nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

I went to the final weekend of Gallery Players' Black Box New Play Festival not knowing what to expect—I mean, what do these people think they are doing, having a theatre company way out in Brooklyn? Doesn’t BAM do that? I quickly learned that there are some exciting things happening in Park Slope at the Gallery Players—and that they’ve been doing this for 35 years. Along with a full season, they produce the Black Box series, which is a boon to aspiring playwrights and theatregoers alike.

In the evening I attended, seven new works, all one acts, were presented. First up is The Cause by Mary Grisalano, a glorified skit about an imaginary “protest camp” run by an idiot, and populated by spoiled yuppie spawn, sent by their parents to perhaps atone for becoming yuppies. The direction, by Joseph Ward, moved the action along at a quick pace, and the actors were all very engaging, but I found the piece a little too long.

Next on the list is Us at 80 by Charles Forbes. In this piece, a group of octogenarians, on a yacht sometime in the near future, discuss life in a style reminiscent of Noel Coward's Private Lives. The trick in the production is that the elderly bon vivants are portrayed by young actors, giving us the juxtaposition of their early potential in contrast to how they turned out. The exposition in the play is a bit overabundant, but overall this is a nice piece. At one point, as the couples argue about whether or not the compromises they made in life were worth it, the action stops, as the yacht approaches what has become of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. All four actors look off, and nothing is said, but you can see by their expressions how ugly and sad what they are looking at is—and you wonder, are they looking at the Reserve or at what they themselves have become. It is a dynamic moment, and kudos must be given to director Michael Escamilla.

The third piece, Potluck, by Isabelle Assante and directed by Ted Thompson, is a rough ride—a bleak attack on the American couple, complete with an elderly couple that hates each other, and of course, the intruder who has just killed his wife and is looking for a good home-cooked meal. I don’t know if it’s the writing, the direction, or the cast, but I just didn't get this piece. I should say that Steve Litwitz, as the murderous intruder, is palatable—but he was too little, too late to save the show.

Fourth up is Mushroom Pie by Joe Lauinger. This is great fun—a slick urban farce about two yuppies obsessed with food. The script is like a fine soufflé: light, delicate, fluffy—and full of hot air. This comedy of manners, expertly played by D.H. Johnson and Kathy Cortez and directed by Jonathan Summey, is a gem, and I am now a Joe Lauinger fan.

The fifth show in the set is Apt. #1D, by Shannon Thomason, directed by Sara Thigpen. I must say that both the playwright and director are friends of mine, and this no doubt biased my reaction. The play is a simple little piece about two lonely people who chance upon each other in the great, lonely playground that is New York. The characters, both lost souls who are have trouble expressing themselves, remind me of some the characters in Our Lady of 121st Street. The cast, Tiffany Tang and Javier Checa, are great—natural, endearing, at ease with themselves. I would like to see this piece either made into a full length play, or shortened a bit.

The sixth show is a quick little bit of erotic verbal exchange imaginatively titled Undress Me. A woman sitting at a bar (Leigh Williams) asks her date (David Nelson) to verbally undress her. What follows is an enticing interplay of erotic visions which leads naturally to questions of fidelity and what those words of lust could mean, relationship-wise. This was another piece that should either be lengthened or shortened.

The last piece, The Fish Pond, is also by Joe Lauinger. Like Mushroom Pie, this is a play about a couple that is smooth on the surface, but dangerously jagged inside. Kathy Cortez and D.H. Johnson again appear as a couple with trouble in their path. Jonathan Summey directs this as well. I would like to see the Gallery Players put together an evening of work by Lauinger—they obviously have the right people for the job. Here, a happy couple who seem smart and in love, at ease quoting e.e. cummings to one another, find a crack in their relationship when the man won’t believe the woman when she says she saw a few fish in an old fish pond.

Overall, this was an excellent night of exciting new theatre. I have already put the Gallery Players website on my favorites list on my computer. It’s www.galleryplayers.com, in case your wondering. I recommend going to the site, and then going to the theatre.

Gay Divorce is appropriate for all ages, but will probably only appeal to you if you are a scholar of the American Musical Theatre or are old enough to have seen its Broadway premiere in 1932. Musicals Tonight!, a concert-style reading series, begins the evening by asking why this musical, which originally ran 248 performances, has been forgotten, and within the first ten minutes, answers its own question.

Presenting Gay Divorce, which has a score by Cole Porter and a book by Dwight Taylor, to a contemporary audience is a formidable challenge; it is rife with permutations of the same banal observation: “Love stinks, but we all want it.” Love, in this case, is marriage, and we get to watch these good-natured men and women duke out their differences in one huffy little confrontation after another.

The premise for this dialogue involves a lovesick American novelist in London who is dragged by his attorney-friend to a seaside resort that is a haven for adulterers and other hedonists. The attorney’s mission: his client must be “caught in the act,” cuckolding her husband so he will grant her a divorce. But things go innocently awry when the novelist bumps into the object of his infatuation, who is (unbeknownst to him) the divorcée, complicating her already skittish commitment to this madcap plan.

Thomas Mills has directed (and choreographed) his actors in what I guess is “period style”: chirping, swooning, trembling, wise-cracking. But their performances are not agile or developed enough (this is, after all, a staged reading) to pull off convincingly stylized depictions. The one distinguished (indeed, terrific) performance is that of Jedidiah Cohen as Tonetti, the earnest Italian co-respondent-for-hire, who has, among numerous charming moments, a song entitled "I Love Only You," wherein he says goodnight to his wife before settling in for a chaste-scandalous sleepover with the divorcée.

Porter’s score save for "Night and Day" and "I Love Only You" is forgotten for a reason: it is dull, glib, and antiquated. Taylor’s book was once snappy, but now is, for the most part, appreciable only if you have the footnotes. And with added songs (including two real snores—"A Weekend Affair" and "Olga"—which were cut from the original and added from another score, respectively), this production unjustifiably clocks in at two and half hours. Still, while Musicals Tonight! may not have (or perhaps could not have) made Gay Divorce relevant, it still gives us a rare opportunity: for some, a walk down memory lane; for others, an alternative to the bureaucracy of the Avery Fisher library.

In Genesis, playwright Matthew Freeman tells, or re-tells, five stories that are among the most familiar to Christians, Jews, and Muslims throughout the world. Using medieval mystery plays as his primary source material, Freeman gives us here the tales of the Creation and the Fall of Lucifer, the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, the First Murder (Cain and Abel), the Flood, and the Sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, all presented in verse that is at once arresting, unfamiliar, and strikingly contemporary.

Now, what's to be gained by this? A lot, as it turns out. Freeman wants us to think about what these stories say and what they mean. He delivers them to us with forthrightness and genuine respect, but Genesis is a journey of discovery and rediscovery that forces us to confront what we think we know about these great ancient stories that we often take for granted. There's just a hint of subversiveness in the air, too—a good thing: stories this enduring need to be questioned and tested.

So here are some of the things that Freeman does in this remarkable work. He depicts Adam and Eve as a typical suburban couple whose peaceful existence is transformed by the nasty intrusion of a tempting worm with an apple. He makes Noah, with nods to Clifford Odets and Bill Cosby, into a simple old man who is mystified to be chosen by God to build the ark that will save mankind. He shows us Abraham and Isaac as unconditionally devoted father and son, locked in a test of faith and love that will prove empowering and historical.

God appears in every one of Genesis' scenes, and indeed the play can almost be construed as a kind of character study, mapping the evolution of the Almighty from Benign Creator to the angry Old Testament God who destroys the unholy and demands obedience and allegiance. Four different actors portray God during the course of the show (reminding us of the ideas that God created Man in his image and that God lives within each of us); particularly effective is the way Freeman, as director, has his actors pass on this Role from one to  the other, reaching out hand-to-hand like a living blow-up of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam." (The tangible trapping of God in Genesis is, aptly, a watch.)

The setting for all but Abraham's story is a spare but comfortable looking family room, and characters anachronistically wear coats, scarves, and hats; both of these design elements serve to make these larger-than-life stories feel more accessible. At the same time, Freeman's text is all in verse, much of it lifted verbatim from plays written centuries ago; the sometimes archaic language coupled with the relatively unusual verse format alienates us from these familiar tales and makes us work harder to listen and understand what we see and hear. This, to me, is what makes Genesis so valuable: having to really pay attention to what Abraham is saying as he prepares to sacrifice his firstborn son makes what this story has to say about blind faith startlingly resonant.

Debbie Jaffe, Jay Leibowitz, James Mack, T.I. Moore, and Barrett Ogden comprise the cast. Moore is especially effective, both as a comically vexed Noah in the Flood sequence, and as the silently judging God of Abraham in Genesis' final scene. Some breathtakingly smart and provocative songs by John Gregor serve as interludes between the scenes, providing subtle non-sequitur commentary on the play's themes. I would love to hear them again.

Freeman affirms, with Genesis, that he is one of New York's brightest and most thoughtful new playwright-directors.  It's refreshing to see such a young man take on subjects as large and important as the ones in this play so fearlessly and intelligently.

Does willful ignorance really need to flaunt itself in an off-Broadway musical?

In Golf: The Musical there's a musical number built around the dubious premise that, now that Iraq has been liberated (or conquered; pick the verb that suits your point of view), America can help it to join the ranks of the so-called "Free World" by teaching its citizens to play golf. This number features a stereotyped sheik character supposedly leading a camel on a long rope, includes a joke advertisement for a combination turban/golf towel, and  ends with an American flag waving as the lights come up for intermission.

Golf is never less dumb than this, but most of the time it is less offensive (though there is a lyric that compares Tiger Woods to Jesus Christ). Intended as a merry celebration of one of America's favorite pastimes, Golf instead is only leaden and hackneyed. Skits and songs are built around topics like the loneliness of the female golfer or the businessman who dreams of playing a perfect game on the links. It feels like leftover material from The Jim Nabors Show or some similar second-rate 60s-vintage TV variety show.

