nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

With Nevada Territory, maverick theatre-maker Frank Cwiklik is back—with a vengeance. Cwiklik, whose oeuvre already includes paeans to the works of such diverse auteurs as Orson Welles and Ed Wood, here celebrates the stylized simmer of the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and others, in a masterful concoction that revels in the violent, nonverbal traditions of this genre while artfully deconstructing them.

The time is 1870; the place is a mining town called Empire. The silver deposits are nearly as dry as the town's sole (G-rated) saloon, in both cases thanks to the greedy machinations of a self-righteous bandit-turned-preacher known only as the Padre. With an ineffectual mayor firmly under his thumb and a posse of thugs enforcing his will without much regard for actual fairness or rule of law, Padre runs Empire. (If, by the way, you think Cwiklik may be drawing some sort of parallel here to our present government, well... you might be right.)

Cwiklik plays fast and loose with mythology and history in Nevada Territory (for one thing, Nevada actually became a state in 1864, but let that go). The improbable anti-heroine of this stark narrative—its Clint Eastwood character, if you will—is a beautiful young woman named Red, a bounty hunter who turns up in Empire and decides to settle some old scores and serve humanity at the same time by taking on Padre and his corrupt establishment. Abetted by the saloon's owner, an old acquaintance (and probably more) named Lee, Red hatches a complicated plan that involves shipping into town some of the pulchritudinous denizens of a nearby house of entertainment and ill-repute run by a tough cookie called Belle (another former colleague), who will distract the locals while Red and Lee rob the Wells Fargo Wagon of this week's receipts.

Things go badly awry, though. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that Lee and Red get double- and even triple-crossed by some of their dangerous associates (the most treacherous being Jud, Padre's lieutenant), and that Padre's past catches up with him in entirely unexpected ways, most seriously in the person of a mute barmaid named Dolly. It's unpredictable and actually even a little difficult to follow; but the bloodsoaked finale, spanning several remarkably exciting scenes, makes for a sensational payoff. It also offers fitting commentary to all that has come before, as we gradually appreciate that everyone in Nevada Territory—so-called good guys and bad guys alike—finally has little to no regard for humanity or the sanctity of life. Is Cwiklik, again, making some sort of statement about the current state of our world?

Could be. In any event, he's certainly commenting on the troublingly oxymoric juxtaposition of artistry and gratuitousness that characterizes not just the films that serve as Nevada Territory's models but so much of popular culture these days. Serving up, at shockingly close range, simulated gun battle after simulated gun battle—with no stage blood, mind you, and only recorded gunshot sounds—he manages simultaneously to scare the bejesus out of his audience, to make us laugh nervously and then full-out at the absurdity of the device, and finally to leave us appalled to contemplate that this is even a legitimate subject for satirization.

The cast includes many members of Cwiklik's "stock company," including Bryan Enk as the faithful but moody Lee, Bob Brader as the slimy, borderline psychotic Padre, Adam Swiderski as the explosive Jud, and, perhaps most memorably, Michele Schlossberg as the powder keg in a bustier that is Madam Belle. Standouts among the strong ensemble, many of whom take more than one role, are Brandon Kalbaugh, Emily Mostyn-Brown, Matthew Gray, and Eva Gil.

The moody atmospherics of the western genre prove more difficult to replicate on stage than many of the other cinematic effects that Cwiklik has captured so dazzlingly in his previous works: Nevada Territory starts slow and moseys through its first hour and a half or so, lingering lovingly but perhaps too long on gorgeously scored close-ups that cry out for sky or desert to frame them. Nevertheless, it's always exciting to see how Cwiklik meets the challenges he sets for himself, such as putting a mine explosion onto the tiny Red Room stage; there's ingenuity and beauty aplenty here, as he continues to prove why his singular style marks him as one of downtown theatre's most consistently original playwright-directors.

Never Gonna Dance looks and sounds exactly like a musical comedy. But to actually dignify it with that once-noble moniker would be like calling a Twinkie a home-baked pastry. Sure, it goes down tastily; but who needs the empty calories and who wants the vaguely mysterious chemical additives? I've given up eating Entenmann's and Hostess; and I'm about ready to stop settling for corporate concoctions masquerading as entertainment, especially when they have a hundred-dollar top ticket price.

This show should have been such a sure thing! Its inspiration is a classic Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, Swing Time. Its Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields score has been augmented with standards like "Who?", "The Song Is You," and "I'm Old Fashioned." Its superior design team have done glorious, tasteful work on shows like Crazy For You, Guys and Dolls, City of Angels, and On the Twentieth Century. It has a genuine star dancer in Karen Ziemba and, perhaps less obviously, a genuine star comic in Peter Gerety.

But Never Gonna Dance probably never had a chance: a pair of unknowns have been put into Astaire's and Rogers' shoes, the director of Rent has been assigned to recreate the art deco magic of the '30s, and the choreographer of Broadway Bares and Hairspray has been asked to devise dances that will conjure the effortless elegance of the old RKO flicks. Which is not to say that Noah Racey, Nancy Lemenager, Michael Greif, and Jerry Mitchell couldn't have come through with the stellar work we were hoping for, but rather only that they didn't. The latter two demonstrate virtually no affinity for this material: Greif responds by blocking rather than staging scenes, while Mitchell flounders and flails, offering up a patchwork of recognizable moves and routines instead of building sequences around emotions or ideas. As for Racey and Lemenager, they're competent but lackluster, and exude neither sex appeal nor discernible chemistry; it's instructive to note that Racey is at his best supporting Ziemba in one of her numbers: casting these two in leading roles on Broadway turns out to be as wrongheaded as it would have been to put Gene Kelly and Ann Miller in supporting roles in a Bobby Van movie.

Which is not to say that Never Gonna Dance is horribly bad. It's not. It tells a diverting if implausible tale, about a hoofer named Lucky Garnett who heads to New York City hoping to acquire the $25,000 he needs to claim his bride-to-be from her disapproving father, only to cutely meet Penny Carroll, a struggling dance instructor, with whom he eventually enters an amateur dance contest whose top prize is, you guessed it, $25,000. Complications—some dopey, some sweet—ensue, involving Penny's pal Mabel and Lucky's first NYC friend, a down-on-his-luck stockbroker named Alfred J. Morganthal.

Librettist Jeffrey Hatcher is admirably faithful to the spirit of Swing Time and other film scripts of the period—maybe too faithful, for he's included a repugnant and unnecessarily swishy dance studio head called Mr. Pangborn, as well as a needlessly dim and overblown Latin caricature  named Ricardo Romero, offensive even when revealed to be entirely gringo. He's also, more dubiously, kept the Nicholas Brothers-Lena Horne tradition of tokenism alive, filling out the story with a pair of vaguely disreputable African American dancers (named Velma and Spud!) who are Lucky and Penny's competitors in the contest.

Hatcher's book nonetheless does its job, carrying us from one lovely Kern tune to another, though neither as crisply or giddily as it should; similarly, the musical numbers themselves are almost all reasonably charming—how could they not be?—without being particularly interesting or memorable. Only a grouch could fail to enjoy "The Way You Look Tonight" (played beautifully under Robert Billig's baton, in a snazzy orchestration by Harold Wheeler); but it sure is hard to relax into it when just about all of the trappings—set, costume, choreography, performance—fail to work. It's as if none of the six producers listed in the program ever checked in during rehearsals or previews: every moment in Never Gonna Dance could have been polished, refined, perfected. Why weren't they?

