nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

As the audience files into the sanctuary of the West-Park Church to watch York Shakespeare Company's production of Henry IV Part 1, we're warned not to sit in the front row. Good call: this high-energy, youthful rendition of Shakespeare's history play makes use of almost every inch of the space—aisles, altar, and all; from my seat in the second row I got nervous more than once as fighting swordsmen/women wielded dangerous-looking weapons just a foot or so away.

Director Marc Silberschatz gets his company and his audience into the fray in this exciting performance. I left the show hoping I would find time to see Part 2, which is as good a recommendation as I can offer. (Both Henry IV plays are in York's repertory right now, along with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.)

It's all about fathers and sons: King Henry IV is worried about his son Hal because he shirks his royal responsibilities to carouse with a fat old reprobate called Sir John Falstaff; Hal, for his part, is struggling to reconcile conflicted feelings for his actual parent and for surrogate dad Sir John. Meanwhile, hotheaded young Harry Percy is the focal point of a rebellion against the king, mostly to avenge the broken promises made by Henry to Percy's father, Northumberland. (See or read Richard II for the background on that.)

Seth Duerr, as King Henry, anchors the play early on with a moving speech about the differences between these two sons; he's clearly out of Hal's hearing range, but the son comes through by the climactic battle scenes that conclude the play—that's the arc of this funny and thrilling adventure tale. This is a commendable off-off-Broadway staging, which is to say that some of the actors are very good—Duerr, to begin with, who possesses a booming, resonant voice with presence to match; also Timothy Foley as Prince Hal and Tony Scheinman as Falstaff, both of whom grow into their roles as the evening progresses; and Kevin Gay, David Skigen, and Marti J. Cooney, each of whom is at least triple-cast.

Others on stage betray a lack of experience, but not in a way that's hugely detrimental to the whole. Production values beyond the built-in majesty of the church setting are nil, again without much ill effect. York is providing a proving ground for emerging artists and a clear reading of a potent classic play: what more can we ask, especially for only $20?

Somewhere in upstate Vermont, two actors named Toby find themselves stuck in a production of Waiting for Godot. Literally stuck, I mean: even though audiences have dwindled to the single digits, the show inexplicably refuses to close, and Toby M. and Toby D., not unlike their characters Estragon and Vladimir, seem to be unable to move. Nothing, to coin a phrase, to be done.

This is Anthony Pennino's intriguing and playful concept for Toby, which is currently being presented off-off-Broadway by Watchdog Theatre Company. The play, generally entertaining if perhaps a bit overlong, explores the nature of friendship along with some of the bigger questions that Beckett sought to understand; Pennino further has fun spoofing the habits of actors and theatre folks as he spins this eccentric but somehow plausible yarn.

The Tobys are an odd couple in the Felix/Oscar mode as much as they are the yin and yang of the human condition that Beckett's characters embody. Quirkily, Pennino has cast his Tobys against type, with the calmer, gentler, and more cerebral Toby M as Estragon, and the gruff, blustery, and often childish Toby D as Vladimir. We only see them perform the tiniest snippets of Godot, so it's not clear how this casting works out. What is clear is that the two Tobys ultimately have no one but each other for company; by the final scenes, the actors have more or less given up all contact with the outside world save their appearances on stage (posing, come to think of it, another set of interesting existential questions that Pennino might want to tackle in the future).

The payoff is less profound that we might hope for; but of course Pennino has set the bar for himself pretty darn high by quoting Beckett so liberally. The pastiche/tribute elements are among the best parts of Toby, by the way, ranging from a refrigerator that always seems to be stocked with the same sparse foodstuffs to an unseen producer (who might as well be called Godot) who can never be reached on the phone.

Christopher Conant is thoughtful, sympathetic, and often quite funny as Toby M; unfortunately his co-star Jon Okabayashi doesn't seem to have the acting chops to fully realize Toby D. Conant and Okabayashi don't exhibit much chemistry together, either, which seriously reduces the feelings of inevitability surrounding their characters' plight. Blake Baldwin's staging feels sluggish throughout; I would have liked to see more shtick and physical comedy to bring some life and variety to the proceedings.

How is it that theatre isn't considered (at least by the vast majority of Americans) to be as exciting and immediate as sports? A play and a game are both live, physical events performed in front of an audience that, if all goes right, is intimately embroiled in the fortunes of the players. I suppose an exploration of the issues surrounding this disjoint could fill volumes, but no one can deny that it exists, and that it finds theatre at a noticeable disadvantage. What, the frustrated lover of theatrics wails as he beats his breast and rends his garments, is to be done?

Well, the Neo-Futurists have come up with a pretty good example of how the gap can be narrowed. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which has been running in Chicago for 16 years, presents a group of actors who attempt to perform 30 original plays in 60 minutes—an athletic endeavor to be sure, and one which viscerally exploits the connection between performer and spectator for maximum ka-pow. And now, the group has brought its bang to Brooklyn.

The randomness-loving interactivity of the evening becomes apparent before the audience is even let into the space, when each attendee must roll a six-sided die to dictate how much admission will set them back ($9 plus whatever Lady Luck deems appropriate). Next, audience members are brusquely asked their names and given nametags that in no way resemble their answers (mine said "Avenue"). Then, after being given a program, or "menu," the games begin.

The cast of eleven has, individually and in groups, written 30 pieces to be presented on a given night; the audience is required to call out numbers from the menu, each of which corresponds to one of these pieces. The actors grab the appropriate numbered sheet of paper from a clothesline, and then, upon reading the title, set up and perform the requested piece. Thus, the show is different every night. Add to this the fact that a number of brand-new pieces are added every week (also determined by the role of a die), and you find yourself with a cast that had better know what they're on about, lest they prove incapable of finishing their duties before the ominous alarm clock chimes the end of the show.

This might sound a bit baroque, but the crew does a good job of making it clear and getting everyone excited about it. And, overall, it works. The performers are enthusiastic, likeable, and largely relaxed, and the range of styles they've poured their energies into are impressive for a group that's only just getting its start. Some highlights:

▪ An expressionistic silent horror tribute revolving around a locked window and ketchup;
▪ A memoir about teenage beer shotgunning, accompanied by live shotgunning onstage with audience volunteers;
▪ An Esther Williams dance sequence in bathing caps and little tubs of water;
▪ A piece of postmodern absurdity in which the script is displayed for the audience, writ large, to compare and contrast with the actual action;
▪ A silly song with a ukulele sung from a great height, which rhymes "Uta Hagen" and "Wisconsin.";
▪ A piece consisting of the cast setting up two single spectators on a date, which highlighted the unpredictability of audience involvement: after setting the helpless victims up at a table and giving them each a glass of wine, they were encouraged to converse, at which point the woman said to the guy, "Hello, pleased to meet you. I'm a lesbian."

