nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

For thirty years, Richard Masur has been one of television's most reliable character actors, guest-starring on shows like One Day at a Time, Rhoda, M*A*S*H, Picket Fences, The Practice, and (of course) Law & Order. He hasn't spent much time on stage, though, which is why Manhattan Theatre Club's new production, Sarah, Sarah, is a treat: it offers Masur's fans a chance to see him up close and in person, creating not one but two roles, both of which are well-served by his teddy-bear-charm and his natural wit and intelligence.

Ultimately, though, Masur is Sarah, Sarah's only drawing-card: Daniel Goldfarb's play, which consists of two thinly connected episodes in the life of a fellow named Arthur Grosberg, is uneven, unconvincing, and lacking much in the way of content. In Act One, Artie is in college studying philosophy (though his mother thinks he's going to be a dentist), and about to wed Rochelle Bloom, a pretty and capable young woman of whom Artie's mother resoundingly does not approve. This scene centers around Mrs. Grosberg (the first Sarah of the play's title), whose heart and will both seem made of iron. We eventually learn a family secret that explains some of her personality, but it's too little too late: we can't like or admire her, because she's been so calculatingly nasty to Rochelle and to the son who is supposedly the apple of her eye; and especially because she's downright abusive to Vincent, her long-suffering best friend.

Act II takes place forty years later, in China, where Artie is with his 30-something daughter Jeannie, who is adopting an orphaned baby (the second Sarah). When the child turns out to be sickly and possibly retarded, Artie has second thoughts about Jeanie's plan; but by the end of the play, sentiment wins out and a happy if challenging  future is portended.

Goldfarb links his two Sarahs superficially, but provides little else to indicate why these incidents are the ones he has chosen to dramatize in Artie's life, or why we should care about either of them. He's liberal with absurd details: Vincent is Mrs. Grosberg's "cleaning lady" and also, I guess, a transvestite (he does his job in full maid's drag); a young woman who befriends Jeannie during her trip to China giggles at inappropriate moments, much to the embarrassment of her spouse. Goldfarb gives a good deal of play to these eccentricities without indicating why. But he withholds information that would help us understand his main characters: why is Jeannie adopting a Chinese orphan? How did Artie and Rochelle manage to get married? Did Artie become a dentist, or a philosopher? Not knowing makes Sarah, Sarah feel gratuitous and random.

But Vincent does give Masur the first of  two lovable roles here; he's middle-aged Artie in Act Two, and though Goldfarb fails to make it clear that he's the protagonist of the play until it's almost too late, Masur dominates the show through strength of character and goodwill. Which is not to slight J. Cameron-Smith, who plays both Artie's mother and daughter—her performance is game but ineffectual. Lori Prince and Andrew Katz complete the ensemble; Mark Nelson is the director. James Noone's set is startlingly elaborate and massive on MTC's smaller Stage II.

Leaving Classic Stage Company after Savannah Bay, I overheard a woman say to her friend that she wasn't intelligent enough to understand the play. I can empathize: this oblique, minimalist work by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray and directed by Les Waters, feels Difficult and possibly even Important.

But if this job has taught me anything, it's that whatever you think the play is about is indeed what it's about. Intention only goes so far: the experience of theatre rests finally with the audience, and, as long as we keep our minds and hearts open, our perception of what happened in that dark room is always true.

I mention this because, interestingly, what I think Savannah Bay is about is precisely what I've been talking about. In it, an actress named Kathleen Chalfant portrays, with really astonishing particularity, another actress named Madeleine, who is telling the story of something that happened in her life, or in a play she did, or possibly both. She tells it to a younger woman who either is her granddaughter or plays (or has played)  her granddaughter. The something concerns a moment of impossibly romantic impetuousness, experienced either by a woman called Savannah or in a place called Savannah or possibly both. Details are murky, as they often are, especially when they are filtered through time and memory and rendered inexact and subjective through reminiscence and characterization.

So obviously I don't have a clear idea what's going on in Savannah Bay. But I do: Madeleine—and a layer behind or underneath her, Chalfant—prevaricates and distorts and forgets and remembers in an effort to get at something that might be true. We, the witnesses, are invited deep inside the process. We're there and we're vitally necessary; and we're not there and we're oddly removed, even alienated, from what's going on. And that's the paradox Duras and Chalfant and their collaborators are after revealing to us: What can we ever know, what can we ever understand, when every experience is finally so entirely and isolatedly personal?

Though I found a way into it that satisfied and challenged me, I nevertheless have to admit that Savannah Bay is not an easy play: it's just 65 minutes long, but the tension between its central mystery (what the heck is going on here?), which pulls us in, and its guiding principle (you can never know what's going on here), which pushes us away, makes it hard to maintain focus. Perhaps exactly for this reason, designers Myung Hee Cho (sets), Ilona Somogyi (costumes), Robert Wierzel (lighting), and Darron L. West (sound) provide a constant barrage of beautiful if austere images for us to look at and listen to when our minds start to wander.

Now, of course, I may be totally off base here; your experience of Savannah Bay may be entirely different from mine. All that I can finally tell you is that I believe it's worth taking the plunge into Savannah Bay (forgive the pun). You'll find yourself challenged and taxed in stimulating ways. Just don't be intimidated by it.

I'm not sure if Howard Korder wants his new play Sea of Tranquility to be taken simply at face value as a ripping yarn, or if he intends something deeper, along the lines of allegory. Evidence for the former includes a twisty, edge-of-your-seat plot that feels like something out of a Hitchcock movie by the end of Act One and then morphs ever-more sinisterly in its second half, along with a larger than usual number of quirky supporting characters who, mounting suspense notwithstanding, keep grabbing at our attention.

Yet I'm inclined to believe that the playwright is interested in more than gripping storytelling here, else why give his play such an ironically deceptive title (for there's nothing tranquil about this piece)? And why make such obvious use of symbols: the two leading characters, a married couple, live in a house that is rotting away at its very foundation, even as the wife is suffering from an intensifying and exponentially debilitating disease; their houseguest, meanwhile—her younger brother, recently fired from his job writing TV sitcoms—is given, by his underage girlfriend, an impromptu artwork which she describes as a pile of junk with nothing holding it together. It's heavy-handed, to be sure, but isn't Korder trying to tell us something about the cancer that's eating away at America nowadays?

Sea of Tranquility is about Ben, a family therapist, and his wife Nessa, a popular science writer, who have moved west (from Connecticut to New Mexico) to start a new life together. They find that they cannot; that stuff from their pasts—accumulations of personal and collective guilts—prevents them from starting over.

Everyone else in the play is trying to revise themselves as well. Nessa's brother Randy is the most obvious example, searching in Ben's hot tub and in the eyes of his young neo-hippie companion for a fresh beginning after having sold out whatever soul and talent he may have once had in Hollywood. But renewal is also on the minds of Phyllis and Ashley, the lesbian couple who have also relocated to Santa Fe from the East with Phyllis's disaffected adolescent son Josh, all patients of Ben; of convicted murderer Gilbert, with whom Ben works as a volunteer; and especially of Astarte, a troubled young woman who may or may not have stolen a great deal of money from the Church of Scientology and who subsequently, abetted by Church lawyer Johannsen, falsely accuses Ben of assaulting and raping her.

Everybody wants to change; nobody can: Sea of Tranquility suggests that corruption and self-interest have become so endemic to our culture as to render better impulses impotent. It's a bitter, bleak outlook; Korder is going Albee and Miller one better in dissecting the American Dream and finding only emptiness and ugliness within.

But the play fails to make a clear cut case for this point of view, though, which is why I began by waffling about Korder's ultimate objective. The story, as I hope I've suggested, is loaded with incident, with plenty of surprising turns and a few red herrings; at times, it feels like these characters are victims of the machinations of others (or perhaps even of a playfully vengeful God), which kind of works against the theme I've postulated.

The play is tautly directed by Neil Pepe and offers great opportunities to its cast, most notably Dylan Baker, who is terrific as the beseiged Ben; Betsy Aidem, deliciously caustic and brittle as alienated Easterner Phyllis; Todd Weeks, doing comic relief with a heart as Randy; and Matthew Saldivar and Lizbeth MacKay, who prove chameleon-like in crafting superbly distinct portrayals of two very different characters apiece.

This is a compelling and provocative work of theatre, presented with genuine care and thought. Sea of Tranquility is too conflicted to completely succeed as either psychological drama or political cautionary fable, but it's nevertheless worth seeing: we should not discount the moods and musings of our dramatists, even when they don't add up to exactly as much as we would wish them to.

All one-act play festivals should have the fellowship and community spirit of Seasons. Sponsored by The American Theatre of Harlem as their first-ever entry into this expanding field of theatrical endeavor, this program of nine short plays by mostly new playwrights is, at 3-1/4 hours in length, too much of a good thing. But you won't hear me complaining: every one of the items on the bill deserves to be there: artistic director Keith Johnston and the festival's producers Aaron Ingram, Bill Johnson, Shawn Wellington, and Dawn Bennett are to be congratulated for putting together an engaging and varied evening that effectively showcases the work of dozens of talented people in a comfortable and nurturing environment.

My favorite among the pieces was the first, a playful comedy called Art Control by Carter W. Lewis. It takes place in a restaurant and shows the desperate measures that a hungry woman is willing to resort to in order to get some vinaigrette dressing for her salad. Lewis surprises us with several unexpected twists in his clever plotting; the result is a delicious appetizer that gets us completely in the mood for the rich and varied theatrical menu that follows.

Most of these selections are much more serious in their intent. Lyric, by Renee Flemmings, and Workday, by Arthur W. French III, confront the most devastating kinds of loss head-on, in unusual ways. Reading Zimbabwe, by Melody Cooper, tells an intriguing tale of a young woman who is able to channel images from her slave ancestors by touching things that they touched; this is an ambitious though not entirely successful effort built around a genuinely wise notion, that we can only move into the future by first honoring the past.

Kate Katcher's Sufi Dancing is an urban fairy tale about a pair of roommates and the detrimental effects that harsh city life has had on them. Katcher takes too long to get to a terrific ending here, one that reminds us that humanity and compassion often flourish where we least expect them. Kwesi Cameron's socially conscious drama Bessie has the opposite problem: it needs to be developed into a full-length play to properly tell its fascinating and complex story of a 1950s African American actress who achieves stardom playing a maid on a TV sitcom—but at what cost?

Two of the pieces in Seasons are showcases for excellent performances by a pair of ATH actresses. Langston Hughes' Soul Gone Home, the only play here not of recent vintage, offers Dawn Bennett a fine opportunity to shine in the delicious role of a slatternly, neglectful mother of a teenager who just died of TB. It's a splendidly cool, cynical bit of writing, and Bennett does it more than justice. Monica Henderson likewise turns in a riveting portrayal of a sad, desperate young woman in Robert M. Tamburino's Model Behavior, about a star of the high-fashion runways on the way down. (Nicole Kong also plays this role at certain performances.)

Classyass, by Caleen Sinnette Jennings, combines comedy with social commentary in its tale of a college freshman who works as a DJ at the campus's classical radio station. When he fails to respond properly to a fax from a local homeless shelter questioning the authorship of a particular piece of music, he sets off an amusing chain reaction that teaches numerous lessons about the dangers of stereotyping.

