Babies, bombs & love is a program of six short plays by members of the Waverly Writers Collective, one of numerous entities scattered all around New York City providing development support for new and emerging playwrights. The title is not so fortuitous and neither, for the most part, are the scripts nor the productions seen here. But there are glimmers of talent evident, and these should be nurtured.

The evening begins with Below 14th, which is written and directed by the group's co-founder (and one of its most prolific members), Laura Rohrman. It's a 9/11 play, set in a restaurant in the months following a much more cataclysmic event even than the World Trade Center attacks: Manhattan below 14th Street has apparently been turned into a permanent frozen zone, because its residents are presumed to be both contaminated and contagious. One of these residents is a haughty actress named Babe, who journeys out of quarantine for a clandestine meeting with her ex-boyfriend Chris, who is a scientist. Rohrman attempts, in too brief a time, satirical comment on our celebrity-obsessed culture and a conspiracy thriller with political overtones; there's a good idea for a longer play here, but the execution of this 10-minute piece is quite muddled. Vanessa Zamora makes a good impression as the actress.

Love in the Time of Atkins, a monologue written by Jason Nunes and performed by Meghan Scibona, is about a woman with unhealthy eating habits whose fit boyfriend put her on a diet, literally locking the refrigerator door on her. Today, sans boyfriend, she's trim and happy, the Atkins way. The punchline of this not-very-funny and quite distasteful piece comes right out of the musical Chicago; after that's revealed, Nunes adds another twist that's either sick or dark depending on your point of view. Either way, this play is unsuccessful. I was never clear who it was that Scibona's character was talking to, or why she was prancing around the stage as if, well, she knew she was on a stage. Nunes, who directed his own script here, should work on providing a clearer and better-reasoned-out context for a one-person play the next time around.

The third item on the program, David Caudle's Feet of Clay, recently won the Samuel French Short Play Festival. This does not, in my opinion, speak well for that institution. It's a one-joke comedy whose joke is in extremely bad taste: two men, on vacation with their wives, are left alone for an afternoon; one of them asks the other if he can take photographs of the other's feet. It amounts to 15 minutes of making fun of foot fetishists, which strikes me as neither respectful nor entertaining. Steven McElroy (as the fetishist) and John G. Preston (as the festishee) deliver the most professional performances of the evening, nonetheless.

Loving Gene Hackman, by Jennie Eng, feels like the most promising entry of the six on view here. Set in a bar, it depicts the (probably) final meeting between two lifelong friends. He's about to be married and is going to move to Texas; she has just found out and is trying to understand why he has been avoiding her lately. Eng navigates the revelations about their relationship with real sensitivity; I wish she had resisted the urge to throw in as much coarse dialogue as she did, however. Her characters, developed with economy and skill, are genuinely human; I would have liked to like them.

Uri/Nara and a Baby by Kyoung Park attempts to use two Korean roommates to symbolize the conflict between North and South Korea. It fails; this is one of the most negligible scripts I have come across in a very long time. Park resorts to a gross-out ending—that the roommates will kill and eat the baby that one of them adopted—in order to try to make some kind of point.

The final piece, and the longest, is Aurin Squire's Baby Talk. It tells the story of a young African American woman who, lacking other job prospects after college, agrees to work as a nanny for one of her professors. The play starts out as a lesson in tolerance, as this young woman, Jasmine, reluctantly finds herself bonding with a bossy Jamaican nanny named Mary. Later it becomes a plea against classism and racism, as Jasmine stands up to her selfish employer after Mary (more or less innocently) tries to give her baby a little taste of rum. An unnecessary epilogue adds a third theme, about the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial success. As you can probably tell, there's too much going on here for a successful twenty-minute play. But Squire's black female characters are interesting and well-rounded (the white professor is a cipher and a stereotype); there's an enlightening and amusing play to be created from the relationship between Mary and Jasmine.

There are some stories that must be told, must he heard. Riverbend's is one: she's a blogger, an Iraqi woman who has been communicating her thoughts about what's been going on around her since August 2003, five months after the United States invaded her country. She's achieved a degree of celebrity, this anonymous woman who was 24 when she began sharing her world on the Internet. Her entries are being collected and published in a book in May, and they are now condensed and dramatized as Baghdad Burning, an uncompromisingly earnest play by Kim Kefgen and Loren Ingrid Noveck, on stage now at the West End Theatre.

The play, like the blog, demands everyone's attention. It recounts 18 months of events, trivial and momentous; traces the destruction of a nation and portends countless human traumas. It's the nakedest kind of mirror for Americans, who can certainly remember the day, only two years ago, when this war began but who, mostly so insulated from it now, have packed away the strong feelings we once had about it and now take it for granted. Baghdad Burning reminds us that war can never be taken for granted. With Glyn O'Malley's Paradise, coincidentally also running in New York this month, it shows us war's human face—the countless awful ways that rampant, ceaseless, careless violence uproot and upend ordinary people. No electricity. No water. Terrible noise of airplanes overhead. Craters where streets and buildings used to be. No security. As time passes, less and less hope.

    I could see the tip of Abu Maan’s cigarette glowing in the yard next door.
    Abu Maan can’t sleep either…
    It’s probably Maan.
    Maan is only 13… How can he be smoking? He’s only 13.
    Is anyone only 13 anymore?
    We’re living, this moment, the future we were afraid to contemplate six months ago...

This play poses many useful questions—about the new leadership of Iraq, about the seeming callous indifference of the American military toward Iraqi people and Iraqi culture, about what may happen to females as the country moves, perhaps, toward fundamentalist Islam rule. The most important ones are the most essential: how did this happen? How did we let this happen? How do make sure this never happens again? Baghdad Burning is about the ruination of a country; the 75 minutes we spend looking at it through a first-hand observer's eyes are absolutely invaluable.

Kefgen and Noveck have done a remarkable job creating this script. I looked through Riverbend's blog—my interest greatly piqued from having seen the play—and I am enormously impressed at the playwrights' skill in culling, from hundreds of pages of entries, such powerful and compelling material and stitching it together so effectively. Riverbend is articulate and often eloquent, but her medium—i.e., the Web—is colloquial and informal and repetitive; making her work stageworthy is no small feat. They've arranged the passages as dialogue for four voices, and Kefgen has provided staging that adds variety and even occasionally imposes a bit of narrative structure to the piece. Some of her ideas work better than others—a segment where the speakers interact as Riverbend's family would is very effective, for example, while another sequence in which the actors march in circles felt like abstraction for its own sake. In a few places, she manages some arresting visual imagery, notably when the company re-enacts the burial of a murdered Iraqi man whose body was discovered by his family months after his disappearance.

The four actors—Becca Blackwell, Deepti Gupta, Cassandra Vincent, and Andrew Zimmerman—demonstrate great commitment and teamwork.

Baghdad Burning is not a great play—certainly no more so than Riverbend's blog is great literature. That does not detract, however, from its significance—particularly at this particular historical moment—as valuable, worthy theatre. Humanism feels endangered these days; the messages about authentic civilization and freedom embedded in Baghdad Burning feel very necessary right now. Six Figures Theatre Company is to be commended for giving this voice a new platform from which to be heard. Audiences owe it to them to listen.

At the start of Barbara Bush Never Slept Here, a two-act play by David DeWitt, it is mid-December 2000. Steven Mark Friedman, as State Representative Homer Patrick Kenilworth, faces the audience and addresses what is supposed to be the Texas Legislature in Austin. In his speech, he announces his resignation from politics. Not because of scandal. Not because he has had enough. No. The reason is because George W. Bush whopped the entire Democratic party—and not for the first time—in his bid for office. Kenilworth, who rails against the results, expects more from his democracy and has no stomach for a political process that produces this kind of leader. Instead, he dons his jeans and rides back to his home in Wrightsville, a small town between Houston and San Antonio, where he is intent on changing his life. Here, he tends to his ailing mother, perfects his peach cobbler, and finds comfort in the friendship of a tenacious Councilwoman while he seeks out the first of his two ex-wives.

It is here that Barbara Bush Never Slept Here, directed by Jim Bracchitta, becomes an homage to small-town Texas living. The next scene opens in the local bar, with Sandra, the owner and Kenilworth's ex-wife, bantering with her young employee Missy. The scene establishes an intimacy endemic to small towns and, perhaps, specifically of the South. Missy, played with spunk by Rochelle Mendez, plies Sandra with nosy remarks about a telephone call from Kenilworth. Anywhere else her prying might earn her a pink slip. But this is small-town Texas, and everyone knows everyone else real well and that’s the way they like it. In fact, Alice King’s Sandra loves her routine at the bar, enjoys Missy’s company, and wouldn’t have it any other way. The only bump Sandra has encountered was when the love of her life chose to spend more time in Austin than in Wrightsville. But that was a long time ago. She’s not much interested in seeing him again. Although, of course, this is impossible, being Wrightsville and all.

Missy, too, is happy, very much in love, and wants nothing more than to share a garage apartment with the object of her affection. She pleads with Robbie, an "aw shucks" kind of youth played by David Mason, who is convincingly unsure of himself. Clearly, he is not ready and this becomes their dramatic conflict.

Pamela Dunlap gives a crisp, fast-talking performance as the passionate Councilwoman, Pansy. She loves politics, just loves it, and devotes nearly 100% of her single life promoting issues important to her, thinking about them, talking about them, and trying her hardest to convince Kenilworth—over one more piece of pie—that the town needs his political largesse and he needs politics.

When some political improprieties are uncovered, Pansy faces momentary disaster. How much more effective this could have been had it been introduced at the outset, especially since it involves Kenilworth. It is an example of how conflict is introduced and quickly resolved, allowing the audience to reach the conclusion far in advance of the characters. As predicted, Robbie finds direction in his father’s landscaping business and is more mature at the end of the play than when he first stepped on stage. Kenilworth faces decision-making time when his mother dies. He receives condolence flowers from Barbara Bush. Kenilworth believes the Bush family has taken this occasion to throw the 2000 election in his face and becomes outraged, deep-sixing the flowers along with the vase. It is unclear to me how this incident relates to the title of the play, but it is the sole reference to Barbara Bush so the interpretation is anyone’s guess.

