nytheatre Archive
2003-04 Theatre Season Reviews

The Aquila Theatre Company isn't one to leave well enough alone, even when well enough is one of the funniest plays ever written, namely Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Now, I don't generally like directors mucking about with classics, but if this play teaches us anything, it's that the hard and fast rules of living are meant to be broken. Robert Richmond and Peter Meineck, the masterminds of this revival, have broken the rules beautifully, and their Earnest is a delight from start to finish. The ultra-mod lucite furnishings and the ultra-hip post-modern sound- and light-bites may jar and/or disorient at first, but bear with them: by the time Algernon and Jack are earnestly (what else?) wooing their wronged sweethearts via David Soul's deathless "Don't Give Up On Us, Baby" at the climax of Act Two, this production is home free, having burrowed its way endearingly and charmingly into our hearts.

Richmond and Meineck have set this Earnest, as Wilde did his, in "the present day," shallowness, small-mindedness, and self-centeredness not having gone out of style. The story is still of two men, not so young as they once were, easing away from callow irresponsibility as they decide to wed two young women, each of whom is resolutely committed to only marrying someone named Ernest. Of course neither of our heroes is named Ernest, though Jack has invented a fictitious brother Ernest to allow himself a reason to visit London (he lives in the country), and Algernon is only too ready to impersonate said Ernest in order to meet Jack's 18-year-old ward Cecily. Things do get sorted out by the end, but not before complications involving Jack's mysterious parentage—he was found in a train station inside a large handbag—and a side romance involving Cecily's governess and a local vicar are properly dealt with. Through it all, Wilde's epigrammatic wit flows freely from all concerned, especially the formidable Lady Bracknell, aunt to Algernon and mother to Jack's fiancée Gwendolen.

What Richmond and Meineck have done here is to play up the characters' preoccupations with appearances and with themselves. These folks don't walk into a room, they make an entrance, down a long runway that would do well for a high-powered fashion show, and with suitable musical accompaniment. Important sentiments (like Cecily and Gwendolen's rapturous, almost orgasmic delight in enunciating the name "Ernest") are punctuated with lighting shifts and portentous music. These people know, after all, that they are the stars of their own life stories; surely they're entitled to some special effects.

Is the punching-up absolutely necessary? Probably not, but the layer of artifice does accomplish two things. First, it distances us just enough from a text that, despite its enduring wisdom and wit, nevertheless reflects social structures (like full-time servants) that don't quite scan for a 2003 American audience. And second, it's just great fun. From the Joe Jackson and Queen recordings piped into the lobby and theatre before the show begins to the ultra-cool techno beat at the finale, Aquila's Earnest is a hoot, as sportive and stylish as the Beau Brummel duds worn so elegantly and carelessly by its leading men.

It also mines, most effectively, some of the play's most biting satire. Alex Webb, in a conservative blue suit tastefully accessorized with a single strand of pearls, is a deliciously imperious Lady Bracknell; the joke is not that he's in drag but that he looks so much like Barbara Bush, from whose lips a line like "I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance" takes on a certain, shall we say, pungency.

Webb is, in fact, the finest Lady Bracknell I've seen on stage, and he's matched by Richard Willis, who nails all of Jack's good and bad qualities and especially his fecklessness in the wake of advancing age. Andrew Schwartz must also be singled out for making much of two smaller roles, Algernon's manservant Lane and the Rev. Canon Chasuble, both of whom he depicts with great panache.

Richmond and Meineck clearly have great respect and affection for Wilde's play, and this shows up in all the little details of this production, such as the neat transition between the play's first and second acts, during which we see Algernon and Jack go out for a night on the town while the set changes all around them. I don't know if Oscar Wilde would like or approve of what's been done to his play, but I am certain that his intentions have been richly served. And what more can we ask of a revival than that?

The events of the last few years have provoked many feelings in Americans; one that's largely been overlooked is the very real disorientation that they've engendered. Hubristic ol' us finally realized: there are people out there who don't like us—and don't feel any compulsion to try to understand, empathize with, or care about us.

Playwright Anne Washburn doesn't offer any judgments as to whether any of this is justified or not in her generally intelligent and engaging play The Internationalist; what's she's given us instead—most valuably, I think—is a palpable sense of what this dislocation feels like. We're used to being accommodated, in the theatre and elsewhere: people are supposed to speak English and they're supposed to emulate and/or aspire to our cultural/intellectual norms.

Well, Washburn is here to remind us that they don't. In this funny, eccentric, slightly surreal thriller, an American businessman named Lowell arrives in an unnamed European country to conduct unspecified but presumably urgently important business. He's met at the airport by a woman named Sara who turns out to be a co-worker (though not the one he assumes her to be); after an embarrassing series of communication snafus that result in her thinking that he thinks that she is a prostitute, things are sufficiently sorted out to land them at a restaurant.

Here, defying expectation, the communication snafus just keep rolling on, now compounded with cultural gaffes like Lowell being afraid to taste the oddly green drink that he's been served.

The next morning, he arrives at work, but the environment is no more hospitable. The staff here—Nicol, Irene, James, Paul, and the boss, Simon—have English but spend much of their time talking in a language that is, Washburn admits, made up. It's never clear what Lowell is doing there (audience disorientation) or what Lowell is expected to do specifically moment to moment (Lowell disorientation). Relationships don't improve over time—they worsen. A gigantic crisis is clearly in progress when Lowell returns for his second day at the office, but don't expect anyone to explain it to either him or us. We get an inkling, in places, that some kind of Hitchcockian embroilment is about to befall Lowell, like in The 39 Steps or something. But Washburn withholds that as well. It's as if she doesn't care if we're ever satisfied with how her story plays out—which is, I believe, entirely her point.

The play—always strange and user-unfriendly—becomes unfathomable at its end. I'd like to see Washburn and her simpatico director Ken Rus Schmoll tighten The Internationalist up (scenes in the imaginary foreign language, in particular, feel like too much of a good thing after a while). But the message of this piece is smart and unusual, and challenges Washburn's playwriting muscle—which I've seen her flex more ostentatiously elsewhere—in a positive way.

Schmoll's staging, with Sue Rees' spare but inventive set design and Garin Marschall's articulate lighting, uses the problematic 45 Below space better than any production I've come across. The cast includes a trio of really praiseworthy performances—by Mark Shanahan as Lowell and Gibson Frazier and Travis York as two of his European co-workers—and three somewhat uneven ones (Kristen Kosmas is terrific as a dangerous streetwalker who wants Lowell to ride to an assignation with her pimp and several of his friends, but less convincing as office worker Irene). All in all, The Internationalist is a surprising and often rewarding theatrical adventure, one that teaches us a lesson that's timely and valuable and refreshing.

When I saw Mint Theater's fine revival of Uncle Tom's Cabin a few years back, I was acutely aware all the time that there were two of me watching the show: one who was getting involved in a period piece that I had never had the opportunity to see firsthand; and another, watching the first "me" watch the play, armed with the trappings of contemporary American culture and ready to evaluate, judge, and discover what could be learned from this unusual experience.

Unusual, but not singular: La Strada Theatre Company's debut production, of Marivaux's relatively obscure satire The Island of the Slaves, offers precisely the same sort of recursive, post-modern experience, inviting its audience to sink carelessly into a Louis Quinze comedy of manners and simultaneously to think hard about what it might have signified then and what it manages to signify now. Knowing much less about pre-Revolution France than I do about ante-bellum America, I found this adventure in playgoing somewhat less accessible than, but in the end very nearly as exciting as, my earlier excursion into the land of Simon Legree. La Strada, led by director Babak Ebrahiminian, is off to a worthy start.

In The Island of the Slaves, Marivaux invents a fantastical island somewhere off the coast of Greece that has been colonized by a group of former slaves. Whenever strangers land on this island, the slaves among them are treated as brethren and given property and occupations, while the erstwhile masters are made to pay for their shortsighted wrongdoing by becoming, at least temporarily, servants to their former chattels.

The conceit turns out to be not so democratic-republican as it at first appears: Trivelin, the island's leader (or spokesperson), seeks to teach forbearance and forgiveness to the former slaves at least as much as he strives to instill in their heretofore aristocratic "betters" a bit of humility and compassion. But the moral is ultimately light-hearted and even perhaps a little light-headed, almost an afterthought; for the bulk of this ingenious little trifle is spent poking merry and pointed fun at the foibles of the French upper classes, represented here by the insufferably coquettish Mlle. Euphrosine and the appallingly cowardly and lilly-livered master, M. Iphicrate.

This is accomplished, in word and deed, by their servants, respectively Cleanthis and Harlequin, who first embroider elaborate portraits in prose for Trivelin of their employers' plentiful faults; and then have a chance to actually play at being them for awhile, all under the watchful—and presumably somewhat-more-enlightened—eyes of Euphrosine and Iphicrate. It's a hoot watching Harlequin and Cleanthis pretend to court and flirt with the exaggerated affectations of polite society, especially because we know how much they'd rather cut loose and be themselves instead of go on with the joke.

And that's all there is, really; except for Ebrahiminian's increasingly vivid subtext—made joltingly tangible in the play's final moments—which reminds us that classism is still with us these days and may in fact be getting worse: how many indulgences are Ken Lay or Dennis Koslowski allowed before today's inert proletariat is roused to storm some modern-day metaphorical Bastille?

So The Island of the Slaves is instructive, in its way; and also entertaining. It's been staged by Ebrahiminian on an eye-popping desert isle set devised by Anka Lupes; with Mark Barton's lighting and Brian P.J. Cronin's soundscape, it's fun, evocative, and makes genuinely inventive use of the often-problematic Mainstage space at HERE. The translation by Amiel Melnick with Isaac Butler is accessible and straightforward—I'd have expected something more flowery, but this suits the production's purposes ably. Of the five actors, Sam Younis is the clear standout as Harlequin, scoring particularly with his fanciful impression of his master a-wooing, for which he adopts a hilarious James Mason accent; Jeanne Harris makes a strong impression as Euphrosine, and Kevin Kelly is effective as Trivelin. Finn Cato (Iphricate) and Anne Penner (Cleanthis) seem less comfortable in their roles; bear in mind that I reviewed the first performance.

Save some time, by the way, to peruse the program, which is literally jam-packed with informative background material prepared by the entire technical staff.

By the way Stephen Kunken speaks, it is hard to remember he is using words that are not his own. So conversational, dynamic and impassioned is his delivery, he never loses track of the unremitting emotional current in The Journals of Mihail Sebastian. The Romanian playwright/novelist’s diaries, chronicling the stealth rise of anti-Semitism in Bucharest before, during and (briefly) after World War II, have been fashioned by David Auburn into an evening that’s impact is augmented by director Carl Forsman’s elegant staging and Kunken’s mesmerizing performance.

Auburn has chosen an eloquent subject for this solo work—Sebastian’s writing contains thought and feeling in equally vivid doses and he immediately arouses our affections. His portraits of friends and lovers are wry and penetrating, and his accounts of their subtle estrangement from him, followed by the government’s circuitous persecution, followed by the panic-led pogroms, while overly-familiar to modern audiences, are still nothing less than horrifying. However, watching the twilight of his denial (and the denial of those around him) obliterated by the harsh dawn of world-wide war is most chillingly relevant right now.

