nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

Once again, the Shakespeare to see this summer isn’t in Central Park, it’s on St. Nicholas Avenue, in Classical Theater of Harlem’s production of Macbeth. Macbeth is a nightmare from deep within the human subconscious. The characters hallucinate and sleepwalk, or they describe horrible visions like that of horses eating their own flesh. The three witches who preside over this tale of blood and insanity symbolize some pagan urge, bodying forth our most repressed dreams. They are the Evil, supernatural and inhuman, outside of our understanding or control. And they infect Macbeth and his wife with the virus of their Evil, inspiring within them a double-crime, the worst crimes in any culture—he kills his king, who is also his guest.

When Orson Welles directed Macbeth in Harlem seventy-five years ago, he outraged the theater establishment by scraping the Victorian enamel off the Swan of Avon to reveal a dark and horrifying idol. To play the witches, Welles imported real voodoo doctors (who, legend has it, cursed and killed a reviewer who panned the show). In this production, director Alfred Preisser alludes to Welles’ voodoo production by clothing his witches in the rags, feathers, and body paint of that religion’s ceremonial regalia. He swells them from a trio to a coven: twelve women—including pubescent girls—who stamp, scream, and sway as they foment their madness. Rounding their number out to an unlucky thirteen is a woman wearing a black-and-white skeleton suit topped by a burlap death’s-head mask. This chorus of women saturates the outdoor space with their power and energy through dance and chant, a physical accompaniment to Shakespeare’s poetic rhythm. They jeer from the rooftop surrounding the small courtyard stage, as if the Macbeths are already in the Pit of Hell and we’re entombed beside them.

And these women are always onstage: sharing the space with the mortals, these dark and pagan spirits pollute the entire world. As Macbeth imagines a dagger before him prior to murdering his king, the women enact a human sacrifice. As they predict his childless future, they pull his crown off and rape him. These bacchantes wave torches against the twilight, chirping and roaring as the sounds of night are described. They turn Macbeth into a Dionysian revel, a Witches’ Sabbath. And the thirteen actresses give themselves to the fearful action utterly: if there was hesitation or self-consciousness, the production would be ridiculous, but there is none and the result is truly frightening. In this production, they, and not Macbeth, are the main characters.

In fact, the atmosphere they create upstages Shakespeare’s play. Of the struggles for Scotland, of the characters’ doubts and mistrust, only Macbeth and his wife’s remain. Ty Jones, as Macbeth, deliberates each action then commits himself wholly. By the final battle, he’s punch-drunk, trying to leap like a swashbuckler but weighed down by his own sword, the sweat in his clothes evidence of his character’s physical and spiritual exhaustion. April Yvette Thompson is more inflexible as Lady Macbeth. She’s all self-assurance and power, and has no patience with her husband’s qualms: she slaps him publicly when he panics at the sight of a ghost. Still, this is a pair of puny humans struggling against the jabbering Fates that surround them, and they never have a chance.

Their sentence is delivered quickly, however, since Preisser and dramaturg Debra Cardona have cut Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy (half the length of Hamlet) to less than 90 minutes. The roles of Duncan and Malcolm have been trimmed heavily to emphasize Macbeth’s struggles with Banquo (Leopold Lowe) and Macduff (the burly but wooden Lawrence Winslow). And the remaining details get lost in the din of fire burn and cauldron bubble. All this may frustrate Shakespearean purists who look for declamation and refinement. But this Macbeth, like Welles’ production 75 years ago, is a work for audiences and not for scholars. You can see Shakespeare done “properly” anytime; here you see Shakespeare without inhibition.

If I had had any idea how much fun Maggie May was going to turn out to be, I'd have gone to see it a lot sooner. The good news is that I got to see it at all: this charming romantic comedy by Tom O'Brien is funny, sweet-natured, and warm-hearted. It boasts a splendid cast, headed by the appealingly hangdog Ean Sheehy, and loving, savvy direction by Jocelyn Szabo. It's the debut production for Wildfire Productions. All of these artists are now on my list of folks to watch out for; catch them here in Maggie May if you possibly can.

Sheehy plays Donny, a young man who journeys to the Bahamas with his ex-girlfriend (and now platonic "best friend") Maggie. He tells her that he's won the trip in a sweepstakes and, not being currently involved with anyone, has decided to share his good fortune with her. But Maggie notices that their room has just one bed in it, leading Donny to make a sheepish phone call to the front desk to complain about the supposed mix-up; we understand—though Maggie does not—that there is no sweepstakes. Donny has planned this trip to win back his one true love.

But he gets foiled at just about every turn, starting with that phone call, which degenerates into a discussion about Donald O'Connor, the famous dancer, who happens to have the exact same name as our hero, and—as Donny points out to the front desk clerk—who is also in fact dead. Once they've settled in to their room, Maggie and Donny head off to the beach—and return, moments later, drenched by a sudden downpour. Maggie makes rum punch and heads down to the lobby to get some orange juice, and Donny immediately bumps into Mark, an old friend from his childhood who now works on this very island as a tour guide/fisherman for a retired super-rich entrepreneur. Over dopey small talk, Mark and Maggie hit it off, and before Donny can do anything to stop it, Maggie has agreed to spend the next day with Mark on his boat.

The next day, things only get worse for poor Donny—much worse. Will he be able to overcome his anxieties and his inertia and let Maggie know how he feels? And will he do so before lady-killer Mark steals her right out from under him? These are the questions that O'Brien resolves in this very satisfying one-act comedy, and even if you guess the answers, the journey that the playwright takes us and his characters on is lively and entertaining.

Sheehy is terrific as Donny, capturing the awkwardness and discomfort that he experiences, first as inarticulate suitor to Maggie and later as hapless third wheel to the apparently clicking Maggie and Mark. He's a fine physical comedian as well, drawing big laughs with business involving such commonplace props as a cigarette lighter or a bottle of sun block. He's not an obvious romantic hero, which makes him that much more appealing to root for.

Christiane Szabo does equally good work as a thoroughly human Maggie, a girl who expects nothing more than a simple vacation and winds up as the reluctant focus of a stormy love triangle. Ethan James Duff is excellent, too, as the third point on said triangle, the chronically boyish Mark. Stephen Bradbury, in the play's fourth role as Mark's pleasure-worshipping employer Charley, proves an able foil to Sheehy's tightly-wrapped Donny.

Maggie May gives us characters to really care about, in believable comic situations, the kind that make us laugh with amused recognition. It's an irresistible romantic comedy. Let's hope it has a life after this (too-short) initial run.

The first half of Magic Hands Freddy, Arje Shaw's new comedy-drama at SoHo Playhouse, is so full of heart and goodwill that it leaves us glowing and eager at intermission. But our hopes are dashed in the play's impossibly dour second act. One senses that the playwright is settling a score here, as he takes what amounts to a pickax to the genial and loving family portrait he painted in Act One.

The play concerns two brothers, Freddy and Calvin. Orphaned at an early age, they grew up in foster homes, with the elder Freddy serving as parent and caretaker to his younger brother. Freddy scrimps and saves so that Calvin can go to college and become a veterinarian; and  with only  minor reluctance, he finances his brother's second degree in art after the latter reveals that he hates animals. Calvin becomes prosperous and Freddy looks on proudly.