It is interesting to watch Kenilworth’s angst about the 2000 Presidential election while we are in the midst of the current Presidential debates and with the 2004 election only weeks away. Perhaps Kenilworth has learned something from the previous election or from watching Pansy dedicate herself to the political process. And, maybe, playwright DeWitt feels this too as he gives Kenilworth some spine—sending him to Washington, D.C., to work with the Democratic Party at the strategic level. His hero is hopeful that this time his efforts will be rewarded with a President more to his liking.

This quasi-drama plays out in the clever setting by Mikiko Suzuki, moving smoothly between a bar and a modest kitchen, with the adept help of Brian Aldous’s effective lighting. DeWitt captures the homey flavor of a small town without zeroing in on its faults. He interlaces the lives of the townsfolk, throws in some twists and turns, and resolves the story by evening’s end. Yet, the conflicts encountered by the characters appear small, without import. To really capture small-town life, the disappointments and yearnings of each character must be magnified, embellished, gossiped about until they are bigger than life. Anyone who has lived on Main Street knows that.

There are city mice and suburban mice. So says a character towards the end of Barton’s Crossing, a play in which three "city mice" drive up to the wealthy Miller’s Crossing to visit their old friends, Peter and Deborah Barton, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Peter’s hit play, "Prince Gregory."

The play is a sort of living room dramedy about how people change when they leave the city and how friendships are strained by distance. Predictably, Deborah has become a stereotypical, cold-hearted control freak and Peter has lost his soul and quit writing to make money selling insurance. The city friends, Melinda, George, and Lionel (two of whose characters are not developed enough for audience members to know what they’re up to), have remained, as Deborah says, forever young. There are also two other characters: Garrison Spencer, the alcoholic neighbor who wears a suit to come over to their house, and his 17 year-old daughter, Alexis.

During the course of the play, the characters get progressively drunker and less polite and begin to push each other’s buttons. An infidelity is uncovered and friends question whether they ever want to speak to one another again. Peter is called a hypocrite and wonders whether he has made the right choices. Apparently, before he moved to Miller’s Crossing, he used to work at a drug rehab clinic in the Bronx, like the lead character in his play. Now, one of his friends says, he has “Burb-itis.”

One of the problems I had with D. Clifford Hart's script, actually, is that Peter and Deborah’s home is repeatedly referred to as being in the suburbs. Maybe the playwright is commenting on the characters’ unawareness of their wealth, but if not, he is missing something big. Deborah and Peter have not moved to a typical, middle class suburb, but to an area more like where Martha Stewart or the Clintons would live. This is obvious from the décor of their living room, which is all polished wood and nice furniture, their costumes, and how they seem to occupy themselves. Apparently, Deborah spends a great amount of time planning social events and Peter has never missed a round robin at the golf course. The Bartons are rich suburban mice, separated from city life by more than just location.

The actors do their best with the script. Johnnie Moore stands out as Garrison Spencer (love the name!) and has a perfect Westchester accent. Anna Soloway is also perfect as his daughter, seeming precocious yet naïve. David Fuhrer, as Lionel Stringer, the city mouse who smokes pot and even does cocaine, has some of the funnier lines in the play, and he tries to have fun with his character’s immaturity. Christopher Cartmill and Alexandra D. Levinsohn are likable as Peter and Melinda, respectively, and, Peter McCabe has some nice moments as George Garber. Zandy Hartig, as Deborah Barton, seems appropriately uptight and out of place and manages to show a looser side of her character when necessary.

Hitler said, just before he invaded Poland, "Who today, after all, still speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

The atrocities he perpetrated against Jews, against homosexuals, against Gypsies, have been abundantly documented in art and culture; his enemies have waged a determined battle to ensure that what the Nazis did will never be forgotten, even as their enemies attempt to minimize or even deny that the Holocaust ever happened. This isn't just important work, it's essential.

The Armenian genocide, which predated the Holocaust by two decades, is less well-known in America and elsewhere, and that needs to be remedied, particularly because the Turkish government continues to refute it. The press materials accompanying Richard Kalinoski's play Beast on the Moon recount instances where past productions of this work have been shut down by Turkish protesters (in California and Germany). Such censorship is appalling, and has made this play, which tells the story of two Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide who journey to America, something of a cause celèbre, wearing its shut-down productions like badges of honor.

But notoriety and noble intentions do not, by themselves, make a play important or good. If Beast on the Moon were the latter, then its author would have found a way to put the exposition inside the play rather than (oh so clumsily!) in the hands of a narrator whose presence makes no sense. And if it were the former, it would seriously and compassionately plumb the authentic suffering of its characters and recognize that the most it can offer is a platform for its articulation, rather than pushing toward pat, cozy, pop-psychology resolutions to problems that can almost certainly never be resolved.

Beast on the Moon begins in 1921, six years after the Turkish government systematically annihilated one million of its citizens, "an unarmed Christian minority population" of Armenians (I'm quoting a program note). Aram (the excellent Omar Metwally), a photographer who emigrated to Milwaukee after his family was beheaded by the Turks, has just picked up his "picture bride," a 15-year-old girl named Seta (Lena Georgas) who has been living in an orphanage in Istanbul since the killing of her parents. The play charts the first dozen years of their marriage, the central conflicts of which are (a) their inability to conceive a child, which the traditionalist Aram views as incontestably Seta's fault; and (b) their inability to communicate effectively with one another, which is apparently caused by Aram's unwillingness to open up and share the family tragedy that he witnessed in 1915 with his wife.

Kalinoski stacks his deck so that it seems that all the mistakes in this marriage are Aram's. The playwright wants us to see Aram as a bullheaded fundamentalist who treats his wife like chattel (he gives her an iron as present—how insensitive!) and whose chosen method of coping with cataclysmic tragedy is primitive and cold-hearted. We are somehow supposed to side with Seta when she unfeelingly gives away Aram's father's coat to Vincent, the street kid that she inexplicably takes in one day and feeds and bathes; we're not supposed to be astonished that after twelve years of marriage, Seta doesn't understand how important that coat is to her husband.

When Aram finally breaks down and relates to Seta the circumstances of his family's murder, we're supposed to believe that he is immediately thereafter healed. If only life were really that simple.

So the love story at the heart of Beast on the Moon is too superficial to be engaging; unfortunately, there's really not much else to the play. The fine actor Louis Zorich is on hand as an 80-year-old version of Vincent, serving as our narrator and providing us with snippets of information about the Armenian genocide that, while informative, always feel inserted rather than organic (they could have been inserted in the program as notes, along with the Hitler quote). What's more, we have no clear idea why Vincent is here now telling us this story. (Zorich is a pleasure to watch, as usual; Matthew Borish, the badly miscast young actor who plays 12-year-old Vincent in Act Two, is not.)

In the end, though it's commendable in calling attention to a vast human catastrophe, Beast on the Moon fails to actually dramatize the catastrophe in any coherent way. I don't mean to trivialize their histories, but it felt as though Aram and Seta could have been victims of any of the (far too many!) systematic destructions of populations that have occurred during the past 100 years. Why did the Turks kill the Armenians? How did Aram get to Milwaukee? Why Milwaukee? Where did the other survivors go? How did the survivors survive? Who kept the flame of Armenian nationhood alive? How do Aram and Seta feel about that? None of this is in Beast on the Moon. But I think we need some of it in order to start to understand the scope of this particular tragedy. Otherwise, it's an abstraction, and worse, a banal one: the kind of generality that leads a Hitler to dismiss a million deaths in eleven words. We need plays—and films and TV shows and books and paintings—to bring this terrible piece of history into sharp focus and help all humankind remember its devastation so we don't let it happen again. But we need a better play than Beast on the Moon to do it right.

In Belfast Blues, Geraldine Hughes tells the story of growing up as part of the Catholic minority in war-torn Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, a place where there were British soldiers occupying the city, children throwing rocks and bricks at them, riots breaking out, tanks on the streets, and terrorists setting off bombs. In this moving and powerful one-woman play, Hughes brings the consequences of violent conflict over religion, national identity, land, and power out of the abstract. She invites the audience to understand the personal, very human consequences of this type of violence, which, unfortunately, we currently hear about on the news from other parts of the world almost daily.

Hughes’s show begins with a short description of her parents before she was born. They were poor, she says, but so was everyone. They had four children, lived a happy life in Northern Ireland, and then the “Troubles” began.

During the play, loud sounds of bombs and gunfire interrupt scenes of everyday life. The first time Geraldine’s mother hears the gunfire, she is shocked. She’s never heard it before. By the end, several years later, she yells at the rioters to just shut up so she can finish her stew.

Throughout the play, Hughes portrays her family’s and her own terror, and also captures the liveliness and love that surrounded her when she was a child. In one funny bit, she takes her first Holy Communion and struggles not to chew the body of Christ, even though she has been warned not to. She also dances around and plays and enjoys ice cream and fish & chips. With her big, wide eyes, she is charming and likable.

In one poignant scene, she runs a small shop out of her family’s living room, selling candy bars and cigarettes to people who come to her window while her mother holds off an inspector. Right after this, a bomb goes off nearby.

It seems Hughes was able to escape Northern Ireland for America only because of luck and charm. When she was a child, she was chosen out of thousands of other girls to appear in an American television film. This experience gave her connections that later helped her go to college in California.

Hughes portrays family members and neighbors as characters in her play, and she does so with a lot of love and fondness. This tells the audience how the people in Belfast tried to live “normal” or at least livable lives. Some of the most vivid of there are: Eddie, who blinks a lot and who assures Geraldine’s mother, when she is pregnant and wonders whether she should bring a child into this violent world, that the child will be loved; Margaret, who always has a cigarette in her hand and an honest word; and Sheila, Geraldine’s mother, who always sings and who wanted to name Geraldine Debbie after Debbie Reynolds. Hughes plays her father Eamon with great specificity as well; I really felt I could see an older Irishman’s face in her own. Here was a man who always bet on horses that came in second and liked to go to the pub.

The set, designed by Jonathan Christman, consists of a brick wall with barbed wire on top, a small brick bench, steps, and some rubbish in the corners. It looks like it could be a bombed urban dwelling with lots of concrete. The brick wall is used as a screen, where images from Hughes’s childhood are projected—tanks, a hospital, a cathedral, a girl in a Communion dress, clips from the movie she appeared in.

The music and sound, designed by Jonathan Snipes, are used well. At the top of the play, we hear children singing and then the sound of bombs. Music punctuates and comments on the scenes.

It seems that the contrast between the children’s singing and the bombs signifies what Geraldine Hughes is saying about the innocence of her childhood and the terrible violence that surrounded her. It is a credit to Hughes that she portrays both the joy and the terror, really putting a human face on the consequences of war.