Sebastian is no Cassandra. He considers himself not so much a Jew as a Man-of-the-World, and hearing him make sense of these omens—interpreting them in a careful, logical way—is fascinating and frightening. There is a nonsensical, almost unfathomable, Hate brewing, and he would like to give his friends, his fellow countrymen and leaders, and those of other countries, the benefit of the doubt. But his expectations from them—honesty, goodwill, and protection—are betrayed and he feels powerless to do anything about it.

Kunken’s transformation from a confident and concerned everyman to a figure less calloused than bewildered is compelling and ultimately satisfying. His manner is equitable, even as his closest friends and colleagues utter scathing remarks about Yids; even as he is governmentally-mandated to give up his bed, skis, radio, apartment; even as fellow Jews are carted off to work-camps while others suffering horrific deaths at gentiles’ hands; even as blitzkriegs level his home; Kunken’s Sebastian is desperate to stay humane.

The journal entries are well-organized into bite-size doses, and Forsman finds endless ways to simply theatricalize the prose. Much credit is due to Nathan Heverin’s beautiful and austere set—a café in the first act, a bedroom in the next—which provides a few delightful revelations. Josh Bradford’s lighting is a perfect complement: functional, yet also silently omniscient. Just as authentic and supportive of this mood are Theresa Squire’s costumes and Stefan Jacobs’ sound.

This is a play that requires its audience to settle in and listen; this is, after all, a non-dramatic source. But the drama described and its effect on Kunken’s Sebastian is worth your patience. What’s communicated is foreboding, but we are left with an empathy that, albeit ineffable, is more useful any day than the panicked opaqueness of an Orange Alert.

The right way for me to review The Joys of Sex is to tell you that it's a modestly entertaining, enthusiastically performed, cutely designed, winkingly silly musical comedy about two young couples who spend most of the show's 90 minutes talking and joking and singing and dancing about sex, and then realize in the end that what really matters is love and commitment. As the lights go down on a pat, happy ending, everybody's satisfied; plus the evening's still young enough for some food, drink, clubbing, or what-have-you before heading home with your sweetie.

The actors are Ron Bohmer, unthreateningly hunky (he takes his shirt off zillions of time during the show) as a married man whose checkered past is probably more fictional than real; Stephanie Kurtzuba as his wife, who wants to have a baby and her first orgasm (in that order); David Josefsberg, cute in a nerdy sort of a way (he wears glasses), tired of being the girl's best friend; and Janelle Lynn Randall, as the oversexed girl with a heart of gold who becomes the object of Josefsberg's affections. All four work hard to put over their characters and material.

The songs have titles like "Intercourse on the Internet," "One Night Stand," and "I Need It Bad," which are about precisely what you think; there's also "Cup of Sugar" (metaphorically intended), "Feed the Tiger" (metaphorically intended), and "Pandora's Box" (also metaphorically intended, but not the way you may be thinking: what a dirty mind you have). All of the musical numbers are concerned exclusively with sex, often with vaguely naughty and/or kinky aspects thereof, such as the notion of having a threesome, or the delights of an S&M club. No breakout hits here; but everything is of a piece, serving the production's overall vision well.

Lots and lots of people in the audience were having a good time. Who am I to grouse?

But grouse I shall; feel free to exit the review now if you're not interested in what may well be a minority opinion. Ready? Here I go:

I hated The Joys of Sex. I hated the tackily commercial lobby display of low-impact sex toys and naughty novelties (breath mints called "dick tacs," for example). I hated the childish nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude of the book and lyrics, a collection of cheap laughs of the Three's Company variety, stuff that's as utterly uninteresting and unsophisticated as a three-year-old talking about his "pee-pee." I hated the fact that four very competent Broadway-caliber actors are reduced to slumming, performing the theatrical equivalent of direct-to-video soft porn or junk food.

Mostly, I was disgusted and discouraged by the values that The Joys of Sex espouses. In one song, a woman is advised (by her grandmother, no less) to behave like a whore in the bedroom in order to please her husband. This same woman has a secret sexual fantasy in which she is raped by a pirate. The only acknowledgement of homosexuality is in the context of a two-woman/one-man threesome, suggested by the man. So much for feminism.

The nerdy guy, who is Jewish (no one else's religion is identified), has a mother who is into Internet sex chat and a father who is into bondage. The slut is played by the show's only African American performer, which might be a coincidence, but it probably isn't. Shame on all involved in perpetuating these harmful stereotypes.

Finally, note that in The Joys of Sex, sex—though endlessly talked about—is only fulfilling within the bounds of a committed relationship, preferably one sanctified with marriage vows.  The woman achieves orgasm when she  becomes pregnant. The slut is happy only after she's slept with the nerdy guy who loves her.

The occasional dildo excepted, there's not a thing in this show that wouldn't please the most ardent so-called family values advocate in Washington. Now ain't that a hoot?

Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner have done it again. The team responsible for the hugely successful Donkey Show has once more thrown into their artistic wok some diced Shakespearean plot, a larder-full of pop songs, a quart of audience participation, and a generous sprinkling of multicultural casting from the racial spice rack that is contemporary America. After cooking to a crisp hour-long running time, they have a tasty stir-fry that will probably feed the crowds at the China Club for years to come. That this new Karaoke Show is immense fun is undeniable, but going to it expecting Shakespeare, or even theatre for that matter, makes about as much sense as going to your local Chinese takeout joint expecting to eat like the folks do in Beijing. Then again, if one is supposed to discern anything of consequence going on beneath the frenetic surface of the entertainment, perhaps it is a questioning of authenticity. What can be termed “the real”? Is the simulation of something inherently inferior and less valuable than the “original”? In a roomful of people, who are the authentic ones and who are the “actors”? After all, karaoke is the dominant metaphor of the experience—a quasi art form that cares only about how well its practitioners can fake it, while at the same time holding out the promise of releasing their “real” selves.

The Shakespeare plot that provides the base to which all the other ingredients are added for flavor is The Comedy of Errors—itself barely an original work. From the Bard’s rhyming versification of Plautus, Weiner has extracted not so much a coherent story as a mélange of images and incidents that might have a fighting chance of grabbing the audience’s attention amidst the orchestrated chaos—identical twins (Anthony #1 and #2) of different ethnicities, an instance of mistaken infidelity, two men in drag competing for the attention of two women in drag, a mock kung-fu brawl, a murder. There are some witty touches—one Anthony works for Solomon Smith Barney, the other was recently fired from Deutsche Bank—that promise post-'90s social commentary along with the merriment. Alas in the ensuing knock down, drag-out against cocktail waitresses, party music, and copious displays of flesh, the poor underdeveloped plot hasn’t got a prayer. By the time the Chinese New Year’s dragon appeared and one of the central twins had some kind of a pop apotheosis, I was in a cheerful haze with not the faintest idea of what was going on. It seemed neither did anyone else nor did they much mind, for it was time for the open-mike portion of the show—which, in retrospect, seemed for most of the audience to be the main reason to have been there in the first place.

As for the cast, they are youthful, energetic, and uniformly excellent (New York isn’t the capital of musical theatre for nothing—it never fails to astonish just how many good singers there are here). Particular standouts included Julie Danao, Robert Orosco, and the drag duo of Aaron Fuksa and Anderson Lim performing Britney’s “Oops, I Did It Again.” But only Jordin Ruderman as Andrea, the long-suffering L.I.E.-princess wife of Anthony #1, actually uses her number to reveal something about the character—to hilarious and show-stopping effect—admirably singing her song with imperfections intact. The rest seem too concerned with impressing us (or potential industry people in the audience) to risk not singing flawlessly—the cumulative result being akin to a forced evening-long viewing of the American Idol preliminaries. And while Charles King, Jr’s reclamation of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” for the gospel choir single-handedly kicked the party into high gear, he should be gently reminded that shouting a joyful noise should never be equivalent to singing flat.

Upon deciding we didn’t need to stick around for the karaoke contest, my companions and I left the club. As we walked out into the simulation that is slowly replacing Eighth Avenue, we were not so much pondering the duality of human nature or the hairline crack separating the fantastic from the real as marveling that twenty years into her career the Materialist Mom can still get the middle managers raised on her milk of me-first bouncing up and down in the aisles. Would that our theatre could get them so enthused.

Vital Theatre Company has  scored something of a coup in attracting actors as experienced and professional as Bill Buell, Pamela Dunlap, Mario Campanaro, Sam Tsoutsouvas, and Alex Wipf to work in their intimate off-off-Broadway space in their production of Eric Lucas' The King of Mackie Street. It's a pleasure to watch these accomplished performers build sympathetic, multi-layered characters, up close and personal; we can see every tiny, nuanced raising of Dunlap's eyebrows, and every subtle hand gesture illustrating Tsoutsouvas' practiced blarney.

The play tells the story of Francis "Frankie" McKeon, a just-retired factory worker who spends his empty days jabbering with his pal Dicky "Ween" O'Dowd, while his wife Moya casts intermittent disapproving glances and hides stashes of money all around the house so that Frankie can't squander it on the horses. Moya has a weekly visit from local policeman Eamon Boyle, a widower who once fancied her and now flaunts his success in front of her husband. The other personage in the house is Moya's dumb but happy-go-lucky nephew Billy, who works as a security guard at a big supermarket, and drops by for breakfast after his nighttime shift.

Frankie, not really content to turn cuckold or fritter away his time with Dicky (who is more or less Ed Norton to his Ralph Kramden), is nevertheless too apathetic to get off his duff and do anything productive. Until, that is, Eamon gleefully drops this bombshell: the factory where Frankie worked has been bought out by a foreign company; his pension will be lost. Suddenly Frankie, who is seriously in debt to the local bookie, springs into action: he has only to look once at his dopey young nephew before he concocts a plan to rob Billy's store. With Billy and Dicky in tow (the latter "disguised" underneath a pair of Moya's pantyhose), Frankie plans to set things right without disturbing his wife's nest egg.

The set-up sounds like the stuff of caper comedy, and it plays that way too; so imagine our surprise when playwright Lucas turns deadly serious in The King of Mackie Street's second act. The robbery is botched, tragically; recriminations flow from all directions as Frankie's world comes crashing down around him. The change in tone comes from so far out of left field that it feels almost gratuitous; Lucas makes the world of the play bitterly harsh in the final scenes, without accomplishing much thematically. Our resultant dissatisfaction with the piece is tempered somewhat by the dramatic opportunities he provides to his masterful actors, who hit all of the emotional notes even if they seem somewhat unmotivated.

Bill Buell gives us a proud, sad Frankie, while Sam Tsoutsouvas is his delightful foil as Dicky O'Dowd; Alex Wipf, stiff and puffed-up, offers perfect contrast as the policeman Doyle. Mario Campanaro is good-natured and likable as the foolish young Billy, so much so that we miss him during the long stretch of Act Two when he's absent from the proceedings. Pamela Dunlap offers perhaps the finest work of the evening, eloquent in her silent disappointment until the very end, when she finally is given the chance to speak the play's sad conclusion.