At a cabaret venue for a ten-buck cover charge (and with food and drink for diversion), it's possible that some of this material might be  reasonably entertaining. But at a $40 price tag, in a house that is nothing more than an off-off-Broadway studio space, Golf: The Musical is not just a let-down, it's a rip-off.

The cast, which includes Broadway veterans Joel Blum (Show Boat, Steel Pier) and Sal Viviano (The Full Monty, Falsettos), work hard to make Michael Roberts' music and lyrics work, while director/choreographer Christopher Scott does what he can with a postage-stamp-sized stage and skimpy production values. These talented folks are slumming: is there no respectable work for a two-time Tony nominee these days?

Anyone looking for a pleasant night at the theatre will find it with the Keen Company's production of P.G. Wodehouse's comedy Good Morning, Bill. A delightful confection of snappy banter and breezy romance, the play follows the affections of a starry-eyed aristocrat named Bill for Dr. Sally Smith, a  no-nonsense M.D. of great beauty. The first obstacle to his courtship is Lottie, the petulant flapper Bill has been dallying with; the second is the fact that Dr. Sally has no interest in him. Complicating matters further are Lord Tidmouth, a clueless old school chum, and Bill's golf-obsessed Uncle Hugo, who has his own ideas about what is going on.

Unlike Swift, Twain, and Dorothy Parker, to name just a few of his fellows in the Hall of Wits and Wags, Wodehouse's humor lacks bite; he is not interested in sharp satire, or in taking mankind to task for errors it seems unable to control. Instead, Wodehouse uses his fanciful imagination and facility with English to create a comforting world of eccentric twits dabbling in daffy flirtations. In a director's note in the program, Carl Forsman cites this good-natured lightness as a primary reason the play has been adopted by the Keen Company, whose mission statement declares its intent to produce "sincere plays," asserting that "earnest intent can still be sophisticated." The combination creates, as I mentioned above, a pleasant experience.

"Pleasant," I must admit, is a word often used to describe what something isn't. Though I was cheerfully engaged in the show right up to the end, I felt that something fundamental was missing in its execution; something that exists within the sizable overlap between tone, timing, and temperament; something that I can only think to call "verve." This lack of verve prevents the production from spanning any dizzy heights, or causing the audience to asphyxiate with joy—reactions that Wodehouse, toothless though he may be, is capable of inspiring. Director Carl Forsman, in his effort to stage the play "sincerely," sidesteps the crispness and distance that Wodehouse's comedy requires. Confusing dryness with iciness, he creates an experience that is enjoyable without being altogether funny.

This being said, on the night I attended, the performances gained in briskness and confidence until, by the end, they finally achieved the pace and sharpness they should have had from the start. Though all the performers have charm and grace to spare, the supporting characters get the most laughs. As Lord Tidmouth, Nick Toren enjoys the oblivious ease of the highly privileged, and his distracted good nature suffuses the entire show. Bridget Ann White's Lottie grows increasingly cockney with each appearance, to great comic effect. And John Vennema makes a splendidly blustery Uncle Hugo, torn between improving his swing and preserving his family's good name.

As Bill, Jeremiah Wiggins initially seems too straight and dull to be causing all this trouble, but by the time he feigns illness in order to lure Dr. Sally out to his country estate he's begun to hit his stride. (Hats off, by the way, to Nathan Heverin for designing such a funny, satisfying manor house.) And Heidi Armbruster embodies the good doctor with a striking balance of professional coldness and subterranean emotion; to watch her come out of her shell is a lovely sight indeed.

In sum, though, the experience remains more sweet than funny, more cute than caustic. Wodehouse's wit requires the lightness and agility of a rapier,  albeit one with a rubber tip; in this production, it feels like the entire sword is rubber. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to be affectionate; the show may be missing some verve, but its sincerity proves infectious.

I don't know whether it's gravity or not, but some force is dragging the men of the Williams family down: Clay is trying to talk his flighty French girlfriend out of having an abortion; his brother Scotty hasn't left the house in two years and spends all his time fantasizing about a gay porn star; and Mort, their father, can't get over his wife's recent departure and now dresses like Michael Jackson and spends an inordinate amount of time playing with his golf buddy's five-year-old daughter. Leave it to Marc Spitz, author of such profane late-night comedies as Shyness is Nice and "...Worry, Baby", to make this family trio the protagonists of a post-modern farce. In Gravity Always Wins, Spitz puts the "dis" in dysfunctional with a tale of disenchanted, disenfranchised, discombulated white men who can't crawl out of the ruts they've sunk into. It's funny, but it's also kind of depressing: there is no hope anywhere is sight for these characters. The oh-so fine line between comedy and tragedy blurs toward invisibility.

Actually, there's not much more to say about Clay, Scotty, and Mort, except that their attempts to improve their lots send one of them on a morbid trip to London and the other two to jail (Scotty gets arrested by an undercover cop from whom he tries to buy some Ecstasy; Mort gets hauled in for suspected child molestation). Father and son bond in jail, sort of; and then there's a reconciliation with the now-returned Mary, the matriarch of this damaged bunch, but her candid confession that she's able to look at her husband's bleached skin and nose job (he's taken the Michael Jackson thing very seriously) without throwing up doesn't really convince us that things are going to be rosy for these folks. Not to mention the therapy bills.

As I said, it's disturbing if you stop and think about it; and although Spitz and his excellent collaborators (led by director Jonathan Lisecki, who also stars as the terribly hapless Scotty) keep the laughs coming, they all seem aware of Gravity's serious undertow. Lisecki has filled the transitions between its many brief scenes facetiously with various characters dancing, go-go style, to an assortment of appropriate rock tunes (even the rat that Mort befriends in jail gets a turn), but the pathos is only barely masked.

All that said, the performances are hilarious, albeit in a desperate way that suits the play's style and timbre. The aforementioned Lisecki excels as the whiny agoraphobe Scotty, while Philip Littell enacts his gloved and occasionally moonwalking dad with exquisite conviction; Brian Reilly, in the fundamentally less showy role of Clay (who is more or less normal, if value-challenged; Marilyn to the Munster-like weirdness of everyone around him), is entirely likable and believable. Frequent Spitz/Lisecki collaborators Andersen Gabrych and Zeke Farrow are terrific, the former as the hunky and barely dressed idol of Scotty's affections, the latter as five variants on "The Man," emissaries from the outside world who turn out to be just as corrupt and messed up and misdirected as the Williamses. Valerie Clift has the least to do as Mary and neighbor girl Becky; but Alexandra Oliver is the show's revelation as Emma, a glorious comic creation whose thick French accent and thicker French belligerence belie the sexy come-hither look that never leaves her face.

It's possible, by the way, that I'm taking Gravity Always Wins a bit more seriously than its creators intend. But I wonder: the world has become so much messier and scarier than any of the pre-9/11 Spitz characters ever imagined; my guess is that the essential, well, gravity of our situation is weighing down on the playwright's mind.

I went to the New Federal Theatre's rousing new show, Great Men of Gospel, hoping to learn stuff. I was not disappointed. This musical, which is written and directed with enormous skill and intelligence by Elizabeth Van Dyke, traces the history of gospel music in America, from its roots in Africa to its present-day emergence as a significant force in popular culture.

What Van Dyke shows us, very compellingly, is how important music was to the Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved in a strange land an ocean away from their homes. Songs—specifically spirituals, or church songs—were a way for these immigrants to learn a new language (there's a thrilling number illustrating the power of "call and response" to do just that). More significantly, though, gospel singing was one of the only acceptable forms of release for slaves in ante-bellum America: glorious voices looking forward to a promised land, free from bondage, offered authentic joy in lives that were unimaginably hard.

Great Men of Gospel is performed by six remarkably accomplished musicians: Jeff Bolding, a fine singer and splendid piano player; Ralph Carter, who leads the company in a thrilling rendition of "Precious Lord," among others; Montroville C. Williams, who shines in solo performances of "We'll Understand It Better By and By" and "Stand By Me"; Gary E. Vincent, as light on his feet as he is soulful when he sings; Cliff Terry, who serves as the company's musical director; and Richard Bellazin, whose booming bass anchors the evening's frequent harmonizing. An audience that was mostly very familiar with the roughly four dozen gospel standards that comprise the score enthusiastically responded to these artists. And those of us who were being introduced to the canon for the first time found a great deal to savor as well.

To promote one’s production of Hamlet as a theatre experience for the entire family, as Minneapolis-based troupe Theatre de la Jeune Lune has, seems a wishful proposition. Most adults consider reading and seeing Shakespeare to be quite an arduous and demanding, if (possibly) ultimately rewarding, task. So why then actively encourage children ages 12 and up to see this production of Hamlet?

Because they will like it.

Clocking in at two hours and fifteen minutes, this vivid and potent reinvention of the play (a collaboration of director Paddy Hayter and the company) is a terrifically funny and eloquent potboiler. Stripped down to its most compelling elements, it is the tragedy of a family, but this production has all the makings of a middle-school sleepover: ghost stories and fart jokes.

The play, of course, begins with the shadowy specter of Hamlet’s Father (Vincent Graceiux), poisoned in his sleep by his brother (also played by Gracieux) who has less than two months later married Queen Gertrude (Barbra Berlovitz), Hamlet’s mother, and become the new king of Denmark. The young Hamlet (Steven Epp) is told of the appearance of his father’s restless spirit by the night watchmen, but soon encounters it for himself and is charged with avenging this treacherous murder. In the process, he goes mad, accidentally killing Polonius (Claudius’ chief advisor, played by Luverne Seifert) whom he mistakes for Claudius, incurring the wrath of Polonius’ son, Laertes (Stephen Cartmell), and catalyzing the madness and death by drowning of Ophelia (Sarah Agnew), Polonius’ daughter, with whom Hamlet had previously shared a budding romance.

