nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

For its inaugural production, Sweet William Collective has chosen to mount Ron Fitzgerald's play of angst, uncertainty and protest, Parts Unknown. It's a challenging assignment, and the good news is that this fledgling theatre company, founded and led by artistic director Danielle Duvall, largely succeeds. In fact, it's the script that lets the company down over and over again, making for a rocky but intriguing evening of theatre and offering us the promise of worthy work to come as Sweet William tackles stronger material.

Parts Unknown begins in a remote cabin, presumably somewhere in the American Far West, where a pair of brothers, Eric and Ray, are listening to a radio talk jock who is spouting off about the glories of liberty here in the U.S.A. We soon learn that these young men live outside the mainstream, and their father has been imprisoned or killed by the federal government. Their supplies are running out, and as the scene ends, their generator suddenly quits on them.

We switch immediately to a studio in New York City, where rock star Johnny Socko is recording a public service announcement. Overseeing production is milquetoast PR exec Tom Murphy and scarily hyper-driven bitch/lady executive Kelly Martin. Johnny leaves in a huff without finishing the job, and Kelly launches into a diatribe against Tom that questions his abilities as manager and man (the two apparently have just had sex moments before).

Next thing we know, Kelly is in charge at the company where they work, making deals in what used to be Tom's office. Tom, meanwhile, is sitting in front of his TV in his underwear, chomping on an assortment of "happy pills" and seemingly impotent to move. Ray turns up at Kelly's office and then at Tom's house trying to understand what they meant when they wrote a "Save the Children" flyer that he has somehow gotten hold of. Johnny Socko is stoned in a hotel room with a teenage girl named Star who wants him to write a song for her.

Admittedly, the story plays out more organically than it probably sounds here; but it's indisputable that in Parts Unknown—which just gets bleaker and bleaker as it progresses—the playwright merges absurdist detail with naive (if valid) notions about the Corrupt Establishment (the media, capitalism, the government, etc.) to create a sad and hopeless picture of stunted life among its young protagonists. Fitzgerald's script suffers from severe lapses in internal logic—why does Tom go crazy? what does Ray want (and how did he get to New York)? why does Kelly go off with an enigmatic stranger named Gray Wolf, and why does she not escape from him when she realizes that he has only taken her to Central Park?

More damaging, Fitzgerald seems finally to have nothing more substantial on his mind than a 20-year-old's angst: detours into hot-button issues like the supposed safety/superiority of Americans and terrorists blowing up buildings feel only like detours (and worse, they already feel dated); we're left, at play's end, with nothing more than a despairing midnight hopelessness. Fitzgerald fills the transitions between his scenes with voice-over excerpts from fictitious radio talk shows. The chatter we overhear sounds authentic and, though far-ranging, supplies the glue that holds Parts Unknown together. It's the best part of the play, but it eventually bogs things down badly; the show feels long at just over two-and-a-quarter hours.

Director Michael Criscuolo does his best to keep things moving, but the many scenes and interludes finally tell on him by the middle of Act Two. He fares better with his cast, urging strong characterizations out of his ensemble despite the two-dimensional frameworks provided by the playwright. Particularly effective in this fine company are Brian Cichocki as the waiflike Ray, Bryant Richards as psycho business guy Tom, Mandy Siegfried as the deceptively innocent Star, and Danielle Duvall as the monstrous Kelly Martin. Kudos, too, to the four actors responsible for the voiceovers during transitions: Ken Schatz and Tamara Scott as the talking head-hosts, and the supremely versatile Patricia Spahn and Dan Truman as all of their callers.

A few years ago, I decided to stop reading Shakespeare. My reasoning was this: that opportunities to see a Shakespeare play I know next to nothing about are of an extremely limited quantity, and that the pleasure and surprise of experiencing an entry in this seminal dramatic corpus in three dimensions, with a minimum of preconceptions, would be rare and precious enough to trump the cultural fluency gained by familiarity with the Complete Works on paper.

Pericles is one of the plays I decided to refrain from reading until I had a chance to see it live. The play, it turns out, is one of Shakespeare's late-period heterogeneous extravaganzas, into which he would have thrown the kitchen sink had indoor plumbing been easily obtainable in Elizabethan London. There are scenes of wicked farce followed by scenes of nearly bottomless tenderness; cruelty, comedy, romance and tragedy mix and mingle like old friends—which, to the latter Shakespeare, they were.

The plot, a direct descendant of The Odyssey, follows the eponymous Prince of Tyre on a series of Mediterranean-hopping adventures in which he runs the gamut from powerful nobleman to humble castaway and then back to the top again. When his life is put in danger after he discovers the incestuous secret of the neighboring King of Antioch, he flees his kingdom and finds himself enmeshed in numerous adventures, including being shipwrecked, saving a kingdom from famine, participating in knightly tournaments, and, eventually, getting married. But when his wife Thaisa perishes at sea while giving birth to his daughter Marina, it is the first of a series of heartaches that culminate in the apparent murder of his daughter 14 years later. This second, later half of the play adds alchemists, brothels and, yes, pirates to the already teeming mix, all of which combine to create, as so many of the later plays do, an affecting meditation on family and the transition from one generation to the next.

So the question: is the staging in question, a Theatre for a New Audience production directed by Bartlett Sher at BAM, a suitable introduction to the play? The answer: absolutely. Facing the daunting task of wrangling such a multitude of narrative elements and linguistic styles (much of the text's multifariousness can be attributed to the play's allegedly mixed authorship, as well as the questionable accuracy of its source text), Sher's main preoccupation seems to be clarity. Marshalling the forces of diction and design, the production's collaborators onstage and off create a united front of classy, evocative austerity to greet the play's brimming flood of words and ideas.

Dozens of locations are invoked primarily by two giant yellow-green curtains that bisect the BAM Harvey Theatre's cavernous stage in various ways; likewise, the identities of myriad nationalities are conjured by vaguely Middle Eastern costumes in shades of green, pink, purple and blue. This is big, stately, simply staged Shakespeare of the school that strives to forge clean truths from the playwright(s')'s grandiosely gnarled materials

I can imagine that to those already familiar with the many-headed nature of this beast, the results might conceivably come off as oversimplified and surface-skimming; as someone who was encountering the piece for the first time, I found it absorbing and poignant. The consummate cast is uniformly in step with the ethos of the production. The biggest casting stretch is to have Pericles portrayed by two actors, one during his youth (Tim Hopper), and the other after the narrative's 14-year hiatus (Christopher McCann). Both performers bring skill and command to their respective roles, but the conceit doesn't add materially to an understanding of the play. Andrew Weems is hysterical as Pericles's fatuous but bighearted father-in-law, and the diminutive Julyana Soelistyo brings a nearly creepy self-assurance to the role of Marina, who is, in all honesty, a creepily self-assured character. In two roles Kristine Nielsen, going from Queen to Bawd to Queen again, sets what must be a new land speed record for social mobility.

Best of all is Brenda Wehle, who portrays the 14th-century poet Gower, upon whose works Pericles is based, and who serves as the play's narrator. She embodies all the mystery of a wizened sage from the Middle Ages while remaining at all times recognizably human (which only serves to make the mystery  more mysterious). This motley play couldn't wish to be held together by a more poetic glue.

There's no way for us to know exactly what theatre felt like to the Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago. But with Persians, Pearl Theatre artistic director Shepard Sobel gives us an opportunity to approximate the experience from our own contemporary perspective. His set designer, Sarah Lambert, has provided a playing space of utmost simplicity, consisting of a platform with some steps and a bare rear wall, a sort of approximation of the skena and paraskena. (Lighting designer Stephen Petrilli projects some beautiful, painterly images on that wall, the sole acknowledgement of today's technology.) And Devon Painter's chiton-like costumes—brilliantly colored robes for each of the four performers—along with primitive-looking masks and subtle but evocative makeup reinforce the sense of historical recreation.

The actors don't just recite their lines the way we expect them to: they chant sometimes, or sing; they move in stylized formations, and stomp out rhythms with their feet, hands, and staffs. The ritualistic feel affects us, though doesn't—can't—move us quite to catharsis as it presumably did the original audiences of Persians 2,475 years ago. Nevertheless, it's an instructive way to look at a play that is ancestor to practically everything we understand to be "western drama."  Sobel's staging of this, the oldest surviving work of the earliest of the Greek playwrights, frames the piece as the communal experience that it was; and rather than alienating us from it, it underscores its relevance. For here we are, two-and-a-half millennia later, still coming together to let the poets and actors teach us about our humanity.

The particular lesson that Aeschylus intends for us in Persians is rooted in the process of warfare. Xerxes, King of Persia, has launched an invasion of Athens. His enormous fleet has filled the Hellespont (the narrow waterway at the border of Europe and Asia), creating a "bridge" across which Xerxes' Army will march into Greece. But the Persians, despite their superior numbers and resources, are repelled and turned back by the Greeks. The defeat is catastrophic: the Army is decimated and Xerxes, literally reduced to rags and tatters, is forced to return home in terrible dishonor.

Now, Aeschylus was, of course, a Greek; the most interesting thing about Persians is that it's not about the glory and jubilation of victory (the Greek perspective) but instead about the bitterness and sorrow of defeat. The chorus are a group of old men who lament the tragedy of Xerxes' actions: they expose their ruler's hubris but they don't vilify him for it; they mourn the loss and the waste without rendering judgment. Persians feels modern for its compassion; it almost seems like it might be anti-war. But there's an inevitability here that reminds us how ancient this play really is: Xerxes has made the gods angry, and he's being punished for it—that's the source of the tragedy, nothing more and nothing less. There's no sense that things could have possibly gone any differently, and here at last is the resonance: are we doomed not to learn anything from thousands of years of history and art?

Joanne Camp, Robert Hock, Sean McNall, and Scott Whitehurst take the collective role of Chorus as well as the individual roles (respectively) of Atossa (Xerxes' mother), Darius (his father, conjured from the dead in spirit form), Xerxes, and a Messenger. All bring enormous concentration and dedication to breathe life into the ancient forms they're enacting.

This is, in the end, a most edifying presentation of a play that everybody ought to see at least once. There's wisdom in Aeschylus' work, which is why it's timeless; we can learn much about who we were and who we might be by viewing it from within the unique time machine that Sobel has crafted for us here.

New York is still just getting to know the work of Sarah Kane. During the last decade of the last century, until she committed suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, Kane was building a reputation as an enfant terrible of British theatre; but her work has come only slowly to America (the only professional production 'til now of one of her play's in NYC that I know of is Axis Company's Crave).

