersed in labors of love, and their care and passion are evident every moment of the show. Tall Jonathan Valuckas makes a gangly, cheerful Barnum, and Logan Tracey, as the more placid (but very spunky) Charity has a lovely singing voice and a charming, easy manner. The supporting cast includes six youngsters who join in the ensemble numbers and five adults who play what seem like dozens of roles among them; Andrew Deichman, who juggles nicely on several occasions as well as portrays Tom Thumb, makes the strongest impression among them.

Greenland and Coris have staged the transitions between scenes with as much attention as the scenes themselves; an interlude early in Act One, in which Deichman and company toss about the trappings of a lunchtime meal to set the stage for Barnum and Charity's "Colors of My Life" number, is especially fun. The co-directors have taken good measure of the talents of each of their players and found ways to show them all off to best advantage.

At the end, I found myself unexpectedly moved by the electricity that results when a whole bunch of performers, obviously having a ball, connect with a roomful of spectators who have allowed themselves to enjoy the humble thespic offerings of their fellows. It's a great way to pass an evening.

Nicky Silver’s Beautiful Child, is a beautiful, if occasionally unfocused, new play that is well worth seeing.

There are two scenes that particularly make it so. The first is when Isaac, a grade school art teacher, first arrives at his parents’ house and tells them he has fallen in love. Nan relishes to an almost hysterical degree every details about her son’s new beau, while Harry listens and looks on, distantly but with affection. There is a heartening ease in this exchange, as though their acceptance of his homosexuality is a non-issue or had been resolved years ago, and he even describes, in polite terms, the special feeling of making love to his paramour. Inevitably, the question arises, “So what does he do?” Isaac glances away as he says matter-of-factly, “He’s my student.”

The second scene involves Nan’s realization that she had previous knowledge of her son’s sexual interests—a glimpse of his predilection a few years before when he invited her to come watch him teach—and feels she could have prevented this, but at the cost of her son’s freedom, and almost as disturbingly, her idealization of him as an extension of herself.

The remarkable thing about this trinity is that they do not struggle to cover up the profound wound they now share. Harry and Nan have an unhappy marriage and there is the requisite bickering, but Isaac’s disclosure and his request to stay at home indefinitely has knocked the wind out of them and all three realize their strong but terribly confused love for one another. Isaac senses that any time now there’ll be a cop at the door, but his understanding of the moral gravity of his situation is tenuous; he is in love with Brian, his eight-year old student, and cannot fathom how that can be unacceptable.

But the play is less about Isaac coming to terms with his problematic romantic and sexual desires, and more about seeing how Harry and Nan come to take responsibility—not blame—for their son’s actions when he clearly is unable to do so himself. This conflict is ground zero, and anything unrelated is an unwelcome distraction.

Case in point: Delia, Harry’s obsessive, Electra-complexed secretary with whom he is ending an affair as she is collecting travel brochures for popular elopement destinations. She is a funny character (played by a very funny actress, Alexandra Gersten Vassilaros), but her solipsistic dilemmas dilute the potency of the main event and she has way too much stage time. While she may have been important in Silver's first draft, when Hemingway advised writers to “kill your darlings,” Delia was exactly the kind of character he had in mind.

Still, Terry Kinney’s direction is expert—at times caressing and at other times plunging into the unexpected depths of Silver’s most vulnerable play yet. David Lander’s lighting is a character inandofitself, and the wit of Michael Krass’ costumes deserves a special mention. George Grizzard’s Harry is a man you would never wish to see burned, and it is lamentable to see him cut to the quick, first by Nan, who claims she never loved him, and again near the end, when he realizes what he must do to protect his son.

Dr. Elizabeth Hilton, Isaac’s psychologist from when he was ten, is portrayed with droll sophistication by Kaitlin Hopkins, and I wanted her to be more essentially tied to the drama. More of a catalyst than a character, Isaac is the least interesting of the bunch for he has so succumbed to a false self. Steven Pasquale is a fine, handsome fellow with a strong presence, but he does not illuminate the character’s presumably fascinating inner world (a fault of the script more so than the actor).

The playwright and director’s greatest asset, however, is Penny Fuller in the part of Nan; she is the lodestone that collects and focuses our attention the snap-second she steps onstage. It is her transition from vicious narcissism to tentative empathy that is the dark roller coaster of the soul of this play.

There's a moment in Edward Albee's Counting the Ways in which the playwright's voice exhorts the cast of two to step out of character and talk about themselves. It's a testament to the connection Brian Murray and Marian Seldes share with each other and with Albee that it wasn't until after Seldes' turn, when Murray made an offhand comment about the late California recall, that I realized their words weren't part of the script. The performers were so attuned to the text that their shift to "themselves" was imperceptible.

In other words, the hype is true: Seldes and Murray are a great act. This is their second partnership in an Albee play (The Play About the Baby was the first), but one would think from watching that it's their twenty-fifth. Seldes, as an aging wife, uses her face as a series of exquisite masks, her body as a vessel of carefully vivacious theatrical gestures. As her husband, Murray is looser and more natural-seeming, shrugging out moments of unexpected wit and depth. Their differences feed their rapport; together with Albee, they create a true portrait of a marriage, in which the individual's habits feed off their absence in the other.

Getting there, however, is a journey in itself. The structure of the evening capitalizes on audience anticipation of the team's onstage chemistry by presenting the duo separately, in challenging pieces by Samuel Beckett, before finally pairing them for Albee's rich confection. In doing so, an evolutionary line is drawn between Beckett, whose stage poetry of mortality and despair is as pure and bracing as a winter wind, and Albee, who approaches similar themes beneath a deceptively comic façade. Seldes and Murray are more comfortable with the latter than the former, but it’s fascinating to see them tackle both.

The night opens with Beckett’s Not I, which consists solely of an illuminated mouth in the darkness (Seldes') and a shadowy, robed figure who occasionally shrugs (Peter Kybart). Out of the mouth flows a torrent of Beckettian patter about a habitually silent woman who, late in life, finds herself suddenly unable to control an inexplicable discharge of words. The words pile up into a surprisingly beautiful structure, one of Beckett’s most theatrically conceived. With chalky skin, blood-red lips, and a filthily cynical laugh at every reference to God, Seldes focuses the full arsenal of a theatrical diva onto a small section of her body; it’s not a perfect fit, but it’s an enlightening one.

Next is Murray's turn. A Piece of Monologue finds him treading the floor in a long dressing gown, facing an empty wall upstage and a dark window down, contemplating an imaginary funeral that might be his own. Murray is convincing and heartbreaking as a man lamenting the fact of his birth (he hollers the word as if being tortured) but equally afraid of dying. Trapped by a void on either side, doomed to circle through Beckett’s skillful repetitions and variations, he can do nothing but dream, and we dream with him.

The final Beckett piece, Footfalls, is the least successful of the three. Seldes appears again, as a haggard woman who portentously paces the length of the stage, interacting with the voice of a shrouded woman in the background (Delphi Harrington) who represents her mother. The rhythm of this piece, as per Beckett, is so slow, and the relationship between the characters so oblique, that, dedicated admirer of Beckett though I am, I became rather weary of it. Seldes, however, wrests back the restless audience's attention with a riveting final monologue.

Beckett’s uncompromising visions can be tough to swallow, and intermission chatter on opening night revealed that at least some theatregoers viewed them as the bitter greens that must be finished before dessert. Their diligence was rewarded: in Counting the Ways, Albee employs his customary biting grace to provide the evening with a deceptively delightful denouement. A series of brief vignettes, some consisting of a single word, the play has its long-married characters repeatedly ask, "Do you love me?" Their responses invoke metaphors of crème brulee and roses, and create opportunities for cruelly comic monologues and images. (It will be a long time before I forget the image of a panicked Murray roguishly biting the head off a rose.) Nimbly maneuvering through cuttingly precise one-liners and unexpectedly piquant confessions, the actors harness their affinity for the playwright and their own star power to provoke laughter that is both uneasy and liberating.

Taken together, the evening reinforces the connection between Albee, the smooth-talking American son, and Beckett, the severe European forebear. They share a thirst for clarity and simplicity, as well as a dark sense of humor—as, not coincidentally, do the actors. It is appropriate that Seldes and Murray must navigate Beckett’s fascinating wasteland before settling into Albee’s more familiar domestic landscape.

And lest I neglect him, director Lawrence Sacharow deserves great credit for never taking a footstep out of place, rendering each of the pieces with perfect pitch. As a night of serious theatre, Beckett/Albee can't be topped.

