nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

Taboo is the most exciting, most interesting, and most invigorating new musical on Broadway this season.

Surprised? I was—oh so pleasantly. Taboo features an infectious pop-flavored score by Boy George (anchored by a pair of Culture Club hits from the '80s, "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" and "Karma Chameleon") and an eye-filling, mind-warping parade of over-the-top fabulous fashions (costumes by Mike Nicholls and Bobby Pearce, makeup and hair by Christine Bateman). It's got a cool retro/high-tech set by Tim Goodchild, choreography to match by Mark Dendy, and a terrific on-stage nine-man band. And it boasts the best-looking ensemble in town, headed by its seven riveting and magnetic leading players, including the still-stellar Boy George himself.

But the thing that I wasn't expecting—what hasn't gotten much play, if any, in the mainstream media—is the fact that there's a heart and a mind behind the music and the glitter. Taboo, which goes through some of the motions of a VH-1-style "Behind the Music" confessional, is in fact the exact opposite. It turns out that Boy George's life has been not only an eventful one but also an examined one: this show, touching and wise against the odds, is a thoughtful and heartfelt meditation on wanting the wrong things, on survival, on growing up. After a dizzyingly anarchic first act full of song, dance, and hedonistic frenzy and a quick, by-the-books account of downward spiral, Taboo finds its emotional center in the middle of its second act. We're hooked, and we stay that way through a finale that approaches genuine catharsis.

The story, which was conceived by Boy George and director Christopher Renshaw and is told in songs by Boy George and a book by Charles Busch adapted from an earlier version by Mark Davies, chronicles the lives of a group of colorful, self-invented artists and also-rans, in the midst of London's wild underground club scene in the early 1980s. In the eye of this maelstrom is Leigh Bowery, a flamboyant, almost Wildean figure who made his life his art and vice versa; he, the show's creators assert, was the authentic original among the "New Romantics" who, for a time, galvanized the city and the rest of the world with their outrageous, androgynous personas. Taboo is, among other things, a tribute to Bowery's genius (for living, if not for actual artistic endeavor), and it's appropriate that Boy George inhabits the role of Bowery in these proceedings.

Orbiting this brilliantly bright nova (so obviously destined to burn itself out) are a desperately super-cool wannabe named Philip Sallon and a plus-sized party girl named Big Sue who alternates between grounded self-assurance and undue self-doubt. These two float around the periphery of the London club scene and drift in and out of the show proper, serving as Taboo's self-appointed narrators. The show's savvy conceit is that its self-consciously subjective account constitutes truth, and it works: Boy George gets points for chutzpah, discretion, and profundity in shaping his legacy with such blatant intelligence.

Speaking of Boy George, he's in the mix as well, of course: we meet him, as Philip did, in a London telephone box, trying to figure out what to do after being thrown out by his flatmates. He's dressed from head to toe in blazing white, like a Roman goddess; Philip is impressed enough by his brazen ambition to give him a job. (Philip also claims to have given young George O'Dowd his stage name, and nobody disputes him, so who knows?) Soon Boy George has a new friend, a congenitally bitchy drag queen called Marilyn; and a boyfriend, a sexually ambivalent hunk named Marcus. And soon after that, he acquires a career, putting together a band called Culture Club and recording a couple of feel-good songs that become mammoth hits. (We get abridged versions of two of them at the first act finale: Boy George has arrived.)

What happens next is the stuff of cliché, but it's also historically accurate: Boy George rises and then falls, horribly—abandoned and betrayed by his lover, addicted to heroin, arrested. And Leigh Bowery hooks up with another of his ubiquitous hangers-on—a shrewd but passionate young woman named Nicola—whom he eventually marries, his homosexual proclivities notwithstanding; he also gets sick with AIDS and dies, but not before going out in a blaze of glory as a living exhibit at a posh London gallery. It would all feel cheap if it weren't so brutally honest, and particularly if it didn't occasion the evening's best writing, a succession of songs that collectively state Taboo's theme: "The Fame Game," "Petrified," "Out of Fashion," "Il Adore." Without even a hint of irony, the real Boy George—now middle-aged and on leave from his new career as a successful London DJ—oversees his younger stage self pronounce the lessons of his brief and now lapsed superstardom: the things we think we want aren't always the things we need. Fame is fleeting. Passion is life.

Euan Morton, from England, incarnates the young Boy George in Taboo with soul and authenticity in what should be a career-making Broadway debut. Raúl Esparza matches him moment for moment in a blisteringly intense star turn as Philip Sallon. Sarah Uriarte Berry (Nicola), Jeffrey Carlson (Marilyn), and Cary Shields (Marcus) are just as memorable and vivid (and each gets at least one moment to shine in the spotlight in this ensemble-driven piece); at the performance reviewed, understudy Brooke Elliott proved explosive and expressive as Big Sue. There's not a more dynamic or higher-energy cast on Broadway.

And there's not a show that's more inventive, colorful, quirky, or willing to take risks as this one. One of the things I love about Taboo—maybe the thing I love most—is that it marches to its own rhythm; Broadway traditions, current theatrical fashion, and even its own structural flaws be damned. Whether interrupting itself—as it does repeatedly in Act One—with sarcastic asides or even, at one point, with a wholly surreal fantasy sequence in the middle of a posh London department store; or stopping cold for an anthem to pride, gay and otherwise, that is also a solemn reminder of the still-unresolved plague called AIDS; Taboo's heart never ventures far from its sleeve. But its tongue—even in campy old Clubland—never gets anywhere near its cheek.

So it's easy to forgive the imperfections—and there aren't all that many, anyway—and it's imperative to honor the sheer originality of what is, after all, a paean to self-invention and originality. Taboo is the musical that says what it wants and means what it says, and does so in a barrage of style and attitude that Broadway has never seen anything quite like.

Tales of Unrest is a program of two short plays adapted from stories by Joseph Conrad. What the pieces have in common, apart from their original authorship, is the theme of sons leaving their fathers: in Arsat, which is based on "The Lagoon," an Englishman is dispatched by his father to Malaysia to oversee some rubber plantations; while in One Day More (from "To-Morrow") a son flees his English home to explore the world at sea.

But the startling contrasts between the two pieces are what make the evening compelling. Arsat, produced by Fluid Motion Theater & Film, and adapted and directed by Christine Simpson, uses Asian drumming, choreography, and flashbacks to tell what happens on the last night that the British boss spends in Malaysia; it's not his story but Arsat's, the native who reluctantly turned his back on his people to form a lopsided alliance with the colonizing Brit. Simpson is sparing with both light and words as she recounts Arsat's sad tale in a blend of familiar and unfamiliar theatre styles; the tragic compromise that he made long ago moves us, but at a remove, because the storytelling here is so detached and abstract.

One Day More, on the other hand, grabs at our emotions right from the start and never lets go. Directed by Jonathan Bank, it tells the story of Bessie, a young English woman who lives with her blind, demanding, difficult father. Her life revolves around him, except for her occasional escapes next door to visit with Captain Hagberd, a tough but fading old man who is obsessed with the notion that his son Harry—who ran away from home years ago—will return tomorrow. Hagberd has all sorts of elaborate plans for his prodigal's return, not least of which is the promise that Bessie, who is the only person in town with any patience for Hagberd's lunacy, will become his wife.

As long as Harry's return is always tomorrow, both Hagberd and Bessie can survive in a state of perpetual anticipation. But Harry turns up today, and of course things can never be the same. Bank and his actors—especially Maile Holck as Bessie—capture the emotional turmoil, making One Day More by turns funny, sad, pathetic, and ultimately blisteringly tragic. Coming at us immediately after its stylistic opposite Arsat, its impact registers even more strongly: One Day More allows us the release that Arsat denies us.

So this is a fascinating evening of theatre: National Asian American Theatre Company (who produced One Day More) and Fluid Motion Theater & Film (producer of Arsat) are to be commended for joining forces and giving theatregoers such an unusual and ambitious double-bill. Special note must be taken of John Ko and Wynn Yamami, the drummers who provide the evocative percussion score for Arsat; and to the fine actor Jojo Gonzalez, who doubles as the title character of Arsat and the mad Captain in One Day More.

That Day in September is of course the 11th, in 2001; and even though everyone remembers it, surely the stories of those who were at or near the World Trade Center when the planes hit carry some special weight. Artie Van Why is one of those people, and his one-man show—a cathartic reminiscence mostly about his own grieving and healing process—reminds us, even as the events of that day seem to slip further out of focus for so many, why we must never forget 9/11.

Van Why worked just a block or two away from the World Trade Center; his company, a law firm where he was a word processor, had just moved to the Financial District after many years in midtown Manhattan. He describes having his coffee at the broad plaza outside the North Tower on that gorgeous late summer morning, and then, at his office, hearing a loud noise and feeling a surprising thump! that he says felt like a dumpster dropping onto the floor above. Information came quickly, and Van Why and several officemates piled into an elevator to confirm for themselves what had happened.

What they saw—what he saw—is something no one should ever have to see. The greater part of That Day in September is given over to Van Why's description of images from what he abstractly dubs the "war zone." He conveys the conflicting feelings of fear and awe and confusion and helplessness as he recounts, deftly, the few minutes between the time he saw the gaping, flaming hole in the North Tower and his realization, on his way home and already half a mile away, that the South Tower had fallen. Because the images of that morning are still engrained in our consciousness, we see everything Van Why describes clearly. But our view is now from the ground, zoomed-in and close-up and way too graphic for comfort.

Van Why's recollections of his return to work, some two months after 9/11, are similarly vivid: the smell of the fire that wouldn't go out for months, the streets filled with barricades and police and heavily armed soldiers, the ghostly burnt-out shells of the Trade Center buildings' remains. It cost him a lot to come back to Ground Zero, and I imagine it costs him something every time he recalls it in his show. That Day in September balances painful memories with a difficult healing process that encompassed a major life change for Van Why, who quit his job in November 2001 and has now returned to the career in theatre he had forsaken nearly two decades before.

What's missing is a sense of any larger perspective. Our city, our country, and our world are all very different after 9/11, but whatever lessons the terrorist attacks may have taught Van Why beyond the visceral one to live clearly in each moment are not discussed here. This makes That Day in September narrower than it might be, and less emotionally affecting as well, so claustrophobically singular is its focus.

Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, Van Why's is a story worth telling, and he tells it with passion and conviction. By relating his experiences night after night to rooms full of strangers, Van Why is making a difference in his own life and probably many others. At least he's working hard to make sure that that day in September won't be forgotten.

