nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

In 15 previous reviews of Musicals Tonight! productions, I've neglected to mention the charming way that producer Mel Miller opens each and every one of his shows. He climbs onto the stage, introduces himself, and then offers three or four minutes of background—about the show and its creators, and about the moment in history when this particular revival originated. So we learn, for example, that 1940-41 was the leanest Broadway season up to that time: just Ethel Merman in Panama Hattie, Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark, Gene Kelly in Pal Joey, Al Jolson in Hold on to Your Hats, and of course Ethel Waters in Cabin in the Sky.

Well, those were certainly the days, eh? The best thing about Miller's work is that he brings the golden age of American musical theatre back to us with modest and unadorned (and unamplified!) concert-style versions of shows that aren't likely to turn up on Broadway but that absolutely deserve a second hearing. Cabin in the Sky exemplifies the Musicals Tonight! ethos: it's got a book of remarkable sophistication (for 1940) that nevertheless wouldn't scan as anything other than a curiosity piece in 2003, all about a pious black woman named Petunia who prays so hard over her dying good-for-nothing husband's body that the Lord decides to give Little Joe six more months to earn his place in heaven. The Lord's General and his counterpart from the Other Place, Lucifer, Jr., do battle for Little Joe's soul, while their earthly representatives, Petunia and the sexy seductress Georgia Brown, duke it out  for his body. There's a charming simplicity to it all, but also a certain simplemindedness: Little Joe, in particular, is awfully close kin to Amos 'n' Andy.

Lynn Root's libretto turns out to be the strongest element of Cabin in the Sky. The score, by Vernon Duke and John Latouche, is a string of very pleasant but mostly undistinguished pop tunes. There are a few gems: the title song reaches for greatness, and "Taking a Chance on Love" is catchy and inspiring.

Opening night found the 15-member ensemble less surefooted than in previous Musicals Tonight! premieres, but game and enthusiastic throughout and downright terrific in the rousing choral numbers (both of them traditional spirituals) "Wade in the Water" and "Dat Suits Me." Among the principals, the standouts are Joe Wilson, Jr. as Lucifer, Jr. and Thursday Farrar as Georgia Brown, but then again that's at least partly because naughty characters are always more interesting than nice ones. Romelda T. Benjamin, as one of the devil's henchmen, is loaded with stage presence; Tanya Tatum and especially Joy Harrell, soloists in the chorales, have gorgeous, big voices.

What do you say about a show that flourishes its insubstantiality and derivativeness like a badge of pride? Sure, it's done what it set out to do, but does that mean it deserves a pat on the head?

Supposedly Café a Go Go (under its original title, A Slice of Saturday Night) was a big hit in London's West End towards the end of the last century. Maybe audiences weren't as accustomed to retro pastiche ten years ago as we are today; maybe Londoners were able to conjure a more successful facsimile of their city's mythical Swinging incarnation. Either way, something got lost at some point over the Atlantic. You wouldn't think that the spectacle of nine attractive young people (plus an older impresario) singing and dancing their hearts out to catchy pop tunes would be dull, but after all this lead-in I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear me say it is. After having seen a much savvier and more thought-provoking Sixties-inspired rock musical experience the night before (Sightlines Theatre Company's Tragedy in 9 Lives), the willful shallowness of Café a Go Go struck me as less than cute—it struck me as a fraud.

The show consists primarily of 31 songs written by the Heather Brothers in gleeful appropriation of the era's hit sounds. You can pick off the names of the songs being aped as their wannabe versions take the stage. ("Sounds like 'House of the Rising Sun.'" "Ah, 'Satisfaction.'" "'Love Me Do,' eh?" "Hey, listen—the entire score of Grease!") The frame on which the songs are hung is supposed to be a nostalgic evocation of the perennial struggles of teenage romance, set against the iconic backdrop of a club named—can you guess?—the Café a Go Go. In the event, it's hard to tell what makes Swinging London so special, aside from mod costumes, cheesy accents, and a cheeky naughtiness that, granted, could never have originated in the States. The performers, given no substance to draw from, camp it up. Imagine a cast of five Austin Powerses, opposite five female Austin Powerses, all with shagging on the brain: if you'd rather spend time in this company than quaking in terror under your bedcovers, ticket info is on the left of the screen.

Okay, okay, A FEW POSITIVE THINGS: Vin Adinolfi makes an authentic and often charming tightwad-impresario-with-a-heart-of-gold; there is a halfway amusing song about being drunk ("Oh So Bad") and a halfway amusing song about what guys can do to hide their erections when girls ask them to dance ("What Do Ya Do?"), adding up to one amusing number; the band is tight as all get-out; and the show's stabs at interactivity are mercifully limited to some voluntary canoodling during intermission.

Obviously all of my snarky reservations would be forgiven if delirious pop highs were on hand, but there's little room for that on the cramped stage of the Café a Go Go; the Heather Brothers are too busy reminding us what we already know. You can hear the songs behind these songs for free any time of day or night on CBS FM—and by the original artists to boot! Yes, of course there's something to be said for the Magic of Live Performance (would I be reviewing theatre otherwise?), but when the "Magic" is as stale and cynical as this, you're better off with the recording.

Gilligan Stump is a hilarious, semi-idiot running for President in Joseph Langham’s latest offering, Campaign Stump! 2004. The show is a sort of mixture of  rock-n-roll show, performance art, and absurdist theatre—with a dash of mime thrown in for good measure. Or is it more like an urban circus act that fits perfectly in the East Village? I don’t know- there is no easy label for this show, other than hugely entertaining and outrageously fun.

Campaign Stump! opens with a short set of intelligent, post-punk music by Slim Butcher, and then moves into what is ostensibly a political rally of sorts for Gilligan Stump, who says “if you feel, as many Americans do, that you are trapped between a soft spot and a dumb place, vote Stump!” He then launches into a series of songs about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and all the things in between. There is a great energy in this show, reminiscent of Laurel & Hardy or the Three Stooges. And it’s infectious. Helping Stump throughout the night is Tha Perfesser..., his silent partner and vice-presidential candidate.

The songs in the show include “I didn’t vote,” a very silly song that sets the tone for the evening; “She is a Vegetarian,” which makes brilliant use of one of those old toys that make different farm animal sounds; and my favorite, “Glue,” all about the terrors of childhood and the joys of eating glue.

As Gilligan Stump, Joseph Langham is a great ball of fire, a sort of cross between a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Lyle Lovett. Langham’s songwriting talent is formidable, as is his playing—but his greatest asset is his sense of manic humor and exuberant absurdism. As Tha Perfesser..., Michael Aquino is outstanding. Although Tha Perfesser... has no lines at all, Aquino conveys every emotion known to man with ease and grace. Aquino and Langham work together with an almost psychic bond. As the drunken booth operator/roadie John Wilkes (get it? John Wilkes in the Booth) Rik Sansone rounds out the show with an almost too credible portrayal of a drunken stage manager.

It is a welcome relief, in this age of faux solemnity on all the news shows, to see some good old wacky political satire. It deserves an audience.

One word of warning: If you don’t like rock-n-roll music played loud and well, you should avoid this show. If, like any true-blooded American, you do like rock-n-roll, get yourself downtown as soon as possible to see Campaign Stump! 2004.

There's something undeniably magnetic about Caroline, or Change; I found, after seeing it for the second time, that this musical had definitely gotten under my skin, lingering in my consciousness long after the final curtain fell. But even with the thing dancing around my brain, I still can't figure out what it's about. There's a grandeur to this show, that of a big, failed, noble effort. But it just doesn't work, at least for me—the dramaturgy seems full of holes, the stagecraft sloppy, and the production itself, in places, shockingly shoddy. If prizes are given for seriousness of intent, then Caroline wins hands down; but I can't locate a coherent meaning here, and if I can't do that then I can't call a theatre work successful.