Classyass, tightly directed by K. Lorrell Manning and neatly acted by Ernest Perry, Conswalia Marie, and James DeLeon, represents what's best about the Seasons festival. I'll look forward to another one next year, and offer just one piece of advice now, which is to consider splitting the offerings into more than one program. Otherwise, Seasons' mix of polished and in-progress work, presented with goodwill and honest purposefulness, is everything one can wish for in a theatre festival.

second.—my first exposure to the work of playwright Neal Utterback and my second to director Joe LaRue—makes me eager to see what both of these smart and talented young artists do next. The craft on evidence here is impressive and exciting.

The play begins on a high floor in a Manhattan apartment house, where two men—Jake and Davey—have taken an unidentified man hostage. The Man, gagged and bound, watches with pained wariness as his captors, neither of whom seems entirely competent or comfortable as an armed criminal, bicker and make small talk. They are waiting for a phone call that will provide them with instructions as what to do next. Outside, a brutal blizzard—the worst in the history of New York, in fact—blankets the city it snow.

This scene is interrupted by a second one, played out on the same set. This one involves Lauren and Vick, a pair of lovers who are straining to salvage their very rocky relationship. Lauren, a doctor, has just lost her mother to a ravaging disease, and is now preoccupied with adding meaning to her life, particularly with the idea of having a child. Vick, a high-powered TV journalist, seems too wrapped up in her own interests to offer much support.

Their argument is interrupted, in turn, by another scene—John, a well-put-together, professional-looking man, has come to visit T, a high-priced escort. To talk—really: and when he's finally ready to say what he came to say, she has trouble believing it and knows that she'll never forget it.

The blizzard rages on; the three stories—juggled with remarkable dexterity by both Utterback and LaRue—unfold, and we are riveted, in part because all seven of the characters are so fully and completely drawn. (Kudos to all of the actors: Mike Doyle (Davey), Joel Nagle (Jake), Mark Stanton (Man), Lisa Kay Powers (Lauren), Eve Eaton (Vick), Tim Altmeyer (John), and Sadie Jones (T).) They're people to care about, and we sense that something astonishing is going to happen to them, something that will link them all inextricably and change their lives forever.

One prop figures in each of second.'s separate tracks, a Village Voice containing, prominently, an article about an event that happened a few days before the present action. An elderly woman was struck by a renegade car on a busy Manhattan street, and fell to the ground battered and bloody. Suddenly and out of nowhere, a mysterious man emerged from the crowd, placed his hands on the woman, and—apparently—healed her. This man, who just as suddenly disappeared, is on everyone's minds as second. moves toward its conclusion.

Where Utterback finally takes his play proved troublesome for me, but that doesn't diminish his achievement. What you need to know about second. is that it is very funny in places, and very thought-provoking in others. For example, he's written for Davey, the dimmer of the two abductors, some hilarious yet oddly profound speeches about cosmic concerns both enormous and inconsequential; for Lauren, the doctor who has just lost her mother, he has composed a beautiful monologue about the nature of trust and love and the differences between them. This playwright clearly possesses a questing spirit, and a compassionate one; the humanity and potency of his work is gladdening.

Metropolitan Playhouse performs plays from America's past, with results that are always illuminating, though sometimes in unexpected ways. What I knew about Secret Service, the 1895 melodrama by William Gillette that is currently on Metropolitan's stage, was that it was set during the Civil War and that it was a huge hit, touring for years with Gillette in the central role of dashing undercover Union agent Lewis Dumont.

What I know about Secret Service now, after having seen it, is that this is one of those shadows of our collective past that's difficult to comprehend nowadays. There's an alarming climactic scene in which Jonas, the elderly Negro caretaker of the Varney household who has been abetting Dumont in his mission against the Confederacy, actually tells his owner's daughter that he'll be her slave for life if only she'll help him engineer Dumont's escape. Believe me, this announcement sits uneasily on the ears: all the dignity that actor Lee Dobson summons throughout his performance more or less collapses under the irredeemably racist weight of that line.

Elsewhere Secret Service feels just hoary and quaint, recounting Dumont's improbable caper, in which he infiltrates the Confederacy's War Department Telegraph Office to send false reports of troop movements to the front lines and thereby set a trap for the unwary Rebs. As unlikely as Dumont's mission is the play's devotion to a code of nobility known only in romance novels: Edith Varney, the impetuous daughter of the South to whom the slave Jonas makes his aforementioned request, is head-over-heels for Dumont, all the more so for his adherence to chivalric notions and lost causes that, common sense tells us, would be anathema to a real-life spy.

So this heaving ole melodrama makes but little sense to modern audiences, though history tells us that our forefathers a few generations back, ate this stuff up. Ah, to be naive and provincial.

Note, by the way, that my objections are not to the play's watchability: Service Service is splendidly sturdy, and though director Anthony P. Pennino has fudged with the script some (adding some pointed passages from works by Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, among others, to remind us of the ugliness of war and slavery), he's turned in a faithful and entertaining rendition of the piece. Ruthann Gereghty as the stalwart Varney matriarch does the most impressive work among a large cast that also includes Metropolitan favorite Andrew Firda as Dumont (whose alias is Colonel Thorne) and Edward Griffin as the play's villain, Benton Arrelsford. Fine work by designers Leigh Henderson (set), Douglas Filomena (lighting), and Rebecca Lustig (costumes) bolsters Pennino's vision.

This is the fifth time that NativeAliens Theatre Collective has mounted its annual Short Stories festival, showcasing (for just one week each year) new plays of ten-twenty minutes in length that deal with issues related to the gay-lesbian-transgendered community. This year there are seven pieces on the agenda, and they are generally shorter and more serious than in previous years. This is an interesting program, touching on subjects that don't often get aired in the theatre, and put together with sensitivity and care.

The evening begins with its lightest item, Tim Douglas Jensen's Stalls and Urinals, a witty vignette about an overly defensive gay man who has decided that his co-workers all suffer from homosexual panic and consequently won't stay in the restroom whenever he shows up. It shrewdly runs its course rapidly and doesn't overstay its welcome.

Benefit, by Richard Ballon, follows; it's probably the most effective play on the bill. In it, a young minister is confronted by a member of his congregation, a middle-aged woman who knows secrets from his past that he'd rather leave in the dark. Because this is Short Stories, it's not hard to guess that Father Fred was once involved in a gay romance, but its intensity—and the impact that it has had on his self-image and his future—distinguish Benefit from the obvious melodrama it could have been. Frederick Hamilton and Deborah Cresswell deliver intelligent, emotional performances here; the play's final message of tolerance and forgiveness is resonant and rewarding.

A brief but riveting monologue by Tobias K. Davis, The Best Boyfriend, follows. Jennifer  J. Katz portrays a female-to-male transsexual. The play recounts, with great economy, the story of a first romance. Davis' spare, textured writing evokes the sadness and loneliness of this character; this is a rich, affecting piece about a person who has heretofore been nearly invisible in contemporary drama.

Laura Rohrman's romantic comedy Feisty Pussy comes next; it's a playful look at two NYU students who are working on a lesbian porn film (whose title is the same as this play's) to pay the bills. It's nicely acted by Ali Squitieri and Samara Doucette, with Peter Herrick amusingly taking a cameo as their director.

Two serious dramas about death, Timothy Ryan Olson's Cleaning House and Chris Mann's Dancing in the Afternoon, follow. Both tackle ambitious topics: the former is about parents going through the possessions of their twelve-year-old son who was killed in a freak accident just a few months after the father caught him kissing another boy and subsequently more or less disowned him; the latter is about a pair of lovers, one of whom has just lost her mother to breast cancer. Cleaning House is too fraught with incident—a lot of it rather implausible—to finally ring true; conversely, Dancing in the Afternoon withholds too much to get us into its protagonist's head. But both of these plays reflect earnest efforts to look at serious subjects that are clearly important to their authors.

The final offering of Short Stories 5 is another good idea that's not quite as well-realized as it might be. It's called After the Dance and it's written by William McGovern; it takes place on a Jenny Jones-ish talk show called "Rage" on which Vincent X, a 75-year-old man, explains why he has retreated from the world: as a young man, he had been so beautiful that he was desired by all he met; now, his looks gone, he can't face a world that he fears will reject him. The question is whether Vincent's perception matches reality; I'm not convinced that McGovern's resolution exploits either the comic or psychological possibilities of this tantalizing premise. Inga Hyatt has a good time as the flippant talk show hostess, though, and After the Dance delivers some welcome laughs despite its ultimately unsatisfying conclusion.

Short Stories 5, like its predecessors, offers an engaging and intriguing collection of works, highlighting not only more than a score of talented young artists but also letting us discover what's on their minds. It's certainly worth a look.

Shrinkage is a program of three one-act plays by Manuel Igrejas. They're all about mental health, but the first two deal with the subject more directly, both taking place in psychiatrist's offices and allowing us to eavesdrop on what may well be the final therapy session for each of two patients.

In Phyllis and Kirby, an uptight single mother is startled by her therapist's (apparently sudden) shifts in behavior. As Phyllis recounts the latest installment of an ongoing, destructive affair with an irresponsible younger man, Kirby is alternately sympathetic and hostile; when she's done with her story, he surprises her by moving out of his chair into close proximity with her and offering a hug. Phyllis is disarmed and then dismayed; but we're not convinced that Kirby isn't right about his approach to her mental health: he might engage in tactics like these every week, just to get a rise out of his tightly wound patient.

It's easier to find our bearings in the second play. Jack and Jane. Here, a young New York actor is visiting his older "shrink," with all going well until a series of surprising revelations uncover first a gap and then a chasm within their relationship. By play's end, Jack feels betrayed, and we're solidly with him, because he's been so open and curious in his own explorations of his past, his character, and his feelings for Jane. This is by far the strongest of the three plays in Shrinkage, and it features a terrific performance by Jeffrey Doornbos as Jack. Doornbos, who is also a cast member of Blue Man Group, is an appealing and versatile comic actor, and Igrejas has given him a role that showcases his talents nicely. Whether he's imitating Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, or demonstrating the texture of a New Jersey accent, or exploding in anger at a sudden realization, Doornbos is remarkably effective here.

The last and longest piece on the bill, Margarita, is also the least successful. It's a monologue, delivered by actress Susan Blackwell about a man who, in pursuit of his own happiness, became a woman. This information is revealed almost immediately, so I haven't given away anything crucial; in fact, the problem with Margarita is that nothing in it ever feels crucial. We keep waiting for the insight that will explain this very dramatic step taken by the protagonist, but it never comes—the play's 40 (or so) minutes are given over instead to trivial detail that never adds up to anything substantial, particularly as monotonously delivered by Blackwell. We don't understand who Margarita is, or why s/he made the choices that s/he did. We also never understand who it is that Margarita is talking to, which is pretty much de rigueur for a solo play; lacking context, it's hard to muster up much interest for this character.

Shrinkage is, Margarita notwithstanding, reasonably entertaining. I was unclear as to Igrejas' intent in collecting these three particular plays into a single evening. I think Jack and Jane, packaged with other plays, would pack an even stronger wallop than it does here, for while it shares a set with Phyllis and Kirby, the two pieces do not articulate a coherent point of view, which is finally unsatisfying.

The Broadway production of Sight Unseen revives a 1992 Donald Margulies play originally presented Off-Broadway. Interestingly, Laura Linney, who stars in this production, also appeared in the original, in the role of the German reporter.