The play's title refers to a reputation that Frankie apparently held in his youth, something not clearly enough explained in the script to entirely scan. Director Andrea "Spook" Testani and the cast do their best to supply some of what's missing in Lucas' text (the slightly unsteady pacing at the performance reviewed will probably be remedied with time).

Here's what I learned from The Ladies, the new theatre piece by The Civilians, written by Anne Washburn and directed by Anne Kauffman:

▪ Chairman Mao seldom if ever washed his genitals.
▪ Mme Mao had a big to-do with the wife one of her husband's underlings about a dress that she wore to a party in Indonesia.
▪ Anne Kauffman's fish sleep motionless at the bottom of their tank.
▪ Anne Kauffman has very strange dreams.
▪ Neither Anne Washburn nor Anne Kauffman is quite sure how to pronounce Chinese names that start with "Q' or "X."

I picked up a few other tidbits here and there about The Ladies' other characters (Elena Ceausescu had only a 4th grade education, Evita Peron had a radio series in which she portrayed famous women of history, Imelda Marcos routinely banged her head against the wall when she was first married). But literally tidbits: and who knows if any of them are true—the actress playing Anne Washburn warns us early on that some or all of the dialogue written for these historical figures is made-up.

What's authentic, presumably, are the verbatim-seeming conversations between Washburn and Kauffman, spoken dutifully into tape recorders and full of those mannered stammers and repetitions and interruptions that sound like Woody Allen crossed with Anna Deavere Smith. These sequences depict The Ladies' creators in the process of creating their creation: talk about post-modern meta-ness! On the surface, Washburn and Kauffman's show appears to be an exploration of four intriguing women who became the consorts of powerful dictators. But what they've cast off on audiences is documentary theatre run amuck: For, defeated by their subjects, Washburn and Kauffman have elected to focus on the women they love best, i.e., themselves.

Now this strategy might have felt less self-indulgent if Kauffman or Washburn actually had anything interesting to say. But their endless cafe chatter about their research and their therapists and their boyfriends and their Art is empty, empty, empty.

I suspect both of these artists have talent: Kauffman certainly creates striking stage pictures here; and Washburn can turn a phrase elegantly. If they can just pull away from the mirror, they may be able to produce some interesting theatre.

But The Ladies is the opposite of interesting: it wasn't just the ultra-uncomfortable steel bridge chair that I was sitting in that made me look at my watch—honest!—every five minutes. Washburn and Kauffman have mistaken artifice for content: there's nothing substantive here, despite some convincing illusions; this is nothing more than an elaborate and hollow put-on. Theatregoer beware!

Yiddish, as better and wiser men than I have written, is the most expressive of languages. From its musical rhythms, sometimes harsh, sometimes poignant, but above all frequently funny, much of post-19th-century American culture—high and low—has derived its flavor. But it is not, as is often assumed, dead. And, of the many great Yiddish theatres that once flourished in the Lower East Side during the first decades of this century, one important one still survives.

The Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre has been going strong for 89 years, a rare feat for any artistic organization, let alone one that produces its work in a language a small minority of us can understand. Or can we?

I was privileged to attend the Folskbiene’s latest production, an adaptation of Leon Kobrin’s 1916 comedy The Lady Next Door. The audience, as might be expected was made up almost entirely of elderly Jewish people. (My companion overheard two of the few young people in the audience complaining about the alter kokers, old pests). If you are not an old Jew, as I am not, I urge you to go see the Folksbiene anyway. First of all, as at the opera, there as supertitles, which helpfully translate the proceedings into English. Second of all, in America in 2003, everyone has a smattering of Yiddish. If you are a New Yorker, you probably have two smatterings, plus a dollop. When a character onstage uses a word like gevalt or meshugganeh… no translation required. Third of all, Yiddish (much like English) is a “mutt” language, made up not only of Hebrew and Old German, but of fragments of the many various places the Jews have passed through since their Medieval wanderings… including English. So the odd English word pops up. Fourth, it must be admitted that this is a highly gestural people. Shrugs, hands on hearts, feigned slaps—these need no translation.

But lastly, and most importantly, good theatre has an appeal that is universal.

The Lady Next Door opens in a Russian shtetl in 1913. A man named Velvel (Sam Gunclear) is about to move to America with his sister Khyenke (Alison Cimmet) and brother-in-law Ben-Tsien (Amitai Kedar). Velvel, we learn, is a bit of a rake, and it is not without trepidation that we see him leave his young wife Hindele (Yelena Shmulenson-Rickman) for the bright lights and fast women of New York City. Two years pass. Velvel is now “Willie” and is firmly ensconced in a Suffolk Street tenement, where he has gotten himself involved with the eponymous hussy (played by Debra Frances Ben). Fortunately, Khyenke and Ben-Tsien are close by and they do not like these goings-on at all. Without telling Velvel, they send for Hindele and Velvel's father Kulye (David Mandelbaum), who is so furious he is ready to hit Willie with a wagon axel.

This static farce is enhanced by the eloquence of period detail. Never has the enormous cultural leap between the old world and the new been starker than that embodied by Willie’s costume change between Acts One and Two. In Russia, he wears traditional coarse peasant garb and a full beard. In New York, he is clean-shaven, wears a linen suit, spats, and a boater. (Fairly unrealistic attire for a factory worker, even a union organizer as Willy is, I might add, but it’s a strong theatrical choice nonetheless.) The old values vs. the new—and the growing pains a family experiences in transitioning from one to the other: this is an American story, that can be embraced by anyone, regardless of religion or ethnicity.

And so the audience full of alter kokers makes me worry. Will the Folksbiene’s audience be dead in ten years? This valuable heritage should not be allowed to wither. Every New York City schoolchild should be required to see a production at the Folksbiene. And my goyim brethren should venture to see their productions at the Jewish Community Center. Because this is our heritage, too.

Special thanks to Caraid O’Brien

Jean Anouilh wrote his Joan of Arc play, The Lark, fifty years ago. We know it in the United States best via Lillian Hellman's adaptation, which is truncated and, not surprisingly, more reflective of the McCarthy-era politics of America in the 1950s than of Anouilh's own perspective. So it's valuable to get a new English translation—endorsed, we're told, by Anouilh's widow—created by Vanya Pawson, a director and teacher with prodigious theatre credits whose work I have not before encountered. Pawson has staged her new version of The Lark at the Sanford Meisner Theatre off-off-Broadway; and though the production is typically lean and the acting sometimes uneven, the work itself is magnificent: a revealing, fascinating, and often stirring look at one of the great stories from the last thousand years or so of western civilization.

It begins at Joan's trial at Rouen, where the men who have been assembled to judge and sentence her are trying to figure out how to expedite a troublesome business. Warwick, the representative of her English captors, wants to get things over with and burn her quickly; but Cauchon, the French priest who represents her homeland and her church, wants Joan to tell her story from the beginning, in her own way, with an obvious eye toward her recantation and redemption.

And so Joan is brought in, and she commences, in her matter-of-fact, country-girl manner, to recount what happened to her: how she heard the voices of the archangel Michael and Saint Catherine and Saint Bridget commanding her to rescue France from its English invaders; how she made her way to the local landlord Beaudricourt and charmed him into helping her get to the court of the Dauphin; and how she looked the Dauphin directly in the eye—calling him Charlie instead of "Your Majesty"—and persuaded him to allow her to command his army and rout the enemy.

The tale is delivered story theatre style, with performers wandering in and out of the "courtroom" as needed to enact each episode. As Joan nears her goal, the play's device becomes more sophisticated, culminating in a gorgeous and supremely theatrical moment at the climax of Joan's rise: the Dauphin, playing a joke on the Maid, instructs his general to sit at his place on the throne—but Joan, as she enters the chamber for the first time, instinctively knows who her rightful king is and strides past the man with the crown to kneel before Charles. Magical, lump-in-the-throat stuff, this.

The Lark's second act takes a somewhat different turn, as Warwick and Cauchon yield, at least temporarily, to the Inquisitor, a fearsome figure sent from Rome to examine Joan's heresy. The lightness of Joan's narrative yields to a more solemn, consequential tone as Joan's fate—death at the stake or, should she recant having heard the voices, life imprisonment—becomes clear. The greater issues surrounding Joan's case—the authority of the Church, the oppression of women, the nature of faith—similarly move into sharper focus. Anouilh leaves it to us to decide finally how we feel about these subjects; what he gives us here is a powerful and resonant celebration of the human spirit, ending with Joan's triumph, crowning the Dauphin at Reims.

Pawson's translation is direct and accessible; the pacing never flags during this riveting tale. She's staged it in unadorned fashion, with a simple set and modest but appropriate costumes; our attention remains with the play's action and themes throughout. Some of her cast members are less proficient than others, but there are solid performances by Matt Semrick as Warwick, Clay Cockrell as Cauchon, Hanna Hayes as Joan's mother and Queen Yolande, Ron Hirt as Beaudricourt, and Michael Boothroyd as Charles. Peter Whalen looks the part of the Inquistor to a "T." Anchoring the piece is a wonderfully evocative turn by Lindsay Halliday, who conveys Joan's essence with such remarkable honesty that we forgive her occasional technical lapses (chief among them: a consistent mispronunciation of "Monsieur"). Halliday has the stuff of a great actor-in-the-making; she's someone to keep an eye on.

I'll watch for Pawson's next show, as well; for now, I just acknowledge my gratitude to her for giving us a chance to rediscover this fine play. I was struck, thinking about the moment in history when Anioulh wrote The Lark, how lightly he lets off the would-be "collaborators" here—for surely Cauchon and his henchmen can be seen as stand-ins for Vichy, co-operating with their conquerors to save their own skins. Just eight years after V-E Day, Anouilh managed to find understanding and compassion for these characters: there's surely a lesson for our time in that.

The Last Letter, titled with precise literalness, is a mother's last message to her son. The circumstances are extraordinary: she is a Jewish doctor in Poland after the Nazi invasion, living in a ghetto that's about to be eradicated: word has just come that a few of the able-bodied young men in town have been sent to the forest to dig ditches—mass graves for the thousands of Jews who will be brought there and slaughtered, if not tomorrow then the next day or the day after that.

So The Last Letter is about facing imminent death, though it turns out to be less confessional and profound than we might expect. It's also about the phenomenon of genocide; of mass hatred and the bigotry and ignorance that breeds it, and here the text, taken verbatim from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, offers not only wisdom but authentic resonance. What Anna Semyonovna writes to her son is mostly a testament to survival—the ways that she and her entirely doomed compatriots go on with their lives, with the trivial pleasures and discomforts that constitute much of them, even though aware that they are about to come to an end. The capacity of human beings for resilience—and for petty distraction, for good and ill—seems astonishing in this context; and real; and oddly reassuring.

But what's most vivid in The Last Letter is the easy way that too many of Anna's former friends and neighbor allow themselves to become complicit in the Nazis' actions. Early in the play, Anna relates to her son a disturbing discovery about human nature: that citizens are only too happy to hate whomever their leaders tell them to hate. This, it seems, has not changed.