So right away there's a good reason to journey to The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City to see the Laboratory for International Theatre Exchange (LITE) and theater et al's production of Phaedra's Love. I'm not sure that I totally "get" what this play is about, and I'm not sure that Peter Campbell's visually arresting staging—which puts much of the action just out of sight, behind pillars or way off to the side, where it will be captured, selectively, on video monitors downstage, near the audience—is entirely in synch with what I understand to be Kane's signature sensationalized approach to theatre.

Nevertheless, Phaedra's Love is intriguing, undeniably visceral theatre; the kind the can only get done by striving experimental companies like these, in spaces that—more and more these days—are well on the fringes of New York's traditional theatre district, in this case in Queens, about fifteen minutes by subway from Times Square.

In an economical 55 minutes or so, Kane retells the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra with a contemporary spin. Hippolytus, spoiled son of King Theseus, is disgusted with himself and his world and spends all his time bingeing self-destructively on TV, junk food, and unsafe sex. Despite, or maybe because of, his nihilist hopelessness, everyone he encounters seems to be attracted to him; heading the list is his step-mother Phaedra, who is obsessed with her absent husband's son. Not far behind is Phaedra's daughter Strophe, who chides her mother for the feelings that she herself feels for this dissolute young prince.

It ends very badly, of course, with none of the main characters still standing by play's end. Kane is showing us, via her Hippolytus, the post-punk rebel without a cause, lashing out at his elders for creating such a terrible world for him to live in, yet seemingly impotent to straighten himself or that world out to make either fit to survive. Ryan Woodle absolutely gives us all of this in a riveting central performance, all the more impressive given the fact that for roughly half the play's running time we can't really see him except on the TV screens.

But I suspect there's more intended here, though what that might be was clear to me only for an instant, near the end of the play. Hippolytus' crimes against his step-mother (he raped her) have been made public, and he is about to be put to death. A chorus, eager that justice be done, bloodthirstily urges on his execution. Do we find here, somehow, a comforting rallying cry, not to allow the amoral rulers who govern us to get away with anything? Too soon, Theseus is on the scene, handling the situation; it all amounts to something wonderfully resonant and pertinent in Phaedra's Love. (I think the continuous background noise of a live broadcast of CNN on Hippolytus' television set helped me arrive at this conclusion.)

Brian Rogers' design is as spare as it can be, straining the audience to synthesize the playing areas in the vast Chocolate Factory space. I've already mentioned Ryan Woodle; the rest of the cast is just as expert as he is, with Jen Daum entirely persuasive and even a little cunning as Strophe, and Natalie Wilder credibly tragic as Phaedra, a woman consumed by unaccountable love (or lust). Julian Rad plays Theseus as well as a doctor and a priest who figure in the story. The chorus is composed of Jillian Apfelbaum, Sarah Miller, and Katie Prascher.

I'll begin this with a gloriously transcendent moment in the middle of Godlight Theatre's Picasso at the Lapin Agile: Picasso's art dealer, Sagot, has just hung a brand-new Matisse on the wall of the Paris bar where the play takes place, and everyone there—Sagot, Picasso, Albert Einstein, Freddy the owner, and Germaine the waitress—takes some time to admire it. A good, long time, in fact: a wondrous minute or maybe even more where actors, mesmerized by something that no one in the audience can see, convey the various essences of beauty with ecstatic, silent, eloquent expression.

Such is the center of Steve Martin's very funny and surprisingly profound comedy about the art of possibilities. Director Joe Tantalo understands that a play about the boundless leaps that human creativity can sometimes take needs to ask its audience to be willing to do some leaping themselves; that's why he has Brian Farley's Sagot hold up absolutely nothing when he unveils his "Matisse." It's also why Randy Falcon's Picasso makes imaginary squiggles on an imaginary napkin when he's asked for an original sketch; and why the stars that supposedly foretell the future—after the bar's roof blows off, near the end of the play—twinkle randomly instead of spelling something out that we can read. Tantalo invites us into the surreal, exciting world of this remarkable play and helps us locate in it our capacity for awe.

Martin's play is set in Paris in 1904 at a bar that really existed called the Lapin Agile; in it, he imagines a night when the very young Pablo Picasso, just finishing his blue period, happens to meet the slightly older Albert Einstein, who is still working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office—a meeting that probably never happened, at least as far as anyone knows. Martin does not toy with history: even though time warps during the course of the evening (and so, kind of, does space, as the actors move effortlessly back and forth through the so-called "fourth wall"), there are no spectacular accidents or coincidences to cause the 20th century to proceed on a path other than the one that we know it took. Instead, Martin uses this chance encounter to meditate on genius. How does one man put pencil to paper and create a whole new way of looking at the world (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the cornerstone of cubism and modernism)? Or, to put it exactly the same way, how does one man put pencil to paper and create a whole new way of looking at the world (the Special Theory of Relativity, the foundation of quantum physics)?

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is smart all over the place, and extremely funny, and very often both at the same time. Einstein, for example, analyzes a terrible joke about a pie shaped like an "e," pointing out that a pie shaped like an "i" wouldn't be funny at all because of the dot, which would either be attached to the top of the pie (and therefore not an actual "i" at all) or separate (and therefore not a pie, but a cupcake).

It's weightier than that, sometimes, of course; relativity and beauty and the fourth dimension and the meaning of art all share the stage, with results that will leave you—between the laughing and the head-spinning intellectual gamesmanship—breathless. Offering counterpoint to Picasso and Einstein are an aging Parisian named Gaston, who is at once commonsensical and nonsensical (like most ordinary humans, I fear); the bar's owner/bartender, Freddy, who has both feet firmly planted on the ground; his eminently pragmatic waitress/girlfriend, Germaine; and a series of beautiful female admirers of either the artist, the physicist, or both. There's also the necessary third point on the triangle of 20th century discovery, a striving young inventor who seems to be entirely fictitious named Schmendiman. Oh, and there's a visitor at the end of the play who ties everything together in a way that surprises and then satisfies, very neatly.

Tantalo's staging uses chairs, actors, and a roomful of imagination to conjure the bar, its eccentric inhabitants, and a hundred years of innovative thinking. It's masterful, terrifically effective work; Martin's script is, I believe, much better served by this minimalist approach than the full-blown naturalism of the original production at the Promenade Theatre eight years back.

The cast is excellent. Randy Falcon's Picasso is equal measures sex appeal, swagger, and raw brilliance; Rob Maitner's Einstein—every bit his match and more—has an edgy bravado that belies his sweeter, nerdier nature. They're a formidable pair of leading men. As Freddy, the bar owner, Mike Roche is shrewd and likable. Flannery Foster's Germaine is beautifully human—more than any other person on stage, she's our guide into the off-kilter universe of the play. Paul Navarra (Gaston), Brian Farley (Sagot), David Gurland (Schmendiman), and Sarah Cook and Lilly McDowell (Suzanne and the Countess, admirers of Picasso and Einstein) fill out the ensemble commendably. David MacNiven, in the small but entirely key role of the Visitor, gives a fine, understated performance that I can't tell you anything more about.

I left Picasso at the Lapin Agile in a mood that felt something like elation. My immediate impulse: head over to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Demoiselles again (I haven't had a chance to do so yet, but I will).  And then a question popped into my mind: The past hundred years were filled with the most terrible destruction yet contemplated by mankind, but they also gave us art and science to treasure—more, perhaps, than at any other time in history. But possibilities seem almost like a luxury these days: where are the Picassos of the 21st century? 

Pick Up Ax, by Anthony Clarvoe, tells the story of two young men at the helm of a Silicon Valley software company in the early 1980s. Brian Weiss is the front-man, a savvy but principled MBA who is being eaten alive (literally: he has an ulcer) by the cutthroat world of emerging high-tech business. His partner, Keith Rienzi, is the company's resident genius and bread-and-butter: a wired eccentric who pads around the office in his socks, banging on keyboards in search of inspiration for his next great idea. Brian and Keith are in crisis: their suppliers are no longer cooperating with them, Brian is having serious difficulties with his Board of Directors, and Keith appears to be at least momentarily blocked. Suddenly and out of the blue, a stranger named Mick Palomar shows up, ready to apply some age-old but not very pretty strategies (e.g., extortion) to give our boys the upper hand. A power struggle inevitably ensues: who is going to end up on top?

Pick Up Ax had its New York premiere seven years ago, six years after it was written; it probably already felt dated by 1996, at the dawn of the Internet Age, with its young techno-geek heroes playing decidedly low-tech adventure games, carrying on about "Dungeons and Dragons," and looking for the Next Big Thing in mood-reflecting software.

Today, it's almost a period piece, but—particularly as brilliantly paired by Alex Roe with another business-themed melodrama eighty years older (Clyde Fitch's The City)—it can teach us some things about our collective history and collective psyche that more topical fare cannot. The Fitch play, in which a striving robber baron faced imminent ruin when some scandalous affairs, some business-related, some not, came to light, reminded us that there used to be a moral code that operated, if not in the real world of commerce, then at least within our idealized manifestations of them on stage.

Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals now seem. Its protagonist—far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks—is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that—or, more disturbingly, maybe because—we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed. Sure, one of the high-powered wannabe executives in this play says, regarding a move that will cause a swift and certain reduction in their company's stock price, "We need to protect the interests of our shareholders." But it seems to me that the almost quaint quality of that speech—which presumably would have choked Ken Lay—is precisely at the heart of Roe's intention here: how much does our world, which has yet to prosecute robber barons far more brazen than Fitch's, admire and reward the wrong sorts of behavior?

Clarvoe turns out to be somewhat prescient in one other way: his genius-turned-CEO realizes, near the end of the play, that the Next Big Thing isn't software at all, or at least not software that does something. Pick Up Ax ends, ominously, with what sounds like a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare of the birth of the now-commonplace computer virus.

There are inconsistencies and imperfections in the script that suggest that Clarvoe hasn't spent a great deal of time working in a large corporation; and his unwillingness (or inability) to reconcile the more fantastical elements of his play (such as Palomar's almost supernatural appearance in Brian's office—for a while, I thought he was supposed to be Mephistopheles) is jarring. But Roe's staging, glossing over these problems, lets us focus on the message, at least some of which may by the way be unintentional. His Pick Up Ax turns out to be a valuable document of recent history, at the very least a source of real food for thought.