The show begins when Jonathan (Ben Shenkman) arrives at the farmhouse of his former lover Patricia (Laura Linney), fifteen years after their breakup. His art retrospective is opening in London (he has since become a famous artist) and he has driven up to the English countryside, ostensibly to catch up with Patricia. Of course, his arrival stirs up a host of emotions in Patricia, her husband (Byron Jennings), and himself. Interspersed with scenes at the farmhouse are a pair of flashbacks to Patricia and Jonathan’s relationship and an interview between the Jewish Jonathan and a tough German reporter (Ana Reeder).

Donald Margulies’ script engages the audience; it's filled with titular references to things unseen. Unfortunately Daniel Sullivan’s intense direction lets us see too much, putting the actors at their emotional peaks at the top of almost every scene. Though the cast rises to this difficult challenge, they’re left with almost nowhere to go, which stops the movement of the play. The men fare better than the women, managing to create arcs under these difficult circumstances. It is interesting to see Linney, clearly the draw of this production, on stage; she does some great work as the older Patricia, but has a lot of difficulty capturing the youthful exuberance of the character’s younger self. The set by Douglas W. Schmidt and costumes by Jess Goldstein are very realistic in typical Broadway fashion, while Pat Collins’ beautiful projections fill the set changes with photos that pique our curiosity and interest in the play.

The final scene (the second flashback of the play), surely intended to be a poignant last look at love lost, feels unfinished in this production, leaving the audience confused, saying (as the woman sitting behind me did) "is that it?" at the end of the show. The earlier directorial missteps, and Linney's unconvincing transformation into a self-centered 20-year-old (in her defense, this may be in some part due to the audience's deep familiarity with the actress) make the ending a poor closer to what is, in terms of the script, a marvelous show. At Broadway prices, perhaps this production is better left unseen.

Silent Laughter is great fun. This “family entertainment” (as is it billed) is not mindless fun, nor tasteless fun, nor harmless fun. Neither is it didactic, highbrow or vituperative.

Maybe this is because there are no spoken words: it is a silent movie (circa 1917) onstage, accompanied only by an organ, and the arpeggios of laughter of the audience. There is occasionally a superscript—a text projection above the stage with a bit of narration or a significant piece of dialogue—but the difficulties, confusions, mistakes, and effronteries of these characters are physicalized with such precision and humanity by the ten-member ensemble of this boisterous new production at the Lamb’s Theatre, that the laughter erupting from the audience is spontaneous, generous and loud.

Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore, the creators, have fashioned themselves a tour de force. Van Zandt (who also directs) plays a gold-hearted tramp named Billy, and Milmore is Ruth, the daughter of wealthy industrialist Brewster Thickwad III, who falls for him. But she is being courted against her will by Thickwad’s slimy, ingratiating protégé, the sinister Lionel Drippinwithit, who contrives plan after plan to squelch his competition. The plot is necessarily generic so as to allow for the maximum amount of monkey business.

Van Zandt’s ensemble has a scientific facility for pratfalls, etc., by turns, graceful and crude, and each has his or her own stand-out moments. Ken Jennings’s millionaire Thickwad is as dotty and malleable as his Max the Thug is menacingly numbskulled, while being mollified and mauled (respectively) by John Gregorio’s tall, wan, and villainous Drippinwithit. Megan Byrne does a trashy turn as Max the Thug’s Girl; James Darrah’s maudlin singing waiter is a comic highlight; Jim Fitzpatrick is desert-dry as Thickwad’s Gorey-esque butler; Ed Carlo and Art Neill excel in a series of small roles, especially Carlo’s Fruitcake Man, and Neill’s buffoon of an Army sergeant; and, as Billy’s pal, Glenn Jones, in an attempt to clear his friend’s name, performs a 60-second plot redux that is spot on.

Also well-deserving of mention are Ralph Ringstad, whose droll organ performance is beautifully in sync with his stage counterparts, and designers Dana Kenn (sets), Cynthia Nordstrom (costumes), and Richard Winkler (lighting), whose ersatz cinemascape is wittily authentic.

But it is Milmore and Zandt who steal the show that they have so deftly rendered. They alone—that is, individually and together—provide too many delightful moments to recount here (though I will say that there is one sequence in particular where Billy tries to put a drunk Ruth to bed that is a marvel of slapstick). Their creation, Silent Laughter, is a play to be enjoyed and admired for its sophisticated ability to tickle us in a wordlessly primitive way.

If you're in town this week (November 3 - 9), if you love the theatre (especially musicals), and if there are still tickets available, then hie thee to the Village Theatre for a rare but spectacular evening with Carol Channing in Singular Sensations. Ageless, magnetic, and hilarious as ever, the remarkable Carol—82 on her last birthday—can still hold an audience like nobody's business (as if we doubted that she could). They simply don't make theatre stars like her anymore; she's the genuine article: I am so happy to have spent another wonderful evening in her presence.

Channing is the first of an impressive lineup of stars who will be joining host/accompanist Glen Roven for Singular Sensations. Described accurately as a kind of Inside the Actors Studio for musical theatre, Singular Sensations offers conversation interspersed with song. It's guided by Roven, a veteran musician, conductor, and producer whose genuine delight in what he's doing shows on his smiling face. Roven leads his guest stars through their careers, pausing for musical numbers at appropriate moments. [Editor's Note: For some reason, the idea failed to catch on; after Channing there were just two more guests and then the show folded.]

At least that's what the series opener portends. Channing—looking smashing in a glittering silver mini-dress—reminisces about her family; her childhood in San Francisco; and her "Russian period" (when she was ten or eleven years old), during which she asked the producer of the hit Russian revue Chauve Souris to teach her one of his songs. She recalls some of the legendary theatre folk she has known during her sixty-plus year career, from Ethel Waters and Tallulah Bankhead to Yul Brynner and the Lunts. (She does some very funny impressions of most of these people as well.) She brings down the house with the story of how she aced an IQ test in order to get into Bennington College (hearing Carol Channing explain how to solve one of those word problems where Train A leaves a station going 40 miles per hour and Train B leaves from the opposite direction at 60 miles per hour—well, it's priceless). Then she tops herself by recreating her first audition for legendary William Morris Agency President Abe Lastfogel: a Gaelic dirge, followed by an ancient Greek chant on which she accompanies herself by drumming on the top of Roven's piano (in what she calls "9/5 time"), followed by a traditional Haitian song which is performed by women as they crush nuts under their feet, hoping to summon forth rain.

This stuff is brilliantly funny, if less familiar than Channing's subsequent Broadway material. Happily, that's well-represented here, too: she does "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and "I'm Just a Little Girl from Little Rock" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and "Before the Parade Passes By" and "Hello, Dolly!" from Hello, Dolly! To which the enthralled audience can only just applaud and applaud and think to themselves, "wow." I've never seen her perform the Blondes numbers in person before, and she delivers 'em letter perfect, bumps and grinds included:, scoring big laughs on lyrics that we've heard a zillion times. On "Dolly," she tells us when she's coming down the stairs, sweeps up an imaginary skirt, and parades in front of an invisible line of waiters; and gets the standing ovation that she completely deserves. She is, in short, a phenomenon: this is pure theatrical magic, of a kind that seldom happens.

So, if you can catch up with this week's Singular Sensation, I advise you to do so; and whether you can or not, think about one or more of the future Sensations as well. They do look to be a pretty singular bunch; their evenings of song and chit-chat won't be the same as Channing's—some will have fewer recognizable signature tunes, for example, and I'm sure that most will be more spontaneous (for don't think for a moment that Channing hasn't told every one of these stories hundreds or thousands of times before)—but all promise to be informative and entertaining.

The best word to characterize Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks is formulaic. Not that formula is necessarily bad, mind you; but I watched the play wishing that something would happen that hadn't been telegraphed moments or even hours before. To no avail, though: Richard Alfieri's play is as comfy and reliable as your favorite bathrobe or Nick at Nite TV series, though probably not as warm as the former or as funny as the latter.

The sit of this sitcom-y play is that Lily Harrison, a proper, well-to-do lady living in a condo in an upscale retirement community in St. Petersburg, Florida, has hired a dance instructor for six weeks of at-home lessons. The instructor turns out to be Michael Minetti, an ex-Broadway chorus boy now pushing forty (or thereabouts). Quickly, the startling contrasts between our protagonists are established:

And actually, that's all you need to know.

Each of the four scenes in Act One begins with Michael arriving at Lily's place, dressed surprisingly but appropriately for the current week's dance. Lily is always reticent and Michael always harangues and then convinces her to go on with the lesson (often using franker language than seems reasonable: I was surprised that Lily never threatens to sue him for sexual harassment). They fight and they make up. And then—much more briefly than you'd expect in a show like this—they dance.

Act Two spices things up a bit by having Lily and Michael enter together in the first scene, having just been to a dance (i.e., "on a date") that has deepened their (platonic!) relationship and brought it to a level of greater intensity and commitment. The final two scenes play out as expected, formatically and thematically, with events transpiring that remind us of the fragile ephemeralness of life and the importance and rare wonderment of friendship.

Mark Hamill dominates the show with his good-natured portrayal of the mercurial Michael. Polly Bergen—looking great—is cooler than desirable as Lily, however; a less emotionally aloof actress might succeed in making us care about this woman, particularly in the play's final scenes, which should score at least a sniffle or two but here barely register. The design is uninspired but workable; likewise the dance choreography by Kay Cole, which is a disappointment, because with a name like Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks it seems reasonable to hope for something a little bit snappy in the footwork department.

The dances, by the way, are: Swing, Tango, Waltz, Foxtrot, Cha-Cha, and something called "Contemporary,"  which is a potpourri of '60s-vintage steps like the swim and the twist.

As I said, there's nothing wrong with any of this, but there's nothing terribly right about it either. The experience of watching Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks is entirely passive: no need to invest anything in the characters, because we know exactly where they're headed from the first second we lay eyes on them. But we can watch the journey and enjoy the occasional hearty chuckle or almost-trace-of-a-tear. There are many shows less entertaining and less socially responsible than this one, that's for sure.

But wouldn't it be nice if the folks behind Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks—eight producers are listed in the program—were ready to raise the bar, even just a little?

In a spurt of entrepreneurial spirit that should make our current government leaders proud, Jamil Ellis and Gene Perelson have lifted themselves up out of the ranks of the nameless unemployed and—well—employed themselves, in an entertaining new play of their own devising entitled 600 Days of Pain. Their work has many of the virtues of the off-off-Broadway world that they've embraced: it's imaginative, it's relevant, it's quirky, and it's spunkily low-budget. At fifteen bucks a ticket, Ellis and Perelson aren't going to get rich with this show—they may not actually make any money at all—but they deserve to be recognized not just for initiative but for authentic nascent talent. I know that I'll be interested in whatever this duo comes up with next.

Eschewing the time span promised by their play's title, Ellis and Perelson depict a single day in the life of an unemployed everyman, whom they call Hero. (Our sense is that the previous 599 days of Hero's life have been pretty much the same as this one.) We watch as he psyches himself up for a day pounding the pavement, and then as he endures progressively grosser humiliations in his fruitless quest for a job. These include: a temp agency where the preoccupied receptionist is also the recruiter-on-duty; a company whose employees live minute to minute in terror that the next email will be their electronic pink slip; a midday stop at a bar, where a high-powered female attorney shows interest until Hero lets slip his job status; and a visit to a kooky job fair at Javits Center that feels more like a carnival than a place of business.