In her show Phenomena: False Evidence Appearing Real, Belinda Sinclair does not dispel the notion of magic as a reality—ours is a world of infinite realities. She does not specifically define her own parameters of magic but states bluntly: “If I can’t explain something, I have no right to not believe it.”

Those attending Phenomena and expecting spectacle à la David Copperfield or Doug Henning will be greatly disappointed. Phenomena, as conceived, written, directed, and entirely performed by Sinclair, is a modest, no-nonsense show that is part demonstration, part esoteric feminist history (fortunately restrained), part group encounter. And Sinclair can’t be bothered with the glamour of tight-fitting satin and sequins. Does this mean that wonder and amazement are forfeited for the sake of a pragmatic approach? Far, far from it. Sinclair simply treats her intelligent adult audience like an intelligent adult audience, and lets the wonder be in the heart of the beholder.

The set consists of a series of angled layers of deep red velvet curtains, left and right, with a large video screen in the center. The show opens with a short silent film montage of Sinclair performing some of her feats in the light of day out on the sidewalk, in parks, etc., against a background of obligatory, but nonetheless haunting Middle Eastern/New Age music.

When Sinclair herself appears on stage, she is dressed simply in jeans, a form-fitting white shirt that could tell no lies, and a black leather jacket. From what I could see, sitting third row front and from shaking hands with her later, she wears little or no makeup. She is possessed of an ageless, quietly exotic beauty juxtaposed with a down-to-earth, but twinkle-eyed, slightly impudent demeanor that is very disarming. Most of all, she’s a pro who knows how to work a room and make everyone in the audience an active participant in her show, whether they intend to or not. But, if you’re shy or self-conscious, don’t let this scare you off. She is also respectful of those who do not wish to participate on stage, as did one audience member who, by the way, also claimed to be a magician.

The evening is fairly divided between belly laughs and contemplation as Sinclair efficiently proves her dictum that “the closer you are, the less you see.” Case in point, the gentleman, whose duty it was to hold on to a full roll of toilet tissue between his index fingers, who couldn’t figure out why or how it was quickly disappearing right in front of him. But to the audience only a few feet away it was hilariously obvious. In a mass audience participation exercise, we all managed to come up with the exact same number despite anyone’s best efforts to depart from the formula.

There are sleight-of-hand card tricks that defy description, even with a video camera capturing Sinclair’s every move. She doesn’t pull any rabbits out of hats, but some doves with serious attitude come out of a silk handkerchief from time to time. No one gets sawed in half, although a couple of people get verbally skewered.

It must be noted that when a fellow named Jason was noodged into “volunteering,” he nearly stole the show out from under Sinclair with his deadpan, acerbic responses while sitting with a kitschy Star Trek-esque colander-with-blinking-lights on his head and enduring a clairvoyance demonstration. Sinclair was only too delighted to share the stage with a worthy opponent but, of course, reigned supreme in the end.

And to prove she is also an actor, Sinclair herself assumes two very different historically-based roles of women from long bygone eras who had been noted magicians/illusionists. Although I think it’s a terrific realm for her to explore for future shows, these role departures did not work nearly as well for me in this production as when Sinclair was just being herself. I was always grateful to see her when she returned, and even more grateful after the intermittent cheesy black-and-white film shorts from the 1950s/60s of well-endowed, pretty women doing magic tricks in a very coy, ladylike fashion.

There is no nudity, raunch, or foul language in Phenomena, just some impromptu suggestiveness (i.e., Sinclair’s banter with Jason). I assume that the NC-15 requirement is due to that fact that, while in character, Sinclair lights up a joint. While her attention to historic detail may otherwise have been admirable, it was a moment I found overly distracting and, frankly, unnecessary, especially with the smoke permeating through the theater. The only other criticism I would add is a technical one, and it might have just been a fluke of the evening. The background music, while effective, needed to be turned down and often overpowered Sinclair’s unmiked voice. I was sitting fairly close to the stage and sometimes had to strain to hear.

That said, I walked in to the theatre tired and cranky and walked out with spirit rejuvenated. I still wonder where up her sleeve the hour-and-a-half disappeared to when Sinclair finally closed the show with one last surprise. No, I won’t give it away here. You’ll just have to go see it for yourself.

Belize, a new musical theatre work performed by the venerable off-off-Broadway company The Talking Band, is an experience that blatantly defies description. Ultimately, I came away with the impression that it is an experience more to be assimilated than understood.

From a production quality standpoint, there is much to admire about the show. The multi-tiered set is efficiently stark and minimalist. Beautiful and surreal backdrops merge collage-like in and out of focus, while hovering sinister and ever-present from the stage right uppermost tier is a gallows. The costumes are colorful and ingenious, although in one memorable scene clothing is completely non-existent for two famous historical characters who inexplicably become part of what—in Belize, at least—is the action. There's as much activity going on on the sidelines (that appeared to be part of the play) as happens on the stage .

And then, of course, there's The Talking Band's signature: sound. Voices, speech, and language are percussion instruments, Irish ballads and African tribal chants are dialogue. It's almost jarring when characters intermittently deliver lines in "normal" fashion.

Floating somewhere in this sensory, multimedia smorgasbord is a plot (and true story) set in the 18th century about Edward Despard, a loyal British army colonel, who, while in Jamaica, marries an African American woman named Catherine. With her help, Despard becomes a revolutionary and champion of the "mixed race" indigents of Belize (then known as the Bay of Honduras). Rather than protect British interests as his commission demands, he is eventually hanged as a traitor in London.

Too busy trying to digest the parade of non sequitur scenes, I was probably 85% oblivious to the historical or political ramifications until some character showed up with a big hat, big speech, or big song. Mostly what I got was: boy meets girl, boy unforgivably disrupts the status quo, girl tries in vain to save boy's butt. Historic cameos abound. Lord Horatio Nelson shows up for a scene, as does poet/artist William Blake (remember "Tyger, tyger, burning bright…"?) who, with his wife, sits sedately in the nude and serves afternoon tea to Catherine.

The performers, some of them founding members of The Talking Band, are generally faultless in technique. John Keating is appropriately intense and fiery as Edward, and Eisa Davis makes a beautiful, elegant, soft-spoken Catherine. Almost too soft-spoken, however—I sometimes had to strain to hear her. No straining necessary, though, for the choruses from Irish terrorist balladeers known as the White Boys of Coolrain and satirical Mardi Gras-style pipe-and-drum band, the Black Mummers.

Standout performances are given by Steven Ratazzi (Lord Nelson) and David Greenspan (Blake), both of whom double as White Boys and sing beautifully; as well as the very charismatic Will Badgett, who also plays a number of roles (Olaudah Equiano, Black King) and is one of the energetic Mummers. Special kudos to Tina Shepard who has the guts to play Mrs. Blake wearing nothing but a cap and an air of grace.

My admiration for the show, however, is unfortunately more detached and academic than it is passionate. Very linear thinkers and those who only relate to straight plays may not want to see Belize as so much of it is aggressively and unapologetically incomprehensible. I noticed that several people didn't return after intermission, and I even found myself almost nodding off at times. That is until the marvelously raucous Black Mummers made a welcome return to the scene and jolted us awake.

I can't attribute my losing attention to the show's being boring or of inadequate quality. Quite the reverse. But I do feel that what makes Belize so admirable in terms of total commitment to its "to hell with rules and structure" form is also its biggest drawback. With narrative substance sacrificed, the show is so diffuse that—for me, at least—the effect was of a pre-waking REM-state dream: remote, nebulous, and a memory quickly lost.

Martin Sherman is an important figure in the written documentation of our hidden gay history. His play Bent, which premiered in 1979, ensured that attention would be paid to the thousands of homosexuals who were gathered up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps.

Sherman writes about the persecution of homosexuals through the personal story of a man named Max. His play illuminates a Berlin of the 1920s and '30s that was a sort of homosexual Eden where gay men and lesbians lived relatively open lives amidst an exciting subculture of artists and intellectuals. With the coming to power of the Nazis, all this changed. Between 1933 and 1945, more than 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality under Paragraph 175, the sodomy provision of the German penal code dating back to 1871. Some were imprisoned, others were sent to concentration camps, and many were murdered in their homes, at the work place, and in the streets.

Max is a man who tries to pass as a heterosexual Jew to survive his internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The play begins in his apartment on the morning following a drunken escapade and a romp with an Aryan stud named Wolf. As Max recovers from the previous night’s indulgences, there is an unwarranted intrusion of Nazi soldiers who storm into his Berlin apartment, killing Wolf. With his roommate in tow, a male dancer named Rudy, Max escapes and refuses a ticket to safety in Holland because there isn't a second one for Rudy. Both men are captured while hiding out in the forest. Together, they are placed on a train headed to Dachau, where Max is forced to participate in a multitude of unspeakable acts, which include the beating to death of Rudy. At Dachau, Max is given the task of moving large rocks, senselessly from point A to point B and back again. There, Max falls in love with another prisoner, Horst, who is a proclaimed homosexual emblazoned with a pink triangle that mocks Max’s yellow star. What follows is a love story that reaches deeply into the heart of the human spirit. There is a coming out for Max that is ultimately tragic, yet unselfish, sacrificial, and honorable.

This production, directed by Aaron Rhyne, marks the 25th anniversary of Sherman’s play. Rhyne shapes each scene with a minimal reliance on set and costumes pieces. The emphasis here is on the characters and the story. I appreciate the ease and accuracy of his blocking, yet I question why the production lacks a true sense of conflict, danger, and profound determination. Is it lack of research (or an active connection to that research)? Or rushed performances? Or the fact that the actors seem to be playing the comedy without first acknowledging the tragedy? Maybe. But, I am respectful of the care taken by Rhyne’s guiding hands that simply need to extend their investigative hold more revealingly on this immensely important moment in history.

As Max, Tosh Marks is disappointing. He carries the production on his shoulders, but does not activate the redeemable and identifiable qualities of the character. His Max is more tiresome than vital, more cocksure than vulnerable, leading to a performance that is superficial and emotionally unavailable. The potential depth of the play hinges on Marks’ ability to access the dynamic realities of the story, a skill that is missed in this production.

As Horst, Jimmy King brings an honesty to the stage that is understated, yet layered with dimension. For me, Sherman’s play comes to life for the first time when he enters the stage, as he actively struggles through the complex realities of the story in spite of Marks’ indifference.

