My first inclination was to call Brett Neveu's exquisitely sad comedy twentyone Mametian; the playwright himself, going in a couple of other directions, bills it as an "existential Girls Gone Wild."  Neither appellation does the play justice, nor do they give Neveu's very original voice its due. So, let me simply say that twentyone is touching, wistful, and wise in ways that are quietly but indisputably its own. It's one of the finest new plays in town at the moment; I highly recommend that you see it.

The place is a small resort town in Mexico. The time, presumably, is Spring Break; or in any event, some vacation period from college. The people, five in number, are David and Jim, who are sharing a room at one hotel; Scott, an acquaintance of theirs, possibly of the passing and/or just-made variety, who shares a room with another guy (Paul, unseen by us) in the same hotel; and Jodi and Nicole, roommates in another hotel.

Around them, as far as we can tell, college students are having a blast, hanging out on the beach or in some dive bar or other 'til all hours. And, for their part, this quintet is doing all the fun MTV wild and crazy stuff like drinking too much and having frequent casual sex. David and Nicole meet on the beach and engage in a mild but very obvious flirtation, and when Jodi stops by, she pulls out the stops, asking David to rub sunscreen on her back and legs and then on his own bare chest. The next time we see them, they're in a hotel room in the middle of the night, partying with Jim and Scott, pairing off haphazardly until Jodi, Scott, and Jim head out for an impromptu threesome.

Yet, with all the contact and all the beer and booze, the disconnectedness and melancholy are absolutely palpable. David, the protagonist of twentyone, seems to experience these the most; but every one of these kids, sated with pleasure, is filled with ineffable longing. Even Scott, who lives on repeating anecdotes and jokes and ideas that he's picked up from others, is aware that something's missing here in paradise; David nails it, though, when he blows up at Jodi for doing certain things not, as she claims, because she wants to, but because she's supposed to.

What's sad—maybe it's actually tragic—is that such awareness of meaningless should come so young. The five characters in twentyone haven't had any real adult experiences, yet they're somehow already used up.

twentyone is, notwithstanding all of the foregoing, very very funny, though the characters' unhappiness is never far from the surface. It's been given a splendid production by Spring Theatreworks as half of their Brettfest (the other selection, Eagle Hills, Eagle Ridge, Eagle Landing, is reviewed below). Director Ian Morgan gives the play a straightforward, careful staging, using the small Altered Stages playing area to full intimate advantage. Josh Zangen's sets, Jason Lyons' lighting, Celeste Reingans' costumes, and Matt Sherwin's sound are all on target. The performances are excellent, with Frank Sallo's complicated and conflicted David providing a compelling center to the piece, and Daniel Loeser's mercurial Jim and Hettienne Park's self-aware Jodi lending strong support; Melanie Wehrmacher's Nicole and Sam Rosen's Scott, two different varieties of airheaded kids who try not to think too much, offer stunning contrast.

There's a surprising amount of profundity contained in this tight little play; Neveu and his collaborators at Spring Theatreworks are to be commended for putting twentyone on stage.

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Eagle Hills, Eagle Ridge, Eagle Landing, an earlier Neveu play, is an eminently suitable companion piece to twentyone; I think seeing the two of them in Brettfest will enhance your appreciation of each.  I found Eagle Hills... enormously resonant, because just the night before I had overheard, at a restaurant, one middle-aged married gentleman instructing another, loudly, in the "best" way to "do" Las Vegas (you can go Sunday through Thursday, apparently, or Thursday though Sunday; and the best month is October). These two fellows are quite exactly older versions of the characters in Eagle Hills..., or at least of Andy, the one who is unwaveringly sure of his way in life and thus least able to understand why sticking to a program in Las Vegas or anywhere else in life is no way to live.

Eagle Hills, Eagle Ridge, Eagle Landing takes place in a bar, in a suburb that contains the three eponymous developments that are home to its three characters. Actually only the first two are home: Eagle Hills, the most downscale, is where Kevin lives with his wife—it's a place that yuppies get out of, as quickly as possible; and Eagle Ridge, where Andy and Mike have "built homes," is the locale of choice for the upwardly mobile. Eagle Landing—nirvana, of the twice-as-big lots and wrap-around decks—is, at this point in these three young men's lives, only to be aspired to.

The first half of the play follows a night of Kevin, Andy, and Mike's barroom chatter. Neveu gets it exactly right: the staccato rhythm, the pregnant pauses, the sheer sad triviality of the whole empty conversation that too many of us have every night with our buddies after work. Mike, a bit dim but endlessly eager, repeats soundbites that he's heard or misheard, these substitutes for actual ideas keeping the conversation flowing (see Scott, above, in twentyone). Andy is the go-getter who says all the right things, drops all the right names, thinks all the right thoughts. (Neveu captures his voice brilliantly, especially the endless stream of buzzwords—names of people and places that we are instantly able to peg from their context.)

Kevin is discontented. Mike says that he heard or read somewhere that "sleep is the new sex" and later that "living life is what life's about." Something in this pair of platitudes sets off all kinds of alarms inside Kevin's slumbering consciousness; suddenly he's aware that some undefined something is inexorably absent from his life. Going to work, talking about never-to-happen vacations in Hawaii or snorkeling or whatever, driving around looking at houses in Eagle Landing that you can't afford—in his epiphany, Kevin understands that there must be more to life than this.

Part 2 of the play, in which Kevin returns to the bar and his friends a month later, after having attempted to do something about his situation, is a bit of a letdown; Neveu seems unsure as to exactly what his anti-hero ought to discover. But the writing remains sharply observed, funny, and challenging.

Ian Morgan again stages with spare simplicity; the actors—David Sajadi as Kevin, Michael Brandt as Andy, and especially Doug Simpson as Mike, who may well just be the actual protagonist of this play—are superb. Brettfest 2004 is, by any measure, a significant success. Spring Theatreworks and Brett Neveu need to be on your radar as they continue to grow as theatre artists.

Among the many choice and challenging, provoking and provocative words spoken by Brian Dykstra in his one-man show Cornered & Alone are some familiar ones: "When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another..." He reads the whole of the Declaration of Independence—in a segment that he semi-ironically dubs the "intermission," inviting us to head out for a smoke if we want to while he does his recitation. Oh, this is nothing, he's saying mockingly, just the cornerstone of our national way of life, that's all.

It's good to hear it; it made me think how inordinately original and courageous our Founding Fathers were. Without precedent, they wrote (and signed their names to):

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it....

Here's the essence of Dykstra's very impassioned, very politically engaged, very intelligent monologue: can we even find 56 statesmen in America today who'd be willing to do what Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and company did 228 years ago?

All the rest of the words that Dykstra utters during this 90-minute performance are his own, and they are not to be taken lightly. Dykstra offers plenty of specifics for us to chaw on; just as the Declaration enumerates all the ways that King George III was a tyrant, so too does Cornered & Alone mercilessly and systematically delineate the ways that contemporary Americans have let down our forefathers and our descendants. "Half of the world's coral reef has been destroyed during your lifetime," he tells us at one point. "And I'm talking to the 20-year-olds." A lethal combination of acquisitiveness and complacency is doing irreparable and irreversible harm not only to our ecosystems but our political ones: reckless hunger for oil leads as readily to the destruction of the Alaskan wilderness as to a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.

If it all sounds a little polemical and serious-minded for a night out at the theatre, well, it is. Cornered & Alone teeters awkwardly but ardently on the boundary between performance art and political rally. It's at its most entertaining doing the Will Rogers thing, letting the folly of current events speak for itself; but that's not to say that there's not real potency in the various other strategies Dysktra employs to make his audience think about subjects like global warming, tax breaks for the rich, and the Republican Invasion (sorry, Convention) in New York City earlier this year. A sustained effort at slam poetry feels a little forced, but most of the theatrical artifice lands squarely on its target, forcing even the most "Liberal" of us (as opposed to "liberal," which Dykstra argues very persuasively that Americans all are by definition; look it up) to confront our complicity in this mess we now find ourselves in.

Part harangue, part rant,  part stand-up routine, even (a little bit) part postmodern deconstruction of contemporary solo performance, Cornered & Alone is mostly this heartfelt, necessary thing: how else is an actor-playwright supposed to communicate an urgent message? One of the sad truths about the current state of American democracy is that the people who most need to hear it—by which I mean the ones who are likeliest to disagree—probably never will: too many of us seem to have forgotten that true freedom of choice happens only when we hear what all the choices are in the first place. Oh well: Dykstra's one-man show is nevertheless a welcoming harbor for the folks who will see it, and it's one that gives them—us—plenty to think about.

I suspect that there's an unassumingly charming little musical buried somewhere inside Brooklyn. Its premise offers us five street performers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, telling passers-by (us, in the audience) a story for whatever change we can spare. Their story is a fairy tale, about a little girl named Brooklyn with a big heart and a big talent who goes searching for the father she never knew. She eventually finds him, along with a villainous jealous rival and a warm-hearted "magic man" fairy godfather. She becomes famous and wealthy, but learns that what's in your heart is what matters.