Threading through Hero's day are phone calls from a company called Johnson & Taylor, whose actual line of business remains indeterminate despite Hero's best efforts; the ultimate moving target, this firm manages to reject Hero's application, then write him into a proposal, and then go out of business in the space of this single eventful day. Ellis and Perelson do some of their best writing here, taking Hero's story out of the mundane everyday and into a surreal hyper-unemployment-space that offers genuine commentary on the crazy state of our up-and-down service economy.

The play's freewheeling style is reinforced by the random casting of its three actors in its many roles (an audience member plays a game at the beginning of the show that determines who plays who). Wigs, props, and funny voices define the various characters, with Jaime Andrews scoring impressively as the distracted temp agency flunky and the very strange personnel person from Johnson & Taylor. Ellis and Perelson complete the cast; they're less accomplished performers than Andrews, but they put over their characters with energy and spirit.

The writing is what distinguishes these two young men as artists to watch: if 600 Days of Pain isn't the sharp, focused satire that it might  have been, it nevertheless sustains a smart, cockeyed view of the world that is both pertinent and funny.

The play is preceded by a half-hour curtain-raiser by a guest artist. At the show I attended, the slot was filled by Creation Nation, a comedy duo consisting of Billy Eichner and Robin Lord. Eichner is a funny guy (Lord is less assured as straight man); sketches about The Passion and celebrity excrement went on too long, but Eichner's ad libs were fresh and amusing.

On hand are Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss, Tony Award winner Rene Auberjonois, sitcom stars Bronson Pinchot (Perfect Strangers) and Peter Scolari (Newhart), Mask's Eric Stoltz, Les Miserables' Nick Wyman, Showgirls' Elizabeth Berkey, Victor/Victoria's Rachel York, stage veteran Bob Dishy, and more-or-less legendary nonagenarian comic Professor Irwin Corey, who used to appear regularly on Ed Sullivan's, Steve Allen's, Jack Paar's, and Johnny Carson's TV shows way back when. Backstage, we have director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker on stage and screen, Bonnie and Clyde on celluloid) and playwright Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, M*A*S*H).

A theatrical triumph would seem to be inevitable, right? Wrong. My sad but honest report to you about the revival of Sly Fox, which has just opened on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is that nonstop hilarity does not ensue and wall-to-wall laughter does not prevail. Sure, Gelbart's script—a biting burlesque, from Jonson's Volpone, about humankind's bottomless reservoirs of greed—is clever and funny. And sure, the eccentric characters portrayed by the stellar cast—notably York's Mae West-ish bordello madam and Stoltz's appealingly dapper manservant—make us smile and occasionally even win our sympathy. But, somehow and nevertheless, Sly Fox never ever ignites: it lumbers rather than crackles; and it rankles rather than tickles. Broad gags about sex, death, and money feel alternately creaky, cringeworthy, or just beside the point. Stinging satirical barbs come off as merely mean.

So what happened? Gelbart's play, following its source material, tells the story of one Foxwell J. Sly (Dreyfuss), a brilliant swindler and student of human nature who makes his living by not underestimating the depths to which his avaricious fellows will sink. At present he's ensconced in a large house in San Francisco (it's 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush), with his loyal servant Simon Able (Stoltz), playing out the final stages of an ingenious scam that has filled his beloved treasure chest with a good deal of new golden loot. Sly has befriended (if that's the word) three of the town's most covetous gluttons: the slimy, twitchy lawyer Craven (Pinchot); the miserly, ancient merchant Crouch (Auberjonois); and the jealous and ornery accountant Truckle (Dishy). Sly has hoodwinked all three into thinking that he is at death's door; he has further fooled each one into believing himself to be Sly's sole heir. The men attend the deathbed with vulturish steadiness, bringing gifts to Sly to ensure their places in his good graces.

All would go well were it not for Sly's wish to see two of his victims writhe and wriggle just a little bit more than necessary. He decides, for a piece de resistance, to have Truckle deliver unto him his beautiful and virtuous wife (Berkley), and to have Crouch disinherit his stolidly upstanding son (Wyman) by changing his will in Sly's favor. To Able's surprise, the marks eagerly turn pimp and traitor respectively for the promise of Sly's fortune; but Crouch fils manages to eavesdrop on the nefarious dealings, with the result that by the Act One curtain, Sly and Able have been rounded up by a randy Chief of Police (Scolari) and taken to jail.

I'm afraid, though, that the unbridled pigginess of these clowns proves rather hard to take, and I think it's precisely because they aren't clowns at all that that's the case. Dreyfuss, Auberjonois, Dishy, and Pinchot are fine actors, but they don't go in for the broad leering, winking, baggy-pants outrageousness that signal gross exaggeration. No, Gelbart and Penn, as interpreted by these gentlemen, come off as if in deadly earnest; and who knows, they're possibly exactly right about the brutishness of our species. But I prefer my satirical medicine with at least a spoonful of sugar: Sly Fox serves it up straight.

Furthermore, it serves it up slow—there's way too much time to ponder the reprehensibility of, say, desiring to rape another man's wife with his permission; and it serves it up coarsely, by which I mean that the snap-to precision that well-executed farce requires is missing here, especially from the second act courtroom scene, which should generate gigantic waves of roaring laughter—you can tell that just by listening to it—but here, lacking sharpness, yields only modest guffaws. Most of those, by the way, are earned by Professor Corey, who plays a court clerk about the same number of years old as he actually is: watch him dip his quill ever-so-slowly into an inkwell and listen to him deliver his few lines with perfectly timed understatement and you'll apprehend the kind of living-and-breathing comic presence that is elsewhere lacking in Sly Fox.

York excepted (she plays Sly's sometime paramour, a busy Madam who wants him to make her an honest woman), these actors never feel funny, even though they frequently say very funny things.

So the experience is uneasy: We get what Gelbart is telling us, and there's value in that. But we don't really get a chance to laugh at ourselves, which would be a lot pleasanter.

JEN: So ... god ... well, do you miss it? Acting?
CHRISTMAS: Oh, no, I, you know?, always felt like I was standing up there in a sundress with a big wet lollipop. I wanted to … act, really act, be active in the world in ways that would make it better or at least try to.

The first act of Brooke Berman's new play Smashing, virtually all brisk exposition, sets up a quirky revenge scenario: Abby, the spoiled, self-reliant, woefully immature 21-year-old daughter of a famous writer, has learned that one of her father's former protégés has written a sensational best-selling novel in which she appears, most unflatteringly, as a character. It seems that when she was 16, Abby and the then-unknown young writer Jason had an affair. Now five years later Jason has appropriated the incident for his first book, and Abby is mortified—and on the warpath.

Impulsively, she jumps on a plane to London, where Jason now lives; her chum Clea, who is fixated on Madonna and hopes to bump into her idol, comes with her. They plot, with fire in their eyes, to pay Jason back for Abby's public humiliation. The lights go down, and we leave for intermission expectantly...

...only to have our hopes dashed by Berman's underachieving second act. A new character, the very likable Nicky, is introduced; he's the front desk guy at the hostel where Abby and Clea camp out while waiting for Jason—who is inconveniently not in London—to return. Clea and Nicky's budding relationship gets the most stage time in Act Two, and indeed Clea, who grows rather rapidly from a pathetic obsessed fan to a decisive mature young woman, pretty much becomes the play's protagonist. Abby the avenger is forgotten by both playwright and creation: Smashing ends unsatisfyingly and pointlessly with our presumed heroine having accomplished and learned very little.

There's no question that Berman has talent—she molds characters that get our attention and hold it, and she writes dialogue that compels us to listen. (She's less sure-footed simulating the prose of Jason's novel: it's too purple to ring true, but not funny enough to work as parody. And there's way too much of it included in the play.)  But Smashing disappoints by so weirdly and radically shifting gears; it's almost like Berman wanted to write two different plays and couldn't decide which to put on stage.

The cast is fine, with the suddenly ubiquitous Merrit Wever as Clea and the appealing Lucas Papaelias as Nicky making the strongest impressions. Trip Cullman's staging works well, using Erik Flatmo's neat minimalist set to good advantage.

Eric Alter's new play Something About You and the 4th of July is so full of love and joy that it seems to me to be darned near irresistible. It begins on a night in September, at midnight, with its irrepressible hero, Sketch, surprising his girlfriend Elisabeth with a gift to celebrate their third anniversary. But it is Sketch who winds up being surprised, as a cool and distracted Elisabeth, clad only in a chemise, emerges from her front door, followed all too quickly by not one but two large black men who turn out to be a pair of brothers whom Elisabeth is "training" as their dominatrix.

Sketch is heartbroken. What follows, in a series of choice, episodic scenes, delineates his journey through grief and recovery, guided by his best friend Cookie, who is gay and lives upstairs; his co-worker Chince, who is self-absorbed and obsessed with money and women; and his newer friend Preacher, who is African American and, following a stint in prison, training to become a delightfully hip minister of God. (Yes, Sketch's pals feel, at first, a bit by-the-numbers. But Alter and his actors make them vivid in time; by the play's second act, you can't help but like these guys.)

Cookie announces each of Sketch's "stages" as the men try to push him back into the world of the living. Eventually, they get him to go on a series of hilariously horrifying dates (via a personals ad thoughtfully composed by Cookie), the funniest of which is with a pushy vegan who carries her pet fish around with her in a plastic bag. More promisingly, the guys take Sketch to a Greenwich Village bar, where Preacher immediately pairs up with smart and sassy Kyra, and Sketch meets one of Kyra's friends, a lively, pretty young woman named Remi. Sketch actually draws Remi's picture while they're out on the dance floor. After he gives it to her—and after Remi is pulled away by her over-protective sister Susan—he realizes that Remi is blind.

Alter doesn't indulge in stuff like love at first sight, but it's obvious where Something About You and the 4th of July is headed as soon as these two meet. It takes a while for Sketch and Remi to connect again, and once they do it takes not just time but a good deal of effort and maturity and understanding for them to build a relationship. Theirs is more fraught with roadblocks than the average romance: Sketch has to learn how to cope with Remi's blindness, and Remi has to learn to trust Sketch. Susan's wariness complicates matters, as does Sketch's emotionally distant father, who disapproves of Remi; Chince's thoughtless blundering further jeopardizes the budding relationship. But the end is never really in doubt, and Alter gives us a sweetly satisfying conclusion that lives up beautifully to the play's evocative title.

Jennifer Bornstein has staged Alter's play with loving care at the spacious Chernuchin Theatre, in a production that is definitely high-end off-off-Broadway. Nicholas L. Troccoli's unit set serves the piece beautifully. The cast of nine genial actors do generally fine work, with the standouts being Daniel J. Scott, who is instantly lovable as Sketch, and Mary Sheridan, who is enormously affecting and convincing as Remi. Larry Karpen is suitably sleazy as Chince. Bunita Tilley is great fun as Kyra and, especially, as the vegan blind date, Kate.

Something About You and the 4th of July is not perhaps as artful as it might be, but in its affirmation of values such as commitment, honesty, and kindness, it generates tremendous goodwill. The family that Sketch and his friends ultimately create in this play brims with love, and they make this sweet-natured romantic comedy into a sleeper feel-good hit.

Grin and Barrett's Productions tell us clearly in the program that their revival of Something Different is a showcase, meant to "show off the talents of all those involved, so that those audience members who might be looking to hire actors, designers, stage crew members, or a director might have an example of the work we can do."