I don't know if it was my growing enthusiasm or just the luck of the draw, but the material seemed to get stronger, and my mood lighter, as the night went on. Cliché is a pitfall when quantity is the goal, and some of the pieces here—particularly some routine autobiographical exercises and a couple of earnest attempts to engage current events—fell flat, but the energy passed forth between the risers and the stage ensured that the momentum never had a chance to flag.

In the end, the group had just begun their 27th piece when the timer put an end to the evening. The last few pieces grew increasingly fast and tense in an attempt to get the whole show in under the clock, and that suspense was part of the fun—when they're opposing Time Itself you can't help but root for the home team. And after these kids get in a few more weeks of training, they'll be even better.

I really wanted to like Touch, the play by Toni Press-Coffman that is receiving a belated New York City debut at Women's Project & Productions. I certainly wanted to like its protagonist, a young man named Kyle who is played by the enormously sympathetic Tom Everett Scott. The opening scene of Touch is a long monologue that takes us into Kyle's head and heart while delivering most of the play's exposition. Scott manages this arduous task beautifully, with an easy conversational style that genuinely captivates.

He tells us that he is an astronomer; has, in fact, always been a science guy. He speaks only a little about his infatuation with the heavens, though, for his main subject is Zoe, the young woman with whom he fell in love at first sight in a high school physics class. He and Zoe quickly discovered they were soul mates, and they married soon after graduation. But now, Zoe is gone.

The tender  monologue morphs, incrementally if a bit awkwardly, into conventional dialogue as Kyle is joined onstage by his best friend Bennie (Matthew Del Negro) and Zoe's sister Serena (Yetta Gottesman). We learn that Zoe disappeared last Thanksgiving, when she went out late in the evening to pick something up at the supermarket and never came home. Touch's second act is half detective story, half uplifting drama, as Kyle tries to discover exactly what happened to his wife and haltingly works through his grief and healing.

The most interesting aspect of the story is the character of Kathleen, a prostitute with whom Kyle has an unusual rehabilitative relationship following Zoe's death. Michele Ammon plays Kathleen with a compelling mixture of intelligence, sincerity, and impenetrable hardness that makes her the perfect foil for the battered, emotionally shut-down young man that Kyle has become; and the tentative steps toward compassion that each slowly undertakes during their surprisingly long-lasting affair feel honest and heartfelt. So it's something of a shock when Press-Coffman has Serena deliver a climactic tirade in which everything beautiful about Kyle and Kathleen's quasi-romance is systematically broken down. If the playwright won't bolster her faltering hero, who will?

In the end, I was confused as to what Touch was supposed to be about. The quirky, unconventional humanity that seemed to be at its core is jerked out from under us. It is, nevertheless, a pretty play, if finally sort of inconsequential: Kyle's astronomy, for example, is mere decoration rather than fodder for something deeper. I can't say that I'm sorry to have seen it, especially for Scott and Ammon's fine performances; but I can't say that I understand what compelled the folks at Women's Project & Productions to put this three-year-old curiosity on stage while so many worthy newer and more relevant works go unproduced.

A cross somewhere between a concert and a comedy show, Toxic Audio features five talented singers who (among other things) recreate famous songs (musical accompaniment and all!) using only their voices. Though this feat alone would be enough to sustain the audience’s interest, the group does quite a bit more, including an improvised rap, songs requiring audience members to participate, and some very funny impressions.

The show begins with the “Toxic Audio Audience Warm-Up,” a series of clever slides that instructs us to attempt to recreate several sounds of ever increasing difficulty (imitate a galloping horse using only your voice? Pretty tricky). We then get to try our hand at singing before the group comes out (the audience I was in was perhaps the most in-tune group of people I’ve ever sat in a room with—we all sang “Copacabana” in the same key without any assistance!!) Finally Toxic Audio emerges, singing the ‘Til Tuesday song “Voices Carry,” an especially fitting opening number for an a capella group. In it, each of the members shows off his or her specialty: one member scats, two do unbelievably accurate electric guitar impressions, another wails on his vocal chords, displaying his incredible range, while the fifth member keeps it all together with vocal percussion. The song list just gets better from here—the group covers a couple of Beatles songs, jazz standards, more '80s hits, and most impressive (to me anyway) the Evanescence song “Bring Me to Life,” a current rock hit that I would never imagine could be done without accompaniment. What makes the show especially interesting, though, is all the fun stuff that the group does while singing, like using coughs and sneezes to provide the percussion for “Coconut.” For a short moment, at the end of the show, the group turns off their microphones and truly sings a capella; more moments like this very effective one could only strengthen the show—it’s easier to forget there’s no instrumentation when mikes are involved.

Toxic Audio is a truly enjoyable evening of music and laughter—these five singers are not only great musicians but great comedians as well. I can’t imagine anyone not having a satisfying time at Toxic Audio.

Considering that Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, it's odd to conceive of their relationship as a romance. But all great shootings are triggered by some kind of passion, and Tragedy in 9 Lives, Karen Houppert's pop/rock music theatre piece, envisions this passion as a twisted form of infatuation.

It reads like a high-art high-school fling between a popular guy and a freaky girl, a psychedelic Pretty in Pink. Andy and Valerie meet, and they are each hesitantly intrigued by something in the other. Valerie tries to convince him to read her SCUM Manifesto, outlining her revolutionary plan to exterminate the male sex, but he tells her he'd prefer the synopsis. Thereafter he quietly absorbs her rants against the patriarchy, and she revels in his attention. Soon they're going on field trips to the Met together, where they share their views on art. Andy takes photos of Valerie, who finds a creative way to affectionately flip him the bird with every shot.

Houppert depicts the two characters as desperately needing something in the other. Valerie basks in the glow of Andy's fame and talent, which also serves as a symbol for her to rail against. Andy feeds on Valerie's energy and anger, using it to fill up the void of coldness that exists in his own heart. Andy is stillness and Valerie is motion, yin and yang spinning in place and balancing each other out. But this is America, after all, so something's got to give. Someone gets shot, and, far from ending his career, the event cements his celebrity, while the shooter slowly devolves into obscurity.

Director Stephen Nunns stages the piece in a studio with tinfoil wallpaper, in which the audience is seated cheek by jowl with actors, silver balloons, and a raucous rock ensemble. The play's opening moments are an evocation of a Factory party, complete with booze and dancing hotties and viewers being asked if Andy can take their picture. A level of low-key interactivity remains throughout, in such scenes as Solanas hawking the SCUM Manifesto to ladies in the audience while hissing at the menfolk.