Certainly, an alert set of eyes and ears would have understood that Karen Ziemba (Mabel) and Peter Gerety (Alfred) are audience favorites, deservedly: the show is never better than during their sole number together, a blissful duet in the automat to "The Song Is You." But Ziemba gets only a pair of obscure ditties early in Act Two, while Gerety virtually disappears: why?

Similarly, Eugene Fleming and Deidre Goodwin threaten to set off sparks in a few dance sequences as Spud and Velma, but their bits are always abbreviated: why?

It's all, finally, serviceable; but never more than that: good enough for contemporary Broadway audiences, or at least I imagine that's what the folks behind this substandard experience are banking on. We have to make them stop treating us this way. Even our trivial musical comedies ought to be spectacular and effervescent. Never Gonna Dance, alas, is by-the-numbers and flat.

I totally did not get New Boy. This play by Russell Labey, based on a novel by William Sutcliffe, is about a 17-year-old  named Mark who attends an English public school in London. Obsessed by, but entirely inexperienced with, the opposite sex, Mark thinks of himself as quite the misfit. So he's surprised when the new boy at school, a startlingly handsome and seemingly self-assured fellow named Barry, is willing to become his friend.

Barry, despite his blond good looks, turns out to be just as inexperienced with girls as Mark is. But Mark soon helps remedy the situation, setting Barry up first with a succession of girls their own age, and then facilitating Barry's seduction by their French teacher, Mrs. Mumford. The teacher eventually leaves her husband for Barry, who drops out of school for a term while the two enjoy a passionate romance.

After that fizzles out, Barry sets Mark up with his sister. Soon after, Mark discovers that Barry is gay and deep in a love affair with his (Mark's) brother, Dan. Barry reveals that he had sensed that Mark might be gay from the very start, which is why he first became friendly with him. But Mark is resolutely heterosexual, or at least so he tells us throughout the play, which ends with the two parting company, more or less, and Mark's destiny utterly uncertain.

So... huh? What is this play supposed to be about? I haven't a clue: though Labey manages to offend, in passing, just about all the groups he portrays in New Boy (besides gays these include Jews, Catholics, and teachers), there seems little other purpose at hand. The story is so implausible that about fifteen minutes in I began to assume that it was some sort of fantasy from which Mark would awaken. I mean, it's not exactly probable for a gay teenager to run off with his (female) middle-aged French teacher. Not to mention—don't any of these children have parents?

So New Boy defeated me; even though it's just ninety minutes long I couldn't wait to get out of the theatre and away from Labey's selfish, mean-spirited creations.

The actors, for the record, include young Neil Henry as Mark, who is a skillful and likable performer. I wish him a job in a much better play next time around.

I usually find Soho Think Tank’s work to be a pleasant and rewarding experience. Not so with their current endeavor, no meat no irony. Playwright and director Robert Lyons claims that his play is a “comic tale”; well…it’s not. It’s not funny, the characters lack depth, and the plot is just not believable.

So, what is it then? It’s a play with two characters—a woman (a vegetarian) and a man (a meat-eater). The man wants the woman to co-write a biographical inspirational management guide (mouthful!) —but the woman does not want to do it. Their motives presumably constitute the play’s conflict.

Unfortunately, all that’s revealed is overt sexual tension that seems to come out of nowhere, a not-so-skilled seduction over green tea and carryout (sushi for the woman and McDonalds—biggie sized —for the man), and a gratuitous scene that allows the characters to smoke a joint. There is also, inexplicably, a gun. A comic tone is forced upon the action of the play; the tone is incongruent with the realities explored in the text.

This is not the sort of thought-provoking, risk taking theatre that I have come to expect from a Soho Think Tank production.

Celia Schaefer and Jeremy Brisiel (as the vegetarian and the meat-eater) both live on the surface of their characters. Schaefer stumbles over lines, fumbles with props, and poses with her hip jutted to one side. Brisiel lacks variety in vocal pitch and inflection and his acting is one-note throughout the journey of the play. Both actors seem to be talking heads without an inner connection to each other—working “at” each other. I missed the unspoken journey of their performances—particularly in a piece that screams for more than what is on the page.

The set design by David Evans Morris is the highlight of this experience. His work, which finds its success in the specificity of its Asian influence, is visually stunning in the loft/warehouse space of the Ohio Theatre. Hardwood floors lay a foundation for large white arched windows in an office filled with the simplicity of a desk, a silver floor lamp, a Japanese table, and a red sofa. Minimal—clean lines. I only wish the rest of the production had lived up to the professional efforts of Morris’ design.

So I was disappointed by this play— especially because I typically enjoy the work produced by Soho Think Tank. As a theatergoer, I have always felt that STT represented some of the best of New York City’s downtown theatre—too bad this production didn’t measure up to their usual standard.

When the story of Noah is retold—I'm thinking of Clifford Odets' The Flowering Peach, or even Bill Cosby's classic comedy sketch—the focus is usually on the tired old man who is suddenly commanded by God to do something that everyone around him thinks is nutty. The subtext is about how one man's unwavering faith gets him through a very human sort of crisis, enabling him to persevere and do what he thinks is right in the face of rigorous opposition and derision from friends and family.

In Andre Obey's Noah, however, the old man is first of all not so old—he's in vigorous middle age, with three strapping sons still in their teens. And when we first meet him, the ark is already built; except for a brief preliminary scene in which one of Noah's suspicious neighbors threatens to kill him, the building process has gone, as far as we can tell, rather smoothly. Noah's sons Sem, Cham, and Japheth, and his loving wife, all view him as an inspired genius and are both curious and supportive of his latest project.

In accord with Nature, the animals arrive instinctively and, minding Noah, board the ark. In accord with some sort of divine power, three young women—Ada, Sella, and Noema—arrive spontaneously and they board the ark as well. And then the real issues of Obey's play start to surface: how do these people survive their voyage as they come to realize the real gravity of their situation—that indeed they are the only living creatures left on earth? And how, after a long, uncomfortable transition (while waiting for the flood waters to recede) will they repopulate and recolonize their renascent planet?

They must grapple with other, deeper questions: Is Noah right to wait for instructions from God on how to proceed; or is his rebellious son Chem right to force the issue, as he tries to catch one of the "chosen fish" or add mast, sail, and rudder to the stalled ark? Is God ever going to answer Noah's prayers for guidance; or has God forsaken his children?

The strength of Obey's play, in this loose but lucid translation by Judith Suther and Earl Clowney, and as staged here with enormous clarity and balance by Peter Dobbins, is that the answers to the above questions are neither obvious nor unambiguous. Noah becomes a vehicle for us to think about our notions of faith and free will, of our duty to the earth, to nature, to each other, and to a Supreme Being. The journey that Dobbins and his actors ultimately take us on is funny and familiar, yet thought-provoking and surprisingly challenging as our assumptions and preconceived ideas are flaunted and flouted.

Dobbins' designers have created a gorgeous, spare environment for the piece, with Mary Houston's set consisting of nothing but a few strategically placed curtains, illuminated, with the stage, by Kevin J. Hardy's stunning lighting (the moment when the sun comes out after the flood is particularly lovely). Arin Arbus' colorful costumes provide happy contrast to the golden earth tones of their surroundings.