This turns out to be honestly helpful, because Something Different—which is the only playwriting credit for TV legend Carl Reiner—is a very bad play: a hopelessly dated mishmash about a blocked playwright named Sheldon "Bud" Nemerov who wrote an enormous hit in 1956 called "Seven Times Seven Plus One" and not a thing since (the show is set in 1967). To get the creative juices flowing again, Sheldon decides to recreate the physical conditions that bred that earlier success, transforming his den into a replica of his mother's rundown kitchen, complete with his lucky typewriter Natalie, a bag of noisy Indian nuts, and even a surrogate mother. Sheldon's wife Beth tries to stand-in as this last-named, but she doesn't have the stereotypical interfering Jewish Mother in her Gentile blood, prompting Sheldon to hire a mother from Mrs. Kupferman's Employment Agency. Sheldon's recreation of his childhood slum surroundings also require the importation of some live cockroaches, which are provided by Pest Controller Phil Caponetti. Eventually Something Different devolves into a series of mostly not-funny dirty jokes about Phil boffing Beth and Sheldon hiring a sexy actress named Ida Schwartz to be his "mother." There's also a running gag about Beth & Sheldon's twins (who are deftly played by Mmes. Ceballos and Green and supply the one comic surprise of the evening that truly pays off).

All that exposition revealed, let's return to our producers' mission statement. Something Different is a poor play, but it functions well as a showcase. Reiner has supplied plenty of comic set pieces for director Rob Reese and his cast to use to display their chops. These vignettes cover lots of ground stylistically: there is, for example, a sitcom-y scene early on that feels like it was cut from The Dick Van Dyke Show, in which Jamie Marrs as Beth evokes the young Mary Tyler Moore in brilliant hommage (not mere imitation). Marrs in fact is one of the best things about Something Different. She looks like a young Jayne Meadows and moves like a young Lucille Ball; she's absolutely hilarious in a bit when, pretending to be Sheldon's mama, she tries to force down several handfuls of the aforementioned Indian nuts.

The novel notion of Sheldon hiring someone to be his own mother elicits some outstanding work from the actresses who play the three interviewees. Jean Liuzzi is fierce and funny as Rose Keller, the salty Irish woman who is more intent on assessing Sheldon's suitability as a son than on worrying whether she'll actually be hired or not. Alicia Harding does the sexy, not-so-dumb blonde bit as Ida Schwartz; she and Reese have a blast cooking up a pair of ridiculous excerpts from Ida's most recent theatrical hit, an evening of topless Shakespeare. (Harding keeps her top on here; this is a family show.)

Christine Campbell then pulls out all the stops in the potentially offensive role of Sarah Goldfine, a black woman who has decided to apply for the job because, as she puts it, "what do you think we colored women have been doing all these years?" In a bravura turn, Campbell travels from Mammy to Black Pride and back again, giving us a rousing Negro spiritual and a Yiddish folk tune in the process; she makes a character that might have been refreshingly satirical and unexpected forty years ago just about palatable to a contemporary audience.

Reese keeps the show moving briskly, though he sometimes seems at a loss as to how to make the frequently implausible plot points feel inevitable or fresh. He's at his best staging the shtick, of which there is a great deal: an early bit involving Sheldon at the typewriter, desperately trying to crank out a first page, is hilarious—who knew there were so many funny ways to crumple paper? Chris Orf, one of the founders of Grin and Barrett's, plays Sheldon and he's good in this scene, but his work is uneven; he's pushing too hard.

Granted, he's stuck in the role that ultimately makes the least sense in this very strange play.  We expect—and need—Sheldon to be the Rob Petrie character here, a bastion of (relative) reason amidst a gaggle of crazy characters. But Sheldon is the nuttiest nut on stage in Something Different, and Orf is forced to be grounded protagonist and high-flying looney-tune at the same time—a difficult prescription for even the most skilled actor.

All in all, Something Different is reasonably entertaining, and does for the most part show off the skills of its principal artists, author Reiner excepted. It's also something of a novelty; you won't be seeing another revival of this play any time soon.

Spokesong takes place in a Victorian bicycle shop, which has been beautifully rendered by set designer Paul Hudson. Its ambiance—the high wooden worktable covered with miscellaneous hardware; the old-fashioned cash register; the front door, outfitted with a live bell that rings whenever someone goes in or out; above all, the bicycles—of every shape, size, color, and description—hanging from racks on the ceiling—promises something special, even before the lights have gone down for the first act.

And indeed Spokesong proves very special. Stewart Parker wrote it in the mid-70s, as a reaction to the recurrent "troubles" in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the age-old hatred between the Catholics and Protestants is manifested in bombings that relentlessly and systematically destroy the city from the ground up, building by building, person by person. Parker's story plays out in Frank Stock's bicycle shop, where the 39-year-old proprietor faces down his community's anonymous bullying enemies by living and working among these emblems of the past. An equally imminent threat to his security comes from a local planning board that wants to knock down his shop to build a highway; Frank counters with a topsy-turvy plan to eliminate automobiles and replace them with bicycles—50,000 of them!—to be offered to the populace free of charge.

Frank knows that his notions are quixotic, and the arc of the play—which is defined by his sweetly low-key romance of an embittered schoolteacher named Daisy Bell—depicts a reconciliation of his romantic inclinations with the hard facts of reality. Frank's journey away from tilting at windmills and toward authentic self-preservation is abetted, in addition to Daisy,  by his brother Julian, who appears on the scene unexpectedly after years away. Julian is a London-based photojournalist whose cynical outlook starkly contrasts with Frank's sunny disposition; each learns something from the other by the time Spokesong ends.

Parker's script is as defiantly unconventional as its protagonist, with diverse theatrical elements stitched-in, delivered mostly by a ghostly Music Hall character called The Trick Cyclist who is Frank's alter ego/conscience. Spokesong has songs, magic tricks, choreographed bicycle routines (including one on a unicycle), and a series of charmingly stylized flashbacks ranging from sepia-toned sequences depicting Frank's slightly pixilated grandfather (the shop's founder) to a broadly satirical sketch about a bike-mounted unit in World War I that might have come right out of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The hodgepodge oughtn't to work, but it does: Spokesong becomes a feast for the imagination, as it takes us to the corners of Frank's active mind, showing us aspects of his personality that would be impossible for him to put into words on his own.

The Storm Theatre is doing perhaps its finest work ever here, under the firm but sensitive guidance of director Peter Dobbins, to tell Frank's story with affection, humor, and grace. In addition to Hudson, the production's excellent designers are E. Shura Pollatsek (costumes), Charles Cameron (lighting), and Tucker Howard (sound). The cast is terrific, led by Michael Mendiola as the thoughtful, solidly appealing Frank; he's warm, ingratiating, and has a beautiful, full-throated singing voice that fills the theatre; you'd expect to see him starring in a Broadway musical, yet here he is, delivering this impressive performance in an off-off-Broadway house. Mendiola's co-stars are fine as well: Ethan Flower is compellingly edgy as Julian; Robin Haynes and Jill Anderson are delightful as Frank's grandparents, seen in the flashbacks; and Colleen Crawford gets the complexities of Daisy's character just right. Paul Jackel pops up as The Trick Cyclist in all manner of guises, singing, dancing, cycling, and clowning with a gallantry that conjures the gentleness that goes with nostalgia.

That's appropriate, because Spokesong is, in part, about embracing the past, and finding what's important about it to help us through our lives today. It's also about finding the courage inside ourselves to resist barbarism described as progress: Frank's stand against modernity feels quaint and absurd to us, but there's authentic wisdom and profundity in it. Daisy asks him at one point what he thinks will happen to his shop; he replies, "If the bombers don't get it, the planners will. Between the devil and the deep. Two kinds of madness."

Somewhere within all this, there has to be a balance: Spokesong helps us reclaim it.

The Mississippi storms of April brew in a clash of winter and spring as Heavenly Critchfield seduces her way through the lives of Dick Miles and Arthur Shannon in this literary history lesson that offers an unexpected glimpse into the early writings of the 26-year old Tom (a.k.a. Tennessee) Williams. The production's dramaturg, Jessica Neeman, sheds light on Williams’ adolescence as a playwright, noting in the program that the play's four lovers “Heavenly, Dick, Arthur, and Hertha, are, without a doubt, the archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. In fact, these characters, among others, are the playwright’s earliest sketches of Tom, Laura, and Amanda Wingfield, Alma Winemiller, Blanche DeBois and Stanley Kowalski—characters inseparable from American drama—and therefore worthy of closer examination.”

Spring Storm is a play of sexual pangs housed in the guise of romance, admittedly overloaded with characters, plots, and social milieu. The writing captures the beginnings of Williams’ rush of languid Southern intensity with poetic passages and themes that walk a conflicting path of melodrama and true life. Even in this early work, Williams explores the universal themes that permeate his later works: the dominating mother, the turbulent family, the virile/animalistic man-beast vs. the asexual/intellectual man-child, bound and unbound sexual forces in conflict, spinsters, and unrequited loves.

Heavenly is in love with Dick, a rebellious hunk of working class manliness, but her mother, Esmeralda, wants her to marry the bookish, wealthy, and socially established Arthur in order to advance her position in society. To complicate matters further, the repressed librarian, Hertha Neilson, nurtures a secret and fatal passion for Arthur. Four unresolved loves tortured by the heat of their desires. Sex and love are often confused and dysfunctionally intertwined, as this drama reveals the complex workings of sexual repression/expression, Southern codes of ethics, and family obligations.

As the play's heroine, Krista Lambden is compelling as petite and lustful Heavenly. She is energetic and on fire as she defies her mother, devours Dick, and manipulates Arthur, all while searching for love in the guise of instant sexual gratification. Lambden skillfully brings to life the young woman of contradictions and her performance is ultimately quite touching.

As the remaining lovers, Joe B. McCarthy’s Dick (did I really write that?) is hot in a brutally natural and physically raw manner. He has created a believable character who is emotionally available and physically unashamed. John Gazzale is less effective as the studious and virginal Arthur. He looks the part, but seems to be showing the audience who the character is rather than living inside the complexities of his repressions. Kristen Cerelli is quite recognizable as the 28-year old spinster. She seems too young for the role, but plays the part with clarity.

As the mother, Elizabeth Kemp is an explosive tyrant masking desperation with social posturing and loss of youth with sunken-in cheeks and pursed lips. Her dialect sounds more Texan then Mississippian, but she has created a dimensional character that lives in Williams’ ever-so expected psychological world of delusion.

As Heavenly’s Aunt Lila, Carlin Glynn gives a mature and effortless performance as the women of reason who disapproves of Esmeralda’s self-serving manipulations. She brings a life experience to the stage that is a gift to all who are fortunate to share the stage with her.

Coy Middlebrook’s direction seems to find its success in the nurturing development of each of the distinctive characters penned by Williams. Some of his blocking feels more “stagy” than the actual human behavior of the characters, particularly in the intense physical moments of the play. For example, he needs to better finesse the physically sexual moments in the play—which are now over the top and uncomfortably forced.