Freddy is married and has a young disabled daughter who currently resides at a state institution because his wife Maria will not care for her. The strain that this has placed on Freddy's marriage is now nearing a breaking point, and Maria announces that she is leaving Freddy to return to the village in Italy where he and Calvin first met her years before.

Shaw creates a pair of terrifically appealing characters in Freddy and Calvin, and their indestructible filial bond seems right at the heart of the play. Which is why the one-two punch that Shaw deals that bond—I won't ruin the story by revealing the specifics here—is both brutal and entirely unforeseen. We leave Magic Hands Freddy deeply let-down by our playwright; which may be the way he feels about life, but it's almost willfully unpleasant and also rather pointless.

That said, Michael Rispoli should certainly count Magic Hands Freddy as  a personal triumph: onstage for virtually the entire show, Rispoli is humane and effusive and vulnerable in a tour de force performance loaded with energy and wit. Ralph Macchio (Calvin) is good, too, though he has less to do; Antoinette LaVecchia gives a detailed portrayal of Maria at two distinct stages of her life, while Ed Chemaly plays various other necessary characters. Rebecca Taylor's staging is fine, making interesting use of the intimate SoHo space, putting actors into the audience far more more often than expected.

A final point: Freddy does, indeed, have "magic hands"—he's a masseur, and evidently a very successful one. But, except for a couple of portentous speeches at the play's beginning and end, little is made of this singular vocation in Shaw's script, leaving us somewhat confused by a quirky but mostly unexplained title.

Mambo Quasimodo takes place in a small, crowded bar that sports a teeny-weeny stage outfitted with a microphone and spotlight. Here our nameless hero, a hunchback who is a comedian, delivers a monologue about his life and times—a mix of autobiography, rant, and darkly sardonic self-deprecation. Riffing on his disability, he interacts aggressively with audience members as he roams freely around the room, sitting at a table with some pretty ladies at one point, and ordering a beer for himself and a random patron at another. He is—this is exactly the way to put it—in our faces; Mambo Quasimodo is a very uncomfortable play to watch, by design: playwright-director Steven Tanenbaum intends for us to experience some of what his creation has endured during a lifetime of being stared and laughed at.

We also get a sense of what makes this fellow tick, in a few flashback/fantasy sequences, that come at us without warning. They're sort of breathtakingly surreal, especially the final one, in which our Comedian imagines himself straightening out and becoming "normal."

A recurring motif in the show is a ringing cellphone (the Comedian's), which he refuses to answer: it's never said, but we understand that the caller on the other end is his father, whose cruel and abusive treatment is now being paid back with enforced silence.

Lawrence Jensen—who is also a member of the cast of Tanenbaum's long-running hit Mono—is terrific in this one-man-plus-audience show, delivering a tough, smart, magnetic performance as the hunchback comic at the center of this drama.

The whole thing—just 40 minutes long, or thereabouts—takes the shape of a stand-up routine, but it's actually a play, in which the audience is arguably the protagonist. I say that because Tanenbaum's character/alter ego is stuck doing this performance every Saturday for as long as Mambo Quasimodo runs (hopefully a long time). But we can't help but be changed by our time with this raw, melancholy, and unexpectedly wise soul, whose observations about otherness are so nakedly honest that they sear us, at least a little bit.

The raison d'être of Man Wanted! is to provide its two young male performers the chance to sing theatre songs that were written expressly for women. In the course of a two-hour evening, they sing 29 of these, ranging from the familiar ("I Move On" from the film Chicago) to the obscure ("That Man Is Doing His Worst to Make Good", which was CUT from the 1953 flop Carnival in Flanders), and from the obviously diva-esque ("Time Heals Everything") to the nearly gender-neutral ("My Own Best Friend," also from Chicago).

At its best, Man Wanted! reinvents and reinvigorates its material: "Someone Wonderful I Missed," for example—from the already mostly forgotten I Love My Wife—is presented here as the wistful duet of a male couple of long standing, both wondering idly about roads not taken, the one at the kitchen table reading the morning paper, the other in the living room with a book. It's definitely the evening's high point: just lovely.

Also successful are the renditions of songs that tell full-fledged stories all on their own, like Shire & Maltby's delightful "Crossword Puzzle" and Kander & Ebb's "Colored Lights," both put over with energy and flair by Selby Brown; and Jason Robert Brown's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything," sincerely delivered  by Ben West.

But, to quote Mr. Ebb, something's missing here.  Man Wanted! has neither narrative nor arc; a lot of the time it feels like the songs are in random order, and performed almost perfunctorily. A compilation revue begs the question, why these particular songs? West and Brown don't really tell us.

There is, too, an awkwardness and an inconsistency in their approach to material written for female characters. Gender identities are retained for some numbers and changed for others; mappings to a (presumably) gay context are seamless sometimes ("What Did I Ever See In Him?") but very forced elsewhere ("Paris Original," with the titular object transformed, unconvincingly, from a dress to a scarf). West does a heartfelt "I Want to Go to Hollywood" in front of an oversized mirror and he almost—but not quite—conjures the spirit of a lonely gay boy longing to be his favorite movie diva. More of that sort of brave honesty would have gone a long way in Man Wanted!

The show is directed and choreographed somewhat unimaginatively by Ben Swasey, especially given the nifty set designed by Ryan Elliott Kravetz, which offers no fewer than six distinct and interesting playing areas. Susan Barras' costumes are problematic too, particularly in Act One, when Brown and West are both constrictingly clad in suit-and-tie. The musical director is Seth Bisen-Hersh.

Mao on Line One, the quirkily intriguing new play by Kimberly Megna currently being presented by DownTownTheatre Company, has a lot going for it. It's briskly directed by Kelly Gillespie, who does a fine job balancing high- and low-tech stage trickery with the script's open-hearted earnestness to keep the audience engaged and disarmed throughout. It sports a spare, theatrical set by Brian Scott, consisting only of some platforms and some chairs, that shrewdly yet effortlessly evokes locations from office interiors to the steps of a museum to a crowded city street. It boasts spectacular costumes by Karl A. Ruckdeschel that manage to be eccentric and naturalistic simultaneously, delineating character with true panache. And its lighting (by Zakaria M. Al-Alami) and sound design (by Sten Severson) bespeak a professionalism and a budget not always associated with off-off-Broadway theatre.

Mao also has an outstanding cast. Jeffrey M. Bender and Natalie Gold, both appealingly human—layered, complex, incomplete—portray Daniel and Lorraine, the couple at the play's center. He's a sales executive at a telecom firm who is feeling brushed aside and disconnected by so-called enabling technologies, while she's an attorney at a high-powered law firm who's battling Type A tendencies and the rat race to find grounding and focus in an increasingly misdirected life. Daniel and Lorraine go out on a blind date; afterward, he literally becomes invisible to his co-workers while she is pursued by memories of her sister, with whom she argued bitterly some years before. Christy Collier, Eric Loscheider, Ellen Shanman, and Michael Warner—never offstage—portray the various people who populate Daniel and Lorraine's world, and they're terrific. Loscheider, in particular, is funny and vivid as both Lorraine's assistant Pat and Daniel's co-worker Huw (watch him as the latter, trying to figure out where his colleague has gone to during one of Daniel's "disappearances": priceless stuff).