The large cast (15 actors) do a fine job bringing Obey's parable to life. In the title role, Timothy Roselle shows us Noah's fundamental good nature and unwavering faith, though he's perhaps less commanding than he might be, especially in the scenes with Chem. Bernardo De Paula, Damon Noland, and Matt Schuneman acquit themselves nicely as Sem, Cham, and Japheth, while Jennifer Curfman, Marisa Lee, and Sharon Freedman are effective in the somewhat smaller roles of the three young women who will become their wives. Stacey Gladstone is especially moving as Mrs. Noah, letting us see both her unconditional love for her husband and her pragmatic concern for him when it appears that his God may have become permanently out of touch.

The Storm Theatre, as they have so often in the past, give us here a vivid, thoughtful reading of a play that has undeservedly been abandoned by theatregoers. I can find only one New York production of Noah in the past thirty years; but this is a play that ought to be done again and again, forcing us, as it does, to confront some of the most fundamental issues of human existence. So bravo to Dobbins and his Storm colleagues for rescuing Noah from obscurity. Hopefully their excellent production will inspire others.

You'll get no argument from me: I liked Yogi a lot, and I'm willing to bet that you will, too. This new solo play by Tom Lysaght about baseball legend Yogi Berra is a thoroughly amiable evening of baseball lore, nostalgia, and gentle, good-natured wisdom. It's masterfully performed by Ben Gazzara, who puts the audience in his pocket the second he saunters onto the Lamb's Theatre stage and keeps us there with his spellbinding presence and split-second timing: who better to play a great Yankees old-timer than this seasoned old pro?

The play takes place at Yankee Stadium on opening day of the 1999 baseball season. Yogi Berra, who had been one of the stars of the team from the '40s 'til the '60s and then went on to be manager for a tumultuous season plus 22 games in the '80s, hasn't set foot here since George Steinbrenner fired him fifteen years ago.

This personal history is recounted—non-linearly, conversationally, off-the-cuff—by the avuncular Yogi, for whom just about every object in the abandoned clubhouse resonates with some significant memory. He sees his old desk and is reminded of Casey Stengel, who occupied it long before he did; he walks past a row of lockers and calls to mind anecdotes about Roger Maris, about Mickey Mantle, about Joe DiMaggio. He chats about his parents, poor Italians in St. Louis who never thought he'd amount to much pursuing his dream of being a baseball player; and he speaks lovingly of his wife and sons, particularly Dale, who himself became a Yankee while Yogi was the team's manager.

He relates it all with pride (justifiably) and with genuine warmth. And yet he keeps coming back to the showdown with Steinbrenner.

Why has he agreed to come back now? Well, that's the whole crux of the show: Lysaght's play is about coming home, and the good reasons that we all should do so, metaphorically if not literally. The Yogi who is the hero of this warm-hearted comedy is a guy who's learned to stopping sweating the small stuff, who has come to appreciate even at the age of 74 that life is woefully brief.

So it's a wise Berra before us, but don't worry—it's still one who stumbles over his words more often than not. Lysaght sprinkles his play liberally with "Yogi-isms"—I'm not certain whether they're all authentic or not, but they're never less than pleasing in their incongruous zenlike sagacity : "When you come to a fork in the road....Take it"; "You can observe a lot by watching"; "Never answer an anonymous letter." My favorites: for sly wit, how about "If I had Steinbrenner's money, I'd throw mine away." And for simple profundity, take the quote that sums up the spirit of Nobody Don't Like Yogi: "I was right, but I was wrong."

The two most compelling characters in Ann Marie Healy’s Now That’s What I Call a Storm are the one who says the most and the one who says the least. Nanette, the talkative one, is a middle-aged Minnesota woman who, during a ferocious snowstorm, goes out into the garage to get a pop and finds Rosemary, her daughter, dead by her own hand. Her husband, Boots, makes the discovery shortly thereafter, and before they know what to do, their friends Arne and Janice stop by for a visit, followed in short order by their two sons, who go to school with Rosemary at University of Minnesota, Duluth. Everyone deals with shock and extreme grief differently, and Nanette does so by making a big dinner and discussing her daughter as though she were still alive.

Joseph, the quiet one, is the younger of the two brothers, and for most of the play he ambulates aimlessly about the living room, all turtled up in his hooded sweatshirt and taking the monosyllabic approach to conversation while his parents politely argue and his older brother, Justin (whose social skills are better developed, if not quite enviable), receives voicemails from his girlfriend who is attempting to fare the storm as she drives from school to meet them.

As a synopsis, this is unavoidably reductive—Healy has created an interesting set of characters who share a past, but just barely (they begin to realize) share a present. Much of the play is spent with the two older couples revisiting old affections and resentments: Boots, Arne and Janice grew up together; Nanette joined the bunch post-college, and has always felt like an outsider. The major communicative obstacle is transcending the “Minnesota nice” talk to get to their viscerally-emergent feelings, and Nanette, perhaps due to her tragic (and secret) discovery, cuts to the quick first with brutal (but not malicious) honesty.

Marylouise Burke, a terrifically funny actress, is all the more so as her Nanette becomes increasingly bewildered by her evaporating role in life. Daniel Ahearn, Guy Boyd and Rebecca Nelson, as Boots, Arne and Janice, respectively, turn in fine performances despite the fact that their characters are more deeply buried in quirky regionalisms and mild-mannered jocularity—what’s not being said is also not particularly intriguing.

Not so with Justin (Ted Schneider) and Joseph (Daniel Talbott). They are unenthused about visiting with the neighbors and their bashfulness is wonderfully realized by Schneider and Talbott. Yet the most enchanting moments occur when Nanette and Joseph briefly discover a connection near the end of the play—he comes out of his shell a bit, and she stops shifting about impatiently and relishes every word he mumbles. However inadequate or overlooked they might feel, for those exchanges they soften and still into quite beautiful creatures.

Carolyn Cantor’s production has a light touch with a dark sensibility; her designers (in particular David Korins for his snowcapped set) have done admirable work; and her cast is affecting across the board. But it is watching Talbott and Burke—individually, yes, but especially in their glowing and ephemeral time together—that makes this an uncommon theatrical experience that is truly worth seeing.

Obsessively, Sam, the one-act dark comedy by Richard Hinojosa that is receiving its New York premiere this month, threw me. On the one hand, it's a wild, off-the-wall, fiendishly irreverent farce about a collection of extravagantly eccentric roommates, their TV habits, and their sex lives. Sam is fixated on his sister, Ly, who has moved in temporarily; Ob (Sam's roommate) and Sess (Ob's girlfriend, another roommate) are struggling to maintain their own little affair until they're interrupted by a woman whose name we never learn (she's referred to as Ive's Girl: Ive is the fifth roommate), who brings nymphomania to new heights as she pursues both Ob and Sess with relentless randiness. For his part, Ive is content to sit in front of the TV, drink from his oversized bottle of Budweiser, and occasionally grunt or belch. Until, that is, Ive gets mad at his Girl and puts a stiletto high heel through her eyeball.

In short: a gross, Animal House/American Pie-styled good time.

On the other hand, Hinojosa's play seems to have something more grown-up at its core. The relationship between Sam and his sister is treated seriously by the playwright: Ly seems to be aware that she has done things to intensify Sam's inappropriate sexual feelings toward her, but we watch her let him massage her feet and write on her bare back in magic marker and it's clear that she's somewhere between conflicted and manipulative. This relationship feels honest and interests us; I wished that Hinojosa had spent more time on it in Obsessively, Sam, because I wanted to know more about it.