It is not coincidental, then, that the actors move about in loose-fitting clothing that resemble pajamas and robes in rooms often moonlit and decked with sheets, pillows and canopies (a seamlessly artful design with costumes by Sonya Berlovitz, lights by Marcus Dilliard, and sets by Fredericka Hayter): much of Hamlet involves the characters’ fulfillment or desire to fulfill their dreams, those unexpected bulletins of forbidden desire. This world is patrolled by ghostly figures (with haunting masks, also by Fredericka Hayter) who are at times servants of the Court, but more often silent shades passing through the space with characters appearing and disappearing magically in their wake. (One of the most captivating moments is when Laertes carries on the drowned body of his sister and hands her to the shades who envelope her in their cloth wherein she is made ghost.)

But what of the fart jokes? Well, they are peppered throughout, mostly at the expense of Polonius, or as the comedic currency of the gravediggers (Siefert and Joel Spence). The company has found remarkable amounts of groundling humor in the text that is at once base and startlingly theatrical, and this is when the actors are most compelling—for example, Claudius’ and Gertrude’s first scene has Graceiux and Berlovitz each subdued by the shades with sheets (his a lusty red and hers black for her recent widowhood), straining like canines in heat to consummate their connubial privilege. Epp’s Hamlet is clownish but clear, not manipulating Shakespeare’s words, but using them expertly to manipulate others. Most engaging, however, is Siefert’s doltish Polonius whose preferred way of approach is jogging up to one sideways, and whose abusive actions toward his children seem to be in equal proportion with his pride in them. His death is, if not the most tragic, certainly the most regrettable.

To conclude by saying “So there’s something in it for the adults and something in it for the kids, too!,” would be unfair. This is a Hamlet with a genuine sense of humor, which can and should be appreciated by the entire family.

First of all, a gargantuan amount of gratitude is due The 7th Sign, simply for reviving Happy Birthday, Wanda June in New York in 2004. This play by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., written at the height of the Vietnam War Era, hasn't been done here (as far as I can tell) in more than twenty years. It's important to see it now, and not so much for its broad anti-war satirical content, though that's certainly pertinent. No, it's the passionate disputation against the status quo that needs to inspire us right now: Vonnegut's rage against the machine, so to speak, is pervasive in this electric play; and yet, there's also spectacular clarity where it matters:

LOOSELEAF: Wars would be a lot better, I think, if guys would say to themselves sometimes, "Jesus--I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much."

This line is spoken, I need to tell you, by a character called Colonel Looseleaf Harper, who in Vonnegut's world is the man who dropped the first atom bomb on Nagasaki.

The play takes place in the home of Harold Ryan, a military man who has served in lots and lots of wars of various shapes and sizes and made a major name for himself as hero in the process. His last engagement has been in a South American rainforest, in the company of his pilot (the already-mentioned Colonel Harper); when the play begins they've been missing for eight years and his wife has just about decided that they must be dead. Her name is Penelope (allusion to Homer intended), and she is being courted by Herb Shuttle, a snivelly vacuum cleaner salesman who is awed by Harold's accomplishments, and also by Dr. Norbert Woodly, a pacifist doctor who is appalled by them. She also has a 12-year-old son, Paul, who doesn't remember his father but thinks he would like him to come back home.

What happens when Harold returns unannounced, with Looseleaf Harper in tow, comprises the main action of the play. To give away its many surprises would be unfair; what I can tell you is that the inevitable confrontation between the man of war (Harold) and the man of peace (Norbert) does indeed take place, and that along the way to said confrontation, Vonnegut finds time to take pot shots at many of humanity's and America's scariest foibles and sacredest cows. And, oh yes: there is indeed someone named Wanda June who celebrates a birthday.

This production diverges from the published text in its ending and also, significantly, in its intermissions. Director Rachel Chavkin has made Wanda June into non-stop theatrics, which is an inspired choice, with two actors—Jill Frutkin and Brian Hastert—engaged in serious, funny hijinks between the acts that keep us amused and comment on the story intelligently. During the show proper, Chavkin's staging falters in a few places, but it's generally brisk and sharp. The design, featuring an inventive unit set by Jesse Hathaway Diaz and quirky but appropriate archetypal costumes by Kristen Sieh, is terrific.

The cast that Chavkin has assembled is excellent, with Frutkin, Hastert, Charlie Wilson (as Paul), and Liz Parker (as Mildred, one of Harold's former wives) particular standouts. Jake Thomas, currently a senior at NYU, is obviously far younger in real life than his middle-aged character Looseleaf Harper, but he's talented enough to make us forget the age difference much of the time. Anchoring the production is James M. Saidy as Harold, in a performance of commanding precision and detail. Saidy manages to be funny, scary, and sympathetic all at the same time; his work here is riveting—among the very finest acting on any stage in town at the moment.

In the end, the connection between the world conjured by Vonnegut and our own is less evident than we might expect; I was keenly aware that the passion that fueled the creation of Happy Birthday, Wanda June is still sadly absent from a lot of contemporary political drama. But The 7th Sign have certainly found the fire, and they're carrying their torch; hurrah for that. We'll keep our eye on them, and hope that visits to their fine and gallant revival of Wanda June sets a fuse under some other theatre-goers and theatre-makers.

The Harbor Theatre has been around for about five years now, and their annual showcase of new work by their member playwrights is one of the most consistently excellent short play festivals in New York. This year's edition of Harbor Currents is no exception, featuring provocative and compelling new writing, presented without frills but with great intelligence and professionalism by a cadre of fine theatre artists.

Helming all three of this year's selections  is the company's Associate Artistic Director, Marc Geller. The plays are a diverse lot, starting with the most emotionally potent, Edmund De Santis' I Stand Naked Before You. Its three characters step in and out of the narrative to let us see the three sides of a love triangle from all three perspectives. De Santis' romantic story is anything but typical: Spiro is an HIV-positive man who has quit his job to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He meets Joe, also positive, and they embark on an affair. But Joe wants more than sex; and Spiro has a lover, Brad, who wants his man back. De Santis examines this complicated set of relationships with compassion and real insight. The piece is beautifully acted by Geller (Brad), C.K. Allen (Joe), and A.J. Vincent (Spiro); it's one of the most satisfying one-act plays I have come across.

Stephanie Lehmann's Salsa Night at the Temple is about three Jewish women at a dance. Karin Sibrava stars as Suzanne, smart and grounded but not as secure as she'd like to be; she is going through the motions of trying to meet a man and not enjoying it one bit. Wendy Walker and Joy Besozzi play her pals, one single and one married, who try to spur her into action. Lehmann's dialogue is incisive and clever, and Sibrava is warm, appealing and often very funny, particularly when she (twice) turns down an invitation to dance from an unseen but very short would-be suitor.

The evening concludes with Stuart Warmflash's The Critical Mass of Love, a quirky, charming love story about a man and woman whose first meeting, at Penn Station, triggers a physical reaction (see title) that makes their getting together irresistible and inevitable. Warmflash's characters are, as usual, articulate and interesting and unusual, and they're well-played here by Chad Deverman and Abby Royle (with Simon Feil in a brief cameo as the woman's soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend). Sometimes sharp and sometimes sweet, this parable about destiny and romance makes a pleasing end to an engaging and entertaining evening.

Most critics tell us that Henry V is about Leadership and Politics and War. But those themes are a means to a much deeper end for Shakespeare. He’s examining the no-man’s-land between what seems and what is. Americans are now learning what Shakespeare knew: morality reaches its depths when it involves Leadership and Politics and War. The mysteries of Shakespeare’s most ambiguous play are particularly relevant today.

Unfortunately, Mark Wing-Davey’s slack production at the Delacorte Theater (in Central Park) seems willfully to avoid contemporary issues. Instead, he adopts a glib tone that suggests an attempt to carnivalize the play. This interpretation does find some basis in the play, which relates politics to theatricality. Shakespeare begins the play with a Chorus who apologizes for the meager stagecraft that would attempt the clash of nations. And Henry seems to be nothing but masks, except for one beautiful moment when, alone on the eve before battle, he recognizes the emptiness behind the pomp of monarchy. In public, Henry responds to events more often than he instigates them. He seems so natural at every moment that he’s a mystery: piety and guilt become him, but so does irreverence and indifference. He’s not dissimilar to the protean Richard III (both conquer women as easily as they wear the crown), except that Henry never lets us in on his motivations.

For Wing-Davey, there’s nothing in Henry V but the spectacle that Henry distrusts. He flirts with the performance of politics by staging the first English victory as a photo op. But more often, he clowns around with bits of mere distraction. Wing-Davey’s theatrical tricks let him stimulate an immediate response in his audience, be it of fear (an English minister opens a French vacuum-sealed tube to reveal not bio-agents but tennis balls), of titillation (the French princess showers nude onstage), of cleverness (actors saddled with stirrups play the French cavalry’s horses), or of confusion (a poorly-paced and spatially-challenged battle scene). In a play about a leader whose doubtful intentions mean the deaths of thousands, this focus on surface seems willfully shallow. To ignore politics in this most political of plays is to disserve the audience.

It seems to be Liev Schreiber’s unique talent (and curse) to transcend inferior productions—both his Hamlet and his Iago overcame lackluster surroundings at the Public Theater in 2000 and 2001. Now, as King Henry, he plays his part close to his chest. At first, it’s hard to tell whether that’s his interpretation or his defense mechanism against a frivolous production. Even through an expressionless first half, Schreiber rewards the listener. To say that he makes Shakespeare’s poetry intelligible is an understatement: he renders the verse with such clarity that it seems to resemble our own thoughts at their height.

And right at intermission, Henry’s mask slips when he slaps a despondent soldier. From then on Schreiber opens up the character’s interior. More flashy and exuberant Henrys find the role in the rousing speeches (on film, both Olivier and Branagh relished these moments); Schreiber derives visible satisfaction from a Hamlet-like soliloquy at night. In this speech on “ceremony,” he shows a man so trapped by fame that he’s not even sure who he is. Schreiber almost awakens his troops with a call-and-response brag to the weak-kneed French ambassador. But he only finds a partner in the play’s final scene, where Henry woos the French princess through a Berlin Wall of a language barrier. For these last moments, the catfaced Nicole Leach matches Schreiber’s onstage charisma.