In The Attic, the new drama by Stephen Gaydos, Michael Szeles and Josh Heine play a pair of brothers, 32-year-old Bobby and 17-year-old Chris. Bobby has been in New York for the last ten years, where he supposedly has become a big shot on Wall Street and lives in a fancy midtown apartment. Chris is in the pangs of adolescence, has a presumed crush on his schoolmate Kate and is dangerously hero-worshipful of the long-absent Bobby. (Their father has been gone for some unspecified amount of time.)

Szeles and Heine instantly convince us that they're brothers—their chemistry is that on the money; they also make it clear that the sentimental views that Bobby and Chris have of one another are skewed inordinately. The Attic takes place in October 2001 in the small town of Somerset, Pennsylvania, not far from where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed. Bobby, drawn to come home for reasons he doesn't fully understand or acknowledge, arrives with literal baggage in hand and plenty of metaphorical baggage in tow; Chris, meanwhile,  has reacted to recent events by stocking up on supplies (including a prominently displayed gas mask) and keeping a loaded pistol in his bureau. He says he's going to dig a moat around the house and mine the surrounding hillside. There's denial and pain and tension aplenty in this household, and Szeles and Heine make it palpable and terrible as the play progresses.

Chris' 9/11 fixation is only the superficial manifestation of what's going on inside his head, however. As playwright Gaydos drills deeper and deeper through the layers of his protagonists' desperation, we realize that Chris has a crush on Bobby's ex-girlfriend Meg, that this crush has a sadomasochistic element that is both attractive and scary to him, and that underlying the crush and much else in his makeup are seriously unresolved feelings about Bobby. And we discover that Bobby has been lying to his family and himself about a whole bunch of stuff, not least of which are his own feelings about Meg and Chris. Meg is actually around during the events of The Attic, allowing both brothers to act on their impulses toward her, and ultimately catalyzing their relations with one another and their immediate futures.

It's a full, full plate: The Attic positively brims with material, from post-9/11 trauma to fraternal rivalry to the hows and whys of domestic abuse.  Indeed, Gaydos' play is perhaps too much like life for its good: it's all chaos and entropy—nothing gets explored as fully as we would like. Szeles and Heine—and, to a lesser extent, Meg Howrey as Meg—build compelling characterizations that provide a kind of dramatic engine for a piece that's been calibrated to overwhelm rather than enlarge. The Attic's path is toward apocalypse, not catharsis: uneasy viewing, this.

It's staged, by the way, with great precision by Paul Zablocki on a terrific set by Chris R. Jones. There are no easy answers to be found here—hardly any answers at all, in fact; but theatre seldom gets as raw and unsettling as this.

The Beard of Avon riffs on the idea implicit in its title, namely, that Shakespeare didn't write all those great plays but instead functioned as a front for various noblemen and women who couldn't risk attaching their own more famous names to so vulgar a pastime as writing for the stage. Playwright Amy Freed presents "Will Shakespere" as a dreamily imaginative but undereducated bumpkin who aspires to write as beautifully as his first "partner," Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford. She later has Will challenging his betters, so to speak, by serving as Neil Simon-esque play doctor and eventually principal writer; she also has him become "beard" to a host of other luminaries, including Sir Francis Bacon and Queen Elizabeth I herself.

There's no particular point to any of this, other than to have some fun; and The Beard of Avon is fun, fitfully, though not terribly original or interesting. Freed sustains two overlong acts by milking a variety of gimmicks, such as having Will and his wife, Anne, actually say (as dialogue) lines that come from the canon; or having Anne actually dress up as a man (à la Portia or Rosalind) to get her husband to prove his devotion to her; or transcribing modern-day idioms into Elizabethan language (e.g., the Queen tells Shakespeare "thou art in water most enormously hot"). And Beard abounds with theatrical in-jokes (as when Shakespeare's boss, director John Hemminge, leads his ragtag actors in a very contemporary "warm-up").

It also flirts, oddly, with what we today call homosexual love, giving Oxford an effeminate but apparently devoted boyfriend named Henry and suggesting that Will has feelings of a sexual nature for Oxford as well. These plot points turn out to be digressions at best, red herrings at worst: Beard wants only to make its audience laugh, with the gag-a-minute desperation of a lesser Mel Brooks comedy.

The stuff that lands does so thanks to some expert playing by Mary Louise Wilson (Elizabeth), Tim Blake Nelson (Will), Justin Schultz (in several roles), and especially David Schramm and Alan Mandell (as Heminge and his co-director, Henry Condel). Mark Harelik overplays badly as Oxford, while Jeff Whitty is entirely out of his depth as the fluttery young boyfriend. The staging, by Doug Hughes, is uncharacteristically   scattershot, failing to maintain focus or a consistent style while encouraging an anarchic ambiance that, though amiable, undercuts what sharpness there is in Freed's writing. Neil Patel's sets are ingenious, but Catherine Zuber's costumes are likewise uneven, particularly Whitty's ensemble, which looks like it was turned down by Gypsy's burlesque queens as being too tacky.

Václav Havel has achieved a level of popularity closer to that of  an aging rock star than a playwright or politician. But that reputation blinds many Western producers to his shortcomings. The Invisible City Theatre Company, in their excitement to produce an American premiere of a work by Havel, seems to have mounted The Beggar’s Opera more because of Havel’s reputation than because of what the play might say.

The original play, John Gay’s 18th-century satire that still bites, snarls at government corruption while playfully poking at the grandiosity of opera. Like Brecht’s famous rewrite (The Threepenny Opera), Havel’s version takes the original work’s subversions to new political extremes. He refocuses the play’s critique from London capitalism to Soviet communism, commenting on the erosion of personal choice under totalitarian rule. (Strangely, he keeps Gay’s title, even though he’s removed both the beggars and the music.)

His new Beggar’s Opera, set in the 1930s of old Hollywood gangster movies, is all about self-interest and the survival instinct. Everybody is a criminal, insofar as everybody not only commits crimes but betrays their loves, their families, and even themselves. Treachery is the coin of the realm, and as somebody shrugs, “Nothing is the way you think it is. It’s worse.” The head of the underworld, Peachum, is also a stoolie for the fascist police commissioner. And the only honest man goes to the gallows in an empty display of integrity—not the antihero Macheath, as Gay wrote it, but a minor pickpocket. Macheath settles for the compromise of a criminal/informant.

Like his friend and sometime translator Tom Stoppard, Havel can be overformal, with relying heavily on dramatic mechanisms. When the show gets too pious about liberty, the viewer might want to jump onstage to shake things up. But the cast looks like they’re having such a good time that the show’s politics play second fiddle to its farce. Playing against Richard Cerullo’s set, made up blue-and-green to resemble a Magritte background, they play roles rather than human beings. Two older actors stand out from the youngish ensemble, Gerry Lehane as Lockit the commissioner and Sean Dill as Peachum the crime boss. When these two undermine each others’ nefarious plans, the stage crackles with the charge of duplicity. David Lawrence Epstein, as Macheath, is less interesting, mugging like Jim Carrey and lacking the erotic allure that defines his character. The ensemble (and especially the gaggle of whores) slouches around like children dressed up in costumes, a sly visualization of Havel’s view of people as innocent and unreflective dupes of power.

For all its entertainment, though—and Jonathan Silver’s production is frequently hilarious—this Beggar’s Opera doesn’t fit with today’s world. Havel’s warning his audience about the dangers of compromise and totalitarianism; Silver might’ve drawn parallels between Soviet Czechoslovakia and the authoritarian goals of Ashcroft or Ridge, but instead, he coasts by on Havel’s topsy-turvy absurdism. Havel’s fun carries the play along through the evening, but this work’s definitely diminished without his politics.

The Belle's Stratagem hasn't been seen in New York for about a hundred years, and the current revival by Prospect Theater Company makes it clear why. This comedy of manners by Hannah Cowley from 1780 is diverting, I guess; but it sure doesn't have the stuff of greatness. It got lost to history for the same reason that a play like Anniversary Waltz (a big hit in 1954) did, simply outclassed by its contemporaries.

Cowley's contemporaries were Goldsmith and Sheridan, and their influence on her is evident. In fact, the one reason that The Belle's Stratagem might be of interest today is its derivativeness: Snake and Lady Teazle from The School for Scandal are appropriated here as characters named Flutter and Mrs. Racket; the eponymous stratagem is an absurd but nevertheless identifiable variant of the one employed by Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. Cowley even reaches further back, to Wycherly, with a key subplot more than a little reminiscent of The Country Wife.

Unfortunately, the brilliant wit that makes these other plays so enduring is missing from The Belle's Stratagem: there's not a single hearty laugh in the thing.  I suspect, by the way, that there were lots of laughs two centuries ago: topical references seem to abound in the script, and I'm sure savvy Londoners enjoyed them the way savvy New Yorkers enjoyed, say, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife's myriad allusions.

But that was then and this is now, and so director Davis McCallum hasn't much to work with, save a fairly lame plot to trick a young gentleman named Doricourt into fulfilling his marriage contract with Letitia Hardy (Rivals-style, this trick includes Letitia wooing him as a mysterious masked lady). Doricoult's friend Sir George Touchwood is preternaturally possessive of his young, beautiful, and naive wife Frances (shades of Faulkland, again from The Rivals), occasioning a gentle come-uppance for that gentleman as well. Absent incisive and/or hilarious observations about their predilection for folly, the characters of The Belle's Stratagem feel merely foolish, and their shenanigans become tiresome very quickly. McCallum hasn't found a single stratagem of his own to liven things up.

The cast, as a result, seems mostly at sea here, with the exception of Kate MacKenzie, who gets the guilelessly sweet-natured Lady Frances exactly right, I think; Christian Roulleau, as an assortment of valets and the occasional barkeep, holds up his end quite nicely, as well. Naomi Wolff's costumes have a thrown-together look and are frequently unattractive; Mimi Lien's elaborate set design, based on mirrors and doors, proves ponderous rather than illuminating. All in all, a strained evening that fails to make a case for reviving a piece that has, apparently deservedly, fallen by the wayside.

My favorite moment in The Boy from Oz comes midway in the second act, when Beth Fowler as Peter Allen's mother sings a short reprise of "Everything Old is New Again." She has just revealed that she has a new man in her life, much to her son's surprise, and then she startles him and us even more by cutting loose, albeit briefly—even forming an impromptu kick line with Peter's boyfriend and manager. Delightful!—and the only time in this 2-1/2 hour show that something happens that feels natural or authentically joyful.

The other 145 minutes are, in sad contrast, cold, hollow, and plastic. It's not that The Boy from Oz is unentertaining—it's diverting, as far as it goes, and it certainly benefits from Hugh Jackman in the title role, the hardest-working man on Broadway at the moment, delivering a professional and proficient performance in a nearly non-stop role that requires him to participate in no fewer than 20 of the show's 27 musical numbers.