But on balance the play appears to be mostly for laughs. The puzzling thing is the interplay between the broad farcical bits about the roommates and the more absorbing throughline about Sam and Ly. Do they intersect somehow? Why, for starters, are Sam's roommates named Ob, Sess, and Ive (with the sister's name completing the adverb)? I tried to make these characters work as manifestations of Sam's sub-conscious—his ego, id, and super ego, for example—but I couldn't finish the connections. It could be that there's a more sophisticated idea underlying this play, but if so, it's not been sufficiently fleshed out at this point.

That said, Obsessively, Sam, though a bit on the schizophrenic side, has its moments, and under Hinojosa's fast-paced direction the cast makes the most of them. Christi Spain-Savage, as Ive's alarmingly oversexed Girl, and David Hollander, as Ive, have the showiest funny roles, and they earn plenty of laughs in them. At the other end of the spectrum are Clint McCown and Teresa Ryno, both believable and compelling as Sam and Ly. Russ Roten (Ob) and Stephanie Woodyard (Sess) complete the ensemble.

The producers of Omnium Gatherum have taken great pains to make sure that members of the press know that the elaborate—some would say far-fetched—meal consumed by the actors in the course of the play's on-stage dinner party is the real thing: a menu card from Gotham Bar and Grill, whose chef Alfred Portale created the bill of fare (he's acknowledged by name in the show), is supplied along with more traditional materials in the press kit.

From it, we discover that the actors are eating "rare, seasonal wild salmon from the Columbia River in Oregon" with a warm sauce made from champagne vinegar, grape seed oil, lobster stock and shallots; roasted Moroccan spiced lamb with lemons preserved in salt for up to two years; and, accompanying dessert, a strawberry coulis (sauce) "drizzled with 25 year old Balsamico Traditionale (vinegar made in Modena, Italy aged 25, 50, or 75 years in traditional oak casks, about $25 per oz)."

Now, it seems to me that actors as good as Kristine Nielsen, Joseph Lyle Taylor, and Jenny Bacon could work with store-bought balsamic vinegar and, marshalling their ample thespic powers, convince the audience it was aged in a traditional oak cask. More to the point, surely a play as theoretically socially conscious as this one—it depicts a banquet attended by a group of famous movers and shakers who debate the state of the world, in particular the circumstances that led to the World Trade Center attacks—would eschew such conspicuous overconsumption. The script's voice of reason, an Arab-American scholar named Khalid modeled on the late Edward Said, argues persuasively that the seriously disproportionate distribution of wealth in the world has something to do with the anti-western sentiment in places like the Middle East. But the powers-that-be behind Omnium Gatherum seem not to have paid attention to their play's thesis. Result: a production that, far from offering the solution that its hype self-congratulatorily suggests, is a big, entrenched part of the Problem.

The audience reaction to Omnium Gatherum disconcertingly proved the point the night I attended: the smug in-jokes about the personal and professional quirks of characters inspired by the likes of Martha Stewart and Tom Clancy drew knowing laughs; a climactic scene in which a WTC fireman beats up a Muslim terrorist drew, scarily, outright guffaws. The apocalyptic climax elicited gasps from the audience; but was anybody moved enough to contemplate how to change their privileged ways to try to make sure no more 9/11s happen in the future? Or, to put it another way, is anybody planning to give up their wild Columbia River salmon and champagne vinegar so that the world might be a better, or at least more equitable, place?

No, I didn't care for Omnium Gatherum, not one bit. Kristine Nielsen, as the Martha Stewart-ish Suzie who is the hostess of the dinner party, is fiercely funny in places; and Jenny Bacon (as, I think, a Susan Sontag-type) maintains dignity throughout; and David Rockwell's ostentatiously lavish set is both effective and appropriate. But playwrights Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros emerge as little more than cynical exploiters of a national tragedy here, as they gloss over signposts of pop culture and high art and contemporary socio-political-economic thought while making no distinctions among them, either in terms of content or value: the script reflects the worst excesses of post-modernism with not a whit of tempering insight. This isn't 9/11 drama, it's 9/11 drama lite: like Craig Wright's Recent Tragic Events, Omnium Gatherum contains nothing substantive beneath its trendily weighty surface. Shame on producers—and audiences—who allow such crass humbuggery to set the tone for cultural debate in New York theatre.

Jackie O and Freddie Mercury. Two icons. Two queens. I’ve never thought of them in the same sentence before, but why not? They both intrigue me in a mysterious way. Maybe it’s something nostalgic? Maybe it’s something they represent? Maybe it’s their ability to endure unspeakable truths and consequences? Maybe it’s their inability to survive the illnesses that ravished their lives? I sat in the Phil Bosakowski Theatre and watched two solo plays that unearthed the complexities of each of these lives. The experience was theatrically surreal at times, as both stories seemed to be told from that moment when life was extinguished and eternity began. Each play was each person’s last breath, and that breath expressed their lives like photographs of pain, regret, sexual desire, and hopeful intention.

If the productions of Cirque Jacqueline and Mercury: The Afterlife and Times of a Rock God are examples of the provocative theatre nurtured by the Double Helix Theatre Company, the entirety of their annual One Festival, which features ten solo plays by emerging theatre artists, most certainly is a must-see. It’s theatre that relies on ideas housed in quality writing, acting and direction. Both productions are simple and to the point. In both productions the actors moved in a world of light shaped by the character’s imagination, with a minimal use of props, costumes, or scenery.

Andrea Reese not only wrote but also impressively performs her homage to Jackie O. She has the uncanniest resemblance to the late Mrs. Kennedy. She turns on a dime, and she's the child of ten, Mrs. Onassis on a yacht in Greece, alone in her New York City apartment, or the First Lady in the ill-fated convertible before, during and after gunshots left her widowed and blood stained. Cirque Jacqueline focuses on Jackie’s relationships with her womanizing father and abusive mother, her marriages to Jack Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, and her blossoming interests and loves during the last decades of her life.

As the legendary rock star and Queen front-man Freddie Mercury, Amir Darvish is a powerhouse of in-your-face sexual and emotional energy. He delves into the intricacies of the psychodrama with operatic grandeur as if he were channeling Freddie’s spirit from the afterlife. Throughout the play, Freddie finds himself searching for his true self, on judgment day, stripped of the accolades of his fame and the indulgence of narcissistic pleasures. I respected that this piece focused on the life of the rock star rather than the music he created, but I missed the incorporation of music as a form of self-expression for the character.

It seemed to me that both performers rushed moments throughout their respective pieces. At times I felt they both needed to simply trust that they were Jackie and Freddy—to take a deep breath and live a bit deeper in the reality of each moment. This may be a result of their being alone on stage and feeling the singular responsibility to push the action of their plays forward, but silence and breath (literally) would deepen the complex layers of both of these recreated lives. This is particularly evident in Darvish’s performance, which is dynamic, but the poignancy of some of his text is lost due to the speed and frenetic-ness of its delivery. Reese seems physically most comfortable in posed and still moments, and so many of her physical gestures are awkwardly executed, as if she's rushing on to the next moment without giving full value to the moment at hand. She needs to take the time to really point her finger, to really take the photo, to really throw the object—to really give full value to the beginning, middle and end of each action.