Librettist/lyricist Tony Kushner has set his play in Lake Charles, Louisiana in late 1963; in fact, the story opens on November 22 of that year, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Caroline Thibodeaux, 39, is a single mother of four who works as a maid for the Gellmans for $30/week. The Gellmans are a Jewish family consisting of Stuart, the father, who plays and teaches clarinet; Rose, his second wife, a transplanted New Yorker whom he recently married following the death of his first wife, who was Rose's best friend; and Noah, 8. The central relationship in the play is that between Caroline and Noah; he idolizes her (says she's the President; stronger than his dad); she indulges the boy by letting him hang around the laundry room and light her cigarettes. Noah is unhappy because his father is horribly distant, his mother is dead, and his step-mother still feels like an intruder in his life; Caroline is unhappy because her eldest son is in Vietnam, her daughter is becoming rebellious, her husband (who beat her) has abandoned the family, her salary is too small and she can't afford even simple things for her kids, and her dream was certainly never to wash clothes and clean house for a bunch of white people. Noah and Caroline seem to intuitively understand that their bond, such as it is, is based in part of this shared unhappiness. Noah thinks Caroline is his friend. Caroline knows that she's not.

The "change" referred to in the play's title is of two types. First, there's pocket change—i.e., nickels, dimes, quarters; specifically the coins left in his pants pockets by forgetful young Noah. Rose has what amounts to a fetish about this: she scolds Noah for leaving the change behind, and eventually decides to teach Noah the value of money by instructing Caroline to keep whatever she finds in the boy's pockets when she does the laundry. Caroline balks—she doesn't want to take pennies from a baby, she says; but Rose is persistent and Caroline's relative poverty eventually overtakes her moral objections. When Noah inadvertently leaves the twenty dollar bill given him by his grandfather for Hanukah in his pants, a crisis is precipitated.

Kushner also means, though, change in the sense of motion and transformation. Noah's home life is certainly in flux, and by the end of the play, he and Rose appear to have at last managed some kind of adjustment; in this sense, Noah seems to me to be the protagonist of Caroline, or Change, for he is the major character who actually grows, from willful babyhood to a more mature acceptance and awareness of his circumstances.

Caroline, meanwhile—the burgeoning Civil Rights movement notwithstanding—is steadfastly resistant to change. This is presented mostly by placing her in counterpoint with her daughter Emmie, who is developing a budding activist spirit, and with her friend Dotty Moffett, another maid who is going to night school and trying to improve her opportunities and her lot.

Now, as you can see, Kushner has put a lot of stuff into his play. The question is, what does it all add up to?

I still don't know. The parts of Caroline that work for me are the ones that show Caroline interacting with Dotty and Emmie and her other two young children. These scenes have an emotional richness—musically, too—that I find affecting; they harness the complexity of Caroline's situation in interesting ways. In contrast, the scenes depicting Noah's family life feel flat and forced; Kushner simply doesn't give us enough information to make any of Noah's relatives more than two-dimensional constructs. Sequences like the one where Rose's communist father carries on about the evils of capitalism before presenting Noah with the twenty dollar bill come out of nowhere: are these grudges that Kushner has been carrying around for years, maybe?

More damaging, throughout the show I was constantly distracted by writers' and director's choices that just don't make sense to me. For example, Noah's father thinks that the boy is 9 years old, though he's actually 8; he excuses himself by saying that he lost a year (referring to the year the boy's mother died). Okay: but wouldn't that mean he thinks Noah is 7?

There's a clumsiness that's pervasive here, too. The opening scenes of both acts take place in the Gellman laundry room, where Caroline works alone. The washing machine, dryer, and radio are all portrayed as anthropomorphized characters, singing and dancing what are presumably Caroline's thoughts while she works. It's a gimmicky way to deliver a ton of exposition, but it never feels like anything other than that; especially because outside her domain, the moon and a bus also speak, not only to Caroline but to others as well.  Suddenly the device is being applied haphazardly—what does it mean?

At the technical level, things are amiss with the show as well. At the performance reviewed, there were sound problems that made it hard to tell at times where the sound was coming from; there was a persistent lighting "bug" that made it look like lightning was flashing on stage at inappropriate moments; and on at least two occasions, set changes that should have been seamlessly magical were viewable through gaps in the curtains.

It all adds to up to an evening where too much time is spent wondering why this or that is happening and far too little time is spent immersed in the words and music themselves. This despite a hard-working and mostly excellent cast, headed by the formidable but uninvolving Tonya Pinkins as Caroline, whose stamina is remarkable but whose coldness—admittedly appropriate to her character—kept me from ever empathizing with her. The performances that did move me came from Chandra Wilson as Dotty and Anika Noni Rose as Emmie—the women they create are vibrant and vivid and human and interesting. Capathia Jenkins (Washing Machine) and Chuck Cooper (Dryer and Bus) have great singing moments, Harrison Chad is admirably genuine as Noah, and Veanne Cox works hard to make Rose more than the wicked stepmother cipher that Kushner has mostly written.

Jeanine Tesori's music alternates between contemporary recitative in the Sondheim-Finn-LaChiusa mode and pastiche of '60s rock and r&b. Stirring melodies assert themselves but seldom feel resolved, which I find problematic. George C. Wolfe's staging works well, I guess; there's woefully little of Hope Clarke's choreography, and it's welcome and exciting when it comes. A little joy, in fact, would go a long way in Caroline: this show is so relentlessly determined to be serious that, while it does grip our emotions from time to time, it never transports, never enlarges, never ever approaches catharsis. Worthy intentions ultimately do not make up for poor implementation; whatever its creators' objectives, Caroline, or Change finally doesn't work.

This production has life in it.

Bold and daring as a world premiere, Anthony Page’s terrific revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof barrels forth with the reckless abandon of its desperate and unflinching heroine, Margaret (the breathtaking Ashley Judd), or “Maggie the Cat” as she calls herself. Her ambition is to become pregnant by her husband, Brick, and thus ensure his (and so, their) status as heir to the vast and palatial Mississippi Delta plantation home of his father Big Daddy (perfectly incarnated by Ned Beatty), upon his imminent death from cancer.

There are problems: Brick (Jason Patric), a former local star athlete, can barely stand the sight of her. He has spent his nights in a whiskey-soaked gloom since the death of his best friend Skipper, and has a palpable disdain for Maggie, who insinuates that the friendship was homosexual in nature. Also covetous of Big Daddy’s estate are Brick's older brother and sister-in-law, Gooper (Michael Mastro) and Mae (Amy Hohn), who will stop at nothing to procure it for themselves and their ingratiating litter of “no-necked monsters” (Maggie’s term). They tattle to Big Mama (Margo Martindale) what they learn from eavesdropping on Maggie and Brick, and blatantly lie to Big Daddy about the terminal state of his health until their self-favoring legal affairs are in order.

Though Maggie is virtually absent in the second act, the first and third belong to her and it is ultimately her play. Judd’s Maggie is feline in remarkable and surprising ways. Just as cats seem to gravitate toward those who care for them least, so she is unyielding in her prance-circle-and-rub of Patric’s sullen Brick. So heartbreaking is her resilience to his stinging obloquy and physical rebuffs: their Act One fight scene is both real and balletic, but it is her recoveries from his sexual rejections that are most devastating. Shock, hurt, shame, grief, torment, determination and defiance all fly across her face in the brief beat before she responds.

Just as emotionally agile are Beatty and Martindale, whose characterizations fascinatingly mirror those of Brick and Maggie. Martindale is wonderful as the gracelessly bovine Big Mama, clamoring for both Brick and Big Daddy’s permanently withheld affections. Beatty’s Big Daddy is so convincing as a crass, hubristic old bigot that when he, too, begins to beg for Brick’s affection (and later when he discovers he actually does have cancer), his sense of defeat is so disarming that his character (and performance) becomes the most human of all.