What keeps Mao from being a thoroughly satisfying experience is its script, which is at once too peremptory and too ambitious for its own good. Megna's characters are charming and we root for Lorraine and Daniel as a couple as soon as we see them together. But their relationship is barely depicted here at all. Instead Megna heads off in, literally, four different directions. We watch Lorraine grapple with her familial problems in flashbacks to conversations with her sister (and it's not clear until late in the play that these are flashbacks—a structural problem that complicates the experience of the play). We empathize with Lorraine and with put-upon Pat as she battles the unceasing and unreasoning demands of her workplace. We similarly follow Daniel's story, as he tries to regain his place and his sanity in a technological environment that seems to make communication increasingly more, rather than less, difficult. And we strain to figure out what Lorraine's obsession with Mao Zedong and Daniel's obsession with James Knox Polk have to do with any of the foregoing.

Megna has, alas, bitten off more than she can chew here, especially in a play that only lasts eighty minutes. She's created characters that we care about, but she jumps around their stories rather than giving us the amplification and detail that would help us understand them. In the end, we feel shortchanged.

But the talent evident in her writing and on view in every aspect of this production is very impressive. Megna, Gillespie, and their collaborators at DownTownTheatre are emerging artists to keep an eye on.

"Master Harold"... and the Boys is very specifically and explicitly about apartheid, the system of institutionalized racism that existed in South Africa for decades, a system which, perhaps in some small way, this play and others by Athol Fugard helped to bring down. It takes place on a rainy afternoon in the town of Port Elizabeth, in a tea room owned and operated by a white family. Master Harold, or Hally, is the seventeen-year-old son. His parents are never seen in this play: we know that his father is a weak-willed alcoholic, crippled in body and spirit; we know very little about his mother. The father is in the hospital, and during the course of the play we learn that his mother is bringing him back home.

The two adults who are seen in "Master Harold" are the family's two black servants, Sam and Willie—the "boys" of the play's title. Sam is fifty, smart and proud, obviously a kind of father figure to Hally, whose own real dad is distant, neglectful, and stupid. Willie is younger and simpler; he's more naive and more gullible than Sam. Today, under Sam's tutelage, he is practicing his dance steps for an upcoming competition, but his bad temper has temporarily lost him his dancing partner, Hilda (he tends to hit her when she doesn't do the steps right).

Hally comes home from school—well, to the tea room, actually—and for an hour or so he intermittently banters with Sam and Willie and works fitfully on his homework. One assignment is to prepare a 500-word composition about a Significant Cultural Event, and after chatting with the "boys" he hits upon the sweetly subversive notion of writing about Sam and Willie's dance contest. Sam explains it to Hally:

There's no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. That's what that moment is all about. To be one of those finalists on that dance floor is like... like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen.

Suddenly, without us really seeing it coming, Fugard turns the intimate and trivial details of Hally's, Sam's, and Willie's lives into something universal: there's greatness in "Master Harold" as Sam ruminates on that dream and what it really signifies: "It's beautiful because that is what we want life to be like."

The tragedy of "Master Harold"—of apartheid; of blind bigotry; of hatred bred by oppression—comes from Hally's inability to believe in Sam's dream; the lessons he's been taught prove finally to be too deeply ingrained to be overcome. Or are they? The play ends bitterly but ambiguously: there's a glimmer of greatness in Hally, too: a spark of tolerance and compassion. Sam and Willie, meanwhile, continue their dance.

"Master Harold"... and the Boys, then, turns out to be much bigger than the anti-apartheid drama it seems at first glance. The relationship between Hally and the two servants is rich and complicated; especially with Sam, there's a crazy mixture of respect and love and patronizing superiority and something that's worse than hate, utter indifference. In contrast, Sam and Willie act out the eternal game of topdog/underdog, with Sam maintaining the upper hand with the younger and weaker Willie. Willie goes home and beats up Hilda. Fugard's microcosm of how the world works—not just under apartheid, but everywhere—is startling.

Roundabout Theatre Company's production, twenty years after the original and more than a decade after the end of apartheid, is genuinely compelling. Danny Glover, who played Willie in the 1982 Broadway version, stars as Sam; he's deliberate and magisterial in the role, especially when called upon to deliver some of Fugard's wise and powerful speeches. Lonny Price, who was the original Hally, now directs, and his staging is straightforward and taut and inobtrusive, designed to let the play speak for itself. One image that I love is that Willie never stops moving—he's either dancing or cleaning for the first hour of the play, the real Everyman while Sam and Hally play out their power struggle. Michael Boatman is deceptively small as Willie; we don't realize how important he is to the play's engine until after it's run its course.

Christopher Denham has the role of Hally, and he's perhaps not fully comfortable in it: at the beginning, it feels like he's worrying more about getting the South African accent right than finding all the nuances in his character. But the performance builds as it progresses. If he and Glover never quite connect enough to underline the most personal part of the play's tragedy, he nevertheless communicates the broader points about human nature and humanity that Fugard is most concerned with.

The piece has been impeccably mounted, with an evocative, detailed set by John Lee Beatty and appropriate costumes by Jane Greenwood. Sound designer Brian Ronan, lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski, and special effects designer Jauchem & Meeh, Inc. frame the show in a wet and windy afternoon that sets the tone perfectly.

The big question is: how did a play as pointless and vapid as Match ever get to Broadway at all? When I think of the many better plays that Stephen Belber has written—let alone the hundreds of worthier plays that Broadway producers must turn down every year—well, it's enough to make you almost turn cynical.

But the business of this review is Belber's Match, not the vagaries of commercial theatre production. Match is a comedy, albeit one with a twisty, melodramatic plot that contains two, or perhaps three, surprises that won't be revealed here. Working around the curveballs, I offer this synopsis: Tobi is a former dancer in his 60s who supports himself as a teacher and choreographer (for operas, one of many quirky but ultimately irrelevant details packed into this play). He lives alone in Inwood (wa-a-ay upper Manhattan for those unfamiliar), where he spends his free time drinking, smoking hash, and knitting beautiful sweaters. One day, he is visited by a young married couple, Lisa and Mike, who have come, they say, to interview him for Lisa's dissertation on American Dance and the American Dance Community in the Late 1950s. During the course of the interview, which coincides with Act One, it is discovered that Lisa and Mike are here for some other purpose than their stated one. As soon as their ulterior motives are revealed, the play's outcome—surprise twists notwithstanding—is never in doubt.

The journey, of course, might be fun or interesting—if only Belber had bothered to create believable, attractive characters. Instead, he's created caricatures whom he manipulates at will; there's barely a second during which anyone on stage exhibits behavior even remotely like real life. The key problem lies with Tobi, whom Belber and star Frank Langella (who plays—or rather, overplays—him) would have us accept as a lovable old eccentric: a gossipy, queeny old sweetie-pie, bitchy but ultimately warm-hearted, melancholy but not pathetic. Except this man—who receives a pair of total strangers, oddly, in his stockinged feet—is, by his own admission and action, resolutely and unwaveringly self-absorbed and self-interested, and a bit of a lecher to boot. He self-identifies as gay (and Langella goes over-the-top making him as swishily effeminate as possible, in an indefensibly offensive performance that would have made Quentin Crisp seem butch), yet he talks endlessly about the women he's slept with; there is, for example, an extended scene in Act Two about his prowess at cunnilingus.

Mike leaves Lisa alone with this man for several hours, as if they were both characters in a sleazy horror movie. (I guess, in a way, they kind-of are.)