But mostly he’s supported by generic performances, actors swelling a scene. Luckily, the lower-class scenes hold up better under these circumstances, and are gleefully led by Harry’s comic equivalent, the puffed-up Pistol. Here, Bronson Pinchot swaggers through his role as well as Schreiber does his: Pistol is the vainglorious side of warfare, all sound and no fight. With a foot-high pompadour, a thick New Joisey accent, and an indescribably strange Zen gesture to calm himself after a flurry of bombast, Pinchot slips modern words into his Elizabethan speech to capture the anarchy of his character. He’s the only common soldier to survive the war, and it leaves him destitute. His role is almost Brechtian enough to raise the issues that Shakespeare was writing about: War is naturally abhorrent, and those who desire war are monstrous. Henry’s reasons are a mystery, and that should disturb us. But it doesn’t interest Wing-Davey, and so his production lacks reason.

A number of famous and talented people were involved in creating Here Lies Jenny—Bebe Neuwirth (its star), Ann Reinking (its choreographer), Roger Rees (its conceiver/director), and most significantly (and unwittingly) Kurt Weill (its composer), along with his hosts of historic lyricists—and yet it’s the most interminable 70 minutes I’ve endured in a long time.

There is not so much a plot as a series of events, and I will endeavor to relate them accurately: Onstage there is the suggestion of an old run-down saloon (smartly rendered by Neil Patel).  A hunched woman in black wearing thick-rimmed glasses swiftly descends the staircase “outside” (the which we see through the invisible wall); she bangs on the rusty door and is let inside by George, the manager (played by Ed Dixon, who has a terrific presence and virtually nothing to do but smile knowingly).  The woman is, it turns out, the piano player (and, in actuality, the music director, Leslie Stifelman, whose work on the keys is the most dynamic aspect of the show). 

She is followed by Jim and John, two muscular men in their thirties whose outfits seem to be a stylistic hybrid of Chicago and Newsies (incidentally, both men, Gregory Butler and Shawn Emamjomeh, have been in Chicago, though neither, according to the program, were in Newsies).  Now descends, wearing a coat and carrying a duffle bag, the eponymous Jenny (Neuwirth, who looks lovely and wears a beatific grin that suggests at least she might have some idea why all these people are arriving onstage). 

For the next hour, Steifelman plays a ton of beautiful Weill songs, which Jenny sings, sometimes with the boys.  Every so often they lift her up and spin her around (this is the bulk of the gentle but timid choreography by Reinking who also did choreography for Chicago, but not for Newsies), and at several points, she reaches into the duffle bag for a hat or a stack of letters, chokes up with tears, and sings a song that does nothing to elucidate her emotional reaction.  (This, such as it is, is the “concept” credited to director Roger Rees).  Finally Jenny seems satisfied with her time in the rundown saloon, so she says goodbye, puts on her coat, grabs her duffle bag and runs back up the stairs, all with said beatific grin that suggests she has undergone some kind of journey which had some kind of redemptive outcome.

I find the “art” of taking a catalogue of an artist’s songs and wedging them into a story or “concept” to be tedious.  At best, one can find a way to present these songs theatrically, but rarely do they have any sort of dramatic weight (even the ones written for the musical theatre).  There is an audience for it—Mamma Mia! is one such project that has been quite commercially successful.  Weill, though superior to Abba in many respects, does not generate a ton of adrenaline; thus the bodies in the aisles are less likely dancing than dozing.  I can’t say this is worth seeing; but it might make for a nifty concept album.

Robert Patrick’s has been one of the leading playwrights of modern gay theatre since the 1960’s. I’m not going to recount the significance of his career in this review, instead, I encourage you to read nytheatre.com’s interview with the playwright for an insightful investigation into the man who championed the beginnings of off-off-Broadway and the “downtown” alternative (gay) theatre scene. Respectful of Patrick’s canon of 50+ plays, I was eager to see his new play Hollywood at Sunset, thrilled that he was once again produced on a New York stage.

The play explores the lives of two gay men who are struggling to salvage their dysfunctional relationship against the backdrop of a homophobic film industry. Both men succumb to personal feelings of anger and fear as they struggle to “out” themselves to family members and business colleagues, while at the same time dissecting the “more-harm-than-good” portrayal of gays in Hollywood films.

Unfortunately, I was unable to appreciate the integrity of Patrick’s play due to the immature, one-dimensional performances of Kevin Held and Graham Fulmer (the sole-actors in the play). In the third scene, the characters of Penn (Held) and Aron (Fulmer) discuss Tom Cruise’s disappointing performance in Interview With a Vampire. Together, they conclude that Cruise is incapable of doing what an actor is supposed to do—“observe human behavior and try to recreate it.” Well, whether or not this is true of Cruise’s performance, I was glad Patrick wrote these words, because it articulates, exactly, my impression of both Held and Fulmer, who seem more concerned about being “actors,” doing a play at the Flatiron Playhouse, than uncovering the subtext, depth and integrity of Patrick’s potentially complex characters. Both men lack any sense of chemistry as the two lovers. They seem to be stuck in a high-school drama, even though Patrick has written a study of two complicated men, who have been partners for more than eight years, and who are deeply unresolved on profound issues of guilt, self-hatred, and insecurity—not to mention the obstacle of being gay men who work in the homophobic maze of the Hollywood film industry. Held seems to be working in a bubble of generic neurotic energy, while Fulmer is tiresome, monotone, and emotionally detached. It is possible that Held and Fulmer are simply too young for the roles. I would love to see a further developed production performed by actors with the life experience to understand Patrick’s moving play.

When I go to the theatre I want to experience moments, not just hear a regurgitation of a writer’s text. Patrick has written a play that tells its story in two hours and fifteen minutes—a substantial amount of time to get to know its two characters if a director explores the potential of all the moments housed in the passage of time. Director Barry Childs never allows the actors to find the unspoken moments that in my opinion are the experience of this play. There is no real tenderness, no real fight, no real love, and no real reason. Ultimately—a disappointment. The legacy of Robert Patrick certainly deserves better.

There is a moment in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (now in performance at the BAM Harvey Theatre) where Priscilla, a young British woman who has come to Kabul to find her mother, and Khwaja, her Afghan escort, gaze at dusk upon the ruins of this once majestic city, now pocked and pulverized by repeated bombings. The actors, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Firdous Bamji, stare beyond the audience in awed silence, broken only by a few murmured phrases, beautifully inadequate attempts at containing in words an infinity of emotion. At this point, all of the already harmonious elements of Frank Galati’s sublime production converge into a moment as soft and concentrated as a shared breath. Topocosmic—the sudden, ephemeral sense of knowing one’s place in the world, in the order of the universe—is the only word that describes for me the effect on the characters, the actors, and the audience.

Tony Kushner’s ambition astounds me. I had the pleasure of seeing the original production of Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop in 2001, and there was much to admire: the writing was prescient, vast in scope and mature. The Homebody section (roughly an hour) concerns a lonely British wife and mother with an astounding vocabulary and a ravenous curiosity, who shares with us her fascination with the overlooked (in this case, Afghanistan) and the outmoded (such as the out-of-date guidebook from which she reads). Thankfully, this part—some of best writing I’ve ever witnessed on-stage—remained virtually unaltered.

Kabul (which verges on three hours) has been improved considerably. The plot points are the same: the husband and daughter of the Homebody have traveled to Kabul, the city to which she had eloped with her guidebook only weeks before, and into which she has now disappeared, traceless but for a gruesome report of her death. Her body, however, cannot be found and there is ample evidence that she may still be alive. What I remember most vividly from the original production was rage and angst. In this version, Kushner has softened his characters’ stridencies, infusing their interactions with a generous sense of humor and gentleness. I found it easier to empathize with these more emotionally-nuanced portraits, which heightened the importance and suspense of their search. This should also be credited to Galati and the remarkable cast he has assembled.

Linda Emond, whose performance as the Homebody is nothing short of ensorcelling, is absent from the rest of the play and the feeling of loss is palpable, but extremely effective. As her daughter, Gyllenhaal is both a wistful echo of Emond’s Homebody and a mesmerizing creature in her own right. Reed Birney is Milton, husband and father, whose grief is appalling and desperately sad; his demeanor is affectless and he has lost all moral gravity to heroin and self-hate. The smack is courtesy of Quango, a vestigial extension of the British government who is, particularly in Bill Camp’s blithely perverse portrayal, bemused by his own terrible loneliness and succumbing to addiction.

As Priscilla’s impromptu tour guide, Bamji’s Khwaja is a warm soul, making his mysterious ulterior motives (which are left satisfyingly ambiguous) more sympathetic than sinister. A stand-out along with Emond and Gyllenhaal, Rita Wolf plays Mahala, a doctor’s wife and former librarian who has started to go crazy under the rule of the Taliban. Perched on top of her couch, Wolf is a lion then a kitten then a lion, etc., sobbing, raging and then cracking bon mots in a babel of different tongues.

Each of the above characterizations is a testament to Galati’s sensitive direction, as is his assemblage of a fantastic bunch of designers—most notably James Schuette, whose set includes a gorgeous stone wall and set pieces (often carrying performers) that rise ominously from below.

New York has one of the most revered theatrical communities in the world, but at least from the vantage point of commercial theatre, things are frighteningly conservative. This revised version of Homebody/Kabul, in addition to being superbly written and produced, is encouraging and instructive in two critical ways. First, it demonstrates the value of a more nurturing creative environment—allowing them a second shot, particularly when they take on such ambitious projects. And second, by focusing on notions of knowledge and empathy, too often lacking in the current administration and the media, it helps us begin to see Afghanistan (for example) as a place with its own lush history and more than just the possible refuge of America’s Most Wanted.

Vicarious paranoia can be fun and cathartic. Witness How to Act Around Cops, the new noir-ish suspense thriller by Logan Brown, which was one of the breakout shows of the 2003 New York International Fringe Fetival. Told in three scenes, superbly staged by Jon Schumacher in a sublimely atmospheric production (credit technical director Nick Keslake, sound designer Jerry Yeager, and composer Marco Paguia), Cops weaves a surreal, disorienting story about a kidnapping/heist gone sour and a traffic stop that turns out to be a terrible mistake. Without invoking any direct references, Schumacher and Brown conjure a world that reminds us of Body Heat, Double Indemnity, Pulp Fiction, and almost anything by Alfred Hitchcock; by which I mean that Cops is dazzlingly enigmatic, cool, and entirely original. Brown's taut plotting lets up in the final scene, which makes the piece less satisfying than we want it to be; but Cops is in every way a triumph of design, staging, and performance.