These details notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed the integrity of each of their performances. Notice must also be given to Charles Messina, who directed Cirque Jacqueline and wrote and co-directed (with Jim Bonney) Mercury: The Afterlife and Times of a Rock God. Together, their theatrical visions have guided Reese and Darvish in the creation of heartfelt and illuminating interpretations of the lives of Jackie Onassis and Freddie Mercury.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of One Innocent Woman, Matt Okin's new play at Theatre for the New City. The story that it tells is an over-the-top soap opera-esque string of abuse and manipulation directed at Shelly, the play's eponymous victim-protagonist; think Peyton Place meets the Book of Job. When we first meet Shelly, she's in high school, in the girl's lavatory, where she and two fellow students are gossiping. Stern parochial school teacher Miss Runkle storms in, saying that she heard someone swearing; Principal Nippen decides that the perpetrator must be poor Shelly (who is obviously not guilty), and punishes her with a salacious kiss.

This is, we come to understand, par for the course for Shelly. She's the lone Jew in a suburban Catholic School; her widowed father disavows her religion and identity, publicly wishing for the day when she will turn 18 and no longer be his problem. At the Senior Prom, she is raped; at her first day of college she witnesses the savage beating of her first new friend at the hands of two thugs. She gets pregnant during her semester abroad and subsequently has an abortion. She gets propositioned at her first job interview. She gets married to the first man who asks her, only to be bitterly rejected by him during the wedding reception when he learns of some of her history.

And so on, for three more acts: One Innocent Woman is never, ever dull, with Shelly's sad circumstances escalating ever more tragically; but it never felt clear to me exactly where Okin and director Spencer Chandler want to take us. The tone of the piece—not to the mention the intentionally grotesque layering of incident—suggests something of the absurd and something of satire. But running through the piece is a subtext—supported, I think, by some of the earlier Okin-Chandler collaborations that I have seen—regarding the persecution of Jews and the nurturing, even redemptive, power of faith. Yet One Innocent Woman's ending seems to undermine that theme: when the play was over, I was still unsure about its intent.

That said, it must be noted that this is, in its way, an engaging and often compelling evening of theatre. Deana Barone gives us a case-study victim in Shelly; her work is even more commendable given the fact that her four co-stars—Kathryn Comperatore, Erin Cook, Rawn Erickson II, and Christopher Lueck—have much meatier roles, playing up to a dozen different characters apiece during the  play, with personalities as vivid as their names: Mrs. Lipman, Chaim Perlik, Dovid Fishbacher, and so on. Chandler's direction is brisk and imaginative, making good use of the open, square stage at TNC and the spare set and lighting design of Jason Norris.

Three quarters of the way into this 90-minute musical, Karla DeVito and Stan Brown sing a song with the mantra “don’t waste your life” repeated over and over. This neatly sums up the whole point of Robby Benson’s new musical, Open Heart, at the Cherry Lane Theatre. It’s a simple evening of theatre (nothing earth-shattering here), but a good time is had, with some necessary life lessons imparted. What I loved about the musical is its reminder to slow down, take a deep breath, hug your kids, say “I love you,” listen to someone’s problem, and take full advantage of today because it could end in 60 seconds. That’s what Benson wrote—a musical that explores how life can unexpectedly change in 60 seconds. It challenges our priorities and does it through humor and a few touching moments, without relying on sentimentality to convey its themes.

Benson has written a cohesive story, with a musical score that is surprisingly complex (in a William Finn sort of way). In fact, many parallels could be made between Open Heart and Finn’s A New Brain—but I’ll leave that discussion for another time. Stylistically, I found Benson’s writing to be a bit labored, mostly in the opening ten minutes, where he seems to struggle with the notion of how to set his musical into motion. The first few songs (mostly performed as telephone conversations) seem contrived. I questioned why they even needed to be songs in the first place. I appreciated the non-musical feel of the opening, but ultimately it is a musical and the rest of the piece functions beautifully as one.

Benson’s score is perfectly conceived for the limitations of his own voice and the impressive ranges of both DeVito and Brown. He writes with a pop ballad influence, but holds his own with the best of composers of traditional musical theatre. DeVito and Brown are both given the gift of multiple show-stopping numbers (DeVito—“Paint a Picture” and Brown—“F**k You”; I’m guessing the songs titles because they weren’t listed in the program). Most impressive is Benson’s ability to compose a solid score that enables his seemingly untrained voice to sing with clarity, DeVito’s pop-influenced voice to belt like Merman and croon like Lena Horne, and Brown’s classically trained male instrument to rival the female vocal gymnastics of Jessye Norman—literally—and they all work so perfectly together!

Benson is wonderfully identifiable as the central character Jimmy. He performs the oh-so-wound-up Jimmy with ease. DeVito and Brown play a multitude of characters that travel in and out of Jimmy’s life—some real and others hallucinatory. They are both hilarious and touching throughout the piece. DeVito sinks her comic teeth into characters like the Korean Nurse, the German (dominatrix) 8th grade teacher, the Jewish grandmother, the Irish nun, the daughter Wendy (at two different ages), Ethel Merman, and Jimmy’s wife Jayne. Brown seems to be the Christmas Past, Present and Future of the production, playing such roles as Jimmy’s friend Rickey (who died of AIDS in 1983), the Jewish grandfather, a monk, and even Jimmy’s penis (most stimulating!). On a special note, Brown is an exceptional performer. He gives by far one of the most vivid musical performances currently on the New York stage. He’s a rare talent—kudos to Benson for showcasing him so generously.

Director Matt Williams trusts Benson’s imaginative writing and the abilities of his actors to get the blood flowing in this production of Open Heart. He redefines the musical experience by incorporating quality acting with the technological “downtown” theatrics of the Wooster Group while introducing moments as broad as the ba-da-bum style of early vaudeville.

Michael Brown’s set is a moving installation of television screens, boom cameras, floating furniture pieces, and exposed theatre walls. The feeling is that of a Hollywood sound stage that transforms itself into various locations on earth and in heaven—and all the surreal places in between. He utilizes live video cameras to capture live action that is projected onto screens and incorporates three stagehands as characters in the play (fully exposed throughout the production) to maneuver his design—they even sing back up at one point!

Credit must also be given to Batwin + Robin Productions for their projection design and seamless collaboration with Brown.

Ken Billington utilizes the simplest of lighting to tell his story. Let me clarify: by “simple” I mean he minimally paints the stage with the reflection of a television screen, but for another moment he introduces the bold theatrics of blinking lights magically framing the proscenium—all the time working in subtleties with their extreme counterparts surprising the audience with each passing moment. Ann Hould-Ward's costumes reflect the naturalness and at times vaudevillian influences found in Billington’s lighting. The contemporary “everyday” outfits worn by DeVito and Brown become the base for a grab bag of sketch comedy costume pieces that transform the wife and the friend into the MAD TV-like characters that seem to inhabit Jimmy’s world.

Operaplay is a sentimental romantic comedy about a brilliant and famous tenor who has stopped singing, much to the consternation of his manager and his staff. Umberto Ecarazzi is supposed to do a live radio broadcast of Turandot on June 4, but with five months to go he is pouting in his hotel room, putting on weight, and pining for a sexy woman named Lucia. Ecarazzi's valet Fazio believes that she's the only one who can motivate him to sing for the broadcast. With Umberto's manager, the impresaria Vittoria, he hatches a plan whereby Lucia will pretend to love Umberto and coax him to lose weight, in exchange for an eight-night stand starring as Violetta in La Traviata.