Disappointing aspects of the production include the set and sound design – an unfortunate reality due to the fact that the essence of Williams’ worlds are often captured in the effectiveness of their environments. The architecture of the Theatre at St. Clements is a perfect space for this production with its vaulting ceilings, church windows and reverent aura, but the set design by Shawn Lewis violates an already southern impression of space with three large, cumbersome and darkly stained platform units that are awkwardly pushed around by actors to shape various locations, which includes an oddly constructed tree in the opening scene. In addition, every time there is a reference to the blowing wind or a strong breeze, huge fans (in full view of the audience) are turned on. The immediate moment following the noted “wind” text the fans (which are quite loud and distracting) are just shut off. Why did this design effect have to draw so much attention to itself? And why is the wind blowing only when an actor says, “There is a wind comin’ up”? David Pinkard’s sound design is similarly problematic.

But Josh Bradford’s lighting is immensely effective in capturing the heat of day and the gentle relief of night. His design appropriately illuminates the vastness of nature and the intimacy of closed interiors as it moves light through the given realities of Williams’ story and the emotional journeys of his characters. And Theresa Squire’s costumes are period specific, appropriate for the personalities of the characters, and follow a color scheme that feels perfectly April in Southern 1937.

It is definitely a treat to experience this New York premiere of Spring Storm, which was originally written in the late 1930’s while Williams was attending the University of Iowa. It is a play that has remained virtually hidden until it was re-discovered in 1996 in a collection of his papers at the University of Texas. Kudos to the LOBO Theatre for bringing this opportunity to New York theatregoers.

With the history play Henry V, Shakespeare wrote perhaps the drama’s definitive study of war. In his hands, the climactic battle at Agincourt, in which a small English army defeated a massive French force in 1415, became canonized as a myth of military heroism. He wrote the play with sufficient ambiguity, however, that theaters can revive it either to support war or to disparage it.

Matt Pepper, in St. Crispin’s Day, foregoes Shakespeare’s irony for a more satiric judgment of human nature. He adapts those scenes from Henry V set on the night before the battle, when the king wanders the front lines in disguise to mingle with his troops. But rather than follow Harry through the camp as Shakespeare did, Pepper targets the common soldiers. He also reverses the earlier work’s tone, for where the scenes from Henry V are a contemplative ramble, St. Crispin’s Day is a mud-slinging assault on our illusions about the nobility of combat.

The style of St. Crispin’s Day might be summarized as Brecht by way of Monty Python. Behind their cheesy British accents and absurd mannerisms, the blackguards onstage—Pistol, Bardolph, Fluellen, and even King Henry himself—act out of self-interest rather than ideals like honor and patriotism. These soldiers bicker and fight as they pitch their tents in the mud, and steal from churches to pay whores. And every one of them, quite realistically, is afraid to die. Only Will, an Irishman (played by David Wilson Barnes with cunning intelligence) has the courage to apprehend higher ideals; an anachronistic anarchist, he plots regicide but can’t go through with it.

Aside from some sloppy set design by Michael V. Moore, director Simon Hammerstein's staging has done Pepper’s script a great service. He’s emphasized the play’s vaudevillian comedy, lightening the over-expository beginning (Michael Gladis and Richard Liccardo stand out for their timing and rapport in these early scenes). Charlene Alexis Gross’ tattered period costumes and Peter Hoerburger’s dank nighttime lighting supply a roughness that reinforces the intellectual satire.

Some audiences may be confused by the play’s cynical reversals of right and wrong: its most heroic act is an English boy murdering a priest so he can desert with a French whore. Others may wonder whether Pepper (and the Rattlestick Theater, by extension) really holds such radical convictions, or whether he’s appropriating them for comedic and dramatic purposes. But if St. Crispin’s Day is satisfying, it’s because this cynicism cuts against the grain of mainstream bellicosity. Pepper attacks warfare with defiance, puncturing the pretensions of those who wage it. With every hit they score, he and his band seem to trumpet victory against a dull consensus.

Julia Jordan says she wrote St. Scarlet about six years ago; hopefully her subsequent works reflect some professional growth. For this one feels more like an exercise in playwriting than an actual play: it contains many of the elements of a well-crafted drama, but they're flimsy and insubstantial, inserted clumsily and arbitrarily into a narrative that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and doesn't seem to have much on its mind. This is the sort of play where as soon as a mirror turns up as a plot element, you know it's going to get broken; Jordan's obvious talent for writing interesting dialogue and creating quirky characters sustains us through St. Scarlet's brief two acts, but the Big Emotional Climax and subsequent denouement feel empty and unearned.

The play takes place in a remote and slightly ramshackle Minnesota house, where three grown siblings—Seamus, Rose, and Ruby—have gathered to prepare for the imminent death of their mother.  Seamus is bossy and distant; his main interest seems to be obtaining the mirror from his dying parent's bedroom to complete the furniture suite he has prematurely inherited. Rose is a rebel, having recently returned from a long time away from home that started when she got caught half-naked having sex on the lawn of her Catholic High School. Ruby is a child-woman of 21 who has been left to care for the dying mother and is consequently exploding with desire to get out and start gathering some experiences of her own. Right now, she's fixated on burying her Irish mother in a green dress and having someone sing "Danny Boy" at the funeral.

It's mid-March, and a blizzard rages outside; nevertheless, a stranger from Brooklyn manages to make his way to this house. He turns out to be Vinny Silverstein, a romantic blowhard/loser who has been in love with Rose from afar following an abortive and unconsummated one-night stand two years before.

Jordan seems aware of the obviousness of her setup, but doesn't rise above it. The mirror breaks, the mother dies, someone sings "Danny Boy," and none of it has any emotional weight because there's nothing authentic behind any of it. Similarly, all of Jordan's Big Speeches feel telegraphed rather than spoken, each of them a finely-shaped rhetorical argument rather than the genuine outpouring of a human being.

The production, from Women's Expressive Theater, is rich in naturalistic detail (like a convincing-looking snowfall outside the kitchen window), but it's sloppy in places—why would Seamus walk out into 30 below cold without first putting on his gloves and hat; and how does the mirror shine and glimmer without any apparent light source? Director Chris Messina offers a serviceable if occasionally plodding staging. The actors never rise above the limitations of their roles, not even the electric Susan O'Connor (Ruby), who deserves (and needs) to play a real grown-up lady lest she be forever typecast.

The seven characters whom John Kuntz portrays in his one-man show Starfuckers aren't literally getting it on with famous people. But, as a show with such a sensational title must itself do, they desperately crave attention. Starfuckers is neither as edgy nor as hilarious as I hoped it would be—expectations are odd, aren't they—but it's certainly a terrific showcase for Kuntz's comedic and acting talents, which are substantial.

 The show is composed of eight vignettes,  separated/heralded by truly cool slot machine-style graphics by Brian Finkelstein and B.T. Whitehall. Kuntz uses the merest of props to transform himself from Ronnie, a needy and rather gauche wannabe-actress, to Adonis, the flawlessly beautiful icon who can sell any product, to Pigman, the grossest and showiest of Starfuckers' characters, a man who had his nose plastic-surgically turned into a snout to win a job as spokesperson for a food company.

Each of these characters is captured either recounting some part of his or her life story or putting a best foot forward in some sort of (loosely construed) audition. The writing is generally broad though occasionally portentous; Kuntz repeats himself and likes similes too much, and he's too willing to go for shock effect rather than something deeper. But the performances constitute a kind of  tour de force for the actor, who gets to smear food all over himself (and throw it at the audience) as Pigman, and dryly drop the names of famous celebrities and fictional characters in the guise of such diverse personas as Julia Roberts' "best friend" and a well-endowed young hustler who claims to have been Alex Trebek's lover.

By far the most effective of Kuntz's creations is Ronnie the Actress—and he knows this, because she alone gets to star in two of the show's vignettes. The first one is a funny if derivative account of a pathetic audition, but the second is Starfuckers' highlight. Ronnie has inexplicably been called back, and her audition piece—an interpretive dance to "Total Eclipse of the Heart"—is one of the single funniest bits I've seen on stage in ages. Kuntz enlists two assistants from the audience to put this deathless number over. You'll never listen to it quite the same way again.

All in all, Starfuckers is entertaining if a bit undernourishing: for all its characters' name-dropping and supposed soul-searching, there's finally not much in the way of substance or satire here. But Kuntz is engaging, and Ronnie's routine is a classic.

For its first full-fledged production, Flying Pig Theatre Company has made the interesting and ambitious choice to revive Emily Mann's 1981 documentary drama, Still Life. Set in the late '70s in the upper Midwest, the play tells the story of a marine named Mark who has been back from the Vietnam War for eight years but not fully recovered from it. It's presented vérité-style, as if Mark is being interviewed by some unseen other, and with him are his wife Cheryl and his mistress Nadine—it's not entirely clear if they occupy the same literal space, but they're all together on stage—who are also being "interviewed." The notes for the published script indicate that much of the dialog is taken verbatim from Mann's own talks with the prototypes for these characters.

It's a difficult play: there is virtually no action, just ninety uninterrupted minutes of talk, occasionally illustrated with a projected photograph of some person, place, or thing from Mark's past. Nonlinearly,  the play charts Mark's tour of duty in Vietnam, and his subsequent failures at home, which include a stint in prison, false starts as an artist, and his rocky marriage to Cheryl. Mann makes few judgments here, and none about her characters; but she connects the particularized violence of Vietnam and our collective denial of same with the broken-up lives of Mark and other vets and the people around them.

Though Mark's situation is sadly timeless, Nadine & Cheryl's circumstances often reflect a pre-feminist sensibility that's hard to grasp nowadays; both Katie Honaker (Cheryl) and Rebecca Nelson (Nadine) come across as too contemporarily self-assured to make their characters wholly understandable. But Still Life nevertheless has real resonance, particularly in Cheryl's observation: "I mean men would not be going on fighting like this for centuries if there wasn't something besides having to do it for their country."

Director Dyana Kimball stages the play straightforwardly and compassionately, moving her characters around as much as the piece's inherent stasis allows; but the venue, the inhospitable Belt Theater, works against her, requiring the audience (who are seated in a balcony overhanging the stage) to continuously (and uncomfortably) look down. The compressed depth of the house causes another problem, an inability to get the slides to project in proper focus.  All that said, there's a lot that's worthy and useful here. And Billy Smith is outstanding as Mark, capturing the layers of complexity of this tortured soul.

Strange Attractions is the second play by David Epstein that I've seen (Midnight, which was presented last season by Invisible City Theatre Company, is the other one). Based on this pair, I feel pretty safe in saying that almost nobody writes the kind of plays anymore that Epstein does; and that is emphatically not a criticism—on the contrary, I admire Epstein's willingness to buck contemporary trends, to go his own way, to write the kind of engrossing, sentimental plays that he seems to like to write. They make for terrific theatre.

While Midnight hearkens back to the screwball comedies of Kaufman and Hart, Strange Attractions reminds us of Zoe Akins, say, or Terrence Rattigan—the robust, character-driven school of drama that involves the audience almost against their will. The central figures here are three sisters. Lina, whom we meet first, is twenty; a nascent artist, she attends community college under duress and rebels by dressing up in punk attire, drinking too much, and hanging out with a bad crowd. Sam is the person she's rebelling against, a tightly wound powder keg of a lady, who has sacrificed a great deal in order to take care of Lina, who is her younger sister; she's not averse to letting the world know what she's suffered, or to making those around her pay for it.