Intercutting primary source material with fictional speculation, the show has the potential to come across as an arch riff on the myth of the Sixties rather than a living, breathing three-dimensional artwork in its own right. This is why much credit must be given to Juliana Francis and T. Ryder Smith, who create within the iconic shells of Solanas and Warhol, respectively, creatures of touching depth. Francis gradually reveals the vulnerability beneath Solanas's brittle exterior in a kind of psychological fan dance, ensuring that we see the human behind the harangue. She moves and speaks like only a true outsider could; her jittery, desperate verve fuels the show. Smith's Warhol is an apt foil; where the temptation to play a spacey Andy for pure parody is enticing (see David Bowie's turn in the film Basquiat), Smith displays a shrewd and subtle awareness of the distance between Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh and Andy Warhol, Pop Artist.

Orbiting around this duo is a square but open-minded Reporter, portrayed by Chris Spencer Wells (who is no doubt tired of hearing that he looks like Drew Carey in that getup). Initially more conceit than character, the Reporter acts as a mouthpiece in transcriptions of interviews with and articles about Warhol and Solanas, until the prevailing spirit of the times liberates him, with comical and disturbing results.

Rounding out the principal cast are James "Tigger" Ferguson as Factory regular Ondine and Laura Flanagan as a trio of Factory females. These two performers reenact scenes from Warhol's film The Chelsea Girls that highlight the ambiguities and dangers of the precarious path taken by many artists in the Sixties. The elements of the narrative come together to create a picture of the era as a time of limitless intellectual promise; of course, for each person this promise existed in a different direction, and the ensuing conflict ensured that everyone eventually fell back down to earth.

The music, written and played by house band The Lowly Turds, sounds great (if occasionally anachronistic in the carefully contrived period setting), but the lyrics have a tendency to pound points home a bit too glibly. It's in the interplay of the performers with themselves, with the text, with fiction and reality, and with the audience that the pleasure and excitement of the show reside.

Triple Dog Dare is an eclectic, fairly flamboyant showcase for the young artists of Fovea Floods, a theatre troupe based in upstate New York whose past output has included impressive revivals of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Baal. There's less to engage the intellect in this program of three short plays, but lots to affirm why Fovea Floods is a company to watch.

In Passing, written and directed by Jane Pickett, opens the evening. It's a three-character play that feels a little like Sam Shepard and a little like David Mamet and a lot like something entirely different. A younger brother returns to the family homestead after a long time away, his pretty girlfriend in tow. He's supposedly on vacation, but he's wound so tight that we expect him to explode at any moment. Eventually he does, in a confrontation with the older brother who stayed at home; but Pickett surprises us by substituting a weird, scary childhood memory for the standard order revelation of family dysfunction that we're expecting. We have to piece together what In Passing finally tells us about its characters—an intriguing concept, and one that begs for longer treatment than the 20 minutes or so that the play currently runs.

As is, it's mostly a thrilling showcase for the acting talents of Josh Chambers and Tim Fannon, who play the two brothers. It's also the most conventional piece in Triple Dog Dare; after a nicely staged transition/scene change, things turn very abstract with Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly's staging of Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin's The War in Heaven. This is a multimedia collage of movement, images, and words, performed mostly wordlessly in stylized dance and gestures. Moody and evocative, it rises to a moving climax as a group of performers portray a team of angels who have been sent down to Earth to find the soul of a prominent and powerful man who has died. They cannot; a resonant and provocative notion, that.

The final offering of the evening is Josh Chambers' Bull Spears, a genre-defying Western that uses narration, projections, mime, and choreography to tell a broad and darkly comic story of latter-day cowboy heroism and villainy. I liked Chambers' approach to structure and form here, but I never quite connected to Bull Spears; Chambers is satirizing something, but I couldn't make out exactly what. I'd like to see Chambers explore his presentational ideas further; perhaps a less deliberately sophomoric text would underscore their potency.

I'm not sure that I'd call any of the the three pieces in Triple Dog Dare an unqualified success, but I'm full of respect and admiration for them: here is theatre that takes risks, looks for new approaches, and stretches its performers and creators in exciting ways.

Trojan Women, as presented by The Classical Theatre of Harlem, is a shocking revelation—extremely relevant, at times darkly humorous, and always captivating. Alfred Preisser has adapted and updated Euripides' tragedy to great dramatic effect. The play begins with a litany of abuses done to the women of Troy by the conquering Greek army. As adapted by Preisser, the list is horrifically familiar to anyone who watches the news or reads the papers. The text uses the accounts of survivors of the more recent atrocities in Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Baghdad, and the result is a sadly believable description of what it is to be a woman in a country overrun by an invading army. I found this brilliant—making the tragedy of the women of Troy accessible to a modern audience.

The story is begun by a girl in the camp who looks like she’s about twelve, describing how her town was overrun, her family murdered, and all the women raped. The surviving women of Troy, including their queen Hecuba, are imprisoned together in a sort of concentration camp, and await their fate. In a separate cage is Helen of Troy, whose face "launched a thousand ships”—supposedly the cause of the war and as such the object of all the women’s hatred. Into the camp marches Talthybius, the Greek envoy and bearer of bad tidings. He informs the women that they are all to become slaves to the Greek soldiers—and that, in a way, this is a good thing. Cassandra, the mad prophetess who is cursed with telling truths that no ones believes, tells her mother Hecuba not to worry, that her suffering will end this very day. One by one, the women are taken away. Finally, Talthybius informs the women that Asyntanax, the infant child of the Trojan hero Hector and his wife Andromache, must be killed—and the soldiers take the child off. And then Menelaus, the cuckolded Greek husband of Helen, shows up. From there, things get worse for the women of Troy.

The cast is excellent. As Hecuba, Lizan Mitchell brings a shocking amount of dignity, rage, and sorrow to the stage. At one point, she lets out a scream that shakes one to the bone. It is rare to see such an amazing actress on any stage—let alone off-off Broadway—and her performance by itself is worth the price of admission.

Equally magnificent is Ty Jones as Menelaus. Jones bursts onto the stage with a savage intensity, threatening immediate harm to anyone who gets in his way. This is a Menelaus whose fury is palpable—a walking, breathing personification of anger, hatred, and unrequited revenge. His performance is riveting because you are never sure what he will do next, but can’t wait to see what it will be.

Zainab Jah, as Helen, is at once sexual, intelligent, and creepy. Ron Simons plays Talthybius as a flustered bureaucrat absurdly trying to spin the events of the day into something positive. Every time Simons enters the stage bearing more bad tidings, it is both absurdly hilarious and unbearably aggravating. It also feels strangely similar to watching a White House press briefing. What is great about all the performances in the show is how the actors make their characters both modern and timeless.

Alfred Preisser moves the action along at an amazing quick clip—the whole show is under 1-1/2 hours. But it never feels rushed or forced. The set by Troy Hourie is suggestive of both a modern urban city, and a Nazi concentration camp; it is full of sharp, dangerous objects, and is separated from the audience by a chain link fence.

Go see this show—this is a fantastic company doing fantastic work on an extremely relevant play. Go!