The wrinkle is, Lucia detests Ecarazzi—and she can't sing. The plan proceeds anyway, Operaplay's first act at least being shaped like a farce; it backfires, of course, but there's a happy ending, one that involves Umberto's devoted maid Peppina, who has been doing some silent pining—she's mute—of her own.

It sounds improbable and a little trite, but a likable and energetic cast under Steven Petrillo's peppy direction make it work. And to his credit, playwright Rick Eisenberg provides plenty of humorous dialogue and a quintet of  appealing characters, this despite the formulaic box he has built for himself with his sitcom-y premise.

The cast's three women fare best. Dee Dee Friedman is lovable as waiflike Peppina, not to mention quite funny in the first act, mimimg exasperation, disgust, and a host of other exaggerated emotions as the mute maid. Gerrianne Raphael charms as the commanding manager/producer Vittoria. And Catherine La Valle comes close to stealing the show as the over-the-top, talent-free diva from hell. Her rendition of one of Violetta's arias sets opera back several decades: we miss her when she disappears from the story early in Act Two.

Peter Farrell ultimately has the least to do as valet Fazio. John D'Arcangelo  is the cast's weak link, lacking the spectacular, gargantuan presence that Ecarazzi needs (he also slips out of his cartoonish Italian accent rather more often than desirable).

A luxurious hotel suite (belying the off-off-Broadway location) is supplied by set designer Peter Barbieri; the appropriate, lovely costumes are by Isabel Rubio.

With its intersecting stories from two different centuries played out simultaneously in the same place, Dave Carley's Orchidelirium feels reminiscent of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. In common with that play, too, is an overriding concern for plant life, in this case orchids; indeed, the room where much of the action occurs is an enormous greenhouse built by the wealthy O'Keefe family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally a staggering 100,000 square feet and eventually expanded to more than twice that size, this conservatory houses a fabulous collection of the flowers that give this play its title, including numerous rare hybrids that can't be found anywhere else in the world.

Orchids, and the obsessions of four quixotic individuals with them, are at the center of this story. An authentic-looking definition of "orchidelirium" graces the program cover: "Medical condition: an orchid induced brain fever marked by confused speech, hallucinations, and feelings of lovesickness." I'm not much of a flower connoisseur, but my favorite fictional detective, Nero Wolfe, certainly makes a convincing case for the power of this particular species: Carley's engaging play spins a tall and tantalizing tale about said power, and scores some interesting points about a broad range of subjects in the process.

Orchidelirium's twin plots revolve around Alice O'Keefe, the slightly dotty spinster daughter of a stove magnate, and her present-day descendant Frances O'Keefe, who disarms us at the very start by pointing out jauntily that a stove magnate is very different from a refrigerator magnet. Alice, stifled by the American version of Victorian manners and suffering from a devastating aversion to motion (she once had the train she was traveling in stopped because of this severe condition), finds she must entertain herself in the greenhouse that her father built for her. Here she raises orchids; corresponds with an English nobleman called Sir Joseph Paxton, seeking tips on how to pass her idle hours productively; and eventually—in concert with Paxton's associate Arthur Fox-Pimmon—hatches a bizarre plan to create an exhibit of the various birds mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare.

Frances exists in a less rarefied world. She has the O'Keefe name, but the money's gone; she's a sometime professor at the university that now owns the greenhouse (Alice left it to them in her will), and her funding seems to be drying up. But that doesn't stop her from sending Mike, a young Baptist missionary and orchid enthusiast whom she found on the Internet, to the Oronoco River rainforest to find a rare, dare we say magical, species of orchid that Paxton wrote about.

Carley follows these exotic stories to their ends and manages their interconnection rather skillfully. Thematically, though, the links are more tenuous; ultimately, it wasn't clear to me exactly what Carley wants us to make of his play beyond an entertaining tour through some dangerous obsessions. Which is not to say that he fails to make insightful observations about the world here—he comments smartly on topics ranging from the current state of academic research in America to the perception of Mormon missionaries by airport security personnel to the philosophical dilemmas underpinning hybridization and cloning.

Director Stephen Wargo does a commendable job staging this complicated play, interweaving the two time periods with considerable clarity. His company, Personal Space Theatrics, has as their mission the creation of theatre in non-traditional intimate environments, and so Orchidelirium is performed in front of, behind, and all around an audience seated throughout the playing area. This is mostly very effective as we meet the quirky characters, but proves slightly problematic near the end of the piece, when we're called upon to imagine some substantial changes in locale and mood. Nevertheless, Wargo is to be congratulated for taking on this ambitious work and introducing it to the New York audience. Ditto his actors—Fred Arseanault (Mike), Margaret Norwood (Alice), Michael Poignand (Arthur), and Navida Stein (Frances)—all of whom deliver appealing portrayals under challenging circumstances.

Ordet, written by the Danish pastor and playwright Kaj Munk in 1925, tells the story of a family whose members are all struggling, in different ways, with questions of religious belief and faith. The patriarch of the Borgen clan is a gruff but principled old fellow whose most prized accomplishment is the establishment of a church and meetinghouse in his town, where he and his fellows (mostly folks who work for him, by the way; Borgen is a well-to-do estate owner) can worship a loving God joyfully.

Borgen's three sons hold very dissimilar views. The eldest, Mikkel, rejects the Church entirely, and for this reason, Borgen has decided not to leave the estate to him—this despite his obvious delight in Mikkel's pragmatic wife Inger and his two little granddaughters. The middle son, Johannes, suffered a tragic loss when his fiancée was killed in an accident; since that time, he has suffered under the delusion that he is Jesus Christ, causing great embarrassment and strain to his family. Anders, the youngest son, shares his father's theology, but religion is causing him grief nonetheless, for he has fallen in love with the pretty daughter of a devout evangelical preacher named Reuben, who refuses to allow the two to wed. When Borgen learns of Reuben's pronouncement, he forgets his own opposition to the match and races to Reuben's home, where he attempts to change that gentleman's mind by any means available. The situation turns ugly when word comes that Inger, who is in the final stages of pregnancy, has suddenly taken ill, and Reuben suggests that her impending death is a sign from God for Borgen to repent.

The events of the second half are not for me to reveal here. What happens will surprise you: the theological structures of both Borgen and Reuben are severely challenged, while the strength of a single individual's unwavering faith is demonstrated when an event that can only be called miraculous occurs.

If Ordet was merely a folk play about a miracle, it would probably feel trivial today; its potency derives from Munk's (mostly) very balanced effort to consider a number of different religious and philosophical points of view and leave it to the audience to try to figure out which one makes the most sense to them. This view is reinforced by the play's ultimate outcome: miracle or no, it's not at all certain than any of these characters' strongly-held views about God and faith have changed—not only do Reuben and Borgen remain unmoved, so too do the local doctor (who represents empiricism and science) and pastor (who speaks for the world of organized religion). From my own perspective, I can tell you that even as I found ways to "explain" the play's miracle, I also found myself hoping that it would happen. Such is the power of make-believe, maybe; or of our innate desire for order and happiness.

It certainly makes for a singular and strangely involving experience, against the odds: Munk reminds me of Shaw more than any other playwright, what with his characters relentlessly debating theology and philosophy for the better part of two hours. The translation by R.P. Keigwin feels a little bit stilted and remote, but J. Scott Reynolds, the play's adaptor and director, keeps us firmly focused on the content of Ordet's argument. Reynolds' production features a stark, simple design that evokes place and period very effectively (sets are by Douglas Flandro, costumes by Nicole Frachiseur, and lighting by Eric Cope). The large cast is generally fine, with particularly strong performances offered by Todd Parmley, Tom Martin, and James Mack as the three Borgen sons, Bill Tatum as the intolerant Reuben and Barbara Bruno as his dour wife, and Jennifer Gawlik as the buoyant, life-affirming Inger.