David Gentile Fraioli steals the show as the wizardly Keith, winning us over first with his inspired eccentricity and later with his unexpectedly grounded savvy. Brian Hotaling partners Fraioli well as the more centered and more conflicted Brian. John Ottavino is perhaps more menacing than he needs to be as Palomar.

Pieces (of Ass), the new theatre piece created, directed, and produced by Brian Howie, purports to explore the “enigma that is the beautiful woman.” But at times it felt to me more like a misogynistic response to The Vagina Monologues. Howie doesn''t seem to be as interested in celebrating women as exploiting them. Yiikes!

The show began almost half an hour late, causing me to wonder if this was a comment on the cliché that “women are always running late.”

The set is beautifully constructed and looks like an upscale strip club, complete with a DJ booth (for DJ Megalicious to provide sound, played by Megan Tropea), a kind of catwalk, and a center stage entrance framed by two cutouts of women that match the hot pink color of the programs. Sumptuously costumed (the clothing, shoes and accessories are practically characters in their own right), the women come out, one by one. The women are certainly beautiful, and they parade, strut, show off, and tell tales. Some are funny, some are sad, and some are boring.

The strongest monologues are the ones that tell stories, where the women's physical beauty is secondary to what is going on in their lives. “Spotlight,” “Down, Boy,” and “10AM” each show these women to be more human and less like the more outrageous characters from Sex and the City. In “Spotlight,” Rachel Hollon enters an amateur “legs” contest and, marvelously carried away by the moment, strips down to her bra…and her granny underwear. Her mortification is funny, but her ultimate realization that her comfort is far more important than anyone else’s expectations makes for a sweet and surprising end to the anecdote. Tami Mansfield does a splendid job in “Down, Boy” as a woman who first believes that females must be the enemy, based on the rivalry she has with her cousin Heidi. After Tami is raped, it is her cousin who helps her though it. Her performance is wry, rueful and heartbreaking. The penultimate piece is "10AM," in which Laurel Pinson confides how she feels most beautiful when she’s alone in her bedroom and does not have to be on display, or prove anything to anyone. Pinson’s quiet and assured performance is a breath of fresh air.

But these pieces are the exception: much of the writing is inadequate, asking us to judge the women who are its subjects rather than discover them. And many of the monologues feel like rants, diatribes, or even sermons, and that proves a challenge for the actors. It’s hard to feel for a woman who uses a fake engagement ring to keep men from bothering her when she’s out with friends, or for a woman who breaks up with men solely based on the size of their penis. It's possible that these pieces are intended as a kind of a parody, but the stilted writing makes the women come off as shallow and vain, more interested in showing off their bodies than their souls. Indeed, one performer, after dropping her mink coat to display her lingerie-clad body, actually asked for applause when there was none. One would hope that these characters are comfortable with who they are, rather than seeking approval.

The show is skillfully produced, with the exception of the lighting. The shadows interfere with the ability to see the faces and eyes of the actors. The sound design is also terrific, with well chosen pieces of music ranging from Hole to "The Sound of Music," but at times the volume seemed more suited to a fashion show than to a play.

Pieces (of Ass) creator Brian Howie also created VH1’s Celebrity Karaoke Cabaret. This could possibly explain the presence of the Celebrity “Centerpiece” played, on this night, by Kirsten Buschbacher who was the runner-up on the ABC reality series, The Bachelor. I am not sure how the celebrity guest adds to the evening.

Ultimately, the problems that the beautiful women of Pieces (of Ass) face are not endemic to ONLY women that society deems beautiful, but to all woman out there—big, small, and in between. Every woman, in her own unique way, is “Eminently Fuckable.” The show tries to explain this to the audience, but falls far short of its goal.

I loved Platonov! Platonov! Platonov!  It's funny and smart and strange and manic and, in its weird way, profound: it's the opposite of boring, precisely what a night at the theatre should always be like. It's a parody of the work of Anton Chekhov that defies expectations by utterly succeeding. It's ferociously complicated, with its ten remarkable actors doing all sorts of crazy, broad, subtle things on a fairly small stage with a polished professionalism and a raw exuberance that common sense tells you shouldn't go together. Director Ross Peabody and playwright Eric Michael Kochmer are to be roundly congratulated for delivering one of the most exciting theatre experiences in town.

Credit, too, the cast, led by Kochmer himself, a wild-eyed, wild-haired, charismatic presence as the title character (billed merely as Platonov in the program, but always referred to as Platonov! Platonov! Platonov! throughout the play), a man who has abandoned principles for amorality to prove a point—a man who has turned himself into something foul (or fowl), to wit, a duck. He's surrounded by a passel of motley Russians who seem to have slipped out of a Cherry Orchard or Seagull when no one was looking: his devoted, self-pitying wife, Sasha, who is played brilliantly here by Heather Carmichael as a simpering martyr (think Melanie from Gone with the Wind with a Russian accent); Nikolai, her brother, a doctor who never actually cures anyone, portrayed by Ian Tabatchnick in black-rimmed spectacles and a spotless white lab coat with a kind of hysterical detachment; and Ivan, the retired colonel who is Nikolai and Sasha's father, a drunkard, inhabited with broad extravagance here by Joe Serpa.

There's also Anna, a wealthy and worldly widow, played robustly by Kate Serpa as an Arkadina or Ranevskaya on steroids; Sergay, her meek son (a cowering Jason Munt); Sofya, his neglectful wife (the comically sexy Natalie McLennan); and Osip, a horse thief (the bearlike Kevin Kaine). And, for no particular reason, a rich landowner named Petrin, skillfully portrayed by Darrin Browne as a go-getter who is entirely aware of his lack of relevance to this particular story; and a giddy schoolgirl named Mary, hilariously acted by Metha Brown with an insistent, high-pitched giggle of a voice that threatens to stop the show every time she burbles Platonov! Platonov! Platonov!

Which she does frequently, and so does everyone else; for all of the women in this play are enamored of the magnetic title character and all of the men—losing their women to him—are at the very least getting tired of him. Each of the characters plays out his or her own self-absorbed melodrama without much regard for what else is going on, which was certainly one of Chekhov's key points about human nature. But in this off-kilter universe everybody pitches just a bit higher and grasps just a bit more greedily: libidos go crazy, suicides don't take; purposeless runs rampant. At the center of it all, Platonov spins about on an anachronistic office chair watching anachronistic video screens that project the madness around him. He is somehow at once cynical and angst-ridden. Oh, and he's a duck.

Can I find a formula for Platonov! Platonov! Platonov!?  It starts, as it must, from Chekhov's own melancholy human comedy-as-farce sensibility; Kochmer's script resounds with the self-involved non-sequitur ramblings of the terminally repressed and inert that we associate with the master. To this, he's added a dizzying anarchy that recalls Marx (the brothers, not the communist) and the Brothers Karamazov (the Flying ones, not Dostoyevsky's). And there's a brooding dada quality that is Kochmer's own, I think.

Whatever its composition, Platonov! Platonov! Platonov!, about an hour long, whirls by breathlessly and never lets up, flinging its authentic intellectual meat, its pretension-deflating gags, and its bawdy, broad surreal shtick, fast and furious and scattershot. There's something in it for everybody, as long as they're paying attention.

I should note that Platonov! is preceded by a quirky experimental short film called Rough for Cinema by Anthony Ferraro, inspired by a Beckett play; and also by another paean to Beckett, Tape's Last Crap, a solo show by Brian Calandra that literalizes a punning title that was just waiting to be used by somebody. Both are odd diversions that help the brain prepare itself for the ordered chaos of Kochmer's angry duck.

Please Please Please Love Me, the new play by Rick Vorndran, is enormously entertaining. Structured as a series of loose but connected episodes, this comic drama charts the up-and-down love lives of four young adults over the course of an eventful year. Eschewing boundaries or conventions, PPPLM's scenes range grandly in style, tone, and format: they're almost all interesting and compelling and a few of them are downright brilliant in their inventiveness and/or incisiveness. Dysfunctional Theatre Company should be proud of this eclectic, quintessentially off-off-Broadway offering.

The play begins in a bowling alley (conjured uncannily by director Jason Unfried with a couple of chairs and multi-purpose cubes plus some evocative choreography: his and our imaginations get a pleasing workout here) where Steve and Nina have reluctantly agreed to meet their neighbors Larry and Linda for an evening of beer, chips, and exercise. Steve and Nina have been together for three years and they're reasonably content. But they're greatly impressed by Larry and Linda's zest for each other and for life, especially when they learn that Larry and Linda have "split up": they still live together, but they no longer think of themselves as a couple, having decided to "open up" their decidedly quirky relationship.

So Steve and Nina decide that they should break up too. And thus begin twin odysseys—interwoven, occasionally, with updates from the Larry/Linda front—chronicling their first year apart. Ultimately Steve emerges as the protagonist of PPPLM, but for most of the play's running time Vorndran plays with our sympathies and expectations, juggling absurd and/or fanciful scenarios with a more linear throughline about Steve's quest for love and security. Not everything that the playwright tries here works, but there's absolutely no danger of boredom as we watch these four characters negotiate a weird, wacky, and sometimes hazardous year.

A few sequences stand out. In one, Steve and Nina meet for the first time after many months apart at a Costume Party From Hell—Vorndran, Unfried and their cast capture the strained ambience of this gathering with uncanny, hilarious precision. Immediately after comes a masterful scene in which Steve and Linda's unsuccessful romance-on-the-rebound is charted from beginning to end, consisting only of seven repetitions of a brief conversation about a pair of scissors. The deliberate avant-garde-ness of this set piece actually works in its favor, jolting us into paying attention as we catch on to what Vorndran is doing: it emerges as PPPLM's spectacularly arresting center.

Other concepts—like a high-powered seminar about flirtation, or a surreal party for National Public Radio employees, or the morphing of one of Larry's dates into a fantastical reality game show involving Joan of Arc, Casanova, and Queen Elizabeth I of England—are wildly imaginative but less consistently satisfying. In general, the farther we stray from Steve's story, the less absorbed we tend to be: a clearer focus on his leading character would probably sharpen Vordran's sometimes scattershot script.

But PPPLM is funny and diverting throughout, and winds up making some vivid and surprising points about relationships, loneliness, and growing up. It also provides some terrific opportunities for the eight actors who comprise its cast. Fred DeReau anchors the show as Steve; in multiple roles, Robert Brown, Chris Catalano, Kevin T. Collins, Jennifer Gill, Theresa Goehring, Amy Overman, and Jennifer Jill White all do outstanding work.