Peter Schmitz is wonderfully grotesque as Greta, the brutal and manipulative transvestite, who like Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in I am my own wife, survives the Nazi onslaught by becoming an informant for the German regime. Christopher Tramantana, Adam Linke, Amos Crawley, Michael Horowitz, and Jonas Gabriel complete the ensemble giving respectable performances.

Joe Galan’s set design is an ever-present (and effective) barrier of barbed wire mounted on a frame, seemingly beaten with a blunt object revealing shards, like needles, of threatening wood. (However, the hanging plants in their plastic containers seem more 2004 Fairway market than 1934 Berlin apartment.) Kristen Pecci’s lighting is most effective in the transitions between each scene, where she introduces shadows and the potential impact of darkness. The remainder of her design longs for movement, contrast, and a sensitivity to the emotional journey of visual tension. Jeff Hinchee’s costumes mostly succeed in their period accuracy with a few blaring exceptions like the brand new white boxer shorts perfectly extending out of Max’s distressed stripped pants (more Calvin Klein grunge-chic than concentration camp filth).

The production is flawed, but the story (and history) prevails. I would certainly encourage you to see this production and support the efforts of this young company.

Best of Both Worlds funks up Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. It keeps the plot, changes the names, puts it in a world of warring clubs, and sets it to R&B. Authors Randy Weiner, Diedre Murray, and Diane Paulus keep close to the original story and leave in the theatrical devices, including a scary-looking gangsta clown and soliloquies to the audience.

The plot is epic. Jealous Ezekiel, king of Funktopia, erroneously believes that his pregnant wife Serena is having an affair with Maurice, king of neighboring Groovania. When Ezekiel catches Maurice and Serena dancing together one night, he throws Serena out of the house. She swears she is innocent, but he won’t listen. Serena has the baby while in exile and her mother Violetta takes the newborn to Ezekiel, asking him to reconsider the banishment. Ezikial tells his right hand man 8-Ball to take the baby out of his sight, and Violetta prophesies that Ezekiel will not have peace or an heir until the child comes home.

Many miles and a long comic monologue later, 8-Ball puts the baby in a garbage can. Back on the home front Serena and Ezekiel’s son Mamillius dies suddenly, and Serena, overwhelmed by grief, dies shortly after. Serena’s ghost then visits her baby, leaving her a necklace and a note naming her Rain. A homeless guy named Sweet Daddy finds the baby and decides to keep her.

Many years later, or after intermission: Sweet Daddy now owns the Bunny Hutch, a club-cum-strip joint where Rain parades around in a bunny outfit. King Maurice’s son Tariq visits on the sly. Tariq falls in love with Rain and proposes to her, but Maurice doesn’t like this one bit, and calls Sweet Daddy a pimp and Rain a two-bit whore. The young lovers are taken to King Ezekiel for advice, because ever since King Ezekiel lost his entire family he’s been a champion of young love. He recognizes Rain because of the necklace she’s wearing. Violetta uncovers a “statue” of Serena that turns out to be Serena herself, alive and well, both families bless Rain and Tariq’s marriage, and everyone lives happily ever after.

The production begins as an interactive event, though the formality of the venue—a high proscenium stage with low, dark seating—hurts the casual beginning. It’s hard to tell where to look or what’s going on. Even before the action starts, the blue-purple and cold red color scheme, fancy projections of snow on the walls, and intricate chandeliers suggest a club. Music begins, and actors slowly appear, take a girl onstage, and dance with her. The two kings sing a duet. The MC croons, “We’re going to the after party.” The audience is hit with a spray of paper. It’s hard to tell if you’re supposed to sit still and pay attention or somehow participate. But a few minutes in, it settles into a groove and becomes straightforward, three-and-a-half wall Shakespearean theater.

The music is smooth R&B and the play is almost entirely sung. The ABAB rhyme scheme and many of the lyrics soon become predictable. The actors give a lot to the music, especially Jeanette Bayardelle during Serena’s song of self-defense at the beginning of the play and Kenita R. Miller and Griffin Matthews in the duet between Rain and Tariq at the top of the second half. However, the actors often weren’t present when not singing, and would stand onstage with a fixed expression even when being addressed by another character. One notable exception to this was the vibrant performance of Shaun Hoggs as King Maurice. From his initial smoothness to his damning of Sweet Daddy and Rain he is alive with animal grace.

It’s a good time, this play. But what are the creators of this piece trying to accomplish? They want to give us an interactive theater experience and put the audience on the club’s guest list. They want to stay true to Shakespeare’s text while giving it a modern, funky feel. They want to give us good R&B music. They want to tell us not to jump to conclusions, that true love conquers all and that you can’t escape what you were born to be. We don’t get everything they want to give us, but we’re still getting much of what they have.

An existentialist will tell you that many of life’s most important questions are not approachable through reason and science. The theatre, however, is an excellent medium for addressing such questions. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Between Worlds is a fascinating look at the questions of choice and responsibility.

Schmitt’s concept is intriguing. The play is set in a sort of metaphysical hotel that lies between life and death. The occupants of this hotel are people who have fallen into a coma. They arrive, via elevator, not knowing where they are or how they got there. It is run by a mysterious woman who goes by Dr. S. She has two angelic assistants who never speak but seem to communicate telepathically. There are two corridors in this hotel; one is marked “A” for accidental and the other is marked “D” for deliberate.

The current tenants of the hotel are from opposite points of the geopolitical spectrum. There are a successful businessman and a working class single mother, a spiritually rich fortune teller and a spiritually poor sportscaster named Colin. Colin is the new kid on the block and the fact that he is so wrapped up in himself makes the story wrap around him and his lack of faith in anything. Into his coma “life” swings Laura, who is bound to a wheelchair in the real world but is free to dance about in this world between worlds. The power of her optimism is intoxicating to Colin and he falls in love with Laura in record time.

As the plot unfolds we learn that Laura is in desperate need of a heart transplant. So it becomes a matter of which one of these half-dead people is going to give up their heart. Dr. S, who is controlled by some unnamable force (maybe it’s God and maybe not), is not allowed to interfere with the choices of her guests. Hence, she is reluctant to initiate any action towards helping Laura because, as she puts it, she can’t “break the rules.”

Similarly, Schmitt’s characters are ruled by the playwright’s existentialist musings. Schmitt raises some very interesting questions but he doesn’t weave these questions into the personalities of his characters. At times the play feels like an existential check list.

However, from what I could gather, Between Worlds boils down to the question of choice and our commitment to a given choice. Colin, for example, is placed in the “deliberate” corridor because he was driving drunk when he wrecked his car. Crashing his car into a tree was an accident but being a drunk for most of his life is a choice for which he must take responsibility. Schmitt seems to be implying that it is our choices that form who we are. Because we are free to choose, Schmitt argues, we must accept the risk and the responsibility of our choices by following them wherever they may lead.

The cast—Sara Barker, Max Evjen, Patrick Jones, T. Scott Lilly, Dana Panepinto, Andrea Seigel, Jennifer Shirley and Jennifer Wintzer—all make some good character choices and it is plain to see that they all worked very hard on their roles. All the actors in the show are also public school teachers. The producing company, Chekhov Theatre Ensemble, is a branch of a company called Stages of Learning which produces educational theatre programs for school children. The object is to provide the actor/teachers with authentic experiences from which to teach. I believe this is a very noble goal. In fact, every ticket you buy goes towards supporting the creation of programs designed to teach children using the theatre form. That alone is a good reason to see this play.

Another good reason is that, for the most part, technically the play is well executed. Russel Drapkin’s light design is gorgeous and the set design, provided by Timothy Mackabee, elicits the sterile world of the play to a "T." Margaret Pine’s sound design, while slightly intrusive, well establishes the mood of the play. Kristine Koury’s costumes are good, though I couldn’t figure out why Dr. S is dressed like she just fell out of an '80s dance club. Ragnar Freidank’s direction is decent but there are some pacing problems that made this two hour show feel a bitlonger than it actually is.

Ultimately, Schmitt is an insightful and intelligent writer and his play is as full of hope as it is full of heady philosophical questions. Schmitt wisely leaves many of these questions for us to answer.

See Boomerang Theatre Company's revival of Beyond the Horizon and watch modern American drama get born right in front of your eyes.

We can't know exactly what it felt like in 1920 to be one of the first audiences to lay eyes on Eugene O'Neill's first full-length play: the accounts that come down to us suggest serious revelation—something new, a genuine American tragedy, was unfolding on stages that were used to either the European kind or a less thoughtful, less motivated American melodrama. Boomerang—with a nostalgic low-tech wooden set by Harlan Penn, starchy-looking period costumes by Cheryl McCarron, achy music by Henry Aronson that plays whenever the action starts to get hot and/or heavy, straightforward lighting by Carrie Wood, and above all a sturdy, clear-eyed staging by Cailin Heffernan that aims to tell a story and try to reveal, as if for the first time, something approximating psychological truth—with all these components, Boomerang brings us near the jolting sensation that Beyond the Horizon must have been and, we find to our surprise, still can be. With one foot firmly in the hoary chestnut territory of old-fashioned melodrama and another just as solidly in the scary, flighty, modern (postmodern?) world of uncertainty, O'Neill shook up his audience, making one kind of theatre instantly quaint and another kind finally possible. That effect persists.

Beyond the Horizon is set on a farm in, I think, New England; it tells the story of two brothers who are both in love with the same woman. The older brother, Andy, is his father's son, strong and hearty, a born farmer who will call you out if you refer to "earth" as "dirt," a visionary who knows that he can make his fortune right here at home, on the land, especially if he can grow the family property via a fortuitous union with neighbor Ruth Atkins, the woman he adores. Robert, the younger sibling, is pretty much Andy's opposite: sickly as a child, he grew up pampered and stand-offish, got a good education, found he loved books and poetry, and now longs to get away, far away, to pursue his dreams, as he says (and as the play's title tells us), beyond the horizon. To this end, Robert has signed on to be a sailor on his Uncle Dick's ship, which is bound for exotic points east on a three-year voyage.

But destiny has something else in mind for Robert. Ruth confesses, all of a sudden, that it is Robert, not Andy, whom she loves. She begs him to stay, and, reacting in a way that makes complete sense at the moment, he does. Andy is devastated and escapes his grief by taking Robert's place on Uncle Dick's ship.