For those theatergoers familiar with Euripides’ Trojan Women, the subtitle of Charles Mee’s revision—“A Love Story”—sounds almost obscene. Euripides’ vision of the sack of Troy and the enslavement of its women remains one of the most heartrending works about war and its victims. One by one, the women of Troy are dragged off as concubines of the victorious Greeks, circumstances closer to rape than romance.

Given Mee’s subtitle, what should an audience expect? Even before the show begins, his discordant choice intimates a postmodern approach. But don’t fear: this is no mere deconstruction of a classic work. Mee’s play, and the Double Helix production, is a wholly moving tragedy on its own: unique and self-contained, and without the thumbprints of an egotistical director or a sterile whiff of experimentation for its own sake.

Which isn’t to say that director Ellen Beckerman doesn’t shock us with the unfamiliar and the (seemingly) out-of-place. On her small stage ringed by gauzy curtains, Beckerman not only gives us the play but several amped-up dance numbers, like a more user-friendly Richard Foreman. But generally, Beckerman’s movement-based style and application of lights and sound (designed by Rychard Curtiss) more closely resembles master avant-gardist Anne Bogart (whom Beckerman studied under). For all their dancing, the chorus of Trojan women are small and pitiful girls whose deadpan expressions belie their jitterbugging energy. Through a profusion of theatrical devices, Beckerman integrates her forebears’ work into an organic production that illustrates the brutality of war—of any war, no matter its reason.

The most important work at Beckerman’s disposal is obviously Mee’s script, a stew of texts whose major component is Euripides. But Mee adds his distinctive voice to the ideas culled from history and art, a combination of precise lyrical poetry, a intellectual grasp of human nature and a vivid theatrical imagination. On Mee’s flexible stage, a woman clutches her child, represented by a sack of flour; a soldier dashes out the infant’s brains by pouring it out. But when the ravenous women pounce on it, is it flour that they’re eating or are they so starved that they’ve become cannibals?

But Mee’s most radical alteration of the Greek original is his addition of an underplot. At certain moments, the action flashes forward in time from the ruins of Troy to the palaces of Carthage, where the lone Trojan survivor, Aeneas, dallies with Queen Dido. As recounted in the Roman epic Aeneid, this young hero eventually leaves his lover to found Rome. The heat Mee generates by the friction between the tragic conquest of Troy and the military empire that it birthed, phoenix-like, provides the energy for Beckerman’s exciting production.

Mee and Beckerman connect these dual plots by casting the same actress as both Dido and Hecuba, Troy’s fallen queen. Aimee Phelan plays the pair with hardiness and power, equally at home in the tragic pitch of Troy and the languid romance of Carthage, her long-limbed gestures adding to her elegant presence. Phelan’s Hecuba commands a chorus of broken women whose eloquent reactions provide the play with humanity. But Phelan remains at the center of attention, even when she’s shunted off to the gauzy wings. The divisions between her roles collapse, so that the climax of this Trojan Women isn’t public, as it was in Euripides, but private: Dido, with the tragic force of Hecuba propelling her, sends her lover to found Rome, which she foresees will conquer the Greeks in turn. Phelan’s performance shows the avenging fury at the heart of the play.

Through all this, Trojan Women: A Love Story is trenchant as well as emotional. The force for vengeance that Hecuba/Dido becomes is a dramatic manifestation of war, which redounds upon the victors and victims alike. Euripides wrote his Trojan Women in 415 B.C., just after Athens had conquered a weak island nation. His work was not written as an eternal classic; it commented directly on contemporary events. Mee too reveals a cautious and humanistic view of warfare, which Beckerman adapts to suit a country that knows violence too well and yet struts victoriously. Remaining faithful to the tragic and theatrical vision of ancient Greece, Beckerman and Mee portray the absolute destruction of war that remains unchanged 25 centuries after Euripides did the same.

A fantastic event, 43 years in the making, is happening at LaMaMa E.T.C. right now, and if you have any interest in theatre at all, you will go and be a part of it. Ellen Stewart’s brilliant Great Jones Repertory Company is presenting SEVEN- seven Greek plays in repertory. There are six revivals and one world premiere. On the night I went, I had the good fortune of seeing two revivals: Medea and Trojan Women. They are both exceptional pieces of theatre—no, works of art. It is rare that a show can be so electrifying, primal, and immediate—and rarer still to see two shows back-to-back of such caliber.

On the night I attended, Medea was the first show presented. This production was originally mounted by Andrei Serban in 1972, and as restaged by Ellen Stewart, maintains urgency and modernity balanced with a sense of timelessness. The entire play is in Greek, Latin, or some other language I don’t speak—but it doesn’t matter, because as performed by the sublime cast, each utterance is clear in meaning. At the top of the play, the audience is herded into a rather closed and dark place, surrounded and infiltrated by the cast, who whisper their lines to one another, singly and in unison. It’s wonderfully unsettling, exhilaratingly creepy, and totally appropriate to the piece. Medea is a story of a wronged woman driven by rage and despair to the murder of her own children—and I found the nightmarish quality of the show a perfect match for the subject matter. After the brief prologue in shadow, the audience is led into the theatre and to their seats. The rest of the story unfolds under torchlight, with a pounding, drum-driven underscore composed by Elizabeth Swados. The play feels like a fantastical ghost story told around a campfire. The cast is uniform in their concentration, in their commitment to the material, and in their trust of one another.

Trojan Women is unsettling, exciting, and poignant. More environmental in its staging than Medea, the play begins in the lobby, when the cast enters as the conquering Greek army, singing a rousing victory march, and parading the spoils of war—enslaved women. The show shifts to the inside of the theatre, and the audience remains on its feet. The action takes place all over—among the audience, on either side of the arena-like theatre, on the catwalks above. At times, the audience feels like they are part of the Greek army, at other times, part of the group of conquered Trojans. The cast is again exceptional—but I must point out Maura Ngyuen Donohue, who plays Helen. For her scene, Helen is put in a cart and pushed through the audience, amidst taunts by the Greeks and the other women. Donohue plays Helen as a fierce, insane seductress who will do anything she can to stay alive. At one moment she is laughing manically, at another she struts about her cart as if daring someone to climb into it with her—it’s both titillating and grotesque. As Cassandra, the mad prophetess, Kim Ima is intense, conveying lunacy, frustration, and anguish of the drop of a hat. The entire cast is made up of theatre gods, and each one of them is accomplished, committed, and a pleasure to watch.

I had the honor of shaking Ms. Stewart's hand after the show, and I told her what I truly feel, which is that there should be throngs of people filling the theatre for these plays—they are important, exciting, pertinent, new—I could go on forever. I cannot recommend strongly enough either of these shows. They are a testament to the power of theatre, and to the power of being a human being.