Have you seen Picasso's Guernica? I remember when I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art a long time ago: it absolutely caught me by surprise, took my breath away, made me understand events that I'd read about but could not have experienced with a depth I wouldn't have thought possible.

I mention this because Guernica is playwright Jonathan Bell's way into his subject in his affecting and important new play Portraits. Or, rather, it's his protagonist Andrew's way into the subject, which is 9/11, and his attitude toward the subject, which is, at first, a kind of hopeless paralysis. Andrew is an artist, and from his studio in SoHo, just a few blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood, he was witness to the devastation of the terrorist attacks. He tells us in a monologue that serves as the introduction to the six other monologues that comprise Portraits that Guernica haunted him during the days and weeks after 9/11. Picasso was able to create that remarkable testament to tragedy in three months: why can't Andrew find a way to similarly use his art to vent his complicated feelings?

And so, Portraits: Andrew's ostensible subjects tell their stories and let their playwright tell his. If it's not Guernica, it's noble and valuable for wanting and trying to be. And in reminding the too-soon-jaded audience of at least one of the great human lessons that we learned that terrible day—that one by one, we can change lives by reaching out and caring for one another—Bell is doing something enormously important. Portraits should be required viewing for everyone, not because it's great theatre but because of its essential humanity.

Six random, archetypal people inhabit Portraits, each spending ten or fifteen minutes to tell us their own 9/11 story. Two of them are tinged with bitterness: Daniel, a middle-aged man who has been successful in all the tangible ways, discovers the hollowness of his soul when he ends up being somewhere he shouldn't be and thus absent from the World Trade Center on that Tuesday morning; and Arifa, a Muslim American woman, experiences cruelty and bigotry as she is told, in direct and indirect ways, that "her people" are responsible for the terrorist attacks.

The other tales, though, resonate with simple wisdom. Betty, a middle-aged woman living in the small town of Oneida, New York, watches the TV coverage by herself and is overcome by her aloneness and inadequacy in the face of such enormity. She reaches out the only way she can think of, calling a random stranger in Manhattan to wish them well. Nancy is a wife and mother of two young boys who lives in suburban New Jersey. Her husband Charlie works at the World Trade Center, and as soon as she learns what's happened she rushes, with hundreds of other wives, to the Hudson River piers, waiting fearfully to see if he will turn up on one of the ferries. He doesn't, and when she discovers that he saved many of his coworkers and then perished himself, her anger overtakes her for a very long time. It's not until Ruth, the mother of one of the men Charlie saved—herself a widow who struggled to forgive her late husband for dying too soon—pays an unannounced visit that Nancy can begin to heal.

Most moving of all is John's account, which begins with an early morning car trip from his native Quincy, Massachusetts to visit his cousin, a fireman from Queens. On the way down, John hears about the attacks; he's a nurse and an EMT so he hurries to what is by now Ground Zero, where he works for more than 24 hours alongside a team of strangers. John reports his wonderment that none of his colleagues are New Yorkers and that none of them will ever see each other again; he tells us how the totality of what happened doesn't hit him until he pulls into a gas station and a policeman puts his hand on his shoulder and says, simply, "Thank you."

John is played by Matte Osian, who gives the most deeply-felt and evocative performance among a strong ensemble of actors. The others are Anjali Bhimani (Arifa), Christopher Coucill (Andrew), Darrie Lawrence (memorable as Betty), Roberta Maxwell (Ruth), Dana Reeve (Nancy), and Victor Slezak (fascinating and complex as the tormented Daniel). Mark Pinter is the director, staging the play with the stark simplicity it requires. Aaron Meadow's lighting and Joshua Pearl's score serve the piece beautifully; Charles Schoonmaker's costumes telegraph facts about each character with impressive clarity.

Portraits does lots of things that, upon reflection, you wish it didn't: it's dramatically clumsy in places; its characters aren't deep; its sentiments are often, well, sentimental. But what I love about Portraits is its passionate remonstrance that we share this planet, that we're responsible for it and for each other. Ruth and Betty, for example, are horrendously selfish in their way, but their natural impulse to connect—one of the things we all share, I think—makes them each do something wonderful.

So we have no Guernica yet, no artist having thus far been mobilized or motivated to give us one. But we have Jonathan Bell, and others, who are reflecting on what the most compelling event in recent history might and should mean, which is at least a good start.

Like its subject, President Harding is a Rockstar ranks as a disappointment. The idea of this new rock musical by Kyle Jarrow is that Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States, can be understood as a rock idol on the way down. It's an intriguing premise, but a flawed one, for the facts (and even the rumors) about Harding, faithfully reported in the show, simply don't support it. Sure, Harding was a handsome, glad-handing politician who liked to drink, play poker, and fool around with women;  but he was also genuinely committed to doing as good a job for his constituents as possible, to the best of his capabilities. His capabilities were, alas, very limited, and those he relied upon to advise him—like his crony, Harry Daugherty, or his wife, Florence—were self-interested at best, corrupt at worst.

We learn all of this in the course of Jarrow's musical, which takes the shape of a confessional/vaudeville (shades of Brecht and Fosse) on the last day of Harding's life, during a tour of the country aimed at salvaging his diminishing reputation in the wake of the Teapot Dome and other scandals. Jarrow recycles the long-standing legend that Harding was poisoned by his wife (though I've always thought he died of a broken heart). Whatever the cause, Harding is on the way out, and his life, or snippets of it anyway, is flashing before his (and our) eyes.

So the show consists of recreations of key moments of Harding's biography, presented broadly as musical numbers and/or comic scenes, often in a deliberately anachronistic and/or surreal manner. Harding's ineptitude and gullibility is staged as a burlesque poker game in which he loses the White House china to political boss Daugherty, who then goes on to win a Cabinet position for Albert Fall (the guy behind Teapot Dome) in the next hand. There's a bawdy scene in which Harding boffs 17-year-old Nan Britton on his Oval Office desk, and there's a bluesy wronged-woman number that follows for long-suffering First Lady Florence. Even Harding's idols Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton get a turn in this score, which is loud and rowdy but uninventive in theatrical terms. (I should note here that it was difficult to hear many of the lyrics given the high volume in such a small space.)

Ultimately, President Harding is a Rockstar didn't tell me anything interesting about a man whose life was without a doubt the stuff of genuine tragedy. Nor, despite a finale that recycles slogans from recent political campaigns, does President Harding seem to want to demonstrate any parallels between its subject's colossal political failures and similar ones of more recent presidents (Clinton, Reagan, and Bush all come to mind as possible targets of such an analogy). The rockstar persona that Jarrow grafts onto his protagonist instead is an uncomfortable fit: nothing in the text (or in the record) supports the notion that Harding desperately wanted love and adulation, but that's where the metaphor is forced to take us.

Lacking a defensible point of view, the show rises and falls on its entertainment value. I think there's an audience for the loud, pulsating, irreverent style of President Harding is a Rockstar, but musically and theatrically this is not my bag. I was very impressed by Caesar Samayoa's stage presence and staying power in the difficult, nonstop title role; and Simone Zamore (Florence Harding) and Elizabeth Meriweather (Nan Britton) registered strongly as well. But mostly, President Harding did not turn out to be my idea of successful theatre—political, musical, or otherwise.

Primrose, written by George & Ira Gershwin, with co-lyricist Desmond Carter and librettists George Grossmith and Guy Bolton, was originally produced in London in 1924, and is currently having its North American premiere in this concert staging by Musicals Tonight! Kudos to Mel Miller for unearthing the script and piano score last year from a London archive. Unfortunately, though, the piece is quite forgettable, which explains its 79-years of retirement. The songs are mostly unmemorable (they include “Boy Wanted” and “Naughty Baby”) and the plot is simply whimsical.

Primrose is about a writer named Hilary Vane, who is taking a working holiday at Little Ferry-on-Thames. His neighbor, Sir Barnaby, wants his ward, Joan, to marry his nephew, Freddie—for financial reasons, not love. But… Freddie loves another (May), and Joan ends up falling for Hilary. In the end, boy gets girl and boy gets girl. Yes—it is certainly a plot we have seen before, and one that we would expect from a musical born out of the 1920’s, but Musical Tonight’s unimaginative rendering of Primrose, presented at the 14th Street Y, marks new levels of shallowness.

This concert homage to the Gershwins is uninteresting on so many levels. Stylistically, the women all seem to be playing variations of Betty Boop and the men are universally too light in the loafers. Granted, this musical is post-operetta with influences of Gilbert and Sullivan, which requires a heightened performance style relative to Noel Coward’s comedy of manners, but dumb/high voices and fey posturings are not the end-all. Surely even the best of melodrama has as its foundation the depths of recognizable human thought and behavior. The tempo of the production is painstakingly slow, which is particularly problematic considering the musical has three acts. Scenes of dialogue are played without any drive toward their climaxing musical expressions; alas, the effect is to diminish the inclusion of the songs, in this concert presentation where the songs should be primary. Ultimately the experience is underwhelming.

The efforts put forth to rescue this remnant of our musical theatre heritage must be openly applauded. I simply wish that the script and score were placed in more capable hands. Thomas Mills’ direction is flat and unimaginative. The text and songs still seem to be “on the page,” rather than living expressions of characters in a drama. I wanted simpler stagings that focused on the material rather than the blocking of scenes. In fact, a true concert, without any attempt to recreate staging would have more respectfully served its purpose. The musical direction by Barbara Anselmi, feels schoolmarmish, by the numbers, and without any consideration for the actors' expression of thought and revelation. The cast of 17-performers is competent, but there are no standouts.

Private Jokes, Public Places may be the most well-written play I've seen this season. By Oren Safdie, it tells the story of a young architecture student presenting her thesis project to two esteemed architects. In typical dramatic fashion, this presentation slowly but surely falls apart; Safdie’s wit, truthful characterizations, and deft touch make Private Jokes, Public Places one of the most rewarding shows currently playing in New York.

Since the show is set at an architecture school, there’s no better place for it to be produced than at the charming theater at the Center for Architecture. Since architectural plans and drawings already adorn the walls, it’s no great leap to imagine a student presentation taking place there. In this way, the audience becomes a part of the play; we are at once the audience taking in an Off-Broadway show and also the audience witnessing this final, important academic review. The actors encourage this relationship; at different points the adjudicators address us, making announcements and side comments, much as professors might deal with a student audience. This device is not only charming, but places us comfortably within the world of this play, allowing us to enjoy it even more.