Okay, it's not the most original or earth-shaking of stories; but the sincerity and earnestness of Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson, the composer-lyricist-book-writing team behind Brooklyn, never feels questionable—they deserved a producer who might have nurtured their creation into a form appropriate to its modest size and aims (a Fantasticks-sized production in an intimate off-Broadway house seems to be what's called for). Alas, they got instead a fleet of ten producing entities to collectively mount their show, and the result—as over-produced as it is over-amplified—is a horrific and gross mountain made from the slimmest and meagerest of molehills.

I mean, as The Fantasticks proved, five threadbare but hearty entertainers armed with nothing but talent and inventiveness can engage our hearts and imaginations with relative ease. But five entertainers wearing headsets, backed by unseen vocalists and a nine-piece rock band, and with what appears to be a limitless supply of props spirited away somewhere—well, these folks, who would be entirely at home on American Idol, don't engage me at all. One of the most hyped aspects of Brooklyn is that the sets (by Ray Klausen) and costumes (by Tobin Ost) are supposed to be streetwise creations crafted from items found in the local dumpster; so when the diva character shows up swathed in black plastic garbage bags and duct tape, with bright yellow "Caution Do Not Enter" tape ringing her legs at the hem of her gown, we're supposed to be delighted by the ingenuity but instead we're dismayed by the clunky vulgarity. Aside from the (possibly unintended) lewd joke implicit in this get-up, what's missing is the theatrical magic: I suspect that given the same amount of duct tape, trash bags, and bright yellow "Caution" tape, most schoolkids could come up with something more interesting than this mess. And—more to the point—I think that a troupe of five homeless people would be inclined to sell, rather than transform into costumes or sets, a haul of usable items such as appear over-and-over again in the show, either on someone's back or as someone's backdrop. So much more would have been accomplished with so much less!

The same is true for the songs, which are almost all delivered with a self-consciously glitziness that would be more appropriate for Vegas or Star Search than for a Brooklyn street corner or a Broadway musical. Most of the show's musical numbers are assigned to Eden Espinosa (who plays the title character, the young woman searching for her dad) and Ramona Keller (her rival, dangerous diva Paradice); both of these ladies sing loud but almost entirely without nuance, style, or feeling. What's missing from their performances is most evident whenever Cleavant Derricks (who plays "Streetsinger," the narrator and fairy godfather character) gets a chance to let loose with a tune, which unfortunately happens only rarely: he sings from somewhere deep within, the way he did twenty years ago when he channeled James Brown in his Tony-winning performance in Dreamgirls; he feels what he's singing and he moves with rhythm and grace, melting time away. Indeed, the chance to see Derricks on Broadway once again is probably the only compelling reason to see Brooklyn.

But there could have been more reasons—if only the producers had chosen to develop this project appropriately instead of allowing it to bloat into this big, cold, ugly monster of a show. Schoenfeld and McPherson are both novices at the very difficult task of writing an original musical, and so somebody ought to have told them that exposition needs to be dispensed with as soon as possible (here it lasts about an hour); that repeated platitudes like "Tears can grow a rose" don't make convincing song lyrics; that an ending offering some kind of clear moral or point of view might be more effective than one that's murkily gooey; that an audience will go anywhere that a show wants to take them if the ground rules are clear and internally consistent (e.g., if the streetsingers really do seem to be on the street, and not inside a multi-million-dollar Broadway musical). There's worthy raw material aplenty here—a tuneful score and some nicely turned lyrics. But it still feels alarmingly like a first draft awaiting scissors and red pen.

Certainly director Jeff Calhoun, whose work on last summer's Big River revival was so terrific, has done little to sharpen Brooklyn's structure or focus. One thing he might have done is introduce some dancing, energy being sorely lacking here; but there's almost none (there is indeed no choreography credit in the program). Kevin Anderson, an actor whose work I have admired in the past, might similarly have added some life to the proceedings as Brooklyn's drunk-addicted, Vietnam Vet dad, but he moves through his (admittedly underwritten) role like a cipher, waking up only to play at being a rock star, like an over-the-hill Adam Pascal, for a couple of musical numbers.

As things are, there are just flashes of the sweetly enthusiastic fairy story underneath all the frippery—the heart behind the hands, as one of the show's oft-repeated lyrics has it. Even under the best of circumstances, I don't think Brooklyn would ever amount to much more than a slight, sentimental, escapist diversion. But my goodness—what's wrong with that?

Brooklyn Boy is the story of a lonely and damaged man who only knows how to abuse people who love him and love people who abuse him. Donald Margulies has given us six real and complicated characters, and Daniel Sullivan’s direction brings this uncomfortable world into three dimensions.

Eric Weiss’s new novel is on the bestseller list. His career is taking off, but his writer wife is divorcing him because she feels like a failure and his dying father ignores Eric’s success. After visiting his father in the hospital, Eric meets his old Bar Mitzvah buddy Ira in the cafeteria. Ira still lives in his parents' house and runs the deli his father left him. He has forgotten nothing about their childhood, and has read every book Eric has published. Eric meets Ira twice during the play, and both times, Ira tries to get Eric to admit his feelings and pray with him, and both times Eric gets so angry he almost hits him.

From his first encounter with Ira, Eric goes to meet his wife Nina to pick up what’s left of his belongings. You feel the whole relationship in one scene. I doubt you’ll be more convinced a marriage is over by any other work of literature.

The next time we see him, Eric is in Los Angeles on the next leg of his book tour. He meets a college student named Alison at his book reading and brings her back to his hotel room. Despite the fact that she’s vivacious, dressed to kill, and infatuated with him, he spends most of the scene parked in a chair with his arms crossed over his chest. As the scene goes on they feign casualness as they remove shoes, jackets, though that’s as far as they get. There is tension in the air, but it isn’t exactly sexual.

From there, we get an extraneous scene in the producer’s office. Though Mimi Leiber as an all-business producer and Kevin Isola as the actor of the moment each play their parts to the hilt, by this point we’ve seen enough of Eric’s pattern to be able to predict the unhappy ending.

In all the scenes, you know at the start the relationship is over. The characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue sparkles, but we know Eric will resist anything offered to him, and grab at anything he can’t have. This heavy inevitability causes the play to drag, which is a shame, because the characters are specific, vibrant, and the cast is a joy. Adam Arkin pays attention to every second of Eric’s struggles, allowing us into this complex being who longs for love he can’t believe in. Allan Miller’s dismissive father is clearly hiding something deeper, Polly Draper has Nina love Eric even when she can’t stand the sight of him, and Arye Gross as Ira brings a terrible sadness to his doglike devotion. Ari Graynor as Alison is especially delicious. She’s a valley girl, she’s driven, she’s dreamy, she’s pretentious, she’s shallow, and she has a complicated past. She’s constantly surprising—one moment she’s telling him how kids her age aren’t interested in literature and how can a guy like him get out of bed in the morning, and the next moment it turns out her favorite book of his is "The Aerie," by all accounts his most obtuse and pretentious work. Margulies has created a dense character with Alison, and Ari Graynor hits not only the notes but the silences in between.

In the very last scene, Margulies tries to let Eric come to terms with his past, his family, and his Judaism, but ultimately, Brooklyn Boy is not a play about revisiting the past, or a play about the dying. Every person and relationship that Eric has is already so close to dead it’s beyond saving. And every possible spark of life, like his relationship with Ira or Alison or the possibility of his movie career, he kills during the course of the play. Eric, as well as Margulies, is not exploring his home or his past so much as admitting its loss, packing up the house, moving on. Life is something that will need to be created again.

Be careful who you decide to have a one night stand with—she may turn out to have a life far more complex and messed-up than you could ever imagine. That’s just what happens to Gabriel, the unsuspecting young man who wakes up after a night of drunken sex to realize that Mary Jen, his partner in crime (or rather in bed), is just this side of totally nuts. Just how crazy Mary Jen really is, and just how “normal” Gabriel, are slowly revealed in Buck Fever, the new play by Juan C. Sanchez having its premiere with the Terra Nova Collective at the Blue Heron.

The script is tightly written. Sanchez has a great ear for modern dialogue, with just enough quirks given to the characters to make them unique. He has created four very specific people—each with a voice, a past, and a way of dealing with the world. Gabriel, the kind young man who starts off the play walking around Mary Jen's apartment, reveling in his sexual conquest, comes off initially as a bit of a twit, but as the play moves along, we begin to see that he is sad and lonely, with a tragedy in his past. But this is nothing compared to the erratic Mary Jen: she comes off as a severely neurotic, spoiled little girl/woman. As her own story becomes clear, she attains a sympathy and sorrow from both Gabriel and the audience.