For its inaugural undertaking, Theater Faction has ambitiously asked two directors and one director-playwright team to separately adapt the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus. This is the first of the great Greek tragedies on the House of Atreus, charting the story from Clytemnestra's murder of her husband, King Agamemnon, to avenge his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to help him win the Trojan War; and then moving through the murder of Clytemnestra at the hands of her son, Orestes (with the prodding of his sister Electra); and finally concluding with Orestes' trial in Athens, where he is finally set free of the furies ("Eumenides") and allowed to begin his life anew.

The resulting three-hour production is certainly interesting and eminently watchable despite a three-hour running time. I wouldn't characterize it as instructive vis-a-vis Aeschylus' intentions or themes: it's a dismemberment rather than a deconstruction, and what it reveals are the attitudes and aspirations of its creators more than a thought-out through-line about the classic text or what it means.

The evening begins with Agamemnon, adapted and directed by Erik Nelson. Nelson is a conceptual artist: the best of his inspirations is to cast random New Yorkers, captured on videotape, as the Chorus: he's had interviewers ask various people to comment on some of the play's great themes, such as whether it's okay to commit murder and whether the murder of a spouse who killed your child might be justified. At first the notion feels dreadfully gimmicky, but as the questions get meatier, it becomes clear that there's potential for authentic depth here. Sadly, Nelson abandons the notion as soon as it heats up.

Other directorial ideas work fitfully or not at all. His Clytemnestra begins the piece by scrawling a series of sayings—nonsense in the shape of syllogisms—and later draws a hopscotch board on the floor of the stage using Arabic numerals and what appear to be Chinese or Japanese characters. I'm not at all sure what Nelson's going for with these actions. But a neat multimedia presentation of Agamemnon's long first monologue (effectively turning it into a one-man duet) is arresting; and Nelson has the actor, Chris Oden, move throughout the auditorium, implicating us in the tragedy (something he tries to repeat, with less success, at the end). It's never uninteresting; but it proves not to be about very much: Nelson's Agamemnon is a George W. Bush-like politician who says he has just defeated the "terrorists" in Troy; but this analogy fails to parse at all because it confuses issues badly: the question of whether President Bush would kill one of his children because God told him to is fascinating, but doesn't help us understand the current world situation one whit; similarly, suggesting that Agamemnon's hubris is the same as our present leaders' illuminates nothing about the human condition. In the end, Nelson has Agamemnon rape Clytemnestra, which muddies the waters still more: plenty of abused wives have murdered their husbands with less provocation and gotten away with it.

The Mourners is Yuval Sharon's title for what's usually called The Libation Bearers. The program reveals that he has adapted Aescyhlus "freely," mixing in texts by, among others, Euripides, Sophocles, Richard Strauss (an aria from Elektra), and Rage Against the Machine. Sharon actually tells the story straightforwardly here, albeit in a quirky, contemporary setting that puts the three-woman chorus in sweatpants and includes a trio of phantom "Electras" (though I didn't know that's who they were until I consulted the program) who are respectively on an exercise machine, in a bathtub, and working on a computer. The extra Electras occasionally add something to the mix—as when the one in the bathtub sings the aforementioned aria (beautifully; kudos to Caroline Worra)—but most of the time they prove enormously distracting. From the smells of bath salts and nail polish to the glimpses of solitaire games and downloaded porn on the projected PC screen, most of Sharon's enhancements feel very extraneous indeed.  But some of the "found" text works well and helps make the ancient story feel more accessible and more modern; and there are some visual images—notably, Orestes rising out of a sandbox that has heretofore represented Agamemnon's grave—that are unforgettable. Sharon, like Nelson, is a young director with talent.

The most fully satisfying piece is the last, Eumenides, which is adapted by David Johnston and directed by Kevin Newbury. Eschewing high-tech and high-concept notions, this is a spare and simple rendering of the classic text with a complicatedly modern point-of-view. Johnston depicts a fascinating tension: on the one hand, Orestes is judged by his fellow men rather than by the gods, which suggests some kind of progress; on the other hand, the younger gods Apollo and Athena (and, by proxy, Zeus) are presented as hypocritical manipulators, ready to sacrifice moral imperatives for expedience at every turn, while the older gods (the Eumenides) are shown to be single-minded defenders of justice and truth—which makes us wonder at what price the aforementioned alleged progress is to be achieved.

Newbury stages Johnston's script with intelligence and assurance, and he's cast it soundly, with Beau Allulli beautifully ambivalent as the mortal Orestes at the center of the thing; Michael Bell and Lori Lane Jefferson confident but shallow as Apollo and Athena; and Vivian Manning, Nell Gwynn, and Heidi McAllister surprisingly the most fully realized and compelling characters on stage as the three Eumenides.

Technically, all three parts of Oresteia are well-executed; Theater Faction has resources to match its brains and ambition. This is an imperfect three hours, but it's never dull: these folks have things to say and notions about how to say them that are worth a look.

At the beginning of this show, actor-playwright Felix Pire tells us that his first name means "happy" in Spanish; and thus the title Origins of Happiness has a neat double meaning. This beautiful and affecting solo play is Pire's reminiscence of growing up, and also an affectionate look at what's most important in his life.

This, too, Pire discloses right from the outset: quoting his maternal grandmother, who was a very significant influence in his life, he explains that family bonds are the strongest; and he goes on to demonstrate just that as he recounts anecdotes about his childhood and early adulthood amidst a tight-knit, loving, occasionally eccentric family living in the Cuban American ghetto in Hialeah, Florida in the '70s and '80s.

Pire's family was poor, and one of the earliest vignettes in Origins of Happiness recalls his discovery of this fact at eight years old, when another kid in the grocery store explained to him what food stamps are. The shame that he says he felt didn't seem to stick to him for very long, though—one of the nicest things about this show is how solidly it proves that a family can overcome life's hardships by caring for and loving each other. Also with pride and fearless self-confidence: Pire's grandmother teaches him that once you have danced, no one can ever take that dance away from you.

And so Pire dances through his youth for us here, from class clown in Mrs. Martinez' math class to beaming novice usher in a local movie house (his first job, at 16). Along the way, we meet an assortment of colorful characters—most of them members of Pire's family, plus a few others—including his gruff but compassionate father; his mother's eldest sister, a successful beautician; his two younger brothers; the aforementioned Mrs. Martinez (hilariously rendered in one of Pire's few "costumes"—a frizzy orange wig, eyeglasses, and a tacky bosomy blouse); and his boss at the movie theater, Usmail (who was named after the inscription on the boat that his refugee parents saw while floating from Cuba to their new home in America—the only English name they knew).

Most memorably, Pire introduces us to his mother, whose capacity for dreaming becomes her most important legacy for her creative young son. A scene in which the 16-year-old Pire discovers something wonderful and unexpected about his mother's past is touching and inspiring; his embrace of a parent's lost hopes and aspirations exemplifies the level of understanding and empathy that Pire achieves here.