But for all the singing and dancing and would-be razzmatazz, Jackman is stuck in a role that is just about the most passive leading character in a musical comedy that I've ever come across. In Act One, young Peter Allen forms a teenage music duo with pal Chris Bell (we are told in passing) and then, in Hong Kong, meets Judy Garland, who engineers his Big Break by bringing him with her to New York as her opening act. Her daughter, Liza Minnelli, quickly falls in love with Peter and they marry, and she becomes a big star. Judy dies of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, the drag queens at Stonewall start a riot the day of her funeral, and Liza leaves Peter after she realizes that a marriage to a gay man isn't going to work out.

In Act Two, Peter falls in love with an advertising guy named Greg who quickly takes charge of many of the technical aspects of Peter's act, and with newly-hired manager Dee Anthony engineers successful engagements for Peter at the Copacabana, Radio City Music Hall, and on Broadway. Greg gets sick with AIDS and dies; Peter gets sick and Liza returns after lo these many years to encourage him to go out fighting. He expires in a gawdy production number built around the biggest Allen hit, "I Go to Rio."

As I hope this synopsis makes clear, though Jackman does in fact perform a whole mess of songs in The Boy from Oz, he's not called upon to play much of a character: I might have enjoyed the show better if it had been a musical revue instead of the stick-figure show-bizzy bio-from-the sidelines that we get here. All we ever find out about our ostensible protagonist is that he wrote songs, loved to perform, and was gay. This final point, by the way, becomes almost defining; librettist Martin Sherman—who ought to know better—presents Allen's homosexuality through a very contemporary prism that distorts how he was viewed by his 1970s audiences.

Sherman also panders by providing foolish one-dimensional characterizations of Liza and Judy, who—both being much more famous than Peter Allen ever was—dominate The Boy from Oz's book in much the same way that they overshadowed his actual early career. Sherman gives us the standard-issue Crazy Judy, Later Years—coarse, self-deprecating, demanding, and moody. Isabel Keating musters the shaky walk and all the manic mannerisms with the aplomb of the most skillful female impersonator, but she can't sing like Garland (so few of us can) and her performance lands somewhere between caricature and mockery.

Liza—played mostly with respectful restraint by Stephanie J. Block—grows from innocent waif to assured powerhouse (i.e., from The Sterile Cuckoo to Liza with a Z). Costume designer William Ivey Long has a blast recreating signature creations for Judy and Liza, by the way: I loved seeing Judy lounging on Liza's sofa in her black pedal-pushers and stiletto heels, and I loved even more seeing Liza invade Peter's apartment in a purple Halston-esque pants suit. But, such images notwithstanding, The Boy from Oz is resolutely NOT camp. It's schmaltz—and if you don't believe me, then you explain why it ends with (a) the dead Greg singing "I Honestly Love You" to Peter; (b) Peter's Mum, in a flashback, singing the family credo "Don't Cry Out Loud," and finally (c) Peter himself, as emotional as he ever gets, performing "Once Before I Go."

If only the songs were actually ever about anything; if only the show's creators weren't so obviously defeated by their lackluster and/or unappetizing central character—well, then perhaps The Boy from Oz might have had the capacity to touch the human heart.

Don't get me wrong: as big-budget Broadway musicals go, this one is far from a disaster and far from the worst I've ever seen. Thanks almost entirely to Jackman, it's ingratiating and often fun. But he deserves far better than this, and so do we.

By any measure, Alexander Harrington's The Brothers Karamazov Part II is an extraordinary theatrical achievement. It's enormous: three sprawling acts in some 38 scenes (plus a prologue); twenty actors playing nearly five dozen characters; a running time of nearly 4-1/2 hours. It's audacious: one of the world's most famous novels, after all, is being tackled here, with a plot large and complicated enough for several TV mini-series; serious issues such as the nature and existence of God are contemplated, at length and in depth. And it's spectacular, at least by off-off-Broadway standards, with as many as five or six scenes laid out in the deep but intimate La MaMa Annex space at any given moment, depicting murders, funerals, and cityscapes, not to mention the most thrillingly and vividly staged courtroom scene I've ever seen in a theatre.

It is, in short, a dazzling, unforgettable, entirely captivating dramatic experience, one that lovers of theatre should not miss, its daunting length notwithstanding. Yes, Karamazov is demanding—of both actors and audience; but aren't the things really worth doing the ones that engage our energies most?

I came to The Brothers Karamazov a complete innocent, never having read the book in my misspent past, and (to my regret, now) having missed Part I when it was produced nearly a year ago. No matter: Harrington and company bring us up to speed in short order, first with a long but useful synopsis of the story so far in the program, and then, gratifyingly, with a ten-minute prologue that not only covers the same ground but also helpfully introduces us to all of the story's main players. Harrington borrows from David Edgar, Trevor Nunn and John Caird's Nicholas Nickleby here, having his actors speak, in character, the narration for each role they take. It's brilliantly effective in preparing us for the breathtaking, breakneck storytelling to come.

For this is quite a story! In Act One we follow the oldest of the Karamazov Brothers, Dmitry, through an amazing two days during which he travels through his village trying to raise 3,000 rubles (which he needs to pay a debt to Katerina, the woman who is devotedly in love with him, having squandered money she entrusted to him a month ago on Grushenka, the woman he loves). Eventually Dmitry arrives at his father's house, where he accidentally wounds a servant with a brass pestle; he then follows Grushenka to the nearby town of Mokroye, where she has apparently eloped with a Polish army officer who was her first lover; here, after Dmitry recklessly gambles away some of his money, Grushenka realizes that she loves him and him alone. (There's also an interlude in which a band of gypsies turns up to sing and dance!) Just as Dmitry and Grushenka begin to plan their life together, a magistrate arrives, charging Dmitry with the murder of his father earlier that night.

 A life—as Lady Bracknell once observed under different circumstances—crowded with incident. There's absolutely a soap opera quality to the proceedings, and Harrington's unabashed by it: the story just keeps spinning on and on, dense and complicated and strange, as compelling as life itself.

In the second act, we spend time with Dmitry's younger half-brothers. Ivan, the elder of the two, is a sometime writer and philosopher who has become consumed by guilt, believing that his own pronouncement (in Part I, "If there is no God, everything is permitted") has somehow led to his father's murder. Alexei, the younger brother, pursues his spiritual calling by tending to the dying son of one of his father's servants, while also striving to save Dmitry from conviction and Ivan from himself. Dmitry's trial takes up most of the final act, bringing the evening to a riveting and then rousing conclusion.

Harrington touches upon the big themes that concerned Dostoyevsky, especially the question of the existence of God and the implications of any answer to that question; there's a finely wrought dream sequence in the second act in which Ivan converses with the Devil and considers the concepts of faith, morality, and freedom. We get caught up in both the storytelling and the philosophy.

Harrington's adaptation and direction represent theatre artistry at its finest; miraculously mounted on an off-off-Broadway budget, it relies on the audience's imagination where production values falter, and on the sheer sweep of its director's prodigious ingenuity for the rest. The design, by Rebecca J. Bernstein (costumes) and Tony Penna (sets and lighting), is simple but wondrously vivid; music, selected and performed by Tamara Volskaya and Anatoly Trofimov, is splendidly evocative (though often opposite in temperament to the action).

The actors do outstanding work, with especially vivid portrayals turned in by Stafford Clark-Price as Ivan, Christopher Pollard Meyer as Alexei, Jim Iseman III as the servant Smerdyakov, Margo Skinner as a rich widow named Madame Khokhalakova, George Morafetis as a penniless old man called Maximov, Antony Cataldo as a curious youth named Kolya, and Steven L. Barron and J.M. McDonnough as the opposing lawyers at Dmitry's trial. (Know that though I single these folks out, everyone in the company is to be commended for the energy and variety of their performances.)

In a sane world, this show would be running on Broadway. It's not; there are eight more performances at La MaMa and then, that will be that, at least for now. I advise you not to wait until sanity manages to take hold: if you love theatre, you owe yourself a rich, rewarding, and—yes—long evening with Alexander Harrington's The Brothers Karamazov.

I've only seen recent Pinter; so I was especially interested in Roundabout's production of The Caretaker this season to get a look at one of the early famous works, on stage. I was not disappointed.

The Caretaker takes place in a large room in a house in London. Most of the house is unoccupied and boarded up. In a fairly neat segment of this room are a bed, a wardrobe, and a few shelves—accoutrements of the spare life of a man named Aston whom we meet shortly after the play begins. For reasons that are partially revealed later on, Aston is eccentric and a bit out-of-step with what we would call normal human endeavor, and this room which is his only home reflects this, for apart from this one orderly corner, the place is filled with junk: old furniture, knickknacks, machines; a toaster with a broken plug that Aston fiddles with; a dirty, once-golden statue of Buddha looking out over the mess from its position atop a useless old gas stove.

Into this muddle, Aston brings an old man who says his name is Jenkins (though he'll admit later that his real name is Davies), a rootless and rotting old reprobate with a gift for gab and a highly developed survival instinct. Aston has apparently felt sorry for this fellow, finding him on the receiving end of some blows at a nearby shop; and so he's brought him in for some warmth and, as he reveals later on, temporary shelter. Indeed, Aston asks Davies to stay on as caretaker in this rambling old house, which we learn belonged to his parents and is now his to fix up for himself and his brother.

The fixing, which is Aston's only job, is moving along with painful slowness: Aston has trouble settling in to any sort of actual work. But, he assures Davies, as soon as he gets a shed erected in the backyard, he'll be able to clear out this room and make it really comfortable.

Davies gets a somewhat different picture of things from Mick, Aston's brother, who drops by from time to time. Mick has a job and other responsibilities, but he owns the house and he cares for his brother; bullying Davies (perhaps in hopes of getting Davies to bully Aston), he too signs the old man on as caretaker. And the old man is only to happy to play one brother against the other to secure his own future.

Pinter's plot, which is revealed as much between the lines as through them, cannily grabs our attention and holds it; every scene seems to contain an unexpected explosion along with the profusion of eloquent silences and speeches that we do expect. It's a grand story, and against the odds, too, since very little actually happens in it—much of our information comes from inference or intuition. (The brothers' names are never actually spoken at all.) It's also very funny; and, often, discomfiting.

It's rich, rewarding theatre. My companion saw in it a sad meditation on our inability to connect—with each other (the characters never really hear one another) and with ourselves (they never accomplish anything either; certainly not what they say they intend). I read it as a play about power, perhaps reflecting the state of the world in the late '50s, when it was written, with old Davies representing the decaying impotence of the British Empire and Aston standing in for the alienated impotence of the Angry Young Man. You will likely discover something else: good drama like this challenges us to coax our own obsessions and concerns from its web of universal truths. The Caretaker is very good drama, indeed.