The first part of the play deals with the uncomfortable moments that are always inherent in a one-night stand when the night is over and the bright light of day shines on the face of the strangers who spent the night in the most intimate of settings. It’s a bit like a duel, with each person sizing up the other, trying to find out who it was they decided to get naked with. This goes on for awhile, and the games they play with each other get stranger and crueler—at one point, Mary Jen bets Gabriel, who doesn’t drink, that he can’t down half a bottle of vodka. Gabriel takes the bait, and—in a moment that is affecting and gut-wrenching to watch—chugs the vodka. Right about then, Mary Jen’s parents—her mother and step-father—show up for an unannounced visit. From there, things gets interesting: tension ratchets up, secrets are revealed, and—well, I don’t want to give any more away. Suffice to say, the more dramatic elements of the story are saved for the second half of the play.

Karin Wolfe, who plays the mother Estelle, is wonderful. Estelle is the stereotypical Midwestern mother—oblivious to the real world, smartly dressed, eager to please, and somehow a little sad at all times. The reason for the sadness comes out, and when it is revealed, Wolfe delivers a powerful portrayal of a woman caught in a very difficult situation. As Aaron, the creepy step-father—why is it that the step-relations are always the bad ones?—Gregory Seel is exceptionally slimy, and I mean that as a compliment. Playing a mean, twisted man is difficult for an actor to do without becoming a two-dimensional cartoon, but Seel manages to do just that. As Gabriel, the innocent young man named after an avenging angel, Ron Garcia is likeable, wide-eyed, and painfully earnest. Charlotte Purser, as the flighty Mary Jen, warms up to her role as the play progresses.

The design is excellent. Michael Boll, Sarah Pearline, and Jessica Jahn create a realistic world—a modern, run-down apartment occupied by a possibly alcoholic waitress in Miami.

Terra Nova is to be commended for having the guts to produce a play that covers some really uncomfortable subjects. I look forward to seeing what they offer us next.

If you're ready to be bowled over by a music-theatre experience that's original, challenging, and explosively exciting, then head immediately to Fovea Floods' new production Bull Spears. I can't remember being so viscerally struck by a musical since Des McAnuff's Tommy ten years ago; Bull Spears' creator, author-composer-director Josh Chambers, is an authentic visionary whose work should soon be making a giant impact on the face of American theatre. What makes it unique—and I'm choosing this word carefully—is that it's a musical with wall-to-wall music, but very few words. And it's a multimedia performance where live actors are far and away the most impressive and important component.

This show isn't like anything I've ever seen. It begins even before it starts: as the audience settles in, a silent movie plays on screens at either end of the stage, synched to a vaguely new-wave-y soundtrack. It depicts a group of young people walking through a field or down a road. Striking images catch the eye: one of the young men sits on a portico wearing a dunce cap; three more young men doff cowboy hats in unison; a mysterious hooded woman turns up. We have no idea why we're watching this arrestingly quiet, almost dull video. But we will.

The play proper is divided into three acts. The first takes place in the mythical town of Bull Spears, Nevada—a very rough cowboy town under the thumb of Horse Dick, a villain so vile that he's actually branded the barmaids. The action takes place in a saloon run by the voluptuous Milky Hills, and mostly concerns the night that a stranger named One Pump shows up, only to land in the crossfire of a brawl engineered by Horse Dick. One Pump resists fighting at first (in a lip-synched mod-faux-country-&-western song whose refrain goes, "I don't want to be a cowboy tonight"). But eventually he has to, and he prevails.

In Act Two, One Pump and Milky Hills have left Bull Spears for Stab Mountain, outside town. This spooky place is haunted by the ghosts of the people we saw in that video, and presided over by scary gargoylish creatures who seem to harvest snakes from their bellies. Another weird inhabitant, called Bonnet, gives our hero and heroine a task—to bring back the only living thing that grows on Stab Mountain, a single flower. Their nightmarish fairy tale mission puts them in grave danger, but again, they prevail.

The final segment is laid in Knife City, a terrible apocalyptic place run by a mayor called Roué who looks like a cross between Snidely Whiplash and Casanova. With a pair of fiendish assistants, he has repressed a good deal of the town's population, imprisoning some of them in a "rehabilitation" facility called the Auditorium. One Pump arrives to try to rescue one of the rebellious inmates and to try to find a hopeful future for Milky White's newborn baby (for nine months have passed).

The above synopsis can hardly do Bull Spears justice—in tableau after tableau and in precisely, thrillingly choreographed fight and movement sequences, Chambers and his cast do much more than merely tell a story; this show is finally more conjuration and evocation than narrative. Bull Spears is, above all else, a theatre experience that demands to be experienced; and though it trades in spectacular imagery (of birds, of knives and other weapons, of awesome destruction and cruelty), and though it is clearly about something (violence, American iconography gone terribly awry, the nurturing power of nature), it is at heart a visceral thing. Bull Spears reclaims musical theatre for the intellectually curious; its eclectic, genre-defying, rock-inflected score redefines musical theatre composition for a new generation. This is breathtakingly original material; not a trace of imitation Sondheim anywhere.

Of course, Chambers has not created this in a vacuum: Fovea Floods, the company he runs with co-artistic director Timothy Fannon, has been putting up extraordinary work for years now. Designers Jared Klein (lighting and video), Jay Maury (sound), Sue Kessler (sets), Leah Piehl (costumes), and Adam Fleming (animation) all make key contributions here, creating a world—or rather, three worlds—for this play that are mindblowingly vivid, particularly given the constraints of off-off-Broadway. Nine remarkable actors bring Bull Spears to life: Noel Joseph Allain, Linsey Bostwick, Tim Fannon, Justin Fayne, Richard Hawk, Sue Kessler, Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly, Cate Owren, Jane Pickett, and Will Schmerge comprise this formidable ensemble, all of whom seem able to rise to whatever task Chambers puts to them, from the dazzlingly complicated choreography (fight and dance) to the intense, deeply-felt moments of stillness that pull us up short from time to time here.

Alright, enough from me; discover Bull Spears for yourself and get excited about the future of musical theatre at first-hand. And to producers and artistic directors: take note. This is something special that merits your attention.

I love urban legends and ridiculous tabloid gossip. Purely for their entertainment value, mind you: I don’t buy into them, but some people do. Playwright Todd Carlstrom takes a historical tabloid headline (that is evidently well documented) and turns it into a very funny postmodern comedy written entirely in blank verse. It is running as part of the Spring Fever Festival down in the Lower East Side at CSV Cultural Center.

Bunnies Part 1 is set in the year 1726 in England. We meet a young pregnant woman who has decided to con everyone into believing that she is giving birth to bunnies. Not whole bunnies, mind you, but bunny parts (and she shoots them across the room). Her motive is that she is looking for some sort of hand-out. She has her husband bring one of her "birthed" bunny fragments to a local doctor, who checks it out and is quickly convinced of its authenticity. He writes a letter to other doctors and that letter eventually makes it all the way to the King. The King dispatches his Royal Anatomist to validate the story. The Royal Anatomist elicits the help of a pop doctor who wants nothing more than to make himself famous over a bizarre story like this. In the end the Royal Anatomist’s skepticism is no match for the pop doctor’s Unbridled Lust for Power (capitalized because Unbridled Lust for Power is actually a character in this play). That concludes Part 1 of the story. Part 2 is to be released soon.

Carlstrom is a master at writing the eloquence of 18th century King’s English. The show’s postmodern style matches the quirkiness of its premise and Carlstrom delivers some odd yet stageworthy characters, like a newspaper that reads itself and the personifications of Unbridled Lust for Power and Good Sense. The play shines some light on why people have a need to believe in something extraordinary while also illuminating why other people have a need to deceive. Carlstrom’s imagination is so out there that I was immediately sucked in and I found myself craving an endless stream of whimsical events.

Thankfully, director/costumer/sound designer Tomi Tsunoda envisioned the same sort of whimsical world that I craved. She creates an atmosphere where everything is tongue-in-cheek and the only thing of any value is kitsch value. From the snappy Esquivel played during all 18 scene changes to the über-campy costumes, Tsunoda’s vision of a postmodern historical tabloid story hits right on the mark.

The ensemble also hits the mark. It is a fairly large cast and most play multiple roles. Richard Bubbico grabs a lot of attention as local doctor John Howard, and is meant to be the character with whom we identify as the story unfolds. Douglas R. Paulson balances subtlety and spunk perfectly as the pop doctor in search of fame. Rory Sheridan and Julie Katz are absolutely hilarious in every role they touch. Jay Gaussoin is also very funny as the barely coherent King George. But for me it is Laura Esposito who steals the night as the bunny-squirting Mary Toft.

Bunnies Part 1 is without a doubt a funny and highly imaginative show. I could see the elements of good writing, acting and directing coming together to form something greater than its parts, like all the flying bunny parts coming together to make a rabbit. The producing company, breedingground productions, presents this festival in the hopes that they can help other self-producing artists get their stuff out there. I think that’s a great cause, so check this work out.

"Love is evil spelled backwards and wrong." So says Earth, an introspective New Age hippie who is one of the unlikely characters stuck for the night in a remote Nevada motel in Kelly McAllister's magnificent new play Burning the Old Man. He also says that most things in life "take short" (as opposed to long); he's a guy who is searching for words to live by. So is Marty, the play's central figure; he likes "This, too, shall pass" as a watch-cry.