Mastro and Hohn (as the insidious Gooper and Mae) are deliciously despicable and it is a pleasure each time they respectively slither and waddle onto the stage so we can despise them further. As their brood of no-necked monsters, Pamela Jane Henning, Isabella Mehiel, Muireann Phelan, Zachary Ross, and Charles Saxton are each perfect little sycophants and perform one of the most adulatory song-and-dance routines ever for Big Daddy, leaving the audience in desperate need of insulin.

Patric is the only performer who doesn’t thrill. His line readings are appropriately acerbic and he’s certainly sexy enough for the part, but his silences are more empty than eloquent and I found myself longing for a presence more charismatic and provocative to match Judd’s audacity and dynamism.

But this is almost a quibble, under the circumstances. It is hard to know how to adequately and specifically praise Anthony Page for this splendid production. He has assembled a fabulous ensemble cast and a terrific set of designers (Maria Bjornson, Jane Greenwood, Howard Harrison, and Christopher Cronin, who designed sets, costumes, lighting and sound, respectively, have created a complete and unified world on stage). He has given us a production with life in it—a risk-taking revival of a venerable old play written fifty years ago that, unencumbered by reputation and tradition, makes us see Cat as if for the first time.

Mike Teele's new play Cedarwood Avenue is almost two plays. The first act is about a gay man living in New York City, trying to cope with his recently retired parents, who are, if anything, too understanding of his sexuality.  Since his coming out to them, somewhat belatedly, at 31, they have become voraciously interested in all things gay. They pore over books (including The Joy of Gay Sex), they undertake independent research with what they call their "homosexual friends," they join and become ardently active in their local New Hampshire chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). They visit their son in Manhattan and suggest an excursion to Stonewall ("birthplace of the Gay Pride movement," Dad proudly announces), where the one parent chats up the hunky bartender while the other plays pool with a bunch of leather daddies.

Act Two is about a brother's relationship with his older sister, from his birth to her death. Actually, before his birth: he relates, anecdotally, that the then five-year-old Karen ordered her mother to bring home a little sister—or else. The two siblings—in the middle of a brood of five kids—share tribulations and problems in a kinship that's quietly special inside this very ordinary, very typical middle class suburban family. She has an abortion at 19 and then a few years later, pregnant, consents to marry her unborn child's father even though she's not in love with him. He hides Playgirl magazines under his mattress at 13, and goes through a long and prolonged period denying and then adjusting to his sexuality. She survives a battle with cancer. They grow apart, but maintain a strong bond.

Now, as you have probably figured out, the man in Act One is indeed the same one that's in Act Two—a likable, modest, generally good-humored fellow named Mike. (That's the playwright's first name, too, which makes us wonder if any of this might be a tad autobiographical.)

What makes Cedarwood Avenue so distinctive and interesting is that the two stories Mike tells us are narrated from such different perspectives. The first half is the amused but exasperated musing of a grown man, getting to know his parents—really know them, I mean, as an adult—for the first time. He's a little bit shocked and a little bit delighted that, in their (relative) old age, these two people, who he remembers as a domineering mother and a distant father who worked nights, are suddenly quirky individuals indulging in all manner of unexpected adventures. Like accompanying their gay son to Stonewall.

The play's second half, meanwhile, is the saga of a brother and sister growing up together, their relationship deepening as they mature but never changing its balance. Teele delineates this bond with compassion and love, making this by far the more emotionally affecting section of the evening—and that's true even before the sister's illness rears its ugly head.

I liked Cedarwood Avenue for its honesty and for its portrait of ordinary, good people doing nothing more or less than just being human. The production at Vital Theatre Company is simple and genuine, featuring a well-paced staging by Sue Lawless and an appropriately impressionistic, even spare, design by SherryAnn Danna (sets), Vanessa Leuck (costumes), and Stephen Sakowski (lighting). Brian Munn, who plays Mike, is appealingly engaging; his work is especially fine in the second act, with him convincingly channeling the boy turning into a man as Mike passes through childhood and adolescence. Stacy Melich, as the sister Karen, is excellent, too, creating a genuinely three-dimensional portrait of a flawed, complicated, loving woman. Melich's chemistry with Munn is terrific, too—we always believe that they are brother and sister. Robert Sonderskov is instantly likable as Mike and Karen's vaguely eccentric Dad; but Ellen Barry's performance as the Mother misses some of that lady's warmth and sharp intelligence.

Mac Wellman's Cellophane is repeatedly described in the press materials as "a spiritual history (and spectral portrait) of America, through the medium of Bad Language." That the "Bad" denotes "improper" or "incorrect" rather than "obscene" becomes clear early on; the text is full to brimming with enough double negatives, subject-verb disagreements, dangling participles, and other grammatical bugbears to make your middle-school English teacher keel over from conniptions.

In Cellophane, it is the job of the Flea Theater's resident company, the Bats, to make sense of the abstract, versified succession of monologues in which all this verbal defiance is employed. The gnarly cadences and flip-flopped syntax of Wellman's prosody chafe and poke against the niceties of presentation, which could have created an interesting aesthetic tension within the performances. But instead of surfing the flood of words, the performers for the most part attempt to display mastery over them, causing the delivery to feel hollow and lifeless. Though the performance styles range from crisp, classical elocution to broad, frantic clowning and rock 'n' roll posturing, the sum of the parts feels like a geometry lesson delivered in Pig Latin: dryly academic, and showing off for the sake of it.

This impression is aided by the neatly stacked nature of the staging, in which every performer duly gets his or her roughly equal time in the spotlight. Some performers are inevitably stronger than others, and the insistence on fairness causes the experience to resemble a recital or classroom showcase more than a fully integrated evening of theatre. Director Jim Simpson (who staged an earlier incarnation of the show in 1986) presents no appropriate images to support the torrent of words.

Not that I'm claiming these are Wellman's most interesting words. That he is a formidable linguistic stylist is undeniable, but words by themselves are a hard sell; I for one prefer to see his skills utilized in the service of a plot, or characters, or a theme. To call the text a "history" or "portrait" is to claim great poetic license. The only thing tying the pieces together is the repetition of certain words and phrases: "at cat," "X to X1," "hoohah," "no base without no ball," and, especially, "cheese." It makes for moderately interesting poetry, but tedious theatre.

In this shapeless production, the "Bad" in "Bad Language" risks being another kind of bad, the kind that means "not good." I'm no English teacher, but I'd rather be appeased by a little structure than opposed by its utter lack.

Certain Things, Which I Will Call Sacred (subtitled "The Lovers' Project") is an hour-long theatrical collage, created and performed by Jessica Burr and Matt Opatrny, about the relationship between a Man and a Woman. It's composed of snippets of poetry, dramatic text, and prose, some of which are tiny, self-contained playlets (such as a segment in which She has just taken a home pregnancy test and the couple contemplate the possible reality of a positive result); others are meditations, often striking, on the nature of love and commitment—one of these that stayed with me was a kind of deconstruction of some of the language of love.

All of the dialogue is hung around a story of sorts: an old man and woman, probably a married couple near the end of a long life together, are seen in a garden. She asks him to come inside; he says he wants to stay outside, alone; she concludes by saying she'll stay with him. Burr and Opatrny repeat this vignette over and over throughout the evening, always with slightly different emphasis and meaning. What we come to understand is that this elderly couple is summoning memories—perhaps not always their own—as they contemplate the nature of their own enduring relationship. Their story ends sadly with the death of the old man; perhaps their foreknowledge of this impending event is the catalyst for their off-kilter reminiscence.

Nearly all of the quoted fragments were unfamiliar to me (though I could guess, when I heard them, which pieces were by Browning and which were by Coleridge); the program lists ten different sources altogether, at least one of whom—Karen Larsen—has not even (apparently) been published. This use of material that can't be readily attributed when we hear it—intentional, I believe—forces Certain Things to stand entirely on its own as a work of art; if we could recognize the passages quoted here, we'd supply context for them, thus possibly altering Burr and Opatrny's intent. Unfortunately, that intent comes through only cloudily: the sense of moody melancholy is palpable, but more specific ideas and themes fail to emerge. By the end of the piece, we're left with a sense that the selections mean a great deal to Burr and Opatrny, but we're not entirely sure exactly what.