Grossman completed his novel in 1960, and The Last Letter reflects its period in its existential outlook. The banality of daily life is primary here; Grossman isn't much interested in spirituality or humankind's innate nobility; perhaps he didn't believe in them. This makes The Last Letter bleak; even at just an hour long, it's hard to take for its almost relentless pessimism.

Kathleen Chalfant plays Anna, and she gives exactly the richly textured, compassionate performance that you expect if you know her work; she's a spectacularly accomplished actor. Here, alas, she is undermined enormously by her director, Frederick Wiseman, whose staging is distractingly and foolishly busy. He puts Chalfant in almost constant motion, when stillness is what the text not only calls for but requires, the better for us to absorb its cogent but very writerly language. And he has, with designer Donald Holder, created a distressingly showy parade of lighting effects that threaten continuously to upstage Chalfant (and sometimes succeed). Instead of engaging with the actor and the words, we are constantly forced to react to a barrage of pyrotechnic tricks: big looming shadows and portentous silhouettes and endlessly mutating images on the back wall that break rather than enhance both mood and concentration.

The show is also very, very dark throughout, which makes it harder to hear, Chalfant's technique notwithstanding. (This is especially true because there is no sound system used in this show; our ears are getting lazy in this age of high-tech amplification.)

So The Last Letter is, in this production, less effective than it might be; it is, nevertheless, of genuine interest. Students of acting will want to see what Chalfant is doing here, and students of history and human nature will want to hear the words that Grossman (via translator Robert Chandler) has given her to say.

A most recent victim of reality TV’s rapacious sensationalism is the institution of matrimony. With programs that depict dating as a game show, courtship as a collision course, monogamy as a morality test, and marriage as a product you cannot live without, the desire for human connection seems merely a prelude to embarrassment. But via the swift, attention-deficit-disordered eye of television, embarrassment—the means and the end of much of this entertainment—is as harsh as fate gets. Before you wipe the egg off your face, the camera has found another subject, and with a laugh and modicum of apology, you can resume your life unchanged.

Thankfully, plays such as Lars Norén’s The Last Supper, now in performances at La Mama, remind us that coupledom is more than a sport, and by engaging in it we risk the most devastating of humiliations. However we are also reassured that the desire for intimacy—romantic, sexual, etc—is not a personal weakness, but a universal pine.

Watching this play is like watching your house slowly catch fire. A volatile pair of estranged brothers and their wives are united on the evening of their mother’s cremation; both marriages are going up in flames. Their verbal pyrotechnics are witty and scathing, their fates sad and inevitable, and their feelings, disturbingly familiar to anyone who has passionately loved another, are as raw as a third degree burn.

Different parental allegiances and an age-old sense of mutual abandonment have left John, a psychiatrist, and Alan, a businessman, at odds about everything; the death of their mother is their final connection. Charlotte, John’s second wife, tolerates his verbal and physical assaults, his sexual iciness, and his demands that she be in therapy, in order to receive his affection which she craves. Monica, Alan’s wife, shell-shocked by his obloquious blitzkriegs, has begun openly having an affair with a much younger man, and her relief is as great as her husband’s anguish.

Norén gives his characters passionately mercurial arias, their emotions shifting with each sentence (equal praise is due to the play’s translator Marita Lindholm Gochman). Director Zishan Ugurlu and her extraordinarily sexy cast bring his words to vivid life and the result is terrifically funny and blindingly painful. Both brothers are burnt out, but they are conjured quite differently by the two actors: Olle Agélii’s John is elusive, petulant and perturbed until he is provoked, most often by Charlotte, to rageful attentiveness; Dan Illian as Alan wears his temper on his sleeve and the disconnect between his actions and his exasperation at their effects is heartbreaking.

But Raïna von Waldenburg and Tullan Holmqvist as Charlotte and Monica, respectively, are at the top of a long and compelling list of reasons to see this production. With an astounding emotional and gestural vocabulary, von Waldenburg makes Charlotte’s neediness dignified and perversely celebratory. Both the actress and the character have an indefatigable resource of tactics for getting what she wants. Tall and angelic, Holmqvist’s Monica hovers over the others—still startled by Alan’s outbursts, still attentive to his (and John's and Charlotte's) dizzying array of needs, but rapidly becoming a ghost to him.

The sum of their words and behaviors create a play that is fully alive—which is to say, an experience fraught with ambiguity. Ugurlu’s direction is so sensitive that the production feels untouched by human hands. In fact, the set itself by Jeremy Morris is an island in the middle of the theatre; his set and lighting and Kimberley Matela’s costumes are gorgeous, giving the actors so much room to live. Mention must be made, too, of the superb group of musicians (Jesper Lundaahl, Pete Drungle, Mari Howells, Dasha Koltunyuk) whose live performance of Paul Bothén's stirring original score bends time (both ours and the play’s), and Brian Dilg’s hypnotizing film sequences, haunting the bare walls.

So many popular entertainments—fictive and “real”—fail to portray the deeper follies of coupledom. (Perhaps THAT is why there is such a high divorce rate.) The Last Supper portrays relationships not as a sport, but as an art, summoning some of those primordial feelings we knew well before Little League.

The Long Christmas Ride Home begins with the sounds of Japanese woodblocks; a stagehand, covered from head to toe in black in the style of kabuki theatre, opens the stage curtain. Three characters—a son and his parents—address the audience and begin to narrate the story, of a Christmas long ago in a Maryland suburb, in particular momentous trips in the car to and from the grandparents' house. A table and two chairs are brought onto the stage to represent the car, and bunraku-style puppets—worked by actors and black-clad puppeteers—are brought onto the stage to represent the family's three children. Now Mother and Father narrate the whole story, speaking their own lines as well as their children's.

My initial response to all of this is: whoa—what's all this artifice about?

And then, after several jarring moments, it starts to jell. It happens in a wonderful scene, a flashback inside a flashback, in which we see the family on Christmas Eve at church. Church for this family is Unitarian, for Mother is Catholic and Father is Jewish and both imagine themselves enlightened enough to wish their children to make up their own minds about spiritual matters. The family arrange themselves on a pew—live actor-parents on either end, three puppet children in the center; actor-parents narrating and speaking all the dialogue between them. The minister at this Unitarian Church is spectacularly unconventional, deciding to show slides from his recent trip to Japan in lieu of a sermon; one of the slides, supposedly slipped in by accident, is a beautiful Japanese print of a naked courtesan having sex with a client. The minister explains that there is much that we can learn from Eastern traditions: that our Western perspective on, say, sex, can perhaps be tempered by an Eastern one that celebrates the beauty and joyousness of an act that we are taught to view as dirty.

And now my response is: yes, I see how showing us something familiar and homely—like this barely functional family trying to keep it together through another Christmas—through an alien prism—like bunraku—can surely be revelatory.  Now I'm leaning forward anticipatorily, and the youngest puppet-child asks her parents, having understood more of the minister's sermon than they perhaps thought, "what do we believe in?"

And now we're back in the car on Christmas Day, and the puppet-children are dancing—an uninhibited, happy, anticipatory dance that actor-children couldn't possibly do. And now we're at the grandparents' house, and the minister is portraying both grandparents, and the grown-ups are sniping at each other and ignoring the children and the family is imploding. Dad's having an affair, and not for the first time; Mom is wondering how to win him back; Grandpa is angry that Dad can't save any money; the youngest child, Claire, and the middle child, Stephen, have a tussle and break Claire's new gold bracelet. The holiday erupts in disaster. Claire's question—what do we believe in—feels remarkably pertinent.

And then: well, gears shift, irrevocably, arbitrarily: playwright Paula Vogel fast-forwards to future Christmases, on which each of the three children—now grown, now played by actors—come this close to killing themselves. (Actually one of them, Stephen, doesn't come close: he has unsafe sex and then dies of AIDS.) Behaviors and words we've seen and heard are repeated by the younger generation. Nobody's happy; nobody's in command of his or her destiny. Stephen, as I said, dies; and his sisters look for meaning and maybe salvation in his and others' deaths. I'm reminded of scenes from the latter part of Kushner's Angels in America, but I'm not sure what this bitterly sad second act has to do with the first act's East/West dichotomy or bunraku imagery or now-abandoned story of Mother and Father and that momentous, eponymous ride in the car. Vogel does bring us back to that ride, by the way; but the damage is done. The Long Christmas Ride Home brims with interesting ideas, and recriminations and regrets and life and death; but it fails to add up to anything, which is a shame, because for a while there it feels like it's going to be very substantial indeed.

Still, I guess we should be grateful that Vogel is exploring, along with director Mark Brokaw, intriguing new terrain. They've stumbled onto the hot theatre idea of the moment—i.e., puppets, elegantly executed by Basil Twist. And they've given an expert cast a spare, alienating production style in which to play—Ride is 100% direct address; actors never interact directly—at which Enid Graham (Claire) and Randy Graff (Mother) prove particularly adept.

Evocative music is provided, live, by Luke Notary on all manner of exotic instruments. Projections of those beautiful Japanese prints are by Jan Hartley.

In the case of The Marijuana-Logues, I am very happy to report that there was a profound disparity between my expectations (that this parody of The Vagina Monologues will seem hilarious to the performers, who will be stoned, and occasionally amusing but mostly dumb to me, who will not) and my experience (that this parody of The Vagina Monologues is, in fact, hilarious to the performers, who were probably stoned, but it was even more funny and smart and engaging to me, who cannot afford a pot habit, is incapable of operating a cigarette lighter, and has an overwhelming amount of friends in rehab).

The sprightful and cunning writer-performers—Arj Barker, Doug Benson and Tony Camin—are not trying to justify or endorse their use of pot. They have not set out to examine the psychological or sociological implications of this habit, nor have they constructed a Michael Moore-esque expose of drug legislation in America (though they inevitably provide insight into these matters). Rather, quite matter-of-factly, they tell us that they are pot enthusiasts and offer us their own observations and those of many other pot-smokers with whom they have spoken (and up with whom they have smoked).

But this show is not solely for the cognoscenti. Just as you do not need the eponymous anatomical equipment to enjoy The Vagina Monologues, so you can laugh with and at the cannabic culture whether your familiarity is along the lines of Bill Clinton or Cheech and Chong. As in The Vagina Monologues, the actors each read from their scripts into their microphones, but the similarities are more sophisticated than one might expect and nary a cheap shot is taken. The Marijuana-Logues address both the joys and the mores (i.e., girlfriends, cops, and parents who cannot appreciate their enthusiasm) of this comparatively harmless dependency, in addition to anthropomorphizing their muse and addressing it directly.

Director Jim Millan’s adroit attention to tone keeps things light and quick; no one waits around for you to get the punch line, mostly because the punch lines—which are many and in rapid succession—are beside the point. Barker, Benson and Camin are so utterly likeable, their sensibility so dry, and their anecdotes so fresh and pithy that I was ever eager to hear what they were about to say next.