Lest those of you with naughty minds fall into Alan Ayckbourn's trap, let it be said that his play Bedroom Farce is not quite the ribald romp the title would lead you to expect. Yes, [sex] is discussed, and even attempted in the flesh, but the script gives equal time to the other activities for which the bedroom is notorious: sleeping, convalescing, and storing coats at a party, among others. A line spoken early in the first act, to the effect that you can learn a lot about a person from his bedroom, serves as a thesis for the entire play.

Park Slope's Gallery Players, with the help of a clever set by Brian J. Massolini that qualifies as the star of the show, aim to bring this message to Brooklyn and beyond. The play tracks the peregrinations of four couples through three bedrooms. I'll try to do this quickly: Trevor's marriage with Susannah is on the rocks, and is not helped by the fact that he runs into an old flame Jan—whose husband, Nick, is at home suffering from a bad back—at a party held by friends Malcolm and Kate. Meanwhile, Trevor's parents Ernest and Delia, after a baleful anniversary dinner, are prevented from sleeping by various means, and are soon drawn into their son's marital woes as well.

And so the characters make entrances and exits into and out of various bedrooms. The set consists of three of them: stage left is Ernest and Delia's room, in which Ernest is worried about a possible leak from the outside; raised in the middle is the chamber of newlyweds Malcolm and Kate, the site of the party and, later, a botched home improvement project; and finally, on the right, is the billet belonging to Jan and Nick, in which Nick spends the entire play in various contortions of agony. (Trevor and Susannah's bedroom, in which lie coldness and strife, is tastefully absent.)

That the material isn't especially deep doesn't automatically prevent it from being subtle, and the Gallery Players miss out on some of the subtlety. The cast's grasp of British mannerisms and diction is rather uneven, but they have the main thrust of the action down; by the end of the play, you feel very solicitous about the fates of the characters. However, it's becoming clearer to me over time that British material needs to be handled very carefully by American artists, since the details—the trickiest thing to pull off—are everything. In a play where sex is primarily referred to as "… you know…", this production appears only too eager to cut to the  chase. In its rush, it passes by much of Ayckbourn's comedy.

Certain actors overcompensate for their born lack of Britishness with boisterous cartoon characterizations; others fare better. As Kate, Inga R.Wilson provides a sympathetic portrait of an anxious new bride who already, appearances to the contrary, fears her appeal is diminishing. Daniel Damiano's Trevor is the surly adolescent strenuously staving off manhood, with all the lightning cruelty and compassionate helplessness such a state implies. And as the ailing Nick, D.H. Johnson is a pluperfect straight man, struggling mightily to maintain his dignity even as painful pratfalls and unwelcome visitors deny him the peace he so deserves.

Overall, the Gallery Players present a solid production with energy and  heart, but one lacking in the laughs which reside with the aforementioned details. With the big picture mastered, hopefully the performers can use the rest of the run to deepen the intimacies implicit in the title chamber.

Michael Isaac Connor's Berkshire Village Idiot is  not the kind of solo play where the actor addresses the audience or some unseen other in the guise of either himself or a character. Instead, like Doug Wright's I am my own wife, it's a multi-character play in which all of the characters are portrayed by a single actor.  It's a genre that more or less by definition requires performance of tour de force caliber, and Connor's is no exception—it's high on energy, variety, and technical exactitude. But I find these one-person plays off-putting: however successful the actor is at creating the many different characters involved in the story, there's always a sense of effort, of remove, and of alienation: I'm never not aware that an actor is standing between me and the events being depicted. The effect is finally of being told rather than being shown, which is a kind of storytelling in the theatre, but for me, not the best kind.

The fact that Connor's play is, as far as I can tell, authentically autobiographical, makes the distancing effect even stranger; and the fact that Connor's script offers little in the way of adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of a very immature teenage version of himself makes it darned near problematic. Connor seems filled with rage in Berkshire Village Idiot, but how long has it been since the events depicted—10 years? 20 years? For the story to resonate, it needs a reason for being told. Apart from the superficial one of giving Connor something sensational to act, I can't find one in Berkshire Village Idiot.

The story is focused on young Mikey's fury when his father leaves the family for two years to re-enlist in the army. Mikey turns into a hostile loner while his old man's away, convinced he has been deliberately abandoned (the truth is that his dad would have been forced to work as a janitor had he remained in the dying New England town where the story takes place). When the elder Connor returns, it sets the stage for a showdown between father and son that eventually explodes into a life-and-death struggle.

Directed by Barry Edelstein, Connor makes his tale—which is often disturbingly violent—vivid and colorful. But it's not particularly a tale I wanted to hear; and Connor never finally supplied a reason for me to care about it.

In a gay bar, after Bernadette's final performance in Gypsy (she's going to be replaced by Susan Lucci), two newspapermen are having a bit of a debate. Brian Bradley of "The New York Standard," who gave the blonde diva the review of her life when Gypsy opened, wishes he had the power to make a Broadway show happen. Morgan Rydell, venomous gossip columnist for "The New York Star," who did just about everything in his power to keep Bernadette's Madam Rose off the Great White Way, pooh-poohs his ability to influence events just by writing mean things in his column. Bradley wishes that Bernadette's next role would be the lead in a revival of Mame. Rydell practically chokes on the notion. And then they decide to make a little wager...

Such is the point of departure for David Bell's funny parody/satire, Bernadette & the Butcher of Broadway. If you're still with me and still interested, then this show may well be for you. An encyclopedic knowledge of musical comedy trivia, the latest fads and trends among the upscale and/or gay glitterati, and the current "who's who" of Broadway theatre is not mandatory but certainly very useful in understanding all of Bell's inside references, which fly by at the rate of about a dozen a minute. Bernadette is Forbidden Broadway for diehards, with fangs; housed at the Duplex cabaret space near Sheridan Square, it makes for a fun, guilty hour to kick off an evening out on the town.

Bell has a grand time skewering not just two of our town's most visible theatre writers but a whole batch of theatre types: Bernadette features a ball-breakingly bitchy producer named Lesie J. McMahon; a seemingly empty-headed stud named Rod Blazer (who is working as a go-go dancer at the gay bar where the play begins, and is later touted by Rydell as the ONLY actor who can play Patrick to Bernadette's Mame); and a ditzy blonde named Tracey who is Ms. Peters' personal assistant (her last job was working for Tina Yothers). Bell also has a ball shooting his arrows at the failing health of the Fabulous Invalid that is the Broadway theatre: Rod's first important public appearance is at the re-christening of the Helen Hayes Theatre as the Alberto V05 Shampoo Center for the Performing Arts. And at one point, Lesie intones solemnly to Tracey that Mamma Mia! is "the best that Broadway has to offer."

Bell is, of course, preaching to the converted, for they're the only ones who are going to keep up with the breakneck silliness of a play where a hospital loudspeaker pages Dr. Chita Rivera and Jerry Herman is nearly blackmailed for doing something that I can't repeat in mixed company. Admittedly there are plenty of plain old gags in Bernadette as well, many of them involving the catch-all character billed as the "Paperboy," who serves as narrator and a host of other people and things, including, hilariously, a heart monitor. The laughs are sustained for the full hour of Bernadette, though unfortunately the plotting trips Bell up before the end, making for a much less satisfying payoff than we're hoping for.

But why quibble: Christopher Borg's staging is well-nigh perfect, and the cast is outstanding. My favorites were Dayna Steinfeld as the cute-as-a-button Tracey and Michael Silva as the dextrous Paperboy/Everything Else; but that's not to say that Brett Douglas (nasty and whiny as Rydell), Ellen Reilly (giving Harriet Harris a run for her money as Satan-as-Lady-Entertainment-Executive Lesie), and Mark Ruggiero (wholesomely winning as hunky Rod) aren't also terrific. Ron Bopst (J. Florence Thackery, Rydell's boss) and Desmond Dutcher (Bradley) have less to do, but they do it with finesse nevertheless.

Bernadette never appears, of course; you'll have to go to the Shubert Theatre to catch her in Gypsy if you're of a mind to. Bernadette & The Butcher of Broadway costs up to $91.25 less (not counting the two drink minimum), and it's a lot shorter and certainly has many more laughs per square inch.

Between Us, Joe Hortua’s new play at Manhattan Theatre Club, is a frustratingly tepid production; nothing new is discovered, no keen observations are made, and the only question I asked myself after the performance I attended was: why is this play being produced by such an esteemed company?