It's also rather difficult to summarize, plot-wise, without giving stuff away: this play's very essence is the unexpected twist, one of which occurs every few minutes. It starts in a car on a dark highway, late at night. Two young men, Barnum and Madson, are driving along when they suddenly become aware that they're being pursued by a police cruiser. Though they don't seem to be guilty of anything in particular, they are boundlessly paranoid; the discovery of a woman's pink purse in the backseat really fans their panic.

What happens next—during the traffic stop, and then in a seedy hotel room and on another dark highway later that night—I leave for you to discover. Even if I tell you that no one is necessarily what he or she seems to be (maybe), and that there's a dark secret lurking in everyone's past (mostly), and that you won't guess (or even discover) all of the strange twists and turns of the plot—even if I tell you that, I don't think I've spoiled anything. It's easy to be seduced by Cops' elusive aura, and although—as already mentioned—the payoff falls short of desire, this is a theatrical roller coaster ride—in the dark—that keeps us laughing and/or giggling nervously and always, always riveted.

Schumacher's savvy direction is probably at the heart of the piece's success; so too is his outstanding cast, which is headed by Chris Kipiniak as the cop who makes one mistake that he winds up paying for on a night of particularly bad vibes. Susan O'Connor is unforgettable as the desperate, deceitful, and shockingly self-possessed woman at the center of the play's improbable vortex of crime; Andrew Breving is at once appealing and repellant as one of her confreres, who is Cops' unlikely anti-hero. Matthew Benjamin, Josh Carpenter, Marc Webster, and Veronica Welch complete the ensemble, all quite effective as various characters who, wittingly or not, become part of Cops' complicated web of lies, corruption, and murder.

Brown will, it is hoped, take one more look at his script and deliver the third act that his masterful play deserves. And then we'll really be looking over our shoulders warily as we exit the theatre...

The frontal lobe of the brain, responsible for the mostly highly cognitive functions in humans, takes frequent "naps" to restore itself: call them day dreams. Imagine that you could eavesdrop on somebody's frontal lobe's naps; imagine that you did while that somebody—a college professor named Stanton Lake—was himself delivering a lecture about the anatomy of the human brain.

Now imagine that somebody else—the prodigiously talented and prolific multidisciplinary theatre artist Sharon Fogarty—put that eavesdropping on stage, in a genre-defying play-dance theatre-musical format; and imagine that it worked. Actually, no need to imagine that: Fogarty's latest creation, How to See in the Dark, is just as I've described it. And it works, ineffably and beautifully.

After a wordless prologue, choreographed to a mostly sung overture of found and original song fragments—sagely setting the mood and establishing the ground rules for what's to come—Professor Lake addresses the audience. He's going to talk, he says, about the limbic system and its effects on emotive condition and instinctual patterning and psycho-social parietal awareness. Helpfully, he writes all of this in an entirely illegible scrawl on the blackboard; and then, beginning with the brain stem—the medulla oblongata, where movement detection and essential self-preservation takes place—he takes us through a number of topics: the frontal lobe, the biology of shock, the parietal lobe, the phenomenon of "perfect pitch," audio hallucinations, and mating patterns, concluding with methods of healing a wounded or damaged limbic system.

It's fascinating, but the science is just this show's surface. How to See in the Dark is not like most theatre: what Fogarty does here is to juxtapose with this brief but detailed academic fare exemplars of what's being discussed. More astonishingly, she manages to tell a compelling and profound story at the same time. Stanton was in love with a woman, Sheryl, whose previous lover abused her violently. Stanton goes so far as to kill the ex-boyfriend when he is let out of prison; but Sheryl's system has taken all that it can, and she dies. As Stanton explains the ways that a broken limbic system can be mended—through death, or through forgiveness and faith—he contemplates Sheryl's fate and his own. Something like regeneration and healing happens for Stanton by play's end.

Fogarty delivers the narrative utterly a-traditionally, using all of the theatre elements at her command to reveal the distractions inside her protagonist's brain. We're always aware that the episodes we're witnessing are somehow ethereal and ephemeral: did Stanton really murder Sheryl's abuser, or is the scene just a projection? The dream state is simulated here more faithfully than I can ever recall having seen done on stage; there is, for example, a dazzling vignette in which Stanton recalls a blissful Christmas shopping spree with Sheryl in which she morphs seamlessly into Red Riding Hood, exactly the way she would if we were asleep and in the middle of a fanciful reverie. Characters move naturally and also dance, while a live "soundtrack" superimposes Irving Berlin's "Happy Holidays" onto Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," with Hugh Martin's  "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" drifting around the edges. Gorgeous, evocative, and moving.

Fogarty's collaborators are entirely simpatico with her off-the-beaten-track style of making terrific theatre. Steve Deighan, who has the leading role of Professor Stanton Lake, is superb, conveying the emotions of his character at and below the surface more or less simultaneously. The other performers are Catherine Rogers (Sheryl) and Matthew Porter (her ex-lover and everyone else) and they execute Fogarty's evocative vocabulary of words, sounds, and movement expertly. Lighting designer Charles Moran provides subtle but effective visual cues to help us navigate between reality and the subconscious. Fogarty (on guitar and flute) is joined by four talented musicians—M. Andrew Curry, Theodora Fogarty, Bobbi Owens, and Renée Torrière—to create the live music for the show, stunning harmonies that provide aural counterpoint to the rest of the proceedings.

How to See in the Dark lasts less than an hour; and the economics of off-off-Broadway theatre dictate that it will run just one week. It's amazing how much can be accomplished in just a little bit of time.

A truly remarkable experience in the theatre, I am my own wife is a must-see. It is rare to witness such a perfect marrying of playwright, director and performer. Together, their creative energies, most resonantly, bring to the Broadway stage an experience that is intellectual, theatrical, funny, and poignant without the trappings of wanting to be a commercial success.

This play, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons this past May, is based on the story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a real-life transvestite who managed to survive the Nazi onslaught and the Stasi; the play is more directly inspired by interviews which playwright Doug Wright conducted with Charlotte over several years, beginning in 1993. Wright never clearly articulates how Charlotte manages her game of survival, and it is unclear whether she is ever telling the truth, but it is revealed that at some point she functioned as an informant for the East German government. What is fascinating about this story is that the protagonist and antagonist are the same person. Charlotte’s story is one of contradictions told through a love and disregard for her Germanic culture, the objects of yesteryear, and friends that she ultimately betrayed. I am my own wife is a compelling yet disturbing investigation into the beauty and ugliness in human nature. It illuminates the truths behind antiquity, the way that the nicks and cuts on a Biedermeier table are proof of its history.

Wright’s play is set inside the home of Charlotte, which she has turned into a museum, filled with clocks, furniture pieces, and a myriad of polyphones and gramophones. Wright treats these objects as a metaphor, as if to say that everything must be saved and understood, as every antique is a record of the living of lives. The integrity of his writing provokes us to think, it teaches us a history we never knew we had, and without forgiveness and sentiment unravels the story of one life.

Like a thread binding a perfect seam, Moises Kaufman directs this production with precision. He trusts the power of the spoken word and the potential of an actor to convey an entire journey.

As Charlotte, Jefferson Mays transcends descriptive words such as “outstanding,” “spectacular,” and “brilliant.” These adjectives seem to diminish the extra-ordinariness of his work. Rarely do we get the opportunity to witness the depth and clarity that he actualizes in this performance—and what a humble and gracious performance it is. Not only does he portray (or, if you will pardon the Brechtian reference, “represent”) the 65-year-old East German, he also brings to life a cast of 40 characters that includes Wright as a character in the center of his own play. Mays lives in the moment of each word and breath with profound inspiration as he brings forth text that is derived from taped interviews, phone calls, and government records. Remarkably, he relies simply on the change of a gesture or a manner of vocal delivery to instantly channel one character followed by another, while at all times pealing away the complex layers of Charlotte. Mays delivers one of the most (if not the most) evocative performances currently on the New York stage. His work is important, it is smart, and it embodies the truest sense of humanity.

Scenic designer Derek McLane, who trusts wholeheartedly his minimalist design, beautifully conceives Charlotte’s world. Exposed lighting instruments unapologetically frame a freestanding wall with transparent wallpaper and a door. Against the back of the stage and rising high into the theatre’s fly space, stands what appears to be the grandest set of collection boxes, each box (or room) filled with the most impressive display of furniture pieces and memories that Charlotte has taken into exile—preserving their historic integrity and protecting their potential extinction due to the devastation of the Nazi takeover and the following, repressive Communist regime.

David Lander’s lighting design beautifully complements the work of McLean. He introduces bold strokes of reds and blues that illuminate the psychological and emotional journey of Wright’s play. More respectfully, he trusts the necessity of gentle white light and the importance of shadows in space, that reveal more readily the stark truths exposed in the play.

Costume designer Janice Pytel has dressed Mays in a black dress and pearls, with a black scarf on his head. Interestingly, he looks more androgynous than feminine, more like a novice in a convent than a replica of Marlene Dietrich. Pytel successfully avoids exploiting the common stereotypes that surround transvestism.

I am my own wife is certainly one of the finest experiences currently on the Broadway stage. In fact, it feels un-Broadway, which is what makes it so special. In some ways it is too simple, too honest, too political and too academic, but it is necessary, and must be witnessed. It seems that stories from WWII, the Holocaust, and our hidden gay past must continually be told in order for us to remember and challenge others to never forget, as difficult as this may be. It is just as Charlotte states when referring to the collection of objects in her home—they are “too old-fashioned, too difficult to dust, but I have an affinity for these objects.” We must all have an affinity for what constitutes our written and un-written history. Fortunately we have Wright, Mays and Kaufman to remind us of that.