A quick scan of amazon.com reveals that none of the major books about the Hollywood Ten and the McCarthy Era Blacklist is still in print; my new copy of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film has no entries for Dalton Trumbo or Ring Lardner, Jr. Thus, the necessity of a play like Trumbo: American audiences need to recollect the time, not so long ago, when basic First Amendment freedoms were compromised and abridged by our government; and they need to recall it not just particularly now, but always.

Trumbo is an exploration of the life and career of Dalton Trumbo, once the most notorious member of the Hollywood Ten, the group of screenwriters who defied Congress and refused to answer questions about their politics (let alone name names) at the height of the Cold War-inspired witch hunt for "reds." Cited for contempt of Congress and eventually jailed, they were the among the first in the entertainment industry to be singled out for their left-leaning ideas and associations; they were also among the first to be blacklisted by the motion picture industry. Trumbo, which is written by the screenwriter's son Christopher (who was just seven years old when his father first testified for the House Un-American Activities Committee), unflinchingly looks at that terrible and shameful time, starting with a recreation of that testimony and covering Trumbo's jail time, his self-imposed exile in Mexico as he struggled to make ends meet by turning out screenplays using aliases and "fronts," through his vindication in 1960, when Otto Preminger put Trumbo's name on his Exodus screenplay and Kirk Douglas did likewise with Spartacus.

It's a kind of profile in courage: Trumbo never backed down from his position that his political opinions and affiliations were private and inalienable. The hardships that resulted—psychological as well as economic—were real, unjust, and—especially when they impacted the lives of his young children—savage: a description of Trumbo's daughter Mitzi's experiences in school after the family returned from Mexico is particularly heart-rending. Near the end of the play, Trumbo uses the occasion of a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Writers Guild to look back on the lessons of the Blacklist. He concludes, sagely, that everybody who lived through that time—victims, perpetrators, and supposedly innocent bystanders alike—had sinned in some way or other to get through it. In such moments, Trumbo becomes a mirror into which we all ought to take a long, hard look.

Now having said all that, I also need to say that I wish Trumbo were ultimately a better medium for so valuable a message. Alas, it's not as strong or satisfying a work as it might be. First of all, the script is talky and largely undramatic: Christopher Trumbo has used his father's letters for much of his text, letters that were meant to be read rather than spoken aloud in the theatre. (Dalton Trumbo wrote dialogue for a living and he knew the difference.) Beyond this structural problem, there's also one of selection: what Trumbo gives us, mostly, is a curmudgeonly eccentric with a heart of gold—when the Blacklist causes genuine financial strain, for example, the level of urgency here feels more like Auntie Mame than The Grapes of Wrath. That's a son's prerogative; but I wish whatever it was that made Trumbo the quixotic defiant that he must have been was more in evidence here. The Marx that's needed is Karl; but the one we get is Groucho.

Speaking of which, Nathan Lane, who plays Trumbo for the first few weeks of its run (he will presumably be replaced by other "name" actors in a revolving door casting concept like the one pioneered by the Westside Downstairs Theatre's former tenant The Vagina Monologues), goes for the comedy whenever he can, delivering a crowd-pleasing but not especially illuminating performance. The meat of Trumbo is cogent argument and Lane the entertainer never lets up enough to give it breathing room. Gordon MacDonald has the play's other role, as Christopher, and he's quite good, whether delivering what amounts to voiceover narration or watching, listening to, and very occasionally interacting with Lane as his father. Director Peter Askin's staging is simple and unadorned, which is entirely suitable to the reminiscence format of the play. Another, less adorned central performance than Lane's may well serve the piece better, too.

But if star power draws people in to see Trumbo, then the battle's already partially won. I left the play aware that it was somehow insufficient in satisfying my need to know about the Blacklist and its deleterious effects on the nation; that's what sent me to amazon in search of more information. But I'm grateful that the seed is now planted in my consciousness. Trumbo, though often less than involving, is never less than interesting, and often edifying. It's a worthy thing.

The play Trust, by Gary Mitchell, an emerging playwright from Northern Ireland, is a fairly compelling, but ultimately unwieldy, story about life with a family that is deeply involved in the UDA—one of the many violent militias in Northern Ireland. If you are unfamiliar with the "troubles” of Ireland, there are two main factions in that country who have been killing each other for many years. One faction is the Catholics, whom the IRA purportedly fight for; the other side is the Protestants, whom the UDA fight for. Many plays, movies, and books have been written about this conflict, and I am sure many more will be written before it all sorts itself out, but none so far, at least in my experience, have come at the situation from the angle of familial melodrama. Trust is sort of like an Irish Sopranos, replacing the mob of New Jersey with the militia of Ulster.

The story has two main plotlines. First, there is the story of Geordie and his wife Margaret and son Jake. Jake is a bit of a sad sack, and is having troubles at school with bullies. Margaret wants Geordie to get more involved with Jake and worries a little too much. Geordie thinks Jake will be fine, and worries too little. What makes this rather boring situation interesting is the fact that Geordie is a high ranking member of the Ulster Defense Army, someone who has seen death and horror, as well as inflicted it upon others. Seeing an Irish thug having to deal with domestic problems is fascinating, and this part of the story is exciting and fresh.

The second part of the story is a maudlin, by-the-numbers plot about a deal going down between Geordie and a crooked English soldier named Vincent who is selling him some guns. The main reason for the secondary plot seems to be to provide a dramatic conclusion to the show when the two plot lines collide. I wish Mitchell had written more of the domestic plotline, and less of the action-movie subplot. In trying to make the play more active, Mitchell has bogged it down. For example, there is one scene in the play where Vincent and his Irish girlfriend Julie are caught by a helicopter—this may sound exciting on the page, but on the stage, it was loud, boring, and predictable.

The cast does a fine job with the script. As Geordie, Ritchie Coster is excellent. He brings power, danger, and sensitivity to a very complex character in a very subtle, nuanced performance. Equally compelling is Fiona Gallagher as Margaret, the conflicted wife and mother. Declan Mooney, who plays Trevor, a recently released jailbird and perennial loser trying to get work in the UDA, brings just the right blend of humor and hopelessness to his character. The rest of the cast does a fine job, although there is an inconsistency to their attempts at Irish accents that detracts from the performances—I don’t know if this is the fault of dialect coach Pamela Prather, the cast, or what is more likely, both.

Erica Schmidt directs the show at a fine clip, doing what she can to keep the rather unwieldy script from bogging down. The transitions between scenes are an interesting spectacle. In each scene shift, one or more characters from the scene just concluded stays on stage, doing whatever they were doing when the scene ended, be that watching television or kissing passionately. As they remain, other actors and stagehands move the scenery about with blank expressions. To me, it seemed that this was a metaphor for people so caught up in their own actions that they are completely oblivious to the world crashing around them.