The play is a sort of modern Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? lite. In the first act, we are introduced to Joel and Sharyl, a very unhappily married couple who have fled New York City for the Midwest and financial stability. They live in a beautiful house, surrounded by all things yuppie, but it is clear, almost from the moment the play begins, that they are quite miserable in their bourgeois utopia. In town to visit Joel and Sharyl are Carlo, Joel’s art school buddy, and his wife Grace. Joel is an up-and-coming photographer; Grace is in getting her Masters. The entire first act is one long, uncomfortable dinner party, with Joel getting drunk and complaining about his empty, sexless marriage. Sharyl is the classic passive/aggressive wife, dropping nasty bombs throughout the night. By the end of the evening, Joel throws a bottle through a window, and Sharyl announces that she and Joel are getting a divorce. Left alone at the end of the first act, Carlo and Grace talk about how unlike Joel and Sharyl they are.

Act Two is another dinner party from Hell—this time at the New York apartment of Carlo and Grace, a few years later. In this act, it turns out that Carlo and Grace are just as unhappy as Joel and Sharyl were in Act One. They are broke (though they somehow manage to live in a huge two bedroom apartment in Chelsea) and have a new baby. Grace has given up school and is working in a restaurant, and Carlo hasn’t sold a photo in two years. Joel and Sharyl, now happy and spiritual, show up for a night of dysfunctional show-and-tell, and by the end of the play it seems like everyone is unhappy.

I found the main problem with the show the script. The plot is familiar and dull. At intermission, my companion guessed, with 100% accuracy, what would happen in Act Two. The characters are borderline stereotypes—especially the female roles, with Sharyl as the WASP Ice Queen, and Grace as the tough girl from the Boroughs of NYC trying to make good. (Also, as a person who works in a restaurant and lives in a much smaller apartment than Carlo and Grace’s, I found it hard to believe in their financial hardship.) On top of that, the play seems to have nothing more to say than “nobody is special,” but if you have a nice house, that’s okay.

The actors all do a fine job, given the material they have to work with. David Harbour is especially powerful as Joel, bringing a savage sorrow to Act One, and a calm spirituality to Act Two. As Joel’s snooty wife Sharyl, Kate Jennings Grant is excellent, a smooth mix of hostility and repressed emotion. As Grace, Daphne Rubin-Vega does as good a job as she can with the weak material she’s been given.

Intense, thoughtful, and provocatively unsettling, John Petrick's Beyond Recognition is one of the finest new American plays I've seen in quite a while. On one level, it's a taut, suspenseful mystery story, as its protagonist, a 38-year-old psychotherapist named Kevin, recovers from a terrible accident that left him in a coma for several months and suddenly begins to remember what actually happened to him—a discovery that is all the more jarring because it differs so wildly from what his former lover/current benefactor Andrew has told him.

But there's more to Beyond Recognition than this: Petrick has written a sad, despairing meditation on the hopelessness of ever fully understanding anybody else. Petrick asks whether there can be love without conditions, a lasting relationship without exchanges and compromises. Bleak, stark, but also very real and filled with compassion, Beyond Recognition is about the treacherous risks we take every time we reach out to another human being.

The play begins in Seattle, where Kevin has just come to live with his ex-boyfriend Andrew following his release from the hospital. Kevin and Andrew's history is complicated: Kevin met Andrew shortly after his arrival in New York City several years prior, and they fell in love and became a couple, despite Andrew's stubborn refusal to acknowledge his own homosexuality, or Kevin's role in his life, to business associates or family. (Andrew, a prosperous attorney, is the scion of conservative parents whose acceptance—and inheritance—he is unwilling to put into jeopardy.)

Eventually, Kevin and Andrew split up, and Andrew abruptly switched coasts, moving to Seattle. The official reason was a better job offer; but Kevin overheard a phone message from a man named Steven that suggested another motive. Then Kevin had that terrible accident and nearly died. Andrew reappeared, nursing him through the coma, and has now brought Kevin to live with him in Seattle. Unsteady on his feet and still unable to remember how to do simple tasks like brewing a cup of tea, Kevin is terribly disoriented.

And then, strange things start to happen: Cleaning up Andrew's apartment one morning, Kevin comes across stacks and stacks of New York newspapers from the period when he was in the coma, many with front-page stories about an unidentified man who was brutally beaten and left for dead in Central Park. At the fish market, he runs into Mark, an old friend from New York, a journalist who just happens to be covering Mayor Bloomberg's trip to Seattle and who wants Kevin to give him exclusive rights to the story of his recovery. And, in his memory, Kevin is replaying sessions he had with a troubled teenager named Josh who had been a client of his when he worked as a social worker for the City.

It's clear that Andrew has been lying to Kevin about what happened to him: How much?—and why?  It's also clear that Josh is involved, seriously, in Kevin's "accident": how did the innocent, almost flirtatious tone of their sessions together lead irretrievably to violence?

Even though Beyond Recognition is structured in such a way that you will guess the answers to some of these questions before they're revealed, I'm not going to disclose any more here. Petrick's writing, and Kate Bushmann's well-paced staging, make every plot twist, expected or no, entirely riveting; I want you to see this play, and I have no intention of spoiling one second of it for you.

I'll close by telling you that the four actors who comprise the cast of Beyond Recognition are outstanding. Christopher Burns plays Andrew, in many ways the most elusive of the characters, with sturdy empathy. David Valcin's layered portrayal of Mark makes us want to know about this man, who is the most incidental to Petrick's tale. As the disturbed, unsteady teenager Josh, Michael Goduti is excellent, demonstrating how far he has come as an actor in the few years since his promising work in such plays as The Chi and Befriending Beau. And in the pivotal role of Kevin, Grant James Varjas is spectacularly good, revealing the uncertainties and complexities of this difficult character with unwavering clarity and authenticity.

So, a worthy set of actors in a worthy new play: Beyond Recognition is the best kind of theatre. Don't miss it.

Well, folks, I have a new favorite show. Big River, Roger Miller and William Hauptman's adaptation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is the great American musical as far as I'm concerned, especially in this revelatory new mounting from Roundabout Theatre Company and Deaf West Theatre. Great because it's joyously exuberant and unbridled fun; great because its staging, which incorporates simultaneous sung/spoken and ASL performance, constantly surprises us with new potent ways to "hear" and understand the stories of others; great because its dominant theme, from Twain of course, is the fundamental but oft-neglected and taken-for-granted one of pure-hearted conscientious individualism. I advise you to head over to the American Airlines Theatre immediately and buy a ticket.

Big River condenses the classic Mark Twain novel, focusing mostly on Huck's adventures with the slave, Jim. When the two meet up, both are runaways—Jim from the Missouri farm where his mistress has just revealed plans to sell him; Huck (most recently) from his renegade drunken Pap who tried to kill the boy during a particularly bad attack of the DTs. Huck and Jim take off on a raft down the Mississippi, the plan being to turn east at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River can lead Jim to the free states and safety. Things do not go as expected, however, and the raft is temporarily commandeered by a pair of rogues recently escaped from jail who call themselves the Duke and the King and manage to involve Huck in a couple of of their confidence schemes. Eventually Huck finds himself at the farm of his old friend Tom Sawyer's Uncle Silas, where, with Tom's romantic and occasionally inappropriate assistance, he succeeds in winning Jim his freedom.

As for Huck's freedom, well, the play ends as the novel does, with our young hero preparing to "light out for the western territories" lest Tom's family civilize him too much. Huck's spirit is unquenchable, so though we don't know what happens to him next, there's no doubt that his admirable independence will ever be compromised, which is why the idea of America coincides so neatly with his personality. Big River shows us a Huck who thinks for himself and acts accordingly, as he explains when he first encounters Jim and agrees (illegally) to help him run away: "I knowed very well I'd done wrong. Then I says to myself, hold on—suppose you done right and give Jim up. Would you feel better than what you do right now? No, says I—I'd feel worse."

So there's something essential about our character as a nation that we can retrieve from Big River; there's also much to discover about how to experience the world in general and theatre in particular in this remarkable production. Director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun employs a cast comprising hearing actors, deaf actors, and actors who are in between. The entire play, songs included, is performed in American Sign Language, and also spoken and sung; where the actor playing a particular role does not speak or sing, another actor supplies the missing "voice." It's carried out with great finesse and thoughtfulness. A young female slave is voiced by her mother (played here by the underrated Gwen Stewart, delivering two inspiring gospel-inflected numbers in glorious style). Pap Finn is portrayed by two actors, Troy Kotsur (who signs his lines) and Lyle Kanouse (who speaks and sings them); together they make the man something of a two-headed monster, which is not far off from what he is, comically terrifying and exactly right. (Calhoun shrewdly uses the same actors to portray the Duke and the King, Huck's other nasty two-headed nemesis.)