The program does, though, provide these two young artists with a splendid variety of acting opportunities, and they consistently rise to the challenges they set for themselves. Indeed, the best part of Certain Things is the way that Burr and Opatrny transform seamlessly from character to character. Burr is particular effective as the sad old woman who anchors the show (Opatrny's old-man walk, very specific, doesn't quite work).

Shrewdly trimmed to just under an hour in length, Certain Things showcases its creators' talents and gives us some engaging, if fleeting insights into the nature of love and relationships. More means than end, this unusual show promises worthwhile future work from Burr and Opatrny, and from blessed unrest, the theatre company that they co-founded with director Lucy Smith Conroy.

I liked Cherry Hill quite a lot, though I'm not sure I totally "got" everything in it. That's based in part on my sense that this new comedy-drama, written by Matt Okin and directed by Spencer Chandler, isn't finished yet: genuinely rich in ideas, it's ripe for further development by its creators, who will hopefully sharpen its focus and clarify its themes.

My impression also stems from the fact that for most of the time I was watching Cherry Hill—its title notwithstanding—I found myself zeroing in on just one of its characters, a 23-year-old  named Bernie Morton who returns to his suburban Maryland home after being away four years at college in New Jersey. Bernie, played with breathtaking raw innocence by Rawn Erickson II, feels like a latter-day Benjamin Braddock (the hero/anti-hero of The Graduate), and for a long time during Cherry Hill I was enthralled by Okin's perceptive updates of that classic tale of post-adolescent angst and alienation and intergenerational dysfunctionality. (There is, for example, a brilliant scene—at once hilarious and pathetically sad—in which Bernie's high school pal Deidre Thistlewhite proclaims her love for Bernie in a karaoke rendition of Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You": terrific, funny, evocative stuff.)

But along about Scene Eighteen it becomes clear that Bernie is not the center of Cherry Hill, and even though I perhaps should have seen where Okin was going in his play sooner, I confess that I didn't, and consequently the last third of it pulled me up a bit short. It turns out that Cherry Hill is about a place, and a kind of place—a stifling, stultifying, stunting sort of middle American suburb where no one seems to listen to (let alone understand) anyone else, and where everybody's hopes and dreams have either been deferred or derailed. The denizens of Okin's Cherry Hill (which is a real community, not far from the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland) include Bernie's dad, whose wife left him when he told her he wanted to start sleeping with other women; Bernie's best friend Judd Thomasino, who works as head usher at the local multiplex and doesn't seem to mind, still lives with his mother, and apparently is beating up his girlfriend Deidre on a regular basis; and Mol Porter, object of Bernie's obsessive love/lust, a gorgeous blonde who sleeps around, one of her "boyfriends" being Bernie's father).

Judd's mother, woefully mourning the death of her scientist husband, eventually sets her cap on Mr. Morton. Their relationship blossoms while Judd's and Deidre's deteriorates, thanks not only to his abuse but to Deidre's belief that Judd and his mother are sleeping together. Judd later turns up with a young man named Berk whom he describes as his "homosexual lover." And meanwhile Bernie can't get to first base with Mol; he can't even get into the ballpark.

The twisted tales of this town—which makes Peyton Place look like Whoville—are delivered in styles that range from fierce naturalism to overt absurdism: there's a scene where Judd announces that his father has been dead for a year and a day and his mom gets up from her mourning chair and immediately begins setting her trap for Mr. Morton, would-be husband number two. And there's a scene where Berk, who has almost no lines, locks Bernie in a consoling hug that's very funny and very weird. Cherry Hill is a catastrophe of human relations; Cherry Hill is a catalogue of human foolishness.

But it doesn't quite gel, or at least it didn't for me; which is why I'm hoping that Okin will take his script back to the drawing board and make some cuts and clarifications to punch up whatever specific themes he's hoping to get across here. Chandler's staging, which is mostly terrific, could benefit from a second look at how to manage the play's many transitions: Cherry Hill has some twenty-five scenes, and a more fluid approach, especially during the ones that are supposed to be occurring simultaneously, would enhance the piece.

The cast is generally fine. Richard Lurie practically steals the show in his cameo as silent but caring Beck; Kerisse Hutchinson makes similar comic hay out of her moments as Deidre, especially in the karaoke scene. Erickson is appealing and engaging as the blank slate that is Bernie, while Michael Sorvino scores as the deceptively easy-going Judd. Joan Porter Hollander is very funny as the mercurial Mrs. Thomasino. Erin Cook (Mol) and Bill Weeden (Mr. Morton) seem less at ease with their material; Christopher Lueck is tantalizingly enigmatic as the town's helpful but menacing sheriff, who appears only in Cherry Hill's first and last scenes.

All in all, an interesting and provocative but ultimately somewhat confusing evening of theatre.

I guess that Jon Robin Baitz was going for a suspense thriller along the lines of Sleuth when he conceived his play Chinese Friends. But his effort, which has just opened at Playwrights Horizons, falls sadly short of the mark. Spoiling its twists and turns by explaining its deficiencies would be wrong-headed, so please take not just my word but that of a good friend of mine, who sent me an email (unsolicited) in which she said, "There were so many holes in Chinese Friends you could practically drive a truck through them." Just so.

What I can tell you is that Baitz's play is set 26 years in the future, on what's described in the program as a "remote island somewhere in New England." (The very first of the play's gross implausibilities is this bizarre locale, which is described as being surrounded by snake-infested waters, as if it were in the Amazon.) On this island lives Arthur Brice, apparently entirely alone; as the story begins, he is greeting three visitors who have arrived by leaky boat, who turn out to be his son Ajax and two of Ajax's friends, Stephan and Allegra. Arthur is guarded and hostile in an unfunny jokey way, brandishing at them a shotgun that he probably wouldn't fire, but who knows. But soon Ajax reminds his dad that he's actually been invited, to deliver an audio tape that will presumably complete the collection of incriminating evidence (of what we don't yet know) amassed by Arthur, who seems to possess a paranoia as grand as the late Richard Nixon's.

The guests get let into the house, allowing Santo Loquasto's nifty but unnecessarily massive glass and steel garage door to lift and reveal the startlingly chic kitchen/dining room of Arthur's island retreat. (Loquasto has severely over-designed here, just as he did for Writer's Block at the Atlantic Theatre last spring.) What ensues is a series of cat-and-mouse games that are presumably shaped like the ancient Chinese game for which the play is named; in them, secrets and lies about events of the past several decades are rooted out and exposed and a kind of justice is finally dispensed. The whole point of the thing is that we're not sure, until the very final moments, exactly who we're supposed to believe or trust or root for. Baitz is canny about building characters with the right amount of ambiguity, and the overall structure of their strategies is neatly mapped out.

But the details defeat the playwright; though it's hard to guess what's going to happen moment to moment in Chinese Friends (a good thing), it's even harder to parse or believe the stuff that actually does happen (a very bad thing). As my friend said, we're talking Swiss cheese here: my companion and I spent our entire train ride home from the theatre playing our own game, citing example after example of Baitz's sloppy construction.

What makes matters worse is that, not content merely to try to create a workable thriller, Baitz has gone out of his way to make Chinese Friends overtly political. The mess that everybody (in the play, in the world) is in, circa 2030, according to Baitz, is a result of the bad policies of the (present, unnamed) administration. Now, I'm not one to stifle discussion about current events; but what Baitz does—via Arthur, who was, we are told, a very significant "policy wonk" in the administration that came to power in 2008—is spout anti-Bush rhetoric that, though designed to press certain buttons in the audience, is ultimately hollow. Meant, I am sure, as an earnest contribution to today's much-needed ongoing political debate, this stuff feels progressively less and less pertinent as the play runs on; and in the context of the story itself, it turns out to be little more than a red herring.