If only things could be this easy. Right after Earth says what he says about love, his girlfriend Candy says, simply and quietly: "Not Always." Ah, as someone said: there's the rub. Burning the Old Man is about the "shall passes" and "take shorts" and "not alwayses" that comprise a life: the faulty ways we think we know other people and our inability to make ourselves known to others: the messy, funny, tragic consequences of choice, destiny, and inertia. Disarmingly intimate—six characters in a single setting in a 24-hour period—it's also enormously epic: in this, his third full-length play (after Last Call and Muse of Fire), McAllister tackles two of the most essential questions of the human experience. What are we doing here? And why do we have to leave?

Two brothers, Marty and Robert, are on their way to the Burning Man festival, where they will deposit their late father's ashes, in accordance with his final wishes. Marty and Robert are, if not exactly estranged, strangers to one another; they don't get along and this trip is not going smoothly. When Robert carelessly drops a joint, he accidentally sets the car on fire; grabbing their father's remains and retrieving Robert's backpack, they run into the desolate Delphi Motel in search of assistance. While they shout at each other, the car explodes; the impact takes out the telephone lines. With no around but the motel's sole employee, the spunky but subdued Jo, the men are stranded. And so they spend the day with Jo, who serves them Thai food and tries to find her old original cast albums (Robert requests Sweeney Todd) and plays Trivial Pursuit with them while they fitfully quarrel and snipe at one another (and occasionally at her, too).

Help arrives in the unexpected persons of Candy and Earth, latter-day beatniks who are also on their way to the festival. They promise to take Marty, Robert, and Dad's ashes with them the next morning—they don't drive after sundown—and in the interim proceed to shake everybody's foundations with their goofball profundity. Candy says she talks to the desert and the stars and Earth announces that telephones frighten him. The pair lead the others in a "vespers" service in which they say goodbye to the troubles of today and look toward the opportunities of tomorrow. Marty and Robert share a rare moment of fraternal connection as they stifle their laughter, as if silently saying to each other "Can you believe these wackos?" But the transformations that Candy and Earth manage to bring about prove to be much deeper and more meaningful.

I won't tell you more about what happens except that Jo's scary bear of a husband, Eddie, also turns up, adding new complications to the escalating crisis that Marty and Robert seem to be facing. The brothers share memories and recriminations as they try to figure out their father's life and what it meant to each of them; and also what their own lives might mean. McAllister doesn't believe in simple solutions or neat resolutions; he understands that human existence is a barrage of random stuff that can feel easy or hard depending on so many things, internal fortitude being  just one (very significant) component. The result is a very grown-up drama about two men resisting growing up. The wisdom, compassion, and emotional resonance in Burning the Old Man bring to mind works as disparate as Shepard's True West, Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, and most of the plays of Eugene O'Neill (including Beyond the Horizon, with which this piece alternates in repertory at Boomerang Theatre Company).

Tim Errickson's production is superb, staged with economy and assurance. Harlan Penn's simple, rustic motel lobby set and Carrie Wood's naturalistic lighting provide a realistic backdrop for the almost magical events of Marty and Robert's crazy day. (Cheryl McCarron's costumes, especially those for Candy and Earth, provide both realism and magic.) The actors are splendid: Brett Christiansen (Robert) and Timothy McCracken (Marty) convince us decisively that they are brothers, for one thing, while very carefully and resolutely defining the complex personalities of these two very different siblings. Sara Thigpen is terrific as Jo, stealing our attention more than once with her brilliantly delineated reactions—this is a woman who doesn't often initiate events but rather makes the best of the cards she's dealt, and we understand that as we watch her gaze offstage at the brothers' car exploding, while the two men bicker obliviously. John C. Fitzmaurice is spot-on as the larger-than-life Eddie, a hulking bulldog of a man whose bark is so ferocious that we can't help but worry a little bit about his bite. As Candy and Earth, Christine Goodman and Philip Emeott are spectacularly good, revealing the essential earnestness and intelligence of this pair of hilariously dippy eccentrics.

Burning the Old Man is so warm and smart and compelling and entertaining that it's going to be hard for other new plays this fall to equal it; this is a show that producers ought to be checking out for a richly-deserved life following this too brief engagement at Center Stage. Full of humor and improbable occurrences and extraordinary characters and a humongous pile of questions, it's also full of answers, if you just listen and look in the right places. Like life...

The first thing that strikes the audience about La MaMa’s production of Butter Melts Away My Letters, a dance-theatre work conceived and directed by Gian Marco Lo Forte, is the set. A large, two-story frame with curtains in front, it seems almost oppressive on the small, black stage. The story begins mostly in flashback. The adult actors are children, and we learn a little about each character’s past: a young girl is touched inappropriately by an adult; a young boy comes to life when he puts on a girl’s dress for the first time. Soon the curtains on the bottom level open, revealing three small rooms, each lit with a stark red light bulb. The three main actors/dancers are now young adult prostitutes, and the expectedly dark events unfold in this sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating production.

The stories are told through dance, music, spoken word, and voiceover narration. Butter Melts is neither fully a play nor fully a flat-out dance piece. In achieving this hybrid of art forms, the production is mostly successful. Choreographed by Stephanie Rafferty, the performers move cleanly between natural movement and dance. When they occasionally speak, it seems fitting. Much of the story, though, is told through a poorly recorded voiceover narration that is often difficult to understand, and some of the story is missed.

The three hustlers are played by Marissa Lichwick, Christopher Mehmed, and Christopher Wild, each stripping down and redressing to show the passage of time and the movement from one compartment of their lives to another, or the accommodation of their clients’ fantasies. The three move nicely together, evoking childish desire one moment and sinewy sexuality the next. There is a dark, fluid bond between them that is about both shared experience and shared longing. They are each dreaming of a future, but something in the past is holding them back. The frustration in their body movement is palpable. In one sweet scene, the three, in white boxers, gather in the upstairs kitchen one morning, and share their dreams, before beginning another workday.

What is missing most from the piece is detail. The form used here doesn’t seem to lend itself to intricate plot or personal histories. The stories, therefore, all seem to be about archetypes: the sexually confused John, the violent street hustler, the pained transgender, the abused young girl. There is nothing really new here about the world of prostitution, and the variety of characters who inhabit it; a world that is much broader and more diverse than the quaint and predictably tragic stories told here. Also, at about fifty-five minutes running time, it is hard to really flesh out more detail. The piece would be more satisfying as part of a longer evening of dance-theatre, all, perhaps, dealing with a similar theme.

Sandy is 38, Jewish, about to lose her job, and desperately trying to get her boyfriend, Richard, to divorce his wife and marry her. Howie, her eldest brother, is a good-natured but not-too-bright fellow under the thumb of his own wife, Florence. Dave, the middle brother, is a repressed, buttoned-up college professor married to a chirpy, perpetual psychology student named Chris. Steve, the youngest brother, is an osteopath in an open marriage with a Catholic wife in a California whose values and lifestyle he has wholeheartedly embraced. On a Thursday between Christmas and New Year's, these four siblings reunite—for the first time in years—to visit their mother, Ethel, who is in a hospital following a bad auto accident. Together, they decide to take her off life support, and then they head to her modest South Florida condo to await news from the doctor. It comes soon afterward, and everyone says:

Yippee!

For Ethel was a controlling, manipulative, uncommunicative tyrant, not much beloved by her scrappy, dysfunctional family. And Bye, Mom!, the first work of theatre by longtime gardening book author Susan Austin Roth, is a devilishly irreverent little comedy about grieving and getting on with life. A little bit sitcommy, a little bit over-the-top, and not nearly so "dark" or "nasty" as its author seems to think, it's a pleasing and entertaining work and a pretty impressive playwriting debut. Under Yanna Kroyt Brandt's fast-paced direction, it's the occasion for some tour de force performances by a company of experienced actors who seem to be having as much of a ball as the audience.

Catherine Curtin, whom I have only ever seen in heavy dramas, has the central role of Sandy; she's hilarious yet believable throughout, whether trading insults with her brothers, manipulating her stolid accountant boyfriend Richard, or—most memorably—warding off her mother's best pal Teddy's efforts to steal a TV set from the less-than-impressive estate. Stephen Bradbury is fine as Richard, a man who has his work cut out for him, apparently really in love with this bundle of neuroses and willing to step up to the plate and marry her—pending favorable financial conditions, that is.

Michael Gnat and Lucy McMichael feel exactly like a married couple as Dave and Chris, and both have telling moments when their characters let loose with what's really happening inside their heads, with results that are at once funny and touching. Robert Heller, as older brother Howie, is mostly a sweetly quiet presence, until he finally has something to get off his chest at the play's climax, and then he's authentically affecting. Norma Rockwood, as the grasping little old neighbor lady Teddy, is a hoot.

