As part of this year's HOWL! Festival, Dixon Place is presenting Peter Petralia's new theatre piece, About Silence. This is appropriate: HOWL! is a celebration of the East Village's long and funky tradition of alternative art; and Petralia and his work are nothing if not standard-bearers of that hallowed and wonderful tradition.

About Silence is a 45-minute performance art piece-cum-experiment in theatrical presentation. Its text is a stream-of-consciousness ramble representing all the knotty little anxieties and preoccupations that keep us from falling asleep; call it a poem, I guess—sharp, tangled, often funny phrases, images, and ideas that range all over the place, from global catastrophes to personal ones, from gnawing little nits to weird or witty non-sequitur juxtapositions. Like this:

About snakes.
Green ones.
Black ones.
Poisonous ones.
About the nice kind too.
About the one in the jungle book that had a lisp, the one that you wondered about. Was he a gay snake?

Running through it is a not-so-submerged subtext about betrayal—an adulterous affair or something worse; something deep and fundamentally final. Petralia's language and concerns are, respectively, beautiful and bracing.

But what's most interesting to me about About Silence is, for want of a better term, its context: the way that Petralia has chosen to present this unusual work of theatre. It's performed by three actors, seated in a row at a table on which rest three Apple ibooks, from which they read their scripts. Petralia told me that the piece is barely rehearsed; the actors all read the same text on their screens, navigating through the document on their touchpads, reading aloud whatever they are moved to read as they encounter it. Sometimes one person reads a line, or several lines; sometimes more than one person reads the same line (with a consistent synchronization that surprised me), and some lines pass unread at all, lost to... silence.

Watching this is far more engaging than you might expect. The experience is of seeing others interact with, and react to, ideas and words in real time. Poised concentratedly at their laptops, the three performers feel more like computer gamers than actors; indeed, I imagined the words dropping down onto their screens Tetris-style as they made individual decisions about what to say and what to skip. A different cast will perform About Silence each night during this week-long run at the HOWL! Festival; opening night was "artistic director night," with Mark Russell (formerly of P.S. 122), Kristen Marting (of HERE), and Ellie Covan (Dixon Place) at the controls. Covan, in particular, was great fun to watch as she registered honest surprise, bafflement, and even embarrassment at some of the words Petralia wanted to put into her mouth.

An ambient musical score by Andrew Shapiro abets the piece nicely; but video by Francisco R. Lopez (of faces, usually in extreme close-up) got tiresome after a short while. The piece itself may be a little longer than it needs to be, for once the actors and the audience all get the concepts and rhythms down—say 30 minutes in—there's doesn't seem to be much more ground to cover. Nevertheless, this was a fascinating evening of theatre. More important, I think that Petralia—one of our most innovative creators of theatre (cf., Bunny's Last Night in Limbo, which NYTE published in Plays and Playwrights 2002)—will learn much from this experiment; as will the actors who get to perform it.

The staging of antiquated comedies creates a real double bind: if performed with complete adherence to their original contexts, they risk losing their audience in academic or historic obfuscation (does anyone know offhand what an Acharnian is?); on the other hand, excessive modernization puts the production in danger of completely superseding whatever it is that made the original text worth examining in the first place. If you’re interested in performing an obscure Aristophanes play (in this case, his oldest existing text), what should be your priority—faithfulness or relevance?

Freshly Squeezed Creative Juices Theatre Company’s current revival of Acharnians, under the direction of Gregory Simmons, reaches for both fruits simultaneously and winds up grabbing neither. At the top of the show, Dikaiopolis (originally a male role, played in this production by Israeli actress Liat Ron) lip-syncs to the Sex Pistols and swigs from a bottle of Pepto Bismol as she complains about the inconvenience and heartache wrought by the ongoing Peloponnesian War. The stage would appear to be set for a thoroughly 21st- (or at least 20th-) century interpretation of the play’s events, in which Dikaiopolis, an Athenian, forges a personal treaty with the hated Spartans on condition that they leave her and her family in peace.

But Aristophanes is a playwright deeply rooted in his time and place, and before long the references to local figures and events begin to collect in huge piles around the performers, with no one quite seeming to know what to do with them. The ragtag chorus of title characters (residents of an Athenian suburb renowned for its production of charcoal, as I learned in a brief program note), arrive to protest Dikaiopolis’s action, and so she runs off to Euripides (yep, that Euripides) to borrow the costume and persona of a character from one of his plays in order to properly rebut the charges against her.

On paper, I’m sure there’s a lot of fascinating history and intriguing dramaturgy, but Simmons and crew opt for a wacky, farcical approach that obscures any salient points the play might be making in a smoky haze of labored slapstick and archly broad characterizations. One wishes that Simmons and Ron (who adapted and edited the current script from Douglass Parker’s translation) either went all the way and updated the references—a la Burt Shevelove’s The Frogs, which upgrades Aeschylus and Euripides to Shakespeare and Shaw for modern audiences—or else sacrificed some laughs for clarity in the name of getting the audience on the same sheet of parchment as Aristophanes.

A strong performance in the central role of Dikaiopolis might have gone a long way towards dispelling some of these complaints, but unfortunately Ron doesn’t prove an ideal fit for the part. Though possessing formidable energy and authority, her onstage interpretation lacks the everyperson charisma and fluency with Aristophanes’s rich language required to grease the play’s ancient wheels. The dialogue is packed so tight with images and ironies that, without an outstanding guide, it’s easy to become lost in the linguistic wilderness. The audience will have a hard time relating the action to their own lives if they can’t see what the stakes are.

And this is a shame, since the play has a lot to teach about the connections and disconnections between public and private life, and the chaos—economic, political, emotional—that war can impose on citizens who aren’t even directly involved in the bloodshed. Still, the show has a few amusing performances, particularly J.M. McDonough as a superlatively bored Euripides, and Kevin Whittinghill as a redneck peasant, forced by poverty to sell off his daughters by trying to pass them off as pigs. In fact, Whittinghill’s scene represents the production’s most successful fusion of classical stereotypes (a poor farmer from the province of Megaria) with modern (the classic American hillbilly) to create a humorous, overblown picture of a universal plight: the untenability of war for those poor simple souls caught in the crossfire. It’s a balance the rest of this uneven production lacks.

Address Unknown is a new play adapted (or edited, as the program has it) by Frank Dunlop for the stage from Kathrine Kressmann Taylor's short epistolary novella of 1938. Through a series of letters, the deteriorating relationship between one-time business partners and friends Martin Schulse and Max Eisenstein is traced. What keeps this from being a talky (if literate) "and then I wrote" evening is the sudden and unexpected arc that the story of these men's lives takes during their correspondence—the stuff, believe it or not, of the suspense thriller at its diabolical best.

Max and Martin, both Germans who emigrated to America, are co-owners of a swank and successful art gallery in San Francisco. Max is unmarried and Jewish; Martin has a wife and a growing family, although at some point in the recent past he had a brief affair with Max's younger sister. As the play begins, Martin has just returned home to Germany; the time is November 1932, just a couple of months before Hitler consolidated his absolute power by becoming Chancellor.

Warm, chatty missives give way, as the months pass, to letters alternately icy (the ones that Martin sends to Max) and filled with horror (the ones that Max writes to Martin). Given a local political post, Martin takes to the National Socialist program with far less reservation than Max expects; though it's not spelled out with the specificity that might help us truly understand it, Martin appears to be at least latently anti-Semitic and at most an active supporter of Hitler's heinous systematized suppression of the Jewish "race."

When Max's sister, an actress, makes plans to perform in Berlin—this is in late 1933, by which time the first concentration camps had already been opened—he writes to Martin (who was, recall, once her lover) and asks him to look out for her. Max's letters degenerate into pathetic pleas for help, until finally he receives one that he had sent to his sister stamped, forebodingly, "address unknown." Further communication with Martin reveals a terrible truth about his onetime friend. What Max does next—the crux of the plot—I will leave for you to discover.

It's certainly a story worth telling: the ways that men allow themselves to allow evil in their world—both in general and in the particular case of Martin's complicity in the Nazi agenda—is always pertinent. The telling itself is not so satisfying, however: what we learn about Max and Martin stacks the deck in the obvious way, with Max the unwaveringly liberal humanist and Martin the cowardly opportunist; the story might be more interesting (and potentially resonant) were those characteristics reversed. The brevity of the piece—barely 75 minutes (at a $65 top, by the way, which feels excessively pricey)—is problematic too: we could really use some more information about these men before being made party to actions that we are intuitively quick to judge.

All that said, Address Unknown has its worthy aspects, notably a  creative set by James Youmans that defines both the differences and commonalities of the play's two characters with classy economy, and effective lighting by David Lander. Jim Dale plays Max, and he's as fine as you'd expect, creating a portrait of great humor and humanity. William Atherton lets us down badly, though, as Martin, wavering between underplaying and overacting without ever suggesting that he actually has insight into this man.

On the subway, on the way home from seeing Address Unknown, I noticed a lady reading a book about the Holocaust. This is history that must be remembered so that it won't be repeated. Hopefully all of us will reflect on that as we watch the painful and personal story of Address Unknown's two antagonists unfold.

After Ashley begins while Ashley is still there. She's a very immature 35-year-old mom, very loving but also very needy, at home on a hot day with her 14-year-old son Justin, who has mono. They're watching TV together, a self-help guru who Justin proclaims, in his self-assured precocious way, a "moron." But Ashley is looking for guidance somewhere, anywhere; she tells Justin far too much about what's troubling her about her marriage (to his dad, a latent hippie, an education reporter for the Washington Post who is apparently more interested in championing liberal causes than giving his wife what she needs), about her sex life, about her loneliness and boredom. It's an inappropriate conversation that we're eavesdropping on, but its sweetness and naturalness help us buy into the situation and begin to care about both mother and son.

Maybe 15 minutes into the play, Justin's father Alden comes in. Though he and Justin seem to have a decent relationship, we can instantly see why Ashley has been so down on him (she has just explained to Justin that they would divorce, except Alden doesn't think he can afford it). Alden and Ashley snipe about anything and everything during the few minutes they're together. The last thing they argue about—and this turns out to be vitally important—is Alden's idea to hire a homeless stranger whom he met in a Starbucks that afternoon to do their yard work. Ashley is skeptical about having a man with bipolar disorder work in their home, but Alden is unyielding on the point.

Here, I think, is where playwright Gina Gionfriddo makes a big mistake in setting up After Ashley. Alden is such a pigheaded ogre in this brief scene where we meet him, that he never stands a chance to win our empathy, to be anything other than the two-dimensional villain of the piece, behaving not like a real person but in whatever arbitrary ways Gionfriddo needs him to. The play, which is ambitious and shows clear signs of talent all over the place, never recovers.

What happens next is that, in the darkness following the end of Scene One, we hear sounds of a frantic phone call to 911. It's Justin; he's fighting back hysteria as he tells a preternaturally insensitive operator that there's a man in the house and that something terrible is happening to his mother in the basement. The operator advises Justin to leave the house if the man's still there, and Justin replies that he can't leave his mother.