Ultimately, The Marijuana-Logues does not make light of addiction. Rather, as the argument against a women’s reproductive rights is a ridiculous political platform at this (or any) historical moment, this savvy entertainment highlights with hilarity the benign nature of this narcotic that continues to be a red herring in the dubiously well-meaning War Against Drugs.

Is the real world now too bizarre for the Theater of the Absurd, the post-WWII movement that grew out of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genêt? Take The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey, a political parable written by Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek in 1959. One day, a tiger appears in Peter’s bathroom, and his life turns into a circus. Government officials commandeer his apartment, and eventually convince him to sacrifice himself to the tiger. Yet even when the action is patently ridiculous, Peter’s reactions are altogether human. Of course we sympathize with him: industrial society crushes the poor victim.

But the argument of Peter Ohey—there’s no action involved, just thought—is about as reductive as this summary. It takes a skilled artist to recast this schematic anti-Soviet mock-tragedy into our very different world. Fortunately, the considerable charm of the Vital Theatre’s production derives from director Aimée Hayes' fresh adaptation. Hayes draws parallels between Cold War-era Poland and America during its War on Terror. A Condoleeza Rice manqué bullies Peter with phrases like “family values,” while Peter’s wife just wants to be on TV. Peter's reaction to the madness seems particularly American: he complains that his apartment has become "a stomping ground for politics, science, art, and authority." But it always was, he just didn't see it.

The other way that Peter Ohey overcomes its limited material is through the tickling performances of Hayes’ ensemble. As Peter, Erik Kever Ryle has the harried look of a blue-collar Joe whose home used to be a sanctuary from authority. His posture sags, his voice whines and wobbles, and his forehead wrinkles with perpetual worry. The rest of the ensemble confidently supplies a batty world to drown Peter in. Mrozek’s characters, aside from Peter, have the depth of people in a commercial; the actors don’t try to overplay them with superfluous, realistic motivation. A typical performance is Michael B. Downing's, oozing sleaze as a TV producer producing a “reality circus” based on the Oheys' home life. Downing doesn’t turn many surprises, but he provides the grotesque background that sets Peter’s melancholy tale in relief.

In fact, Peter Ohey, like much of the Theater of the Absurd, is pretty transparent: there’s no dramatic tension (see the title) or irony, and the satiric targets are already self-parodies. Fans of this mocking type of political theater will find some silly commentary in Peter Ohey. But others may want a more aggressive, Brechtian retort to our current highly dangerous absurdities. With Peter Ohey, the Vital Theatre proves that political theater can be lot of fun; in the future, hopefully, the content will match the talent.

The Merchant of Venice is one of those plays that makes you squirm. People do nasty things in it—and not the people you expect. The characters we think are good do bad things, the characters we think are bad do good things. In my opinion, that is what makes this such a great play. Shakespeare makes all of his characters both noble and base capable of miraculous eloquence, and at the same time, reprehensible callousness. In other words, he makes them human beings. On top of that, there are many who claim that his depiction of Shylock, the Jewish money lender, is anti-Semitic. Some consider the play a comedy, some consider it a drama. Dominic Cuskern, the actor who portrays Shylock in the Pearl Theatre Company's present revival of Merchant, calls it “a comedy with tragic elements.” I think the only safe thing you can call it is a compelling story.

The plot is complicated, almost picaresque: Antonio, the titular merchant, is full of melancholy for unknown reasons. His good friend Bassanio needs to borrow some money from him, but Antonio is currently out of cash, so he borrows money from Shylock, one of the many Jewish money lenders in Venice. It is clear that Antonio doesn’t like Shylock, and that Shylock is not too fond of Antonio. Antonio rails against the Jews, and Shylock rails against the Christians. But a deal is made wherein Antonio puts up a pound of his flesh as collateral for the loan from Shylock. This done, Antonio gives the money to Bassanio, who leaves for Belmont. In Belmont, Portia, a smart young woman, is in an awkward position because of her father's will, which states that any suitor who can guess which of three caskets has a picture of Portia in it will win her hand in marriage. Portia is, of course, in love with Bassanio, but has to deal with some comical suitors before Bassanio arrives, chooses the right casket, and wins her hand. Meanwhile, back in Venice, time has run out for Antonio to pay back Shylock. Antonio, short of cash due to unforeseeable disasters, asks for mercy. Shylock, whose daughter Jessica has just run away with Christian pretty boy Lorenzo, refuses to let the matter slide, and demands his pound of flesh. Word of this gets to Belmont, and Bassanio hurries home. Portia decides to go to Venice herself, so she and her maid Nerissa dress up like men and go to see what’s what. It goes on from there to a trial scene, the standard Shakespearean Act Five wrap-up where all is revealed, and everyone heads off to the castle, or to the woods, or some such place.

As convoluted as all that sounds, it’s a fine script, full of complex characters and beautiful passages concerning such universal themes as racism, loyalty, and the quality of mercy. What a pity that this production didn’t have more kick to it. My companion at the show the day I saw it put it best: over-earnest and humorless. There seems to be an intentional separation between all the actors on stage, as if they are all playing their societal roles, and aren’t really thinking about what they are doing. At first, I thought this was the façade that would crumble as the plot thickened—but no. The façade remains throughout. There are moments of passion here and there, but too few and too far between each other. Also, there is a declamatory style of speaking prevalent in this show that seems more suitable to a different era than the one we live in. The costumes by Sam Fleming are quite lovely, and suggest Renaissance Venice perfectly. There are a few stand-outs in the show. Andy Prosky is quite funny, and infuses some life into the show as Launcelot Gobbo, the smart-ass servant of Shylock. And in the smaller role of Salerio, Cornell Womack brings passionate conviction to the stage. If the rest of the show delivered the energy that these two actors do, it would be quite a show indeed.

Does The Moonlight Room want to be on the stage or in the movies? It certainly has the potential for a life in both venues, but what is remarkable about this play is playwright Tristine Skyler’s ability to take the hyper-naturalism of film and transform it to the stage as theatrical vision.

The Moonlight Room is set in the waiting room of a New York City emergency room, and centers around the drug overdose of one teenager and the two friends who rushed him to the hospital. Adolescent characters are the center of this drama about the struggle of being a teenager growing up in Manhattan. More specifically, it’s a play about children who are raised by a city and not their parents. This generation of youth seems to be damaged by the agendas of their parents, whether it’s the overprotective father, the mother who has never recovered from the failure of marriage and the loneliness of divorce, or the socialites who raise their children through the intimacy of a nanny and function merely as a source of cash flow. It’s a play about miscommunication and is a cry for boundaries, structure and responsibility.

Skyler writes dialogue that is as stark and sterile as the emergency room in which she places her characters. She trusts the essential emptiness of silence that is at times louder and more poignant than any words. She writes characters that are weighted down by the burden of having to speak. She gives voice to characters that struggle against the resonant vibrations of their expressed thoughts and who are torn between their desire to live and die. My only difficulty with the script is that Skyler has insisted on the inclusion of a dozen or so monologues that seem to work against the minimalism of the rest of the play. I found them to be preachy, contrived, and “stagy.” This was particularly true of the character of Mr. Wells (Lawrence James), the father of the boy who overdosed. At one point he walks on to the stage, tells a long story that is blatantly wrapped up with a moral at its end (lest I forget the exclamation point) and then just walks off stage for no apparent reason. The play then continues on without any response to the whole event. Skyler needs to trust that her points are being made, and we get them from the glance of one character to the other, the silence between them, and the dialogue that already reveals truths like pieces of an unfinished puzzle. So, why the inclusion of the soapbox? Unfortunately, these monologues only dilute the necessity of Sal’s (Laura Breckenridge) explosion to her mother towards the end of the play, possibly the only warranted moment for extended writing.

The company of actors, which includes Brendan Sexton III, Kathryn Layng and Mark Rosenthal, as well as Breckenridge and James, all deliver cohesive and powerful performances. The trio of Breckenridge, Sexton and Layng are particularly exceptional. The final scene of the play between Breckenridge and Layng is by far one of the most honest and revealing moments in the theatre witnessed by me in quite a long time. I knew at that moment why I needed to be in the theatre watching Skyler’s play. I forgave the overwriting, because I realized that it was a necessary path for Skyler to unearth her story's ending.

Jeff Cohen’s direction handles this play with the gentle touch of a doctor with sutures in hand. He allows the actors and the playwright to be the focus of the production. There’s no ego here, only a story that must be told, and he tells it with unadorned clarity.

Marion Williams’ set is a sterile hospital waiting area, which feels more rural New Jersey than urban New York City, but it is designed with spic-and-span detail. Scott Bolman’s lighting is crisp in its nearly all-white design. Kim Gill’s costumes capture the essence of each character without any sense of theatrics.

For those of us who delight in seeing one musical in an evening, The Musical of Musicals offers a bounty of pleasures, presenting us with five shows, each in the style of a legendary composer/team. The premise is simple: June, our ingénue, finds herself in a fix—she cannot pay her rent. Every one of the mini-musicals addresses this dilemma in a different way, much as the legends—Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Kander & Ebb—might have done.

Creators Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart have a remarkable collective ear, for they have conjured up the passions and sounds that make each of these composers unique, most notably in their Sondheim-esque section, which invokes memories of Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Company, and others, as the in-jokes prod laughter from the “theatre cognoscenti” (a phrase from one of the numbers) in the audience. Rockwell and Bogart draw their book from the works of the original composer/lyricists, putting it together in clever ways; the Rodgers & Hammerstein segment is fittingly called “Corn” and takes place (where else?) in Kansas in August. The Webber section, a mishmash of Evita, Cats, Sunset Boulevard, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Phantom of the Opera, is most memorable for its number “I’ve Heard this Song Before,” a spoof on Webber’s tendency to reprise familiar motifs ad nauseum.

The small cast, led by Bogart and Rockwell and featuring Lovette George and Craig Fols, works exceptionally well together, and the members even take turns at the keyboard, flawlessly (and humorously) transitioning from person to person mid-song. George seemed a little tentative in the opening scenes, but by the Kander & Ebb section she was putting her best foot forward, yakking it up with the rest of the cast. I did feel though that costume designer John Carver Sullivan, by choosing to garb the company all in black, missed a valuable opportunity to evoke even more laughter through parodic costume choices.

Rockwell and Bogart have gotten it right: this show is for the musical theatre cognoscenti, who will appreciate the references and jokes that keep you on your toes. If you consider yourself a musical theatre buff, I highly recommend you rush out to see The Musical of Musicals, as you’ll have a blast identifying all the allusions. If you’re not a walking repository for musical theatre trivia, however, you might find yourself sitting in the dark, wondering why everyone else is laughing hysterically.

Very early in The Mysteries, Brian Kulick's play derived from stories from the Old and New Testament, Adam and Eve make their inevitable appearance. Portrayed by Chandler Williams and Jennifer Roszell, they are—as they certainly would have been—completely naked; and, true to the tale, they are blissfully unaware of that fact until they sample the forbidden apple. And then, they demonstrate shame, and cover up what we politely term their private parts.