But it's Rob Sedgwick who's been assigned the most colorful role in Bye, Mom!, and he runs with it like a pro. His Steve is a bundle of eccentric nuttiness, wavering from shaky, frenetic insecurity to drug-and-drink-addled exuberance to the cool, detached, centeredness to which he aspires but only very seldom achieves. Sedgwick's performance brings to mind the classic antic hippie characters inhabited by Dick Shawn in his prime (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; The Producers). It's a delight to watch.

Roth's plotting is not as strong as her characterizations—a surprising family secret that is revealed in Act Two, Scene One feels like it's included only because Roth thinks she's supposed to have one. She should have more confidence in her (considerable) ability to conjure an almost Chekhovian picture of the absurd collision of a family whose deep and unshakable love for one another makes them weirdly functional against the odds. By the end of Bye, Mom!, we've come to believe in and like her exaggerated creations, and are rooting for their happiness. That's a fine accomplishment for any mother.

I always find it interesting to see adaptations of classic plays. In fact I rarely go see a classic play unless I know the producing company has done something new with it. That said, Gamelan Dharmaswara’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest unquestionably flames amazement throughout La MaMa’s Annex Theatre.

Caliban Remembers: A Balinese Tempest is told through the memories of the deformed beast Caliban a year after Prospero has left the island. He wallows in the misery of his loneliness and reenacts the days before Prospero left. The story is told using masked actors and shadow puppets. However, there is not a screen for the puppets but just a façade with a string drawn across it. This is a sacred form of Balinese puppetry known as Wayang Lemah. I must admit that I was a bit disappointed with this style. I was looking forward to the use of shadows. Granted, there is a screen with an eternal flame burning behind it that is used to create some shadow effects, but it is not utilized nearly enough. Instead, Wayang Lemah sort of resembles a Balinese version of a “Punch and Judy” show. I Nyoman Catra (who plays Caliban) does an outstanding job in his characterizations, but the way he knocks the puppets together when they are supposed to be hitting each other reminded me of a kid making his Hotwheels wreck into each other.

There is a huge orchestra that plays traditional Balinese music. Not all of it appealed to me. There are a lot of clanging instruments and drums that at some points sounded somewhat noisy. I was relieved when someone stood up and played a single flute. But the dancing most certainly appealed to me. The dancers are all outfitted in exquisite Balinese garb and their choreography in the banquet and the wedding reception scenes is definitely a highlight of the show. The costumes for the production are a colorful and detailed eyeful. And the masks are extraordinary; ranging from character-appropriate half masks to elaborate full headdresses.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show is the translation of the shadow puppets into masked actors. There is a string drawn across the width of the stage and the actors all perform on a two dimensional plane. Many of them, though not all, even hold their arms as if they were shadow puppets. The acting is very presentational. The lovers are instantly in love, the fops are boldly foppish, and so on. I especially liked Troy Lescher as Trinculo, Nadia Mahdi as Stephano, and Erica Giovinazzo as Miranda. Mahdi in particular held a posture that for most humans would require a third leg. Co-directors Ron Jenkins and I Nyoman Catra keep the acting style consistent. It has a de-familiarizing effect that forces one to contemplate the play’s themes.

One of the major themes is forgiveness of those who have done you wrong. Few Americans know about the Balinese reaction to the terrorist attacks on one of their resort hotels. Instead of answering bombs with bombs, they looked to themselves and asked what they might have done to contribute to the cause of the violent act directed at them. As Prospero says, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge as my own.” Perhaps if we as Americans were to turn the question of what we do to bring this sort of hatred upon ourselves, we might follow the Balinese example and be able to actually win the war on terrorism without having to fight it.

Despite playing the horniest man who ever ruled Rome, decked out in a costume that is down to one codpiece by 8:30, André De Shields’s presence as the Roman Emperor and title character in Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Caligula comprises far more than skin and shape. He looms powerfully as he struts amongst the audience, microphone in hand, seducing ladies, asking in a silky baritone which of them has made love with an animal. In this play that is part episodic biography, part cabaret, De Shields passionately rivets our focus with skills that he has honed over 35+ years as a theatre star. Such skills are what keeps his Emperor dangerous, wolfish, and sexy, for De Shields stokes the megalomaniacal fire in Caligula until it extinguishes with his final breath.

His self-love is ferociously charismatic, and we believe him when he warns that monotheistic religion is robbing us of opportunities to indulge in the senses, where life and power can be found. Seductively, he lets us feel important, us little people. He even tells us we are gods when we dance, drink, and fornicate. Jesus, on the other hand, preaches peace, love, and compassion, but doesn’t hand over much of a sense of power with his philosophy—Caligula opines that his is the better deal. After all, if everybody in Rome needs a one-god focal point, why not let it be him, a man of flesh and blood who loves to sin? It sounds a lot more fun. Sure, free love isn’t free if he has the power to demand it, but as the Emperor says, “Slavery is hot.”

A festive orgy party frames the evening, the last of Caligula’s notorious “entertainments.” Fearing warnings that the population and senate are increasingly malcontented by his narcissism, the Emperor desperately attempts to cram every conceivable indulgence into the night’s revelry, as an all-out final assault on the humility so en vogue with the masses. He especially galls them by naming his horse head of the Senate. Another animal he thrusts into esteem, so to speak, is the bonobo chimpanzee, mankind’s closest genetic relative amongst the apes. Though the bonobos do not roam beyond Africa’s Congo Basin, knowledge of their exploits have reached the Caligulan court, where their praises are sung—particularly for the chimps’ appetite for sexual variety in both pleasure and position.

Yet Caligula remains haunted by excesses that carry too far, such as his ultimate expression of “pure” love, knifing Drusilla, his sister and incestuous lover. Caligula later works himself into murderous fury while coaxing audience members onto the stage to dance in a “cosmic pool of love”; he knows that not everyone will do so, and therefore, it follows by his fraying logic, love him. When he begins to violently crack a whip at members of his own court, he starts an avalanche of resentment that culminates with his murder.

Alfred Preisser (CTH’s artistic director) and Randy Weiner have written this play with music as a vehicle for De Shields’s showmanship, and Preisser as director has surrounded him with a young supporting cast of Broadway-caliber singers and dancers. The opulent set and lighting, by Troy Hourie and Ben Stanton respectively, lend a perfect quasi-Vegas glitz to the evening. Special kudos must also be given to the designers of sequences that got applause for sheer spectacle: choreographer Angela Lewis for the party’s opening, Afro-rhythmic dance number; and fight choreographer Teel James Glenn for his wrestling scene, featuring a main card bout between Caligula and Jesus (Noshir Dalal).

Preisser, Weiner, and De Shields deftly use the cabaret format’s informality to give the show a dry hipster wit, much appreciated in these times when the zeitgeist’s insatiable craving for lurid history (gasp, was Lincoln gay?) has grown wearisome. The play is not rooted in a rigid time period or culture, and therefore professional wrestling matches between deity and dictator are fair and relevant game, as are references to modern moon science, DNA composition, and the story’s notoriously carnal 1979 film version. It is De Shields and his delivery, though, that truly keep the show racing and unpredictable, and he commands our attention thoroughly enough to make each new outlandishness a delight. Too savvy to rely solely on shock value, as a less-skilled performer might, he gives Emperor Caligula the moxie of a rock star, and we happily slide into our groupie roles.

CaribBeing, a solo show conceived, written, and performed by Tessa Martin, and directed by Bill Van Horn, fits very well in the small midtown Jewel Box Theatre. The piece asks for an intimate space where the actress can transform herself into Caribbean people telling their hi/stories in front of an audience allowed to witness the transitions into various idiosyncratic personalities.

The frame used for the "visit" into characters' lives is a regularly scheduled TV program interrupted by real life interviews and satirical sketches meant to elevate the debate of cultural wars and offer insights into matters of identity and obstacles to cultural unity.

The show takes the audience on a journey from the Caribbean television to the Bechinche Salon in East Harlem, to the underpaid West Indian babysitters on the Upper East Side, to a Haitian demonstration in Lower Manhattan, to the Cuban community in West New York, and back on the air.

Tessa Martin is funny and versatile, succeeding in making this cross-gender, cross-ethnic trip (where "leisure" is not the key word but "social awareness") into a fast-moving Caribbean experience.

On a more general level, the production is a meaningful portrayal of the immigrant experience in cosmopolitan New York City. It reminds me of Sarah Jones' bridge & tunnel, a highly acclaimed performance that deals with some of the same issues: the race for a green-card, the ten-year wait for getting one, the humiliation endured for the sake of one's children's future, the difference between people’s status at home and in America, the struggle for survival, the label of "exoticism," the frictions inside one's own community, the omnipresent stereotypes, the nightmare of the American Dream, etc.

That immigrant feeling of belonging nowhere or in-between is conveyed in a light, positive manner by Tessa Martin. As I do believe that comedy is a strong way of staging tragedy, I find CaribBeing actual, effective, well-done, and necessary.