Tulips & Cadavers is about Rembrandt, the Dutch painter who lived from 1606 to 1669. Though it takes the shape of deathbed reminiscence, and though it includes an impressive array of material both personal and professional about the artist, it would nevertheless be wrong to categorize the piece as mere stage biography. No, playwright-director Jimmy Camicia has something more interesting in mind here. He begins his play by having Rembrandt ask the audience, "What do you see when you look?" His answer to his own question leads to a fascinating exploration of what it means to create art, and what art's creation means to the world.

I should add immediately that it's also an enormously fun journey: Tulips & Cadavers has lots of insightful things to say to its audience, but its foremost concern is to entertain us, and it does so winningly. This Rembrandt talks to us in very contemporary language, and he's disarmingly frank about the asses he kissed to rise to the top of his profession by his thirties. He's just as candidly matter-of-fact about his sex life. Among the tales he spins are ribald accounts of three lovers: Saskia, the well-to-do woman who gave him entree to high society; Geertje, the vulgar and unstable dry nurse whom he engaged when Saskia died after giving birth to their only surviving son; and Hendrijke, the young woman who became his second wife after he consigned Geertje to an expensive but secure mental institution.

So there's much to engage our prurient curiosities, especially in the breezily informal staging that Camicia provides. He stands center stage as Rembrandt, addressing us at a lectern, with a trapezoidal screen behind him on which are projected slides of some of his paintings. To his right is the actor Craig Meade, dressed in black-tie formal which he embellishes with just the perfect accessory—a beaded headdress, for example—to take on the roles of each of the three lovers, as well as Doc Tulip, a subject of one of Rembrandt's earliest paintings. (Meade, who is just spectacularly good, will turn up again at the end of the play as the Playwright himself).

To Camicia's left is Crystal Field as Flora, the aging artist's aging model. Scold, coquette, and woeful pragmatist, she is the painter's muse—maybe the only one he has left; maybe the only one he ever had. Field is brilliantly effective, throwing away punchline after punchline with deadpan assurance; later, when the script post-modernly takes a twist that requires her to shift from Edith Bunker-ish frowsiness to a kind of stately, angelic grace, she does so with impressive ease: a mere change of vocal tone and posture are all she needs to transform herself.

The setup lets us in on the play's self-referential-ness early on, but it's not until the final scene that we completely comprehend what's on the playwright's mind. Thirty years ago, Camicia was an off-off-Broadway revolutionary; today, like Rembrandt in his later years, Camicia is not so much in favor as younger artists whose bold styles were made possible only by his earlier experiments. Flora tells the dying Rembrandt that his pictures are out of style because people like art that willl go with their furniture; when we look at Camicia's art, do we see that something more or less the same has happened? When Meade-as-The-Playwright collides with Camicia-as-Rembrandt, that connection is made literal. There are some things about art that never waver: value, beauty, worth—they're always decided by the perceiver. "What do you see when you look?" turns out to be the only question that counts for anything at all.

The title of Twentieth Century refers not to the hundred years between 1900 and 1999 but rather to the Twentieth Century Limited, a cross- country luxury train which, in the imaginary 1938 of the play's setting, speeds past any darker reality that could tempt a viewer to interpret the title allegorically. The 20th century was, after all, a time of great upheaval, conflict and misery, but you wouldn't know that by observing the creatures who inhabit the three swank compartments in which (with the exception of an epilogue at Grand Central) the play's entire action takes place.

I admit that I've never seen the 1934 film version of Twentieth Century, but I know that its screenwriters—Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur—were capable of some real satirical grit. Their classic play The Front Page is grand, toothy satire that pulls no punches in its examination of an America gone mad with its own desire for sensation, and I went into this production expecting the same delirious debunking of theatrical types that The Front Page accomplished for newspapermen.

Alas, this new stage version of their play—itself an adaptation of an earlier play by Charles Bruce Millholland—is absolutely, empirically, irrefutably fluff. Re-adapted for the stage by Ken Ludwig, it's clear that, on its 72-year journey from play to movie and back to play, the material has lost some of its pop. Walter Bobbie's production for the Roundabout doesn't sparkle like champagne; it's more like a fruity white wine that you have a nagging suspicion the host poured out of a box—but hey, at least it gets you a little tipsy.

What buzz the show delivers comes from its star power. Though the supporting cast is fully effective and competent, they're not allowed to make nearly as much of an impression as the celebrities. Alec Baldwin plays Oscar Jaffe, a big Broadway producer hung over from a hard financial fall; Anne Heche is Lily Garland, the glamorous stage star he created, only to have her desert him for Hollywood. The action is fueled by the twin engines of Jaffe's attempts to woo, cajole or trick Lily—with whom he endured a long, tempestuous screwball romance—into signing a contract for a new production, and Lily's passionate resistance to this proposition. (It's also aided immeasurably by John Lee Beatty's literally locomotive art deco set.) That the stars are going to end up together is a foregone conclusion; the fun is in watching them sweat to get there.

And sweat they do. Baldwin's and Heche's faces turn comically red; they jump on each other and wrestle each other to ground; they slam doors and then, for good measure, slam them again. Heche is a whirlwind, creating in Lily a gleeful caricature of vanity and excess whose every swoon and shimmy is calculated for maximum dramatic effect. In a stylized homage/parody of John Barrymore (who played the same role onscreen), Baldwin has fine comic chops, and even if he doesn't quite own the play his blustery ingenuity and faux-sophisticated accent make for consistent laughs. His finest moment is a monologue in which he describes to Lily in dripping, nearly prurient detail his dazzling plans for her in the role of Mary Magdalene in his comeback vehicle, a Broadway version of the Passion.

I don't know if the passion-play aspect of the plot was in the original story, but it's certainly timely—and a refreshingly irreverent tonic to all the blood-drenched coverage of Mel Gibson's recent film. It's here that the pleasantly  amoral aspect of the material shines through with the greatest success. Elsewhere, the cosmopolitan comedy is compromised by Ken Ludwig's ham-handed adaptation. It's easy to see where Ludwig left his stamp—all the groaningly obvious sex gags that wouldn't pass muster with 1930s censors are presumably from his pen. Crackling dialogue of this sort relies in part on the limitations set on the writers back then—the frisson dissipates when you can spell things out and use words like "sex" and "sleep with."

In the end, however, this casually anachronistic stance on sex is merely part of a larger problem. Throughout, the characters' self-absorption is taken for granted—we're never presented with a larger context of time and place in which to find their actions thrillingly, lovably reprehensible. In a play with as grand a title as Twentieth Century, this is a rather crucial omission.

Uncovering Eden takes place in Iraq in 1926, shortly after the British established themselves there after centuries of Ottoman rule. But that's just background: Uncovering Eden is an entirely apolitical play, despite its hot-button setting. It tells the story of an American archaeologist named Chance McNeil, a sort of Indiana Jones character who is leading an expedition that may accomplish what the play's title suggests. For he and his colleagues, who include a wise and modern Arab named Dr. Ali Mehemet (who is a cousin to King Faisal) and a stuffy British Old Testament scholar named  Berenger, seem to be on the verge of finding evidence of a lost Sumerian temple whose priests recorded the story of creation long before Moses.