Does any of this make sense to you? It didn't to me: Belber just piles on the random, sensational details, dressing them up alternately as epigrammatic bon-mots or deliberately vulgar exclamations. It's like having Sophia from The Golden Girls star in a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. Ad-libbing. In drag.

Well. shame on all the perpetrators of this mess, tickets for which, by the way, cost as much as $81.25 each. Set designer James Noone seems less culpable than others, having devised a set that is both more naturalistic and more interesting than the play it houses. Ray Liotta, in his Broadway debut, scores with native charm despite the underwritten role he's been handed, while Jane Adams barely registers, perhaps hoping we won't notice how preposterously her character behaves (she has, for starters, concocted a scheme for getting into Tobi's home that Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz might have found far-fetched). Langella, meanwhile, just basks and revels in his scene-stealing, the way that, say, Maggie Smith did in Lettice & Lovage (only that was a much better play).

There was a time when Broadway was synonymous with the best that American theatre had to offer; and sometimes, that's still true. Not this time, though: Match is theatre at its worst.

Matt & Ben is a cute, funny comedy about a pair of aspiring actors who have decided that writing their own screenplay will put them on the fast track to success. So they're working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, when boom!—a package falls onto Ben's coffee table, seemingly from out of the sky, or heaven. The package turns out to be a finished screenplay, something called "Good Will Hunting."

Yes, it's that Matt & Ben, and if J. Lo and The Bourne Identity have perhaps clouded the memories of Damon and Affleck ingenuously pawing a Best Screenplay Oscar almost a decade ago, that hasn't stopped a quartet of producers from mounting  a full-scale production (with name director David Warren at the helm) of Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers' giddy, silly FringeNYC festival hit. We're talking pleasant but verrrry slight, here; if the subjects of this gently ribbing buddy comedy weren't major Hollywood stars, would anybody be paying any attention?

But Matt & Ben is about Matt and Ben, or rather, younger, caricatured versions of Matt and Ben. The time is the mid '90s, the place is Ben's messy frat boy apartment in the Boston suburb of Somerville. The set-up has already been described; the dilemma—should Affleck and Damon take advantage of this astonishing gift from the gods?—propels an hour of slapstick fighting, flashbacks, and fantasy sequences involving Gwyneth Paltrow and J.D. Salinger. The characterizations are simple: Matt is talented and smart and ambitious and intense, Ben is cute but dumb.

The reason to see it, mainly, is for Mindy Kaling's superb clowning as Ben, stopping the show, for example,  by goofing around during Matt's oh-so-earnest high school talent show rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Kaling is even funnier as Gwyneth Paltrow, who appears to Matt in a dream sequence: I love the way she throws down an iced muffin as if it were poison, proclaiming intently that she never touches food. Brenda Withers, who plays Matt (and, briefly, a Katherine Hepburn-like J.D. Salinger), is mostly straight man to Kaling's hilarious Ben.

Ultimately, Matt & Ben isn't about anything beyond its irreverent poke at a couple of fair-game celebrities. Kaling and Withers nicely finesse the possibly actionable notion that the script of Good Will Hunting could not have been written by the then-rookie Affleck and Damon, giving their piece a sweet and uplifting ending that entirely defangs everything that came before. Pleasant but not not terribly purposeful, which is probably what people said about Ben Affleck ten years ago.

Simon, the central character of James Comtois’ new play Mayonnaise Sandwiches, is the classic lament of many a parent personified: a 25 year-old who lives with his mother and stepfather, has neither gone to college nor gotten a job, and spends his days and nights underachieving his life away on the Internet or in front of the television. On top of this, he is covertly dating a girl nine years his junior, and his daydreams fall into two categories: those of being arrested for statutory rape, and those of turning his garage band into, well, at least a band that makes it out onto the driveway.

It is hard not to love Bryan Fenkart as this shrugging force of global disappointment—distrustful of those who believe in him, and resentful of those who call his bluff. He is unconvinced by his own bag of tricks, and it is quite affecting to watch him play them anyway, with his failing, fractured charisma. Certain he isn’t listening to them, his family, girlfriend and best friend are vocal about his shortcomings, but unbeknownst to them, Simon has a biological alarm clock inside that has gone off, and he has no idea how to stop it.

This last nuance is apparent mostly due to Fenkart’s layered portrayal, more so than Comtois’ writing. His play, like his protagonist, shows a great deal of promise, but has yet to really deliver. The most striking choices are also the most ill-used, such as the conceit of Simon’s actions (and sometimes those of other family members) being paralleled—indeed, commented on—by whatever television show happens to be airing. For example, a sports announcer may jeer at a golden opportunity Simon missed to further his music career, or a woman on a Jerry Springer-esque talk show might bemoan her son’s preference for jailbait. But this conceit is inconsistent and only intermittently funny and enlightening.

Much of the time, we are watching contentious scenes between Simon and his mother (a vaguely-written role played, however, with appealing conviction by Leslie E. Hughes), who had him when she was twelve years old. The treatment of this last potentially fascinating detail vacillates between the absurd and the kitchen sink; it generally explains her attempts to steer her son’s lifestyle, but the result is muddy melodrama.

Director Peter Boisvert has made a few good casting choices (in particular, Fenkart, Hughes, and Diane Currie, who plays Simon’s soothingly uncomplicated 16 year-old paramour), but has not entirely succeeded in bringing the play to life. Lacking throughout is a sense of place, inhibiting the actors’ behavior—i.e., a bartender shuffles about aimlessly behind his bar, cleaning the same glass fifteen times; the environment of Simon’s home does not exist beyond a couch and a television, and the family reclines as though they’re waiting for their furniture delivery.

The eponymous mayonnaise sandwiches represent our knowingly-harmful indulgences—the way in which we choose, psychoanalytically-speaking, to die in our own fashion. But it is implausible that Simon’s father has succumbed to this vice, much less would suffer a heart attack because of it; as portrayed by Don Piccin (a Russel Crowe doppelganger), he is young and virile and eats maybe two such sandwiches on-stage. My point is that this is an unpersuasive and unsatisfactory symbol, both in theory and in practice—a disappointment from what may be a talented writer. Comtois, like Simon, has Potential, but must make bolder choices and then fully commit to them. Take the band out of the garage and see what happens.

It’s the Metropolis for the twenty-first century. You know, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film about a futuristic city maintained by workers enslaved underground. But it’s not set in Germany; it’s in America, and even closer to home—New York City. It’s the new Rent for the “Rent generation,” who now (hopefully) see the world with wiser perspectives. It’s a piece of theatre for the Taboo crowd (if Taboo had been off-Broadway), but, fortunately, in a theatre appropriate for a downtown audience.

Ministry of Progress has at its center a “simple” man named Dave Glutterman, earnestly portrayed by Jason Scott Campbell. He’s as much of a medieval Everyman as he is a contemporary average Joe. (Think the man in your office whose name you can’t remember, not the reality TV show!) He’s trapped in a time that is today, but also yesterday and tomorrow at the same time. He stumbles into a world where humanity and compassion are held hostage by a government that has eliminated freedom of speech and human rights. The inhabitants of this place all seem to function as brainwashed animatrons. In the midst of this nightmare is Dave, a man who simply placed in the mail his driver’s license renewal form, only to have it returned with the statistical identity of another man— Dave GUTERMAN (born in Krakow, Poland, in 1921). They left out an “L” and a “T” in his last name, so Dave travels to the Ministry of Progress to correct the error and to reclaim his identity. Once inside the Ministry, he is sent on a journey to the Basement of Hell and its maze of hallways with offices titled: The Vault of Unrecovered Identities; The Department of Lame Excuses; The Department of Heterodoxy; and the Department of Open Lies and Small Talk.