As for Huck himself, he's played here—superbly, appealingly, sincerely, and simply—by Tyrone Giordano, whose expressiveness in silence blasts into outer space any preconceived notions we might hold about the limitations of deaf actors. His words are spoken and sung by Daniel Jenkins, in the guise of Mark Twain; as our evening's host and narrator, he couldn't be a more natural choice. Jenkins was the original Huck Finn when Big River debuted on Broadway nearly twenty years, so his affinity and affection for Huck is deep and palpable, and his performance here is extraordinary. Giordano and Jenkins bring Huck to life and allow us to discover his character in astonishing ways: their duet on Huck's signature tune, "Waitin' For the Light to Shine," is beautifully moving. (It gets topped by the second act reprise, though I won't tell you how here—you need to see Big River for yourself to find out.)

Of the remaining major characters, some are played by a single hearing actor, like Michael McElroy's magisterial Jim (his rendition of the climactic number "Free At Last" stops the show); Michael Alden's delightful puckish Tom Sawyer; and Melissa van der Schyff's plucky and entirely likable Mary Jane Wilkes, the young woman who is very nearly cheated out of her inheritance by the dastardly Duke and King. Others are acted by deaf performers, their voices unobtrusively provided by others in the ensemble: most memorable among these, perhaps, are Miss Watson and Tom's Aunt Sally, both played by the radiantly compelling Phyllis Frelich.

Under Calhoun's direction, Big River engages all of our senses along with our imaginations; his collaborators Ray Klausen (sets), David R. Zyla (costumes), Peter Fitzgerald (sound), Michael Gilliam (lighting), and Carol F. Doran (hair and wigs) contribute to make this a genuine feast for eye, ear, heart, and soul. Klausen's sets are especially noteworthy—whimsical inventions that fly out of leaves from an oversized Huckleberry Finn volume, here suggesting Injun Joe's cave with a flurry of words on a page encircling a tantalizing black hole; there flattening out to morph into Pap Finn's bed within a remote log cabin. Klausen's work is delightful here, and absolutely fundamental to the show, offering yet another way for us to experience a story that we're already "hearing" two ways instead of the usual one.

That's the key to this Big River and why it works so well: from the simplest of elements, we discover not only Twain's timeless tale, but the thrill of new forms of discovery as well. I'll give the last word to composer-lyricist Roger Miller, who in Big River's most famous song, a grand paean to the Mississippi called "Muddy Water," puts it it like this:

Look out for me, oh muddy water
Your mysteries are deep and wide
And I got a need for going someplace
And I got a need to climb upon your back and ride

How many of us ever release the past: really let go of all the painful, sad, troubling memories and embrace—soar into—an unknown but unencumbered future?

This is what Birdy is about. This gorgeous play has been adapted from William Wharton's novel by Naomi Wallace, and is being given its belated New York City debut by Women's Project and Productions (it premiered in London six years ago). Solidly directed by Lisa Peterson, ingeniously designed, and movingly acted by a six-man ensemble, Birdy is blazingly theatrical and infinitely wise.

It takes place in the mental ward of a military hospital in Kentucky, shortly after World War II, and also in a Philadelphia neighborhood perhaps ten years before; often, scenes play out in both of these settings at the same time, lived and remembered by the drama's protagonist, Al Columbato. When we first meet Al, he's a teenager, indulging the fantastical obsessions of his best friend Birdy, who is going to try to prove that he can fly by leaping off of a high tower. When we next encounter him, Al is older, a vet returning from a long and brutal war, his face swathed in bandages from a nasty though never-explained wound. He's been summoned to this hospital in Kentucky by Birdy's doctors—for his friend has also been damaged by battle, and is now nearly catatonic, spending his waking hours squatting, pigeon-like, in his cell. Dr. White and Renaldi, the male nurse in the ward, hope that maybe Al can break through to Birdy and help to cure him.

And so begins a painful and arduous rehabilitation: Al visits Birdy every day and uses his limited repertoire of communication skills—yelling, ridiculing, and badgering—to try to get a rise out of his old friend. As he does so, he recalls the time when they were practically inseparable, bound together by a need to escape families that didn't seem to much understand or care for them. Al, whose father beat him religiously, sought to re-invent himself as a resilient tough guy; while Birdy found refuge in the canaries and pigeons that he raised and envied. The need to escape eventually led young Birdy to fashion a flying apparatus, using a revved-up bicycle and a pair of giant aluminum wings, which we see in a vivid flashback at the beginning of the play's second act.

And then, Birdy re-invents itself. What we understand, gradually and then all at once, is that Birdy—silent and seemingly unresponsive in his "cage" in the mental ward—is ok: it's Al who needs be healed; to free himself. Wallace doesn't avoid complexity here: she shows us Al's projection of his hatred of his father on any authority figure, particularly Dr. White; the brutality and terror of life on the front; and the palpable (and unresolved) sexual tension between the young Birdy and Al. The key, of course, is that by wanting to help Birdy more than anything else in the world, Al is taking the first steps toward helping himself. Courage comes with forgiveness: we're left with the hope that both men will find a future more welcoming than the past.

Wallace tells the story beautifully, leaving most of the details to our imaginations while vividly capturing the essentials on stage. She uses the younger versions of Birdy and Al to provide exposition in flashbacks and to trace contours of emotional memory as Al and, sometimes, Birdy relive moments from their earlier lives. Shrewdly, she places the young Al on stage with the older one whenever there's a crisis: he still hasn't learned how to forsake the old scars and battles, after all—that's what his journey in Birdy is all about.

Both the younger and older versions of Al and Birdy are superbly cast here, with Zachary Knighton and Peter Stadlen as the teenage pair and Adam Rothenberg and Ted Schneider as the duo a decade later. Schneider's concentration is remarkable: he spends much of the play immobile, but we feel him listen to the other characters, and we sense the strength of his bond with Rothenberg's badly damaged Al throughout. Knighton and Stadlen bring enormous conviction to their portrayals of the young Al and Birdy. I love that the casting of the two characters at different ages is as careful as it is, based more on vocal quality and attitude than mere looks: we always completely believe that both actors are playing the same individual.

Peterson's staging is spare and forthright, allowing her actors and Wallace's eloquent script to work their magic without encumbrance or affect. The narrative propels forward with the inevitability of real life, while the flashback-memory sequences stand out almost in bas-relief: several of them, like the ones where Birdy launches increasingly eccentric attempts to fly, or a terrific scene in which Al coaches Birdy to "go all the way" with his prom date, are at once touching, funny, and revelatory.

Women's Project and Productions, to whom we must be grateful for at last putting this exquisite play before a New York audience, are focusing on the anti-war aspects of Birdy to reinforce its timeliness. That's absolutely valid; but the real potency of this piece lies in its universal themes of acceptance and release. In the end, the important thing that Birdy has to teach us is how to grow up; or perhaps just how to grow.

Biro, a one-man play that is written and performed by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (who also serves as the production's "directorial consultant"), tracks the odyssey of a man named Biro from his childhood in Uganda through his incarceration, in his 30s, in a Texas prison. It's an eventful life: Biro grew up in a revolutionary family during the reigns of the famous despot Idi Amin and the less well-known (but, according to Biro, much worse) "tyrant" Milton Obote. As a young man, Biro joins the rebel army that will overthrow Obote, which eventually sends him to Cuba, where Biro contracts AIDS. Unable to obtain medical treatment in his own country, Biro journeys to Canada and then slips across the border (illegally) and makes his way to Texas. Here he works in menial jobs until he is arrested for being drunk and disorderly and sent to prison.

Biro—who is a fictionalized version of  a real person—is angry about how his life has turned out. He doesn't want to be in the U.S.; indeed, the most interesting aspect of the play is the way it illuminates the perceptions and/or misconceptions that people like Biro from what we Americans call the "Third World" hold about our country.

So Biro rails against unfair immigration rules and the dehumanizing treatment he's received at the hands of the petty bureaucrats who have handled and hired him in the U.S.—at once lax and hypocritical and at least latently prejudicial. The play ends with a wail for help: he wants to go home, but that if he does so he will surely die because "in Uganda only the rich can afford the medicine now."

Note, though, that in jail Biro receives treatment for AIDS, paid for by American taxpayers; this dilutes one's sympathy for Biro's plight. (And I suspect that the millions of Americans who can't afford prescription drug coverage would identify with the line I quoted at the end of the last paragraph.)

So Biro is finally not very persuasive as what I think it intends to be, a plea for justice and compassion. There's nothing heroic about a character who worries only about himself in the face of an epidemic that is literally decimating the population of an entire continent.