Safdie’s script fascinates; beginning as a comedy with some very funny moments, it is some time before the audience has caught on that the show is going to a much darker place altogether. Covering issues of race, gender, and of course architecture, Safdie tells a compelling story, even for those who could care less about architectural theory. He’s helped by a remarkable company of actors: M.J. Kang, Anthony Rapp, Sebastian Roche, and Geoffrey Wade. Kang shines in the starring role of Margaret, the young architecture student. Her perfectly crafted performance is so believable, so real, so endearing, that it’s hard at times to remember that she’s acting. Rapp does a good job as Margaret’s professor and mentor, and Wade and Roche’s characterizations of well-regarded architects alternate between effective comic and dramatic turns. Director Maria Mileaf has done an amazing job, not only with the casting and her actors’ performances, but ensuring that the pacing of the show never wavers, keeping it entertaining and moving (in both senses of the word) at all times.

This gem of play is definitely worth seeing; students of either drama or architecture should definitely take it in, but it’s a worthwhile experience for everyone.

The most compelling reason to see Promised Land is Lynne McCollough's fine performance as a woman struggling to cope with a disabled husband, a floundering business, and a dead marriage. McCollough—who has been seen to great advantage in numerous off-off-Broadway shows, among them the recent Self Defense—creates a woman of great intelligence and towering strength, whose acts of self-preservation are at once gallant and gratifying.

They are, however, not much supported by the rest of Harvey Huddleston's play, which is a muddy melodrama in which McCollough's character's husband is in fact the protagonist. His name is E.L. Sullins, which unwieldy moniker has almost certainly been bestowed in order for another character to make the ironic point that E.L. stands for "everlasting." E.L. seems to be anything but that: he is blind and addicted to cigarettes and cheap bourbon, he spends most of his time pretending to be a bigshot and dreaming about a retreat for the sight-impaired called "Promised Land" which he says he will build one day in the heart of the Ozark Mountains.

E.L. has a big secret, which is revealed slowly but is never surprising, having to do with the accidental death of his young son Ronnie eight years ago. The boy's death is the obvious source of the strain between E.L. and his wife Robby, but his excessive bad habits certainly aren't helping any. The play is pitched, nevertheless, toward him: it is he, rather than McCollough's long-suffering Robby, who is supposed to garner our sympathy,. But as written by Huddleston and played by David Mazzeo in a mire of machismo bravado, there's little depth and less to respect in this man. The play falters accordingly—how are we supposed to care about E.L.'s presumptive redemption when we are rooting for the maltreated Robby from start to finish?

A hackneyed subplot involving E.L.'s naive assistant Charley and his troubled romance with a high school student named Betty Sweeney feels trite and unnecessary. More valuable are the appearances of Sheriff Elmer Brown, made into less of a stock character than he might otherwise be by the accomplished TV actor Bruce McKinnon, providing McCollough a worthy foil for some of her tenser moments.

Huddleston has set his play very specifically in Arkansas in May 1973, but I could never discern the significance of these choices. Promised Land, in the end, tells a very conventional and unsurprising story in a very unimaginative way. Local color might have helped, but—except for McCollough's and McKinnon's convincing regional accents—not much use of it is made here.

Gayfest 2004, brainchild of Bruce Robert Harris and Andy N. Sich, is a three-week, four-play celebration of theatre created by gays and lesbians and/or exploring gay and lesbian themes. I missed Week 1 (a new musical called 108 Waverly); Stan Richardson is scheduled to cover Week 3. Here's Week 2.

It's a double bill of two one-act plays that have both been presented with some success in NYC and elsewhere. Both pieces are well-crafted and well-mounted, though together—with a combined running time of nearly two and-a-half hours, counting intermission—they're almost too much of a good thing. They don't particularly complement each other, stylistically or thematically, so despite their considerable merits, they make for kind of an odd, longish evening. The festival itself, by the way, is slickly and professionally produced, with a nice pre-show curtain speech by Harris and Sich, a big ad-filled program, and the evident support of a large number of enterprises connected with the city's gay and lesbian community.

As for the plays themselves, well, for me the real find is Susan Jeremy and Mary Fulham's P.S. 69, which is hilarious, sharp, and occasionally even a bit heart-warming. Michael D. Jackson's A Taste of Heaven, which precedes P.S. 69, has been favorably reviewed on nytheatre.com twice before, most recently at last summer's FringeNYC festival, and I'll defer to Tim Jensen's words about it, which are here.

In P.S.69, Jeremy portrays about two dozen characters to tell the riotous saga of a woman named Molly Dikowski (sp?) who wants to become a public school teacher in New York City. Molly is starting at the bottom, as a freelance substitute (the qualifications for which, she says, are having a B.A. degree and no prison record). In bold, broad strokes, Jeremy and Fulham paint a picture of our education system that is at once horrifying and hilarious, by which I mean that it would be one of those if not for being the other (take your pick). Without ever feeling heavy-handed, P.S. 69 exposes apathy (among teachers, students, and parents), low-level corruption, hypocrisy, the dangers of too many rules, the dangers of too few rules, and—above all—the woeful and chronic underfunding and understaffing that plagues NYC schools and so many others. At the same time, we watch Molly grow and mature into a more confident person as she navigates a perilous course towards her goal.

That course is filled with obstacles, in the persons of such unforgettable characters as: Molly's best friend Jasmin, who advises her to moonlight as a stripper (bad idea, it turns out); two ancient lioness-cum-teachers who seem to always be in the faculty lounge; a bureaucratic-minded principal; many uncooperative parents, including Officer Angela Perez, whose daughter Precious becomes the focus of the play's main conflict; and acres and acres of distinctive kids. All are portrayed—in spectacularly vivid detail—by the remarkable Jeremy, whose skill as a performer feels as assured and controlled as, say, a young Lily Tomlin or Whoopi Goldberg. She's enormously impressive and consistently funny, whether embodying—all by herself—the chaotic babble of a schoolyard full of children or recreating Molly's pathetic, tentative striptease debut at a men's club.

There is, by the way, a lesbian-themed subplot that makes P.S. 69's appearance at Gayfest make sense. But this is a terrific piece for audiences of just about any stripe; as long as you once went to school, you'll find plenty to relate to in this sharply written and beautifully performed tour de force.

All in all, an entertaining and auspicious introduction to a festival and a producing company that we expect to hear more from.

Yankee Rep mostly specializes in original short plays, often presented in rotating programs of two or more at a time. Which means that if, like me, you can't get to more than one evening of a show's run, you've likely missed some of the nifty work this group has to offer.

Ergo, their current production: revivals of two of their biggest hits, Sergio Cacciotti's Quitters and Terese Pampellone's The Doomsday Club, on a single, very funny bill. I had missed both of these pieces their first times around (in 2002 and 2001, respectively). I'm happy to have caught up with them.

Quitters is about a pair of roommates, edgy and volatile Jake and passive-aggressive Bobby, who make a wager as to who can quit smoking for the longest time. The history of this bet is played out hilariously in a series of black-outs, each introduced by a shrouded Grim Reaper figure carrying a sign that indicates how many days have passed. The men—both of them overgrown boys in the macho-Mamet mode—become progressively more sullen and crafty as their withdrawal from nicotine deepens. The whole thing culminates in a terrific scene in which the two of them, in foolish sitcom style, try to cover up their bet in front of Jake's disapproving girlfriend. Playwright Cacciotti co-stars as Jake, matched point for point by Jon Hemingway as Bobby. Michelle Marlowe is memorable as the girlfriend, Maria.

The Doomsday Club is an ever quirkier and darker comedy, about the maudlin pre-occupations of five women so gloomily antisocial that they've been kicked out of every support group in town. Playwright Pampellone's conceit is that each of these ladies has her own morbid obsession: Celia is so worried about cleanliness and germs that all of her furniture is covered in plastic; Francine is a chronic hypochondriac; Elizabeth is a suicidal Goth type stuck caring for her aged mother; Sheila is an obsessive-compulsive with an addictive personality; and Estelle, a garbage collector, is just downright mean. They're all played to grand exaggerated comic effect by the excellent cast assembled here (in the same order: Lynn Bowman, Celia Bressack, Jennifer Lamberts, Coree Spencer, and Chris McGinn). The plot hinge is that a sixth woman, Myra (Mercedes Casamayor), wants to join their club. But after spending time with these neurotics—Celia, for example, pretty much follows the others around with Dustbuster and disinfectant—Myra bales out, leaving the rest to ponder (or not) their fates in a world that is nicer to them than they can ever appreciate.

Christopher Morran is The Doomsday Club's director; Chris McGinn staged Quitters. The pairing works felicitously.

There's not a bigger or more splendiferous show in town: for high-kicking musical numbers and high-spirited holiday cheer, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular simply can't be matched. In just an hour and a half, the audience is dazzled by a 36-piece orchestra that zips up, down, and all around the mammoth Music Hall stage; a pair of skaters dancing on the ice in a replica of the famous Rockefeller Center rink; the always-moving tableaux of "The Living Nativity" (complete with camels, donkeys, and sheep); five breathtaking routines featuring the amazing Rockettes; and the coolest 3-D short that I've ever seen to open the proceedings in grand style. This is delightful fun for the entire family; whether or not you've seen it before, it's almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face and some seasonal spirit—that will hopefully linger for awhile—into your heart.

It begins with a pre-show that commences some twenty minutes before curtain time: George Wesner and Fred Davies, seated at the humongous Wurlitzer organs situated on either side of the auditorium, favor us with a sampling of holiday favorites such as "Sleigh Ride," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and the inevitable "Carol of the Bells." Then the live orchestra—sounding great, I should add, under the baton of Todd Ellison—heralds the show proper with the overture. When that's done, we pop on our handy-dandy Spectacular Specs (there's a pair glued to every program) to watch a zesty little movie in which Santa Claus, the Statue of Liberty, and a number of other landmarks loom so close that we really feel we can reach out and touch them. The mood is set.

Our host for the evening, a jolly fellow known as Santa Claus, now makes his entrance, and introduces the succession of acts that comprise this vaudevillian concoction. Some are familiar: the teddy bears dancing a delightfully abridged Nutcracker; the Rockettes impersonating a parade of toy wooden soldiers (who get knocked down with astonishing finesse at the end of the number); a New York street scene featuring Santa and company rockin' and rollin'—corny but charming.