Based on the radio play by Charlie Morrow, Kimberley Hughes has created a musical experience that is as raucous as a rock concert and as poignant as the best of musical theatre. She incorporates the musical talents of eleven composers: John Beltzer, Sara Carlson, Philip Dessinger, Ted Eyes, Alex Forbes, Kathy Hart, Gary Levine, Christine Martirano, Jeremy Schonfeld, Tony Visconti, plus her own compositions. These songwriters masterfully helm the score with a singular vision. The result of their efforts is a postmodern expression that attempts to reinvent the boundaries of musical theatre.

Campbell is endearing as the atypical hero of this drama. His Dave searches for the positive in every situation, which, I’d like to believe, is the reason he ultimately succeeds in reclaiming his identity. Campbell embraces with all his might the reality of the man who needs to change a simple mistake, whose destiny is to tear apart the metaphorical walls of the Ministry of Progress. He is supported by an amazing group of performers that include: Brian J. Dorsey, Tyne Firmin, Gary Marachek, Jennifer McCabe, Maia A. Moss, Julie Reiber, Richard E. Waits, and Christian Whelan. To single out any one of them would do an injustice to all of their performances.

Adriana Serrano’s set design is an installation of scaffolding and platforming that houses the rock band that underscores all of the play’s action. Projected on large screens throughout the space are images bound in black and white that find their colorful outlet as the Ministry is torn apart. Images from surveillance cameras become the moving sky; blank expressions on employee identification cards become colorful remembrances captured in home movies from childhood.

Jason Kantrowitz defines time and place with his inspired lighting design. He utilizes the best of rock concert lighting to transform the Jane Street Theatre into the Twilight Zone of Hughes’ musical creation.

Fabio Toblini’s costumes evoke a multitude of periods in fashion to define his sense of the here-and-now yet sometime in the future. He dresses McCabe in a gypsy dress that brings to mind a modern Mary Magdalene. He dresses workers at the Ministry in uniforms that reflect a Socialist army. He exposes the naked body to reveal an experienced freedom from oppression. His design has a sense of humor and moves from sepia tones to the vibrant colors of a rainbow.

Kudos to Hughes for her imagination, talent, and vision that has enabled her to direct and conceive Ministry of Progress with masterful skill. This show is deserving of a full audience and a healthy theatrical life.

Ticket prices are $60 and $65. Wouldn’t it be great if student rush tickets were available, since they are the audience to most likely embrace this piece?

British playwright Colin Pink has found real pertinence in the legendary tale of Theseus and the Labyrinth; his new play, Minotaur, is scarily resonant, even in the raucous and uneven production by The Luminous Group, now at the Kraine Theatre. Pink sticks to the basic story from Greek mythology: On the isle of Crete, King Minos' wife Pasiphae became enamored by the great bull given them by the god Poseidon and had a child by it, a cursed beast called the Minotaur that is half-man, half-bull. Minos engaged the clever Daedalus to build a maze in which to house the Minotaur, into which young Athenian captives are sacrificed to feed the monster. One Athenian, Theseus, falls in love with Minos' daughter, Ariadne, and with her help—she gives him a magic ball of yarn—he defeats the Minotaur and escapes from Crete.

Pink's version focuses on Theseus' wily manipulation of Ariadne and on the Minotaur's sad and misunderstood imprisonment. The Theseus portion of the play, which takes place above ground in Minos' lavish palace and its environs, is quick and rowdy, if a bit scattershot, incorporating pop culture references from British Music Hall to hip-hop to paint unattractive portraits of a set of characters whose motivations are all overtly political, from the cunning and seductive Theseus, who takes advantage of dim Ariadne to win his freedom, to the Bush- or Blair-like King Minos, distracting his impoverished country with a makeshift war against an imagined enemy (not to mention promulgating the bloody, unnecessary, but very popular annual ritual of the sacrifice to the Minotaur).

The "downstairs" part of the play happens in the Labyrinth, where a much gentler and smarter Minotaur than we expect plays chess with his one human friend (Sirus, his "keeper") and muses about the nature of life in general and his own cursed existence in particular. These scenes are reminiscent of Calderon's Life is a Dream, and—with a similarly tragic end ordained by mythology—give this Minotaur real stature. The contrast between him and his more powerful relatives above ground is stark and disturbing.

It makes for interesting drama; alas, the concept is not fruitfully mined by Kristina O'Neal and her colleagues at The Luminous Group, who emphasize the broad comic elements at the expense of the play's more thoughtful core. The production, which includes lots of dancing and a parade of punk-favored costumes by Frank Tropiano, might work better if more of its resources were dedicated to mining the text's deeper meanings.

There are a pair of commendable performances—Josh Stein-Sapir's Theseus, and particularly Brandon Breault's thoughtful take on the Minotaur.

Julian Rad and Hilary Adams give us here a highly visceral theatricalization of Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, one that offers much to admire. Adams is the director, and she has created, using six very tall ladders and not much more, an imaginative, engaging rendering of the story's milieu. Rad wears many hats here: he is the producer, he has designed the lighting and sound, he has made the adaptation from the original book, and he is also a member of the show's ensemble of eight actors. He's pulled off quite a hat trick here, excelling as designer and producer and proving more than competent in the other departments.

Rad's vision is fundamentally that of Man against Nature—his Moby Dick is at its best when it brings us into the world of the whalers, men who battle the elements as much for the existential thrill as for the promise of adventure and wages. Adams' staging soars when it's portraying the men at work—swabbing the deck in a kind of manly ballet, lowering the whale boats in a gloriously choreographed pantomime.  Rad has filled the play with authentic sea chanteys and songs from the early 19th century and they provide not just verisimilitude but real insight into the story and its characters: we get to know these men through their rituals and relaxations.

But Moby Dick is also the story of an obsession—Captain Ahab's quest for vengeance against the great white whale that took his leg—and of the eternal struggle of good and evil. Rad seems on less sure footing here: the confrontations between Ahab and the whale and Ahab and his pious and pragmatic first mate Starbuck don't have the pulsing forward propulsion of the other scenes. The whalers' journey on the Pequod feels inevitable, while Ahab's feels forced; it's an imbalance that makes Moby Dick's second half, which is mostly about the pursuit of the almost demonic title character, less satisfying and less exciting than the first.

The play is performed by eight actors who commit themselves fully to the production, with the standout unquestionably Michael Berry, who is both masterful and appealing as Starbuck (he also has a splendid singing voice).

Four years ago, Edmund De Santis wrote a play called Making Peter Pope, about a man in his 30s whose life seemed to be on the verge of implosion, with family, career, and relationships all veering wildly out-of-control to create a midlife crisis of near-epic proportions. Now De Santis has written a new play, More Than This, which on the surface tells the same story: a mid-30ish New Yorker named Sam is bombarded with Life Events—his father is dying of cancer, his wife is losing interest in their marriage and indulging in an insider trading scheme at work, and he has just been promoted to Group Leader at the consulting firm job that he hates.