And I thought: how do they know that these parts are the ones they should be suddenly covering? Quite apart from an elemental shock value (defused, somewhat, by the warning notice in the lobby—who else is going to be naked in this show?), Kulick's rendering of one of the most familiar stories ever raised, for me, only this question: where did the fetishization of sexual organs come from in our culture? And I suspected, as I thought this, that this question was almost certainly not the one I was supposed to be thinking about at this particular moment.

But I found myself thinking other similarly, seemingly trivial thoughts as I watched The Mysteries, and in the end that's my reaction to this show: it's an interesting work, but I'm not sure it's terribly well thought-out. It puts some of the oldest tales of what we used to call the Judeo-Christian tradition on stage for our inspection, but it doesn't frame them in a particular substantive or meaningful way.

Which is not to say The Mysteries is without value: stories this enduring are certainly worth hearing again, even if only in the context of theatrical gimmickry. The creation of the world is depicted here almost story-theatre style: when God creates the firmament and the stars, actors dressed in heavy winter coats and scarves (as angels) hold up illustrations of star maps from old encyclopedias. The Fall of Man, meanwhile, involves a stageful of apples; and the Flood is cheekily simulated by supernumeraries pitching buckets of water at the actors playing Noah and his Wife.

All of the Old Testament material—which also includes the tales of Cain and Abel and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac—is taken from the York and Wakefield Cycles, medieval mystery plays designed to make these moral lessons from the bible more accessible to common folk. The New Testament is filtered through much more contemporary interpretations—works by 20th century writers Tony Harrison, Mikhail Bulgakov, Dario Fo, and Borislav Pekic—which put a political spin on Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead and the crucifixion, with the two eastern Europeans making connections between totalitarian bureaucracies and the entities that judged Christ, and Fo cheerfully but ironically observing that people are steadfastly and dreadfully still people under just about any circumstance.

Does this add up to a clear-eyed, consistent take on ideas that form the basis of our common culture? Not really; The Mysteries proves, instead, that these stories are, well, stories, subject to varied interpretations. The fundamental precepts that they usually signify—faith, for example—are largely absent here; instead Kulick and his collaborators stand aloof from their subjects, showing us an authentically naked Adam and Eve but not revealing much of real depth about why they remain so inextricably bound to our view of the world thousands of years after they were first written about.

Wouldn't it be nice if a hundred dollars could buy an evening of light-hearted musical theatre for the entire family? At Gallery Players, it can: that C-note gets you and five others into their delightful production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood—and you'll even get some change back. (Compare with the typical Broadway musical, where the same money buys exactly one ticket.) Of course, the Park Slope alternative doesn't offer any big-name celebrities in the cast. But your chances of having a terrific time here are at least as high as in one of the big houses in the Manhattan: these folks are having a ball on stage and they're giving their all to make sure everybody in the audience has one too.

I actually saw Drood when it premiered on Broadway almost twenty years ago, with big names like George Rose, Cleo Laine, Howard McGillin, and Patti Cohenour in the cast. Their formidable talents notwithstanding, I had a much better time this past weekend at Gallery Players' revival. That's partly due to simple logistics: Drood is a very rowdy, very friendly, interactive musical, with cast members chatting and visiting with the audience quite frequently; in fact, its eponymous mystery is solved by audience vote, conducted by cast members stationed in the aisles. Now, the Imperial Theatre (where Drood played; more recently home to Les Miz) is just too mammoth to house such shenanigans comfortably. But the cozy Gallery Players space is the perfect size: Drood fits it like a glove.

More fundamentally, though, is the free-wheeling spirit of the show itself. Composer-lyricist-librettist Rupert Holmes has cannily crafted it as a show-within-a-show: we're in a British Music Hall (and a fairly modest one, at that) in the late Victorian period; the evening's entertainment is an original musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The story—which hardly matters most of the time: there's a short synopsis at the top of this page if you care to take a look—is constantly being interrupted: by the company's "Chairman," one Bill Cartwright, who narrates and comments on the plot; by exhortations to sing along with company favorites or to boo and hiss the villain; by the eager chorus of singers and dancers who are ready to leap, at a moment's notice, into the company's signature number "Off to the Races." (This rousing specialty is ingeniously wedged into the plot—sort of—to serve as the rousing first-act finale.)

The point is, nobody's taking anything very seriously here: lapses—some planned, some perhaps accidental—are part of the brew; heady high spirits rather than strict professionalism is what's on display. In a Broadway house, this kind of thing sits uneasily; but in a humble theatre in a basement in Brooklyn it's downright giddy fun.

Holmes has worked with Gallery Players to trim and slightly reshape his show, so if you're familiar with the score from the original cast recording you'll notice that a few songs are gone and a couple others have been added; the changes all feel right, speeding things along and placing the emphasis less and less on exposition and more on the music hall pastiche that is Drood's heart and soul. The highlights are "Both Sides of the Coin," a patter song performed by the Chairman and John Jasper, the story's villain; "Never the Luck," a sweet, silly waltz in which one of the company's perennially minor players wistfully bemoans his status; and "Don't Quit While You're Ahead," the big second-act show-stopper performed by the entire ensemble.

The mystery, which revolves around the apparent murder of Edwin Drood, is almost an after-thought, though Holmes and the actors have worked hard to provide alternate endings based on the outcome of the audience voting. I think that there are enough mathematical possibilities such that this cast need not perform the same ending twice during their month-long run.

It is now time to mention some of the enthusiastic, talented folk who are making this production of Drood such a lark. At the top of the list is surely director-choreographer Steven Smeltzer, whose staging is brisk and fresh and fun and full of energy (his choreography for "Don't Quit While You're Ahead," in particular, is splendid—absolutely Broadway-caliber). Michael Kramer's sets are simple, inventive, and light-hearted. (Jenna Rossi-Camus' costumes are mostly fine, but occasionally they're jarringly anachronistic; William Cusick's lighting feels a little darkly moodier than it needs to.) The four-man orchestra, led by musical director Ken Legum, is terrific. (The arrangements, uncredited, are outstanding as well.)

There are 22 (!) people in the cast, and they deliver enthusiastic performances. The four young men who comprise the male dance chorus—Rocco L. Arrigo, Dax Valdes, David Bishop, and Rikard Skogsberg—are especially exciting to watch. Among the principals, particularly fine work is offered by Frederick Hamilton as the suave but demented villain John Jasper, Peter Mensky as Drood's hotheaded Ceylonese nemesis Neville Landless, Allison Regnault as Neville's over-the-top-exotic twin sister Helena, Vinnie Kay as a fresh-faced naif called Deputy, and Keith Broughton as the Music Hall's put-upon Stage Manager. Anchoring the entire evening is Greg Horton in a truly bravura turn as the Chairman. When Horton and Hamilton take the stage in "Both Sides of the Coin," for example, they generate pure theatrical magic.

Drood even leaves us with some sage words of philosophy (from "Don't Quit While You're Ahead"):

Once I bet my last ten pence and won.
Twice as rich then, friends said, "Call it done."
"How sad," I said; "So, that's your wildest dream, eh, then,
"Twenty pence instead of ten?"
I doubled up my bet again...

Jez Butterworth’s new play The Night Heron is what I have always pictured the moors of England to be—beautiful, scary, poetic, and sad. The titular Heron is a rare bird that has been spotted by some of the locals in the town where the play takes place, and is as elusive as happiness is to the lives of the two main characters. This production, by the Atlantic Theatre Company, is stunning in every aspect—design, direction, and acting. But the true star of the show is the script itself, which is alternately funny and tragic, horrific and heartbreakingly sweet. It is rare to come upon such a fully realized text, and exciting as well.

In the middle of the Cambridgeshire Fens—England’s equivalent to the great swamps of the American South—two recently unemployed gardeners struggle to survive a harsh winter and the harsher atmosphere of the small village they live in. In this dark, damp marsh, secrets and schemes of gothic proportions slowly creep out of the earth and infiltrate the forlorn little shack that Griffin and Wattmore, the two gardeners, live in. The play opens with Wattmore—a tragic figure of a man, played with immense passion and subtlety by Chris Bauer. He is soon joined by his fellow sufferer and apparent lifelong friend, Griffin. Clark Gregg is fantastic as Griffin, able to evoke laughter from the audience with the slightest tone, and within moments have the same audience weeping. Gregg is so good, he makes it look easy, which I believe is the sign of greatness. The two together are a dynamic team—and they portray friendship, and all its wonders and sorrows, perfectly.

Both characters are at the edge of the abyss, financially, subsisting on the Dole—English welfare—and hunting rabbits for food. But this is more than a bleak portrayal of how the other half lives: there are hidden reasons for why these two fairly intelligent men have come to such dire positions, and those secrets are slowly ladled out as the show progresses.

Into this unhappy mix is thrown Bolla, a new lodger in their tiny shack. Bolla, played with gleeful menace and humor by Mary McCann, is a bit odd, to say the least. In Bolla, Butterworth creates a character who is constantly saying or doing very surprising things, but in a completely believable way. Every time the character is on stage, you lean in, wondering what new madness she will unveil. I don’t want to give anymore of the plot away, but I will say that the world of the play is full of misfits, morons, and menace, and that the entire cast, to a one, is excellent.

The design is equally wonderful. The set by Walt Spangler is gorgeous. In a very simple way, he creates what appears to be a real shack in a real swamp. It even rains! Laura Bauer's costumes are great—especially Bolla’s outfit for a night on the town. And the original music by Stephen Warbeck is the perfect complement to the action on stage—haunting, melancholy, and beautiful.

Neil Pepe directs the show at the proper pace, at times slow as molasses, at times quick and frenetic. There is a great unity in the show, from design to acting style—and I assume this to be to the credit of the director.

The Night Heron has everything you want in a show. I highly recommend it.

In 1985, Larry Kramer wrote an autobiographical play that was larger even than his own then-infamous public persona. Beginning in July 1981, the month that the New York Times ran its first article about the “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” that has come to be called AIDS, The Normal Heart follows the struggle of Kramer’s alter ego, Ned Weeks, to focus his rage against both the government and the gay community for ignoring this disease, and so perpetuating it.

But Kramer’s incendiary play is more than an activist’s historical diatribe. While staunchly political, it has a howling private pain at its core. As an increasing number of his friends die from this plague, Ned cofounds Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization that eventually ousts him for his radicalism—at best, he is considered an alarmist; at worst, more toxic than the virus itself.

However, when he meets Felix Turner, a high-profile (and closeted) writer at the Times, a different kind of story begins. Felix is attracted to, not appalled by, his fervor, and Ned, who has forever scolded his brother, his friends, and the gay community at large for ostracizing him, begins to see himself as a man and not a monster. Felix and Ned have a kind of Tracy-Hepburn dynamic—a brazen bickering that gives way (and gives in) to the fragile human need to touch and be touched, both in body and spirit.