And some of the items of the bill are new, at least to me (it's been seven years since my last visit to the Christmas Spectacular). A gorgeous segment entitled "White Christmas in New York" (replacing the much hokier "Christmas in New York" that used to occupy the same slot in the program) features the Rockettes as mannequins in a store window who magically come to life and then  perform their trademark taps and kicks under the approving eye of an animated man in the moon (he indicates his favor by showering the ladies with glittering moondust). Likewise, an improved "Santa's Toy Workshop" number peaks with the Rockettes decked out as three dozen reindeer, hoofing (sorry) and then leading Santa's sleigh out as a grand finale. Speaking of Santa, there's another charmer on the agenda, "Here Comes Santa Claus," which features a stageful of Kris Kringles—more than I could count—dancing deliriously into infinity.

It's none of it high art, but it's always sincere, always grandly imaginative, and always in excellent taste—lessons, by the way, that creators of some of the doggedly less appealing musicals elsewhere in midtown could well take to heart. The Christmas Spectacular is glitzy and gawdy and commercial, but it's bountifully theatrical and endlessly entertaining. And, yes, it's totally old-fashioned—rooted, mostly, in a perennially '60s Bing Crosby/Andy Williams Christmas Show mindset—but I'm not sure there's a darn thing wrong with that. (A tiny caveat: mightn't the producers want to rethink the unintentionally exclusionary nature of the Western-centric "One Solitary Life" that caps "The Living Nativity"?)

So, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular maintains its place at the top of New York's heap of holiday entertainments. There's still nothing I know of that quite equals the thrill of 36 Rockettes doing their synchronized kicking across the apron of that oversized stage. At this show you get to experience that three times in ninety minutes, with 5,000 of your new closest friends. Happy holidays!

A little more than a month ago, the lights went out here in New York and across a big swath of the Northeastern United States. Be honest: as soon as you understood the scope—and before they told you it was Canada's fault or Ohio's fault or whatever—you flashed on the idea that another terrorist attack was taking place.

So I am startled and even a little appalled to read in Variety (September 8-14, 2003) that Playwrights Horizons' artistic director Tim Sanford thinks his current offering, Craig Wright's Recent Tragic Events, which takes place on September 12, 2001, is "a period piece." But then I see the play, which is a muddle of pretension, platitude, guilt, sentimentality, and superficial jokiness. And I realize that Recent Tragic Events is a bleak testament to a sad disconnectedness that apparently still exists in our country: alienation disguised as cynicism; or vice versa. Surely the myriad issues that the terrorist attacks either created or crystallized demand response everywhere in our culture, certainly in the theatre. But Recent Tragic Events feels troublingly like a media grab rather than an attempt at any sort of serious grappling.

Less a play than an elaborate mindgame, RTE begins with an actor pretending to be a stage manager pretending to interact with the audience. Later, this actor, still pretending to be a stage manager, will tell us that what she told us at the beginning was a lie; and then reinforce the dreary self-referential post-modernness by actually showing patrons in the front row a copy of the script, indicating where it says she's supposed to show them the copy of the script. Joyce Carol Oates—not the famous author, but a fictitious character who shares her name and history and is portrayed by a sock puppet—will discourse on the nature of free will; she will tell another character (who's played by a human actor) that because he does not believe in free will, he is a puppet.

The intent of these and other similarly portentous aspects of Wright's play is, presumably, to make us think about the nature of randomness and destiny and inevitability and consequences. But the smarmy cutesiness underlying them makes it impossible to take anything seriously: there's barely a sincere second in this play, so steeped in self-gratifying, value-free culture are its characters and milieu. The leading lady, Waverly (played with extraordinary disinterest by the wooden Heather Graham), is preoccupied all evening with trying to find out whether her twin sister, who lives in New York City, is still alive. Yet she agrees to go forward with a blind date with hapless book store manager Andrew (a sensitive attempt at humanity by the fine young actor Hamish Linklater, utterly derailed by the script). And despite her being, we are told, a grounded, smart, successful advertising executive, she allows her Kramer-esque neighbor Ron (annoyingly personified by Jesse J. Perez) to run rampant throughout the date.

For his part, Ron is a shallow compendium of outrageous tics designed to elicit mild shock-value laughs. One of these is his girlfriend of the moment, Nancy (another blush of humanity against the odds, via the radiant Colleen Werthmann), who shows up for the blind date party dressed only in a t-shirt (allowing Waverly to ask her politely to cover up her vagina—another shock-laugh) and speaks less than a dozen words during the entire play.

Hardly people to cherish, let alone spend time with on the night after 9/11. They all claim to be freaked out, but they manage nevertheless to make pointless callow jokes, to briefly debate political determinism, and—on a day when I remember vividly only how humanely caring and kind everyone was—to treat each other rather cavalierly.

In that same Variety article, Sanford recalls that spirit of community, and he notes—quite rightly, I believe—that people are less united two years later. But, those differences notwithstanding, does anybody not think that the world is a vastly different place now? Recent Tragic Events, in its disregard for and disinterest in the genuine concerns that it traffics in, turns out (I hope!) to be the one thing Wright could not possibly have wanted it to be: hopelessly retro.

It’s impossible to discover the truth. That seems to be one of the main messages in Luigi Pirandello’s brilliant play Right You Are, which is now playing at Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre. Pirandello was like a literary scientist, experimenting with perception, illusion, and reality; using the theater as his laboratory. Although he wrote almost a hundred years ago, his plays fit perfectly in today’s world.

At the top of the show, Amalia Agazzi and her daughter Dina are arguing with Lamberto, Amalia’s brother, about their strange new neighbors, a newly-wed couple and one mother-in-law. It seems that the mother of the bride lives in her own apartment, and is never allowed into the new couple's home—which both infuriates and mystifies the locals. Lamberto, played with droll panache by Tony Randall, tries to reason with his sister and niece, but to no avail. Soon, more of the locals come in, along with Mr. Agazzi, and everybody proceeds to gossip incessantly about the strangers. The mother-in-law in question, Signora Frola, is brought before the curious townsfolk on the pretense of a social call, but it quickly turns into an interrogation by the locals about her living arrangements, carried out with the same amount of indignation that most people these days save for discussing Michael Jackson.

According to Signora Frola, the reason that she is not allowed into her own daughter's home is that her husband is insanely jealous, and won’t let anyone see his wife, not even her mother. While this strikes the locals as an odd arrangement, they are satisfied with the answer, and Signora Frola leaves. Almost immediately afterward, Signor Ponza, the son-in-law of Signora Frola, shows up, with a very different version of the facts. According to Ponza, Signora is mad with grief over the death of her daughter, who died two years previous. Ponza explains that he has since remarried, and is pretending that his new wife is the deceased daughter of Signora Frola to keep her from completely losing it.

What follows is an often hilarious, and thought-provoking, absurd comedy that examines truth, illusion, and the instability of the human personality. What drives the show is the almost insane need of the locals to know exactly what is going on in their new neighbors' homes. The problem is, there is no way to ever arrive at a solid truth when it comes to human beings and their perceptions. We all have our own specific truths, and it is this relativity of human existence that Pirandello explores. I won't say what happens in the rest of the play, except that everyone’s idea of the truth gets turned on its head by the end of the piece.

The direction by Fabrizio Melano moves at a brisk pace, but still lets the audience follow the complicated plot. Maria Tucci, as Signora Frola, is excellent. Brennan Brown as the passionate, deeply troubled Signor Ponza, is wonderful. Brown electrifies the stage every moment he is on it. And as Councilor Agazzi, Henry Strozier is fantastic—absurdly funny but entirely believable. The set, by James Noone, is gorgeous, as are the costumes by Noel Taylor. But the true standout of the show is the script itself. Right You Are is a wonder—it made me want to go out and read all of Pirandello’s plays, or better yet, see them performed.

The complete title of this production is: Road House: The Stage Version of The Cinema Classic That Starred Patrick Swayze, Except This One Stars Taimak From The 80s Cult Classic The Last Dragon Wearing a Blonde Mullet Wig. I mention it because it's as accurate a summary of what's going on at La Tea Theatre right now as anything that I'm about to write: especially that blonde mullet wig, which never looks anything less than salon-perfect, despite the fact that its wearer gets into fights with bad guys about once every five minutes.

The whole notion of this stage parody ("brawlsical," as director Timothy Haskell terms it) is to give its audience a good time. A 1989 movie that has, in some quarters anyway, turned into a sort of cult classic, provides the foundation for the fun: the preposterous tale of Dalton, a Martial Arts Hero with a Past (shades of the old Kung Fu TV series) who wants to stop fighting but can't seem to. Of course taking a job as the "Cooler" (sort of the Bouncer-in-Chief) at a rowdy bar somewhere in the contemporary but still wild west makes Dalton's objective harder to achieve, which is only the most obvious foolish thing about this film that Haskell and his game cast cheerily deconstruct here.

The result is a potpourri of gags and fight sequences that land maybe half the time (more, I think, if you know the film, as I do not). Some of the stuff that's really funny includes: a foam rubber chair thrown unexpectedly into the audience during one of the barroom brawls, Taimak Guarriello's deadpan delivery of Patrick Swayze's minimalist performing style, and everything that Ago the Magichef does. Ago is a major find—a dry, wry purveyor of illusions both cheap and exotic who underplays, stunningly, two roles (the main one is Dalton's mentor/guru, Wade Garrett). He's hilarious, whether delivering a silly sight gag (like taking off a pair of dark glasses to reveal another pair underneath) or creating genuine sparks with some magical firearms.

Live foley artists provide sound effects that enhance the production nicely. Live film effects are less successful. Guarriello's fight choreography, Rebecca Ramirez's dance choreography, and Huck  Dill's endless parade of wigs (many of them worn by Christopher Joy, who seems to be having a howlingly good time) are all on the money. The leaden (uncredited) script, presumably faithfully transcribed, holds up only fitfully. But the company's high-energy goodwill is infectious. Road House is certainly not high art, but it's a spirited late night diversion.

For a variety of reasons, it takes a while to realize that the protagonist of Betty Shamieh's compelling new play Roar is Irene, the 15-year-old daughter of Palestinian immigrants living in Detroit. At first, we think the play is about Irene's parents, Ahmed and Karema, who are enormously interesting. They run Ahmed's Snacks & Liquor, which is located at street level, below their small apartment; Ahmed, a musician stuck in a life he deplores, dreams of returning to the Middle East (to Jordan), while Karema, aggressively pragmatic (and passive-aggressive vis-à-vis her husband) keeps the shop and the family on the tightest of leashes while hoarding savings and overseeing a miniature empire of apartments (apparently nicer than the one they live in) which are held as rental properties.