Pire's characterizations and impersonations are very funny but they're always filled with respect and love; Origins of Happiness is like an evening with an old friend looking back fondly at old photos or family movies, and indeed slides and pictures of many of Pire's subjects are projected on screens above the stage throughout the show. All of them should be proud of the marks they've left on Pire, who has accumulated a lot of wisdom about what's truly important in life in a relatively short span of years. In Origins of Happiness, he shares some of that wisdom, with plenty of humor, intelligence, and flair.

Thankfully, and worries about John Ashcroft and company notwithstanding, most contemporary Americans don't know what it means to not be free. By which I mean, we take not just our freedoms for granted; but also the residual manifest destiny and cockeyed optimism that, acknowledged or not, we believe to be our due as a result of all that righteous freedom.

Which is why it's valuable for us to listen to playwrights like Slawomir Mrozek, to try to understand what it might be like to not be us. The pairing of one-acts by the Polish playwright, currently at La MaMa courtesy of Paul Bargetto's East River Commedia company, accomplishes exactly that: even though they're more than forty years old, Out at Sea and Striptease both offer vivid glances at the scary, absurd world of life under totalitarianism; they remind us why we must be diligent in defending the fundamental liberties we sometimes seem to forget we have.

But enough polemics; these plays, though overtly political, are also greatly entertaining, at least in part because of their novelty. Out at Sea, the stronger of the two, takes place on a raft, far, far adrift. There are three men on it, but apparently no more food; within moments after we meet these characters, we find that they are talking, casually, about eating one of their number.

Well, two of them are casual: right away, the Fat and Medium Castaways (as they are noted in the program), form an instinctive and rather sinister alliance, and then spend the rest of the play figuring out how to get the Thin Castaway to agree to be their next meal. Mrozek investigates various strategies—there's talk of drawing lots; philosophical arguments pointing to the reasonableness of this or that outcome; even a so-called democratic election. However, Fat Castaway—who is an insidiously ruthless fellow—intuits that appeals to reason or logic won't succeed, and so he brilliantly pounces on the Big Idea that will work: Thin Castaway must sacrifice himself because his faith tells him to.

Out at Sea is finally breathtaking in its profound comprehension of how so-called civilized society operates, with a killer closing line that summarizes, in five words, an enormous amount of human history. Yet, the play is mostly not the tract that I've perhaps made it out to be; it's genuine absurdist farce, with surreal appearances by a Postman and, hilariously, Fat Castaway's former Nanny, plus barrages of babble about absolutely nothing, masquerading as something Terribly Important. It's a funny, disquieting, disarming piece that gains in awful gravity as Thin Castaway's fate becomes less and less negotiable.

Striptease takes place in a room, or cell, bare except for a single chair. A man enters, dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase; shortly afterward, another man arrives, identically dressed and also with a briefcase. Their predicament soon emerges: they're not exactly sure where they are, or how they got there, but they're intent on getting out. How? Well, Man I believes that he is always free, just so long as he never makes a choice, which would limit some of his freedom; therefore he always does nothing. Man II, on the other hand, believes that taking action at every interval makes him, if not free, at least somewhat in command of his life.

After he discovers that the exits have been blocked, Man II starts to bang on a wall (Man I, of course, sits inertly in his chair). Suddenly, a big white-gloved hand appears—like Mickey Mouse's, but as tall as a person. It "asks" ("tells"?) Man II that he must surrender the shoe he's been banging against the wall.

Thus begins the "striptease," which eventually robs both Men of shoes, belts and suspenders, jackets, and trousers. Neither philosophy proves particularly effective in affecting events; but the principled arguments go on Mrozek has captured another essential truth about the human condition.

Bargetto's staging is conscientious and, when conditions allow, inventive; pacing felt a bit slow at the show reviewed, but I was watching the very first performance—this should improve over time. The spare design by Young-ju Baik is splendid. All four performers do fine work, with Paul Todaro (Fat Castaway) and Nora Laudani (Postman and Nanny) making strong impressions in Out at Sea, and Cornel Gabara (Medium Castaway and Man II) and, especially, Troy Lavallee (Thin Castaway and Man I) outstanding in both pieces. Out at Sea and Striptease proves to be an instructive and fascinating evening of theatre; I quite recommend it.

Time is a tricky subject to talk about philosophically, because as a perception it’s almost imperceptible. But one of theatre's greatest strengths is its capacity for making an abstraction concrete, simply by showing how that abstraction affects behavior. In her quirky comedy Out From Under It, playwright Susan Bernfield contemplates the effects that our modern conception of time has on our emotional well-being.

Time is both an objective measurement (“I leave work in 15 minutes”) and a subjective perception (“the minutes drag”). Between these two notions of time lies a chasm that workaholic Joanna accidentally drops into when she’s beaned one night by an errant snowball. When Joanna awakens from her coma three years later, she finds her internal clock somehow “off” from the rest of the world, as if her watch had slowed down without her noticing. She spends the rest of the play trying to find the beat that the rest of the world keeps time to. “Where’s normal?” asks Joanna, as she learns that while her life paused, her sister got married, her parents split up, and her best friend got promoted. Lurking under her metaphysical confusion is the shock of mortality. A random snowball ended Joanna’s life once already; she begins to sense that life has value because of its scarcity.

The ratio of value to scarcity is, of course, an economic relationship. Bernfield’s capitalist approach to existentialism forms another layer of the play. Bernfield’s written a gray-toned examination of a culture where market forces are more important than the soul. As in Don DeLillo’s novels (which Out From Under It resembles), modern American culture has alienated people from their surroundings. Initially, Joanna defines herself by her job advertising crumble cake, but after her reawakening, she finds that this very common practice doesn’t solve her temporal problems.

If the play has a fault, it's that it’s fairly sedate and static. Joanna goes to work, visits the doctor, talks to her mother and her sister and her boyfriend, but nothing much actually happens. In fact, Joanna spends so much time musing that some audience members might want to shout at her, “Go dancing, get some exercise, have some fun and stop thinking so much!”

If they don’t, part of the reason is Addie Johnson’s performance as Joanna. She has a lithe body that she makes almost gawky, and a smile that’s beguiling. Johnson’s Joanna walks like a woman who still isn’t used to her adult mind and her post-adolescent body, while her interactions with her family (especially her laugh) retains a childish sprightliness. She's like Wendy from Peter Pan: she’s the girl who’s finally decided to grow up, but hasn’t arrived yet.

Johnson is backed by a capable cast, but only Camilla Enders (as Joanna’s physician, Dr. Jane) approaches her relaxed and intelligent performance. Enders renders her character with quick strokes: a prim delivery and a ramrod posture tell us everything we need to know about Dr. Jane. Enders also plays Jane’s sister, a victim of breast cancer with whom Joanna holds imaginary conversations. Both turns demonstrate Enders’ flair for the physical side of acting and her confidence in her abilities.

For a play about maturing, Out From Under It comes across as very youthful. The performances are fresh and the design is modern and chic (Lauren Helpern’s grey minimalist set illustrates the play’s tone admirably). But the play occasionally seems more immature than fresh. Bernfield and director Alexandra Aron get so swept up by the play’s buoyant naiveté that they haven’t applied themselves to editing it closely. Out From Under It needs to be trimmed, a line here and an exchange there, to make it tighter and punchier; as it is, once in a while we drift off, and find ourselves examining the photos that Helpern projects in the set’s grey windows. But most of the time, Aron builds her production around the yearning that Joanna has awakened with. Out From Under It shows the future opening wide for Joanna, and finds hope as well as fear in that opening.