Cut to three years later. After Ashley is now ready to get down to business: life for Justin (and Alden) after the death of the 35-year-old mother and wife whom we met and liked at the beginning. She was raped and murdered by the homeless man hired by Alden. Tapes of Justin's call got, apparently, a great deal of airplay—he became known as the "911 Kid," hero to a nation for his bravery in refusing to leave the scene of the brutal crime. He has spent most of the intervening years taking drugs and alcohol, though he seems now to be clean. His father, meanwhile, has written a large best-selling book called "After Ashley" in which he somehow manages to spin himself as a hero, championing the humanity of misunderstood homeless people like his wife's killer, arguing that his decision to bring that man into his home was the correct one, elevating (I guess) Ashley to a kind of martyrdom to the cause.

That doesn't scan particularly well, does it? Again, here is Gionfriddo sacrificing internal logic and consistent characterization for the sake of her larger goals. Much of the rest of After Ashley amounts to an attack on ambulance chasers and institutionalized victimhood: Gionfriddo is angered by the new patterns of public grieving that seem to give license for, well, anything. She has Justin cite, in a pointed monologue in Act Two that summarizes virtually everything she has to say in this play in under five minutes, the case of the 9/11 victim's widow who parlayed her status into lucrative book and TV deals; she wants us to restore proper perspective—and dignity—to survivorhood; she bemoans the communal displays of candles and ribbons that have somehow replaced genuine personal emotion in our culture. I think she's entirely right about this, by the way. But unfortunately the play she's written is at once so far-fetched and so mean that it only undermines her cause. (The glib Hollywood ending doesn't help matters, either.)

These people—Justin, Alden, the 20-year-old groupie named Julie who latches onto Justin and becomes his girlfriend—aren't nice; they don't behave as though they care one whit about anyone other than themselves. Indeed the only character in the play who actually seems to have human feelings is the high-powered TV talk show host, David Gavin, who, in Grant Shaud's expert performance, seems to have a real existence beyond the narrow parameters sketched by the playwright. (Another character, the sexual mystic Roderick, appears at the end and seems to function as a combination deus-ex-machina/comic relief; Mark Rosenthal plays him for laughs, and who can blame him?)

Kieran Culkin is quite good as the sulky young hero of the play; if he seems older than the 17 years that Justin supposedly is, well, that's how the character is written—one of the key implausibilities of Gionfriddo's script is how wise-beyond-his-years this young man is: the playwright confuses intelligence for sophistication and worldliness. Anna Paquin does her best in the thankless role of Julie. Tim Hopper, on the other hand, seems at a loss as to how make the selfish, self-serving Alden into anything other than a monster.

Dana Eskelson is enormously interesting and likable as Ashley, and we miss her when she's gone. In fact, the main trouble with After Ashley is that the one genuinely human thing in it is sacrificed by its author all too soon in the name of some Big Ideas that are only clumsily articulated. Gionfriddo might do better exploring the intimate reality of human interactions instead.

Roi Escudero—"Bubi" to anyone she's ever met and anyone who's ever seen one of her extraordinary shows—doesn't believe in walls. She's against barriers of any kind: artistic ones that would attempt to put any of the multitudinous disciplines that make up her work—music, dance, poetry, mime, mask, puppetry, fashion, architecture, video, and others I've forgotten at the moment—into separate boxes; linguistic ones that would suggest that a single evening of theatre can't be performed in untranslated English, Spanish, and French. She's certainly opposed to the "fourth wall," having her actors engage and sometimes interact freely with the audience—they know we're here and we know we're here: what could be more real or natural than accepting that and playing with each other? So she coaxes the people in the front rows to take the stage at the finale while we all sing together to a recording of the only anthem her show needs:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

There's After Charlie, Bubi's new show at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, in a nutshell. Two words: Imagine. Peace.

After Charlie is all about imagination. Its framing device has two teenagers stuck in a dark subway tunnel during a blackout, where they listen to a bilingual radio program called "Radio Passion" which more or less comes to life and takes over the show (the teenagers are not returned to; oh well). Playing on "Radio Passion" is a story about a fellow named Hip-Hop who, planning to take a trip, visits a fortune teller named Gypsy Soul who warns him never to open the Black Suitcase and reveals to him that a famous TV psychic named Destino will figure in his fate. Hip-Hop packs for his journey and decides he needs to take a computer with him, which he obtains in the "persons" of an android named Robotic and (for want of a better term) an assistant android called True Vérité. True leads the group to Destino; they later pick up a pair of ethereal entities called "Bubolinos" (one named Valiant, the other called Splendor), and together they travel to Utopia and then—after learning that Humanity has opened the Black Suitcase and become enmeshed in Dr. Mind's Net by such things as Greed, Vanity, Power—head to Earth to try to save its inhabitants from themselves.

The play follows a track from magical realism fantasia to, when the characters arrive on Earth, abstract allegory. The first part is breathtaking and beautiful, an effortless, gorgeous, non-stop display of images, aural and visual, as performers morph from character to character and transport us from place to place without regard for the rules of logic or physical reality: a man on a giant television screen gives an android a massage, for example, and it somehow makes sense. Using every traditional theatrical element and then some others that you don't expect, Bubi and her collaborators invent a world of fluid and unfettered transformation: radios come to life and speak three languages at once, memories become home movies projected onto people's clothing, a tango dancer dissolves into a brilliantly colored piece of cloth. Surreal and imagistic, this section of After Charlie isn't so much about something as a celebration of anything, with the emphasis on any. It's blissful and engaging, and reaches a magical peak when, for no special reason, the performers congregate on or near a piano to sing the Gershwins' "Our Love is Here to Stay."

If only. The second half of After Charlie is earthbound (so not so much heavenly lightheaded- and -heartedness); the fantastical creatures of Part One turn mortal and struggle with the same material stuff that fills our own lives. Money is the main villain here, and it's not without a certain earnest heavy-handedness that Bubi assaults most of the sacred cows of our prevailing political and economic structures. (It's like Everyman vs. the WTO.) The power of its conviction, not to mention its fundamental and incontestable humanity, keep it sturdy and buoyant, however; and Bubi's spectacular imagination figures boldly here as well: a monstrously oversized entity called "Barbie Dollars" (dancer Ruben Celiberti wearing a phenomenal mask/headdress crowned by a porcelain doll head wearing a tiara) turns a Bubolino into a queen; a grieving woman called Hope, shrouded in black, appears from the shadows to mourn the loss of Humanity to the dark forces of Greed.

In the end, the experience—so rich, so unifying—reminds us all, on stage and off, of our commonality, our capacity for compassion, our deep desire for peace. If even a tiny amount of the worlds' capital—artistic as well as financial—were used as expansively and humanely as Bubi does here, we'd live on a safer, saner planet.

Talent attracts talent: though After Charlie is being mounted on an off-off-Broadway budget in a children's center's auditorium in Greenwich Village, it is nevertheless brimming with outstanding performers. Apart from Bubi herself (who takes a few roles on stage in addition to her various duties behind the scenes as writer, director, and creator of a wondrous array of costumes, masks, and puppets), there's Ruben Celiberti, who sings, plays the piano, and dances with authentic grace and power; Mick Bleyer, Olivia Callander, Andy Chmelko, Valentin Ewan, and Kristin Maloney, who play the five main characters with open hearts and all sing and dance impressively and exuberantly; and—on video or on recordings—Julio Soler, Paula Wilson, Neil McCleod, Lee Terry, Patricia Herrera, and Nelson Rahadamez Rodriguez. Credit is also due to Soler (video editor), James Ewan (atmospheric paintings), Cynthia Colwell (photos), Sally Jenkyn Jones and Andrea Bruno (some of the costumes), Nene Laplacette (jewelry), and especially Gregg Bellon (lighting and technical direction).

There's sure to be nothing quite like After Charlie elsewhere in the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and its free-spirited and robustly uncommercial shape and form mean that it's probably not for everybody (what I saw—the first public performance—is definitely still rough at the edges). Yet, for all its fantastical, convention- and genre-defying ways, this show is one of the most real and most grounded work of theatre I've seen in quite some time.

Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde feels like a potentially irresistible combination, which is why I was interested in seeing Irish Rep's new production of After the Ball, a musical written by Coward in the mid-1950s based on Lady Windermere's Fan. Alas, these two sophisticated wits do not bring out the best in one another: what's gossamer in Wilde just feels just insubstantial; what's virtuosic in Coward comes across as clumsy patchwork. After the Ball—at least this version, which has been edited by Barry Day, who also supplied some additional material—is mostly a bore, I'm afraid; the only characters I cared even a little bit about were Mr. Hooper and Lady Agatha, very minor figures in Wilde's play who have been promoted to second romantic couple in this musical (sort of the Will Parker/Ado Annie slot) and who are given the evening's only genuinely engaging number, a lovely waltz called "Faraway Land."

As for the Windermeres and that pesky fan, well, it all feels like a great deal of fuss over nothing. Lady Windermere is an upright and steadfast young wife; she and her husband appear to be entirely devoted to one another, as they assure us in their first song "I Knew That You Would Be My Love." But Lord Windermere has been seen at the rooms of a potentially shady stranger, one Mrs. Erlynne; what's more, he's paying for them. The gossip reaches Lady W's ears and a quick scan of the household chequebook confirms that her husband is indeed hiding something from her. So when Lord W rather unaccountably suggests that he'd like his wife to invite Mrs. Erlynne to the ball they are throwing tomorrow night, Lady W is aghast—and, incidentally, suddenly much more disposed to listen to the romantic overtures of Lord Darlington, who wants to run off with her.

At the ball, Lady W snubs Mrs. Erlynne and, distraught at her husband's entirely out-of-place attentions to that personage, decides to elope with Darlington. She goes to his rooms, where she accidentally drops her fan, which is subsequently discovered by Lord W. Mrs. Erlynne appears just in time to save the day and Lady W's reputation. (It turns out that she has a strong motivation for doing so, but to reveal it would ruin the one possible surprise of this mostly very predictable libretto.)

For most of After the Ball, I found myself asking, "Why didn't Lord Windermere tell his wife the truth about Mrs. Erlynne from the start?" but of course had he followed this reasonable course of action there'd be no play at all. So the gossip and would-be betrayals spin out, alternately in Wildean epigrams and Cowardy operetta. The book songs have tell-all titles like "Stay on the Side of the Angels" (Darlington to Lady W), "I Offer You My Heart" (Darlington to Lady W again), and "I Feel So Terribly Alone" (Lady W). Scattered amongst these are transitional specialties like "Oh, What a Century" for the male chorus (one of those songs in which Coward's lyric is supposed to dazzle us as it rhymes a whole bunch of related items) and "Something on a Tray," a would-be show-stopper performed by the Duchess of Berwick, a minor character in Wilde who functions here (in Day's edition) as the narrator of the tale. None makes much of an impression.

The program informs us that the great set and costume designer Tony Walton is the driving force behind this production—he has apparently cherished memories of the original show, which he saw some 50 years ago. Unfortunately, neither his design nor staging of this show helps him make much of a case for the merits of After the Ball. Lisa Shriver fills in a little lively choreography where she can; she's well-served by Greg Mills (Hopper), who gets to do the lion's share of the (relatively meager) dancing, and by Collette Simmons (Lady Agatha), who is sometimes his partner. The rest of the ensemble do competent but uninteresting work, with the exception of Drew Eshelman, who is fairly charming as Lady Erlynne's elderly suitor, Lord Augustus, and Kathleen Widdoes and David Staller, who overact rather embarrassingly as, respectively, the Duchess of Berwick and Lord Darlington.