Shortly after Roar begins, we meet Karema's sister, Hala, who is so intriguing that for a while we think the play is going to be about her. She functions, instead, as catalyst for most of the action; Shamieh acknowledges a debt to A Streetcar Named Desire here, fashioning a character of limitless charm at the end of her rope. Hala has arrived in the United States after being thrown out of Kuwait, where she was living the high life as mistress to a rich Arab; but the Gulf War (the first one—Roar takes place in 1991) has made that career choice impossible, so she shows up on Karema's doorstep with a plan to bounce back that involves maneuvering her way into the good graces of Ahmed's brother, Abe. Abe had wanted to marry Hala before they all emigrated to the U.S., sometime after the Six Day War. But her sour treatment of him then may make it difficult for him to take her back now.

Did I mention that Karema hates Abe, because—in order to achieve his first professional success in the United States—he allowed business colleagues to think he was Jewish instead of Palestinian?  I should add, by the way, that Abe and Ahmed are (very liberal) Muslims, while Karema and Hala are Christians. Shamieh's set-up here is rich in detail and conflict; she reels us in as she spins out the histories, feelings, and objectives of her characters, all the while supplying the important and necessary subtext of their other-ness in America: we never forget that they never forget that, as first-generation settlers from Palestine, they have yet to meld into our great melting pot.

So Roar tells a familiar tale of immigration; one that, with a few tweaks here or there, applies to most of our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents—after all, were the Chinese or Jews or Italians or Dominicans or just about anybody else welcomed with open arms into this country? The problems faced by Karema and Ahmed and Abe—of prejudice, of assimilation, of giving up little pieces of yourself and your history in order to build a new life—are universal; Shamieh knows this, even as she makes them very specific and very particular in her play. One of the things most valuable about Roar is that it reminds us that there's always a new wave of refugees seeking sanctuary on our shores.

Which brings me to Irene, the more-or-less typical American teenager: born in Detroit, she speaks unaccented English, embraces popular music, squabbles with her parents, finds excuses to cut school. Hala's sudden appearance, all by itself, makes Irene start to confront the ways that she's not a typical American, and the chain of events that Hala's visit sparks pushes Irene rapidly toward adulthood. The older generation will never stop being immigrants, but Irene is going to grow up American; the question is, how much of her forbears—how much of the Palestinian—will live on in the woman that Irene becomes.

Roar is filled with warmth and humor and involving conflict; it's a fine play, and director Marion McClinton has given it a thoughtful if somewhat formulaic staging. The cast is excellent: Annabella Sciorra is radiant and commanding as Hala, Joseph Kamal makes an intelligent and sympathetic Ahmed, Sarita Choudhury is just as appealing as Karema, despite the character's manipulativeness, and Daniel Oreskes, appearing in just one scene as Abe, is wryly human and humane. Anchoring the play superbly is young actress Sherri Eldin as Irene; who manages her transformation into young womanhood with grace and subtlety.

Firebrand Theory is a new theatre group formed by Michael Scott-Price and Jaime Robert Carrillo (they had previously done some work in Washington, DC as feeT of claY). RomAntic aGE is their New York City debut. Are they a company to keep an eye on? Sure. Can this show be deemed an artistic success? Not really.

But it is interesting. The idea of RomAntic aGE is to trace one man's spiritual odyssey, using movement and selections from the poetry of William Blake as vehicle for the journey. As the quirky titular capitalization suggests, this man's main emotional hurdle is the reigning in of rage—in particular, after he catches his wife making love to his best friend. Experiences with otherworldly beings (a grim reaper-ish figure, an omniscient being who sweeps leaves in the park, some angels) help the protagonist find a kind of serenity and move on with his life.

The piece, created and directed by Scott-Price, is abstract and performance-art-y. Some of the movement is richly evocative, particularly the exciting fight sequences between the man and his friend (performed by Carillo and Billy Lane). In other places, though, the action on stage can be confusing. For example, I thought the story was moving backwards and forwards through the protagonist's life from death to birth and then back again; but the production notes suggest that that's not what's intended.

Nevertheless, RomAntic aGE finds theatrical expression for its themes that is often surprising and lovely. Erica Hemminger's set—a park dotted with barren metal trees—is an appropriately arresting backdrop for the play, and Brian Patrick's soundscape works nicely, too (though the performance attended was marred by too many missed cues). Director Scott-Price needs to work on transitions, which are now very jumpy. And he relies too much on silence and darkness to carry the piece forward: RomAntic aGE is probably twice as long as it needs to be, and too much of it happens in dim shadow. We will follow its protagonist's journey—and be more invested in it—if it plays out before us more quickly and more clearly.

We are increasingly becoming a society preoccupied with "What have you done lately?" rather than the more expansive "What have you done?"; ask Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale if you don't believe me. You might also ask Neil Simon, who just twenty years ago was America's most popular playwright but who now apparently can't even get produced on Broadway. His 34th (!) play, a fascinating but badly flawed comic drama called Rose's Dilemma, is having its NYC debut at Manhattan Theatre Club, in a production helmed by MTC's artistic director Lynne Meadow. To call its reception chilly is to understate the case: at the performance reviewed, the audience responded with the most active dislike for a stage work that I can ever recall witnessing, with a lot of patrons leaving during intermission.

The author of The Odd Couple and Brighton Beach Memoirs deserves better.

He's been savaged by the mainstream press, which misses few opportunities to remind theatregoers that it was Mary Tyler Moore who was supposed to star in this production before she left, acrimoniously, during previews. Worse, he's been given no support whatever from his producers, who have saddled him with a shoddy production in which all four roles have been badly miscast (and Miss Moore wouldn't have done any better than her hapless successor, Patricia Hodges) and has been barely directed—"blocked" is the most accurate way to describe it—by Meadow.

A huge, giant waste, all of this; for as the hearty folks who stayed for Act Two can tell you, there actually is a worthy play idea buried under this fiasco. Simon has a lot on his mind these days—his last play, 45 Seconds from Broadway, was among other things a valedictory to the well-mannered, respectful theatre of his and our youth; at 76, he has earned the right to be listened to. In Rose's Dilemma, he returns to more personal territory, meditating on old age and death: on how one's contributions—private and public—will be judged, if, indeed, they endure. He also considers how the loved ones who have left us endure in our hearts, a subject that was at the center of his earlier Jake's Women and which here seems less supernaturally gimmicky and more wistfully organic: it feels like Simon is visiting his first wife, whom he lost to cancer three decades ago. Or preparing to rejoin her.

The Rose of Rose's Dilemma is a famous writer named Rose Steiner, who lives in a big East Hampton beach house with a young woman named Arlene who is her assistant. There's another inhabitant, but he's not real: Rose's longtime lover Walsh McLaren, also a writer but now deceased, occupies Rose's thoughts with alarming frequency, and she interacts with him, or his "ghost," as if he were still alive.

Rose's dilemma is that she is running out of money. Walsh "suggests" that she complete his final, unfinished book, a seemingly surefire way back into the black. To assist with this task, Walsh further "suggests" a young, untamed, currently blocked novelist named Gavin Clancy; and even though Rose and Gavin mix like water and oil when they meet, he turns out to be exactly the right man for the job. He's also the right man for Arlene; but I won't spoil any other of the play's surprises—of which there are several—lest you decide to see it for yourself.

Simon has made Rose and Walsh rather too much like Lillian Hellmann and Dashiell Hammett for his play's good; but their relationship—once we start to really comprehend it—is beautifully rendered and becomes the bittersweet heart of the drama. Rose, we come to understand, is dying: her real dilemma is not how to support herself so that she can keep going on, but how to prepare herself so that she can, at last, stop.

More drafts are needed to clarify this; a less indifferent production—which, I imagine, almost any other staging would be by default—would also help: can you believe that not a single one of Simon's signature one-liners got a laugh? David Aaron Baker fares best among this cast, giving Gavin real appeal; but Geneva Carr is too much the ingénue as Arlene, while John Cullum seems under-rehearsed as Walsh, resorting to an aw-shucks Andy-Griffith-as-Matlock persona for a character who ought to be more imposing than a TV detective. As for poor Hodges, well, she doesn't have a chance: forced into Moore's shoes two weeks before opening, she hasn't had time to find her character yet; whether she ever will is a question, because Rose is a larger-than-life woman who needs an honest-to-goodness star to play her: Marian Seldes or Lauren Bacall came to mind as I watched Hodges soldier on.

David Merrick pulled the plug on another Mary Tyler Moore show, Breakfast on Tiffany's, realizing that it just wasn't good enough to put before audiences. Would that MTC had guts like that. Meanwhile, here's Rose's Dilemma, a shambles but still valuable. I treasure each of Neil Simon's communiqués at this point; let's hope the next one gets less cavalier treatment.

Brass Tacks Theatre Company should be proud of itself: their 3rd annual Rosetta Festival of New Works—at least on the basis of the second of its two programs—is not only significantly better in every respect than last year's, but also among the most entertaining and encouraging new play evenings that I've seen all season. The six short plays on the bill all displayed sharp writing, direction, and acting; and production values—given the off-off-Broadway budget and limited size of the Creative Place Theatre—were impressive as well.

One of the main objectives of a show like this is to introduce audiences to new playwrights. Mark Harvey Levine, who authored two of the items on the agenda, is certainly a heartening find. His plays are Cabfare for the Common Man and Shades, and while neither is perfectly realized, both are smart, humane, funny, and indicate a terrific sense of theatrical craft. Cabfare uses the taxi as a metaphor for life, with a gently omniscient driver (deftly played by Bob Brader) picking up an unwary young man (Andy Hoey) as his "passenger" and then taking on him on a ride through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the first throes of committed romance.  Levine's writing is well-observed; Adam Fitzgerald's direction is superb, using a minimal number of common objects inventively as props (a fan and a small crate comprise the "cab," for example).

Just as sweet and original is Shades, Levine's other entry. Here the six differently-colored sides of a cube—an art object created by one of the characters—correspond to six vignettes showing the events of a single evening from varying perspectives. Things become interesting in the final iterations, when new information is added along with the differing points of view. The result is a neatly impressionistic take on human relationships. Brad Caswell's staging is excellent, with color-coded props squirreled all around the set to quicken transitions between the six scenes. Kris Brown, India Myonne McDonald, and Tim Loftus comprise the fine cast.