Peter Strauss survives the mire admirably, turning in a most respectable performance as Arthur Brice. His three young co-stars—Tyler Francavilla (Ajax), Will McCormack (Stephan), and Bess Wohl (Allegra)—have roles that are both less fleshed-out and less credible. They acquit themselves reasonably well nevertheless; at least they're attractive. Laura Bauer's costumes and Obadiah Eaves' sound/music are as unimaginative as Loquasto's set is numbingly overpowering; no one seems to have given a lick of thought to what our world might look, sound, or feel like two-and-a-half decades hence. Which would seem, on the face of it, to be one of the several possible appeals of a work like Chinese Friends. Alas, this production disappoints on just about every front.

Fans of great acting will not want to miss Nancy Walsh's triumphant tour de force in John Clancy's revival of Cincinnati. Walsh storms into the intimate downstairs playing space at 78th Street Theatre Lab before the lights have even gone down, in such a frenzy of raw nervous energy that we fear for her safety and—after she starts yelling at the audience—our own. She's carrying an armload of books and her demeanor makes it clear that she's some kind of teacher and she thinks we are her students. As she agitatedly tries and repeatedly fails to get her cigarette lit, she lets loose a torrent of stream-of-consciousness ramblings peppered with invective about a meeting that a woman whom she calls "Susan" has had to endure with an infuriatingly cool and collected superior. Eventually, she manages to gain some control over herself, to approximate composure. And the real breakdown begins.

Cincinnati—the fierce, frightening, highly intellectual inner monologue by Don Nigro that Walsh has already played to great acclaim abroad—is the story of a woman struggling to deal with loss, grief, and sanity. In fits and starts, Susan's situation reveals itself through Nigro's carefully reckless prose: she teaches philosophy; she used to be married and once had a daughter; she lived in Cincinnati. All of that is in her past; what she has now are memories of a fire and the charred body of her child, plus the knowledge that she can't go back to Cincinnati ever again.

But this is no mere linear narrative of a woman's descent into madness (and/or herself?). No, what Nigro seems interested in here is much deeper and scarier: Cincinnati is a journey inside the exploding brain of a brilliant woman who understands that she's losing her mind and is looking everywhere but within for an explanation. Susan returns again and again to the notion of aloneness—the idea that no one can ever comprehend the pain that she feels, and the related idea that it is only that pain that defines her as human. Sometimes bitter, sometimes humorous, sometimes blisteringly brutal, Susan's musings offer no solace and yield no answers. But they rivet our attention throughout this ultimately sad and disturbing play.

Susan is an Everest of an acting challenge, and that's why it's thrilling to see her so comprehensively and organically embodied in Walsh's intelligent, intuitive performance. The flashbacks, the flights of fancy, the fits of anger—all emanate naturally from this intense and troubled woman who feels things too strongly and thinks about things too deeply. At the same time, Walsh shows us a consciousness outside of itself, narrating its own devolution, as it were; and here Walsh's command of her instrument stands her in particularly good stead, demonstrating, for example, the precise way that someone can look at another with simultaneous compassion and contempt. Walsh's energy is so immense here that when the play is over, we feel spent with her; she needs a moment to rejuvenate after the lights come back up for her curtain call—and so do we.

John Clancy's direction is spare and direct, entirely free of staginess or artifice that might distance us from the proceedings. Cincinnati emerges as an achingly authentic, bruisingly involving hour in the theatre, and Walsh's work in it—gallant and unforgettable—will surely rank as one of the emotional highpoints of the theatre season.

It's been quite a while since I have seen a work of theatre as pointed, potent, and visceral as Spring Theatreworks' Cinders. Jeffrey Horne's revival of Janusz Glowacki's sly, shrewd, disarming parable of corruption, power, and mis(dis)information is thoughtful, provocative, and arresting. Boldly acted and brilliantly designed, this is theatre at its very best: anyone in search of the challenges and jolts that superior drama can serve up should hurry to the Milagro Theatre in the Lower East Side and experience this piece, which is surely one of the finest productions of 2003.

Cinders takes place in Poland in 1979 in a girls' reformatory. (Note that that was before the end of one-party rule in Poland; but the events of Cinders could happen anywhere at any time, and, more or less, they do.) The reform school is overseen by the Principal and run by his Deputy; on their watch, the girls are going to put on a play based on "Cinderella," and this play and its development are going to be filmed by a documentary film Director who is eager to create something artful and sensational that will win him a prize at a festival in Germany.

Glowacki sketches out the web of power relationships among his players—that's the crux of his play, in fact. Among the girls, there's a scary Lord of the Flies/women's prison movie pecking order, dominated by the girl who will play the Prince in "Cinderella." Several of the smaller girls function as lackeys at best (as slaves, at worst), while others serve as deputies. Only the one who will play Cinderella is a match for the Prince, at least in part because she tells such wonderful stories—fairy tales of their own devising are the only escape for these maltreated young women, who are victims not only of parents and communities that ignored and/or abused them, but also of the system in which they now find themselves trapped.

Which brings us to the next rung of the hierarchy, occupied by the Deputy, who practices methods of control that would be the envy of any would-be dictator or terrorist. There's a particularly chilling scene at the end of Act One in which the Deputy interrupts the girls' storytelling with a surprise inspection of the barracks that culminates in two of them being summoned via a tap on the legs. (The girls dutifully follow the Deputy, and the lights blackout before we know what happens to them next.)

The Deputy is not above playing mind games with his ostensible boss, the Principal, or with the Visitor from the Outside World, our documentary film director. The Director, meanwhile, not exactly beholden to any of his subjects, nevertheless needs to comprehend the politics of this place so that he can better exploit them, in pursuit of what he will certainly call honesty but is at best only half-truths. Indeed, the tendency of every one of the authority figures in Cinders—from the Director all the way down to the Prince—to disseminate, to use words to obfuscate rather than to communicate, proves the most insidiously resonant fact of this play: what are underlings supposed to do when a thing is officially not whatever it actually is?

They fight back, is what: there is heroism in Cinders—utterly unexpectedly, I should add, so beaten down are its oppressed characters.

Horne has staged the play in bright light and shadowy dimness (lighting design is by Matt Gratz) on a stark, simple set by Jonathan Collins that makes spectacular use of the Milagro's problematic stage, dividing it into a visible zone bounded by a pair of curtains and an invisible zone surrounding it, to whose mysterious depths the characters retreat when they're not needed. Jessica Steele's effectively quirky costumes and Stephen Pietrowski's evocative mood fill out the rest of the environment.

The ensemble of twelve actors do extraordinary work. The eight women in the cast—Karen Allen, Erin Treadway, Jennifer Naso, Shannon Flynn, Karen Ogle, Maggie Kettering, Alison Saltz, and Kelly Reeves—create exquisitely specific individuals as the school's inmates, each one catching and holding our attention as we glimpse her humanity being drained away. Gregory Kostal is perfectly officious as the Principal's superior, while Matthew Drennan is seductively opportunistic—like a viral infection—as the Director. Doug Simpson is likeably ineffectual and well-meaning as the Principal, so much so that we almost feel sorry for him, that is until we remember that he's as culpable in his incompetence/apathy as his Deputy is in his petty tyranny. As the Deputy, Scott Thomas Hinson is superb: he actually looks like Simpson, or at least what Simpson would look like if he'd shrunk in the wash: he marshals his character's grievances and insecurities and ego-tripping grandiosities with just the right level of restraint, creating a chilling portrait of the bureaucrat-as-fascist of terrible authenticity.

Glowacki's script, translated by Christina Paul, grabs our attention with its ironical, suspenseful story-telling, and holds it with its hideous and horrible honesty. Cinders, exploring the timeless capacity—desire?—of man to exploit man, feels particularly timely at this historical moment. Theatre simply doesn't get more pertinent than this.

What is it with these Australians? Slowly but surely they're taking over the entire entertainment industry: Hollywood is pretty much in their grasp, Broadway is showing signs of succumbing (at least if Hugh Jackman is any indication), and now they've got their hands on the circus as well.