To write about this masterpiece nearly twenty years after its explosive premiere at the Public Theater (where it is now in revival, presented by the Worth Street Theater Company) is a humbling experience. The play’s relevance today is abundant. While governmental organizations have become significantly more attentive to HIV (largely due to Kramer’s revolutionary second organization, ACT-UP), the rate of infection is rising rapidly in New York City, in the United States, and around the world. New medications have become synonymous with a cure for an increasing number of gay men who hubristically dismiss condoms as archaic. The Bush administration prefers to pour billions of dollars into the wrongheaded practice of encouraging kids to remain abstinent as opposed to teaching them how to safely manage their own burgeoning, bewildering and undeniable sexualities. And the same establishment that ignored the “homosexual cancer” less than twenty years ago, now shuns third world countries as AIDS ravages their entire (largely heterosexual) populations.

But just as striking was the emotional effect on the audience the night I saw it. There was audible sobbing throughout the second act, fiery applause for every scene, and an emphatic curtain call, after which we all filed out, stunned, vitalized. David Esbjornson has fashioned an engrossing production that combines majestic staging with an anti-precious sensibility: the lines are shot off in swift, screwball comedy-time, while the fury and agony are at once messy and elegant.

In a fearless performance as Ned Weeks, Raúl Esparza leads a flawless cast; he is, appropriately, the guarded aching heart around which the production is organized. His ever-ready exasperation puts him hopelessly at odds with friends/co-founders Bruce Niles, the closeted head of GMHC, and Mickey Marcus, the government healthcare worker whose unemployment seems imminent (played by Mark Dobies and Fred Berman, respectively, with quick and deep emotional facility). McCaleb Burnett, as Tommy Boatwright, the fourth co-founder, provides a generous amount of humor, and ultimately comes off as the most clear-eyed and care-taking of them all.

Billy Warlock’s Felix is a steady and sexy match for Esparza’s romantically skittish Ned, and as Ben, Ned’s brother, Richard Bekins expertly vacillates between being and feeling helpful and helpless. Joanna Gleason has the most difficult role as Dr. Emma Brookner, who amidst her dying patients is slowly amassing information about this furtive disease; she has some didactic speeches, but Gleason wisely handles them with more humor than portentousness. And in a handful of small roles each, Paul Whitthorne (as the first fellow we see diagnosed, in particular) and Jay Russell (as Mayor Koch’s assistant, in particular) round out the cast beautifully.

I have no end of praise for Mr. Kramer’s play, Mr. Esbjornson’s production, and the performances of Mr. Esparza and his fellow cast members; this is rare, exciting, and necessary theatre.

In one of the writings which are the basis of Mary Zimmerman's extraordinary theatre work The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Renaissance thinker/artist recalled a childhood visit to a cave. The beckoning blackness, he tells us, elicited a pair of contradictory feelings: fear of the dark, and desire that something marvelous might be inside. Those are more or less the same feelings that a hopeful theatre audience ought to have just after the lights go down. Once in a great while, something truly and miraculously marvelous really does happen.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci is, if you will forgive the hyperbole, the most stimulating and intelligent exploration of the workings of genius since Sunday in the Park with George. Notebooks takes us into the mind of a man who spent his life trying to make sense of the world around him—a man who never seemed to lose his sense of awe or wonder about things even as he attempted, sometimes with delicious pigheaded foolishness, to codify them. We witness the boundless fascinations of this man, from color and light to motion and flight. We watch demonstrations of his discoveries about painting and perspective and we are awed by his insight. And we listen to his convoluted explanation of a phenomenon such as "weight," or observe his fanciful attempt to make man fly, and marvel not at his limitations but rather his eternally questing spirit.

Notebooks celebrates the spectacularly wide-ranging artistic and scientific achievements of Da Vinci with a thrillingly theatrical vocabulary. Eight actors—and a remarkably skillful, passionate ensemble they are—portray Leonardo and his thoughts, here narrating passages from the notebooks (virtually the entire text is lifted from them), there enacting a demonstration of this or that thought experiment. Zimmerman and a team of brilliantly imaginative designers create a dazzlingly volatile environment for the piece, sort of a Renaissance Era laboratory/playpen, surrounded on two sides by what looks like an infinite number of drawers, each of which contains an exciting possibility. For a mini-lecture on how light acts upon a woman's white gown to change its color, a veritable meadow pops out of one those drawers; another is found to contain a pool of clear water to elucidate a point or two about dreaming. The effect is at once magical and evocative, stream of consciousness made manifest on a conjuror's stage.

Zimmerman doesn't merely create a circus of random notions here, however; Notebooks has real bite because at its heart is an ineluctable tension, that between Da Vinci's unquenchable desire to understand all of nature and his absolute inability to apprehend humanity. Leonardo's subjects—of his paintings and of his scientific explorations—function on one level as animatrons; but on another we sense their simple unspoiled fun, and we're always keenly aware that their master never shares in it. A sort-of running joke reminds us that for, all his brilliance, Leonardo had trouble keeping his own household under control; it's the key to the central paradox of his personality, a paradox that, perhaps, rests right at the crux of creative genius.

Notebooks is filled with humanity and humor; invention and surprise. It brims with wondrous a-ha! moments when connections click into place. And it exalts us with sequences of almost impossible beauty: a cadaver's dissection yields a heart that looks like a butterfly or a quivering leaf; a class in artistic perspective culminates in a shimmering study that evokes The Virgin of the Rocks. Zimmerman celebrates the glories of the mind here and emerges with a genuine masterpiece. To crib from Da Vinci himself, quoted more than once in her play, it is indeed extraordinary that everything in the universe can be contained in such a little bit of space and time.

There never seems to be an easy way to go home. Always, it seems, the ghosts of the past, and the reminders of what could have been, bar any happy reunion from being completely realized. Such is the case for the character Michael Riordan in Ann Noble’s play The Pagans. Noble’s play is set in County Clare, Ireland—but is more about aspects of familial relationships that about Ireland. In the play, Michael, the prodigal son of the Riordan clan, returns home after years of living in New York City. Along with pent-up rage at his younger brother and a bitter silence with his father over stolen money, Michael brings his new, American wife. What follows is an alternately engaging and droll slice of family life in an Ireland where people still gut fish for a living, drink lots of whiskey, and dream of better lives.

The script is a mixed bag. At times, the dialogue is fresh, subtle, and exciting; but at other times, it is tedious, predictable, and clichéd. I am not sure whether the author intends for the characters to sound dull in an attempt to be true-to-life—which is dull and clichéd at times. She has created some wonderful characters in this play, including Bobby Quinn, a local fish-gutter who seems a few chapters short of a book; Frances Dorcey, the spinster aunt of the Riordan clan with an amazing capacity for memorizing prayers; and Margaret Riordan, the deeply complex mother of the clan. My favorite scene in the play comes in Act Two, when all the characters, a bit inebriated, sit in the living room, laughing, playing games, and goading Aunt Frances into a game involving her knowledge of the first lines of traditional Irish Catholic prayers. If all the play were as intelligently and humorously written as that scene was, this would be a play worthy of a Pulitzer. Sadly, the play quickly devolves into melodramatics after this scene.

The direction, by Stephen Hollis, is excellent. The action moves at a quick pace, and relationships are established quickly through tidy little gestures, movements, and silences. In the role of Bobby Quinn, Mark Alhadeff is a wonder—both hilarious and sad, always surprising, and full of emotion, Alhadeff fills the stage with humanity every moment he is on it. I hope to see far more of him in the future. As Margaret Riordan, Nora Chester is excellent, conveying strength, a lifetime of suffering, and humor with simple conviction. Frank Anderson, as the often napping patriarch Thomas Riordan, is great. Anderson makes the stubborn father both funny and a bit pathetic. Rachel Fowler, as the long-ago love of Michael, brings strength and grace to a character that seems a bit thinly written. The cast has varying degrees of ability when it comes to speaking with an Irish accent—which is quite distracting, particularly when people who are supposed to have grown up and lived their whole lives in the same Irish village sound so different from one another.

The Parrot, currently running at the Flea Theatre, seems to be about the power and eternality of stories. We are left with these final lyrics: “It is told and retold / Told and retold / The stories never end.”

While there are many engaging aspects of this new musical with book and lyrics by Paul Zimet (who also directs) and music by Ellen Madow (who musical directs), the story is not among them. Zimet has based his play on an old Italian folktale of the same name, which concerns a king who is called away on business, so he hires a parrot to tell stories to his daughter to keep her from being lured away by a suitor; ultimately, the parrot runs out of stories and reveals himself as a prince. Not the most scintillating source material, but not without possibilities.

Set in present-day Queens, Zimet’s modernized version revolves around Bela, a normal 16 year-old girl who discovers, after her mother goes out of town for the night on business, that she is being spied on by her mother’s boss’ son, BB, Jr. and visited upon by a few dispossessed parrots, one of whom tries to enter via the window unsuccessfully (for the window is shut). Bela cares for this Parrot, who begins to tell her stories about royalty of days of yore, as BB, Jr. devises dumb plans, with the help of his younger and smarter friend, Grovel, to get inside Bela’s house and declare his love for her.

This musical differs detrimentally in several ways from its source material. Bela’s mother is not particularly anxious about leaving her daughter alone for the night, nor does she have any apparent “understanding” with the Parrot. There’s no danger of Bela being lured away by BB, Jr. as she finds him pompous and stupid. The Parrot, perhaps as a result of a slight concussion, does not try to distract Bela from the knocking at the front door (BB, Jr.); she considers answering it, but then asks the Parrot if there is more to his story, which there is. Thus, we have a play that is heavy on content, lite on conflict.

For all of The Parrot’s narrative dullness, this production is often striking and quite witty from a visual perspective. The most arresting sequence happens during one of the Parrot’s stories: a moonlit stage is filled with men and women in black streetwear, resembling crows and gabbing into their cellphones. Deftly performed by this talented cast, these one-sided conversations are deliciously depthless, funny and sad. Other highlights include a pair of “Refrigerator Ladies” (Autumn Dornfeld and Kimberly Gambino) who give the appliance its requisite hum and occasionally step out in their gaudy Saran-Wrap-and-Tupperware ensembles to appear in various musical numbers.

Zimet has assembled a winning cast who are as delightful when providing vocal or percussive support (on rubber-banded deli cuisine containers and the like) as they are during their centerstage moments. In addition to Dornfeld and Gambino, Matthew Dellapina and Paul Iacono (as BB, Jr. and Grovel) turn in fresh and funny performances, overcoming their script-mandated dumb-hunk / smart-pipsqueak shtick. And much praise is due the clever design team of Nic Ularu (set), Lenore Doxsee (lighting), Kiki Smith (costumes) and Ralph Lee (puppet and masks), who elegantly transport us through space and time.

The Parrot, originally commissioned by the Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis Playground Project (an organization which encourages a more sophisticated sort of theatre for young audiences), is just over an hour in length and will certainly amuse children and adults alike with its droll theatricality. However, a healthy infusion of drama—perhaps taking another look at what intrigues in the source material—is necessary for this particular story to be told and retold in any kind of memorable way.

We are the inheritors of Aeschylus, the earliest playwright whose works haven’t been destroyed by Time. Aeschylus, an exemplary citizen of democratic Athens, used theater as a democratic forum for cultural discourse. Ancient myth and contemporary politics collide in his masterpieces, which illustrate the precariousness of mortality in an enormous world filled with uncontrollable forces, both divine and human. These plays still stir the deepest of tragic emotions in 21st-century audiences, a fact that the National Actors Theatre proves this month with The Persians, the oldest surviving play in Western civilization.