Caz Dies Alone is a sweet, sad, touching, funny, achingly intimate play: sitting in the audience, it really does feel like you're eavesdropping, or peeping through a keyhole, at actual people caught in actual moments of living their lives and being human. It's about two young men in their 20s, Mike and Tom. We don't know much about them except that they're somehow involved in show business (on the periphery; nobody's even close to famous here) and that they live together in a big underdeveloped loft in an outer borough (Brooklyn, I think). As the play begins—at a party that Mike and Tom have thrown for themselves at their apartment—Mike breaks the news that their intended third roommate has bailed out on them, and that they need to find a new one, fast.

By the next scene, they have done just that. Her name is Fran (short for Francesca, though I think the only way we know this is from the program). She's a wannabe dancer with a whiny voice just this side of really annoying; good-hearted but a little bit ditzy.

Eventually it becomes clear that Mike has become kind of infatuated with Fran, but he's totally unwilling/unable to do anything about it. He has a sort-of girlfriend, Jasmine; but the main reason he won't move on the Fran front is because of a "rooommate code" that exists in his head (if nowhere else). Meanwhile, after a night of drinking with (of all people) Jasmine, Fran admits to Tom that she has a crush on him, and after only a little bit of tentativeness, they act on her impulse. Tom is in a relationship—with Jane, a co-worker/friend who evolved into a girlfriend after a long platonic stretch.

What's great about Caz Dies Alone is the way this tangle of relationships is explored. We watch these characters, paired and grouped in various combinations, mostly at Mike and Tom's apartment but occasionally in more public settings. They talk; or more often they attempt to talk, but barely manage the meagerest of sentences; sometimes they don't talk at all. Caz zeroes in on the truth of communication, which is that people are mostly inarticulate but always saying something: this is a play about listening, about second-guessing, about missing connections; about the miracle of making a connection—a miracle because it's so darned hard to do. The greatest scenes in this play are the ones with the least amount of dialogue: Jane and Tom, awkwardly silent on a couch after a date, trying to decide when/if to make the first romantic move, gauging where they are in the relationship—is this the moment?—with strained eloquence that we can read on their faces even if they can't. Or Tom and Fran, on the night when she makes her pass at him. Or Tom and Jane again, at a bar, celebrating his performance at a poetry slam. Or Mike, by himself, trying to comprehend why Fran picked Tom over him, why Jasmine is going away, why he is apparently going to be alone forever. (I should mention that "Caz" is his nickname.)

Stuff happens and people move forward in time and maybe even make some progress, but ultimately little really changes for anyone in Caz Dies Alone. Which is precisely right: this is a play about the moments in between momentous events. Indeed, where the play falters (which it does only very rarely) is in trying to impose too pat an "ending" on its characters.

Now I need to say a word about process, because the way that Caz Dies Alone was created greatly informs its final state. Director Robert Davenport has adapted the methodologies of British playwright/director Mike Leigh, whereby the actors, under his guidance, improvise the characters and then devise situations and relationships for them. Davenport's crew made this play from the ground up in just eight weeks, which is remarkable in and of itself. But the raw immediacy that they've achieved is the real payoff--a very happy accident indeed (to borrow the apt name that Davenport has given his troupe), brought forth by hard work and splendid karma: great art bursting forth seemingly spontaneously from a fortuitous collision of personalities, minds, and spirits.

Of course, part of Davenport's genius is assembling the players, and the quintet responsible for Caz Dies Alone is formidable. Mike is played by Andrew Cassese, a veteran of the Revenge of the Nerds movies, who makes Mike kind of a Nerd ten years on—buttoned-up, self-contained, and terribly afraid.  Lawrence Jansen is astonishing as Tom, letting us into this man's head like a dream interpreter: his is one of the finest performances in New York this season. The women—Anna Cody (Jasmine), Tricia McAlpin (Jane), and especially Laura Flanagan (Fran)—are equally impressive.

I've seen Davenport's two previous efforts, both created with the same techniques, neither nearly so satisfying. With Caz Dies Alone, he's nailed it, and proved how well his process can work.

Edmond Rostand is certainly best known for writing Cyrano De Bergerac; his other works have received little attention over the years, and are rarely produced. Chantecler, for example, was last produced in New York 94 years ago, back in 1911. The Adhesive Theater Project has taken on the noble goal of resurrecting this play, and have done so with a production that relies heavily on puppetry, spectacle, and multimedia. Rostand’s classic fable doesn’t perfectly fit the modern, experimental style of this production, but both the story and this style of theatre are more interesting than one might suspect.

Chantecler is the tale of a rooster who believes that his “Cock-a-doodle-oo” causes the sun to rise each morning. He’s envied and praised by the other farmyard animals, and reviled by the nocturnal denizens of the nearby forest. A love story blossoms between Chantecler (Orion Taraban) and a wild Guinea Hen (Drae Campbell), while an envious Blackbird (Charles Goonan) schemes with the owls to kill Chantecler. The whole thing is, of course, an allegory about pride, and jealousy in 19th century French society.

Like any well-written satire, its subject matter holds up after a hundred years. There's a theme about individuality (common in Rostand's work) which might even be more appropriate now then in the 19th century. Chantecler is a likeable protagonist and his self-determination is sympathetic to modern audiences. The talk of fashion, arrogance, and two-faced sycophants still rings true in our society. (The other roosters just be playa haters, if you follow my vernacular.

The Adhesive Theatre Project uses a new translation by Kay Nolte Smith. It isn't too modernized, or Americanized, so the show maintains a timeless quality, and can be interpreted as either present day America or Rostand’s France. Smith has even managed to work in the occasional bit of rhyming dialogue.

To bring the animals to life, Adhesive uses puppetry and elaborate costumes. Principal characters like the titular rooster, the Guinea Hen and the Blackbird are dressed in human clothes, with a few bird-like accoutrements, such as feathered hats, to hint at their animality. The supporting characters are mostly puppets or actors in full-body animal outfits. The puppetry is quite impressive, and there's a large cast of puppeteers on hand to bring the whole menagerie to life. Aaron Unger, in particular, stands out as a puppeteer (his Gander is one of the show's first visual treats). There aree also some animals represented by elaborate masks and mechanical appendages: the Owl Dukes wear metal helmets with creepy eyes that flash in the dark. And let's not forget the couple of outfits with moving robotic appendages, like the owl wings that spread out by themselves, powered by pneumatics.

All of this spectacle does tend to lose its impact as the show runs on. Running just shy of two and half hours, some of the bits overstay their welcome. Act Two starts with a lengthy routine in which dozens of different roosters show up at a party; all of them are played by one actor who rapidly changes costumes dozens of times. This bit seems to go on forever, with the novelty of Velcro costume pieces being rapidly stuck to a guy in a rooster suit wearing off long before the scene is over.

On the other hand, there are several innovative multimedia features to the show that don’t overstay their welcome. The back wall of the set holds a projection screen that is used to turn night into day, among a few other things. A live projectionist mixes projections during the show, creating an effect much like animation, only live, in real-time. There also is a live band providing constant incidental music and accompaniment for the handful of short songs in the script. The music adds a cinematic feel to the evening, and is one of the more effective elements of the production. The orchestra also provides sound effects too (e.g., a drumbeat for a gunshot, etc.)

At times it seems as though the show is centered more on the stylized concept, rather than on Rostand’s story. This doesn’t make a bad show, in fact, Chantecler is very entertaining, but isn’t necessarily what Rostand fans might be looking for in the rare production of his work. Then again, it might be their only chance to see Chantecler for another 94 years.

Since it is so well understood and appreciated by mainstream audiences, we tend to forget one important fact about realism: it is experimental. Directors did not start dragging kitchen chairs onto stages, nor writers start seeding their plays with vulgar colloquialisms until well into the 19th century, a mere yesterday in historical terms. Shakespeare may have written about holding the glass up to nature, but he seldom did just that. He, like every other poet of the stage for millennia, conceived ideal characters, walked them through ideal plots, and gave them ideal speeches to say.

This remains true to a degree. As plodding and prosaic as some of us find the dialogue in Death of a Salesman, one has little doubt that Willie Loman’s story and the manner in which it is told sprang from the head of Arthur Miller. Real realism, literal, empirical reproduction of actual human acts and deeds performed onstage is damned weird. Real life, unshaped by the artistic hand, is strange and unfamiliar to us in its tedium. Beckett and Pinter (though neither could be accused of leaving any material “unshaped”) recognized the uncanny, voyeuristic power of presenting virtually nothing onstage. The meaningless, the mundane, the vague, the unexplained, the boring… the line between true realism and absurdism can often be hair-thin or even nonexistent.

If for no other reason than that, Collective Unconscious’s Charlie Victor Romeo would be a unique experience. The title refers to radio operators’ lingo for the initials C.V.R., which stand for “cockpit voice recorder.” All the dialogue in the piece was spoken by actual pilots, co-pilots, navigators, and flight attendants during routine commercial passenger flights. The mere fact that we are privy to their conversation is unsettling. This is surveillance as theatre. In some ways it is more convincing than so-called reality TV. In reality TV, cameras capture actual people who are only too aware that they are being videotaped and so wind up giving a contrived “performance” despite the documentary nature of the premise. In Charlie Victor Romeo, actors enact events as they actually occurred in real life, right down to the smallest detail. Needless to say it’s far more compelling and far more “real.”