Curious aficionados of the work of Coward and Wilde may want to venture to Irish Rep to check out After the Ball, but be warned that what's to be discovered here is hardly a long lost treasure. This is minor, minor Coward, and is unlikely to see the light of day again any time soon.

Arthur Miller’s After the Fall is a cerebral drama with an obfuscated heart: its beat can be heard, but faintly, and we cannot quite locate it. Without a clear emotional point of view, the play gives us no means of organizing this blizzard of intriguing but disparate ideas. The title refers us generally to post-Edenic times, but also to more nascent events such as the Holocaust and McCarthyism that make us realize that we do not recognize paradise until it is lost.

In Michael Mayer’s beautiful but chilly revival, Peter Krause portrays Quentin, through whose mind’s eye we see key events from his past (from early childhood to the collapse of his two marriages), as he waits nervously in a New York airport for his latest paramour; despite his disastrous romantic track record, Greta, whom he met on a trip to Austria, might renew his sense of safety in relationships. So elegantly do Richard Hoover’s set, Donald Holder’s lights, Dan Moses Schreier’s sound and Michael Krass’s costumes evoke an airport terminal circa 1965 that it is difficult at times to follow Quentin’s mental tributaries (ably navigated by Krause). But attention must be paid or one can get quite lost. The words are key as the intellect is all that is really engaged. This is the central problem of the play, the production, and our narrator.

Quentin is a moral man in a world whose ideals are turning rancid. He suffers the effects of the aforementioned historical and personal devastations, though he has managed to avoid participating in them, wittingly or un. The specter of the Holocaust looms as a prime example (and rapidly forgotten one, Greta fears) of the evil of which mankind is capable, and with which he (by virtue of having been unable to help save its victims) feels complicit. Friends name names in the McCarthy hearings, but Quentin, a lawyer, is in the clear and is even defending a colleague who has written books on legal practices in Russia, a case which ends abruptly in yet another fall: a suicidal leap.

But the play, however, seems to be more about the ways in which he participates in his two marriages. His first wife, Louise, (played with nuanced disdain by Jessica Hecht) feels almost invisible to her husband—just another one of his ideas. The disintegration of their marriage comprises most of the first act, but the telling feels more requisite than relished. Both Quentin and Miller’s destination seems to be his second wife, Maggie—a thinly disguised, rather harshly rendered portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Once a secretary at his firm, Maggie (brought to sizzling life by Carla Gugino) has risen to iconic heights as a songstress, then an actress; her endearing unsurety has blossomed into vituperative instability.

Finally, as Maggie drags him into the pit of her own private hell, do we see Quentin truly emotionally engaged. This is the version our narrator, and perhaps the playwright himself, would rather we not see: a reluctant victimizer to the woman he passionately loves, who begs and then provokes punishment. His sadism is of the laissez-faire variety— he refuses to aid her ultimately suicidal overdose, but decides not to prevent it.

Perhaps the hardest fall is Quentin’s from his own pedestal. He realizes that he, like every other person who chooses to participate fully in their life, has blood on his hands. But the conclusion is an intellectual one, borne of reason. Krause sheds some tears, but neither Miller nor Mayer invite us in to share Quentin’s shame of being merely human. We may have been made in God’s image, but the similarities stop there.

Aga-Boom is a lighthearted gambol through junk and destruction. Like old Looney Tunes cartoons, it treads a dark line without ever inspiring fear. These characters exist in a real and potentially dangerous world but are protected by their innocence.

The title Aga-Boom is a play on the Russian word for paper, boomaga. The show begins and ends with scenes about paper, starting with a small piece of paper stuck to someone’s hand and ultimately escalating into an enormous paper fight. And what a fight! Paper is hurled by performers and audience alike while huge heavy rubber balloons thump all around. Grey tubes with flashing lights become cannons when actors kick rubber balls though them, straight into the audience. There is a true sense of anything-can-happen. The staff is present should there be a problem, but even they are scooping paper up from the aisles, egging the audience on.

Throughout the piece, the audience is the wild card. There is a lot of audience participation, but the performers use exclusively adult volunteers. The reason for this is obvious when you see the fun  they have at the volunteers' expense. The first volunteer is encouraged to handle a mop head as if it were a newborn baby, cradling it, rocking it, feeding it. The clown who was encouraging him slowly exits the stage, leaving the cheerful volunteer alone and mystified. Enter another clown, who snatches the mop head back, makes fun of the volunteer for mistaking a mop head for a baby, and mops the floor with it. During another skit, two audience volunteers are left onstage alone under a white sheet after the action is over, for long enough that they uncertainly shift and try to peek from under the sheets to see what’s going on, before finally being rescued. Even initially, a clown uses an audience volunteer to get rid of the paper stuck to her hand. She frees herself and the audience member is left with the troublesome paper. In all of this, the performers are taking a risk with the audience. Yes, the volunteers are the subject of fun, but anything can happen in their moments alone up there. They could potentially change the course of the show.

All of the performers are old-school pros, the sort of actors who can make a raised eyebrow clear to everyone in the house. Dimitri Bogatirev as Aga is very accomplished technically. He does a complicated whirling dance with a suitcase, artfully spins streamers of toilet paper, walks on crutches an a single stilt, and spins a toy airplane around his erect topknot while stepping in and out of hoops. Philip Briggs as Dash relishes his role as the dour, serious one. But it is Iryna Ivanytska’s Boom who is the real protagonist of the piece, and her simple mischief got her a standing ovation. Out of place with the rest of the show, but weird and beautiful, is Elena Nekrassova’s mask piece. A former rhythmic gymnast, she uses contortion to create different bodies for a neutral mask that she wears sometimes on the back of her head, sometimes on top, and sometimes on the side. She’s strange, elastic, and alien. You can’t take your eyes off her.

This show is filled with important lessons—that fun can be had in the most unlikely places, that the most mundane of items can be fodder for the imagination, that it’s a good time to trick people and throw things at each other, that anything really can happen. And if a lesson in any of the above is not enough for you, go just to see the performers. After years in famous circuses worldwide, they know what it means to stand in front of group of children of all ages and entertain.

If Theatre Rats’ production of Agrippina, A. Giovanni Affinito’s sexy new play about power and Oedipal complexes, seems to be as compellingly watchable as a soap opera, well, that’s because that’s what it is. With Craig A. Brown delivering a terrific performance as a likeably twisted young Emperor Nero, this drama of ancient Rome is the theatrical equivalent of a page-turner, and just as much fun. Affinito picks up the story where I, Claudius leaves off, recounting the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that pitted Nero against his domineering mother Agrippina in a battle to—dare I say it—the death.

The play begins with a 20-minute dance sequence, written by director Alexis M. Hadsall and choreographed by Natalie Neckyfarow, in which the events preceding the main story are (more or less) depicted. (Some of these events are also recounted during the play proper, in flashback.) Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus and great-granddaughter of Augustus Caesar, is desperate to place her son Nero at the head of the Roman Empire. To this end, she marries the emperor Claudius, who is her uncle (necessitating a change in the incest laws); she then maneuvers to have Nero declared Claudius's successor (instead of the more likely choice, Claudius's own son, Brittanicus). Aggripina knows that a prophecy from her youth foretold her own death at Nero's hand once he came to the throne. Her journey toward that destiny is detailed in the play.

Affinito gives us a Nero far different from the gross fathead we've met in other accounts. Apparently long before he fiddled while Rome burned, he longed for freedom and a kind of reform, for himself and his people. Which is not to say that Affinito's Nero is wise or even capable—he's a bit of a flake, actually; but especially in Craig A. Brown's lovable portrayal, he seems well-intentioned if high-spirited. His central dilemma is how to deal with his feelings for his mother: he knows he's stuck under her thumb but he's also aware of ambiguous longings to surrender to another woman. When one of his chief ministers, the devious Otho, sends his own wife Poppaea to lie with Nero, it appears that Agrippina has met her match.

Treachery, betrayals, and murders follow. I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that most of the characters in this drama are untrustworthy, and the few who are seemingly too innocent to survive in this sea of sharks probably won't. Affinito keeps the action moving as Agrippina moves toward a bloody, if not quite tragic, conclusion.

That qualification—not quite tragic—suggests my main quibble with this work, by the way. Though the play is called Agrippina, it is Nero who sits squarely at its center: he's by far the more complicated (and therefore interesting) character, as well as the protagonist of the action. Agrippina merely schemes from the sidelines. Though she gets a last-minute monologue in which she summarizes her sad history in a few minutes, it amounts to too little, too late; we just don't care enough about her to justify giving over the play to her. And Brown's ingratiating and energetic turn, contrasted with a miscast (and much too young) Beth McKenzie's less effective portrayal of the title character, tips the scale even farther away from Agrippina.

The large ensemble does generally fine work, with Ridley Parson (as Burrus, Nero's former tutor), Michael Catangay (Pallas, Agrippina's lover), Brad Caswell (Herculeius, one of Nero's councilors), Sarah MontBlanc (Poppaea), and David Holt (Brittanicus) particularly noteworthy. Hadsall's staging is a little florid; the dance sequence at the opening of the piece, though excitingly choreographed and very well-executed, is just too big for this off-off-Broadway space, and there are other indications of a kind of directorial self-indulgence throughout. The most jarring of these excesses is the costume design, which is credited to Hadsall, Caswell, and MontBlanc—not really true to period, it puts the men in Egyptian-style skirts (they are almost always bare-chested) and the two leading ladies into filmy transparent garments that reveal, as often as not, the absence of anything underneath. It's a Bob Guccione touch that the play doesn't need and can't support—Affinito is going for Masterpiece Theatre-like intrigue, but the skimpy outfits and abundant pulchritude threaten to reduce it to soft porn.

Nevertheless, I had a fun time at Agrippina, and I suspect a lot of people will, too: it's a grand, passionate yarn that's easy to lose yourself inside of for a couple of hours.

With a live band, a cast of eighteen, and strikingly professional production values, Classical Theatre of Harlem is pulling off a minor miracle in reviving Melvin Van Peebles' Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. And that's without even considering the chutzpah of director Alfred Preisser and his partner Christopher McElroen (CTH's executive director) in attempting to do this challenging, ambitious, complicated work of genre-defying and barrier-breaking theatre. Believe me, few companies would even think of taking this on: though hailed rightly as an innovator that led to everything from A Chorus Line and for colored girls to modern Hip-Hop and spoken word, this show, which premiered on Broadway in 1971, certainly ain't going back there again anytime soon. So, though I don't think they've quite done it justice, I am really glad that CTH is doing what they're doing. They're giving us a rare opportunity to see an authentic landmark of theatrical, cultural, and social history.