And the Roundabout has done a highly commendable job of putting it on. Director David Jones' pacing may be a bit slack, but our interest never flags and the characters and themes emerge with clarity amid Pinter's deliberately murky device. John Lee Beatty works his usual wonders with the remarkably detailed set, while Jane Greenwood's costumes and Peter Kaczorowski's lighting contribute mightily to the ambiance of the piece. The play is performed beautifully by its fine cast of three: Patrick Stewart, stagy and rangy as the cantankerous and manipulative Davies; Kyle MacLachlan, careful and sympathetic as plodding Aston; and Aiden Gillen, mercurial and enigmatic as the sometimes dangerous, sometimes tame Mick (his performance brings to mind John Malkovich's similarly combustible Pale in the original Burn This).

I am quite glad to have seen this Caretaker, because I think that having done so, I have now seen The Caretaker. Particularly if you're a novice Pinter spectator, I recommend this production highly.

Terese Hayden's production of The Chalk Garden wasn't in the best of shape the night I saw it (the second public performance)—actors missed cues and seemed to have trouble with the props; and the pacing overall was slow, painfully so at times, reflecting what felt like general discomfort with a script not yet quite learned.

But I can't hold any of this against Hayden and her colleagues, for whom the work is so obviously a labor of love and the commitment so evidently total and wholehearted. Hayden and her informal stock company of actors, led by the formidable Jacqueline Brookes, collectively have so much experience and intelligence that even when not at their best they're worth watching: we can't help learning something from them, and we're constantly aware that the younger actors working alongside them are learning even more. Hayden's been working off- and off-off-Broadway for more than fifty years now and shows no sign of quitting. We can't quit her.

Nor should we, for as I said even under less than perfect circumstances she and her gang can't help but make compelling theatre. Better yet, they make it around plays we don't get to see very often, as in the present instance of Enid Bagnold's 1955 comedy/drama/mystery. It turns out that The Chalk Garden is a quirky, interesting piece about a fading aristocrat named Mrs. St. Maugham, about whom the nice thing to say is that she's eccentric; her granddaughter Laurel, who at sixteen still hasn't gotten over her mother's remarriage four years prior and stubbornly stays with her grandmother and mimics, in her own way, that lady's eccentricity; and a mysterious woman called Miss Madrigal who applies for the job of Laurel's companion and ends up transforming the household, a literal breath of fresh air in a place so stagnant that nothing can grow in it, inside or out.

Bagnold's work here is nothing if not unconventional, with the first act structured like a languid, odd drawing room comedy and the second act, rather startlingly, a suspense thriller as Miss Madrigal's uncharted past becomes an object of curiosity for Laurel and the audience. Act Three manages a tidy conclusion. Bagnold's contrivances—the on-cue entrances of Laurel's absent mother; the foreboding arrival of a Judge—make the play creak a bit more than we'd like, but The Chalk Garden nonetheless satisfies.

A young actress named Robin Long makes her New York debut as Laurel, and she's a major find: beautiful, self-possessed, and fully in command of her difficult, mercurial character. Long deserves to be seen on other stages soon, and often; her performance all by itself makes this production worthwhile.

Elizabeth Nafpaktitis does able work as the enigmatic Miss Madrigal; her scenes with Long are the highlights of the evening. The rest of the company are still finding their bearings, I think. Brookes, watchable as ever, may be too grounded to capture the flighty old bird that is Mrs. St. Maugham.

By the time The City reaches its sensational climax, George Rand, Jr., the rich and successful businessman who is its hero, has gotten embroiled in a murder, a case of incest, a family marital scandal, and a web of shady and probably illegal business dealings, all converging to bring him down on the very day that he's been nominated for the governorship of New York. Now if George were alive today, in the face of such certain ruination, he'd write a book and then sell the rights to TV.  But George is a creature of his own time, a century ago, or at least of the rigid morality that prevailed in public a century ago, in the theatre of Clyde Fitch, who invented George when he wrote The City. And so the play ends not with cynical ambiguity but with reassuring absolutism: the bad people get punished, and the good people expiate their sins and prosper (spiritually, at least).

Such is the value of a play like The City, and the fine work done by Metropolitan Playhouse, letting us see where we came from so that we may better understand where we are now and how we got here. The City is a fascinator: written just before World War I exploded thinking people's ideas about how the so-called civilized world was supposed to work, it went out of fashion almost immediately and never really received a second look. But notwithstanding its staunchly old-fashioned values, it's a modern play for 1909: It marked the first time that "goddamn" was uttered on an American stage; more importantly, in a culture steeped since the time of Jefferson in the innate superiority of the utopian rural ideal, The City offered a firm defense of urban life. Fitch makes it clear that his characters are pure or wicked all on their own: it's not the city that makes them that way.

A word, now, about those characters, who are well-drawn and compelling. At the play's center is George Rand, the son and heir of a banking entrepreneur from upstate New York. The elder Rand was, we learn, something of a low-end robber baron. George insists, after his father dies early in the play, on moving the family to New York and expanding both his business and his influence, until in Act II he's on the verge of that gubernatorial nomination I mentioned earlier. The other Rands are behind him 100%, from his mother who yearns to leave the stultifying small town life to his elder sister Tess, who marries (disastrously, it turns out) a fast-talking sharpie, to younger sister Cicely, naive and eager and, it develops, in love with the very dangerous Fred Hannock.

Hannock is George's confidential secretary; before that, he was a small-time hoodlum who was blackmailing the senior Rand. We understand quickly that Hannock is Rand's illegitimate son; his proximity has made him party to the business excesses of both father and son. He's a drug addict to boot (why not?; remember, the evil people are REALLY evil in Clyde Fitch's world). Somewhat improbably, Hannock doesn't know that Rand was his father, which enables the incest angle to become the fabulous, shocking driver of the play's climax.

It's all enormously watchable, as well as—see above—thoroughly instructive: we can learn so much about the American character of today through the prism of popular American drama of 1909. The Metropolitan has done the piece well, with a fine ensemble led by Michael Hardart (stalwart if perhaps a bit too modern as George, Jr.) and Andrew Firda (splendidly, understatedly rotten as Hannock). Ruthanne Gereghty has some wonderful moments conveying the intransigence and hypocrisy of Mrs. Rand; there's fine work, too, from Patrick J. Curley as the Rands' butler Foot and Annette Previti as George's long-suffering, very nearly too-good-to-be-true love interest, Eleanor Vorhees.

The production is not without its problems, the only really important one being the odd butchering that seems to have been done to the play's first act, which here has been rearranged and shorn of much helpful exposition. I suspect that the objective was simply to make the play shorter; but the results are jarring and sometimes confusing, disturbing both the play's linear chronology and unwaveringly straightforward narrative structure.

But once we arrive in Act Two—which comes quickly here, thanks to all the cuts—we are firmly in Fitch's capable hands, and The City starts to work its particular magic. We feel reassured and probably a little bit superior that we no longer live in a world of moral absolutism. And yet, lingering in Fitch's world for these couple hours makes our contemporary superiority feel that much less certain: a ha!—Fitch can still shake up an audience, even today.

Inside the program is a cartoon highlighting the title of this play. In bold letters, is written the word “DICK.” The letter “I” is drawn as an erect penis (testicles included) that is emitting a cloudy substance (read “semen”). Inside this substance are revealed the words “The Coming of….” Is this in bad taste? Hmm… that depends on your level of tolerance. Is it infantile? Well… personally, I think so. If nothing else, it is a clear sign that playwright Marc Morales has diminished the potential of his play to an adolescent obsession with the male orgasm.

Morales' play centers around the character Richard Long (“Dick Long”), a screenwriter struggling to get his latest script produced. Through the financial assistance of his ex-mobster-turned-TV-clown  uncle, he gets the needed $$$ to make his film. The only problem is that the uncle wants the nephew to turn the script into a porn film—which the nephew reluctantly concedes to do insisting that he will make a “porno with a moral.” Long enlists his friend Anthony to serve as cameraman. Together, they head off to conquer the film industry—a porn equivalent to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Hollywood (read “excellent”) adventure.

They encounter a cast of stock characters that includes Big Dick Sanchez, Reverend Todd, Nora Screammore, Glen Bang, a closeted porn star named Sara, a production manager named Tina, and an overzealous fluffer named Carmen. Long and Anthony dive headlong into auditioning and shooting their film. From here to the end, Morales attempts a farcical sendoff that includes Long’s continued struggle with the integrity of his original script, a romance between Long and Sara, and a multitude of mishaps that snowball things out of Long’s control. In spite of all the trials and tribulations of making porn, Long ultimately rises above the explosion of filming blunders, reconciles his conflicted struggles as a writer, and finds his truth in the arms of Sara.

Morales is a writer with promise, but The Coming of Dick is an under-realized example of his potential. His dialogue is superficial and uncomplicated with its references to such topics as Dawson’s Creek, The Lord of the Rings, Joanie and Chachi, and Prince and Sheena Easton. Dick/Dickey Long’s moral dilemma is not fully developed, so the “play with a moral” is convoluted. I was confused—is Morales writing a play about making a porn film, or is he dealing with the larger issues of friendship, love, and actualizing dreams? Either story is worthy of exploration—but in its current state, The Coming of Dick merely skims the surface of both possibilities. I would love to see further development—for Morales to write a broader piece of ridiculous camp, or to center more deeply (and realistically) on Long’s moral dilemma. As it stands, The Coming of Dick is simply a frivolous and unimpressive experience in the theatre.

A note to the sound operator—pull back on the volume. On the evening that I saw this production, the vibration of the speakers distorted the majority of the sound design. This was unfortunate, because I enjoyed Morales’ inclusion of several voice-overs and his musical transitions (which included several of Rick Springfield’s greatest hits). Unfortunately I was unable to understand the play's final voice-over, so I’m uncertain of Morales’ final statement.

In one of those weird juxtapositions that makes coincidence feel like zeitgeist instead of something more random, I happened to see Eduardo Machado's new play The Cook during the same weekend that I saw Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change. At the center of both of these otherwise very different works is a relationship between master and servant that has been badly misunderstood by one of the parties, with cataclysmic results. Though Kushner uses this notion to somewhat interesting effect, it is Machado who really plumbs the depths of this universal human tragedy. The Cook is a moving, compellingly dramatic account of the ways that large impersonal notions and events like political ideology and revolution actually make themselves felt on individual people's lives.

The play begins on New Year's Eve, 1958, in a mansion in La Habana, Cuba. Outside, Castro's army is marching into the capital city, preparing to oust the dictator Batista and install their new, presumably populist regime. Inside, the rich and powerful are indulging themselves in a grand party. We observe the goings-on from the kitchen, where Gladys, the cook, is trying to figure out how to make Baked Alaska for 70 without melting the ice cream, and Carlos, the family's chauffeur and also Gladys' husband, teases gently about the coming revolution and what it will mean to working stiffs like them. In between, the lady of the house, Adria, jokes with Gladys about the recipes, frets mildly about her still-absent husband (it's getting close to midnight), and suggests—decadently, forebodingly—that they set the clocks back an hour to delay the coming of both the Baked Alaska and the New Year.