If it seems morbid to spy on these people, now is a good time to remember that the cockpit voice recorder is known colloquially as the “black box.” It’s the indestructible case containing the recording of conversations by an airplane’s flight crew and air traffic controllers in the minutes before the plane is destroyed by accident. In Charlie Victor Romeo we witness the lead-ups to six separate plane crashes. Here we confront an entirely different kind of meaninglessness and another way in which absurdism can mirror reality. Disaster is dream-like; think of the most common reaction to the events of Sept. 11: “I couldn’t believe my own eyes.” In the days after that tragedy, I often thought that I had acquired a much deeper understanding of what had motivated the expressionists, surrealists and absurdists in the first half of the twentieth century. The violence that can rip a building or an airplane asunder has the whiff of the unreal about it… life becomes a waking nightmare.

All this is to say, that this meticulous, faithful recreation of those last minutes of the various flights, acted with straightforward true simplicity by its talented cast, plays like high experimentalism in the theatre. We thrill to the stress of the flight crews as they desperately try to salvage their damaged airplanes. Yet, somehow, taken in a vacuum as they are here, the characters navigate their sturm und drang without our sympathy. We don’t know them, we haven’t met them, and therefore we only care about them with a certain detachment, for they are strangers. Stories that might play as high drama (or, in the hands of Charlton Heston and George Kennedy, melodrama), become simple theatrical exercises, no more, no less. The lack of point of view or commentary on the part of the creators reinforces the feeling that this is a meditation on existential meaninglessness. It is not a polemic on behalf of air safety… there is no common denominator to the six disasters, and, as we all know, planes are safer places than automobiles or even our own bathtubs. The characters live or die irrespective of their moral worth (which we never learn about anyway)—no one “deserves” their fate here.

If the play resembles anything it is a theme park thrill ride. We are “there.” Apparently this feeling was even stronger in the play’s earlier incarnation at Collective Unconscious, although I was not fortunate enough to have caught it then. In that small 30-seat house, the audience no doubt was almost literally in the cockpit with the pilots. At P.S. 122 we are a bit farther back, watching the actors sweat it out from a distance. But all the same, one walks away with a vague disquiet, a reminder, a nagging, gnawing feeling….

“Someday, out of the blue, for no reason at all, my number will be up”. That awareness is the motive force of all great art, and, beyond that, all positive action.

Three Sisters Redux, adapted and directed by Brian Rogers from The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov; with Jennifer Lee Dudek, David Fraioli, Sheila Lewandowski  (running time: 55 minutes)

I really didn’t know.

It’s an anxiety well known to patrons and practitioners of experimental theater. I’m at an experimental Chekhov festival to see an adaptation of my favorite play. One look at the program shows that the enormous cast has been cut, leaving only the sisters themselves, and to my post-feminist reactionary horror a man is playing Masha. Once inside the theater, the audience sits within the proscenium gazing into the risers, balcony and crowded storage space beyond with houselights up. The lights never changed, but you can’t miss the start of the show. The actors, wearing neutral colored street clothes, burst in and take their places.

But I didn’t know. Unlike the mechanical experimentation I was expecting, this production sings.

A quick summary of the play itself: Olga, Masha, and Irina live with their older brother Andrei in a house in the Russian countryside. They moved here from Moscow eleven years ago and, overeducated and out of place in this little town, they dream constantly of returning to the big city. an officer named Vershinin arrives. During the course of the play, Masha and an army officer named Vershinin fall in love, despite the fact he has a wife and two daughters, and she has a husband as well. Andrei marries a local woman named Natasha who proceeds to make life hell for the sisters. A Baron has fallen in love with Irina, but another soldier is jealously vying for her attention; however, Irina isn’t in love with either of them and wants to find meaning in work, but her jobs at the telegraph office and the town council are driving her to raving desperation. And though they never talk about it, it certainly does seem that Olga and Masha’s husband Kulygin would be perfect for each other if circumstances were different.

Brian Rogers understands that for Chekhov, character and situation are one and the same. Rogers captures, especially in the beginning, the humor of the play. Deftly executed in this production, the humor demonstrates the absurdity of human action and the unexpected swings of the characters’ minds and moods. The characters never know what is happening next, and because of that, the audience is surprised with them. Since this production strips away the other characters and the plot, the sisters’ passion and emotional vulnerability becomes the dramatic centerpiece.

Although there are only three characters physically present in this production, Rogers is onstage as stage manager/narrator. He announces the act changes, updates us on the plot and reads the other characters' lines when necessary. The actors’ movement fills the room with action and people. Sheila Lewandowski brings maturity to Irina. Jennifer Lee Dudek gives Olga a formal dignity without restraining the ferocity of her emotions. And why cast a man as Masha? It makes sense when he’s the best person for the job. David Fraioli’s Masha is an utterly transparent creature; everything affects her and everything can be seen through her. She’s so open to the power of the moment that she can’t hold back her laughter or her tears. He is clearly a man, but there is never a doubt that Masha is a woman, and this juxtaposition allows the character to go beyond gender and speak to a common human experience. The actors’ commitment to the world they inhabit at times makes them seem more alive than the audience.

And at the end of the play that night, we were treated to a very happy accident. As the three sisters stood at the top of the risers staring over the edge, Olga began the famous double last line. “If only we knew” she said, and applause, faintly audible, began in the theater on the building’s upper floor. And as it crescendoed, she repeated, “If only we knew.”

Chicago City Limits has new digs at the New York Improv on West 53rd Street, across town from their old location in the East 60s. This venue, a traditional nightclub-style space with tables packed tightly together and drinks and light food available before the show starts, is actually a more comfortable fit for the long-running comedy troupe than the proscenium theatre they used to occupy: what's lost in elbow and leg room is more than made up for in ambience and intimacy.

As for the entertainment, well, have no fear: CCL remains the consistently reliable purveyors of solid comic divertissement that they have been, in my experience, for the past many years. Their show is a pleasing hybrid of improvisation and scripted sketches. I attended the performance on the night before New Year's Eve, and so I got to experience their look back at 2004, a series of fast, funny blackout sketches and songs covering the highs and lows of the year. CCL's writers are very definitely Democrat-leaning and so the political pieces tended toward the downbeat, with some anti-war vignettes in particular more pointedly pertinent than is generally the case for this troupe. But in general this segment offered a clever and light-hearted take on a diverse array of topical targets, from the Jackson family and Bob Dylan's new book to the hidden dangers of approved drugs and  rising MTA prices—almost all of it set smartly to recognizable songs from "YMCA" and "The Times Are A-Changing" to "With a Little Bit of Luck" and even Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."

The preponderance of a CCL show, though, is improv, and that's where the company—which at the performance reviewed included CCL founders Paul Zuckerman and Linda Gelman along with regulars Rob Schiffman and Joe DeGise II plus music director Travis Ploeger, all terrific—really shines. A suggestion from the audience of "diarrhea" inspired Schiffman to create a song about a plot to kill the wife of Danny DeVito (think about it). The yelled-out made-up movie title "Walking Barefoot in the Ladies' Room" yielded a broad parody of John Cassavettes films in which a lawyer and a female window washer find unlikely romance. These folks are nothing if not fast on their feet.

The current show includes signature segments like a Jeopardy game in which "contestants" make up questions to answers that are called out by the audience, along with familiar improv staples such as performing a scene in various styles as suggested by viewers. A new bit featured a volunteer from the audience providing sound effects for an improvised scene.

For my money, the best part of any CCL show is the "torture the actor" finale, in which one of the four cast members has to guess an unusual or obscure phrase, abetted only by clues provided by his castmates. The phrase on this particular night was particularly tough as it was in Latin; DeGise valiantly managed to stitch it together in about 20 minutes, syllable by syllable (e.g., "spiritus" was conveyed in parts as a synonym for ghosts + a colloquial term for the derriere). This game is always great fun, thanks to the quick-witted cast, not to mention the comforting effects of schadenfreude as we watch the designated victim squirm.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now: in terms of consistent, funny, warm-hearted comedy, CCL is unmatched among the improv groups I'm aware of. And though they're not exactly edgy envelope-pushers, neither are they ever sophomoric, vulgar, or cheap. Bathroom humor just isn't CCL's style--which is why that "diarrhea" suggestion got morphed into a Rhea Perlman gag. An evening at a CCL show will almost certainly leave you with a smile on your face and at least a couple of nifty one-liners to regale your friends with the next morning at the office. What more can we ask?

Funny how the most successful businessmen of the the late 19th century—people like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould—are still well-known a hundred years later, while their contemporaries who devoted themselves to doing good for humankind—people like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald—are merely names to us today, if even that. Anthony P. Pennino's fascinating new play Children's Crusader is trying to rectify this circumstance, putting the very significant life of Florence Kelley on stage at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Who is Florence Kelley?, you ask. See Children's Crusader and be astounded.