It's a show unlike any other: Van Peebles kind of invents the form as he goes along here, which means that the piece is as uneven as it is exciting. At its best, it's a microcosm of urban (low)life—a bag lady, a junkie, a postman, a waitress at a diner, a blind beggar selling pencils, a couple of kids, a couple of hookers and their pimp, and a dissatisfied underemployed man whose corns are killing him appear as if out of the woodwork to create a downtown bus out of a conga line: the diversity, vitality, and sadness of a neighborhood explodes before our eyes like a spontaneous fireworks display. The show happens all over the theatre—on stage, of course, on Troy Hourie's remarkable multi-level set which represents, with economy and artistry, a dozen or more inner city locales; and also offstage, in the wings, on the fencing that surrounds the elevated orchestra "pit," and in the aisles and between the seats in the audience. Van Peebles' "tunes from blackness" erupt from anywhere and everywhere, surprising us, catching us off guard, keeping us riveted and engaged.

There's no story line per se, but instead a whole batch of stories as each of the two dozen or so disparate characters who inhabit this neighborhood gets a moment to show us who they are. Each of these "numbers" is a scored poem—a declamation more than a lyric, set to music of varying styles but always rooted in something close to funk (it reminded me of Isaac Hayes, whose "Theme from Shaft" was written in the same year). Some of the scenes are introspective, happening inside someone's head—a luckless man sings as he shaves in "Mirror Mirror on the Wall"; a prisoner about to be electrocuted for killing his girlfriend reminisces about happier times in the raunchy "Lily Done the Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail." Others are magic-realistic streetscapes, like the lively crie de coeur of a transvestite prostitute ("Funky Girl on Motherless Broadway"—"Love for Sale" turned on its head). A woman harangues her worthless beau in public in "Come Raising Your Leg on Me." A pimp brutally attacks one of the ladies in his stable in "You Gotta Be Holdin Out Five Dollars on Me."

Life on these mean streets is hard, rooted in institutionalized racism and the rites and rituals of poverty. There's a sense of community, but it's mostly directed outward (against cops, for example); scarcity plus a kind of caste system dictate that these folks don't often help the less fortunate. This is just one of the many ways that Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death has, I fear, not dated one iota since it was written. That amazing title lets us into its mindset; the finale is downright incendiary:

Put a curse on you
Gonna fix it so yo menfolk
Can't see no beauty in yo womenfolk too
Se you menfolks be boys
To the man
And to your womenfolk too
I'm putting a curse on you

What must this have felt like in 1971, with Dr. King and Malcolm X barely gone, with Jimi Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner" being played on Radio Hanoi (Ain't Supposed to Die begins with an arresting version of the national anthem), with the Stonewall riots and Midnight Cowboy recent memories? The show has probably lost a lot of its capacity to shock—though the sex talk is surprisingly rough—but the twin engines of injustice and inhumanity propel this piece to reach an unexpected resonance. The second act climaxes in two horrifically brutal moments, one in which a young prostitute is raped by two cops in their cruiser, followed by another in which the same cops kill a teenager involved in a looting. The shock here is of recognition.

The shape of Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death makes it very dependent on its performers to put it over, and it's here that the CTH production sadly sometimes falters. There are a few powerhouse turns here: Ty Jones is unforgettable as the pimp Sweet Daddy, as is Lizan Mitchell as the Bag Lady; J. Kyle Manzay (Blindman) and Ralph Carter (Wino) get to execute some fancy footwork and sing a little a capella. But most of the other ensemble members are straining to put over their characters—most can sing or move or act but have difficulty putting the whole package together. And a few—Simone Moore and Tracy Jack in particular—seem to be resisting the show's spirit, or at least its style. Toure Harris' sound design is problematic, too, causing some of the miked performers' voices to feel disembodied. But the band, led by William "Spaceman" Patterson, sounds great. And Preisser's staging, especially of the big group scenes, where everybody's being themselves and doing something different on their own little patch of turf, is beautiful (and beautifully executed).

The bottom line? I'm really, really glad that I got to see Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. All of these artists connected with this production deserve nothing but our gratitude and praise for making it happen.

Airport Hilton is about a man named Paul Cowler who is trying to deal with a terrible shock. He finds himself alone in a room at the eponymous hotel. He has just learned that his wife and unborn daughter have been killed in a plane crash—the result, apparently, of a bomb in someone's luggage. Paul's pain is tempered with significant amounts of guilt, because he should have been on the plane, too—he and his wife were heading off to Barbados, for a second honeymoon—and, even worse, because the reason he missed the plane is that he was here, in this same hotel, closing out a long-term affair with another woman.

Anthony Jaswinski's script depicts Paul's wretchedness in meticulous detail, via an unsettling roundelay of flashbacks and flashforwards that eventually reveal the actual chain of events that have occurred. (Don't worry, I'm not giving anything away; but nothing here is quite as it seems.)  Jaswinski's background is in film, and it shows—Airport Hilton feels more like a screenplay or teleplay than a work of theatre: it's got a cinematic sweep that seems more concerned with how things look than what they are; the characters' preoccupation with superficial instead of deeper concerns seems more movie-like rather than play-like as well. That said, this is nevertheless a well-crafted Twilight Zone-y suspense yarn, one that keeps us both riveted and guessing throughout.

Director David Epstein tackles the material on its own terms and comes up aces. Though the design is noticeably less elaborate than in previous Invisible City Theatre Company productions, Epstein fills the theatre with atmosphere. Transitions between scenes (which often jump back and forth in time) are awesomely seamless, felicitous stage approximations of movie dissolves.

Epstein's cast delivers outstandingly, as well. Gerry Lehane, as Paul, is entirely compelling; there are moments in his performance that are startlingly revelatory, as when he glances out the window of his hotel room to look at the assemblage of news vans that have converged on the disaster site: it's as if we can see the whole circus ourselves—his work here is that intense. Maggie Bell, as Gerry's wife, is at once spectral and grounded, keeping him and us guessing about what she knows vis-a-vis his infidelity and what she's going to do about it. Also fine are Cecelia Frontero as the airline representative assigned to Paul's case and Elizabeth Horn as a fellow "survivor." Rounding out the company are the ever-reliable J.T. Patton as a hotel security officer and Kristin Woodburn as Paul's mistress.

All Shook Up is a winner: what a delightful surprise that is! It's the most fun I've had at a new musical since Hairspray.

The main reason, I think, is that All Shook Up's creators—director Christopher Ashley, choreographer Ken Roberson, and book writer Joe DiPietro are the main ones—understand that a musical comedy gets its energy from people, not gags; and its joy from songs, not spectacle. They've put thirty talented souls on stage at the Palace Theatre, and given them two dozen musical numbers to put over in high theatrical style, all in service of a boisterous, life- and love-affirming plot. Their happiness is infectious. I smiled over and over again as the show played on, and left with a warm feeling of goodwill that lingered until bedtime.

The story takes place on an eventful day in 1955 in a small town that never was in a mythical version of Eisenhower Era America. When we first meet the inhabitants, they're forlorn and lonesome: pretty gas jockey Natalie sings "Love Me Tender" to the air, longing for a man to sweep her off her feet, onto his motorcycle, and out of this burg; her sweet but geeky friend Dennis, who is unrequitedly in love with her, sings along. In the next scene, at a local watering hole called Sylvia's, the whole town dejectedly announces that their town feels like "Heartbreak Hotel."

The score, as you may have noticed, is made up of songs made famous by Elvis Presley.

Just as things are feeling bleakest for these folks, an enigmatic stranger in a leather jacket comes roaring into view on his motorcycle ("I'm just a roustabout / Shifted from town to town"). His name is Chad; he looks a little like that Presley guy and he can swivel his hits just as rowdily and with the same devastating results (women faint); but his personality turns out to be more reminiscent of, say, Fonzie (and he can hit a jukebox and make it start playing like Fonzie, too). For Natalie, he's a personal Rainmaker.

What follows is a cheerful round robin of interlocking love stories: Chad seems to make everybody get all woozily romantic. Natalie disguises herself as a biker boy named Ed in her effort to woo Chad; Chad gets gaga over Miss Sandra, the worldly blonde bombshell working at the town museum; Miss Sandra falls head-over-heels for Ed. Natalie's Dad, Jim, goes cuckoo for Miss Sandra as well, while stalwart Sylvia (she of the saloon; see paragraph 3) realizes that Jim is the man she needs. Sylvia's teenager daughter Lorraine, meanwhile, loses her heart at first sight to Dean, the strapping-but-shy son of the town's aggressively anti-fun Mayoress. And Dennis is still in the picture, too, hoping he can win over Natalie. I won't tell you exactly how each of these little stories works itself out, but there are a whole batch of weddings at the finale. Everybody—audience included—leaves happy.

'Cause it's all set so snappily and playfully to all these classic tunes. Chad, Miss Sandra, Dennis, and Natalie/Ed ignite their love rectangle in locked duets of "Teddy Bear" and "Hound Dog." Lorraine and Dean declare their undying devotion in "It's Now or Never." Chad teaches middle-aged Jim how to be cool with the ladies in a wittily staged "Don't Be Cruel." Sylvia realizes that she's in love with her old pal Jim in "Can't Help Falling in Love" and wails to the rafters when he rejects her in a spectacular "There's Always Me." (Sharon Wilkins, possessed of a big voice that she knows exactly how to use, stops the show cold with this number.) The Mayoress (played with zesty nastiness by Alix Korey) declares her enmity to Chad's decadent lifestyle in "(You're the) Devil in Disguise." 

The show sizzles and sparkles whenever Roberson gets his actors dancing—"C'mon Everybody" gets the blood pumping, showcasing the sexy, smooth moves of Cheyenne Jackson (as Chad) and the deftly talented chorus. (The ensemble includes such excellent dancers as Justin Bohon, who made a splash a few years ago as Will Parker in Oklahoma!, Paul Castree, who was a standout in Saturday Night Fever, Justin Brill, Justin Patterson, Randy A. Davis, and Michael James Scott). "Blue Suede Shoes" occasions some fine athletic stepping, while the finale "Burning Love" again gets the entire company swinging. (A dream sequence to "Jailhouse Rock" is Roberson's only real misstep: it simply tries too hard.)

Ashley and DiPietro make sure that All Shook Up never gets too grounded or takes itself too seriously. Church lady hats turn into tambourines at one point; museum statues burst to life and encourage Miss Sandra to "Let Yourself Go." Nothing feels forced or corny, somehow; the silliness is always giddy enough to land sweetly. And though we're constantly aware that we've seen everything here before—in Twelfth Night, in As You Like It, in Hairspray, in Footloose, and in lots of other places—there's a relaxed freshness to this show that's ingratiating and just downright pleasing. Plot developments that subtly twit racists, ageists, and scary judgmental conservatives make their points without overwhelming the genial, light tone.

The cast is superb. Jackson is as appealing a leading man as you could wish for; I responded to his gaudy charms much more than to, say, Hugh Jackman's last season. I've already told you that Wilkins is invaluable as Sylvia; Nikki M. James is equally strong-voiced as her daughter Lorraine, and Jonathan Hadary is her match in every other way as the kind-hearted Jim. Curtis Holbrook and Mark Price prove themselves spectacular dancers as Dean and Dennis, respectively; I wished both had more opportunities to strut their stuff. Leah Hocking has fun as sexpot Sandra, while John Jellison is fine in the small role of Sheriff Earl. Only Jenn Gambatese disappoints—just a bit—as Natalie; it's not that she doesn't account well for herself, but rather that's she more or less outclassed by the talent surrounding her.