Not that this is a new development: Circus Oz has been traveling the world for 25 years, showering audiences everywhere with a barrage of gleeful, clownish anarchy. On their third visit to the New Victory Theater, they spare New York no bedlam. With a raucous rock band onstage and a subversive crew of buff and occasionally bawdy performers, they may not be a parent's dream but they're certainly a kid's. Take, for instance, Erik, a robot dog almost as ribald as Triumph, the foul-mouthed rubber pooch from Conan O'Brien. When he flaunts his aluminum bollocks before the spotlit front row, you can see the moms and dads cringe even as their children shriek with joy.

Metallic canines aside, there are many things here that you've seen before: trick BMX-bike riding, by-the-numbers acrobatics, white-faced clowns making merry. But for every familiar bit, there's something completely new: a clown (Tim Coldwell, the group's elder statesman) doing an entire act standing upside-down on the stage's high proscenium; a bunch of shrieking human-sized cockatoos hurtling dangerously through the air in an elaborate trapeze act (replete with fake bird poo); a contortionist (the stunning Sosina Wogayehu) juggling multiple balls amidst impossible undulations. Overall, the performers' feet spend less time on the ground than anywhere else.

The whole affair has an irresistible rough-and-ready quality. Performers wander onto the stage during each other's acts and stick around to see what happens; the transitions between acts channel the wildly chaotic spunk of unsupervised children storming a playground. The flip side of this roughness, however, is that sometimes the going is a bit rough. Mistakes are made, people stumble, occasional bits don't work out or go on for too long without any discernible climax.

Still, I spent just enough time convinced I was about to view someone's untimely demise that the experience as a whole was much more exciting than not. The skill, brio and daring of the performers is electrifying, their feats deserving of respectful awe from the mere mortals in the seats. Even the group's none-too-subtle political commentary can't dilute the primal thrill that comes from seeing Matty the Boy Scout shot from the Humanitarian Cannon over the heads of the audience in an effort to earn his World Peace merit badge.

It would take a cold, cold audience to deny the group's infectious spirit, and on the snowy night I attended children and, yes, even adults hooted and hollered with glee. If this is the face of the impending Australian hegemony, at least we can all be assured of a good time.

In 1970, there was briefly on Broadway a play called Norman, Is That You? which made a farce out of a Midwestern father's discovery that his son is gay and living with his male lover. Closet Chronicles, a new play by Eric R. Pfeffinger that is being produced by Fat Chance Productions & Monday Morning Productions off-off-Broadway, treads pretty much the same ground.

Oddly, Pfeffinger seems blissfully unaware of some of the key events—the gay liberation movement, the AIDS crisis, this year's Supreme Court ruling—that have rendered his thin one-joke premise nearly obsolete. Which is not to say that homophobia, internalized or externalized, no longer exists; indeed, Closet Chronicles proves that it's still alive and well: this play is so dumb and so offensive that it sets the cause of gay rights back a good 25 years.

It takes place in Cincinnati, where Ed and Nancy Angell live with their troubled teenage daughter, Agatha. Their elder son George returns home for the holidays, and it is on three of them—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter—that our story unfolds. Over turkey and stuffing, George drops an out-of-the-blue bombshell: "Mom, Dad—I'm gay." Christmas features the family festively reading from the Bible (the passage in Leviticus that says for a man to lie with another man is an abomination; Dad hasn't quite gotten used to the idea yet). George's present from his parents is a gift certificate to the Gay No More clinic. For Easter, George plans a little surprise of his own: he brings along his lover, who turns out to be black.

Would-be hilarity ensues in Act Two as Wes (that's George lover) cheats on him in the family's living room with the Gay No More doctor and Mom accidentally lets slip that Dad has a thing for feet. Pfeffinger actually has a germ of a good idea with the character of Agatha, who feels neglected because big brother George's coming out is occupying all of the family's attention. But the situations are so two-dimensional and the characters so dim that it's impossible to become engaged or invested in anything that happens in Closet Chronicles. And the dialogue—mostly lame gay jokes that wouldn't make the cut even on a bad sitcom—is leaden and unbelievable.

We're left with two questions: Why would anybody put this drivel on stage; and why on earth is the fine actress Marilyn Sokol (who plays Nancy) reduced to performing in it?

It’s easy to see why Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean appears so frequently on college campuses across the country—it features a large, almost entirely female cast and bursts to the seams with juicy scenes and good parts. It’s no surprise to learn, then, that the foundations of this production lie with the Circle in the Square Theatre School. A group of recent alumni, most of whom performed in a production of Jimmy Dean there last year, have come together to form TowardsTruth Productions, with this remounting of the show as their inaugural effort.

The play centers itself around the masks people hide behind to get through their lives, most notably Mona, whose life peaked the day she was chosen to be an extra on the set of Giant, James Dean’s last film, and bottomed out the night of his death, not long thereafter. The show takes place twenty years to the day after that fateful night, when Mona hosts a reunion of her Dean fan club. Through the course of the evening, all the characters are forced to drop their facades and confront the truth. Hanging over all is Marfa, the site used to film Giant, which features prominently and is of course, in typical movie fashion, just a facade as well.

In the central role of Mona, Summer Crockett Moore does fine work, as does Jessika Hardy as her younger self. Other standouts include Siobhan Parisi as Mona’s best friend Sissy and Valeda Hood, who gives a completely convincing performance as the “slow” Edna Louise. Director Alan Langdon coaches the cast through some great moments, especially in the climactic second act, but Graczyk’s script seems a bit too one-note, and the ending wraps up so neatly you could tie a bow around it.

TowardsTruth seems to be off to a good start with this production, and many of their actresses certainly prove themselves capable of challenging work. Their most difficult task is ahead: finding a show with enough good roles for all that is interesting and challenging.

What I liked best about Constellations, the new play by Julie Book, is the way that it stays true to its objectives: it sets out to chart one bright young woman's descent into madness, and it does so in an intelligent and compelling way. If ultimately Constellations winds up on familiar and frequently-trod ground, its journey there is surprising and interesting.

We meet the heroine of Constellations in a bar. Her name is Jenny, and her vocation (exotic dancer) belies her sensitivity and intellectual prowess. Jenny is steeped in science, especially astronomy, but she's supporting herself as a glorified hooker: we understand right away that her propensity for danger is rooted in a lousy self-image and a badly troubled childhood. Most of the play takes place in a mental hospital, to which Jenny has been consigned following the death of one of her pick-ups, a practitioner of autoerotic asphyxia (i.e., someone whose orgasms are enhanced by the sensation of being strangled). How Jenny got here is revealed in flashbacks that comprise the main action of the drama.

Much of Jenny's history is casebook—an absent, drug-addicted mother, and sexual abuse at the hands of an overly ardent step-father—but there is still plenty in Constellations to keep us riveted. Chief among these is Eugene, a fellow mental patient who may well be Jenny's soulmate; at the very least, he represents her first chance at an equitable and stable relationship with a man, and despite his, er, eccentricities (one of which is a propensity for taking off all of his clothes at inappropriate moments), he and Jenny become a couple to root for.

Another unusual touch in Book's deft script is the use of two "ghost" figures—physical manifestations of beings from Jenny's subconscious, one her step-father, the other a more benign father substitute, the scientist Carl Sagan. Book uses these specters particularly skillfully in scenes between Jenny and her therapist, Dr. Mann, illustrating the struggles within the young woman's mind as she grapples with reality and the future.

Constellations features a generally praiseworthy cast, led by Stephanie Schweitzer as Jenny and Eric Millegan, who does excellent work as the odd but sympathetic Eugene. James Riordan is seductive yet creepy as Jenny's kinky companion Jonathan, and Annie McGovern is fine as Dr. Mann, at first businesslike and then appropriately compassionate. Less effective are Ernest Mingione as Jenny's stepfather and Charlie Moss as Sagan, neither quite summoning up the totality of his character that would help us fully understand Jenny's inner turmoil.