Terrific as Making Peter Pope is (and I liked it so much that I published it in my first anthology, Plays and Playwrights for the New Millennium), More Than This is by far the wiser work, more mature and more profound, reflecting what has happened to De Santis and to all of us since 1999 (September 11th, for example). More Than This shakes up the random happenings of life—some trivial, some suibstantial—and distills from the chaos a kind of recipe for meaningful life. Whether you agree or not with its prescriptions—to help others, to live in the present—it's impossible not to be admiring of this play's honesty, perspective, and courage. More Than This is about finding a way to live that makes sense in a world that increasingly makes no sense at all. I love it for that.

I also love it for its precise, vivid writing, which it shares with De Santis' other plays. With economy, humor, and warmth, More Than This introduces us to Sam and his circle, characters who are quite alarmingly real: Sam's wife, Cathy, a high-powered lawyer on the fast track; Lori Ann, Sam's boss, who has proudly "rewarded" him with a promotion that he doesn't want but can't find the nerve to turn down; Phil, Sam's father, a gruff retiree who is facing down cancer; Leona, his mother, who is trying to deal with her doctor-hating husband and his all-too-imminent death; Marie, Sam's sister, mother of five and daddy's favorite, trying to eke out brief visits to their parents' Florida trailer.

Phil's illness and passing—played out at what Sam calls "the trailer of death"—is at the heart of More Than This (or is the gut?); as Sam's first up-close encounter with death, overloaded with all sorts of emotional and psychological baggage as it is, it becomes a life-changing experience. For the better.

For Sam does have some help: there's Ryan, an unemployed accountant who becomes Sam's workout partner at the gym and winds up introducing him to the practice of meditation. And, in Florida, there's Eve, an attractive young home health care worker who assists the family through Phil's final weeks (he insists on dying at home rather than in a hospital). Sam and Eve are instantly attracted to one another, and as Phil moves through the last stages of his life, their relationship blossoms.

De Santis never veers off course, though; More Than This is sometimes satirical, sometimes fantastical, and sometimes farcical, but it's spectacularly grounded; this is no fairy tale, and there's no happily ever after in sight for anybody. Indeed, looking backward and looking ahead are anathema; what Sam learns is to anchor himself firmly in the right-now. I remember reading long ago a Zen proverb that said whatever you're doing now should be the thing you want to be doing when you die. Such is how we learn to value the precious thing called life.

More Than This is less antic and absurdist than Making Peter Pope; it's serious and serene. It's been staged with raw theatricality by Marc Geller on a stark unit set. With lighting designer Stephen Arnold, Geller is able to convince us that we're in Sam's office, at the gym, on a rainy New York street, or just outside Phil and Leona's trailer—and they do it with just a bare stage and three wooden stools.

Christopher H. Matthews heads the cast as Sam, propelling the play with a questing, almost quixotic spirit. His seven castmates all do fine work as well, with particularly affecting performances turned in by Charlotte Hampden as Sam's exceedingly well-put-together mom Leona and Glenn Kalison as the earnestly compassionate Ryan. Lucy McMichael gives a wonderfully complicated and layered performance as Sam's boss, clearly in love with him but entirely unaware of it. Her life is a house of cards built on misplaced values and goals, and because she's so entrenched inside it she's Sam opposite; McMichael's needy desperation makes her almost tragic.

See More Than This: it's a rich and rewarding theatre experience. De Santis and his collaborators take us on a roller coaster ride that takes in most of what existence has to offer, from giddy moments of happiness to solemn moments of sorrow and reflection. You will find perspective here, and catharsis, and perhaps solace and renewal.

Dramatists from Alfred Hitchcock to Sam Shepard to current hit maker Tracy Letts (Bug) have all understood the storytelling potential of the American motel room. To launch their new theatre company Apartment 929, co-artistic directors Clark Middleton and Darrell Larson have assembled a program of new short plays that all take place in that very setting. Eight writers—Shepard and Middleton among them—contribute to Motel Blues, as the evening is titled; it's a collection of edgy, punchy, moody pieces—you can feel the highway and the flashing "Vacancy" sign just outside. Clocking in at more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is too long, but an embarrassment of riches is certainly not the worst problem for a brand new troupe to have.

The evening is divided into two acts of four plays each. The first half is the more upbeat, with its focus, more or less, the idea of the motel as a secret place of dreamy and hopeful seduction and rendezvous. The darker second half looks at the motel room as terminus: characters here are running or sinking or both.

My personal favorite among the eight is Clark Middleton's monologue Dear Dr. Phil, which opens Act Two. In it, Middleton plays a man whose burglary attempt at a drug store has gone badly awry. What's distinctive about the piece is that its protagonist, like Middleton himself, suffers from chronic Rheumatoid Arthritis, which debilitating condition explains the palpable sense of otherness he experiences and, more directly, the crime itself—a desperate effort to get hold of some prohibitively expensive medication. Middleton gives us a glimpse of what it means to live in constant pain—for tasks that most people take for granted, such as putting on a pair of socks, to become significant events that require planning and special tools. The shock of the day's inadvertent outcome—a murder—is muted but enormous. Acted and written with defiant understatement, Dear Dr. Phil packs a steadily strengthening emotional wallop.

Lee Blessing's Thermopolis and Sam Shepard's Pure Accident, both also in the second act, offer fine opportunities to their actors and directors. In the former, Danton Stone plays a middle-aged man who has kidnapped his teenage step-daughter for reasons that are never quite articulated but turn out to be sadder and less sinister than we immediately expect. Jess Weixler is blisteringly convincing as the angry young adolescent; Lucie Tiberghien is responsible for the taut direction. Shepard's piece, adapted and directed by Darrell Larson, is an enigmatic stage poem about a collapsed marriage, with the husband (Wayne Maugins) bewilderedly searching for his disappeared mate, and the wife (Emily McDonnell) escaped to another state with a waitressing job and a new name. Shami Chaikin—sister of legendary director Joe, whose legacy is celebrated by Apartment 929—makes a memorable cameo as the wife's confused mother.

Slamming Doors, by Linda Reynolds, is more monologue than bona fide play. In it, Catherine Curtin plays a distraught woman stranded in a cheap Detroit motel; staged by Randal Myler, it's the weak link in Act Two, one-note in both writing and performance. Similarly, Mike Batistick's minimalist Manbaby, maybe five minutes long, emerges as barely even a character sketch, depicting a sad, random conversation between two men, one of whom works in animal control.

But the rest of the first half startles and arrests. There's Jan Jalenak's mini-dramedy You Too, about the tentative, joyous afternoon fling between two just-acquainted women; and Adam Rapp's quirky tale of seduction and negotiation, Bingo with the Indians, in which a savvy older writer (Stephen Caffrey) lures a naive kid (Scott Barrow, in a terrific performance) to read a scene from one of his plays. Starting the evening off is Stephen Belber's Management, perhaps the most sharply-written piece of all, a tantalizingly odd meditation on connection featuring Katie Firth as a traveling businesslady and Chris Messina as the motel manager who brings her an unsolicited bottle of complimentary wine. Details in this piece, which is staged by Tiberghien, are beautifully wrought.

The evening's length aside, Motel Blues is extremely well put-together. Simple sets and complementary design elements all work nicely on the intimate Greenwich Street Theatre stage. Indeed, with its array of talent in every department, and hugely professional production values, Motel Blues promises a rich and interesting future for Apartment 929. I will look forward eagerly to what they do next.