The third sister is Margo, who turns up unexpected shortly after the play begins. Much older than both Sam and Lina, Margo lives in Chicago with her wealthy husband Rick, who is a banker; she hasn't seen Sam in three years and Lina barely even knows her. Sam is less than thrilled by Margo's sudden visit, and even after Margo reveals the reason for it—she is dying of bone cancer—Sam proves relentlessly unforgiving.

Secrets and recriminations ensue. Most of the secrets are telegraphed to the audience long before they're actually revealed (but don't look at me: I'm not giving a thing away here); we are nevertheless instantly captive to this dysfunctional family saga because Epstein the playwright creates such plausible and interesting characters and because Epstein the director, in collaboration with the three capable actresses who headline Strange Attractions, keeps us focused and fascinated by them. Maggie Bell plays Lina, showing us the bad-girl facade and the vulnerability underneath at every turn, along with the intelligence, humor, and surprising warmth of this conflicted young woman. Elizabeth Horn, as Sam, earns and holds our sympathy throughout, in spite of the selfish and often mean-spirited things she does; she's a victim of circumstance and also a survivor, and Horn makes her admirable and understandable even as she displays the raw meanness that keeps her afloat. Jennifer Baines is Margo, the sister whose big admission fuels the final moments of the play; her desperation is palpable as she struggles to do the right thing in the face of her sadly imminent death.

Rounding out Strange Attractions—and adding a great deal of vitality and humanity to the proceedings—are the current significant others of each woman. Jerry (Gerry Lehane) is Sam's fiancé, a well-meaning cop who puts up with a great deal but turns out to be holding back an explosive revelation or two of his own. Darren (J.T. Patton) is a smart and surprisingly well-put-together college student who has been hired to be Lina's algebra tutor but develops quickly into a new romantic interest; quirky and good-humored, he gives Lina the confidence and hope that she so clearly lacks and needs. In the final scene of the play, we meet Margo's husband Rick (Matt Walker), who has come to take his wife back home. His pain proves almost cathartic, and helps bring Strange Attractions to its emotionally potent, if somewhat ineluctable, conclusion.

The play is not without its flaws, particularly in the final scenes, when the pace slackens up a bit; but the characters and situations keep us fairly riveted from start to finish, and in at least one instance—the scene between Darren and Lina that provides the climax to the play's first act—genuine theatre magic is made. (An aside: Bell and Patton are terrific together here; Patton, who was also in Midnight, is rapidly becoming one of off-off-Broadway's most accomplished young actors.)

In the end, we find that we care what happens to these people, and that we're maybe a little better for having spent a couple of hours eavesdropping on their troubled lives. What more can we ask from an evening of theatre?

Primary Stages has opened its season with a very funny new pair of one acts by A.R. Gurney called Strictly Academic. In a little over one and a half hours, the two vignettes made me laugh quite a bit, think a little about how absurd we as a species are, and leave the theatre with a big smile on my face.

The first play, The Problem, is a fine little piece about a seemingly happy couple who turn out to have more than a few skeletons dancing in their closets. This is established very quickly: at the top of the play, the husband, played with a hilarious sense of obtuseness by Keith Reddin, is sitting at his desk, going over a mathematical problem, completely unaware that his wife (the equally hilarious Susan Greenhill) is quite pregnant. Things get worse when the wife informs the husband that she isn’t at all sure the baby is his. She suspects this because they haven’t had sex for over five years. The husband ponders this for a moment, and then announces “I really don’t see much of a problem.” What follows is a series of revelations that go from absurd to ridiculous on a Monty Python-like scale. Both Reddin and Greenhill are fantastic, delivering their impossibly silly lines with complete sincerity, making for a very funny performance.

The second play, The Guest Lecturer, is an absurdist horse of a different color, with darker hues and savage secrets. On the stage of a small regional theater, Mona, the artistic director, is presenting the latest guest lecturer in what appears to be a series. You can tell right away that something is a little off by the barely contained mania of Mona, played with a perfect mix of sex, lunacy, and love of theatre by Susan Greenhill. The guest, one Hartley Carr of the University of Southern Ohio, enters, and begins his lecture on “Drama in America.” But almost immediately, the lecture becomes a deranged interview between Mona, who may or may not be drunk, and the befuddled and increasingly confused Hartley. What follows is a great parody of community theatre, fund raisers, and lectures on the state of the theatre by stuffy academics. And that’s just the set-up. Things take a very dark turn, and we learn that this particular community theatre has a unique, nasty secret. I don’t want to give away any more of the plot- I will just say that this story takes a lot of fantastic leaps, and all of them work in the context of the play.

The script is a gem, full of great dialogue and remarkable characters, all trying to communicate with one another, and for the most part failing miserably. Gurney creates this world full of people who can’t quite keep up appearances of normality in such a witty, joyful way that you can’t help but laugh, not only at the characters, but at the instantly recognizable foibles of humanity common to us all.

The cast is great. Led by the formidable Susan Greenhill, this is a troupe that knows how to deliver absurdist farce. Greenhill shines, particularly as Mona. At one point in The Guest Lecturer, she climbs onto the piano and begins to sing like a torch singer, and I laughed so hard my sides hurt. This woman is a comic genius. Remy Auberjonois, as the titular guest lecturer, is wonderful. He exudes academia as he strolls on stage, and when the play demands far more of him in a plot twist I won’t reveal, he delivers in spades. Keith Reddin seems to be born for farce. Nothing is too broad for him, and he always comes off as believable no matter how unbelievable the premise, both as the husband in The Problem and as the all-business president of the community theater's board in The Guest Lecturer. And in the smaller role of Pat, the onstage pianist in The Guest Lecturer, Amy Southerland brings a unique brand of insanity and willfulness.

Paul Benedict directs the evening seamlessly, keeping the cast on the same comedic page, and driving the pace briskly. A successful farce needs to be over-the-top but plausible, and Benedict makes sure that we buy everything the cast is selling.

The design, like the show, is clever and simple. James Noone creates a collegiate apartment for the first act, and then in a matter of seconds transforms that set into an open stage for the second act. Laura Crow's costumes are great, especially Mona’s outfit for The Guest Lecturer. With her sexy black dress and ridiculous red hairdo, you can tell right away that Mona has some issues.

I should mention that there is no intermission in the show, so act accordingly. But go see this show and have fun.

I don't go to the theatre to sit back and relax: I have a comfy sofa and a TV in my living room for that. No, I go to the theatre to get shaken and/or riled up; to get excited; to get prodded and poked and provoked.

The Stampede Theatre Festival is, consequently, precisely my cup of tea. Feed the Herd Theatre Company, sponsors of this new wintertime celebration of edgy, envelope-pushing entertainment, are building a reputation as purveyors of drama and comedy that engages, enlarges, and makes audiences think. The new play Styrofoam—the first Stampede offering that I've taken in this year—exemplifies their aesthetic: it's funny, it's smart, it's risky, it's even a tad scary. I highly recommend it.

It begins with two ordinary joes, clad a little incongruously in bulked-out sweatshirts that make them look a little like Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live, self-consciously negotiating their opening lines and cues. Playwright Kevin Doyle wants us to be completely sure: this is a theatre; these guys are actors. The business gets sorted out, and the play proper begins. HH and BB—those are their names, per the program—are movers; in short order, we meet Christopher, the self-absorbed yuppie who has hired them. He's moving into a brand new apartment, and they're bringing in his "items."  After he thoughtlessly ignores the guys as they struggle in with two easy chairs and then a coffee table, we get the picture: Christopher is rich and powerful and important, and HH and BB, mere workers, are insignificant and unworthy of his notice.

Styrofoam ain't subtle.

But it's pointed—and it's very funny. Soon Christopher's girlfriend, Jessica, arrives, glossy and model-thin and giving new meaning to the term "clueless." She admires the view—apparently, this place is so well-situated that you can see the United Nations, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and all of Central Park from a single window here—and then settles in with him for a pleasant perusal of the Sunday paper.

HH and BB, meanwhile, are bringing in the items: TV, stereo, computer equipment, food processor, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Christopher has commanded them to just the dump the contents of every carton "over there"—and he's reminded them more than once to take the boxes away. So our intrepid movers empty container after container. They all contain Styrofoam. As we'll see, Doyle packs real teeth into his metaphor.

And so it goes: the yuppies absorb Times articles and upscale advertisements and the proles slowly fill the room with Styrofoam. Marketing, acquisitiveness, and intellectual pretensions are deftly satirized; the problems of the working stiff who needs to swallow his pride to make a living are duly dramatized.  Economic, social, and geopolitical inequities are demonstrated. HH asks BB more than once if he thinks "they've" (referring to us) gotten the point. BB explains that it doesn't matter. With a nod to Ionesco's The Chairs, the boxes of Styrofoam keep pouring in.

Doyle has shaped his play beautifully: the collision of dead-on satire, as Jessica and Christopher behave like the perfect little consumers they are, with absurdist farce, as the movers mindlessly and ceaselessly enumerate their employers' possessions, is hilarious and explosive. Doyle and his simpatico director Brian Snapp supply enough variety to keep things continually interesting. And Doyle has a wicked surprise ending for the thing that caps it nastily and neatly.

Styrofoam is performed expertly by its cast of four. Varick Boyd and Patrick Shefski manage to be both downtrodden and self-aware as the put-upon movers. Dan Roach and Keri Meoni, meanwhile, perfectly capture the eternally oblivious and concern-free mindset of the Haves, blithely trading repartee about fashion and current events and acquiring things with careless authority. (Their dissection of the Sunday Times is priceless: Doyle is a canny commentator on the way our world works.)

Styrofoam probably doesn't finally teach its audience anything they don't already know, but that's only because the people who need to hear what this play has to say are, alas, not likely to get lured into an off-off-Broadway theatre up a steep flight of stairs from the street to watch a show without a single name-brand artist on the playbill. Which is, of course, precisely the play's point; which is why you must see it immediately.

It is preceded, by the way, by a strange mini-performance-thingy called This Is Not a Knot, written by Brian Snapp and directed by Eric Michael Kochmer, which begins at the bottom of that staircase I just mentioned, and which has nothing to do with what follows except that it has everything to do with getting us in the mood to be awake, alert, and in tune to all our senses. Like a warm-up: 'cause why would we be here if not to have some kind of experience?

Like Lewis and Clark, Studs Terkel, Simon & Garfunkel, and so many others before him, Frank Cwiklik has gone off to look for America. What he's found, in all its loud, vulgar glory, is on stage for your perusal at The Red Room, in a brilliantly lurid and spectacular epic-melodrama-pastiche called Sugarbaby. Whether you, too, are in search of America or merely a good old time, or, like me, the most exciting damn theatre of the summer, you need to see it.

Through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old girl from the heartland named Bailey Sugarman, Cwiklik surveys the American landscape in two hilarious, hyperkinetic hours. He visits trailer trash territory and the great mecca of kitsch, Las Vegas; he dips into the culture wars via a pair of battling journalists, righteous TV newsman Rod Butane and obnoxious crusading documentary filmmaker Mitch Common. Theatrically, he honors the great American tradition of acquisitiveness by grabbing with both hands from all imaginable sources, putting It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on stage, by way of Chicago, in a tiny East Village space with just a few chairs and tables for scenery. Thus Sugarbaby celebrates two more American traditions, ingenuity and in-your-face wiseacre-ness. All of which, along with a socko surprise finale, somehow makes Sugarbaby the most heartfelt and genuinely patriotic work of art that I've seen in I don't know how long.