Direction by Thomas G. Waites is brisk and design by Ian McDonald, Barbarella Zane, and Thomas Anderson with David Erbach is serviceable. Constellations is a commendable achievement. Its run was abbreviated to a single performance; if it should happen to re-emerge; or if Book should put another play before us, it would certainly be worth taking a look.

Rudy Gray's new drama Conversation with a Kleagle tells a compelling, important story of a dark side of the American past that we need to be sure never to forget. Set in the late 1920s, the play begins in a small Louisiana town, where local bigshot Randall Monahan is chewing the fat with visiting reporter John Watson over a cup of (very) spiked coffee. The conversation drifts, over and over again, to what Monahan refers to as "Nigras": their inherent inferiority to whites, their place on the social stratum, and the best ways to deal with them when they get uppity (i.e., lynching).

It's shocking talk, even in context; and especially because we know (and Monahan quickly figures out, though it's not entirely certain just how quickly) that Watson is a light-skinned black, "passing" for white to provide entrée to this bigoted Southern power monger who thinks nothing of dressing up in full Ku Klux Klan regalia as a genial practical joke for his guest. Watson is a reporter for a Negro newspaper based in Chicago, and his expose of Monahan helps seal his reputation as a fearless, crusading journalist, though at a fairly steep price.

For as soon as Monahan is sure that Watson is black, he tries to lure him into staying for what would certainly turn into a lynching. Watson is only saved by the quick thinking of a Negro bootblack, Tookie, who arrives unexpectedly to shine Watson's shoes and manages to help the reporter escape out the saloon's back door to safety.  Back home in Chicago, Watson learns what this brave act cost Tookie: he has methodically been stripped of job, home, security, and—most horribly—his oldest son, who disappeared after school one afternoon and was never seen again.

Did such heinous activity really happen in our country, regularly and unchecked, less than a hundred years ago? Gray shames us by reminding us that it did; the lesson of Conversation with a Kleagle is that we must work hard to make sure that it never happens again. Gray depicts the hatred and ignorance of his racist Southern characters uncompromisingly: the play's climactic scene, in which Watson returns to confront Monahan, fairly reeks with ugliness as the latter systematically degrades and humiliates this Negro journalist whom he calls "boy" and to whom he feels righteously superior.

If the play has a flaw, in fact, it's that this pivotal scene belongs too entirely to Monahan. When things start to get out of hand and it looks like violence might be done to Watson, the Southerner cannily rethinks his position, leaving our ostensible hero to do little but cower and react. Gray feeds us enough of Watson's back story to make us root for an act or two of raw courage, but the play comes up short in that regard.

Nevertheless, it's a worthy enterprise, made powerful by a pair of forceful and commanding performances by Steve Aronson as Monahan and Todd Davis as Tookie. Mark A. Daly doesn't make as much out of Watson, but as I've said, the role is somewhat underwritten. Willie Ann Gissendanner and Eric R. Moreland have a stirring scene as Watson's parents (it's a flashback, though director Stacy Waring doesn't help us understand that until it's almost too late).

Conversation with a Kleagle is imperfect, but like just about everything else I've seen at The WorkShop Theater Company it's brimming with earnestness and integrity. It's obviously more important to these folks to tell a socially conscious and significant story than to worry about commercial concerns. Such endeavor is only to be encouraged.

Cookin' is a lot of fun. It comes to the New Victory Theatre from Seoul, where it has become the longest running show in Korean history; it's been seen in more than twenty countries all over the world, including the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. Its success is easy to understand, for Cookin' speaks the universal language—no, not of food: of the beat. Cookin' is a joyous, funny, exuberant celebration of percussion, of the childlike jubilation in making a whole lot of noise. Kids and grown-ups alike respond viscerally and happily.

Which is not to say that there's no cooking in Cookin'. On the contrary, the premise of this loose, good-natured show is that a team of chefs is charged with creating a multi-course wedding banquet—and they have only one hour in which to do it. The team consists of: Head Chef (Won Hae Kim), Female Cook (Choo Ja Seo), Sexy Food Dude (Ho Yeoul Sul), and—a last minute addition—Nephew (Bum Chan Lee). Nephew's uncle is The Manager (Kang Il Kim); nepotism, rather than skill, has landed him his job, which is part of the problem faced by this kitchen quartet. The rest of the problem is that, like Nephew, none of them seems able to stay focused on the task at hand. Instead, these folks are liable to begin chopping some vegetables and, in short order, wind up tapping their knife blades rhythmically on the chopping blocks in neat percussive harmony. After that, it doesn't take long for the feet to start tapping, the bodies to start bouncing, and the stage floor to start filling up with flying bits of cucumber, onion, carrot, and cabbage as the chefs let their fancies carry them away.

Cookin' charms as creator/director Seung Whan Song devises ever more ingenious ways to turn kitchen rituals into zany, exciting musical numbers. Some of the bits are broadly slapstick, like the staff's abortive attempts to kill the enormous duck (played by a big silly-looking stuffed toy) that is supposed to be the evening's main course. Other sketches are showcases for the extraordinary cast's particular skills, like a plate-juggling exhibition led by Nephew or a funny physical routine in which Head Chef gets stuck inside a trashcan.

And some moments are just blissful, as the four performers get caught up in the energies and moods of the remarkable music they make, using all sorts of found kitchen objects (pans for gongs, mixing bowls for drums, chopsticks for drumsticks, etc.). The show is built on a Korean musical style called Samulnori which, as explained in an informative program note, "reflects and reconstructs the routine beat of Korean life." One of the neat things about Cookin' is the painless and fascinating cultural exchange that it facilitates. We learn and understand a great deal about another country's way of life—and all with barely a dozen words of English uttered on stage!

We also find ourselves in awe of this amazing group of performers. Bum Chan Lee makes the biggest impression, in part because of his sweetly ingratiating performing style and in part because of his spectacular drumming: his quickness and his concentration are downright astonishing. Won Hae Kim and Kang Il Kim excel as clowns, while Ho Yeoul Sul and Choo Ja Seo shine particularly during a martial arts choreography sequence.

Cookin' bounces along giddily and easily for ninety minutes, switching gears often enough to ensure that even the youngest members of the audience (and this is a great show for all ages) don't get bored. Various kinds of interactivity are introduced throughout, including one bit where two lucky audience members get to taste some of what's been concocted on stage, and—a highlight—the "Dumpling Challenge," in which four volunteers are made to work extremely hard, to the delight of the rest of the crowd.

Cookin'—finally more Stomp than Iron Chef—is a distinctive theatrical treat. It's a grand and lively introduction to the traditions of a country halfway around the world; and of course it's a fun and appropriate warm-up to a delicious meal right after the show. Korean, anyone?

The show begins most unexpectedly with Kelly as Carême carting into the playing space an undercooked blancmange, with hilariously messy results. From there, the piece's first half recreates a chaotic (but apparently not atypical) day in the working life of Carême. On this particular day, he is commanding a fleet of chefs and assistants to create a feast for several hundred guests of England's Prince Regent, in honor of the forthcoming birth of a child (and, it is fervently hoped, heir) to the Prince of Wales. The menu is astounding: dozens of different dishes in every imaginable category, topped off by eight desserts of sculpted sugar depicting famous monuments such as the Parthenon.

The mere notion of preparing all of this food is daunting; doing so under the conditions then prevailing—before electricity, before refrigeration, before modern appliances—seems downright miraculous. So Kelly, in the guise of Carême, utterly has our attention as he barks out orders to unseen staffers regarding every detail of the regal banquet. In between, he talks about how he happened to end up in this English kitchen (more or less as a spoil of war, following Wellington's defeat of his one-time boss Napoleon Bonaparte); he also regales us with anecdotes about the many famous people he has fed. The effect is, to be sure, something like Bobby Flay in a time machine; but the material is so darned interesting—and our concern over the fate of this remarkable meal so complete—that the show truly compels and engages.