Gladys has worked in this house for all of her adult life; she and Adria have what feels like a warm, easy rapport. Adria even tells her, meaningfully, that if Gladys weren't her servant, they probably could be friends.

This turns out to be very important: much more so than Adria thinks when she offhandedly says it. Near the end of The Cook's first scene, Adria suddenly bursts into the kitchen with the news that she and her family are fleeing Cuba—right now, this minute—because Castro's forces are on the way in and Batista and the aristocrats must necessarily therefore clear out. She gives Gladys seven hundred American dollars and asks her to keep the house in order until they can return. Gladys solemnly promises her "friend" that she will do just that. There are tears and a frenzied exit; but after Adria has gone, Gladys reaches into a forbidden stash and lights herself a New Year's cigar: the Baked Alaska is suspended—Viva la Revolution.

Time passes. We learn next that Carlos has become a minor member of the new Communist government, and that because of his position he and Gladys are allowed to live in this house that she promised to take care of. We also discover that Carlos has let power go to his head and has taken a mistress, whom he flaunts in front of Gladys. For her part, Gladys is in a holding pattern—watching over Adria's home, and still cooking.

More time passes; Act Two takes place in 1997. Carlos has been displaced from his cushy job; his daughter by his mistress, Elena, is grown and sharing the house with him and Gladys. They now operate a modest but flourishing state-sanctioned cafe, catering to the many tourists who are flocking to Havana these days, their success attributable mostly to Gladys' excellent and authentic recipes. Elena is studying to be an engineer. And then, Adria's daughter—an affluent Cuban American who has never been to Cuba before—pays a visit to the house that once belonged to her mother. Things are said; much is, at long last, understood.

Was Adria ever Gladys' friend? Could she have been? More to the point, maybe: was Castro ever Carlos' friend? Can we turn back the clock for an hour to try to hold onto something that isn't really there? What's lost when we push ahead? What does revolution actually mean?

Machado gives us lots to ponder here: The Cook—forgive the cheap play on words—serves up a veritable feast of thought-provoking notions to contemplate and debate. The twin tragedies of Carlos and Gladys—decent, ordinary people who wanted to believe in something bigger than themselves—play out naturally and gradually: the reality of their existence is palpable, which is what makes this piece so affecting. (Indeed, The Cook fumbles in its middle scene when it shifts focus to deal with the persecution of Gladys' homosexual cousin by Castro's government: with its obviously politicized Bigness, this subplot goes against the homely grain of spare understatement that otherwise characterizes the play.)

INTAR's production, directed by frequent Machado collaborator Michael John Garcés, is excellent, downright lavish by off-off-Broadway standards, with a beautifully realized palatial kitchen designed by Antje Ellerman, replete with the constant sights, sounds, and smells of endless food preparation (samples are even served to the audience before the performance begins). Garces' staging is exquisite, especially in realizing the chasms of space and time that exist between the haves and have-nots who occupy this house. All five members of the cast do fine work, especially Jason Madera as the wondrously pragmatic Carlos and Nilaja Sun as his smart and passionate daughter Elena. Zabrya Guevara, on stage for virtually every second of this long play, is in constant motion as Gladys, as if she will stop breathing if she stops cooking—a riveting performance that never quite strips away all the layers of mystery from this complicated character.

The Cook is the best kind of theatre—entertaining, compassionate, involving, and richly human.

A group of ragtag actors struggle to get through a performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It: that's the basic conceit of this play by Don Nigro. If the characters were a bunch of incompetents, we'd have another Noises Off; but though much of what happens here is very, very funny, the antecedent play that I'm put in mind of is Waiting for Godot. Lurking behind every moment of this existential slapstick farce is the question Why; even though God himself may be in the same room with his actors, the answer is far from clear. The best anyone can come up with is something, well, by Shakespeare:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

They're performing for an audience of imaginary people, and for no clearly expressed purpose. There seem to have once been plenteous other actors who would have enabled them to do the play right, but they've been lost to various near-apocalyptic catastrophes; the one called Rosalind remains with the company, but she's lost her mind and is unable to function properly as leading lady

And so Celia, William, Amiens, Audrey, and the Clown—for that's the only way we know them—gamely play many parts. All they want is to get through it. And that's all I am going to say about the philosophical stuff of The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It—because although philosophy may be what the show is about (and director Christopher Thomasson clearly values that notion), it's not what the show is.

What the show is—and there's something profound to be understood in this, but leave it go—is a lot of fun. A LOT. Sarah Sutel, who plays the reluctant second lead Celia with sportsmanlike but ironic cheeriness also gets to don the silliest wig ever to play Phebe, the rustic shepherdess who falls head-over-heels in love with Rosalind's male alter ego Ganymede. She is utterly hilarious showing us how that happens, losing herself in a big, giddy, silly trance; Ethel Merman called this kind of thing her "goon look" when her Annie Oakley went similarly gaga over Frank Butler.

Josephine Cashman's character, Audrey (the "country wench" who becomes the Clown's love interest), finds herself recruited to also portray Rosalind when the one called Rosalind proves unfit for the role. Her journey from tentative unsureness to full-fledged divahood (parading expansively as a leading lady who herself is masquerading in drag as the boyish youth Ganymede) is extremely well-realized. Her leading man, Orlando, meanwhile undergoes a similar transformation, for he is being doubled by William (the naive country boy); both are played by Christopher Yeatts, a young actor of superb comic intuition and invention.

[You have possibly noticed by now that more than passing familiarity with Shakespeare's As You Like It will help you understand what's going on in Nigro's schizophrenic take on it; click here if you need a refresher.]

Brian J. Carter, ostensibly Amiens, takes on lots of characters, notably a very sweet-natured Silvius and an absent-minded Jaques who never seems able to get through his "Seven Ages of Man" speech. Candice Holdorf is the pixilated, or shell-shocked, Rosalind, forced by her circumstance to leave the play proper and instead serve as its narrator and sometime commentator; she's quite wonderful. The Clown character functions primarily as Touchstone, and Todd Butera is outstanding  in the part, delivering perhaps the finest rendition of this stock figure (the "wise fool," who appears in virtually every play of Shakespeare's) that I've yet witnessed.

Participating sometimes, but mostly guiding things along, is the Curate (Timothy Roselle), a community theatre director right out of Prospero's book; or is he, as I've suggested and one character on stage suggests, a Greater Power still?  Roselle captures the essential ambiguity that is key both to his character and the play.

We laugh and laugh at the antics: at the downright folly of the inadequacy—a cast of seven trying to juggle such a complicated work of theatre—and—what's even loonier—that they don't have a single defensible reason for doing so.  Nigro nails the human condition; and Oberon Theatre Ensemble nails his play in this lively, likable, thought-provoking production.

The Daughter-in-Law was written by D.H. Lawrence about ninety years ago, roughly the same period when his novel Sons and Lovers was published. But it was not produced until decades after his death, and is now being revived by the Mint Theater Company, which has become our town's most reliable discoverer of "lost" dramatic works worthy of our attention.

This tight, emotionally hefty drama centers on a triangle whose points are a man, his wife, and his mother. Luther Gascoyne is a 30-year-old coal miner who lives in a small town near Nottingham in a brand-new house purchased by his new wife, Minnie. Their history, which we learn in the play's long first scene in conversations between Luther's mother, his younger brother Joe and a neighbor, is complicated: Luther met Minnie several years ago and asked her to marry him twice, but she turned him down. Minnie, who has worked as a governess for some time, came into an inheritance recently and decided to marry and, finding no one else willing, proposed to Luther, who readily accepted.

Now here's what you need to know about these people: Luther is indolent, handsome, passionate, but not too bright; Minnie is smart, independent, and deeply in love with Luther (but she shows it by picking at him constantly, trying to make him a better man); and Mrs. Gascoyne is controlling, manipulative, bound to old-fashioned ways of thinking and living, and  desperately afraid of growing old alone. A volatile bunch, and when Lawrence drops in as catalyst the fact that Luther has made a local girl pregnant just a few weeks before his marriage to Minnie, count on something explosive to occur.

What's most interesting to me about The Daughter-in-Law is how modern it is. Minnie is a thoroughly twentieth century sort of heroine—self-reliant, blunt, powerful; entirely unafraid to take care of herself or to take on whatever obstacles may come into her path. (There's a moment when she's faced with the prospect of losing all of her money, and she shrugs it off, saying that she can always get a job somewhere to support herself; bravo!) Lawrence depicts her relationship with Luther and Luther's conflicted feelings for his wife and his impossibly domineering mother with a psychologist's eye, which makes the play both less delicate and more forward-thinking than its contemporaries.

He's also inserted an interesting socioeconomic subtext to the piece—which I wish he would have explored more, frankly—in which he contrasts Luther and Joe's kneejerk adherence to a coal miner's strike with Minnie's surprising sympathy for management's position. Though he presents Minnie as having, on some level, "bought" herself a husband and then paying a hefty price for that folly, he lays groundwork, not fully fleshed out, for future serious problems to come when Luther's politics inevitably clash with his wife's.

The Mint production of The Daughter-in-Law is of their usual excellent quality. Director Martin L. Platt stages the piece with respect and assurance, and the ensemble of five actors all do excellent work. Mikel Sarah Lambert probably makes the strongest impression with her impeccably detailed portrayal of Mrs. Gascoyne. Peter Russo is appealingly melancholic as Luther's brother Joe, a lost soul if ever there was one, and Jodie Lynne McClintock is memorable as Mrs. Purdy, the pragmatic mother of Luther's pre-nuptial paramour. Angela Reed and Gareth Saxe both offer strong characterizations as Minnie and Luther, but I didn't sense much chemistry between them; the fireworks that I was expecting in the play's two climactic scenes don't quite happen as a result.

But this is a great introduction to a play that, in its rich and complex portrayals of passionate, simple people, absolutely deserves to be seen.