Nor, alas, is there much to praise in Biro's production. Mwine's writing is haphazard: he introduces intriguing subjects (like the little-known Obote) only to abandon them. He performs with deadly monotony, rarely moving from the center of the stage. The elegant but dull set by Riccardo Hernandez offers us nothing else to look at, while Chad McArver's lighting scheme is more conducive to sleep than attentiveness; Peter Nigrini's projections look fuzzy and unfocused even from the rear of the auditorium. Mwine speaks in a thick accent (not his own; he was born in the U.S.) that makes much of what he says very difficult to understand. Consequently, I imagine that even if Biro's script were compelling, it would falter under these circumstances. As things are, it turns out that Mwine has finally very little of interest to say, and he says it poorly.

I bailed out right after the bit where the girl in the bikini spread a big plastic sheet all over the stage and poured water on it, and then sloshed through it, luge-style, along with the unattractive hefty guy whom the program identifies as, I believe, Phil. She had sprinkled some round things onto the sheet that looked, from Row M, like undercooked meatballs, but I realized when I read some of the press materials later on that they were supposed to be olives, which I would have figured out had I recognized that the bottle containing the water was supposedly a gin bottle and the bottle that she shook nothing out of was supposedly vermouth—she was making a giant martini, see, only I didn't get that at all, though lots of others apparently did, because they were laughing uproariously at this.

But as I said, I bailed out: my motto is that life is too short for bad theatre, and my other motto is that at this point in my theatregoing life, if I don't have even a shred of a clue as to what's going on onstage (or why), it's their fault, not mine.

You see, as Heidi said under only slightly different circumstances in Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, I don't know who these people are and I don't know why they're funny. I understand that playwright Charles L. Mee, director Anne Bogart, and the members of SITI are creating a collage in bobrauschenbergamerica, a theatrical analog to the kind of visual art that Rauschenberg himself is famous for, a hodgepodge of text, songs, stage pictures, and images that will collectively indicate America. What I don't understand is how (or why, or whether) these formidable artists believe that what they're actually doing in bobrauschenbergamerica accomplishes said objective.

It's played out on a wall and door made out of a big American flag that evokes the artist. Rauschenberg's mother narrates an intermittent slide show and tells the audience that her family didn't care at all about art. A man in a square '50s-style suit whom the program calls Allen (Ginsberg?) declares his love for another man in an undershirt and sweatpants; they sing and dance (at one point, with Allen clad only in bath towel, shoes, and socks), and, later, iron. A woman devours most of a gooey cake. A homeless man (eerily reminiscent of one of the characters in Woody Allen's recent off-Broadway debacle Writer's Block) directs a movie about conspiracy theories.

There's a bathtub on stage, and a tatty deer lawn ornament. There's a picnic lunch and—though I was gone by then—a pizza delivery.

Ok, that's America. I gu-e-sss.

Actually, bobrauschenbergamerica's parade of low-pop-culture references and low-brow mid-century homespun artifacts—not to mention the vulgarity and mindless offensiveness (I forgot to tell you that a character of color is referred to as a "nigger" and a "spade" at one point)—feels like a very particular manifestation of America—the kind that's filled with contempt for, well, just about everything.

I'm a fan of SITI's work, and they execute the nonsense here flawlessly. I say that even though not one second of this show resonated in any way for me—no new connections were revealed; no exciting discoveries were made. I say this because, at previous SITI shows, that is precisely what happened.

Hence my disappointment, which turned into disgust, which has now settled into despair. bobrauschenbergamerica is more than two years old, which means that its "America" is already terribly out of date: is this crass, cynical, complacent, navel-gazing-masquerading-as-art the best we can do now?

Merriam-Webster gives the word "bold" several meanings, including: fearless before danger, intrepid, impudent, presumptuous, assured, confident, adventurous, free, and standing out prominently. The four characters in Bold Girls, Rona Munro’s powerful tale now at 29th Street Rep, manage to embody all of these definitions.

The show takes place in 1990 in war-torn Belfast. Marie, Nora, and Cassie are doing laundry when a young stranger named Deirdre enters the house to escape a spell of street violence. Her disruptive presence influences the characters throughout the play, prompting suspicions, confessions, and even violence. Even more present are the missing men, either dead or in jail (the “kesh”), who continue to affect all four women in their absence. Faced with a daunting situation, each “bold girl” deals with it in her own way: Marie with optimism, Nora with resistance, Cassie with fantasy, and Deirdre with theft.

Munro’s script is compelling and unpredictable; most interesting is the way she allows her characters to break the fourth wall and directly address the audience in short monologues that reveal their inner thoughts. Marie gets more of these speeches than the other characters; I would have preferred to see a balance of them among the actresses, but the technique is surprisingly effective at drawing us in.

Ludovica Villar-Hauser’s direction brings out some powerful performances from her actors, though the pacing of the show seems lengthy and prolonged. However, since the show ran nearly a half hour over the announced running time, this might be chalked up to opening-night jitters. Certainly shaving 25 minutes off the show could only help, especially in the extended second act, but through the course of the run the talented cast will surely be able to accomplish this task.

Susan Barrett (Marie) is clearly the strongest of the ensemble, portraying her optimistic character with finesse and confidence. Paula Ewin (Nora) and Moira MacDonald (Deirdre) do fine work in their respective roles, and though Heidi James (Cassie) took most of the first act to settle into her accent, she shines in the climactic fourth scene. James’s characterization gives Cassie a youth and joie-de-vivre that make her seem much younger than her 35-year-old character, especially distracting when she is alone with Barrett’s Marie, who is supposed to be about the same age.

Mark Symczak’s set and Douglas Cox’s lighting create the appropriate mood; I was especially impressed with how Symczak solves the set-changing problems inherent in a space without a curtain, fly space, or wings. The hanging laundry draped around the theatre helps include the audience in the piece. Tim Cramer’s sound design beautifully underscores the entire piece, providing realistic and appropriate noises that further transport the audience to 1990s Belfast.

29th Street Rep should be commended for bringing such a potent script to off-Broadway; it seems tailor-made to their company and abilities. It’s also nice to see actresses given such challenging, difficult, and complex roles and to see these roles executed so well. Bold Girls certainly presents some adventurous and intrepid female characters, refreshing among the simplistic Madonna/whore parts apparent in so many of today’s TV, film, and theatre productions.

Bombay Dreams is, hands down, the most entertaining of this season's new Broadway musicals. It is also, more impressively, the one that does the best job matching results with expectations: all that this big, lush, warm-hearted show wants to do is bring the Bollywood movie aesthetic to life—and it does so, beautifully and excitingly. New York theatregoers will find themselves wrapped up in the hoarily melodramatic but utterly involving story of Akaash, the slum boy who becomes a movie star; they may also be entranced by the exotic, even foreign world of music and dance and theatrical customs that is the story's backdrop. Bombay Dreams works its magic gradually: let it happen, lose yourself in it, and enjoy this authentically unique journey.

The show begins in the slums of Bombay, in a neighborhood occupied by a poor but scrappy community of Untouchables. Here we meet Shanti, the revered elder of this group, a wise and pragmatic old lady; Sweetie, a passionate and outspoken young eunuch; and Akaash, Shanti's grandson and Sweetie's best friend, a young, good-looking fellow who ekes out a living offering tours of the city to rich visitors and who dreams of becoming a star in Bollywood films.

Bollywood—the center of the Indian film industry, physically located in Bombay—is an idea as compelling as Hollywood once was in America; so we discover early in Bombay Dreams, as Akaash and Sweetie muse about their favorite movies and about how it would be just as unlikely as the plot of any one of them if Akaash actually got "discovered" and put onto the screen. On cue, a pair of strangers appear at Shanti's home: Vikram, a too-nice young lawyer who offers to help Shanti and her friends fight the imminent demolition of their homes at the hands of a greedy real estate developer; and Priya, his fiancée, who is—guess what?—a budding film director, and the daughter of India's most prolific and successful moviemaker.

This, you see, is how Bollywood works: this is a world where the improbable takes wing. And so, thanks to Sweetie, Akaash next finds himself at a TV studio during the live broadcast of the Miss India Pageant; he manages to get on stage and to perform, opposite his idol, the great Bollywood star Rani. Akaash is a smash, particularly with Rani, who is always on the lookout for a sexy new leading man on- and off-screen. Before you can say "Shakalaka Baby," Akaash has been hired by Priya's father Madan to co-star in Rani's next film, about a boy from the slums who makes it big in Bollywood movies. "Shakalaka Baby," by the way, is the big improbable musical number in that film that we get to watch being "filmed": gorgeous, with a stage full of dancers and, at one point, a fountain bursting out of the floor, spurting sprays of multi-colored water. There's never been anything quite like this in any American musical I've ever seen.