What follows proves something of a letdown, however. Kelly shifts his narrative style to that of a documentarian (a la Doug Wright in I am my own wife), chronicling, in Cooking for Kings' second half, both his own quest for information about Carême and his subject's rise and sad (though vaguely clichéd) fall. After our genuine investment in Carême's work in Part One, this pulling back feels at once forced and anticlimactic; it feels like someone told Kelly that a one-hour show wouldn't sell, prompting him to add something new onto a piece that in fact works astonishingly well.

Kelly also attempts to whip up an actual dessert during Part Two, which is logistically difficult in the very tiny Theatre C of 59E59. It also makes him fall prey to what I'll call the "Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair" syndrome: Mary Martin reported in her memoirs that when she first performed her signature song in South Pacific, she sang at the same time that she put the shampoo on her head, with the result that no one paid attention to a word she said; Kelly has the same problem when he mixes up the batter for a pastry just a few feet away from his audience—we're so intrigued and curious about what he's doing that we temporarily lose sight of the drama that he's enacting.

This troublesome second half notwithstanding, Cooking with Kings makes for an informative and entertaining evening. And Kelly has written a book about Carême (available at the theatre, of course), for those whose appetites for culinary history have been whetted by his play.

After the opening night performance of the original 1949 production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a woman leaving the theatre uttered the now-famous statement, “[This play] is a time-bomb under American capitalism.” I wonder if she had seen the original production of Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-At-Law 18 years earlier, and if so, what her response might have been. Having no familiarity with this play previous to witnessing The Peccadillo Theater Company’s superb revival, I was stunned by the fact of its relative obscurity.

Willy Loman was a victim of capitalism—its discarded agent. Whereas, George Simon’s life is a rags-to-riches tale, every plutocrat’s favorite bedtime story. Having grown up amongst the multi-ethnic, largely immigrant population of Yorkville, Simon has become New York City’s most revered and envied attorney. The brilliance of Rice’s protagonist is that he is at once kind, susceptible, nasty and bullying—a man who believes he has, not so deep down, a heart of gold; he does not realize that it is the gold we call “fool’s.” Thus, the dynamic of the play is much like a boxing match: the challenger (Simon) versus the defending champion (Capitalism)— watching one man often succeed and rarely (but profoundly) fail at beating the System.

Set in the reception room of the law firm of Simon & Tedesco and in Simon’s private office, the play is populated by a fascinating array of characters, each in Simon’s personal and professional orbit—his lovesick and faithful secretary, who he assumes is lesbian; his unfaithful socialite wife and her two snobby children from a former marriage; his pious mother and hedonistic brother, who is in a perpetual gambling-induced financial quagmire; a libidinous client, recently acquitted with his aid of her husband’s murder; and an elderly woman from the old neighborhood whose speechifying socialist son he pledges to release from prison.

Simon goes through a kaleidoscopic range of attitudes and behaviors in conflict and collusion with these and other characters, and under Dan Wackerman’s dynamic direction, John Rubenstein masterfully navigates his vacillating morality. Comedy, tragedy and melodrama are several terms historically used to describe this play; Rubenstein’s vigorous and complex portrayal helps us understand why. By the middle of the second act when the major plot points emerge—Simon is threatened with disbarment by an adversarial colleague based on a small(ish), well-intentioned ethical slip from years ago—I was already ensorcelled by the to-and-fro of this man’s day-to-day life.

Wackerman and his exquisite ensemble maintain a brisk clip as they nail the everyday interactions of the attorneys, secretaries, clerks, messengers, clients and would-be clients. The perfect amounts of emphasis and overlap are given to their delightfully banal exchanges. With such a terrific cast, I am hard-pressed to isolate specific performances, but I will mention a few: Lanie MacEwan as Regina, Simon’s secretary, has alternately fire and flood in her eyes as she struggles to maintain the tractability of her emotions; as Zedorah Chapman, the acquitted husband-killer, Nell Gwynn is hilariously single-minded in her desire to augment her lawyer’s fee with some carnal gratuity; Beth Glover’s Cora, Simon’s wife, is a moving and purring ice sculpture, and Joseph Martin and Madeleine Martin are chilling as her Brahmin progeny; a hilariously long and frustrating investigatorial account is given by Robert O’Gorman as the firm’s good-natured process server who moonlights as a private detective; and David Lavine’s fervor as Harry Becker, the subversionary young man that Simon bails out of prison, provides some of the most affecting moments of the evening.

So much can be said of this play from both a dramatic and thematic standpoint that I can only try to evoke the scintillating and sophisticated flavors of this well-executed production and recommend highly that you see it. (There is also a comprehensive and useful program note by the dramaturg William M. Peterson.) I’m sorry to say that this is the first work I’ve seen by The Peccadillo Theater Company (now in its second decade of producing neglected American classics), but it has more than whet my appetite for many of their productions to come.

It’s about love. With Cupid in the title you get what you expect—a few lost souls, a few arrows, and a bit of magic.

The Imagination Company’s New York premiere of the musical Cupid and Psyche is an enjoyably romantic lesson on love. Its message is no deeper than to “Spread a Little Love,” as noted by the opening song title, but what a lovely message it is. Beautifully constructed by Sean Hartley and Jihwan Kim, with direction by Timothy Childs, this production is the perfect dessert to follow a romantic dinner at Chez Josephine.

This musical rendering of the Roman myth of the same title tells the story of a boy, a girl, and his mother. It's a tale of forbidden love that begins at the deserted altar of Venus. It seems that all the devotees of Venus are now paying homage to the beautiful virgin Psyche, whom they are all calling the "new goddess of love." Outraged, Venus calls upon her winged son Cupid to set in motion a plan of revenge. She tells Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. Cupid has every intention of appeasing his mother, however once he sets his eyes on Psyche, he too falls captive to her beauty and charm, and after a magical courtship the two fall in love. When Venus finds out, she determines to make Psyche suffer through many tests and punishments. Only through the intervention of the gods do the lovers reach their destiny.

Hartley’s book and lyrics and Kim’s music set a tone that is light hearted and fresh, with clear reflections of the musical styles of yesteryear. Just as we look to mythology to reflect on the pangs of our hearts' desires today, Hartley and Kim have successfully captured the timelessness of our passions. It seems that their goal is to bring smiles to our faces, to ease the taking of a breath, and to bring us closer to the person sitting next to us. They do this through laughter and with a moral at the end of the story. It’s a refreshing reminder at how uncomplicated theatre can be.

Childs’ direction seems to tell this story from the playful perspective of a child (pardon the pun!). Sometimes the action is animated, as in a Disney cartoon, complimented by the exuberant choreography of Devanand Janki. Childs sets up the best of story-telling environments—taking us back to the days when bedtime stories sent us off to that hopeful place of dreams.

Laura Marie Duncan’s Venus is deliciously sexy as she manipulates her son with jazzy intervals of jealousy. As Cupid, Barrett Foa is wonderfully earnest as the blonde boy with wings who's duping his mom to get the girl. As the beautiful mortal Psyche, Deborah Lew wins us over with the purity of her voice. As the sidekick to Cupid, Logan Lipton is delightfully fun as Mercury and even more so when taking on the roles of Pan and the Gargoyle from Hades. It’s also great to see Lew and Lipton making their off-Broadway debuts with such success and in such an enjoyable evening of theatre.

David Swayze’s set is simple, and most impressively, seems to enlarge the extremely small space of the Houseman Studio Theatre. Aaron J. Mason’s lighting is competent, but could have been enhanced with the use of more color. Christine Darch’s costumes seem to be most challenged, particularly Lew's, which seems to be a black leotard top and skirt with pieces of purple scarf pinned around the waist. Certainly the beauty of Psyche deserves better than this.

Go see Cupid and Psyche. Escape the chaos of your day and remember that love is in the air… breathe it in.