It's a neat hook for what amounts to a romance-adventure drama. But Uncovering Eden stretches genre because its love story involves two men, the hot-headed maverick Chance and the older Eliot Cornell, a brilliant professor who was once McNeil's teacher at Oxford and, as we soon discover, also his lover. Chance needs Cornell to prop up his expedition, which is suffering from bookkeeping irregularities and a run of bad luck that may or may not be sabotage; he also wants him to validate the magnitude of their find. Cornell, in ill health, craves Chance's strength and vitality. And it turns out they both need each other's love, which manifests itself in a father/son-S&M thing that seems to make them both very happy.

The story is complicated by the fact that Chance, Ali, and Cornell all keep having the same dreams about a pair of Sumerian men who were lovers, one of whom was the keeper of the sacred tablets that our heroes are now trying to locate. Another subplot involves the mysteriously missing Wilmott, McNeil's other partner on the dig, and a silly-ass Inspector who is sent to investigate his disappearance. Uncovering Eden is filled with incident, which keeps us watching and listening, sometimes on the edge of our seats.

What I love about this play is the way that author George Barthel devotes just about as much stage time to steamy, potentially kinky loveplay between Cornell and McNeil as he does to Dr. Mehemet's explanation of the theological and philosophical implications of the archaeologists' discoveries. Talk about wide-ranging interests: there's something for everyone in Uncovering Eden, with the obvious exception of a "typical" heterosexual love story. If it's finally not great dramatic literature, it's nevertheless gripping theatre, not least because it covers so much ground in just a couple of hours.

The production at Wings Theatre is generally satisfactory, with fine anchoring performances by James A. Walsh and Raymond O. Wagner as McNeil and Cornell, and solid supporting ones  by Gabriel Rivas as Ali and Josh Mertz as Berenger. L.J. Kleeman and Richard Bacon's staging is fluid, if a bit turgid at times; Kleeman's set and costumes are terrific, though, as is Bacon's evocative sound design.

Oberon Theatre Ensemble's revival of Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love is revelatory. Director Tim Errickson and his consistently excellent cast of seven mine this early play by Canadian Brad Fraser for authentic emotional content, and as a result a work that always seemed to me to be nihilist and sensational now exhibits unexpected depth and humanity. It's also a ripping good show: Remains, part angst-ridden twenty-something melodrama, part suspense thriller, keeps us riveted to—and occasionally on the edges of—our seats.

The play concerns a group of three old friends and their continued quest for love and affirmation from one another and the world around them. David had a brief career as a television actor but has now returned home—to Edmonton, Canada, where the play is set—and works as a waiter. He lives with Candy, a woman who was once, briefly, his lover and is now a very close friend, his sexual preference having become more or less exclusively homosexual. A frequent visitor to their apartment is Bernie, another longtime friend (though Candy doesn't like him much anymore; hasn't since the death—an apparent suicide—of Bernie's girlfriend Dana, who was Candy's best friend). It's clear pretty much from the outset that David has seriously unrequited feelings for Bernie; and as we get to know Bernie, we understand that his macho posturing almost certainly masks similar, hideously repressed yearnings for David as well.

We also start to get suspicious about what Bernie is doing at night that causes him to get blood—not his own—all over his clothing. Especially because we keep hearing subtle but persistent news reports of a serial killer on the loose in Edmonton, murdering young women.

David pretends to be jaded and cool but is obviously horribly lonely; so when Kane, a young busboy at the restaurant where he works, develops a crush on him, he is at once repelled and interested. Candy, getting icier and bitterer with each passing day, is just as vulnerable, and during the course of the play she pursues abortive and painful relationships with a bartender named Robert who turns out to be married and a lesbian from her gym named Jerri who turns out to be scarily clinging.

The seventh character is Benita, another of David's friends, who is, I guess, some kind of call girl; she has psychic powers and delights in recounting morbidly grotesque, urban-legend-styled horror tales.

Playwright Fraser puts all of these volatile personalities onto the stage and shakes well. Under Errickson's steady hand, the thing coheres into a searingly intimate portrait of young people finding their way and making all sorts of missteps and mistakes in the process. The concepts of being loved and getting older are very scary to these characters, and so fear is the primary emotion on display here. But there's also sadness, and anticipation, and exuberance, and even some compassion in the mix: relegating the more gruesome and gratuitous aspects of Remains to the background, Errickson makes the piece a humane examination of a group of damaged young adults finally growing up.

The production, stark and simple, is designed beautifully by Ian Pfister (sets), Melia Marden (costumes), Carolyn Sarkis (lighting), and Sarah Gromko (sound). Carrie Brewer supplies appropriate fight choreography (interestingly, the longest sequence involves two women). The cast is exemplary. Ian Pfister anchors the play as David, capturing the cynical veneer and the aching vulnerability underneath. Heather McAllister is similarly self-assured and hard-as-nails on the surface while displaying an underlying sadness as Candy. Peter Picard is smooth, suave, and scary as the conflicted Bernie. In the smaller roles, WT McRae is engaging and disarmingly youthful as Kane; Kate Sandberg is appealingly enigmatic as Benita; and Evan Zes and Thea McCartan deliver vivid, sometimes surprising turns as Robert and Jerri.

JAMES: I'm not your son.
MARGARET: I wish you weren't!
JAMES: I was switched at birth by gypsies. And they said, let's punish this baby. Let's send him to Dainsville, Texas, let's dump him into a framehouse with no books and brown wallpaper and pink chenille bedspreads...
MARGARET: You spiteful little jabber-monster...
JAMES: Let's give him to a sadistic idiot who runs a hardware story and a vicious, dried-up woman with bad hair and no taste.
MARGARET (raising her hand): You are just begging for it...
JAMES: Fine. Hit me again. But just look at your dining room.

Thus begins Act One of Valhalla, the new comedy by Paul Rudnick. It's supposed to be the late '30s in a small town in Texas, yet here's this self-assured teenage boy with enough attitude and arch delivery to start his own Queer Eye for the Straight Guy franchise.

James is the neighborhood bad boy: his sexual proclivities, general rebelliousness, and smart mouth eventually land him in reform school, but not before he makes a pass at seducing hunky Henry Lee Stafford, a schoolmate who will eventually become captain of the football team and marry the prettiest girl in town, Sally Mortimer. James returns to Dainsville at 18, on the eve of Henry Lee and Sally's graduation and wedding, and tries seducing both of them to get his wicked way; later James finds himself on the same ship to Europe with the now-married Henry Lee (both having enlisted during World War II) and he seduces him one more time.