This is an O'Neill play, so it shouldn't surprise you when I tell you that all does not go smoothly. Far from it: both young men, fighting their true natures for the sake of pride but little else, are ravaged by life; Ruth—so willful and unpleasant but somehow also admirably stronger than either brother—hardens into stone. O'Neill tears us apart as he shows us the destruction of these three souls, pushing his play toward a tragic ending where a painful death feels less terrible than bitter endurance. In later plays, O'Neill would illuminate the gallantry of the pipe dreamer; here he depicts, nearly unadorned, the calloused heart of the stoic.

The script manages to feel at once dated and contemporary; long and windy like almost all of O'Neill but impossible to cut—every second of the three-hour running time is necessary, if only to make sure the audience suffers at least a fraction of what the characters do. There's sparse comic relief (in the person of Mrs. Atkins, a vituperative old crone of a woman whose propensity for finding fault with everyone around her is so excessive that it's funny), and only occasionally do fireworks really explode (as in the first act climax, when Andy and Robert's Irish father lets loose with a tantrum after Andy announces his plan to ship out). But simmering passion pervades the play, and keeps us riveted throughout. By creating, for the first time in American theatre, people who seemed to be having real emotions, O'Neill pulls us into the thick of the drama. Somehow the novelty of that involvement endures, gluing us to our seats more than 80 years later.

This is a huge play, and Boomerang is to be commended for tackling and, in large measure, mastering it. The nine cast members have all clearly dug deep to figure out the clockwork inside each of their characters; particularly impressive are Ron Sanborn, natural and dynamic as the father, and Margaret A. Flanagan, calmer and yet fluttery as the mother. Jennifer Larkin shows us the willfulness and steely resolve of capricious Ruth, though lighter aspects aren't so well-navigated at this point in the development of her performance; Justin G. Krauss similarly has gotten well under the skin of Andy, but some moments land better than others—both of these actors are going to sharpen their characterizations as the run progresses. Peter O'Connor, in the marathon role of Robert, is doing splendid work, especially in scenes opposite Krauss and young Emma Devine Warman as his daughter Mary. All of these actors are going to be better at their craft for having done this play, which all by itself is a good reason for Boomerang to have mounted it and for audiences to support the effort by coming to see it.

But the fact of the play itself is an even richer reward: we decry our lack of a sense of history in this country, but then here comes Beyond the Horizon, an authentic artifact that still somehow lives and breathes, offered up for us to witness, study, and lose ourselves in. Such opportunities are rare; I'm grateful that the folks at Boomerang have brought this one to us.

Big Top Machine, a sly and sometimes heartbreaking celebration of wonder, is also an inquisition into our collective loss of capacity for same; it is, furthermore (and perhaps above all else) a showcase for the remarkable and very particular talents of Kevin Augustine, an actor, playwright, and puppeteer whose work has amassed a small cult following and whose most recent play, Animal, has just been published by NYTE. Big Top Machine pre-dates the more mature and more narratively assured Animal by about five years; this splendid revival at the invaluable Brick Theater in Williamsburg offers a welcome second look at this delightful piece for those who have seen it before, and a thrilling introduction to Augustine's oeuvre for those who have thus far not had the pleasure. Either way, don't miss it.

The show begins, disarmingly, with an old bum, barefoot and in a tattered old suit, assailing the audience on the subject of heroes. What, he asks, makes us feel awe in these all-knowing, cynical times of ours? And then he turns back time a little, and recalls his days as Ramsey the Flying Man, the "hero" of the circus; in real life an ordinary guy named Stan, recovering from a broken marriage and looking to recharge his life by realizing his dreams of being extraordinary. Stan/Ramsey, clad in yellow unitard and a flowing red cape, climbs the big pole in the center ring and then flies off the top, some 250 feet in the air. Sure, he's abetted by some invisible wires: but he believes—and desperately wants us to believe—that it's authentic magic. Do we?

That's for you to decide; what's incontrovertible is the magic that Augustine and his collaborators make in realizing Ramsey's sweetly sad-sack story, with enormous wit, imagination, and theatricality. For the record, and to give much-deserved credit where it's due, those collaborators are: lighting designer Andrew Hill, sound designer Sean McPaul, props and costume designer Gloria Sun, and puppeteers Laura Emmanuel, Sophie Nimmannit, and Matthew Riggs.

Augustine plays at least a score of characters, often more than one at the same time (at one point, for example, he plays an entire classroom of unruly children). With the eerily human puppets that are his trademark, he creates several memorable personalities here, including a small boy named Jacob who steadfastly refuses to believe in the circus, and Frank the Ringmaster, who does still believe, though it takes a bunch of martinis every night to really do the trick.

Augustine sits in plain view behind another of his amazing puppet creations, a sideshow woman in a humble floral print dress, and—using his hands for hers—conjures a beautiful butterfly from an old leather box.

In the guise of a Siegfried & Roy-like lion tamer, he shouts foolish commands in faux-German and performs the silliest animal act you're ever likely to see.

And in a tour de force at the very beginning of Big Top Machine, he more or less turns himself into a puppet, with his black-shrouded assistants decking him out in various accessories (tie, hat, scarf, etc.) as he re-creates Ramsey's audition for the circus, playing all the parts with rapid-fire precision and perfect, hilarious timing.

The show's piece de resistance/climax is a jolting, thrilling deconstruction of Augustine's puppetry art. Watch this remarkable performer argue with himself—Frank the puppet versus Ramsey the hero: the actor debunks the artistry as just so much smoke and mirrors, and illusion and magic collide with reality and self-deception.

Me, I root for illusion in a case like this: Augustine and the circus that he creates in this show are 100% A-1 prime humbug, in the best Barnum tradition, and thank goodness for that. We always need something to marvel at. Big Top Machine is a grand place to begin.

I think it’s fair to say you either like performance art or you don’t.

I do. I like anything that pushes art in a new direction, not relying on traditional form and structure. It’s fun to watch where the artist is going, and to take the ride, free from the constraints of narrative devices. Nothing in performance art is wrong. Nothing is over the top.

Birth of a Terrorist, written, performed, and directed by Amy Shapiro, is performance art at its purest, moving freely from short narrative to poetry to rant, sprinkled economically with sight gags and props. Like most works this “experimental,” some parts are stronger and more thought-provoking than others. All, however, are entertaining—partly because of Shapiro’s energy and complete commitment to the work.

The show is billed as a set of characters that exemplify “the myriad of ways in which life is unfair.” That’s too simple. Some of them are triumphant, like the woman who used to define her self-worth by how many rock guitarists she had sex with, but who has learned to both respect her body and enjoy it on her own terms. Another section about the overpricing and gentrification of the Lower East Side—the neighborhood her immigrant grandparents worked so hard to get out of—is simply ironic and clever. And some of the show, as the title implies, is infuriating, like the long section on the war in Iraq, containing some very disturbing statistics about the military budget that I don’t remember Michael Moore covering.

Oddly, one of the most moving pieces for me was the first hand account of September 11th, a subject not easy to deal with theatrically. Perhaps we are far enough away from it now that we can look at again without being numb. Or perhaps Shapiro's images are just that strong: She describes her own experience of being at work in a lower-floor office only blocks away, and seeing first papers flying by the windows, followed by frantic people running, and finally a gray cloud several stories high.

Many other subjects are touched upon, such as the failings of the health care and education systems. Some parts didn’t work for me, like the part about her religious beliefs. But that’s me. I have a feeling different parts resonated differently for each audience member. Could it have been more focused? Maybe. And maybe that would have made it stronger. It is a new piece and I have a feeling it is still evolving. On the other hand, it’s performance art. There are no rules. So why not just take the ride?

Lots of young theatre artists are playing around at bringing cartoons, comic books, and pulp thriller/sci-fi genres to life on stage (Mark Lonergan and the Vampire Cowboys come to mind). For several years, Jeffrey Lewonczyk and his partner/collaborator Hope Cartelli have been at the forefront of this mini-movement, and their newest work, Bizarre Science Fantasy, provides a lighthearted, enchanting, and thoroughly entertaining example of this enjoyable and burgeoning style of theatre.

BSF is a trilogy of three short pieces, each of which tells a silly/fantastical tale without dialogue. Movement, dance, and music are what propel these stories, and much of the fun comes from the ways that Lewonczyk (author/director of all three) has mixed up styles and preconceptions to keep his audience amused and surprised. So a spacegirl saga that feels like a winking parody of Charlie's Angels quickly morphs into a hilarious, netherwordly cartoony fantasia where three aliens that look like a cross between TeleTubbies and the Lullaby League from The Wizard of Oz execute an entrancing comical dance. And a tongue-in-cheek allegory that starts out feeling like a paean to Harold Lloyd movies is suddenly interrupted by what I can only describe as a live Bugs Bunny routine (with three bewitching lovelies as the gravity-defying Bugs and our Lloyd-esque hero as a hapless Elmer Fudd), and later by a pair of delicious choreographed routines performed to nifty and unusual recordings of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

So at its best, Bizarre Science Fantasy is a triumph of imagination and invention; and even when it's not so inspired, it's always a darned good time. Narrated by Lewonczyk in the disembodied guise of a fourth-dimensional being called The Nightmarer, the show begins with "The Amphibians," set in a desolate bar where a man (Devon Hawkes Ludlow) and a woman (Jessi Gotta), both of whom have seen better days, sit across from one another drinking alone; the only other occupant is the bartender (Robin Reed, delightfully slatternly in a shapeless housedress and rolled-down knee-highs). Until, that is, we start to hear the sound "rivet-rivet-rivet." Something has gotten into the tavern—something froglike and, it turns out, terrifying. The bartender deals with the first intruder, but many more of these invisible creatures follow in this fast-paced and very silly sci-fi/horror spoof. Best moment: Gotta, feigning a sedate retreat to the ladies' room after Ludlow makes an unwanted advance, comes face-to-face with one of, er, Them.

"North of Polaris" features Cartelli and Katie Brack as a pair of sexy astronaut-ettes on a mission to outer space. It starts off as a loopy spoof of the sexy-girl-crimefighters-in-impractically-revealing-outfits genre, with Cartelli a hoot adjusting her makeup while seated at the spaceship's controls and Katie Brack, as the serious one, pressing zillions of imaginary buttons on a make-believe navigator's console. Eventually they land on a faraway planet, where Brack meets that winsome trio of aliens I told you about earlier and Cartelli wonders off on her own. The piece includes a neat after-school-special sort of moral, and contains the inspired notion, right out of a Get Smart rerun, that the girls' compacts double as walkie-talkies. Ludlow, Gotta, and Reed play the space creatures, adorably.