Akaash becomes a big star, and—encouraged by Rani and Madan—abandons Sweetie, Shanti, and the others from his past. Though he and Priya are obviously attracted to one another, he continues to court Rani while she stays with Vikram. Will Priya and Akaash wind up together? Will Akaash remember his roots and stop shunning his family and friends from the slum? Will the slum be saved?

The answers are never in doubt, but the surprises nevertheless continue. The second act opens with a spectacularly splashy number called "Chaiyya Chaiyya" (set at the Indian Academy Awards), in which all of the dancers have two costume changes (and Rani and Akaash have three!). The story reaches its climax on the day that Priya is to wed Vikram, in a ceremony that begins with a parade of brightly costumed attendants and guests carrying huge carved elephant statues on tall pedestals, and that culminates in a brilliant vision of crimson and gold under a stunning canopy.

This is, in short, a beautifully realized show—Mark Thompson's detailed sets and costumes are dazzling, the perfect compliment to the exotic sounds and rhythms of A.R. Rahman's score, which includes melodies and percussion that are decidedly unfamiliar to the American ear. Indeed, what makes Bombay Dreams particularly thrilling to me is its refreshing unfamiliarity: the design, the music, and the choreography (by Anthony Van Laast and Farah Khan) are not at all like typical Broadway fare. This show allows its audience to immerse itself in the sights, sounds, and ideas of another culture; that's a wonderful feeling.

And, the superficial obviousness of Meera Syal and Thomas Meehan's book notwithstanding, Bombay Dreams lets us experience an uplifting, heroic story, for once. This is a show where the protagonist grows and does the right thing, where the villain is punished, where love and tolerance and virtue are duly celebrated. That's a wonderful feeling, too.

The cast of Bombay Dreams is terrific. In Manu Narayan, the young actor who is making his Broadway debut as Akaash, we have a genuine, bona fide star who could give Hugh Jackman a run for his money: this guy is a fine singer, a sensational dancer, and is handsome and sexy to boot (he's already got a cadre of fans who scream from the audience at his curtain call). Leading lady Anisha Nagarajan (Priya) has a lovely singing voice though a less persuasive presence; Ayesha Dharker (Rani), on the other hand, is explosive, delivering one of the season's most memorable turns as the hot-tempered, self-involved, self-protecting movie star. Offering superlative support are Madhur Jaffrey as Akaash's grandmother Shanti, Deep Katdare as the slick and nasty Vikram, and Sriram Ganesan as the big-hearted eunuch Sweetie. All of these actors are unfamiliar to us because South Asian performers are almost never cast in Broadway plays; here's a chance to rectify that shameful situation and also to take a look at some remarkably talented people you've never seen before.

So, I heartily recommend Bombay Dreams. I had a blast: found myself lost in the music, dance, colors, passions, and simple truths of an experience of unexpected potency and charm. What a deal: a Broadway musical that shows us something new and makes us happy! This is the most entertaining musical in New York since Hairspray: enjoy it.

“It means, totally unscientifically, that there are all these other versions of people inside them. These other possibilities. Normally regressed primordial tissue but occasionally they attempt to form. So cool.” So says Sarah, a future pathologist in Julia Jordan’s new play Boy, now playing at Primary Stages. She’s specifically talking about a medical aberration, but she's also addressing the main theme of the play—other possibilities, hidden promise, dreams deferred. Boy takes place in a bleak world populated by lost souls who hide their emotions, ambitions, and pain deep inside, with often unfortunate results.

The story revolves around two characters: the un-named Boy of the title, who is unable to let himself be anything other than a stoner from a small town, and Mick, a boy in his thirties unable to let himself be anything other than a loser from a small city. The action takes place in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, where Mick grew up and has returned after trying to be an actor, and where Boy has moved after a tragic incident with his friends involving a suicide pact. Mick is trying to get back together with his ex-girlfriend Sarah, whom he left three years previous. He also is having trouble dealing with his mother Maureen, an English professor at a community college; and with his father, who is having a serious psychological crisis. Meanwhile, Boy is having a series of sessions with a psychiatrist, trying to make sense of what has happened.

It becomes clear early on that Boy is a special person, a gifted storyteller with a keen eye for the way the world works—but is stuck with a dark, nihilistic view of life. As the play progresses, we are slowly given the gruesome details of what happened to Boy and his friends before he moved to Minnesota, which helps us see why he has such a cynical point of view. We also learn that Boy is taking a literature class from Maureen, who sees great talent in Boy. What is interesting in this play is the contrast between Boy and Mick. Mick has had a fairly nice life, we are led to believe, and yet he can’t seem to make anything of himself. Boy has had a pretty rotten existence, and doesn’t want to make anything of himself. Of course, by the end of the play, the two meet and discuss life and all its possibilities. It is also revealed that Boy’s psychiatrist is Mick’s father—a kind man suffering from severe depression. By the end of the play, most everyone has faced his or her inner demons, not always with positive results.

The script is good. Jordan writes believable dialogue, and makes her characters distinct and memorable. She also makes use of shifting timelines in a clever manner. There is basically one scene between Sarah and Mick, which chronologically takes place at the end of the story, but in the play, is spread out from the opening moment to the final curtain.

Joe Calarco has directed the show with a quiet restraint, keeping most of the emotions of the characters just below the surface. Calarco also knows how to let a silent gesture speak volumes—especially when dealing with the character of Boy.

The cast is excellent. In the title role, T. R. Knight is fantastic. Knight never goes for the stereotypical stoner dude, but at the same time, he is unafraid to let his character be the typical small town zombie. It is his specificity of character, of attitude, and of thought that makes his performance shine. As Maureen, Caitlin O’Connell is a powerhouse. O’Connell makes Maureen both intelligent and vain, likeable and unlikeable. Her Maureen is a woman about to explode, angry at a job she feels she is better than, worried about her husband, and unable to get her son to do anything with his life. As Terry, Maureen’s husband and Boy’s psychiatrist, Robert Hogan is warm, sad, intelligent, and compelling. What is great about both Hogan’s and O’Connell’s performances is their subtlety—they both let their insecurities and anxieties simmer beneath their calm exteriors just the right amount, creating a sense of tension every time they are on stage. Miriam Shor, in the thankless role of Sarah, who seems to be the one character without any deep inner strife, does a fine job. At one point in the show, after coming across as a very serious medical student, Mick convinces her to tell him some of the more gory aspects of pathology. When she does so, Shor turns Sarah into a little girl having the time of her life, telling Mick a secret. As the spoiled man-child Mick, Kelly AuCoin does a good job on conveying a self-absorbed pseudo-intellectual.

Boy is not without its share of problems—the script is a little overwritten, and there are some technical difficulties that still need to be worked out. But all in all this is a fine new play, and worth investigating.

Sarah Jones begins bridge & tunnel, her hilarious, moving, and timely one-woman (but many-charactered) show, with the requisite “cellphones-off” announcement, capably and digressively delivered by a homeless (or at least, home-lite) woman who has been asked to do so by the proprietors of “Bridge and Tunnel Café” where the eponymous play takes place. The early café event of the evening (as a hip-hop show is to begin immediately after) is the annual “I Am A Poet, Too” open mic night populated mostly by immigrant poets. Mohammed, our Pakistani host and the progenitor of this series, is himself an immigrant to the United States, and he is as amused by his experience in this country as his fellow poets are bewildered, humiliated, humbled or enraptured by theirs.

This series of living portraits is more than just an opportunity for Jones to showcase her stunning ability of conjuring characters from around the world (Russia, Mexico, Jamaica, Australia-by-way-of-Williamsburg, etc.), though that alone would be reason enough to watch this tour de force. She does not stop with characterization, but gives these people snowflake-singular souls. Both the poems and the manner in which they are presented speak important truths about the happiness and regret that comes with choosing, as opposed to inheriting, American citizenship.