I need to start at the beginning. Bailey Sugarman, nicknamed Sugarbaby, is a fairly average American teenager. Her mother is the chronically low-brow Ginger Sugarman-Malveaux; her stepfather is a large, loud, beer-swilling armchair reactionary named Aron Malveaux; the two fight like Jerry Springer guests whenever they get near each other (and Cwiklik has the happy idea of putting them on a TV talkfest to duke it out in public in Act Two). Sugarbaby works at McMullan's, a purveyor of unhealthy fast food (don't miss the on-stage menu card, more truth than parody, I'm afraid). Her only friend in this oh-so-limited world is a car mechanic named Jesus with an Elvis fixation; when she impulsively quits her job, she asks Jesus to take her on a roadtrip. She wants to get away; she wants to see America.

So off they go; only nothing's ever simple, right? A pair of stoner-losers whose apparent only vocation is peeping through the Sugarmans' windows report that Sugarbaby has been kidnapped by a Moose-lem terrorist (their pronunciation). That story finds its way to the USNC television network, where anchorman Rod Butane, embroiled in a campaign to make "God Bless America" the national anthem, quickly realizes that Sugarbaby is going to be our country's next national media heroine. Self-appointed champion of the people Mitch Common, meanwhile, who had briefly interviewed Sugarbaby at the McMullan's right before she quit, is determined to make her the heroine of his next film documentary. And then there's Sheriff Rufus J. Miranda, whose objectives are to bring Sugarbaby back home and to bring whatever lawless ruffians took her away to justice.

Breathlessly, at breakneck speed, the chase is on; or more accurately, the chases are on: from Sugarbaby's home to Las Vegas, where the Sheriff, Butane, and Common pursue Jesus and Sugarbaby through a casino full of Elvis impersonators, down the glittering Vegas Strip, and eventually at the airport, where our hero and heroine pay off a pilot to fly them to safety. The action continues relentlessly to Florida, where Sugarbaby and Jesus have another close call with the Sheriff (while a telecast of the aforementioned talk show, plugging Ginger and her new book and Aron and his new foundation and website, goes on blissfully in the background). Sugarbaby has a near-death experience that sends her temporarily to the gates of Heaven, where the real Jesus, Elvis, and Uncle Sam are playing cards and talking philosophy; and then back to Earth in time for a protest march on Washington, D.C.

How it all plays out—almost never significantly more foolish or far-fetched than what actually happens in real life these days—I leave for you to discover. How Cwiklik accomplishes all of these shenanigans in an off-off-Broadway theatre is what makes Sugarbaby not merely dead-on timely satire but the inspired masterwork of a budding theatrical genius. The climax of the show's first act, which catapults from the Tropicana Hotel to the highway to the airport, is a miracle of staging, with Cwiklik quick-cutting among pop culture reference points to depict, with remarkable economy and precision, a pair of thugs trying to tip over a car, a gunman taking over an air traffic control tower, and a hit-and-run car accident, all in about three minutes in a space no larger than 10x10. Wow.

Of course one of the secrets of Cwiklik's success is his choice of collaborators. His company, Danse Macabre Theatrics, has built up quite a stock company over the years, and many of its members are shown here to outstanding effect. Michele Schlossberg (also responsible for the very impressive fight scenes) is smashingly funny as Ginger and in a variety of cameos, notably a slot machine junkie whose resolve to joylessly and endlessly spin the reels is tested—but not defeated—by the casino chase sequence I mentioned earlier). Dan Maccarone takes on numerous guises, most memorably Uncle Sam and Rod Butane's overworked assistant, Jerry. Adam Swiderski is a compelling and then commanding Jesus, delivering a formidable Elvis impression for the show's finale. And Josh Mertz does his finest work ever, in my opinion, as the self-interested, hypocritical newsman Rod Butane.

Company newcomers Amanda Allan, Erik Bowie, Angela Madaline and Jonathan Wise (all of whom take many roles apiece) and Brandon Kalbaugh (as Sheriff Miranda) are terrific; ditto Alexander R. Warner, who is masterful as Aron and, briefly, as Jesus H. Christ. Kevin Myers gets Mitch Common's smugness exactly right, as well as his quivering cowardice. And, at the center of it all, newcomer Marguerite French is smart, sassy, passionate, and perfectly ordinary in the title role, the young girl who runs away from home and inadvertently creates America's newest media circus.

Bravo to them all, and especially to ringmaster Frank Cwiklik—director, designer, writer, and co-producer—who orchestrates enough drama, comedy, and mayhem here to fill every one of Barnum & Bailey's rings, and then some. Sugarbaby deserves to be Cwiklik's breakthrough; attention, savvy producers: the next big thing may well be happening at The Red Room. Theatre just doesn't get more vital, or entertaining, or exuberantly in-your-face than Sugarbaby.

And I haven't even mentioned the voice-over pizza commercial, or the automaton airport security worker, or the Polish gangster-immigrant who spouts poetry about his new homeland, or... you get the idea. Hurry up. Get tickets.

Featuring four self-absorbed characters who relentlessly dissect postmodern social mores and contemporary verbal foibles in front of a privileged Manhattan backdrop, Suitcase might appear dangerously close to coming off as a high-end episode of Seinfeld. But Melissa James Gibson, author of Soho Rep’s 2001 hit [sic], has provided her play with several attributes that pre-empt such a glib reading. These include:

  ▪ A playful confident sense of theatrical gamesmanship (resulting in, for instance, an intricate dialogue consisting entirely of the characters speaking each other’s names);
  ▪ A staggeringly fluid ability to make pseudo-intellectual banter accessibly hysterical (e.g., a conversation about what kind of situation could prompt one to say the word "Aristotelian" three times fast);
  ▪ Heartbreakingly crude a capella songs about longing to be noticed by a vast and chilly world.

Even more to the point, she and her collaborators have created a quartet of characters to whom these potentially silly or shallow tricks seem entirely natural. Sallie and Jen are disaffected grad students who have been struggling for a long, long time to finish their dissertations (on, respectively, alternative narrative styles and garbage). They constantly procrastinate by engaging each other in ambling phone conversations about nothing in particular. In addition to evading their academic work, they are avoiding their ardent and tenacious lovers: Karl (who is seeing Jen), a sensitive fellow who has a "policy" forbidding him to speak about feelings over the phone; and Lyle (Sallie’s boyfriend), an analytic chap who is distraught over the dreamlike disappearance of his father. They both attempt doggedly to gain access to their supposedly significant others, with results ranging from the mockingly maudlin to the downright slapstick.

The subject is communication, and the maddening near-impossibility of making it meaningful in a world awash with words and definitions, quotes and citations, clichés and misnomers, linguistic lies and emotional insecurity. This theme is illustrated most spectacularly in several overlapping four-way conversations that take place on telephones, through door intercoms, and across closed doors and stairwells, but it’s also present in the play’s quieter moments, such as when Sallie silently listens to the city’s night sounds through her lonely intercom. The melancholy spirit of pointlessness hovers threateningly over every word and action, a presence the characters—especially the intellectually gridlocked women—keenly feel.

The least improper breath would cause the play’s entire willowy structure to drift into cynicism or superficiality, but director Daniel Aukin and his pitch-perfect cast are in full control. Each of the actors—Christina Kirk, Thomas Jay Ryan, Jeremy Shamos, and Colleen Werthmann—creates a clear, carefully stylized character that would be insufferable if he or she wasn’t so helplessly human. This coy compassion, which a lesser crew might have a hard time extrapolating from Gibson’s dense, arch script, is what finally gives this production its wonderfully shabby elegance. (Louisa Thompson’s set, Matt Frey’s lighting, and Shane Rettig’s sound design deserve special citations for cleverly and concisely evoking the New York we feel from the corners of our senses without always noticing it.)

The title refers to the suitcases of garbage Karl tries to bring Jen to help her with her dissertation, thoughtful but dubious gifts that are consistently rejected. In the end, however, any resemblance between this play and the disposable anthropology of must-see sitcoms is strictly coincidental. Unlike those filled with Karl’s trash, this Suitcase is an experience I wished I could pack up and take home with me.

Young theatre companies often give us the most interesting and challenging theatre. Case in point: Steven Gridley's Sun, Stand Thou Still, which premieres as one of a trio of new works in Spring Theatreworks' Springfest 2003: In 3-D. It's an amazing piece: deliberately enigmatic, deliciously complicated, quirkily surreal, irresistibly entertaining, and entirely satisfying. Count me as a fan of both the playwright and the company from now on.

An epigraph in the program, from the Book of Joshua, sets the stage: Joshua asked God to make the sun stand still during the battle against the Amorites, ".... And there was no day like that before it or after it..." Gridley's play takes place in the Great American Desert, where a man picks up a hitchhiker on a lonely road. The driver can barely see, having been blinded during a staring contest he had with the sun not long before. He says he's going West, that he has been heading west for 60,000 miles; and though the hitchhiker points out that the breadth of North America is quite a bit less than that, both men seem content to believe the figure.

Eventually they encounter another human being, a pretty young woman selling apples at the side of this remote highway. Her apples are remarkably sweet and the driver agrees to buy all of them in exchange for taking her to a town by the ocean at the very end of this road. The hitchhiker tries to get her to tell how she grows her apples so sweet, but she explains that this is her only real secret and she needs to keep it.

As I hope you can tell, the events and characters of Sun, Stand Thou Still are just this much off kilter to feel real and not real at the same time; Gridley piles up non-sequitur details and withholds a lot—we never ever find out anything about the hitchhiker, for example—to rivet our attention and propel his unusual tale forward. I don't want to give away too much of what happens next. What you need to know is that the apple woman meets with an accident, and an officious police officer and a mysterious man (who may well have been the cause of that accident) set out after her. All five characters meet up just a few miles before the supposed end of the road.

The other important thing you need to know is that the driver was married to a woman named Barbara, who died just before the 60,000-mile road trip began; this may or may not be the route to the heart of the play. I think it is: that the driver's journey has to do with acceptance of loss and reconnection with love. But Sun, Stand Thou Still is so richly complex that other interpretations present themselves: perhaps the play's protagonist is really the hitchhiker, who might be some sort of condemned wanderer or even a grim reaper; or perhaps it's the apple woman, a siren roaming the world looking for peace. Your imagination and your intellect will probe these and other notions as you take this beautiful work in. The thought that lingers for me is something that the apple woman says when she fears she may have forgotten her secret apple-growing recipe—that nothing is worth anything unless it's shared with someone you love.

Spring Theatreworks has mounted Gridley's challenging, delicate play with great care. It's gracefully directed by Jacob Titus, and splendidly acted by Frank Shattuck, Nathan Stith, Erin Treadway, Stephen Douglas Wood, and David Wylie, all of whom invest the heightened absurdity of what's going on with the right amount of conviction—not so much that the thing feels precious, and not so little that it feels jokey. Shattuck is especially compelling as the blind driver, convincing us that though his sight is failing he can somehow still discern details that matter to him, like the odometer reading on his dashboard.

Sun, Stand Thou Still kept my companion and I talking and guessing for hours; its mysteries are tantalizing and stimulating, and as a result it's a play to cherish. Both Gridley and his company (he's the Literary Manager of Spring Theatreworks; Jeffrey Horne is the Artistic Director) have been on the NYC theatre scene for less than three years; they're off to a great start. I look forward to what they come up with next.