“It’s a f**cked up play” said one of my students when I mentioned that I had seen Neil LaBute’s (U.S. Premiere) The Distance From Here at MCC Theater. It’s exactly what I said to myself when I first read the script this past summer. Seeing the play on stage only confirms how dark, ugly and troublesome the story and its characters are. LaBute writes about life on the wrong side of the tracks with an intimate connection to that demographic's realities. He holds the mirror up to a disadvantaged and dysfunctional nature, inhabiting his world with the type of people that I have spent my 40-years trying to avoid—partially out of fear and admittedly out of judgment. Metaphorically, it’s as if LaBute is saying “Screw you and look over here – here is America – here’s the pregnant teenager – here’s the stepfather sleeping with the stepdaughter – here’s all the cigarette smoking and beer drinking – here’s the name calling – the screwed up families – the absent fathers – the missing people – the lack of education – the dead end jobs – the physical abuse – the violence – the deception – the stealing – the homophobia – the ignorance – the promiscuity – the emptiness – and here is where you are too. Damn-it, it’s not about the family next door or those red-necks down the street.” All this lives in LaBute’s play.

The play centers on Darrell, his high-school friend/Tim, girlfriend/Jenn, mother/Cammie, stepfather/Rich, and stepsister/Shari. Their world is shaped by maple paneling, Chevy Impalas, Michelob Lite, McDonald’s happy meals, teased bangs, tight jeans, itchy crotches, and sex (think the sexual habits of primates—mating with whomever’s nearby…if it fits). It’s a twisted world of no ramifications captured in a play of consequences. Darrell is a deadbeat high-school outcast with a multi-marrying mother and a seducing stepsister (who's sleeping with the current stepfather of the moment and has an ever-crying and unattended illegitimate newborn—and the question is “who is the father?”). Together, they live a loveless existence of physical impulses, stuck in the economic trap of welfare. Tim is perpetually stunted and diminished by Darrell’s constant berating as he struggles to get an education, work at the local fast food restaurant, and overcome the misfortunes dealt him. Tim and Jenn have a secret that they keep from Darrell and the play falls deeper into its already consuming hell when that secret is revealed. It is a play about betrayal, and each betrayal is an abusive strike on Darrell—who is certainly a victim, but is more precisely a deviant participant.

LaBute’s script is written with in-your-face precision. Its main flaw is that its final scene feels more like the end of an Act One rather then the end of a play. I left the theatre following the intermission-less performance wanting to return in ten-minutes for the rest of the story. I was puzzled by the play's ambiguous and seemingly arbitrary ending and questioned why LaBute stopped writing when the characters seem to have so much more to say.

Mark Webber is frighteningly recognizable as Darrell. He brings a rage and honesty to the stage that feels definitive of a generation of youths across America. Logan Marshall-Green is impressive and quite moving as the sensitive Tim. His comic talents live in the dimensional truths of the tragic hero. Alison Pill is sadly haunting, tough, and damaged as the burdened and abused Jenn. Her talent as an actor compliments most generously that of Webber and Marshall-Green. Together they deliver performances that are equally dangerous and disturbingly illuminating.

Melissa Leo (Cammie), Anna Paquin (Shari), Josh Charles (Rich), Amelia Alvarez (Girl), and Ian Brennan (Boy/Employee) round out the cast. Leo looks great as the white-trash ineffectual mother, but seems to be missing an emotional connection to the character. Paquin is interesting as the amoral stepsister, creating a character who is physically gawky and who identifies her self-worth through the touch of a man. Charles is disturbingly understated and sexy as the blue-collar husband, stepfather, and adulterer. He avoids all the trappings of playing a potentially one-dimensional stereotype.

Michael Greif’s direction sets a rebellious and stifled tone for LaBute’s play. He has characters smoke incessantly throughout the performance. Scene after scene, the theatre fills with the oppressive and uninvited invasion of second-hand smoke—a constant reminder that each breath brings death one step closer. It seems that the ultimate goal for all these characters is death—the longed-for escape. The action is fast, it is violent, it is loud, and it is ugly. He directs for a generation populated by short attention spans.

Louisa Thompson’s set wonderfully captures the oppressiveness of life in oblivion. She utilizes a manual turntable to rotate a paneled/brick wall that transforms itself into all the locations in the play (a living room, a monkey exhibit at the zoo, outside a mall, a school room). Angela Wendt’s costumes rely on stereotypical cheap and oddly tight clothing that instantly telegraph to us the characters’ status and essence. James Vermeulen’s lighting is stark and unadorned with its brutal influences of daylight and its healing inclusion of the night sky.

Robert Kaplowitz sound design sets the volume at uncomfortable levels—a choice that is to be expected in a LaBute production. He is most successful in the production's scene changes where he forces the audience to deal with the screaming angst of the play's action through hard pounding rock music.

This is a production to be witnessed, because the issues raised are sad and disturbing—and compelling.

The End of You, Michael D. Cohen's gently lyrical new play, charts the relationship of a young man and woman who are struggling to overcome troubling memories and experiences from their pasts that hold them back from achieving unconditional connection with one another. If that sounds a bit like clinical psychobabble, I'm sorry, because Cohen's script is lovelier than that, although it is also that single-minded: all that we really know about the play's two characters, Joel and Kamala, is rooted in their psyches. That's finally a bit of a limitation—The End of You feels more like a short story than a fully satisfying drama.

But it's nevertheless compelling on its own terms, because what Cohen does disclose about these two people interests us. Joel is introspective and passionate, clearly deeply in love with Kamala and trying to reconcile his feelings about an incident that he witnessed years before, while away at summer camp as a young boy. What he saw was a fight between two camp counselors that ended tragically; what he remembers, in addition to a generalized horror, is one of the fighters looking lovingly into his child's eyes just before the end.

Kamala, meanwhile, is haunted by memories of her father's death from cancer and the mysterious appearance in her room one night of a stranger. The latter event—which is never absolutely defined as either real or imagined—makes Kamala a restless sleeper who won't go to bed if the window is open.

The action of the play shows Joel and Kamala slowly remembering and revealing these stories to one another, a communication that eventually leads to a sharing of the deepest sort, as the two assume a kind of co-ownership of each other's memories. This, Cohen tells us, signals a mature love that will enable Joel and Kamala to finally complete their commitment to one another.

Flowing through the story are small scenes involving a boy and girl, who at first I identified as younger projections of our leading characters (near the end of the play, I wasn't so sure). Cohen's use of these figures finally muddied rather than clarified the central conflict, at least for me.

Sarah Gurfield has directed Cohen's play, with nice results. The two children in the play both do fine work. Poorna Jagannathan, as Kamala, has difficulty making her admittedly mercurial character sympathetic. P.J. Sosko's Joel, however, is unflaggingly appealing and credible; I was on his side from the moment I made his acquaintance.

It's easy to understand the appeal of an unproduced screenplay like The Fisherman of Beaudrais to an earnest off-off-Broadway theatre company with a social conscience like Firedrake Productions, Inc. It's the work of two famous socially conscious screenwriters, Ring Lardner, Jr. and Dalton Trumbo; and in fact one of its main concerns is whether a man should or should not inform on his friends to save his own neck, a subject intimately associated with both of these victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. It's also an uncompromising look at war and what it does to people: it's set in 1940 during the German invasion of France, and its characters include collaborators, resistance fighters, Nazis, and a host of innocent people trying to get on with their lives even as all they hold dear is crumbling down around them.

It is, specifically, about an old vagabond (that's the nice word; bum might be more forthright) named Louis Geroux, who is arrested for stealing some cheese and muscatel and happens to be in jail in a small French town just as the Germans arrive there. A wall of the jail collapses in an explosion, and Louis walks out unharmed, and arrives a few days later at the seaside haven of Beaudrais. The natives, already coping with an influx of refugees, assume he made a heroic escape from the enemy and he does not dissuade them. He is quickly befriended by Emelie, the pretty daughter of the town's mayor, and invited to stay in her home.

Before too long, though, the Nazis arrive in Beaudrais; the mayor is arrested and replaced by a former friend whom the Germans like because he hates Communists and Jews. Emelie gets a job at a local cafe. Louis, meanwhile, stumbles into the local chapter of the Resistance, a group who give the play its name, conducting their secret meetings while sitting on the beach with fishing poles in hand. Louis happily takes free shelter, food, and wine from his new comrades; but eventually the freedom fighters find something noble for him to do for France in return. At the play's climax, Louis faces a moral crisis and confronts his willingness to become a hero.

In outline, it's a great story; too bad that the actual script doesn't come close to measuring up. As adapted (very faithfully, I am assured) by Kathleen Rowlands and Joseph Rinaldi, The Fisherman of Beaudrais comes across not as the paean to individualism and liberty that I'm sure Lardner and Trumbo intended, but rather as a creaky, formulaic flag-waver. Battle lines are drawn with terrible clarity: the French characters talk frequently and earnestly about how terrific it is to kill German soldiers, the more the better; the Germans, meanwhile, are presented uniformly as bullies or cowards or both. There's an awareness of a moral imperative—Emelie and her beau, who is one of the Resistance fighters, discuss whether it's entirely appropriate for them to be in love during wartime, for example—but the conclusions drawn are murky if not downright strange: the only real imperative is to defeat the Nazis, whatever the cost.

Now that's almost certainly an accurate reflection of America's state of mind in the early 1940s; the question is, what does The Fishermen of Beaudrais have to say to us today, in 2003? (Never mind the historical significance, for apart from the trivial detail of its origin, this script says nothing that a hundred extant war pictures didn't say better.) Are Rowlands and Rinaldi interested in drawing a parallel to events of our time? Do they mean for us to take this play as a mirror of our times, or as a cautionary tale?

I can't answer these questions: nothing in the adaptation or in Keith Oncale's ambitious though ultimately static staging provides anything like a point of view about the piece. Instead, the thing is done rather earnestly, like a school project: the creators have thrown lots of energy, people and scenery into the mix, but they don't finally do much more than get the story told. Worse, they do so with considerable awkwardness: the play's 26 separate scenes are rendered with set changes that become downright intrusive; Oncale finesses them at first with a neat equivalent to the cinematic fade, but he seems to have run out of transitional steam by the halfway mark. The short scenes and exclamatory dialogue never let us forget we're watching a screenplay (one of the German soldiers actually says to a Frenchman, "Do you surrender, or do I shoot you down like the dog you are!"--that's how clichéd it is). The most exciting moments, notably a guerrilla attack on a restaurant, occur offstage. Lacking the film director's tools of art—closeups, exteriors, a heart-rending score—Oncale is defeated by the material. And lacking any guiding principle or perspective to help us understand why we're watching this old-fashioned hokum, we are defeated as well.

A final note: the performance of The Fishermen of Beaudrais that I attended ended very badly, with audience members unable to leave because the theatre's front door was locked. There may have been a good reason to lock the door, but spectators need to be informed, before the show, how they are supposed to exit in the event of an emergency. A lot of people left rather angrily as a result, and I can't say that I blame them. I am hoping the folks at Firedrake have addressed this logistical problem.

There aren't many issues more timely at the moment than the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. The Fist, Misha Shulman's earnest and wondrously even-handed new play at Theatre for the New City, offers a good deal of food for thought on this volatile subject.