Initially, director Ethan McSweeny directs his production at modern America, flushed with our victory over Iraq. The Persians is the only ancient Greek tragedy based not on myth but on history; set in the capital of Persia during their war against Greece, the play turns the Greek victory over their greatest foe into a warning against imperial hubris. McSweeny, with Ellen McLaughlin’s script, captures this immediacy in a prologue that sends us back through the ages. When the seven-man chorus says “Surely we were doing the right thing, because we could,” they’re summing up the position of men whose egos are bounded only by the lands they rule, no matter when or where. Behind them, percussion and cello music designed and composed by Michael Roth plays counterpoint to Aeschylus’ vivid descriptive poetry.

Aeschylus loads his play with foreshadowing that makes the Persian loss seem inevitable. In speeches filled with dramatic irony and poetic imagery, we hear how Xerxes, the newly-crowned king, has acted with callow egotism, and when his army is defeated, we feel that he’s brought his fate upon himself. But Aeschylus, who fought in several battles, refuses to vilify the Persians. The wives and mothers of Persia have lost husbands and sons in a cataclysmic rout, led ignominiously to their deaths by a foolish man-child.

By playing close attention to Aeschylus’ simple dramatic structure, McSweeny builds tension to a staggering conclusion. The chorus, who begin in concord discussion, split into arguing factions. James Noone’s set begins as a stately and intimate circular chamber, but by the end is an endless wasteland of red sand. Striking a similar note of decay, Jess Goldstein’s costumes regress from the opulent robes threaded with gold worn by the chorus to the dirty rags of Xerxes’ final entrance. The staging shows this empire dissolving until nothing is left but desert, like Shelley’s “Ozymandius.”

By his astounding climax, McSweeny has linked the contemporary world to an eternal cycle of empires. He’s stripped away the eons to reveal Aeschylus’ primal theater as a ritual of faith in which we partake. First, the chorus summons the ghost of Xerxes’ father (Len Cariou, supernaturally chilling), who prophesies the fall of his empire. Soon, Xerxes (Michael Stuhlbarg) returns, the sole survivor of the routed Persian army, and leads the chorus in a heart-wrenching prayer to the gods he’s offended. His lamentations call forth horror and pity from us, for we recognize in our own country the zealous patriotism that led him into tragedy. McSweeny acknowledges the daemonic forces of history and mortality, and like Aeschylus, he reminds us that Pride and Time can destroy empires.

The poster (and program cover) for Stiff Upper Lip's revival of Philip Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney has the lurid, pulpy flavor of an ad for a B horror flick. It's appropriate, I think, because this production seems to have, as its main goal, to scare the pants off its audience. I'm not sure whether Ridley's numbly despairing comedy quite supports that concept, but for over-the-top gothic creepiness, this mounting, helmed by Kevin Kittle and featuring a remarkable tour de force star performance by Victor Villar-Houser, is unmatched.

The first act of The Pitchfork Disney introduces us to Haley and Presley Stray, a pair of twins who give new meaning to the terms "dysfunctional" and "enabler." They live in a rotting house (neatly rendered by set designer Valerie Green, the walls filled with the ghostly outlines of missing— discarded? sold?—objects that once hung on them). They subsist on chocolate and tablets; they share, among other things, a dread for the outside world, stemming, perhaps, from the moment when their parents were taken from (or abandoned) them.

Presley likes to imagine that he and his sister are the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust. One day, as he recites his apocalyptic vision to her, he notices a man outside their house. Intrigued, though also alarmed, he eventually unbolts the locks (five of them) and brings the man in. The stranger promptly vomits on the carpet, in what is surely the most singular first act curtain of all time.

In Act Two we learn that he is Cosmo Disney, a self-promoting showman who makes his living eating nasty things and displaying the presumably hideous visage of his masked sidekick, Pitchfork Cavalier. Disney is rather brazenly a symbol for the worst of contemporary society's excesses (his name is surely not coincidental); he and Presley engage in a weird and wary battle of wills that manifests itself in a high stakes poker of nihilistic awfulness: Cosmo eats a cockroach, Presley fantasizes about being flayed alive.

My sense is that Ridley has written a twisted allegory about the cosmic wasteland that is the post-modern world; but, notwithstanding the supremely edgy performance of Villar-Hauser as Presley, the sheer terror of the nightmare never quite kicks in. Instead, The Pitchfork Disney feels like the campfire ghost story of an excessively lurid and kinky imagination.

With tongue planted fairly firmly in cheek, William LoCasto has given us The Plot: A Murder Mystery. It's set in New York City in 1958, when husbands still told their wives what to do, when a sexy scandal could destroy a career, and when being a big Broadway producer meant you were powerful, famous, and in demand.

One such producer, Carl Fagan, is at the center of The Plot: he's observed one evening making a threatening gesture to his wife Margaret by one of his up-and-coming playwrights, Derek Thompson. At a dinner party shortly afterward, Derek's wife Samantha gets it into her head that Carl is indeed planning to kill Margaret; and when Margaret reveals to Sam, at lunch the next day, that she has been bragging about writing a book that will "tell all" about Carl's extra-marital affairs, Sam is convinced she's uncovered the motive for Carl's would-be crime.

Then, Margaret is run off the road in what may or may not be a traffic accident. And events start transpiring that bear a curious resemblance to the plot of a new murder mystery play being written for Carl by Derek's naive younger brother, Justin. Is Carl up to something? Quite possibly: I don't want to give too much away, but there's poison involved.

Playwright LoCasto keeps his story moving briskly, and he has one or two neat surprises up his sleeve; but it's clear from the start that The Plot is more comedy than suspense thriller. Steeped in the attitudes and argot of its Eisenhower Era setting, and performed in the intimate Creative Place Theatre space, the play feels like a throwback to the black-and-white sitcom era; I was reminded particularly of that I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel eavesdrop on some new neighbors and conclude wrongly that the husband is a murderer.

The best thing about this production is Anthony Guernica's terrific performance as the Dobie Gillis-ish Justin Thompson. Guernica plays goofy innocence beautifully: with eyeballs bulging out of their sockets at the slightest provocation, he's impressionable gullibility personified. Even though his hangdog character is the show's second banana, he steals the play neatly.

Joseph Caffrey is delightful in his two brief scenes as Detective Bob, the policeman who lives down the hall and manages to save the day. And Susan Tabor turns in an elegant, endlessly interesting performance as possible victim Margaret Fagan. But others in the cast are less effective at finding the light touch that LoCasto's play requires; Cynthia Enfield, in particular, misses the madcap loopiness that rebellious-but-dutiful wife Samantha needs in order for the show to really work. (In a way, LoCasto undercuts the actress by declaring Samantha to be a journalist, but then having her behave like an amateur snoop rather than a professional reporter. He might want to rethink giving his very '50s heroine a career.)

Such occasional unevenness notwithstanding, I had fun at The Plot. LoCasto, whose first play this is, demonstrates real flair for gentle, screwball-styled comedy here. I'll be watching for what he comes up with next.

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz was a theorist as well as a playwright. He wrote (in An Introduction to Pure Form in the Theatre), "When leaving the theatre, one should have the impression that one wakes up from a strange dream in which the most trite things have the elusive, deep charm characteristic of dreams, not comparable to anything."

Thanks to the meticulous efforts of Jeffrey A. Lewonczyk and his collaborators, audiences are getting a rare opportunity to witness Witkiewicz's unorthodox theatrical vision, at the Brick Theatre in Brooklyn. And, indeed, Lewonczyk's staging of The Pragmatists—an early Witkiewicz work—feels exactly like a waking dream; certainly not comparable to anything that I can think of.

The strange, nearly surreal quality of the event begins even before the play starts, as Lewonczyk himself escorts the audience, two or three at a time, around a maze of drawn curtains to the seating area. On stage in a dim glow of shadows sits a motionless man on a couch; close by is a white-faced, white-clad rag doll of a woman, who looks like a character from a German Expressionist painting come to life (though nevertheless quite still). Nearer to the spectators, another woman plays an odd melody on a tinkly little toy piano.

Soon, the play proper begins. It's about Plasfodor (the man on the sofa), who talks a lot but seems fairly incapable of actually taking action; his mute wife Mammalia (the Expressionist figure), from whom language seems to want to explode almost continuously, but of course her soundless condition makes communication difficult, if not impossible; and their servant (the one at the piano), an androgyne named Masculette. They are visited by Plasfodor's friend and possible rival, the bombastic Count Von Telek, who has the improbable job of Minister of Poisons. Von Telek has brought Plasfodor a gift: a Chinese mummy who, apparently, was once lovers with Plasfodor. Masculette is in love with the Count; Mammalia, at one point, tries to stab him—alas, with a retractable stage knife that can do no harm.

None of this ultimately matters very much, though, for in The Pragmatists, understanding—such as it is—happens at cognitive levels above and below pure reason. For me, the experience was of a clash of isms: surrealism, sure and pervasive; also absurdism (and even some of Brecht's alienation effect); cubism in the play's distortion and reconstruction of things we think we recognize; existentialism in its pessimistic presentation of impotence; maybe even some dadaism (hard to be sure because we don't see it all that often.). As all of these abstract ideological/artistic/political notions suggest, my experience at The Pragmatists was essentially an intellectual one. I was engaged, but not emotionally involved; and so for me at least, Witkiewicz's hope that I would be affected by his work the way that a dream affects me didn't happen.

But I'm very glad to have had a chance to sit through it. I was astonished to find out that The Pragmatists was written in 1919, for in its disconcerting disconnectedness it feels much newer than that. What I learned at The Pragmatists was that much of what we call seminal in modern drama—the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and Sartre, for example—began to take root here.

The production, artful and detailed, is a marvel. Iracel Rivero's costumes and set are stunningly stylized. The (uncredited) lighting, a blend of traditional instruments and more subversive hand-held pieces, flashlights, etc., creates an ethereal haze without every feeling eerie or obvious. David Shim's sound design completes the environment—everything is at once familiar and unfamiliar.

The five actors make what is essentially non-sequitur nonsense endlessly compelling. Hope Cartelli is by turns broadly funny and painfully eloquent as the silent Mammalia. Fred Backus, sporting a hairstyle that is all by itself sort of netherworldly, embodies anomie and inertia as the impotent Plasfodor; while Andrea Modica is all inflated pomposity as the visiting Count. Stacia French is aptly enigmatic as the Mummy. Kelli Rae Powell, vaguely grounded but trapped as Masculette, arouses the most of our sympathy for seeming to be in our world as well as theirs.

It's weird, unnerving, challenging, and sometimes frustrating stuff; it qualifies, as few experiences actually do, for the appellation unique. The Pragmatists is both an adventure in esoteric theatregoing and a lesson in the thoughts and work of one of the 20th century's lesser known dramatic innovators. Lewonczyk—who works as a reviewer for this website when he isn't directing off-off-Broadway plays—has done us proud.