Amy Rhodes' one-woman show I Enjoy Being a Girl is very short (just half-an-hour long), but it makes a big impression. It chronicles some of her tribulations, from high school through college and beyond, coping with being the "best friend" to a variety of young men when she would have preferred to be "girlfriend" instead. Now, this sort of post-adolescent confessional can be deadly, but Rhodes—who is a deft comedienne and writer, possessed of genuine wit—provides the distance, maturity, and heart to make it not just palatable but funny and compelling. You leave the show actually wanting more, which is no mean achievement.

Rhodes takes us back to her days as an eight-grader in Des Moines, Iowa, when—in between helpful counsel about the day's Spanish homework—she manages to work up the courage to ask Tyler Peterson to a school dance. She then leapfrogs through a decade or so of playing Eve Arden/Thelma Ritter to a passel of useless young men, ranging from Ryan, the high school buddy who talks about himself in the third person and comes out to her as gay shortly after an ardent make-up session, to The Zeff (spelling?), an insensitive frat boy on whom she wastes a good deal of time and energy at college in Boston.

What's refreshing about I Enjoy Being a Girl is that Rhodes knows—and lets us know—that these guys are jerks; without getting uptight or defensive, she defuses the follies—theirs and hers—of these past crushes.

She's also remarkably honest, recounting a particularly painful story that begins with someone calling her "fat ass" on a Brooklyn street. Rhodes' writing and performance style is admirably straightforward, avoiding the mawkish and finding the universal humor in her experiences.

I Enjoy Being a Girl will, we are told, be coming back in 2004. It will be worth seeing; it could even—and when does anyone ever say this and really mean it?—be a little longer.

The most immediately delightful feature of Vital Theatre Company’s solid and engaging revival of Robert E. Sherwood’s 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Idiot’s Delight, is that the audience feels thrust into the center of the action—in the middle of the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Monte Gabriele, a lackluster resort in the Italian Alps, near the Swiss, Austrian, and Bavarian borders. On this particular winter afternoon, it is filled with a group of travelers of various nationalities whose train trip across the border to Switzerland has been truncated due to substantial information that world war is imminent. Which country will initiate, who will be fighting with whom and to what end, are questions on everyone’s minds as they watch the nearby airfield for Italian bomber planes for a sign.

But, this being a comedy, coexisting with the dread is a mostly affable (and humorous) awkwardness amongst this collection of strangers, which includes: Mr. and Mrs. Cherry, enchanted honeymooners from England; Doctor Waldersee, a German scientist who is near finding a cure for cancer; Quillery, a Communist labor organizer from France; Irene, a Russian countess of iffy descent and her companion, Achille Weber, a French arms merchant who has inside knowledge of the impending war; and Harry Van, an American impresario/confidence man, who with his girls, Beulah and Shirley, is touring abroad a very mediocre lounge act.

Though Sherwood’s politics are expressly pacific, questioning the integrity behind and usefulness of war, his deeper concern seems to be about fully participating in life amidst conflict and ambiguity, both on an interpersonal and a worldwide scale. How do these people react to their limited loci of control—petrification or adaptation?

The plot focuses on Harry Van and Irene, whom he could swear he met and fell in love with ten years before when their separate acts were briefly touring in tandem in middle America. He has modestly persevered by way of whiskey and a deep sense of irony, whereas she—black-haired and no longer blonde, with a convincing Russian accent and the works—has taken a more circuitous route of survival: total reinvention.

Director Julie Hamberg and her gifted ensemble get all the laughs honestly and without resorting to caricature, slowly revealing the play’s warm and hopeful heart. The cast is uniformly authentic, affecting, and endearingly theatrical. Amid the fine performances, Ron McClary and Aimée Hayes stand out, as Harry and Irene, whose scenes together are poignant and engrossing. Roberto Sanchez-Camus’ set design deserves much credit for helping to create the audience’s immersion described above, as do Carrie Yacono’s lighting and Suada Perezic’s sound.

Not frequently produced and certainly not with such great care and capability, Vital Theatre Company’s production of Idiot’s Delight is a somber and joyful, smart and funny comfort, particularly in these troublous times.

In a Manner of Speaking is a brand new play by New York-based writer John Watts, the winner of this year's Playwriting Competition at Astoria Performing Arts Center. It centers on Carl, a former UPS driver who retired nine years ago when he won the lottery. When he quit his job he also quit his family, leaving his wife of 16 years and his teenage daughter Ruth. Now Carl spends his days drinking beer and watching TV; he's also supporting Ruth, who is studying organic chemistry in graduate school and temporarily residing in his reasonably spacious but very lived-in apartment.

On this particular day, Ruth has a couple of surprises for her father. First, she's invited her mother Stella to come for a visit, which she does, earlier than expected, her latest arts & crafts creation in tow—an odd-looking vase created by her pottery teacher that looks an awful lot like the male member.

Next, Ruth springs Humphrey on both of her unsuspecting parents. Humphrey, it turns out, is Ruth's fiancé; she's let him think that Carl and Stella are still married, and so Ruth begs them to please play along. She tells them that Humphrey is an actor who earns his living, as so many do, as a waiter; she fails to tell them that he's Chinese-American, which she has reason to believe will matter to her Archie Bunker-ish father. (And she hasn't told anyone that she's pregnant, which makes for climactic eleventh-hour fireworks in this play.)

Watts has created generally likable characters (the exception is Stella, whom Watts doesn't seem to care for himself; she's presented as arch and striving and demanding, in a James Thurber-wife sort of way, and Lisa Schwanker isn't able to overcome this in her characterization). He's put them into an interesting situation, and the play manages to be entertaining (if not especially insightful) exploring it. Watts is particularly adept at building to moments: there's a sequence, for example, in which Carl and Humphrey bond improbably while performing an audition scene that Humphrey has freely adapted from A Streetcar Named Desire, which is both funny and illuminating.

What the playwright hasn't mastered here is consistency: his characters behave the way he needs them to in the specific contexts required by his set pieces; we never really get to know any coherent, fully-formed individuals in this play. Instead, Carl is a lout and boor here, and a wise and loving husband and father there—but how these aspects of his personality blend together isn't ever explicated.

Because Carl is the protagonist of the play (I think), I especially wanted to understand more about him. What has he been doing for the last nine years of his life other than collecting beer bottles? Why does he so steadfastly resist his wife's encouragement to grow and change? Watts clearly likes this guy, and wants us to identify with him as regular galoot with bad habits but decent principles (and that's certainly how Frank Bonsangue plays him). But we don't have enough information to figure out who he really is.

Charlee Chiv and Danielle Erin Rhodes complete the cast, as Humphrey and Ruth, respectively. Director David Renwanz provides an effective staging on an efficient unit set by Rachel Gordon that places the living room and kitchen/dining room of Carl's apartment on separate levels in order to optimize sight-lines.

In the Belly of the Beast Revisited begins in complete darkness, with the sound of a woman screaming. A nod, perhaps, to the sometimes sensational noir theatre that we're used to seeing at 29th Street Rep; or to the conventionally scary stuff that a play about a convicted murderer portends. Whatever you decide to read into this attention-getting opening, know that it's the only Stephen King moment in this show: the horror story that's about to unfold is unsettling, upsetting, and shocking—but it has nothing to do with bogeymen or serial killers. Adrian Hall's play—brilliantly realized here by director Leo Farley and leading actor David Mogentale—is about the systematic breakdown of a human being by a faceless, soulless bureaucracy. The sheer, reckless waste that's depicted here both chills and boils the blood, shaking us up in ways we just don't see coming.

Jack Henry Abbott, the protagonist of this piece, spent all but nine months of his adult life in prison. He and his sister grew up in foster homes; from the time he was 12, he had left that grievous system of institutions for a worse one, spending his adolescence in reform schools. (His formal education ended with the sixth grade.) After that, he was incarcerated more or less continuously until he committed suicide at the age of 58, with one three-month reprieve in 1981. That was the year he was paroled, thanks to his correspondence with Norman Mailer—he wrote to the famous author about life in prison when he learned that Mailer was researching his book on Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song. But after just a short time on the outside, he was back in: early one morning, after a night out on the town in Manhattan, he murdered a waiter. Celebrity and talent notwithstanding—for by now, Abbott had written not one but two books, moving accounts of his incarceration—his days as a free citizen were over.

The first half of In the Belly of the Beast Revisited introduces us to Abbott, his sad, sad history, and his experiences as an inmate at various American penal institutions. The show is particularly successful on that last point—in the intimate 29th Street space, it's impossible not to be viscerally affected as Abbott, in the person of actor David Mogentale, is systematically humiliated and dehumanized by miscellaneous prison officials and outsiders. We witness the patronizing interviews of psychologists and lawyers; worse, we see him stripped naked by guards and then made to bend over, pushed onto the cold floor of his cell where he will lie, immobile, in the fetal position. We experience with him the conditions of a "blackout" cell, plunged into impenetrable darkness. We hear his accounts of prison life: time spent in solitary, time on the yard, time trying to survive a brutal subculture where rape and knife fights are the norm. At the end of Act One, Abbott quotes from his book In the Belly of the Beast relating the circumstances leading to the murder of another prisoner, and given all that's come before it somehow makes a kind of sense to us. Forget recidivism, or anything like that: Abbott's prison experience is a reversion to barbarism. We're outraged: can the penal system still be really like this in a civilized country like the United States?

Act Two focuses on Abbott's trial for the murder I mentioned earlier. And our attitude shifts, subtly but importantly, for we discover that the inhuman conditions of prison life could not prepare Jack Henry Abbott to live as a "free" citizen like you or me. Even with his poet's soul, Abbott had no tools with which to negotiate the real world with any kind of success; his return trip behind bars was inevitable—ordained, perhaps, the first time he was denied parole for attempting to escape. (Maybe even sooner than that: just watch the news any random night, and listen to accounts of rampant dysfunction in the foster care system.)