Musical comedy is supposed to feel exactly like this: you actually want to clap along with the cast for the final reprise. I had a ball at All Shook Up and I think you will too.

What is the function of clowns? Are they meant to lift our spirits and take our minds off our troubles? Or are they meant to hold a mirror up to society so that we might see ourselves seeing? The two clowns in all wear bowlers, a hilarious and innovative piece of new vaudevillian theatre, aim to fulfill both of these potential functions.

The idea behind all wear bowlers is quite brilliant: Take Godot's Didi and Gogo, turn them into Laurel and Hardy, and have them walk off the silver screen and find themselves trapped in the reality of the very play that is showing. At first they are shocked by the presence of an audience, so they jump back into the black and white film from which they came. (The caption reads: “There’s people out there!”) For the next ten minutes or so they jump back and forth from screen to stage with such amazing precision that I can only imagine that in addition to performing their respective physical bits they are also counting in their heads, like a musician keeping time, for the exact moment they are to jump seamlessly back onto the screen. I was hooked from this moment on. The show is full of great sight gags but this opening gag is by far the most impressive. Eventually the projector stops, we see the film melt, and they are no longer able to return to their world. They try to escape our world but they are blocked at every escape route so they decide that they must do what they do best—entertain their audience. They interact with the audience, pulling some people on stage and at one point stealing the chairs of two audience members. I’m sure that there is a certain amount of improvisation with the audience at these moments but for the most part the show is a series of very well-rehearsed vaudevillian bits.

The title all wear bowlers is taken from a stage direction in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Its two characters look more like the tramps one might see in a Beckett play than they do clowns, and they certainly express some of the existential struggles with identity and existence for which Beckett is known. The shows creator/performers, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, have invented a hybrid of vaudeville and existentialism. These two clowns have undergone a rebirth. They have been thrown into our world and they are compelled to entertain us, all the while they are trying to escape our world and return to their own where they know who and where they are. We are bizarre phantoms to them. At one point they actual sit down and watch us watching. They scoff at the audience for watching such avant-garde theatre and all the audience can think to do is laugh at themselves. Later in the show, Lyford and Sobelle re-create Rene Magritte’s famous painting of the headless man with the bowler hat. The headless man is shocked to discover that he has no corporal existence—much like our two clowns who are trapped in this world that is no more real to them than the world of film is real to us.

Lyford and Sobelle are exceptionally skillful performers. There was not a moment in this show that I was not thoroughly engaged in the action. The essence of good clowning is establishing a good character. Lyford and Sobelle are not up there “clowning” so to speak, rather they create characters around which many unexpected events happen. Sobelle plays Ernest who is a bit more brash and yet more sympathetic to the audience’s needs than his counterpart, Lyford’s Wyatt, who has an endearing innocence and goofiness to him. Both Lyford and Sobelle have extraordinary comic timing and each sinks into his respective character so deeply that by the end of the show I felt more like I was in their world than in my own.

There is very little dialogue in the show and there doesn’t need to be. Lyford and Sobelle use their bodies, sleight-of-hand, and sight gags to tell their story. What little dialogue exists is very funny, but there is something about it that didn’t all work for me. Perhaps it is the occasional use of vulgarity, which doesn’t seem to fit into the world of this show. Maybe their characters were trying to appeal to a modern audience.

Sobelle uses a funny voice that he gets a lot of mileage out of, and Lyford is a master at tickling his audience with an expression accompanied by a nonsensical noise. Honestly, I can’t remember when I’ve seen better timing combined with such powerful chemistry on stage. These two performers are an absolute joy to watch.

Their director, Aleksandra Wolska, does an excellent job pulling out the pathos in a show that is on the surface a vaudeville act. Wolska shows us some of the dark and sometimes ethereal undercurrents that flow through all wear bowlers and she establishes an amazing balance between the form and function of the show and its characters. I particularly liked the scene where she turns the actors around and shows us the “magic” behind one of their sight gags.

Technically, the show is as precise as its performers. The lights, designed by Randy “Igloo” Glickman, create great atmosphere and movement; however, there is one point where the audience is blinded by white light in order to create the effect of the clowns jumping off the screen for the first time—possibly there is a more stylized way to produce this effect without blinding the audience. Tara Webb’s costumes are dead-on and James Sugg’s sound design pops up unexpectedly and earns several good laughs. Filmmaker Michael Glass creates a mini masterpiece with his opening shot of the desolate and miserable tree that evokes both Godot and the world of the two clowns.

all wear bowlers is a show that you can enjoy purely for its entertainment value. There is a message that you might pull out of it but you don’t have to. It’s your choice. You can go just to laugh… clowns are funny. But the clowns in this show also help us look at the ambiguity of reality.

As the audience is being seated at Dodger Stages Theatre 4, the band begins to assemble on stage. Techies with smoke machines start setting the mood as an announcer comes on to let us know how many more minutes before the stars of the evening will be arriving at the theatre. Finally, they get there. The band kicks in full-blast and the crowd goes wild as Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham, the “Apostles of Pop,” hit the stage for the final show of their tour. It’s a play. It’s a concert. It’s Altar Boyz, the new Christian boy band that’s come to save a few New York souls with ninety minutes of witty music, hot dancing, and way more laughs than I expected. It’s a tight, fun show that you can’t help but love.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: in a time when fundamentalist religious extremists are wreaking havoc with our Constitution and playing games with many of our rights and individual lives, how can a show like this play in New York, a city not known for its tolerance of intolerance? Well, there’s really nothing in Altar Boyz that should offend anyone. The religious content is about at the level of a Saturday morning cartoon, with the intellectual prowess of… well, a pop boy band. The show, in fact, pokes plenty of harmless fun at organized religion. The only message here is the power of love, acceptance, and great hair products.

With fierce, athletic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek choreography by Christopher Gattelli, the five boys are put through their paces, sweating like crazy, all the time singing full out and staying delightfully in character. All five actors have tremendous voices, mad dance moves, and sharp comic timing. There’s Scott Porter as Matthew, the “heartthrob,” who picks a pretty girl from the audience, sits her up on stage, and sings his big solo number; “Something about you makes me want to wait.” Tyler Maynard as Mark, the closeted gay twinkie, is a comic master. He stops the show with a number about how Matthew, his secret crush, helped him come out… no, it’s not what you think. Andy Karl is the tough street kid, Luke, with the hip-hop dance moves and the heart of gold. He was sent away for a while for “exhaustion.” One time he was so “exhausted” he cracked up the van. Juan, played by Ryan Duncan, is the hot Latin with Ricky Martin moves, a story more heart-breaking than a novella, and hair that gets sexier the more he sweats. Finally there’s Abraham, the hip-hop Jew played by David Josefsberg. But are Jews allowed in here? “I think I see one in front, hanging on the cross,” he points out. By the end, he teaches the rest of them a thing or two about “Christian” love.

There’s a fun, simple book by Kevin Del Aguila that tells the story of the band’s creation, and gives each boy his moments to shine. The story leaves us here today where the band, with their new digital machine that measures lost souls, is planning on purifying the audience one by one until the counter gets down to zero. Stafford Arima’s direction is right on, full of not-so-subtle innuendo and jokes on the cast that only the audience gets. Renowned deejay Shadoe Stevens is the perfect choice here for the voice of God. Lynne Shankel’s tight four-piece band rocks the house, adding way more fun, excitement, and bang for your buck.

The very diverse audience was laughing and cheering throughout, and on their feet at the end. Altar Boyz is a crowd pleaser, for sure: a harmless, non-stop good time, perfect for kids and teens of all ages.

There are several dozen new short plays and theatre pieces being presented at this year's American Living Room at HERE—many of them are, to some extent, works-in-progress, and all of them are being shown under festival conditions, which is to say with minimal production values and reduced rehearsal/technical development time. That said, this remains one of the city's great breeding grounds for interesting new theatre, and so we'll be reporting on some random evenings that we're able to catch as the Living Room runs its course between now and the beginning of September.

I saw two programs on Tuesday, August 3. The first, a pair of very short satirical plays by Ross M. Berger, proved delightfully timely (in keeping with the Living Room's overriding theme this year of response to the current political situation in this country). Push Polling depicts a telephone survey about the upcoming presidential election  in which the questions seem, shall we say, just a little bit more biased than we might hope for. (For example, one question asks—and I'm paraphrasing here—"Would you be more or less likely to vote for George Bush if you knew he had the body of a healthy 24-year-old?" while the next asks "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John Kerry if you knew he had a disease such as psoriasis or HIV?") Funny, timely stuff, this; eerily familiar, too. Berger also takes swipes at the controversial practice of outsourcing, with pollster "Amanda Smith" portrayed by actress Shetal Shah as an overseas employee housed in a South Asian country. Semper Hifi is the companion piece, another unsettling comedy set in a Circuit City store in March, 2003, where a fervently patriotic clerk lets his obsession with the war in Iraq cloud his business judgment, time after time. Berger's a smart, sharp writer, and he captures some of the key obsessions of our current political moment astutely in both plays; he's also the director of both pieces. His cast—the aforementioned Shah, along with Bill Folman, Michael Szeles, Paul Risman, and Amir Darvish—all turn in excellent work.

The second, much longer item on the bill was And I Love You, written by Sarah Kozinn and directed by Matthew Graham Smith and Joshua Matthews. This piece was much less successful than Berger's double bill, mostly because Kozinn's script seems to have grafted two very different plays onto one another, with highly problematic results. The first of these—the one that leads us into the piece—is about a suburban couple who have apparently taken very seriously the federal government's frequent dicta to be aware of their surroundings and report suspicious activity, and have consequently turned themselves into neighborhood private eye/vigilantes, reporting minor infractions like parking violations to the local authorities in a misguided effort to "do their duty." This is a swell satirical idea—but unfortunately Kozinn doesn't follow through on it. Instead, she lurches into a second idea, concerning a woman whose inability to have children of her own sets her on a scary and dangerous course that eventually leads to kidnapping and murder. This story would make a terrific cautionary tragedy, but here, as an extension/conclusion to the earlier yarn, it's played for laughs, which defuses its natural power. My advice to Kozinn would be to separate these two excellent ideas and let each develop organically into the form it requires—a sharp satire on the one hand, and a deeply-felt drama on the other. My advice to directors Smith and Matthews is to focus on blocking and spatial relationships and to work with the actors (David Crabb and Karen Grenke) to sharpen, as opposed to broaden, their performances.

Imagine I, Claudius re-scripted with a sensibility somewhere between Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, and then toss George W. Bush into the mix. The result is Amerikus Rex, the hilarious and smart new comedy by Kevin Rice. I've been waiting all year for a pointed and satisfying political satire and here, at last, it is: a play that keeps us laughing from start to finish and pulls us up short now and again by telling the truth with devastating wit. It's also an enormous amount of fun, especially in the rollicking, high-energy production of director John Giampetro. The cast of six, led by the remarkable Dan Matisa in the neatest bit of double-casting in recent memory, is terrific.