The final item on the program is "Hell's Belles," a somewhat longer and more abstract piece that originally premiered last summer in the Hell Festival. It revolves around Ludlow as a not-so-innocent rube who gets sentenced to eternal damnation in the company of the three demonic title characters. This piece is the most ambitious of the trilogy, and though it's more uneven than the other two, it achieves the evening's most blissful high points (notably the Loony Tunes-inspired sequence in which Ludlow dodges Belles, brooms, and other obstacles with rapidfire grace). Ludlow's clown persona doesn't always mesh with the more actorly work of the women in the cast, and the throughline is more complicated and confusing than the more direct plots of the two other pieces. But it's a fine, fun piece nonetheless, and a giddy and effective closer to the bill.

BSF is being presented in the intimate storefront Brick Theater in Williamsburg, which is rapidly becoming one of NYC's most dependable venues for high-energy, low-budget theatre. Lewonczyk uses the space masterfully, and he's abetted by his designers (Cartelli on costumes, and the estimable James Bedell on lights). And the eclectic soundtrack for the evening—happily disclosed fully in the program—is priceless.

As with all such anthology evenings, the quality of the writing in Box 3, the third installment of this year's Black Box New Play Festival, varies from quite good to not-so-good; what remains consistent throughout the evening is the quality of the Gallery Players' polished, dexterous presentation of the works. The Players' company of actors and directors come together to give these new works productions as fine as their playwrights could wish for.

The evening starts out with Dennis Schebetta's Stuck Outside of Dayton with the Bob Dylan Blues Again, a piece about two best friends-cum-musicians stalled beside an Ohio back road after their van breaks down between unrewarding gigs as a Dylan tribute band. The depiction of the pair's friendship encompasses pretty much the exact crisis and resolution you might expect, but director Lisa Jackson and performers Alex Smith and Matthew Morgan put it over with just the right combination of heart and irony; Morgan in particular toes an amusing line between wanton self-parody and artistic integrity as Tweedy, the member of the pair that doesn¹t want to settle down.

The second piece of the first act is also the evening's best and most surprising. The Dessert Cart, written by Daniel Damiano and directed by Joseph Rosswog and Ria Cooper, presents a haute-bourgeois couple ordering their final course at a fancy restaurant. Though initially their pompous patter—often spoken in unison—is hugely grating (and probably meant to be), the play ripens into a surreal exploration of the different ways people define satisfaction, and the toll taken by our convergent definitions. The whole cast hits the lightly satirical mark exactly, but David Keller, as the husband, steals the night in the piece's satisfying conclusion.

The latter half of the program is somewhat weaker than the first, but with enough entertaining moments to keep it from dragging. The highlight is the first piece, Staci Swedeen's Couple Capacity, in which a lonely young woman (Rene Poplaski) shares her romantic disillusionment with the audience as the excruciatingly affectionate couple beside her gets closer and closer to playing footsie in the biblical sense. Two plays later, in a nifty bit of synergy, the couple returns in Judd Lear Silverman's All the Comforts of Home, in which the female (Maria Ryan) discovers, upon her first visit to his home, that her boyfriend (Craig Colfelt) keeps a very peculiar family pet in the bathtub. Only Michael Bettencourt's Fare Thee Well—a you-go-girl ode to joys and pains of the female breast that swoops predictably from grating whoops of empowerment to manipulative confessions of pathos—falls flat.

But throughout the second act, even when the proceedings swerve to the cutesy or the pat, the commitment and pleasure the directors and performers bring to the works is undeniably infectious, making for one of the more successful one-act compilations I've seen in recent years. Though none of the plays is particularly ambitious on its own, the Gallery Players' dedication in bringing them to life makes for a solid achievement.

Gallery Players' Black Box Festival is a showcase of new works by tri-state area authors, and an impressively entertaining one at that. But I want to begin this review with a nod to Tim Amrhein, the designer responsible for the sets used in the five short plays that comprise Week 4 of the Black Box; and also to Heather Siobhan Curran, the evening's producer. Amrhein has fashioned a mod Beverly Hills casting office, a Hawaiian doctor's office, a fashionable Upper East Side church, a yoga classroom, and the interior of a woman's ovary (!) out of just a few set pieces, which he uses, re-uses, and reconfigures with refreshing ingenuity. And Curran has found a way to sequence and transition through these very different pieces with seamless flair. I see lots of short play festivals every year; the Black Box is one of the best-produced I've come across.

Okay, now for the plays themselves. They're an above-average lot (which certainly helps Curran and Amrhein do their jobs so well). There's a real gem in the middle of this program, a charming comedy called Goddess of Fire by Staci Swedeen, which takes place in a doctor's office late on a Friday at the end of a particularly bad week in Hawaii. The play starts with Mrs. Parker, the receptionist, attempting to close down the office; but before she can get out the door, a woman in shorts and a colorful lei comes rushing in, demanding to see the doctor. Her husband has had a bad accident (it turns out he nearly cut off his thumb trying to cut into a piece of fruit), capping the couple's catastrophic second honeymoon trip. This woman, Toni, finds solace in the unexpected person of the just-departing patient Mr. Wallace, a younger newly-wed fellow on his first honeymoon; their bonding—sweet, a little bit wise, a little bit gallant—is the lovely center of Swedeen's delightfully warm-hearted one-act.

Mary Willard's A Hunka, Hunka Santa Claus is the first piece on the agenda; it's a comedy about two contenders for a Christmastime gig; if it's a bit one-note and predictable, it's nevertheless satisfying. A Funeral for a Friend, by John Paul Porter, is a conversation between two middle-aged women attending the church service for a recently deceased "friend," one of whom has already set her cap on the new widower. A little sketchy, it's a very witty script, nicely balancing its darkly humorous premise with a strain of genuine humanity. More gimmicky are Mittelschmerz by Romina Wancier and Susanne Kreitman Taylor, a reality TV parody set inside a woman's ovary (her eggs compete for survival and/or the hope of a "spin-off" with a bachelor/sperm); and Yoga Kills by Charlotte Winters, which takes a slapstick look at the world of competitive yoga. But even these two pieces prove quite enjoyable.

All five plays are directed skillfully by Yvonne Conybeare, Matt Schicker, and Amy L. Smith. The acting is of fine quality as well (and was extremely well-received by the enthusiastic first-night crowd at the performance reviewed); stand-outs include Sue Glausen Smith and Patricia Lavin as the Upper East Side funeral-goers in Porter's play, Wayne Temple as the renegade sperm in Mittelschmerz, and Erin Kate Howard and Kevin Dedes as the central figures in Goddess of Fire.

Ping Chong’s Blind Ness: the Irresistible Light of Encounter, now playing at La MaMa, is a meditation on colonialism in the Belgian Congo and its lasting effects on that region and the world over. Interlaced with passages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Blind Ness is concerned with events from the late 19th century—King Leopold II’s rapacious mission in the name of Progress, and the activists, unwittingly catalyzing the human rights movement, who exposed the black heart of Leopold’s quest—all the way up to June 30, 1960, the day the Belgian Congo was handed over to its newly established native government headed by Patrice Lamumba (whose subversive Independence Day speech further ensured his assassination by Belgian authorities, political rivals, and the CIA six months later.)

Subject-wise, Blind Ness could not be more relevant, as the United States is about to “relinquish control” of Iraq to its America-appointed, America-approved government. In fact, many of the appalling violations of human rights in the name of Civilization (a cover story for brutally violent opportunism) over some 80 years that are depicted here—including horrific incidents of humiliating and mutilating torture, ultimately captured and brought to light by photographs—have been successfully implemented by the U.S. in a mere 80 weeks. Needless to say, the parallels in attitude, if not (yet) action, are haunting.

Unfortunately, this intriguing material (Lamumba’s Independence Day speech alone is riveting) has been transformed into little more than a book report with a budget. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of attempts at theatricalizing this dense volume of historical occurrence. However, Chong’s theatrical imagery, but for a few exceptions (an ominous black ball cutting across the stage of its own volition; the aged King Leopold II, riding around on his tricycle), is dull and outmoded, and there is almost no compelling dramatization to speak of.

Historical figures, whose factual lives are fascinating, introduce themselves to the audience and recite the bullet points of their biographies (i.e., “My name is Roger Casement and I’m a British diplomat and Irish Nationalist who, in 1875…” etc.). At other points, the ensemble, a markedly inexperienced group of students dressed in dowdy black outfits, shift about in various formations and announce the happenings of a particular year, as though they were in the stagehand-wear segment of a beauty pageant. The interminably long scenes excerpted from Conrad’s prose are played in shadow behind the scrim—a once-experimental technique that has been proven to work and is no longer innovative enough to save the audience from the dense dialogue that, though hypnotic in novel form, is stagnant on stage.

Randy Ward’s projections of beautiful and devastating photographs in the History Channel-esque opening sequence is the most enjoyable part of the evening: a chance for the source material to speak for itself, undiluted by the all-too-often distracting and oppressive effects of stylization.

Israel Horovitz is best known for his plays The Indian Wants the Bronx (which introduced the world to Al Pacino back in 1968) and Line ( a long-running hit at 13th Street Rep). For the past quarter-century, he has devoted much of his time to his own GloucesterStage Company, laudably bringing theatre to a depressed pocket of his home state of Massachusetts. This venue provided the launchpad for the two works included in Blue Collar. In North Shore Fish (properly pronounced “Nath Shah Fish”) a dockside Don Juan named Sally Morella (Gil Ron) takes turns browbeating and knocking up the women who work on his frozen fish packing assembly line. His reign of terror is brought to a halt when a plant inspector (Nancy Harkins) disqualifies the last meager work the the company has managed to secure, thus forcing the permanent shut-down of the factory. In Sins of the Mother, four fish processors (T.S. Joseph, Francisco Solorzano, Luca Pierucci and Gabe Fazio) meet in a similar factory, where recession and drug abuse have taken a toll, with deadly results.