To single out certain moments as “highlights” is difficult indeed, but still vivid in my mind are a Chinese woman coping with her daughter’s alternative lifestyle; a Mexican union leader (paralyzed in a construction accident) whose true love disappeared while illegally crossing the border; a Cuban lady’s open letter to her former real estate agent; and a motor-mouthed Latina teacher’s assistant introducing the star poet of her high school English class. Laughter and tears, reputed to be so close together, rarely happen at once with such force and frequency as they do during Jones' performance.

bridge and tunnel (which Jones co-conceived with Steve Colman) is receiving terrific support all around. Meryl Streep (expert shape-shifter and chameleon) and the Culture Project are to be commended for presenting this production, a move that is both nurturing to a fine young artist and, as importantly, a kind of activism. Director Tony Taccone and his expertly employed design team—Alexander V. Nichols (sets and lights), Blake Lethem (scenic painting), and Chris Meade and DJ Rekha (sound/music)—work in such a symbiotic way that the action becomes seamless and the world complete. Costume pieces swoop down like hawks from the upper reaches of the set, while the music and lights have an uncommonly intuitive and dynamic relationship.

Above all else, bridge and tunnel is a most important piece of theatre. What is being discussed is larger than race or ethnocentricity—this addresses American xenophobia from the points of view of the invaders, the strangers in our midst, who are taking the country to task, holding it responsible for its promises of freedom and opportunity, and refusing its hypocrisies with a vigorous vehemence that many born-Americans cannot immediately comprehend. Sarah Jones is challenging us to participate in our civic and global lives, not because it is right or good, but because it is ultimately liberating.

Do not miss her show.

As I recall, Macbeth ends with its two murderous main characters dead, having writhed in horror at the evil that they found themselves able to do. Eric Coble, who has neither Shakespeare's gift for poetic imagery nor his moral curiosity, ends his Macbeth update, Bright Ideas, with his two protagonists simply chasing madly after one another at their son's 4th birthday party.

Not that it is always thus: Bright Ideas, which takes its name from a fictitious ultra-prestigious Manhattan pre-school that Anyone Who's Anyone would give their eye teeth to get their child into, starts off as a satire of the very values depicted in my previous clause—asking, tongue more or less in cheek, why yuppie-type married couples waste so much energy and time keeping up with the Joneses by, for example, racing directly from the delivery room to place their newborn's name on a hoity-toity daycare center waiting list.

Genevra and Joshua Bradley, the schlemielian couple at the center of this play, have done just that; now, with little Mac just months away from what other parents in the play call the Big Four, they have become desperate to enroll their son in Bright Ideas Early Childhood Development Academy, which is apparently the Harvard of pre-schools. So desperate, in fact, that when Genevra discovers that the child of her co-worker, the preternaturally slimy and snobbish Denise, is about to actually get in to Bright Ideas, they decide to murder her (the co-worker, not the child), thus forcing Denise's ex-husband, who lives in Chicago, to take custody of the now motherless child, and thus opening up the coveted slot at Bright Ideas for Mac.

Before you can say "All hail, Genevra," the two have done the deed (via quicker-than-expected poison, supposedly undetectable and indeed undetected in Coble's absurd universe), and Mac has gotten into the school of his parents' dreams.  And Coble's none-too-artful satire has run entirely out of steam, and so ventures—ditheringly, foolhardily—into Shakespearean territory. Already in the poisoning scene Genevra seems afflicted by derivativeness, imagining as she prepares the blighted pesto that she sees a mortar and pestle before her. Now, in Act Two, Genevra has become downright power-mad. She picks a fight with Mac's teacher because he has only gotten a "Satisfactory" on his report card in Doll-Playing. She makes the moves on the virile father of two of Mac's schoolmates, both prior winners of the coveted Golden Pony "Child Champ" Award. And she turns violent and threatening after a meeting with Bright Ideas' Principal goes wretchedly awry.

Suddenly, teachers are being injured by stray garden machinery and the parents are aligning into two camps, pro- and con- the once mousy Mrs. Bradford. Hubby Josh, meanwhile, has taken to drink and roams the house at night in his Scooby-Doo boxer shorts, wailing about the pesto stains on his hands that won't come out. Coble, entirely out of ideas, lets the Macbeth imagery—which hasn't made a lick of sense from the get-go—run rampant, all the while escalating the coarse and unfunny antics until the play climaxes with Genevra chasing a pregnant lady around a restaurant with a gun in her purse and a pair of boxing gloves on her hands.

The Macbeths' story makes for compelling theatre because it illustrates some terrible but fundamental truths about human nature. In contrast, the Bradfords' story, celebrating unmotivated baseness to seemingly no purpose, does not make for compelling theatre. MCC Theater has nevertheless lavished on it a much stronger production than it deserves, including a talented pair of leading actors (Seana Kofoed and Paul Fitzgerald), a name director (John Rando), and a smart and savvy design team (of whom Rob Odorisio, whose sets fly on and offstage with an almost magical unobtrusiveness, is probably the key contributor). What a waste!—for Bright Ideas signifies nothing.

The creators and producers of Broadway Sings The Odd Potato are hoping that their new Hanukkah musical will become an annual holiday tradition here in New York City.

Eileen Bluestone Sherman has adapted this show from her own successful picture book The Odd Potato—a slim but spirited tale about two children who have just lost their mother, and who use their imaginations and memories of her favorite stories to celebrate Hanukkah without her, not so incidentally reawakening their still-grieving father to joy and life. Sherman has provided book and lyrics to music by her sister, Gail C. Bluestone; unfortunately, she's opened up her story in all the wrong ways, building production numbers for three lovable but peripheral characters while failing to establish emotional connections or context for the unhappy family at her show's center. Unless Sherman and Bluestone can perform a major overhaul, their musical isn't likely to have the long life they're hoping for.

But now for the good news: to showcase this as-yet-unrealized but entirely well-intended project, Sherman and her producing partners have mounted a delightful concert presentation of The Odd Potato, conceived as a radio play from the '50s (admittedly a stretch—were there very many live radio shows by that time?), and featuring an all-star cast that mines this material for all that it's worth. Frank Gorshin serves as principal narrator and also plays Murray Weintraub, the neighborhood grocer whose ill-timed Hanukkah potato shortage fuels the holiday "miracle" at the center of the tale. Gorshin proves both game and lively in the role, making an old Jewish man's kvetching sighs into a show-stopping gag and even stepping away from the microphone to indulge in a bit of giddy dancing.

B.J. Crosby plays Mille Harris, Weintraub's employee (the presence of this charming African American lady in an otherwise apparently all-Jewish neighborhood is neither referenced nor explained); she provides calm comfort (and occasional exposition) until she breaks loose with the show's best numbers, "A Little Imagination" and, memorably, the finale "A Child's Dream Will Light the Way." Crosby's voice is a sterling instrument, and she finds some divine notes here; it's a pleasure to have her on hand.

As Potato's main characters, the Levy family, are Molly Ephraim and Sky Jarrett as daughter Rachel and son Sammy, Mark Jacoby as the father, Joe, and Debbie Gravitte as the (late) mother Anna. With the exception of Sammy, who gets a couple of cute novelty numbers, the Levys are woefully underwritten and underdeveloped, and so these talented performers have less to do than we might hope. But Gravitte is her usual sunny, big-voiced self, and helps put over one of the show's sweetest songs, "My Mother's Menorah"; and Jacoby is professionalism incarnate, making much more out of his two numbers than anyone has the right to expect (in one of these, he is actually costumed as a potato, with a menorah on his head). Ephraim and Jarrett are expert juvenile performers, and Jarrett scores with his comic renditions of "The Dreidel Song" and "The Latin Latke Song."

I've saved the best for last, though: stage and TV veteran Charlotte Rae, as friendly neighbor-lady Mrs. Rosenblum and (briefly), Anna's mother Rifka, is the icing on Potato's formidable cake (please forgive the mixed-up food metaphor). Rae, petite and fragile-looking at 77, is the consummate comedienne we remember from Car 54, Where Are You? and The Hot l Baltimore, delivering gags and schtick with joyous aplomb; her uproarious clowning in "Don't Forget the Pepper" (a song about how to make killer latkes) is the evening's highlight. What a treat to see this great performer!

So I have to conclude by saying that I had a great time at Broadway Sings The Odd Potato, but it was the Broadway part that won me over—hurrah for terrific talents like Rae, Gorshin, Crosby, Gravitte, and Jacoby, in whatever circumstances. As for the Potato itself, well, Sherman and Bluestone's tale has a sweet Hanukkah message, but a lot of rewriting is going to be needed in order to coax it out.

A question for our times: What makes people give up control of their lives to irrationality?

The answer is contained in Tracy Letts' remarkable play Bug, currently at the Barrow Street Theatre in a production that is both astonishing and unforgettable. Shaped like a horror story—the kind that any normal playwright and director would have put on celluloid rather than on stage—Bug mines the paranoid depths of the human soul, discovering there reasons for apathy, murder, and self-destruction of tragic proportions. It is, perversely, enormous vicarious fun and affectingly terrifying, or at least terrifyingly affecting. The performance of Michael Shannon as the scariest and farthest-gone of the drama's characters is nothing short of electrifying.