Familiarity with I, Claudius (at least the TV series) will probably enhance, but is absolutely not necessary for, your enjoyment of the piece. It takes place in Rome in 13 A.D., where Augustus Caesar, presiding over the vast Roman Empire, is worried about imminent death and needs to select a successor. His wife, the scheming Livia, is pushing hard in favor of her son Tiberius; but Caesar isn't all that fond of his step-son and so—and here's where Rice departs from history—he recalls his younger son Cornelius from the distant isle Amerikus, where he was banished ten years before. We discover that the cause of this banishment was that Cornelius invaded the wrong country (Scythia instead of Syria); for this rather serious transgression  he earned the undying enmity of Livia in addition to his punishment. But now Caesar has brought him back, to challenge Tiberius to be the next emperor of Rome.

Cornelius arrives in disguise—a 20th century-style business suit and a cowboy hat; things are different over there in Amerikus. He also has a funny accent that we'd call Texan; his ingratiating aw-shucks manner, not to mention his difficulties with Latin, remind us of a certain American president now in office. It turns out that Cornelius has established a military super-power on the island where he's been exiled, one that has come to dominate its neighbors (Canadum and Mexicum) and in fact has 703 military bases ringing the Mediterranean Sea. Amerikus has replaced slaves with something called a "labor force," simplified religion by eliminating the pantheon of gods in favor of a single "true" almighty, and revolutionized technology by inventing the "engine," which needs oil—something they have in Scythia—to make it run. Some say that Cornelius, who has been known to mount a "Crusade" or two against infidels, wants to take over Rome and the entire world.

Now, I want you to know that, heavy-handed as some of the foregoing may sound, Amerikus Rex is never ponderous or even terribly serious. Rice keeps the tone deliciously light and puckish: the jibes at the actual Amerikus Rex that Cornelius represents are sharp little pokes designed to deflate and puncture but never to destroy. So Cornelius is portrayed as hopelessly dopey—Claudius, assigned to be his tutor to help prep him for the "duel" with Tiberius, never gets any farther than explaining the difference between "dextere" and "sinistere." But Cornelius is also depicted as much shrewder than his detractors give him credit for; in a nod to Robert Graves, Claudius explains that it was his uncle Cornelius who taught him to stammer and play the fool in order to survive in the lethal household of the Roman emperor.

Mostly, Rice piles on the shtick and the gags with dazzling frequency. Tiberius, desperately trying to get his step-father Augustus Caesar to name him as his heir, disguises himself as a haruspex and delivers his prophecy like a stand-up comic doing gross-out jokes with a tray filled with fake pig innards. Claudius, Bugs Bunny-like, morphs into a paper boy, a TV newscaster, and a WWF referee to comically comment on the battle for the throne between Tiberius and his lost step-brother Cornelius. Tiberius's girlfriend Clea, pretending to be an auger, turns up in a feathered head-dress and sparkling evening gown, prompting Claudius to chide her that she's dressed for Caesar's Palace, not the palace of Caesar. Rice is not above a gag like this one:

Tiberius: Bring me some of Caesar's wine.
Clea: Why, do you think it might be poisoned?
Tiberius: No, I think it's the good stuff.

But, tomfoolery aside, Rice always stays on point, and he's an extraordinarily skillful parodist. Cornelius's first report about his exile, for example, is an almost word-for-word play on Julius Caesar's "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres." Amerikus Rex is for neither the faint-hearted nor the illiterate. But the rest of us should have a blast.

That's nowhere truer, by the way, than at the play's brilliant and hilarious climax, in which Tiberius and Cornelius forsake a battle of wits for a battle of swords, to the death. Matisa, who I told you earlier plays both of these gentlemen, thus fights a duel with himself—choreographed by John Nagle, it's a magnificent tour de force of the first order.

Matisa is capital in both roles throughout; so too are Caitlin Gibbon as Clea, Valorie Niccore as Livia, Jack R. Marks as Caesar, and especially newcomer Adam Green as Claudius. Giampetro's staging is fast, furious, and fun; the simple sets—mostly some Roman pillars—by Tim Baumgartner serve the piece beautifully. Ramona Ponce's witty costumes—which include, in addition to the aforementioned get-up for Clea's auger, a spiffy reversible toga for Tiberius/Cornelius and a spectacularly silly haruspex suit that looks like something Alvin Colt threw away for the Forbidden Broadway parody of Lion King because it was too over-the-top—are literally show-stopping.

Whether you're a fan of savvy and literate satire or just rooting for a Bush defeat in two weeks, Amerikus Rex is sure to buoy your spirits and encourage you to keep on fighting the good fight. Don't miss it!

“Welcome to this very special AM version of An Evening with Carol Channing,” said a lovely male voice this past Sunday morning as he introduced "Ms. Channing" (aka Richard Skipper) for the 11am performance at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. With a look of anticipation, I sat in the theatre hoping that the premature exit from my Sunday-bed was going to be worth the effort, and that the upcoming performance would justify missing Dolly Parton’s interview on CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. No worries. Instantly, as Carol entered from the back of the theatre, greeting audience members individually as she traveled to the stage, my obsession over missing one grande dame on TV was instantly replaced by another on stage. With complete admiration for Skipper’s performance, my breakfast with Carol was truly one of the most entertaining and easy experiences in the theatre I have had in quite a long time. I was blessed with the surprising eighty-minute gift of smiles, laughter, quick wit, and exuberant talent. Skipper’s generosity on the stage equals that of the inspiration to whom he pays homage.

Fortunately, Skipper’s source material is a living legend, who like Julie Wilson, can rely on eighty-plus years of life history to support the integrity (and intimacy) of each moment. Carol sings an array of her greatest hits that include “Hey, Look Me Over,” “Hello, Dolly,” “Bye Bye Baby,” Before the Parade Passes By,” “A Little Girl from Little Rock,” “Broadway Baby,” and “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The “evening” is full of banter with the audience, tales of an only child turned Broadway star, and a collage of songs that are evidence of a life’s contribution to the theatre—all joyous encounters of camp, earnestness, and pure comic revelation. Skipper is a perfect Carol, more of an actor than an impersonator (being her, not playing her). His Carol is all you would expect, fingers bejeweled with the grandest of gems, the blond toss of teased hair, the dress of sequins, and the wide-eyes of innocence.

Skipper’s final performance at the Midtown International Theatre Festival is Thursday, July 29, at 8:30 pm. I urge you to see this show! Following this performance, Skipper heads back to Las Vegas (New York City will miss him!). You can view his website for a detailed biography, photos and video clippings at www.richardskipper.com.

Thanks to Skipper and Ms. Channing herself, “…Carol will never go away again!”

If you’re not afraid to walk through the valleys in the hidden shadows of your mind then you might have the courage to step into the downstairs theatre at La MaMa for the Opole Puppet Theatre’s world premiere of …And I Have Uncurtained the Night. The show is eerie in an engaging and sensual way. The style harkens back to the Symbolists of the early part of the last century. There is a creepy scraping noise that reminds me of the scythe in Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse. It gives you a sense of foreboding like there’s something in the room with you but you’re the only one who can perceive it.

The play is based on "The Story of the Mother" by Hans Christian Andersen. I’m not familiar with this story, but I got the feeling that even if I were it would take me days to decipher the bizarre happenings in this piece. However, that matters very little in the grand scheme of this show. It’s like watching a staged film noir with puppets; it’s not about a lucid series of events but rather the exquisite execution of moments.

Marcin Molencki’s lighting design brings the show into a world where light and shadow play like lost children. The use of strictly side and/or down lighting gives director Krystian Kobylka the opportunity to have characters mysteriously appear and disappear, an effect that elicited whoas and ahhhs from the audience. Waldemar Wojewoda’s sound design is an ethereal barrage that sweeps you into the realm of death and fate. The music is performed superbly under the leadership of Lech Jankowski. The set motif, provided by Joanna Braun, consists of thin metal rods constructed to form three tunnels. At one point the whole thing swayed to the music. The actors/puppeteers curtain the tunnels at various depths to help create a fabulous play of light. I felt this gave meaning to the title of the show. The puppets are twisted formations of the characters they represent. The Mother character, animated brilliantly by Barbara Lach, seems to be split between the puppet and the puppeteer. Still, somehow, I was able to focus on both without feeling like I was being drawn out of the illusion.

…And I Have Uncurtained the Night is a highly conceptualized show but not to the point of alienation. It managed to draw tears from my wife. This is not to say that you will definitely cry, but you will most certainly gain an understanding of the meaning of abstract theatre and the effects it can have on all your senses.

Will Chen (Thomas C. Kouo) is a twenty-something Asian-American musical writer in New York, besieged by the cacophonic commercial jingles he writes to make money; phone calls from his parents in Taiwan, full of confidence-boosting reminders like “When are you getting a ‘real’ job?”, “Are you doing drugs?”, and “Have you dumped your non-Christian, white girlfriend?”; and a sublet search for these parents for their Thanksgiving visit, when they will meet Jane (Lisa Howard), said un-dumped, non-Christian, white girlfriend. His is a life lacking strong foundation in identity, direction, or serenity, so it is poetic that an earthquake in his parents’ country reduces the next 24 hours of his life into chaos. And the Earth Moved is Chen’s asymmetric musical journey through that day, created by Timothy Huang from events on an actual day when he was unsure if his parents still lived. Huang turns New York into a mercurial hell for his main character. While on a errand, Chen’s own neighborhood magically morphs into an unfamiliar corner of the city, and he becomes lost. Unable to contact his girlfriend or parents, Chen zigzags from stranger to stranger, mostly Asian and all possessing a strange power to humiliate him about his parents, his lack of ethnic pride, and his faithlessness.

Kouo has a mellifluous tenor sound, supported by the bright vocal power of his supporting cast. Many of the ensemble dart in and out of the action as various residents of this strange Wonderland or Oz that replaces the Upper West Side for a day. The show-stopper, “The Concert of Prayer,” is delivered by Melanie May Po, who belts some serious gospel as Sister Deborah of the First Chinese Pentecostal Church of Harlem. Huang’s composing skills and gift for melody lend this show its most formidable asset, the score. Certain pieces nimbly trim the fat off Asian stereotypes of all-too-common experience, leaving us with a stark revision of the American Dream. Indeed, “Livin’ the American Dream” is bodega-owner Dilly Gent Lee’s chipper summation of his existence. But it masks a fact sung in his line “I never leave the store”—working like a mule does not mean he will sell enough Tic-Tacs and cigarettes to ever hire help, take a vacation, or buy a house. Two ensemble choruses, “Wan Fat Chow’s” and “Ha Ha We So Happy” are sung by the clown-nosed, peasant-hat-wearing staff of a Chinese restaurant, sending up the shouted broken English of the Asian minstrel character.

Director/choreographer Zoie Lam succeeds at keeping the show’s pace brisk and unpredictable. The minimalist set, standard for festival works, is niftily augmented by photographs projected onto an enormous screen at the back of the stage, suggesting street corners and building interiors. Though few flaws are noticeable as the show proceeds, certain scenes seem incongruous even in a plot meant to keep us off-balance. Howard, as Jane, the dutiful girlfriend left at home while Chen wanders, is forced to navigate through a story about searching for candles that intermittently swarms in and uproots us from the main plot. It would be far more interesting for us to slip further into Chen’s lonely shoes, and have little idea what is going on at the home he cannot find. In the Pentecostal church scene near the end, Chen comes to an epiphany that is a bit pat—it is regretful that Huang’s final themes take such a hygienic turn. I didn’t want the refreshing complexity of this identity hunt to end.