The Classical Theatre of Harlem has chosen to present their latest offering, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, as a timely reminder of the profits and the price of war. Though Brecht originally wrote the show during World War II, director Christopher McElroen proves that the show doesn’t have to be solely a response to the Nazis; it also pertains to today’s American wartime society.

The show follows the fortunes of Mother Courage, a peddler living in a wagon who uses the war for profit, despite the very high price it exacts from her. Her children, who assist by towing the wagon, all meet tragic ends, and the show culminates with Mother Courage, in the legendary final scene, pulling her wagon alone. Though ostensibly set during the seventeenth-century religious Thirty Years War, McElroen has chosen to fill the show with contemporary references, emphasizing America’s values of profit over all, including a Fox News anchor as narrator, dollar signs decorating the soldier’s present-day uniforms, and the show’s funniest moment, a “for sale” sign on the Iwo Jima memorial. When presented this way, the parallels between the war of the play and America’s present conflict are brought into stark relief. Scene Three’s discussion of the Swedish King’s profiteering can’t help but remind one of the current administration’s Halliburton connections and the awarding of billion-dollar contracts in Iraq.

Gwendolyn Mulamba heads the company in the challenging title role; thankfully she is up to the task and imbues Mother Courage with both strength and vulnerability. The rest of the cast does fine work as well, most notably Jaime Carrillo as Mother Courage’s son Swiss Cheese and Michael Early as the Chaplain. Composer/Music Director William Patterson has successfully set the many songs in the show to an equal number of styles, including Jazz, Funk, and Blues. Most extraordinary, though, is set designer Troy Hourie’s turntable; without the budget of a Les Miserables, Hourie has managed to successfully combine a typically high-tech device with low-tech manpower that fits in well with McElroen’s vision. The show does feel a bit long, but since the performance I saw clocked about 45 minutes above the announced running time, I think it can be chalked up to opening night jitters.

This production of Mother Courage and Her Children does what good theatre should; using the stage as a medium, it presents an entertainment that encourages contemplation and concern about our society. Brecht would be proud; his theories advocating the use of theatre to rouse and provoke are currently being put to good use at the Classical Theatre of Harlem.

What happens to a man who becomes very well-known for something, and then can't do or be that anymore?

George L. Fox, called America's first musical comedy star by chronicler Gerald Bordman, became famous playing the title role in a pantomime called Humpty Dumpty; so famous that he performed the show thousands of times; so famous that, according to another chronicler, Cecil Smith, he became obsessed with having his likeness erected in Union Square. Fox was a clown, and so his profession required him to apply white paint and powder to his face every night before he went on stage; and it required him to engage in precision-timed, highly physical routines with his supporting cast. He was ruined by either the makeup or an on-stage collision or both: in the 1870s, when Fox was at the peak of his career, his behavior became erratic and unpredictable and he was eventually forced to retire. He died in 1877 at the age of 52, shortly after being released from a Boston mental asylum.

Fox, pretty much forgotten these days, lives again in Bill Irwin's new play, Mr. Fox: A Rumination. All of the foregoing is treated in it, to greater or lesser extent; but this aptly titled piece makes no pretense to history: it's a meditation, by one clown, about another. In Mr. Fox, Irwin explores what it means to perform and what it means to be a performer; poignantly, he confronts the fact of growing older and the diminishment in capacity that goes with it.

He also, lest I get your worried that Mr. Fox is single-mindedly serious, entertains, dazzlingly, in trademark fashion. A good deal of the play is taken up with recreations of Fox's clowning (I can't say how authentic they are): a rowdy two-man routine (executed flawlessly with Geoff Hoyle); sequences involving Humpty Dumpty, Harlequin, and Columbine; and a wonderful bit called the "Freedman's Bureau Sketch" that is both delectable comic set piece and significant plot point. Irwin shows us Fox on stage, at the height of his powers and in decline; he also shows us Fox offstage, where he keeps on performing or falters, ill-at-ease or out-of-his-depth. Irwin's Fox can't exist without the greasepaint; he literally cringes whenever somebody opens a door and lets in natural light.

The play delineates Fox's manipulation at the hands of a trio of interchangeable manager-businessmen. It also recounts, in brief, Fox's courtship of and marriage to the pretty young dancer Mattie Temple; in one of the evening's most inspired scenes, the aging Fox looks into his wife's face and sees, for an instant, the giddy, adoring ingénue who first caught his eye: does the performer ever step aside?

There's a gorgeous, blissful moment where Fox stands alone in his dressing room, playing around with a hat, working out new "moves." Irwin and Fox are as one here (and I could watch Bill Irwin play around with a hat for as long as he cared to do so): is either performer ever more "himself" than right now?

Irwin, generous as ever, gives the choicest spot on the bill to his old Pickle Family colleague Geoff Hoyle—a hilarious, gorgeous bit called "The Dance of the Three-Legged Man" that stops the show. The rest of the company—Bianca Amato, Marc Damon Johnson, Jason Butler Harner, Peter Maloney, and Richard Poe—do fine work here as well. Signature's artistic director James Houghton is at the helm of the production. The designers—Christine Jones (sets), Elizabeth Caitlin Ward (costumes), James Vermeulen (lighting), and especially Brett R. Jarvis (sound)—offer invaluable contributions.

Some of Irwin's playwriting is heavier-handed than we might wish: points about the actor as "slave" (contrasted with Fox's relationship with his black assistant, George Topack) are hammered out more than necessary; and it's hard to consistently avoid cliché in depicting Fox's downward spiral. But the themes of Mr. Fox resonate, especially if you've been following Irwin's career (and have seen his last two shows at Signature, The Harlequin Studies and The Regard Evening, both of which find culmination here).

The end of Mr. Fox portends Irwin's retirement from the kind of physical comedy and dance theatre that he's built his career on, along with both a passing of the torch to younger performers and, importantly, a new direction for Irwin himself. He exits not by disappearing inside a trunk but by walking through a door; we await the doors he will be opening next. For now, we lean in as he ruminates, and feel privileged for the chance to witness this valedictory.

Yes, we all know A. A. Milne as the creator of Winnie the Pooh, but as Jonathan Bank and the Mint Theater are currently at great pains to remind us, years before the Hundred Acre Wood was open to the public Milne was renowned as a playwright of formidable popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. Somewhere along the line the storybook author eclipsed the playwright, and this is a shame, since Bank's current production of Milne's Mr. Pim Passes By is good enough to make you forget there was ever such a bear.

With a title that threatens to teeter into preciousness, Pim is certainly a comedy, but it's an intelligent one that subtly chips at the cultural mores of its time, revealing hints of a poignant emotional core while never (at least on paper) letting its fizzy spirit flag.

In this production, both the depth and the fizz owe much to a grand performance by Lisa Bostnar. Bostnar plays Olivia Marden, who, along with her husband George—a member of the Buckinghamshire landed gentry—and Dinah, George's niece, lives a rather idyllic existence in the stately Marden family manor (cozily designed here by Sarah Lambert). George (Stephen Schnetzer) can be a bit stodgy, but Olivia knows exactly how to handle him; her every word and gesture conveys an amused indulgence, a little bit motherly and a little bit coquettish, that never leaves us in doubt that their marriage is in the best possible standing.