Meanwhile, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria grows from a spoiled peculiar little boy to a spoiled peculiar young man. Gay but more significantly an aesthete, Ludwig takes pleasure only in the excesses of Wagnerian opera and extravagant castle-building; he eventually strains his country's treasury—by now he is King—to create ever-more-fabulous palaces until he is forced to abdicate in favor of his younger brother.

What are James Avery and King Ludwig doing in the same play? Rudnick never quite makes that clear, I'm afraid, though he has the two cross paths, at least metaphorically, in a climactic second act scene at one of Ludwig's castles that almost, but doesn't quite, work. Here James and Henry Lee seem on the verge of declaring their love for one another and making a commitment—the same sort of commitment, I guess, that Ludwig has made for creating beauty to the exclusion of doing anything else as his country's ruler.

But unconditional love and unconditional beauty don't quite surface in Valhalla; and even if they did, they aren't really the same thing, are they? Rudnick mixes apples and oranges a lot in this unwieldy play, hoping to make a point about what's really important in life, but because he keeps trying to make connections that aren't there he finally manages to say very little indeed. Valhalla, instead, emerges as just another cold, calculated Rudnick farce, very much in the mold of Rude Entertainment and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, complete with snappy one-liners, modish in-jokes and pop-culture references, and an entirely gratuitous flash of frontal male nudity. All of this happens in the first act, by the way; the second and more ambitious half of Valhalla barely manages to provide even a few guffaws. The ending—in which Ludwig dies and James renounces his hedonistic homosexual ways—is gloomy and ponderous.

All that said, Valhalla provides a terrific role for Peter Frechette, who has a blast as the frenetically effeminate Ludwig, decked out in ridiculously extravagant period costumes by William Ivey Long and goofy curly-haired wigs by Robert-Charles Vallance. Candy Buckley and Jack Willis enjoy themselves, too, in a variety of roles; Scott Barrow and Samantha Soule are fine in less showy roles (principally Henry Lee and Sally). But Sean Dugan never makes sense out of James Avery, which is certainly more Rudnick's fault than his. It's too bad, because an authentically heroic gay leading man is something we could probably use nowadays. Valhalla, squandering the audience's goodwill the way that Mad King Ludwig squandered Bavaria's cash reserves, comes up blank.

Vampire Cowboy Trilogy proves that it is possible for theatre to be irreverent, silly fun without being vulgar or crass or dumb. Filled to the brim with jokes, foolish plot twists, and wall-to-wall comic book-style action, this triple bill of live-action cartoons also possesses authentic wit and even a bit of a social conscience. You'll laugh a lot and you'll have a terrific time, but your brain won't have been kept waiting outside idling: playwright Qui Nguyen and director Robert Ross Parker, the dynamic duo behind this super-heroic little show, genuinely engage their audience. Vampire Cowboy Trilogy deserves to be New York's next big hit; check it out now, before some savvy producer moves it off-Broadway.

The evening begins with a Prologue that provides a totally accurate indication of what's ahead. It features the  very funny Melissa Paladino as a character billed in the program as "The Kooky Flight Attendant with a Heart of Gold," who is here to demonstrate the safety features of our aircraft—er, theatre. Her tortuous mime is accompanied by an announcement, delivered by a booming unseen voice on a loud speaker (actually, a barely-hidden Dan Deming, just offstage holding a megaphone), which includes useful information such as: "Do not use the overhead bins, as they do not exist." (There's also a warning in Croatian, during which our KFA, winging it, simply waves a tiny Croatian flag.) OK: seatbelts fastened and cellphones turned off, we are ready for the Vampire Cowboys.

What follows are three hilarious one-act parodies of staple action-adventure genres. First up is "Jake Misco: Outer Borough Paranormal Investigator," a noir send-up set in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) in which the title character, a "dick" who seems to spend most of his time talking to himself in voiceover narration, tussles with a beautiful mysterious stranger who claims that she is being haunted by her late husband's ghost. Jake, played to perfection by Dan Deming, is a superb comic creation, stepping over chairs (even when people are sitting in them) rather than walking around them, and maintaining an edgy bravado that belies a  fundamental dimness, bragging, at one point, that the tattoo of Humphrey Bogart on his chest is lifesize. The silliness never lets up in this sketch, even as the plot thickens beyond all plausibility. Caitlin Dick (as Molly, Jake's supposedly psychic, supposedly French secretary), Temar Underwood (as Janitor Jim), and Andrea Marie Smith (as the mysterious client) complete the cast brilliantly.

Next comes "Captain Justice & Liberty Lady versus The Hooded Menace," a Cold War Era comic book brought to life: classic Green Hornet by way of TV's campy Batman. Underwood and Paladino star as the good guys, while Deming, in improbable purple t-shirt and baggy tights, is their arch nemesis; Smith portrays an even more villainous master criminal called The Spectator. Dopey puns and gags alternate with pow!bam!zonk! fight scenes (featuring Megan Ketch and Margie Freeswick as a pair of Norwegian Ninjas and, later, as a pair of Japanese Ninjas), all in the name of nonstop comedy: you'll see, for example, Liberty Lady hold a computer floppy disk up to the light when she's asked to read her files, and you'll also see prodigious head-knocking and eye-gouging à la Moe (of the Three Stooges). Buried not so subtly underneath, there's even a sort of moral.

The Trilogy concludes with "Tina: Teenage Warrior Princess," which spoofs a popular TV show with a very similar name. This one pulls the stops out in terms of absurd plotting, with our heroine and her sidekick Gabby battling Missy, the most popular girl in school, and her squad of Zombie Cheerleaders. Tina and Gabby's adventures take them to the school flagpole, where they have to retrieve the Insoles of Inachus, and also to a classroom, where a strange long-armed teacher named (appropriately enough) M. Linstructeur, is delivering one of those pointless high school French dialogues. (My favorite exchange from the faux dialogue: "Ou est mon uncle?/Il est sur la bicyclette orange.")

"Tina," like the other two pieces, is apt and funny parody. It features the most fight choreography, including an exciting climactic battle in which Tina wields, among other weapons, a hockey puck, a baseball bat, and a basketball. The combat scenes are wittily staged by playwright Nguyen with assists from various company members, and showcase the cast's female actors, which is in itself pretty unusual.

Everything about Vampire Cowboy Trilogy is executed with excellence: the seven cast members are all terrific in multiple roles; the sets and lighting by Nick Francone are appropriate; the costumes by Christopher M. Domanski are clever and witty; and the staging by Robert Ross Parker is flawlessly sharp. The sheer professionalism of the entire enterprise assures us that we're in good hands throughout, which goes a long way toward fending off the curses of sophomoric humor and winking self-reference that too often plague shows of this type. Vampire Cowboy Trilogy earns every one of its myriad laughs honestly. A genuinely good time is had by all.

So as I said at the beginning, this sure feels like a hit. New York will be hearing much more from Nguyen, Parker, and the rest of the Vampire Cowboy crowd. I can't wait.