Antigone begins right after the two sons of Oedipus have killed each other in a battle for control over the city of Thebes. Their uncle, Creon, has taken control of the government and decreed that the remains of one, Polyneices, must not be buried because of his attempted rebellion. Their sister, Antigone, decides to defy Creon and bury her brother's body, saying that the law of the gods supercedes a law made by man; she does so, even though she knows that the punishment for her defiance will be death. Creon learns of Antigone's act, metes out her stern fate despite the fact that she's his niece; despite the fact that she's betrothed to wed (and much loved by) his son Haemon.

Creon does all this, and for his hubris suffers mightily. The play is about the moral question posed and answered by Antigone, to be sure; but it's also about the consequences of a leader's arrogance. I think this latter theme is the one that has led NAATCO to mount Antigone at this particular moment, and Mia Katigbak's stunning portrayal of Creon—looking very Republican in a conservative dark wool suit and red tie—does a fine job of revealing the tragic consequences, personal and public, of convincing yourself that you know the will of the gods.  Everybody else's pain pales before Creon's cathartic journey—everyone, that is, except for the citizens themselves, embodied by a chorus of eight men who give counsel and take orders from their King and stand by, seemingly impotent, as his choices wreak despair and destruction on their city. (There's a lesson in this for our time, too, I think.)

Director Jean Randich gives us a thoroughly striking production, incorporating Sue Rees' stark, stylized set, Elly van Horne's modern-dress costumes, visceral chants and drumming (the music is by Robert Murphy), and exciting movement (James Shubert's agitated leaps against the city walls are particularly thrilling)—all of which succeed in reminding us of the play's timelessness and of its ritualistic elements: whenever men gather to try to rule themselves, their faith is never left far behind. The entire company does fine work here, with Art Acuna's Haemon, Nicky Paraiso's Tiresias, and Emi Fujinami Jones' Eurydice particularly noteworthy. NAATCO's work seems to get better with each new production.

But all this said, I was put off in places by this Antigone; I think the source of my discomfiture lies in the translation by Brendan Kennelly that NAATCO has elected to use. First of all there's the style of it—blank verse with rhymed couplets and/or passages here and there; the rhymes kept sticking in my ears, feeling sing-songy and distracting me from the sense of the text. More disturbing, though, are two themes that Kennelly seems to emphasize: that women (e.g., Antigone and her sister, Ismene) are powerless against their male rulers, and that money is the cause of much evil and suffering. These ideas are both in Sophocles, but the play fails to prove either one; why does Kennelly, in a modern translation, spend so much time hammering them home?

Antigone—the classic Greek drama of disobeying authority—is a very astute choice for The UnConvention. The Abingdon Theatre’s West 36th Street location is just a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, putting it in what feels like the “Green Zone” of Manhattan, and many authorities must be obeyed just to get to the venue. Like a frame around the production, this pre-show experience of barricades, armored vehicles, and heavily armed officers gives an effective visual reference for authority to draw upon during the performance.

One Year Lease is presenting this updated revival of their 2001 production, which played in New York and internationally. This is Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, an accessible, modern version of Sophocles’ drama, originally written during the Nazi occupation of France. To Anouilh’s text, this production also adds a letter from an Army Sergeant currently serving in Iraq to his mother, bringing the context of the action to the immediate present.

The performances of the four actors in this production are uniformly clear and precise, but director Ianthe Demos has made some challenging choices which create a distance between the audience and the drama. The heart of Greek Drama is argument—the action of the play is the clash of ideas and beliefs. So it is frustrating that some aspects of the staging make the arguments hard to follow. Rather than using a full cast of actors, or actors in multiple roles (as the original Greek drama would have done), many of the supporting parts are played by stacks of sand bags; that is to say, recorded dialogue is played with a light shining on one of six stacks of bags. No matter how skilled the sound design, and how hard the live performer is working, it is very difficult to find an extended scene between an actor and an inanimate object compelling. Furthermore, much of the dialogue of the Chorus is in French, and most of the role of Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, is performed in Greek. I felt a sense of relief when we finally reached an English language scene with two live actors—the confrontation between Antigone (Tella Storey) and Creon (Ariane Barbanell). Both are passionate and driven and I found myself completely engaged in their debate—which made it all the more disappointing when it was time for more recorded-sandbag characters to “enter” and muddy the proceedings. As the descriptions of some of the most important events of the play (which, in the Greek tradition, occur offstage) are left to these non-presences, it makes the climax and resolution of the play hard to follow for anyone not already familiar with the story.

The design of the production is very effective in its simple, direct style—the floor of the playing area is covered in sand, and the stacks of bags are the only set. Throughout the production, photographic images of the first Gulf War are projected on the back wall. I was particularly impressed by the work of lighting designer Mike Riggs, who manages to create a rich atmosphere in the small space, without ever leaving a speaking actor unlit or interfering with the projections. And his lighting on a repeated visual effect of raining sand is beautiful.

I have very much enjoyed the past work of One Year Lease—their work is consistently innovative and their production values are high. I think Demos is a remarkable director, I just wish that this time she let us get closer to the play itself. Anouilh’s version of Antigone is an interpretation, rather than a translation. And this production felt like an interpretation of an interpretation and too many degrees removed from the drama itself.

The story of Antigone—a young woman who defies her king to obey the laws of family and religion, choosing to bury her dead brother even though such burial has been proscribed at pain of death—feels particularly relevant at the moment: it may be viewed as a response to everything from "If you're not for us, you're against us" to the abridgements of privacy and freedom under the so-called Patriot Act. So playwright Chiori Miyigawa's vision in Antigone Project, which she conceived and which is now being presented by Women's Project, makes a great deal of sense: enlist five women playwrights to explore this tale and find the resonances within it, for America in 2004.

The results are varied and fascinating, if not always completely on the mark. Miyagawa's own piece, Red Again, is far and away the most interesting and exhilarating, incorporating her trademark style—in which cultures and histories blur into a single timeless archetype of humanity—to retell a piece of the famous story with honesty and potency. It takes place in Bardo (from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a place of transition between life and death), where Antigone and her boyfriend, Harold, have just arrived. As in Sophocles, she hanged herself after her uncle the King ordered her sealed inside a cave, and he killed himself upon learning of his beloved's sentence. But, entirely unlike in Sophocles, here the two are looking forward to their next lives, and reviewing the facts of their own existences and that of Antigone's sister Irene, who remains alive on a troubled Earth.

Irene is, in fact, trying to get help from the authorities—she's got two dead bodies (Antigone's and Harold's) to dispose of, and a century of terror, genocide, and holocaust is caving in on her:

Yes, you might have called my brother dark-skinned; though not really dark, but definitely not creamy white. That did not make him a terrorist. He didn't have any weapons. All he had was a wallet which transformed into the shape of a gun in the presence of police officers. But I'm not calling about Polynices. Children are being murdered everywhere by fictitious weapons of mass destruction and economic sanctions and post-war deprivations and words like "axis of evil." Please help. I'm calling on August 5th, 8:15am. The mushroom cloud from Hiroshima is choking Manhattan. It's April 22 and the mustard gas released at the eastern front of France is choking Manhattan. It's September 11th, 8:46am. I'm reporting a broken city.

Miyagawa's sweep, as the above excerpt illustrates, is devastating and breathtaking: she turns a story about one thing into a story about everything. Red Again is also filled, perhaps surprisingly, with warmth and good humor. It's directed splendidly by Barbara Rubin, and played to perfection by Angel Desai (Antigone), Joey Collins (Harold), and Tracie Thomas (Irene). It's an extraordinary piece, especially given its brevity (20 minutes, perhaps); no one but Chiori Miyagawa could have written it.

Red Again is, smartly, the last of the five plays on the bill; the other four, all of which are of interest, are nevertheless prelude to its immensity. My favorite among these others is Karen Hartman's Hang Ten, in which Antigone and Ismene are, incongruously, relaxing on a beach watching some passing surfers. This play takes place between the time that their brother has died and Antigone goes off to bury him; during this interlude of decision, Hartman hypothesizes a visit from a particular surfer that will change both women's lives and, one imagines, the course of legend/history. Hang Ten is clever and funny, and it's sharply staged by Anne Kauffman and performed by Angel Desai (again, as Antigone), Jeanine Serrales (Ismene), and DeSean Terry (Surfer).

Lynn Nottage's A Stone's Throw, directed by Liesl Tommy, places Antigone in a contemporary African setting, where the forbidden crime is not burying a brother but bearing a child out of wedlock; this Antigone faces stoning for an act of romantic, not filial, love. I found this piece compelling but also confusing: is Nottage referring to a specific current event, such as the recent threatened stoning of a Muslim woman in Nigeria? In any event, the parallels between her story and the original feel strained at best.

An African American woman is at the center of Tanya Barfield's Medallion, which is directed by Dana Iris Harrel. Set during World War I, this play revolves around a sister's attempt to obtain something—anything—from the U.S. Army that belonged to her brother, who was killed in Europe serving his country, so that she can provide him with a proper burial. The General to whom she makes her plea makes it clear that there is one standard for whites and another for blacks; she will not get his medals or anything else. Medallion is brief enough not to outstay its welcome, but its points about racism are fairly obvious; again, the link to the original Antigone story seems somewhat tenuous.

Antigone Arkhe, written by Caridad Svich and directed by Annie Dorsen, is the one avant-garde entry on the bill. In it, an archivist narrates a kind of tour of a museum's holdings—related to Antigone—while a living statue and film footage recreate moments from the Greek tragedy. Resolutely arty and portentous, this piece didn't finally make a great deal of sense to me; but the visuals (projections are by Nick Schwartz-Hall) are very cool.

The whole evening lasts less than 90 minutes, which is just the right length for a program of one-acts; it's extremely well-produced, with a very capable ensemble (which includes, in addition to those named above, April Yvette Thompson), and with a sleek, mod design (sets by Rachel Hauck, costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy) that facilitates quick transitions between the pieces.

All of the works give us new twists on an ancient theme; Miyagawa's powerhouse conclusion reiterates the theme with palpable forcefulness. It's important to note that her play ends with enormous hope, as Antigone and Harold prepare to try again, in new lives. Theatre like this is similarly renewing, reminding us that in our capacities to think, question, ponder, and protest lie our greatest strengths against oppression.

Think about a high-profile sex scandal, like the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair. There's a political component, right?; though it didn't finally bring down the administration or anything. There's definitely a prurient aspect: he did WHAT with the cigar? she did WHAT under his desk? There's a celebrity/star thing: Bill, now perhaps untouchable; Monica, forever a Scarlet Woman or a zaftig joke, or perhaps both.

The power of Rob Handel's intriguing, inquisitive new play Aphrodisiac is that it offers a perspective on matters such as these that we just don't ordinarily encounter. Monica's a human being, after all; maybe she really was in love with the President (Handel speculates as much in the excellent penultimate scene of this piece). Maybe Monica has a family who, no matter how they feel about her or Mr. Clinton, are genuinely touched by all the negative attention that's been showered on their daughter/sister/whatever. Maybe all the stuff that we're sure doesn't matter—such as, a person's feelings—is in fact the only stuff that does matter.