That is, until the eponymous Mr. Pim passes by. Pim (the pleasantly befuddled Jack Davidson), a stranger, is merely paying George a routine business visit when he drops (without knowing it) a bomb upon the Mardens: on a recent business trip, Pim claims to have encountered a man of the precise name and circumstances of Olivia's dissolute first husband. Olivia, the upshot goes, is an inadvertent bigamist. George is dismayed by their relationship's sudden lack of propriety; Olivia is disheartened by the sudden coldness this lack of propriety provokes in George.

Ibsen, say, could have spun tragedy from this conceit, but Milne (abetted here by Bank's blithe direction) provides an inherently lighter touch. Even as George works himself into a dudgeon, Olivia takes the high road, anchoring the play with a resourcefulness and sense of humor worthy of the greatest comic heroines; in Bostnar's nimble hands, we are shown only the merest glimpses of the sadness enfolded deep within Olivia's cushion of
wisdom and wit.

Ultimately, in fact, Bostnar's incandescence comes close to overwhelming the production. This is because she's not quite evenly matched by Schnetzer, whose largely stiff portrayal of George never quite illustrates what Olivia sees in the fellow. By playing George straight, without the carefully rounded stylization employed by most of the other performers, he allows us to take the proceedings a bit too seriously. The character's case for proscriptive morality faces an uphill battle in the looser climate of today's New York, and the complications it creates could have benefited from a more charismatic proponent. Nevertheless, the depths hinted at by this clash between sentiment and seemliness suffuse the play with a tenderness that nicely complements its lighthearted surface. We are always assured that, several reversals down the line, all will be well for the Mardens.

On the way, however, there is much to enjoy in the forms of Bostnar, Davidson, Kristin Griffith—as George's gruff aunt Lady Marden, a living embodiment of George's venerable family history—and Victoria Mack as the effusive Dinah. Mack's quintessentially eccentric ingénue is particularly enjoyable; she's a good girl, but slightly cracked, and the opening scene in which she assails the hapless Pim with a chirping stream of unasked-for personal information, gets the play off to a smashing start. Only James Knight, as Brian Strange, Dinah's suitor and budding modernist painter, feels a little out of place, but he seems to be having a good enough time that in the end it doesn't matter.

All of which reflects well on Milne. This is a gentle, almost foamy play, but it does its job exceedingly well. With Bank and company, Milne's posthumous reputation remains in most capable hands.

The Queen’s Company production of Much Ado About Nothing, currently playing at Urban Stages, is one of the better off-off-Broadway stagings of Shakespeare I’ve seen in quite a while. And don’t let the fact that the cast is entirely female scare you away—this is not a show about feminism, or the evils of being a man. According to their press materials, the Queen’s Company uses all female casting to “expand the performing opportunities for female actors, challenge gender assumptions, and give new life and meaning to theatrical works”. While I didn’t find my gender assumptions challenged by this, or discover any new meaning in this timeless comedy (one of my favorites), I did find the cast more than up to the task of creating a fun, exciting night of theatre.

Directed by Rebecca Patterson, this production works best when dealing with the sillier aspects of Shakespeare’s play. Her handling of Dogberry and his silly band of watchmen is wonderful—and is one of the highlights of the evening. Where the play falls a bit short is in the more serious moments—there is little difference between Beatrice & Benedict and Hero & Claudio, both in age and in the characters' attitudes toward love. Hero and Claudio are young, passionate, and headstrong in this production, which is as it should be. But Beatrice and Benedict—who are written as older, wiser, and more cynical characters than their youthful counterparts—seem to be of the same age, intellect, and experience as Hero and Claudio. As a result, some of the more poignant moments in the script are glossed over. This is the first time I’ve seen a production of Much Ado where the comic elements so heavily outweighed the dramatic.

The cast is very young, and full of energy. Zainab Jah—in one of the more ambitious bits of double-casting I’ve seen—is fantastic as Dogberry, outshining her own performance as Beatrice. Virginia Baeta, as Don Pedro, the prince who connives to get Beatrice and Benedict together, has the perfect blend of seriousness and silliness, and I hope we see more of her on the New York stage in the future. And Jacqueline Gregg, as Don John, the brother of Don Pedro who connives to separate Hero and Claudio, stalks the stage like an angry cat, adding tension and excitement to the evening.

The design is exceptional. The costumes, by Sarah Iams, are clever, beautiful, and appropriate to the characters. The set, by Jeremy Woodward, is simple, and combined with the lighting of Aaron Copp, gorgeous—but never in a distracting way.

I went to the theatre anticipating gay camp, outrageously fun characters, and a smattering of sweet sentiments that would make me proud to be a gay man and want to run off to Tiffany’s (or Abercrombie & Fitch) and register for my own big gay (Irish) wedding. I imagined myself saying, “go see this play, it’s a hilarious hoot,” but no such luck. In fact, I was wrong from the start in assuming that this was an evening of theatre for gay audiences. What exactly is My Big Gay Italian Wedding then? It is an amateurish play written by Anthony J. Wilkinson (who has also cast himself as the Italian husband-to be) that is full of self-conscious clichés that perpetuate shallow stereotypes that enable straight audiences to laugh at gay people. The operative word in the last sentence is “at.” A smarter playwright would have finessed the script to secure that he and his play were in on the joke.

Here is the gist of the storyline. Two guys want to get married. One is Italian and the other is Polish. The fact that Guy #2 is Polish seems to bother Guy #1’s Italian mother who consents only if her favorite priest performs the ceremony. Of course, the priest cannot marry the two men because the Catholic Church does not recognize same-sex marriages. So, a Unitarian pastor is flown-up from Florida to save the day. The conflict deepens (barely) when it is revealed that Guy #2 has slept with his best man while on Fire Island earlier in the year, but all is forgiven when Guy #2 sings an Italian love song to Guy #1. There is a happy ending that includes a honeymoon in Paris.

Now, I suppose that this insubstantial plot could work if the production were halfway competent. Throughout the play several of the actors break character and sneak peaks out into the audience to see who was out there, as if the audience couldn’t see them looking. Many of the actors just scream their lines—as if by screaming they would instantly be funny. And all of the actors lack a sense of inner life that might bring dimension to their characters. The performances are substandard and certainly not what I would expect for the charge of an off-Broadway ticket price. In the actors' defense, Peter Rapanaro’s staging is far from effective, leaving them mostly to fend for themselves. There is no directorial shape to the production—within each scene, during transitions between scenes, and for the arc of the play as a whole. I would recommend that Rapanaro sit in seat B-6 (as I did); then he would realize (hopefully) that one-third of the production cannot be seen because actors are blocking actors.

The production values are less than professional. I did like Chris March’s hot-pink bridesmaids' dresses, they were fun, but…. Sound cues just cut off without any thought to shape or transition. Scene changes are sloppy with stagehands and actors coming out sometimes in light and other times in darkness. One scene change in Act II left the stage empty (and fully-lit) for nearly two minutes.

In my heart of hearts I believe Wilkinson had the best of intentions when he set out to write this play. Certainly, there’s money behind this production. They are already selling T-shirts as you leave the theatre. The T-shirts are campy and fun, but does a cool T-shirt make for good theatre? It is sad to me that audiences will probably flock to see this show simply because of the title and all that it evokes—Gay, Italian, and the potential parallels to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. All I can say is: save your money, too much has already been thrown away on this insulting and irresponsible production.