Bug begins with a woman hiding out in a motel room (an homage to Psycho, perhaps?). Her name is Agnes White, and she's isolated herself here in this Oklahoma motor lodge because her abusive husband Jerry has just been released from jail. Agnes' panic is palpable, especially when the phone keeps ringing but nobody seems to be on the line; she smokes, drinks, and frets silently in near-darkness.

Then Agnes' friend R.C. turns up with a young stranger in tow, Peter Evans. Quiet and mysterious in a maverick-cowboy sort of way, Peter is also vaguely dangerous, which probably makes him even more attractive to Agnes than he'd otherwise be, and against her (and certainly our) better judgment—despite and also because of her predicament—she lets him stay overnight.

It should not surprise you to learn that Jerry shows up, too, and that Peter and Agnes eventually become involved. As Act One nears its close, we find a naked Peter in bed with an equally naked Agnes, searching among the bedclothes for a bug that he says has bitten him on the wrist. He finds it, and even though Agnes can't quite make it out, she humors him as he strips the bed and searches for more critters. Annoyed that Agnes refers to his prey as "he," Peter hypothesizes that it could be a matriarch bug, one that may have laid thousands of eggs in their room. We leave for intermission aware that the search is on.

And how: when we return, the stage is filled with bug strips, bug sprays, a bug light, and—most startlingly—a makeshift table in the center of Agnes' room on which sits a microscope and all the trappings of a mini laboratory. Peter is on the case: he is convinced that the room is infested (even though, as Agnes and R.C. sensibly point out, no other guest at the motel has reported seeing any insects whatsoever), and somehow linked into a vast and sinister conspiracy that involves such disparate events as the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana and the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh.

The question is: will Agnes believe in Peter's obsession, or will she manage to free herself from this increasingly unhinged man?

The other question is: will Jerry somehow return, and is he in any way involved with this weird plot?

Oh, and there's still one more question: Could Peter be right? Why does an Army doctor named Sweet turn up suddenly, claiming to be Peter's psychiatrist, but equipped with information about Agnes that he has no obvious reason to know?

Why does a pizza get delivered to Agnes' room, even though neither she nor Peter remembers ordering it?

I'm not telling, of course; see Bug to find out how it all plays out (and climaxes in a spectacular and inevitable conclusion that you nevertheless won't see coming until it's too late). See it for Letts' insanely delicious plotting, and for Dexter Bullard's extraordinary staging, which puts special effects onto a small off-Broadway stage beyond anyone's reasonable imagining; kudos to designers Lauren Helpern (sets), Tyler Micoleau (lighting), Brian Ronan (sound), and Kim Gill (costumes) and to fight director J. David Brimmer for helping Bullard to realize his extravagant vision.

Michael Shannon's Peter is the stuff of theatre legend, I think: Shannon has to unmake and make the bed whilst stark naked, undergo an epileptic-type seizure, commit acts of horrific violence on himself and others, and spurt prodigious amounts of stage blood in a performance of more or less limitless sensationalism; somehow he makes it all not just plausible but organic. I've never seen anything in a theatre quite like what he does.

Shannon Cochran is eerily convincing as Agnes; the play is told from her point of view, and she keeps us riveted as she shifts from mere desperation to ever-accelerating levels of obsessive fear. Michael Cullen (Jerry), Amy Landecker (R.C.), and Reed Birney (Dr. Sweet) are all excellent as well; this is as solidly crafted a production as anything our theatre has to offer.

To Letts' supreme credit, the puzzle never gets entirely pieced together: fans of the Illuminati and conspiracy theories will find nothing in Bug to refute their notions. The rest of us watch the show reasonably secure that we're superior to Peter because we don't itch from the inside out.

But, to borrow from Tennessee Williams, wouldn't it funny if all of this were true?

Bug Music is an educational concert experience, ideal for children and their families, especially kids who are curious about, but not participating in, the making of music. Clarinetist Don Byron leads a six-piece jazz ensemble through works by Depression/World War II-era composer/bandleaders Duke Ellington, Raymond Scott, and John Kirby, occasionally as accompaniment to vintage stills and film clips. Most of the selections were unfamiliar to me, but almost all were pleasing—I particularly enjoyed some of Scott's novelty numbers, such as "Siberian Sleigh Ride" and "The Penguin."

In between songs, Byron provides his young audience with lessons about how music is composed and introductions to each of the instruments in his band; this part is actually pretty interesting: I learned, for example, how the snare drum got its name (and what the "snare" does). Multimedia aspects of this part of the show are fairly low-tech, but Byron's conversational style and obvious enthusiasm for the subject make it informative and fun.

Byron also illustrates, briefly, how some of the music on the evening's program was adapted by Carl Stallings (whom he does not credit, regrettably) for use in classic Warner Brothers cartoons. (The advertised screening of vintage cartoons from the era is a bit misleading, by the way: only two cartoons are shown during Bug Music, and neither is remotely a classic.)

But Byron does spotlight footage from two "lost" films that's absolutely worth seeing. War Dance for Wooden Indians is a short subject built around one of Scott's novelty tunes, featuring some of  the most bizarrely eccentric tapping (by what appear to be two Native Americans in traditional garb) ever captured on celluloid; it's a hoot. The clip from Sepia Cinderella, a "Negro" film from the period, showcases Kirby and his band, playing up a storm; the highlight here is watching the legendary drummer Big Sid Catlett do his amazing thing.

The grown-ups in the audience seemed satisfied by the dozen or so examples of jazz and swing played live by Byron and his colleagues; the youngsters in the crowd were engaged throughout as well. Bug Music makes for an enjoyable eighty minutes of low-impact education and entertainment.

bunkerbaby, a new play by Colin Hodges, is actually more like three plays, each of which piggybacks on the last with diminishing success.

After a breathy opening song heavily indebted to David Lynch, two spoony teens named Sylvia and Jimmy D sneak into a musty old bomb shelter to secretly make love. Sylvia (Melody Bates) flirtatiously concocts an underground fantasy existence for the pair, dubbing her beau "Salty Dog" and describing the tiny blue babies they'll create; watching the affable but confused Jimmy D (Brian Reilly) weigh his attraction against her eccentricity as he navigates the purgatory of adolescent desire makes for genuinely interesting drama.

In the morning, however, Jimmy D wakes up alone and pantsless in the bunker, which marks the beginning of the play's second phase. He is discovered by Sylvia's parents, who reveal that their daughter has been missing for months. Thus begins a dreamy tale of obsession and loss in the American suburbs.

But now occurs an even vaster shift, which finds Jimmy D wandering in the Kafkaesque headquarters of an ultra-hip vampire cult where Sylvia may or may  not be secreted. Say what? By the time the characters stand upon an asteroid hurtling into the gaping mouth of a black hole we realize just how far we've come from the poignant two-hander the play began with.

All of this might make a successful dream narrative if it were fleeter and more surprising, jumping from one potential storyline to the next faster than we can anticipate. But instead each development rambles on: Hodges has some interesting ideas but he doesn't know when to stop and let them breathe, which makes for a tiring trek intermittently enlivened by attractive scenery. (Let me also suggest that it's a poor idea to run the play without an intermission, especially since the story offers an ideal place for one.)

The production works hard to balance the script's diffuseness with clarity. Director Michael Kimmel orchestrates the journey as crisply as the text allows, abetted by Andrew Hill's mood-enhancing lighting. The entire cast without exception does admirable work navigating this terrain, and the performances keep the evening from feeling interminable. In particular, Melody Bates creates in Sylvia a character who spouts Hodges' overwrought prose as if to the manner born; from top to toe, she's the ideal resident of this mystifying world, and at times it feels like the play is in her service rather than vice versa. Brian Reilly is a solid Jimmy D, providing the play with what sense of reality it has. As Sylvia's grief-warped parents, Paul Eisemann and Eva Patton could hold their own with any of the oddballs in Twin Peaks, WA, as could Amy McKee as Jimmy D's artfully "normal" ex-girlfriend, Tracy Lynne. Finally, as daffy cult members, Johnny Sparks, Sara McGowan, and McCready Baker save their post-grunge Cheshire cat characters from pretentiousness by embracing just how silly they are.

Obviously I wouldn't spend so many sentences writing about bunkerbaby if I  didn't feel there was something to it. I believe that, between his hallucinatory images and his striving for poetry, Hodges exhibits what could potentially prove to be a captivating voice. If he exercises a little restraint in his dialogue and plotting, he just might find himself on the right track.