Handel manages to turn everything we think we know about this corner of political/social discourse inside out in this provoking and provocative little play of his. Aphrodisiac is only peripherally about Monica and Bill, though they get a fair amount of stage time; the main plot concerns a California congressman named Dan Ferris whose apparently clandestine relationship with a Washington, D.C. intern has come to light now that the intern has disappeared. Ferris has two children, a 33-year-old son named Avery who works for the Mayor's Office in D.C. and consequently believes, rightly or wrongly, that he's a political insider; and a 24-year-old daughter, Alma, who has escaped the family for a life of her own in New York. Alma and Avery, if not exactly estranged from their parents, are at least out of touch with them—and out of the loop as the publicity about their father and the intern, Ilona Waxman, escalates. They want answers, support, and comfort. Avery says:

Do you find that you hate to give your name? When I check in at a hotel or whatever the girl sees the name Ferris and there's this tiny reaction. Then I have to wonder if she's going to ask me "Any relation?" and I'm going to have to decide whether to lie. Or be, what, sort of defiant. "He's my father."

In the play, we never see Alma and Avery get information about what happened from any source besides the radio. Solace and understanding they find in each other, in a drawn-out "game" in which they take turns role-playing themselves asking their parents questions or re-enacting made-up "scenes" between their father and Ilona. They're after, and perhaps find, emotional rather than factual truth; Handel's great gift to his audience is providing this singular point of view as a way in to considering the private meaning and consequences of public events.

I love, for example, the way that Alma bristles when a newscaster refers to their father as an "undistinguished" congressman. It's so easy to forget that everybody we write or speak publicly about has a reality we don't know anything about: Handel himself does—how does what I'm writing right now feel to him and those close to him? That, at least in part, is what Aphrodisiac is about.

It trades, too, in more particular political issues. What did Clinton's easy way with vows and language and women do to his office and to our country? There's a terrific scene in the play's second act in which Avery imagines a late-night bull session involving his father, the President, Willie Nelson, and Keith Richard, all considering the question of whether Clinton should make some kind of public acknowledgement about the death of Kurt Cobain. It feels eerily more real than reporting that must, conceptually, be more factual and accurate; it also feels like it matters more.

The play reaches a kind of resolution with the arrival of Monica Lewinsky. The press release (quoted in the material above this review) suggests that Monica's appearance is part of the kids' game, but it felt real to me; in any event, what she tells the younger Ferrises is riveting and important. Handel, playing fast and loose with journalistic truth in ways that would normally scare me, manages to stay honest and on point throughout Aphrodisiac. I will be watching for whatever he comes up with next.

The production, the third from 13P, solidifies their reputation for fine work. It's directed tautly and compellingly by Ken Rus Schmoll and features a simple, spare, and very appropriate design (sets, Sue Rees; lighting, Garin Marschall; costumes, Michelle R. Phillips; sound, Bray Poor). Jennifer Dundas (Alma), Thomas Jay Ryan (Avery), and Alison Weller (Monica) turn in superb performances.

Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Septimus: No.
Thomasina: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

Hannah: It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion.... The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.

Ah,. entropy. Central to our world and, for the last century or so, to our understanding of it. But hardly a likely subject for a play; but then Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is hardly a likely play. Written just eleven years ago, it feels somehow pertinent—downright timely, in fact—as our world seems to move further from thinking with each passing day. I saw Arcadia in its American debut at Lincoln Center and didn't expect that I would ever see it again—it's a hard play, on the audience and on the company seeking to produce it. But it's so challenging, so full; so ecstatically awe-inspiring as it tries to embrace and encompass, well, everything. It would seem to defy doing on the off-off-Broadway scale, which is why it's so exciting and impressive that Invisible City Theatre Company has not only attempted Arcadia but really done it. Their revival, now showing on the tiny Manhattan Theatre Source stage, is spectacularly good—an extraordinary account of an extraordinary play.

Alright, I will slow down a bit; try to arrange this enthusiastic prattle into something coherent. Arcadia takes place in Sidley Park, an English country house, in 1809 and the present. The historical story is about a 13-year-old genius named Thomasina Coverly and her adventures learning about mathematics, carnal embrace, and a host of other seemingly unrelated subjects from her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Septimus is no match for his brilliant young pupil, whose ideas about the natural order contradict Newton's; they will ultimately literally devastate him. But he's plenty clever enough to evade the more trivial challenges issued by Ezra Chater, a would-be poet who is visiting the Coverly estate and whose wife is carrying on not only with Hodge but also with Hodge's school chum Lord Byron (also visiting at the moment) and Thomasina's uncle, Captain Brice. The tutor is also dallying with Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom; she, meanwhile, is in a bit of an uproar not only because of the shenanigans of "the Chater" but because her husband has hired a landscape architect called Richard Noakes to refashion the estate's gardens from their current Arcadian ideal state ("nature as God intended") to a wilder, untamed Gothic style ("a garden for The Castle of Otranto").

The contemporary plot, spinning out in the same room in front of the morphing garden, revolves around two of Lady Croom's descendents, Valentine Coverly and his younger sister Chloe. Valentine, shy and brilliant, is a perpetual student; he's using his family's meticulous game records to try to prove an esoteric theory about the patterns of behavior of populations over time. He's being visited at the moment—and is quite enamored of—Hannah Jarvis, an academic who has been hired by Val and Chloe's mother to research the history of the estate's gardens. Hannah's professional interest is the "Hermit of Sidley Park," a mysterious figure who she believes symbolizes the metaphorical entropy of the early 19th century. Also on hand is Bernard Nightingale, a rival academic who has concocted a theory that Lord Byron killed the obscure poet Ezra Chater in a duel; he's convinced that this discovery will make him famous.

In scenes that alternate between the two periods, the 19th century Coverlys and their visitors and their modern-day counterparts pursue one another's hearts, minds, bodies, and souls; and those so inclined also look for patterns in the maze of trivia, noise, nature, emotion, ego, and passion that constitutes our existence. Stoppard dazzles us with conundrums here; he arranges and rearranges to show us how foolishly essential are our pastimes and pursuits. The ideas and the language astonish.

It is, admittedly, dense and often difficult—few things really worth their salt are otherwise. Arcadia is rigorous theatre; but it's also thrillingly passionate, vital, visceral theatre. As we piece together the mysteries confronting and eluding Thomasina and Hannah, in particular, there's a kind of catharsis to be experienced here.

Director David Epstein, against all manner of odds, has placed it all clearly and comfortably before us, in a staging that's loving, thoughtful, and wise. His company of twelve actors do remarkable work here, especially Christine Albright, who as Thomasina accomplishes the very difficult task of convincing us that she is (a) only thirteen and (b) an authentic genius. Also noteworthy: Maggie Bell, charming and funny as smart but flighty Chloe; Avery Clark, fine as the pensive Valentine; Zac Springer, endearing as their silent younger brother Gus; and Adam Devine, devilishly appealing as the tutor Septimus. Elizabeth Horn gives another of her trademark excellent performances as Lady Croom, showing us the formidable, fashionable, and eminently practical soul of this stunningly superficial personage.

The easy thing to say is that Arcadia is not for everyone, but that feels like a cop-out to me. Epstein gets this play, and he's making it accessible to audiences by virtue of the clarity and sharpness of his vision, not to mention the economical $15 tariff that he's charging for tickets. So go: I don't know of a more engrossing or engaging evening of theatre in town, certainly not at this price.

Call me a slob, but 3 hours and 12 minutes of As You Like It is more As You Like It than I actually like.

I'm not saying that Shakespeare demands cuts (though they're generally quite useful). I'm not saying that there weren't people in the room who were clearly enchanted by and involved with what was going on on stage. But, for me, Sir Peter Hall's slow and heavy-handed production of this play sapped the joy and spirit right out of it, making it what we were always afraid it was when we were forced to read it in high school or college—i.e., long and boring.

Doesn't the title cue us that the play is about giving the audience what it craves? As You Like It is an amalgam of many of Shakespeare's most tried-and-true ingredients: A boy and girl who thrust and parry a bit before they're ready to admit to each other/themselves that they're head-over-heels in love; a stolen kingdom and a little bit of intrigue before things are inevitably restored to just and righteous order; and comic relief, in the form of a clown in love with an earthy country girl and a self-important windbag in love with the sound of his own voice. Throw in some singing, some dancing, and a few other random plot points, and you've got a crowd-pleaser, told in the Bard's timeless poetry, to be sure, but not exactly brimming with profundity or eternal life lessons. It's a romantic comedy, for gosh sakes! But Hall has decked it out as if it were Hamlet, underlining practically everything in it with a seriousness of purpose that, whether or not the play actually supports it, makes for heavy and unpleasant going from the bleachers.

In the play's main storyline, Rosalind, disguised as the boy Ganymede, gives her boyfriend Orlando "lessons" in how to woo his sweetheart (herself). Hall, with his daughter Rebecca as Rosalind/Ganymede, turns this game into an agonizing test; my companion (only slightly exaggerating) compared it to William Mastrosimone's Extremities, where an abused heroine tortures and torments a rapist.

One of the subplots concerns the simple shepherd Silvius and the woman he loves, a shepherdess named Phoebe. Phoebe doesn't like Silvius, especially after she lays eyes on Ganymede and decides to fall in love with him instantly. Ganymede, who is of course actually Rosalind, can't let this happen, and contrives to bring Silvius and Phoebe together. But her action, which in other As You Like Its has felt loving and inevitable, here seems brutal and random: Phoebe screams inconsolably when she discovers that she's been tricked into marrying this fellow she, apparently, genuinely detests.

I guess Hall is saying something about what life is really like here. The question is: should he be? I'm just not sure that the mostly two-dimensional characters in As You Like It can support all the weighty baggage that Hall's interpretation is handing them. And even if you think they can, I still have to ask, why must these delightful creations be made to do so? Why can't we just enjoy Rosalind-as-Ganymede teasing Orlando, and look happily forward to her unmasking and an unambiguously happy ending?

Some things I did enjoy about the production: Dan Stevens's exuberantly boyish Orlando, Michael Siberry's golden-throated Touchstone (the clown), James Laurenson's swell turns as the very evil usurper Duke Frederick and the very gentle banished Duke, and Philip Voss's comically pompous Jaques (except during his famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech, which he declaimed in a manner so well-rehearsed that it took me away from the play and into an oratory contest).

Some things I did not enjoy: the blackshirt/fascist uniforms worn by Duke Frederick's men (unnecessary overkill, don't you think; plus almost trite in the context of modern productions of Shakespeare); John Gunter's dour set, which includes a weird trough of dirt in the first scene that confused me and an unappetizingly barren forest for most of the rest of the play; and the decision to include verse after verse of all those woodsy nature songs.

Rosalind's epilogue felt pretty beside the point, too; after more than three hours, all I really wanted to do was go home. I want to be so wrapped up in what's happening on stage that I don't even know what time it is, but Hall's work here, by trying to impose serious purpose and ideas on a sweetly gossamer romance, prevented me from becoming either engaged in said ideas or enchanted by said sweetness. Not theatre as I like it; not really As You Like It either, I fear.