As someone who grew up the son of blue collar parents in a fishing village not far from Gloucester, I must strive mightily to contain my prejudices. Just as a character in Sins of the Mother says of the non-fiction fishing boat drama A Perfect Storm, “That movie was bullshit,” and my brother the restorer of military vehicles snorts in derision when he sees a Korean War jeep in a World War II movie), so do I find myself needing to tamp down a tendency to spot faults that matter to no one. The works of Shakespeare are riddled with historical and technical errors, but so what?

And yet when one presumes to undertake something that purports to be realistic, one does so at one’s own risk. It’s all or nothing when you erect that fourth wall. If we put our eye to a keyhole, we don’t want to see anything phony on the other side. Pure naturalism of the sort that is supposed to be Horovitz’s stock in trade is the hardest thing in the world to achieve. All artifice must be dispensed with. When any remains, one realizes that the drama has made no appreciable advances over the 19th-century melodrama, which, for the most part, it has not. Horovitz gives us coincidences to rival the worst in Sardou. In Sins of the Mother, young Douggie unknowingly walks into the same stevedore’s hall occupied by his mother’s lover Bobby and the son of the man who sold her the drugs that killed her. This might have been alright if the character had intended to do so, i.e., as part of some sort of vendetta. Unfortunately, this is not the case—it’s just a coincidence. A million-to-one coincidence. In North Shore Fish a woman goes into labor at the same time two other characters have just broken into a fistfight, directly after the news that the fish plant is closing. My, my, what a dramatical fish factory! There’s more going on here than General Hospital!

In addition to such improbabilities, Horovitz gives us that horrible resort of the barren playwright, the Extended Spoken Exposition, most egregiously when Bobby explains to Douggie (the audience, really) that as legitimate fishing work dried up, fishermen and those in related industries took to smuggling, dealing, and using hard drugs. Of course, Douggie knows all that... as anyone who lives in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island knows it. While others might not know it, there are far more resourceful ways of conveying the information without dreaming up a conversation that never in a thousand years would take place.

There’s no doubt that the working and under-classes are underrepresented onstage, and for his efforts to do do, Horovitz is to be applauded. Yet, even in well-meaning efforts like these, the results are generally inaccurate, and, at their worst, patronizing. Writers often ascribe to the working classes a romantic sentimentality about their jobs I can assure you they do not possess. “We been packing fish in my family for generations,” gushes one character in North Shore Fish. To the real “Blue Collar” who, statistics tell us, spend several hours a night envying the lifestyles of their favorite stars on television, such a reality is (rightly or wrongly) simply a badge of shame... the sort of thing one mutters before putting a bullet in one’s head. A real play about a real fishing assembly line would have no dialogue at all, just silent zombie-like repetitive motions to the ear-splitting sound of machinery. What patronizing sins are committed by the playwright are compounded by the producers. The title of this evening of theatre is a case of point. Oh, those wacky, wacky workers. Can you imagine packaging a bill of plays set in the shtetl and calling it "Jews"?

For the most part the earnest young cast acquits itself commendably, however. But here again, the company makes an all too common mistake in dealing with this particular subject matter. It’s just another example of AAA: All About the Accents. Nearly everyone in the cast struggles mightily to talk Mahssachusetts, and the effort they are making is palpable. Some come close to nailing it, some don’t, but their struggles are a distraction and a handicap. Accent work should be “invisible”; the actors need to master it to such a degree that they can bust out the other side and do their acting in such a way that neither they nor the audience pay it much heed. As Blue Collar currently plays, the ahccents stick out like a saw thumb.

I've not been to Ontologic-Hysteric Theater's Blueprint Series before (it's in its 12th year), but it will be difficult to keep me away from now on. The mission of this annual summer event is to provide "a forum for directors to engage in theatrical exploration and experimentation." I'm impressed: this is as classy, supportive, and professional a theatre laboratory as any set of artists could hope for, at least on the basis of the two 40-minute works that I saw. There are two others being presented this year; my guess is that whichever pairing(s) you take in, you will be in for a memorable adventure.

What's so exciting and encouraging about the Blueprint shows I saw is that these two directors have clear, specific, and original visions that they have been able to develop and realize on stage in fully-formed, well-rehearsed productions. The first item on the bill the night I was there was Sam Hunter's Abraham (A Shot in the Head), which is an arresting, abstract theatre piece about life and death on the American prairie. Set in a field littered with trash, it pits an old farmer, his wife, and a stranger who turns out to be their grandson against the elements and one another. Hunter plays here with contrasts between water and drought, fertility and barrenness, cultivation and desolation, and faith and cynicism, among other subjects; more meditative poem than traditional play, Abraham challenges our assumptions about the nature of shared values and, more importantly, the nature of the theatre experience itself. Hunter's staging is precise, stylized, and endlessly fascinating, and it's well-served by three exemplary performers, Patrick Carlyle (Boy), Elizabeth Neptune (Wife), and Jeffrey Maxwell (an extraordinary turn as the Old Farmer).

Abraham was followed by A Child is Being Beaten, which is billed as the first act of a longer piece but which feels complete and very satisfying on its own. Written and directed by Keith Mayerson, the play uses a variety of devices and approaches to take us into the history and head of a damaged young man named Robert, who, we learn, has been the victim of systematic abuse since childhood. The play works like an onion, its layers peeled away gradually as deeper and truer aspects of Robert's psyche are revealed. Each of these layers of revelation surprises us—Mayerson uses monologue, fugue-like repeated dialogue, and absurdist interludes narrated by a grotesque but friendly puppet (created and operated by Sakura Maku and Karen Zasloff) to paint his disturbing picture of severe family dysfunctionality. It's a compelling, absorbing experience.  The cast, all terrific, consists of Sumner Hatch as Robert, Elizabeth Meriwether as various young women in his life, Alice Barrett Mitchell as his mother, and Bruce Kronenberg as a postman whose reason for being in the play is one of the many startling discoveries that await us here. Steven Rattazzi is the deadpan voice of the puppet.

Both Mayerson and Hunter are true finds, as playwrights and directors. I will look forward eagerly to new works by each of them (and to whatever future manifestations emerge for these two remarkable projects). Kudos to the curators of Blueprint Series, Brian PJ Cronin and Joshua Briggs, for doing their job so expertly. This is a summer theatre event well worth checking out.

John Glines's witty and sometimes touching new play Body and Soul is a snapshot of a pivotal evening in the lives of five gay men who are linked together by the past and reaching for new connections in the future. A man and his twenty-something nephew spend a weekend at a close friend’s New Jersey lakeside home. The friend recently ran into an old acquaintance with whom the uncle had a brief but torrid love affair some five years ago. The friend has invited the ex for dinner. The ex turns out to be the same man the nephew met that afternoon, and made plans with for the evening. To thicken the stew, the ex shows up with another friend whose longtime lover passed away almost a year ago.

Is five years enough time to get over the hurt of what could have been, or is destiny giving the uncle a second chance to hold onto the true love of his life? It’s a bit of a soap opera, for sure, but a nicely written one with many funny moments.

Glines has put together a script that flows easily, with characters and situations we can all relate to. The uncle has been a hero in some ways, rescuing his nephew when his homophobic parents threw him out for being gay. There is richness in this deed, but it doesn’t fill the emptiness left by the love that that got away. The ex, in the meantime, has lived around the world, working as a photographer and exploring the places he and the college professor father only talked about. But after five years of travel he, too, has been left with a deep loneliness. The widow, though still grieving, has had seven years of love that he will take with him through life.

There is something a bit awkward, though, about the way Dave McCracken has directed the script. Sometimes there don’t seem to be any real relationships or connections going on, no indication of the years these men have known each other, or the lives they’ve shared. Often the actors seem to be playing every line, every emotion, as if they don’t trust the script. With knowing looks, head movements and gesturing, they tell us exactly what is going on, exactly what we should be feeling, instead of showing us and letting us discover for ourselves.

Shawn Willett as the widow is sad and weepy from his first entrance till his last exit. Michael Bianco as the ex-lover is visibly brimming with desperation and loneliness. As the young, eager nephew, Blake Young-Fountain puts so much effort into each line that it is almost exhausting to watch him in the small theatre. Everything is happening right up front, on the surface. Nothing is left underneath or behind the words. After a bumpy start, Dale Church as the uncle manages to keep a mostly even keel. Oddly, Christian Sebastian as the flamboyant host with the bitchy one-liners gives the most subtle and believable performance of the evening.

Dionysus Theater’s L’il Peach is a warm and intimate space that is just right for Glines's sweet and personal script. A little scaling back of the broader emotions would make this production of Body and Soul the little gem it was meant to be.

Stewart, the protagonist of Boise, David Folwell's new play at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, is having a midlife crisis. Work—as a middle manager in a cubicle in a large nameless corporation—is unsatisfying. Co-worker Bill is a pest. New Human Resources staffer Tara intrigues him; she quotes Bertrand Russell, and flirts much more than someone whose job almost certainly includes dealing with sexual harassment claims ought to.

Stewart's wife, Val, doesn't understand him. She lectures him about missing the toilet bowl, and scares him when she tells him that if he ever got really sick or hurt, she wouldn't be willing to care for him. Their sex life apparently sucks (if you'll pardon the vernacular); we see them at it in bed a few times, and in each instance he is fully clothed (including shoes), in the sort of passionless pose that you'd expect to find him with a $40 hooker (as opposed to the woman he's supposed to love and cherish till death do them part).

Stewart's sister, Jackie, offers the vaguest of consolation—she will at least listen to him—but she's much too wrapped up in her own troubles to finally offer much help. (She gives her brother a dildo in an attempt to resolve his marital problems.) These troubles are exclusively sexual; she's involved first with a beginner S&M master with a health food fetish, then with a European artist with a one-track mind, and then with a seemingly nice guy whom—for some reason—she is only interested in physically.

Stewart tries to get closer to Tara, but she meets his best friend—the chronically immature Owen—at a company Christmas party (what Owen is doing there is never explained) and falls head over heals in love with him.

Stewart is very near the end of his rope.

So, naturally... he realizes that what he really wants is to rape his sister.

And he tries to.

And then, sometime later, we see him, naked, putting on his orange prison jumpsuit. Folwell has him tell us, ironically I suppose, that he's found peace at last.

Boise, which is no more plausible or entertaining or enlightening than I have described it here, has actually gotten some positive reviews among my colleagues in the theatre press. This puzzles and concerns me enormously. The script, though occasionally funny and clever, is a shambles in terms of characterization or plotting: we never get inside Stewart's head, and so we never understand what his crisis is really about or why it should explode in such a reprehensible and anti-social fashion. Folwell's presentation of female characters—as whores, essentially; or, in the case of Val, controlling bitches—should alarm anyone who thinks that violent behavior against women is rooted somewhere in male psychology.