The prosecuting attorney at Abbott's trial reads the same passage about the murder of a fellow inmate, and this time it's unbearable. We're left only with the senseless truth, that a human being has been irredeemably given up. Lost.

Mogentale's work here is nothing short of extraordinary: this is an intense performance that will live with you for days and days. His fellow performers James E. Smith, Heidi James, and Gordon Holmes are superb as well, essaying numerous roles and serving as our sometimes reluctant guides into this ugly story. Leo Farley's direction—taut and relentless—serves the piece well, as do Mark Symczak's ingenious unit set and Stewart Wagner's stark lighting.

This is an important work of theatre: compelling drama, to be sure, but more than that, a brutal document of a terrifying fact about our world that we'd rather sweep under the carpet than look at head on. Bravo to the courageous folks at 29th Street Rep for making us look.

Every one of Tom Stoppard’s plays blends together a new place, time, idea, and theme, yet his style is as recognizable as a thumbprint. From his Hamlet redux Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to his recent three-part Russian epic The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard depicts what it means to be human, in our drive to change the world and our recognition of limits, especially that great limit mortality. His canvas is all humanity, but he paints individual souls by pinpointing where intellect meets passion.

In a minor play by a major playwright, Indian Ink braids together art and poetry with empire and history, while an old-fashioned love story adds energy to the ideas. In the spring of 1930, Flora Crewe, a (fictional) modernist poet, travels to India for her health. As she writes in a house outside of Jummapur, she sits for a portrait taken by a young widower, Nirad Das. The couple discuss art and empire, with her independence encouraging his inner emancipation. In the background, the Indian nation slowly takes its modern form.

Do Flora and Das consummate their relationship? It’s unclear, but even if they don’t, they have several erotic scenes onstage, their lovemaking taking the form of spirited conversation. The couple’s most intimate moment occurs when they discuss the Indian concept of ras, or “taste” (essence/tone/atmosphere), the intrinsic attribute that makes a thing into a work of art. Stoppard may be the only playwright who can make information sexy, and in his plays, the more fascinating the information, the sexier the scene.

This dense but graceful play receives its New York premiere from Alter Ego, a young company composed primarily of South Asians, which is to say, from the former British Empire that implodes during Indian Ink. The ensemble, directed by Ashok Sinha, pays utmost respect to the world of the play, answering the respect that Stoppard pays their culture. Sinha choreographs the large cast on walkerspace’s small stage well, but more importantly, he develops the charge that is this play’s greatest jewel. He’s helped by Jeff McCrum, whose lights are more subtle than they first appear, especially during a sunset and at the play’s climax after dark.

But Lethia Nall (Flora) and Sendhil Ramamurthy (Das), as the erotic poles of this Anglo-Indian romance, give the play its heart. Nall’s Flora seems to have stepped out of an E.M. Forster novel: her cosmopolitan vivacity, her socialite Socialist independence, and most of all, her physical ease bespeak that freedom of European artists between the World Wars. Nall shows Flora’s great talent, questing spirit, and relaxed intensity. Ramamurthy’s Das is her alter-ego, a man who’s in love with a repressed culture, ramrod straight and proper while he paints a female English VIP until her aggressive questions put him out enough to show his true artistic soul. The pair show the best of both worlds, and their love—whether literally consummated or not—finds ultimate expression in her free-verse portrait of their affair and his painting of the pair as divine Hindu lovers.

This being a play by Tom Stoppard, there’s much more, both onstage and in the script. Sinha and dramaturg Anuvab Pal keep the audience’s attention by allowing the action to introduce the myriad ideas. But as mentioned above, this is minor Stoppard: there’s a sloppiness to his dramaturgy that’s absent from Arcadia, which this play resembles structurally. Letters form a 1990s subplot, in which an academic consistently misinterprets Flora’s epistles while her sister explains Flora’s relationship to Das’ son. The play’s second half hops from place to place, focusing more on Flora and yet losing sight of some of her sensuality, despite her flirtations with a Maharaja and an English lieutenant. Most of the minor characters are broad parodies rather than human beings, a rare lapse for Stoppard, a lover of the human psyche. Still, minor Stoppard is more valuable and more cause for celebration than most plays. And Alter Ego’s production shines throughout, proving their staging worthy of Stoppard’s own talents. This company mixes artistic ardor and professional execution like Stoppard at his best. Their excellent production of Indian Ink sets the stage for a bright future.

Instructions for Forgetting is a theatre piece by Tim Etchells and his London-based company Forced Entertainment. In it, Etchells reads aloud a number of stories, culled from submissions from his friends—"I ask for things that are true. The topics can be anything."—and he shows us snippets of videos, also solicited—"I say, 'Don't make me anything special—send what you have.'" The result is a 105-minute collage of narrative and/or reminiscence, seemingly random yet also seemingly reinforcing a pattern, or an idea, about memory and the ways it is stored.

It's a canny show idea: though our engagement with the core concept peaks early on, our identity as eavesdropper-voyeur keeps us paying attention. Some of the stories are compelling, especially one about a woman whose daughter's ex-boyfriend is being tried for murder; and many of the videos are quite watchable—a piece about a woman undressing for pay in a model's studio exerts real fascination, for example.

I was surprised by the relatively small number of objects in this collage: there are, in particular, only a handful of stories, and they each seem to go on much longer than they need to. And I was aware, always, that Etchells' circle seems made up entirely of artists, which means that these "found" artifacts all feel "made"—there's a sense—again, especially in the case of the stories—of things crafted rather than more organically grown. This unexpected polish extends to the structure of the piece as a whole: Instructions for Forgetting begins, titillatingly, with an anecdote about video footage not included depicting hardcore pornographic acts; and ends, upliftingly, with an image of an apparently ordinary person dancing in a crowded city street. An arc like that bespeaks calculation rather than randomness; I found that this worked against what I understood to be the show's premise: mightn't something more raw and less neatly fabricated stimulate more energy and thought?

This is, nevertheless, an unusual theatrical event, and certainly a valuable introduction to one of the mainstays of the current London alternative theatre scene.

Intimate Apparel tells the story of Esther, who has worked all of her life as a seamstress and made a success of herself—probably as much of one as it's possible for an unmarried, respectable 35-year-old black woman to be in 1905 Manhattan—as creator of beautiful, desirable ladies' underthings. She lives alone in a boarding house run by Mrs. Dickson, a pragmatic, loquacious widow who wants Esther to marry "up," as she did, to a well-to-do man with some assets. But Esther instead gets herself involved in a mail order romance with a Caribbean worker on the just-begun Panama Canal. Against Mrs. Dickson's stern advice and her own better judgment, Esther lets herself be wooed by this rough-hewn but poetic stranger, until, near the end of Act One, matters come to a head in the form of a marriage proposal.

I won't tell you what happens next; anyway, there's more to Esther's life than romance, and its compartments are sketched out in impressionistic detail by playwright Lynn Nottage in quick, quirky, disjointed scenes that almost feel like revue sketches. (I love this about Intimate Apparel—the different faces we put on for different company ring so true!)

So we see Esther with one of her best customers, a bored and unhappy Park Avenue socialite who is vainly trying to win back her distant husband with frilly lingerie; this rich white lady, Mrs. Van Buren, takes unusual interest in Esther and is only too happy to help her—for, as the daughter of freed slaves, she can neither read nor write—compose love letters to her faraway beau.

And then we catch Esther way downtown, in a bordello, where another of her clients, a prostitute named Mayme, is always in need of some new enticing garment to satisfy the male trade.

More interesting, for me, than either of these relationships is Esther's strained, ambivalent friendship with Mr. Marks, the Jewish immigrant from whose shop on Orchard Street she buys all her material. Though their religions and races make even touching one another taboo, Esther and Marks share a passion for fabric. The impossibility of their transcending the gargantuan barriers that separate them—especially contrasted with their courageous efforts to tear some of those barriers down—makes for the most compelling, and ultimately heartbreaking, moments of Intimate Apparel.

Nottage zooms in on Esther and her man, George, in the play's second act; this constriction of focus pushes the storytelling toward melodrama and cliché; the panorama of New York turn-of-the-century life—so gloriously conjured, by the way, in Harold Wheeler's grand syncopated ragtime score—is largely missing and greatly missed. Nevertheless, Intimate Apparel qualifies as stirring, well-crafted drama—satisfying and intelligent.

Daniel Sullivan's staging, for Roundabout Theatre Company in their newly-renovated Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center (this space was once home to the American Place Theater), favors character over style: the performances are superb, but the play's episodic structure isn't particularly dealt with, which eventually works against it. Viola Davis (Esther) is the show's quiet, solid center, only occasionally bursting forth with the passion that we know is boiling inside her; she's so convincingly introverted that she sometimes makes us forget she's there. Until she finds the nerve to stop being fifth business, Davis's Esther is easily upstaged by the bolder characters surrounding her—Lauren Velez's saucy but conflicted Mayme; Arija Bareikis's spoiled, melancholy Mrs. Van Buren; Russell Hornsby's gently brutish George; Corey Stoll's compassionate, tentative Marks; and Lynda Gravatt's grounded, sadder-but-wiser landlady Mrs. Dickson. (The latter two do especially fine work.)

Derek McLane's sets, which glide on and off stage with a kind of magical reassurance, and Catherine Zuber's costumes, which include many authentic-looking period creations devised by Esther, serve the play beautifully.

The pulp-titled Intrigue With Faye begins hot and heavy, with a couple seen via surveillance cameras entering an apartment building. Images projected onstage show the pair as they neck in the elevator and grope their way down the hall. They slip inside their apartment, and onstage at the same moment.

The erotic thrill quickly dissipates with the live bodies however, in this case those of TV stars Benjamin Bratt (of Law and Order) and Julianna Margulies (of E.R.). Rather than explore the voyeurism of video through the spectacle of theater, Intrigue With Faye turns out to be a standard relationship play about trust and fidelity. Playwright Kate Robin (a writer for Six Feet Under) has only updated the conflict by having the lovers film their movements and pour over the footage nightly in their loft littered with videotape (the sleek 21st century set was designed by Riccardo Hernández).