It concerns Shauli, an Israeli army officer who has become a refusenik (draft-resister), choosing to be arrested by the military police rather than to obey orders to serve in the contested West Bank Israeli settlements. We know that Shauli has made this decision from the start of the play; the drama—and there's plenty of it here—revolves around how he will let his family know about it—and the likely prison sentence that will follow.

Shauli's wife, pregnant with their first child, supports her husband's politics fervently. But Shauli's father, Eli, and grandfather, Jacob, are just as adamantly opposed: Eli, in particular, shares with the present Israeli leadership the conviction that definitive action and force are the best means of dealing with the acts of terrorism carried out by the Palestinians. Jacob is a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Israel at the time of its founding as a modern state; his son (and Eli's brother) Schlomo recently retired from the Israeli military, only to be killed a few months later by a teenage suicide bomber.

Playwright Shulman—who also stars as Shauli—served in the Israeli army in the 1990s, and one suspects that his own views on these incendiary matters mirror his character's. But, immensely to his credit, he has not written mere propaganda here. Far from it: The Fist is remarkably objective and fair-minded, giving play to all aspects of this complicated subject. Shulman leads us through political quagmire with Talmudic care: Must the Israelis defend themselves against their Arab neighbors at all costs? When they deny land or rights to the Palestinians do they also deny the democratic standards upon which their state was founded? Are the Palestinians waiting until they outpopulate the Jews in Israel, so they then can take over by sheer strength of numbers? What's the difference between the wall around a Palestinian settlement and the fences around Jewish ghettos that were once common in Europe? Can a soldier ever disobey his nation's call to duty? Can a free nation indefinitely imprison dissenters and still be free?

Shulman knows that there are no simple answers to these and the dozens of other explosive questions that surround the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Fist is valuable for giving voice to so many of them. And in the end, its most important lesson may be this: Shauli and his family argue and debate heatedly for hours—literally, that's just about all that happens in this play. They yell, they shout, they get angry, they cajole, they call each other names, they break away from their Sabbath meal. But they never stop talking. Isn't that the key to resolving these colossal problems—learning, listening, striving steadily for understanding?

Shulman gives a compelling performance as Shauli; he's as fine an actor as he is a skillfully even-handed playwright. Mark Brill, as grandfather Jacob, and Anna Tsiriotakis, as Shauli's wife Yael, also do outstanding work. Less assured are Bob Adrian and Judith Jablonka as Shauli's parents, neither of whom seemed convincingly passionate. Mike Rutenberg provides straightforward direction; likewise, the design (by Maiko Chii and Tamiko Komatsu) is simple and appropriate.

The Flu Season introduces us to a playwright worth knowing, an American  named Will Eno whose work has heretofore only been produced abroad. Rude Mechanicals Theater Company does well to present him here; more Eno plays deserve to be seen. His voice is distinctive: he has a flair and facility for rich language that is most impressive—not just wordplay, but a genuine pleasure in communicating that's, passed on to the audience, playfully and originally; caring about the meanings and the sounds of what he writes and having honest-to-goodness fun in the process. The Flu Season is, above all, a treat for the intellect, offering savory helpings of heightened theatrical dialogue of awe-inspiring depth and texture.

The play begins with a character who identifies himself as "Prologue" speaking contextual narration of varying relevance, first in darkness and then from a bright pool of light center stage. When he's done, another character, "Epilogue," takes his place, providing an opposing point of view—less sunny and more cynical. Together, these two comprise a kind of postmodern Our Town Stage Manager, commenting not only on the action of the play but also on all the circumstances surrounding it, including the audience and each other and particularly this play's genesis and evolution. It's deliberately artificial and self-referential, especially in Act Two, when it becomes clear that Prologue and Epilogue are speaking as the playwright (rather than for him): the play becomes less about what it's heretofore been about and more about itself: process wins out over content.

That's kind of a shame, because the content, when it's given us, is engaging. The characters in the play that Prologue and Epilogue are so relentlessly narrating are a Man and a Woman who are patients in a mental hospital who have a brief and bittersweet romance. They are shepherded—sort of—by a bureaucratic Doctor who is preoccupied by almost every aspect of his existence except for his job, and a common-sensical Nurse who spends at least as much time managing the Doctor as her charges. All four interact in stylized fashion, musing about meaning and context and perspective nearly as much as Prologue and Epilogue do. But because they are talking about experiences—as opposed to the once-removed theatricality that is always the narrators' subject—they come close to achieving something profound, maybe even cathartic.

But then the -Logues break in, destroying whatever sense of empathy or involvement that the others have created. Eno loves to talk, but he hasn't learned to show instead of tell. Detachment necessarily distances, and distance isn't what we seek in the theatre.

Nevertheless, Eno's talent is thrilling: see this play and see the next one and the next one after that, because this guy has got the goods. Director Hal Brooks appears to be approaching the work with some ambivalence, by the way: half of his actors play Eno straight, while the others seem compelled to punch up every line, as if in on some bitter cosmic joke. (For the record, the former group include Andrew Benator as the Man, Roxanna Hope as the Woman, and Elizabeth Sherman as the Nurse—all dazzlingly effective, while the latter group are Matthew Lawler as Prologue, David Fitzgerald as Epilogue, and Scott Bowman as the Doctor). Very effective sets (David Korins) and costumes (Becky Lasky), and very cool lighting (Mark Barton) and sound (Sloan Alexander) punctuate the piece evocatively.

Whenever Mel Miller puts one of the seldom-seen musicals of the '10s, '20s, and '30s on stage as part of his Musicals Tonight! series, it's almost always worth taking a look. Miller produces concert-style revivals, which means the actors have scripts in hand and production values are kept to a minimum. What's nice is that we get to hear a passel of tunes by American masters—some familiar, most not—performed without amplification. We also get a gander at what a hit musical sounded and felt like eighty years ago. The experience is thus instructive and entertaining.

The present example is Rodgers & Hart's The Girl Friend, their second book musical, originally produced on Broadway in 1926. The thin book, by Herbert Fields, concerns a Long Island farm boy named Leonard who dreams of being a bicycle racer. His trainer and girlfriend, the down-to-earth Mollie, engineers a visit from a racing impresario who agrees to give Lenny his big chance. The promoter's sister, a lovely blonde temptress named Wynn, sets her cap on naive young Lenny. Complications, of course, ensue; there's no doubt as to the outcome (and Fields doesn't work terribly hard to make the journey there very plausible).

Then and now, The Girl Friend exists as a frame for comedy routines, dances, and songs. It was built around the talents of Sammy White and Eva Puck, who a year after this show would become the original Frank and Ellie in Show Boat, thus ensuring their places in musical theatre history. We can imagine what they might have been like in The Girl Friend: they would have delivered the show's two hit songs ("Blue Room" and the peppy title song); he would have made much of a bit where his ankle is supposedly broken; she would have put over the soubrettish "The Damsel Who Done All the Dirt" (which is the score's best example of Hart's signature wit).

Ashton Byrum—who seems the very essence of "fresh-faced"—and plucky Carey Anderson acquit themselves nicely in the White and Puck roles (though they're not given much opportunity to dance, which the originals surely must have done). Nanne Puritz is the femme fatale; Todd Buonopane and Jennifer Winegardner are the obligatory secondary comic couple.

Rodgers' music comes into its own with "Blue Room" but elsewhere in the score seems to owe a significant and uncharacteristic debt to George Gershwin; and it often feels like Hart, not at his best, is stylistically channeling George's brother Ira. There's an incongruous big number called "Town Hall Tonight" that interpolates jokes and vaudeville shtick (and seems to invoke minstrelsy in its title, though that's not addressed here). And there are a quite a few numbers whose lack of durability is entirely understandable.

So what's a Gruffalo? The short answer is that it's a big, furry, voracious monster who may or may not represent the power of the imagination. He's created by a Mouse, who has wandered into the deep, dark wood to search for nuts, only to find herself beset by a host of comical predators, such as a leering Cockney fox, a daffy martial owl, and a flamboyant Mexican rattlesnake. Whenever she finds herself in danger of imminent ingestion, she invokes the image of the Gruffalo, an ostensibly imaginary beast who conveniently happens to enjoy dining on fox, owl, and snake. After talking her way out of these scrapes, imagine her surprise when she discovers that there really is such thing as a Gruffalo…

The content of this theatrical adaptation of a popular British children's book, not reflecting the richest or most evocative of children's fare, defies criticism a bit. It's a story with no overarching moral, except to say that it's not a bad thing to be clever, and it seems to have no grander purpose beyond entertaining and delighting children. The songs in this musical version are just what they need to be to keep the kids engaged, no more or less. The costumes (by Isla Shaw), however, are simple and wonderfully effective, with the exception of the Gruffalo's, which is complex and wonderfully effective.

But it's on the performance level where the piece really shines. The movement work of the three performers, and director Olivia Jacobs's consistently inventive staging, should be required viewing for any director or actor with an interest in physical theatre—and yes, for children as well. The levels of metaphor and image conjured up by three people in space is astounding: an actor serves as a revolving door in the middle of the forest; two actors combine to create a giant pair of snapping jaws; people jump on top of, under, and around each other in static chase sequences. And yet it's never show-offy or self-satisfied—it's the fabric of the piece itself, presented in a series of eye-catching, human-sized patterns whose confident slapstick audacity dazzles the minds and eyes of children and fellow-travelers alike.

The individual actors deserve kudos. Michaela O'Connor's Mouse is a perfect plucky protagonist, vulnerable but resourceful. As the succession of Predators, Sean Kempton exhibits an impressive range of silliness. And whatever you might imagine a Gruffalo to be, Derek Elroy is it—just listen for his adorably feral growls.

And finally, a thank you to the New Victory, for routinely hosting outstanding groups like England's Tall Stories Theatre Company, the producer of this show. It's good for tomorrow's theatrical community to be exposed early to such quality creativity.

I can't think of any performer who makes me smile as much or as readily as Bill Irwin: I imagine that I'd be perfectly content to sit in a theatre and watch him work his particular magic on an audience for as long as he'd care to do it. So it's with mixed feelings of joy and sadness that I report that The Harlequin Studies, first of three Irwin offerings at the Signature Theatre Company this season, is only seventy-five minutes long (and that for many of those minutes, the stage is given over to others). Indeed, a very real source of my melancholy as I write this—apart from the lingering effects of being in Irwin's presence last night, for he, supreme Clown that he is, makes us laugh and cry at once—is my realization that The Harlequin Studies is, among other things, a passing of the torch. I'm not saying that Irwin is never again going to don the ruffles and diamonds of this famous character, but there's definitely a valedictory feel about this show. Irwin is getting older (which means that we all are): he's looking back and ahead here, and that's cause for at least a touch of bittersweet reflection.