I'm all for theatre that's funny and satiric, that pushes buttons and explores issues that we think of as dangerous or taboo. But I'm also for theatre that's purposeful (as opposed to prurient); I don't know what Folwell is trying to do in Boise apart from get my attention.

I should note that Chris Burns, onstage for the entire length of the play, works hard to make Stewart into a believable and compelling character; he's defeated by the script. His colleagues in the cast are similarly at a loss; why Geneva Carr (Val), Tasha Lawrence (Jackie), and Lucia Brawley (Tara) would even consider appearing in their roles is beyond me. Boise ranks as one of the most repellent and distasteful theatre experiences of my entire reviewing career, and that's saying something. Boo hiss.

I was curious to see Bokan, the Bad Hearted, the new puppet drama presented by Loco 7 at La MaMa. The show combines life-sized puppets with dancers and live music to recreate a myth of the ancient indigenous Amazon culture. The mission of Loco 7 is to develop the use of puppetry as an instrument for the dancer, incorporating both dance and design on the stage. I have had little experience with puppetry on this scale, and was hoping to expand my horizons. I wasn’t expecting this richly colorful dance piece, or the bold sights and detailed sounds that fill the large stage of La MaMa’s Annex. The production is truly beautiful to watch, with an almost magical feel.

The story of the primordial struggle for power between men and women in the Amazon Jungle is told here, for the most part, as a dance. After a short video piece of a woman who I assume is a modern-day member of the tribe of people the piece depicts, we are taken back into the jungle where giant tree puppets grow up from the floor, filling the room as the puppeteers and musicians set the atmosphere of movement, music, and sounds. The suspended set pieces, constantly in motion, create what feels like a living, breathing jungle. Through an 18’ by 18’ mask of the Sun-god, a dancer emerges in a brightly colored loin cloth and body paints, setting the stage for the myth to be told. Other performers appear, interacting with life-sized puppets suspended form the ceiling, manipulated by puppeteers who are visible on platforms above the wings of the stage. At times the performers wear masks and become living puppets themselves. At other times, the stage performers become puppeteers, dressed in black with life-sized puppets attached to their bodies. At still other times, the performers, clad in short grass skirts and bold body paints, simply tell much of the story through dance movements and vocalizing that seem modern and ancient, contemporary and indigenous at the same time.

The story begins when the Sun-god sends a disease to kill off all the men. But Seucy, the Water-goddess, bathes the women in her fertile waters, guaranteeing the next generation. Angered, the Sun-god impregnates one of the woman, and a son is born who, twenty years later, leads the men away from the women, and replaces what was a matriarchal society with a new patriarchal order. This is a very abridged version of the story, culled from my much longer press kit notes. Sadly, the program contains only a brief outline of scenes, and I worry that the plot might be difficult to follow for people not familiar with the actual myths that are the source material—or privy to the information in the press packet. There is some dialogue, chanting and singing, but it is all done in a language created by the composer, Liz Swados, which incorporates elements of the indigenous languages of Columbian and Brazilian tribes. Swados has created languages before for other pieces. The effect is striking, but does little to help us better understand what is going on. This problem could easily be solved with better program notes, as one might get at an opera or ballet.

The ensemble cast, which includes writer-director-choreographer Federico Restrepo, crisply captures the movement and vocal qualities that bring us sharply into this other world. Restrepo is also responsible for the lighting and puppet and set design and construction, while cast member Denise Greber also designed and created the striking, colorful costumes. The music and language created by Swados are evocative and haunting, creating not only a time and place, but a tension and conflict between the characters.

Boom isn’t your average sketch show.

Elephant Larry isn’t your average sketch comedy group.

Sure, you can see they’ve gotten a little inspiration from the long line of funny guys before them (if you had to peg them, you might say they’re similar in style to the Kids in the Hall, except not Canadian—well, they’re five guys who play all parts, including female, themselves). But these guys, who tout in their press materials that they are “five bad boys with the power to rock you,” are a breath of fresh (and really funny) air in what has come to be the staid world of sketch comedy. And, I must admit, I was rocked.

The show is sponsored by the Onion, which we know from the pre-show blips on the projection screen. They have taken (what we learn throughout to be) pieces of the show and turned them into Onion-style front page headlines. This gives them monster street-cred—it really is a genius union. Before I go further, let me name the boys. They are Geoff Haggerty (“Jeff with a G”), Stefan Lawrence, Chris Principe, Jeff Solomon (“Geoff with a J”), and Alexander Zalben. They are each uniquely interesting, bursting with energy and funny.

The show opens with a trailer, complete with booming theatrical voiceover. And then, in the span of merely an hour, they manage to send up everything from Japanese businessmen to elementary school recitals, from MTV to 70s-style game shows, from Frankenstein’s monster to the National Anthem, missing nary a beat.

I was baffled. How is it that every sketch is funny? Sure, they rehearse and rehearse and pick out the best stuff. But how did they manage to have everyone laughing—not one stickler in the bunch!—at every single thing?

Their stuff is well written, but not over-written. They let you in on the joke early—the game is visible almost from the get-go. I think there’s something to that—so many sketch writers like to “keep the secret” like some latter-day Agatha Christie. But if the audience spends the whole sketch trying to figure out the game and then either can’t, or god forbid, it’s lame, everyone is disappointed. NOT the case here.

Even stuff that should not work works! They’ve got a sketch based entirely around puns. Puns are not funny. Puns suck, unless you’re pity-laughing at your friend’s dad or something. The sketch works! They go back multiple times, on stage and in pre-recorded video, to a sketch that would go on and on ad infinitum (if they didn’t have the good sense to cut out early, adding immensely to the humor) that has audience members screaming out, slowly and steadily, the very long title of a game show. You figure it out five words into the sketch, but keep laughing until they cut the lights.

This is probably one of the best shows you’ll see in the city for eight bucks. It’s quick and easy, and a really good time.

From the minute the “please turn off your cell phones, beepers, and pagers” curtain speech devolves into a passionate rant on urban planning, it is clear that Boozy is not your average musical. It’s more like the musical you might get if you threw the collected works of Brecht, Robert Wilson, and Abbott & Costello into a blender with a few college textbooks, a ride at EPCOT Center, and a biography of Robert Moses. (For those who aren’t New York City history buffs, Moses was the last of the great urban planners, the man responsible for both the Verrazzano Bridge and the Cross-Bronx Expressway, among many other projects). It’s a wild, inventive, action-packed exercise in tightly controlled mayhem—so sit back and enjoy the ride.

The subtitle of Boozy is “The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses,” and that gives you a pretty good overview of the plot, such as it is. The story of Le Corbusier, a French modernist architect more famous for his theories than his actual buildings, serves as almost a prologue, and the starting point for the bizarre revenge plot that winds through the piece, but the majority of the play is about Moses.

Thrown into the mix are some over-the-top conspiracies for world domination (Goebbels, Roosevelt, and Mussolini—played at times by live rabbits, whose presence is in fact justified by the script in one of the evening’s silliest jokes—banding together to profit from World War II), a vengeful femme fatale (Le Corbusier’s ex-girlfriend, a.k.a. urban-policy reformer Jane Jacobs), and a fairly accurate condensed history of urban development policy in New York. And just in case that’s not complicated enough, the cast also includes dancing Freemasons, a crippled child of indeterminate ethnicity (their description, not mine) with a Cockney accent, and a Daniel Libeskind (the winning architect in the competition to redesign the World Trade Center site) imitator. (One of the press clippings indicates that Les Freres Corbusier, the company behind Boozy, invited Libeskind to perform as himself, but he declined.)

Amid all of that, if you can keep your attention focused, the show does present a moderately cogent re-evaluation of recent opinion on Moses, which, depending on how strongly you feel about him, is either refreshing, sacrilegious, disappointing, or inconsequential to your viewing experience. Although the play’s subtitle acknowledges the negative view of Moses that was popularized by Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker, the creators are interested in opening Moses’ legacy for reexamination, reminding us that he was seen as an enormously popular visionary before he became demonized for his plan to demolish SoHo for an expressway.

I swear, it all makes cockeyed, manic sense by the time they’re through. This is a credit to the coherent vision of the co-creators—director/writer Alex Timbers, lighting designer Juliet Chia, and set designer David Evans Morris—and the rest of their production team (costume designer Jenny Mannis, video designer Jake Pinholster, sound designer Bart Fasbender, and choreographer Katherine Profeta). The production’s stylistic—and stylized—cohesion lets everyone involved get away with flourishes and digressions that might otherwise seem indulgent or aggressively and over-consciously “postmodern.” The self-indulgence isn’t entirely missing—sometimes they’re having a little too much fun with their technological toys, particularly in one video-simulcast sequence that seems unnecessary—but it’s kept to a minimum.

Timbers also brings out top-notch performances from his whole cast. The entire ensemble walks the very difficult line of performing tongue-in-cheek material in a highly stylized manner without ever seeming facetious or smarmy. There’s not a drop of condescension by the actors toward the audience or their characters; even when the narrative is mocking the characters, the actors are fully committed. Among the principals, I was especially taken by Nina Hellman as Jane Jacobs. Jacobs is the thread that ties together the play’s real-world story (more-or-less accurate biographies of Corbusier and Moses) and its off-the-rails counterpart (see the description of the Goebbels/Mussolini rabbit conspiracy, above), and Hellman finds both the seriousness of Jacobs’s passion for emergence theory and the camp in the revenge fantasies of a scorned Frenchwoman. Among the ensemble, special kudos for sheer bravura go to the loopy glee of the flamboyant Mayor LaGuardia (John Summerour) and his demented, drooling pageboy/love slave (Matthew DeVriendt).

Boozy is a madcap high-tech and high-concept farce. At times, its conceptual ambitions and its farcical ones collide: the play raises some serious questions about the future of our cities that are often obscured by the chaos of the manner in which it asks them. As far as I can tell, the play's broad strokes of Moses’s biography and philosophy are pretty accurate. But it’s hard to derive grounded opinions on urban policy from a play that also claims that Mussolini, Goebbels, and Roosevelt planned World War II to profit from housing developments. Nonetheless, this is a beautifully executed, smart, and fiercely original piece of theatre.