We watch the footage (designed by Dennis Diamond and shot by Tom Houghton) with them, projected on a large white canvas that hangs in their home like a minimalist painting: maybe they shop at the same gallery that the characters in Art did. Certainly, like those characters, Lissa (Margulies) and Kean (Bratt) are inordinately fond of psychobabble that shifts their faults onto their partner.

The common danger in a drama founded on therapy is that the characters will look shallow. Although Robin does stumble over this problem, she and director Jim Simpson fall into a bigger trap: they haven’t provided fully-developed characters who can stand up to their own rigorous self-analysis. Bratt can’t escape Kean's two-dimensional disingenuousness (he uses Eastern philosophy as a weapon in arguments) except in the recorded sequences on the wall. In a way, he’s acting with mirrors: he exists only in reflection and indirect views.

On the other hand, Margulies, whose tele-radiance translates to the stage world better, overcomes the script’s absences, supplying a sense that Lissa is evading a part of herself, which allows her to strip the character’s layers away over the second half of the play. Some big stage names also appear on camera (including Michael Gaston and Craig Bierko, as well as Swoosie Kurtz in a scene-stealing performance). Intrigue With Faye might’ve played more with our cultural obsession with being seen and becoming stars, but there’s still enough interesting material to pass the time. Overall, Robin’s play is overcrafted and without insight.

Theater Ten Ten's spring musical this year is the sprightly Gilbert & Sullivan confection Iolanthe, wherein a phalanx of fairies collides with a passel of lawyers. It's hard to say which group is the sillier.

The fairies, led by the gruff but cantankerous Fairy Queen, are in a bit of tither because one of their number, Iolanthe, was banished for committing the terrible sin of marrying a mortal. She now resides in a frog pond of all places, much to her sisters' consternation, and they beg the Queen to forgive her and restore her to their world, which that lady—soft touch that she is—pretty readily does. Iolanthe's return is followed in very short order by a visit from her son, Strephon (he's half-fairy, half-mortal, with the mortal section being from the waist down). He asks his mother and the other fairies to help him win his true love, Phyllis, from her guardian, The Lord Chancellor.

Which brings us to the lawyers and politicians. The Lord Chancellor is a lovable, bumbling, would-be rakish scamp of a leader (think the Pirate King from The Pirates of  Penzance or Koko from The Mikado) who is in love with Phyllis, himself; his duty and position have kept him from petitioning himself for her hand in marriage. But it turns out that just about everybody is in love with Phyllis, and in the course of the play, that alluring young person manages to get engaged to two of the Lord Chancellor's parliamentary associates, Lord Mountararat and Lord Tolloller (this is after she has a tiff with Strephon, when she sees him sitting on the lap of his very youthful-looking fairy mother Iolanthe).

Both fairies and government officials behave foolishly, leading with their hearts despite the constant pointed satirical insertions of their creator, librettist/lyricist William S. Gilbert. Much singing ensues, and in the end everything is sorted out, with everyone paired up appropriately. As if anything else was to be expected.

Never having seen this particular G&S operetta before, I had fun wading through the frivolity, which is sometimes waist-deep; Gilbert's devilish wit pokes fun at the foibles of lovers and lawyers with equanimity and dexterity, much to our delight. Sullivan's music, meantime, is light-headed and effervescent as ever.

The score is sung beautifully by the company of eleven, the harmonies in the choral numbers comprising perhaps the loveliest musical moments (credit must be given to Matt Castle, who is the musical director of this production). Top performing honors go to Cristiane Young, who manages to be imposing, formidable, and entirely harmless as the Fairy Queen, like Margaret Dumont with a sense of humor and perfect pitch. Greg Horton, as the Lord Chancellor, has some of the show's other big comic moments, including a second act patter song quite unlike the "Modern Major General"-sort of piece that we're accustomed to. Frederick Hamilton and Kelly Cooper are attractive and likable as the young lovers Strephon and Phyllis, doing their arias more than justice.

David Tillistrand has a particularly enjoyable moment performing the second act opener, whose chorus goes like this:

I often think it's comical—Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive—Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!

Jacquelyn Baker is charming Iolanthe; ditto Lisa Riegel, Ruth Weber, and Sarah Zeitler as the Fairy Chorus. Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper and Morgan Sills round out the company as Lords Mountararat and Tolloller, respectively.

Judith Jarosz, Ten Ten's producing artistic director, has staged the show lovingly and winningly on Caitlin McCleery's simple, airy unit set, which doubles perfectly as Fairyland and Parliament without needing a single adjustment. Joanne Haas's whimsical costumes are delightful.

The audience sits on stage, up close and personal with the cast in this production. What's lost in perspective is gained in infectious enthusiasm. This Iolanthe is a lark; bring the whole family and have a good time!

I wanted to leave at intermission.

Manhattan Theatre Club’s American premiere of Rona Munro’s play Iron attempts to explore a lost relationship between a 25-year old daughter and her 45-year old mother. The daughter, Josie, resolves to see her mother, Fay (who is in an all-women’s prison), for the first time in 15 years. Thir interaction is supposed to uncover deep truths of why Fay is imprisoned which will help Josie reclaim her lost childhood memories. But in reality the script never reveals why Josie lost her memory in the first place; the only reason given for Fay’s imprisonment is that she was mad and killed her husband; and the only memory reclaimed by Josie is one of dancing with her father as a little girl while standing on his feet. Not very deep, particularly for a piece of theatre that took 2-hours and 20 minutes to reveal itself.

One thing worth mentioning is the performance given by Jennifer Dundas as Josie. In spite of the superficiality of the script, Dundas' work is honest and grounded in the deep layers of someone in need of healing. Her middle class English dialect is impeccable, which unfortunately highlights the flaws in the dialects of the rest of the cast. Lisa Emery (Fay) has a most unsuccessful lower class English dialect that is closer to a middle-aged Eliza Doolittle than a resonant, uneducated, contemporary woman in present day England. Overall, Emery seems to lack an ability to live in the hidden secrets of her character—it is too easy for her to speak her text, as it is not grounded in the inner workings of conflict.

Anna D. Shapiro’s direction is self-conscious and formulaic in MTC Stage II, which seats its audience on three sides of the stage. For example, in almost every scene that Dundas and Emery play together, Shapiro has them sit across from each other at a table, both at the far right of their respective benches, on a diagonal from each other. Predictably, in the middle of each scene, they each (one at a time—as if we won’t notice how unmotivated the blocking is) slide to the opposite ends of their benches—now on the opposite angle from each other. Wow—50% of the scene played in one spot, 50% in another spot to open up the scene to the whole of the audience. Great in a textbook, but in this case it is blocking that has nothing to do with the action of the play. I wish Shapiro had allowed the needs of the characters’ intentions to dictate the play’s physical life and was less concerned with the external techniques of staging a play.

Mark Wendland’s iron set is quite striking as it successfully captures the cold and sterile world of the prison. Kevin Adams’ lighting captures the transitions of the play better than the moment-to-moment of each scene. His lighting seems to “pop up” at times for no reason other than to illuminate an actor, and when the actor moves within the scene the previous light arbitrarily disappears. I missed the over feel of light and how it shapes the inner truth of each scene and the play as a whole—helping to tell the story.

Anthony Pennino's new play contains 26 scenes—cantos—that collectively delineate nearly twenty years in the history of one Italian American family: hence the title. Pennino's ambition here is to sketch not just a family saga but to explore the ethos of his ethnicity, and so interspersed with more-or-less naturalistic scenes that show the Alghieri clan coping with love, loss, growing up, and other things are more stylized segments that variously send-up or comment on Italian American stereotypes, from The Godfather to Ol' Blue Eyes to Tony Soprano.

It makes for a funny and often thoughtful evening of theatre. The throughline—presented, interestingly, non-chronologically—tracks the teenage and early adult years of two Alghieri cousins, descendants of patriarch Giovanni, Sr., who arrived in America during the Great Depression and forged a modest living as a shoemaker. Vin, elder of the two cousins, is the son of Giovanni's heir, Vincenzo, who has expanded the family business to a chain of seven stores in suburban New Jersey. Vincenzo is married to Maerose; in addition to Vin they have a daughter, Gina. The younger cousin is Gio, son of Frank, a child psychologist, and his non-Italian (and non-Catholic-born) wife, Vivian.

Vin is a dreamy, rough-and-tumble guy who hates school and meets his girlfriend, Lisa, in a barroom brawl; Gio is a whiz-kid who hates sports, is awkward with girls, and plans to be the first Alghieri to go to an Ivy League college. Yet despite the significant differences in their upbringings and predilections, these young men are best friends; at the heart of Italian American Cantos is the relationship between them, and their journey from unaffected camaraderie—kids quoting from Goodfellas or tossing a ball in the yard—to very separate lives apart, as Gio heads to the City and Columbia University while Vin, addicted to heroin, implodes.

The play is longer than it ought to be: Pennino is building a family drama of heartfelt intensity here, as well as a breezier satire of cultural mores and stereotypes; that's a lot of material. One obstacle for the playwright is probably his closeness to his subjects: this work is unabashedly autobiographical, and there's a sense of not wanting to leave anything out—not wanting to slight this story or that event—that finally weighs the piece down, especially in its somewhat drawn-out conclusion.

But much of the script is filled with insight about its stated thesis, namely: what does it mean to grow up as a second-generation Italian American nowadays? Just how accurate are the Mafioso/Goomba stereotypes? And how damaging?

Italian American Cantos is directed by Gregory Simmons and features an attractively spare and utilitarian production design by Thom Weaver. The cast is headed by Joseph Schommer and Jarrod Pistilli who play Gio and Vin, respectively; Schommer displays a nice mix of intellectualism and naiveté, while Pistilli is instantly appealing and sexy in that young John Travolta way. Among the supporting cast, Lisa Barnes makes the strongest impression as Maerose, giving depth and complexity to a character who in other hands might be more of a cipher. Paul Romanello and Christina Romanello (brother and sister, I'm told) are also effective as Gio's father Frank and Vin's girlfriend Lisa.