But, lest I appear glum, it's also significant cause for celebration. Bill Irwin on stage doing anything is a treat, as far as I'm concerned; Irwin doing what he does better than anybody else—all those wonderful corny hat tricks, for example—is a bonanza. As I already said, Irwin makes me smile as soon as he shows up, and I'm not talking just a mild turn-up of the lips here: a big, dopey grin lights up the face for the whole time he's on stage. Irwin's gift is perhaps the most wonderful one there is: he makes us happy, pure and simple. In The Harlequin Studies, in the commedia-dell'arte-inspired guise of the scampish, guileless servant, Irwin radiates bliss. Whether he's doing lightning-fast impressions of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, or devising silly, complicated strategies to accomplish the relatively simple task of setting a table, or wooing a hat rack that his roguish mind's eye has turned into a pretty lady, Irwin weaves theatrical magic that is pretty much without parallel in my experience. He's very funny and so we laugh; he's spectacularly graceful and so we feel a kind of thankful awe; he's complicit in our every reaction and so we feel utterly redeemed.

Ok, enough—sorry, but I just love this guy. I need to tell you now that The Harlequin Studies is not at all the one-man show that I must be making it sound like: it is in fact a skillful play, in three acts plus a neat finale, that celebrates, explains, and generally has some fun with the character—and idea—of Harlequin.  A delicious "Preamble" gives us Irwin and composer-musical director Doug Skinner clad in academic cap & gown, expostulating semi-seriously on the subject at hand, precisely setting up in terms of theme and form what's to follow. Brief vignettes featuring Harlequin in various guises, from traditional to very contemporary, come next, showcasing just how archetypal the character really is and, incidentally, the varied talents of Irwin's co-stars.

The centerpiece of the evening is "Harlequin and His Master Wed," a one-act play in which the sweet but mischievous servant gets into a variety of scrapes as his foolish old master Pantalone plans to marry a beautiful young woman. Her father is a rather nasty fellow known as The Captain, and as his nefarious schemes start to unravel, it is of course Harlequin who somehow manages to set things right. This charmer of a sketch includes lots of trademark Irwin shtick (involving his hat, a plate, a trunk, and other props); an evil-looking watch that The Captain uses to hypnotize Harlequin; a dream ballet; and a brilliant, beautiful, appropriate ending featuring literally a stageful of bouncing, leaping Harlequins.

Irwin owns the stage, of course; but he generously lends it from time to time to Paxton Whitehead, Marin Ireland, and Rocco Sisto, who are all letter-perfect as Pantalone, The Girl, and The Captain, respectively; and to John Oyzon, Andrew Pacho, and Steven T. Williams, three young acrobat/dancers who supply Harlequin's leaps and bounds with energy and agility.

It's delirious fun throughout, and over far too soon: does anyone embody  the ephemeral fragility of live theatre more than the Clown? We leave The Harlequin Studies aglow, but also aware that we want more. Happily, two more Irwin shows are in our near future. I can't wait.

The Heiress, a dramatization of Henry James's Washington Square by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, is a masterful play that reveals both suppressed anger within a family and the suppression of women in the 19th century. This play premiered on Broadway in 1947 and returned there in 1995, with a Tony winning performance by Cherry Jones. Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, alongside the great Ralph Richardson, immortalized James’ story in the Oscar-winning film of 1949. The Heiress is a play with a history, and with that history is a legacy, a legacy that places expectations, however unfortunate, on current and future productions of this story of a young women simmering with desire and controlled rage.

The story reveals the journey of a young heiress named Catherine Sloper who is a plain but presentable spinster living with her domineering father, Dr. Austin Sloper. What she lacks in looks she makes up for in wealth, and soon finds herself the object of much attention by the penniless yet dashing Morris Townsend. At the heart of the drama is the question of Morris’ motives for loving Catherine: is it for love or for money? Catherine does not seem to care one way or the other, but her father cannot believe any man would love her for any reason but her wealth. Dr. Sloper forbids them to marry, but Catherine proposes an elopement, which fails to materialize because Morris knows most of her expected fortune will go elsewhere if he marries her. Catherine retreats, crushed by the betrayal of her beloved, only to be visited by him a second time when he once again proposes marriage.

It is a compelling and deeply moving story. Unfortunately, the Roundtable Ensemble’s production of The Heiress left me unsatisfied despite how much I appreciate the play. The production is under-realized and is lacking in depth, with performances that live on the surface of these complex characters. Yes, Oana Botez-Ban’s costumes are surprisingly detailed in the style of 1850, particularly those worn by the women, and yes, Jo Winiarski’s set successfully relies on the richness of red velvet curtains and furniture pieces to detail the home on New York City’s Washington Square; but little care is placed on actualizing the play itself.

Mahayana Landowne’s direction is competent, yet her staging is stagnant and seems to go against the actor’s impulses. Insufficient detail is given to the characters' silences housed in their subtexts, and the tempo of the entire production lacks any sense of urgency or specificity to the emotional reality of each scene. Landowne fails to utilize the full potential of the set in her blocking. Often times actors run into chairs and awkwardly stand on the far downstage corners of the stage, staring blankly out over the audience through an undefined fourth wall. Many of the actors seem to speak with aspirant tones, as if to make their vocal qualities period-specific, which only further sabotages dramatic moments, causing them to teeter on the verge of melodrama.

As Dr. Sloper, James Jacobson is bland, lacks emotional investment, and wanders throughout the set without motive and specificity. He stands stoically and generically with his hands behind his back while his eyes gaze blankly to the ground and out through the fourth wall. I missed from his character the aching pangs of love felt for his deceased wife, a love that fuels his repressive anger towards Catherine, whom he blames for taking his wife’s life during childbirth.

Kelly Ann Moore lays a wonderful foundation for playing Catherine, and is possibly the reason to see this production, yet she relies on the vocal quality of “timidness” rather than Catherine’s truths and desires to guide her performance. Perhaps better direction, dramaturgy, and the freedom to trust her instincts more deeply in each moment would free the Catherine she is truly capable of being. I wish her the opportunity to play this role again in her career.

As the fortune hunter Morris, Michael Balsley is flat, asexual, and a bit blank in the eyes. He is more dumpy than dashing, more earnest than calculating. Dee Pelletier, who plays Morris’ sister, Mrs. Montgomery, in contrast is perfectly cast, playing each moment with detailed skill, honesty and integrity.

The restrictively small dimensions of the Mint Space prove particularly challenging to the staging of this play that is set in the grand opulence of the Sloper home. I applaud the successes of the production's set and costume designs for overcoming this obstacle, and congratulate the Roundtable Ensemble for their efforts in producing The Heiress. But I wish that Landowne’s direction had taken advantage of the intimate space to expose more richly the inner truths of James’ original story. An opportunity is definitely missed for a revealing that can only occur under a microscope.

Grief and anger can make us do very foolish, cruel things to one another; even to the people we love. 3`, by the great Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, is a hauntingly beautiful play about the repression of sexuality, sibling rivalry on an epic and twisted scale, and suicidal madness. Lorca was inspired to write the play by a family he was familiar with growing up—a family ruled by an almost tyrannical widow who kept her daughters cloistered in a period of mourning that never seemed to end. In the play, the titular Bernarda has recently been widowed, and has announced that all her children—one daughter from an earlier marriage, and four daughters from her last marriage—must go through an eight year period of mourning. She also tries to keep the dangerous outside world from intruding into her home. The daughters are for all intents and purposes locked into the house, the windows are barred, and everyone in the house wears nothing but black.

This dark, manic response to sorrow and despair resonates in the post-9/11 world deeply. Indeed, it is as if Bernarda has passed her own personal Patriot Act for her family, complete with isolationist provisions and a huge distrust of the rest of the world. Bernarda enforces her rules of mourning through intimidation and fear, thinking that what she is doing is what is best for her children.

The daughters react in various ways. The eldest daughter, who seems to be detested from the get-go by her half-sisters, is slated to marry local nobleman Pepe el Romano, and doesn’t have too much of a problem with the way things are going. But the youngest daughter, who has been having a secret affair with Pepe, is none too pleased with things. And Martirio, another daughterof a plain demeanor, is also in love with Pepe, and slowly succumbing to the heartbreak of unrequited ardor. Add to this happy household a grandmother who is kept locked up like an inmate in a Victorian insane asylum, and you have the basic premise of the play.

I went to the Propect Theatre Company’s production full of high hopes. It seemed to me a perfect time to produce Bernarda Alba, what with both the President and Brittney Spears talking about the sanctity of marriage, rumors of a female V.P. candidate, and so on. What better time to do a play that deals with the lack of sanctity in some “traditional” marriages, women in positions of power, and a world ruled by somber grief and strident dictums on how to behave? Sadly, such contextual musings were never afforded me during the show due to well-intentioned but poorly executed concepts.

In approaching this play, director Cara Reichel has decided to have each of the nine main characters portrayed by both a speaking actress as well as an actress who depicts the character solely through movement. These “shadow” characters are on stage every time their more traditional counterparts are onstage, attempting to present the inner struggles of the characters through movement at the same time that their doubles were speaking. But this has the adverse effect of distracting the audience, making it difficult to concentrate on both the action of the play and the words of Lorca. One scene in particular, in which all the daughters have dinner with their mother and a neighbor, was very hard to follow, because on one side of the stage there were nine women eating and speaking, and on the other side of the stage there were nine women leaping about like modern dancers. Rather than reinforcing each others' performances, the speaking actresses and their shadows only diminish their respective impact on the play. Reichel is to be commended for taking such a large chance with the show, and I hope she has learned something from this that will make her next endeavor a fuller production.

The design of the show is of mixed caliber. The costumes by Sidney J. Shannon, are beautiful—evocative of the Spain of a hundred years ago, and appropriate to each character. The set, by Timothy Richard Mackabee, and lights, by Ji-Youn Chang, are wonderfully concise— simple, functional, and pleasing to the eye. The music, composed by Jason Atkinson, is beautiful, but played at entirely too loud a volume, and quickly becomes an overbearing distraction, much like the shadow characters.

In the role of Bernarda, Tamir is a strong presence, naturally exuding the power of a matriarch in last century Spain. Her shadow, 12-year-old Danielle Melanie Brown, is a pleasure to watch—but, as I said, I found it distracting to have to split my focus between the two actresses playing the same role at the same time. As Poncia, the older maid of the house, Betty Hudson is a gem—funny, smart, and worldly-wise. Jennifer Blood brings passion and fire to the role of the youngest and most rebellious daughter, Adela. And Karen Sternberg is absolutely wonderful as the forgotten flower of a daughter that is Martirio. I hope to see her in many productions in the future, as I found her talent to be exceptional.