John C. Davenport, another playwright unfamiliar to me, provides a strong piece here as well: Stool Samples, in which three incorrigible barflies chat and banter and speculate how long it will take before they are—as apparently always happens to them—thrown out of the bar for bad behavior. Davenport's dialogue is funny and authentic; the play is probably a bit overlong, but the surprise ending is worth the wait. Mason Walker stands out among the four actors as the most lovably juvenile of the drinkers; David B. Sochet, Patrick Hayden, and Ric Sechrest do good work as well.

Greg Kalleres' Naked Men is perhaps more sketch than play, about a pair of strangers in a steam room, one of whom is sort of passive-aggresively obsessed with the fact that the other has not removed his underwear. Kalleres supplies funny give-and-take leading up to the expected payoff; Matt Schicker's perky staging shrewdly eschews both cliché and gratuitousness. C.L. Weatherstone and Dan Roach, both towel-clad throughout, are very funny as the duo.

Emilio Iasiello's Fixing Things parodies noir conventions to tell the story of a housewife who needs some home repairs and enlists a hunky carpenter to help her out. Loaded with double entendres, and backed by sultry saxophone music (performed live by Mike Albertson), Fixing Things garners plenty of laughs while visiting fairly familiar territory. Kevin Molesworth's staging is clever, though neither Gia Rhodes (Florence) nor Frank Avoletta (Stan) seemed to me to be quite in tune to the rhythms of the thing.

The final item of the evening, Tough Cookie by Rich Orloff, offers delightful comic writing. It's the story of a teenager who has murdered a schoolmate over a chocolate chip cookie; we meet him as he is being prepped by his attorney, while his trashy, woefully dysfunctional parents alternately hover and interfere. Orloff scores numerous zingers here, all the while neatly satirizing a number of contemporary mores. Paul Caiola and Darcie Siciliano are particularly good as the boy and the lawyer, respectively; Mark Lang (Dad) and Mary Goggin (Mom) do fine work as well.

All in all, a better than average showing for this, one of NYC's seemingly ubiquitous new short play festivals. I will certainly be back for whatever Brass Tacks does next.

If I were not aware that the author of Roulette, Paul Weitz, had among his screenwriting credits American Pie and About A Boy, I would be flummoxed by this play receiving any performance outside of a first-draft-caliber reading in the author’s living room. This may also explain why the play’s director, Trip Cullman, has been able to assemble and hold onto a first-rate cast, despite their obvious discomfort with this often embarrassing material.

The play boldly begins with Jon, a distinguished family man sitting down alone to his coffee and morning paper at the dining room table, then producing a revolver from his briefcase and doing a quick round of Russian roulette before heading into the office. This outrageous gesture is an ambitious choice that puts a great deal of pressure on the rest of the play to answer questions such as, I dunno, why is he sitting down at the dining room table and playing a quick round of Russian roulette?

Such queries are not answered, nor are they actually even addressed. Yet we ARE treated to such probing questions as Jon’s wife, Enid, being asked for the first time by their college-age son, “Hey, how did you and Dad meet?” The answer—she was a waitress at a Vegas casino where Dad gambled one night—functions as nothing more than unsophisticated exposition (Mom and Dad plan to go to Vegas in a couple days); any acknowledgment that this question is unusual (i.e. has the story of his parents’ meeting been shrouded in mystery? Or is he too self-involved to have ever asked?) is egregiously absent.

We see in the next few scenes that Enid is having an ambivalent affair with Steve, the next door neighbor, whose wife, Virginia, has a not-terribly-interesting psychological problem; that Jon's son, Jock, has some mild (no sarcasm here) anger-management issues; and that his daughter, Jenny, is universally antagonistic and tends to sneak an occasional drink from the liquor cabinet (de rigueur teenage behavior that makes her American Pie counterparts look like juvenile delinquents). If such antics comprised the majority of this play, I would recommend it to any sitcom-zealot whose television is on the fritz.

But at the end of the act, this not-too-terribly troubled man mirthfully shoots himself in the head at a family dinner, and returns home eight months later (the beginning of the second act) speaking in the jargon of one who has spent his past eight lifetimes as a high roller in a Vegas hotel. The playwright seems to be exploring questions of Reality—Whose reality is right? Does reality exist or even matter?—but the reality is there is nothing at stake, no ultimate goal in sight, and the actors seems to be waiting for their next exit to go and have a good cry.

Larry Bryggman admirably perseveres as Jon, having the most ridiculous stuff to do and seeming the least distressed by it. As Enid, the ever-enjoyable Leslie Lyles receives the most laughs (which isn’t saying much) with her droll line-readings. Mark Setlock is fully-committed to navigating the nonsense of his spineless (both dramatically and dramaturgically) role as Steve, the affairing neighbor. Anna Paquin (Jenny), Shawn Hatosy (Jock), and Ana Gasteyer (Virginia) are all fine actors, but have developed vocal, facial and physical tics galore to compensate for lack of character. The singular surprise of the evening can be credited to scenic designer Takeshi Kata, whose compact set reveals Jon’s office (which we visit for one scene) in a most unexpected way.

But no amount of manufactured quirkiness by Cullman and his cast can make Roulette the “dark comedy” it aspires to be. There are fundamental playwriting problems here that obfuscate what the playwright actually wants to say, which is the one area that should never be left to chance.

Rounding Third is a witty and often touching play about one of America’s greatest institutions—Little League Baseball. The play delves into issues of fatherhood, marital relationships, adultery, and death—but its core issue is friendship. Playwright Richard Dresser writes scenes that capture the poetry of the ordinary guy and opens up the heart of the play with several poignant monologues. Guided by the skilled direction of John Rando, actors Matthew Arkin and Robert Clohessy deliver superb performances in what proves to be a masterfully acted piece of theatre about baseball and the agony that can unravel the most ordinary of lives.

Two Coaches, Don (Clohessy) and Michael (Arkin) have opposing views as to how to coach the team. Don is Mr. Win-at-all-Costs. Michael is Mr. Can’t-we-Just-Have-Fun. They both have sons on the team. Don is married, but is having problems with his wife. Michael is a recent widower. The men never seem to agree; as they struggle to communicate their opposing philosophies to the team, we come to understand the validity of both their points of view. The play is an exploration of what it is to be a man in small-town America, how having children changes one's self-perceptions, and what it truly means to succeed.

Clohessy and Arkin are perfectly unadorned in their performances. It’s incredibly refreshing to see actors at work who aren’t relying on the gimmicks of their craft. Clohessy embodies the tough skinned, testosterone-driven and emotionally stunted Don with perfect average-ness. Arkin’s Michael is a nervous, yet ever eager underdog, who is driven by the desire to simply belong. Arkin delivers a particularly moving—yet funny—plea to God begging Him to let his son catch a fly ball in a monologue that is ultimately a plea for hope in his own life. Together, Don & Michael's story can be told through the metaphors of a baseball game—a few errors and strikes followed by some wild pitches and a line drive. Actions that reveal themselves as the two men, seemingly on opposing teams, discover they are in fact allies.

John Rando’s direction is simple and untheatrical. He relies on the pure essence of Dresser’s characters to illuminate the truth of the play. Derek McLane’s set is a perfect playing field of grass, with a chain link fence and back end of a van. F. Mitchell Dana’s lighting design is minimal, with clean lines, and is perfectly reflective of the emotional journey of the play.

Go see Rounding Third. As a writer, Dresser embodies the ability to channel the voices of real people. You will recognize your neighbor, your brother, and maybe yourself.

Ruby's Story is not your usual World War II drama. The place is somewhere in the American heartland, the time is 1944, right around D-Day. The conflict in Europe is about to turn around decisively; but in this slice of home, things are anything but decided. Walter is a first generation German-American, the proud son of immigrants who, until Pearl Harbor, was openly admiring of Hitler and his policies; for this, he has earned the enmity of his neighbors and something close to the dissolution of his family. His elder daughter, Helga, married her sweetheart Jimmy just before he went off to war; he's in France—probably involved in the Normandy invasion—but until Helga hears from him, she's sick with worry about him.

The next daughter, Rose, defied her father by becoming involved with a local Polish fellow named Stan; before they could wed (against Walter's wishes), Stan suddenly joined the Polish army in England. Now Rose's grief and anger threatens to make her crazy.

The third daughter, Frieda, works in town at a torpedo factory, where she has lately started to date the boss's son. Her beau, Sid, is even more anathema to the bigoted Walter, because he's Jewish; as a result, she conceals the romance from everyone in the family but her younger sister Ruby. When the relationship comes out into the open, the results are explosive.

Grace, Walter's wife and the girls' mother, hopes that her Midwestern horse sense, her devotion to her daughters, and her Bible will somehow hold the tenuous family together.

And then there's Ruby, the youngest child, whose story—as you can see from the title—this finally is. At fifteen, she has dreams of moving to New York and becoming a journalist, like the newsmen such as Edward R. Murrow whom she hears regularly on the radio. Mostly preoccupied with this fancy, she is at the periphery of the dramas being played out in her house; but of course she can't help but be affected by them. Her older, present-day self narrates the play and watches her memories unfold.

What I liked about this new play by Ron Osborne, which is the winner of the 2003 New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest, is the way that it reveals a side of wartime America that is generally ignored. What was it like to be a German American during the war? What was it like to wait, impatiently and uncourageously, for word of a husband or boyfriend? What was it like to try to grow up normally in a world turned upside-down by events entirely beyond your control?

I would have liked to know a little more about Walter than Osborne tells us here; the focus is more on the girls' romantic issues than on Walter's political ones. But Ruby's Story certainly provides interesting insights into a number of aspects of our collective hidden past.

The production at 13th Street Rep is earnest and careful, featuring a staging by Troy Miller that makes imaginative use of the resources of this small, plucky company (Osborne's script is almost cinematic in its requirements). Among the ensemble, Mary Anne Sayre makes the strongest impression as Young Ruby, creating an appealing and credible young woman of intelligence and curiosity. Understudy Paul Casali, covering the roles of Sid and Stan at the performance reviewed, offered fine, differentiated performances as both of these young men. Rounding out the cast are Catherine Hennessey (Adult Ruby), Edward Bergtold (Walter), Amy Bizjak (Grace),  Kelly Barrett (Helga), Hella Bel (Rose), and Elizabeth Ulmer (Frieda).