Here, very quickly, is some of what this remarkable woman did during her life (1859-1932). She was the daughter of a U.S. Congressman and met Abraham Lincoln and the woman's rights champion Lucretia Mott while still a child. She went to Cornell University and then abroad where she became a disciple of Socialism. In her 30s, she moved to Chicago, where she was appointed Inspector of Factories by the Progressive Governor of Illinois, John Altgeld. She went to law school and was admitted to the Illinois Bar. At about the time she was 40, she moved to New York City, where she became an advisor to then-Governor Theodore Roosevelt; and when TR became President she continued to work with him, shaping numerous pieces of legislation regulating labor conditions for women and children. Eventually, some of the laws she authored had their constitutionality challenged in the Supreme Court, and with Louis Brandeis (later a Justice of that Court) as her attorney, their legality was upheld. Kelley also worked with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago and with Lillian Wald at Henry Street Settlement in New York City's Lower East Side.

That, in a nutshell, is what's covered in Children's Crusader. (Pennino assures me—and a quick gander at some articles on the Internet confirms—that there's enough additional material for at least one more play.)

Social consciousness is always taken for granted, I think, and never really in fashion: it's good to be reminded of a woman—and a whole circle of associates, including the aforementioned Addams and Wald along with writer Henry Lloyd and others—who dedicated her life to making the world a better place, for the benefit of those less fortunate. The play shows us a few archetypal cases—a teenager named Connor working in a coal mine; another youngster named Lech, a Polish immigrant, forced to work in a factory rather than go to school; an Irish seamstress running a factory in her home, afraid to challenge the powerful businessmen who buy her wares—to help us understand what fueled Kelley's outrage at the System. The windmills that she tilts at are apathy, self-interest, greed, and simple economics; they're all still with us today, which means that her work is more, not less, important to take note of.

Pennino balances the history with scenes depicting Kelley's troublous family life—she was, it seems, a great mother to all children save her own, and her stormy love/hate relationship with her son Nicholas drives much of the domestic part of the drama here. Pennino peppers his script with visits from a variety of famous figures from Kelley's lifetime, including the colorful Teddy Roosevelt, whose children Ethel and Kermit also make brief appearances (and Kermit's pet boa constrictor is alluded to), and, in a dream sequence, Calamity Jane.

Pennino is even more successful in conjuring the Gilded Age, for better or worse, in scenes featuring numerous anonymous characters, from workers and immigrants to newsboys and hawkers at a World's Fair. (One of these sequences, evoking Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit in the space of a couple of minutes, feels too reminiscent of Ragtime, however.)

The play is a brand new one and is probably a little different today than it was when I saw it; the script and the production will undoubtedly continue to sharpen as the run proceeds. Alex Roe's staging is fine, keeping things moving nearly nonstop and evoking myriad locations with economy and imagination on Ryan Scott's utilitarian unit set. Melanie Rey plays Kelley and makes her a likable, interesting heroine; it's a marathon role that keeps her on stage for almost the entire 2-1/2 hours of the show. An ensemble of eight energetic performers plays everyone else, seemingly a hundred other characters, from presidents and governors to hungry children working in factories. Sidney Fortner is the standout of the group, offering genuinely complex and admirable portraits of Calamity Jane and Lillian Wald.

The breadth of Kelley's achievements and Pennino's ambition means that Children's Crusader is fairly dense with incident: most of the episodes recounted here really just scratch the surface. The play will have done its job, though, if it whets the viewer's appetite to learn more about this lady and the history she helped shape.

After spending two-and-a-half hours in the Hilton Theatre watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and being left almost completely cold by the show—but also aware that most of the almost two thousand other people in the audience seemed to be having a fine old time—I searched for guidance in writing this review on the Internet Movie Data Base. What, I wondered, did critics have to say about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when it came out as a movie in 1968? Roger Ebert, as it turned out, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, had some sage words on the subject:

What I'm getting at is this. It would be useless for me to review Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from an adult point of view, because most adults are not going to see it voluntarily. The audience for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, pretty obviously, is going to be kids—and the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents and older brothers and sisters they drag along.

Now what do the kids want to see? A kid's movie!

To which, all I can really add is: Ditto. Even that part about the kid's movie still seems to apply, for although I haven't seen the film of CCBB in some 35 years or more, I feel pretty certain that this stage adaptation is a fairly faithful rendering of what the youngsters in the crowd have been watching and memorizing on DVD over and over again. The elation in the room was the joy of familiarity, and I felt it all evening long: one little girl, about two rows behind me, had a big happy smile plastered on her face throughout, and started clapping along with the songs she knew as soon as they started.

Okay; but what sort of experience will the adults accompanying all these well-to-do children have? If mine is any indication, the answer is: not bad, but not particularly good. For a show that gives off lots of actual sparks on stage (literally: it seems like every other scene has some pyrotechnic effect or other), CCBB produces nary a metaphorical one. There are fifty people in the cast and another eighteen in the orchestra pit (not to mention a dozen or so dogs who race across the stage early in Act One); there are some two dozen musical numbers and oodles of large and diverse sets; there's a flying car, for pete's sake! But never once did I feel a twinge of excitement at having my imagination or sense of wonder exercised; nor did I get much in the way of energy or warmth from the stage. This is movie-to-musical biz by the numbers: see the show you already know and be sure to pick up the souvenir t-shirt and toy car before you go.

I'm sorry if that sounds cynical, but honestly, that's what it felt like.

The story, for the record, is about a ne'er-do-well eccentric inventor named Caractacus Potts, whose children, Jeremy and Jemima, are enamored of an old racing car. When the kids learn that the car is about to be junked for parts, they beg their father to raise the 40 shillings needed to rescue it. After a series of misadventures—one of them involving his candy invention, which brings his pluck and ingenuity to the attention of spunky candy heiress Truly Scrumptious—he obtains the money and surprises the kids by buying the car. The vehicle, restored to its former beauty by Caractacus, is christened "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (because that's what it seems to "say" when it starts up), and turns out to have some very special powers. When faced with floodwaters, it's able to float; when required to journey to far-away Vulgaria to rescue Caractacus's lovable old Dad, it sprouts wings and flies.

Now, about Vulgaria: It seems that when Chitty (the car) was in commission as a racer, the evil Baron of Vulgaria learned of its strange magical abilities. He's dispatched two bumbling agents, Boris and Goran, to track down the car and bring it—or Caractacus—back to Vulgaria. They track the car to Potts, but kidnap the wrong man, which sets off the chase that leads Caractacus, Truly, Jeremy, and Jemima to the land of Vulgaria in Act Two. Here, the evil Baroness's hatred of children has led to their banishment; a very scary guy called the Childcatcher is charged with rounding up any that appear and taking them away to someplace terrible and permanent. Naturally, Jeremy and Jemima fall into his clutches; can Caractacus and Truly, using their noggins and teamwork, save them and also rescue Grandpa?

My IMDB research led me to some commentary to the effect that the whole Vulgaria plot makes CCBB an allegory about fascism and/or the Holocaust; and I have to admit that one scene laid in a secret cavern where the Toymaker has hidden children from the Childcatcher was pretty bleak and terrifying. But the Baron and Baroness are portrayed very clownishly, so the only real monster in the show is the Grim Reaper-ish Childcatcher. And the means by which the Baron and Baroness are overthrown are so facile and simplistic that it's tough to really ascribe much moral weight to the story: the sensibility is pitched, I think, toward the very youngest of children, who will understand the black-and-white of the thing without subjecting it to any sort of analysis.

So, the show is just broad, uninspired fun. Adrian Noble's staging is never better than competent, while Gillian Lyne's musical staging and rather sparse choreography is maybe not even that: why, for example, has Raul Esparza been given Dick Van Dyke moves to accomplish in "Me Ol' Bamboo" that he's just not equipped to handle? Anthony Ward's costumes and sets are similarly lacking in memorability. The real star, of course, is the car, which has "automation and effects by Hudson Scenic Studio, Inc." (This outfit is billed in the program below Bridgehampton Motoring Club, who provide the storage facility for the "publicity Chitty"; they need a better agent.)

Raul Esparza and Erin Dilly play Caractacus and Truly; they're talented, but the only real opportunity they're given to prove that is in a short number near the end when she impersonates a music box doll and he reprises "Truly Scrumptious." Henry Hodges and Ellen Marlow are fine and entirely un-cloying as Jeremy and Jemima. Marc Kudisch and Jan Maxwell have a blast as the Baron and Baroness, and Kevin Cahoon is effectively sinister as the Childcatcher. But Chip Zien (Goran), Robert Sella (Boris), and Philip Bosco (Grandpa) are cruelly wasted here: these enormously skillful players are reduced to playing stick figures—they may as well be walking around a theme park wearing big Mickey Mouse heads for all the actual acting they've been allowed to do.

A final, fairly important criticism: the sound, designed by Andrew Bruce, is absolutely terrible. I'd estimate that I was unable to understand about half of the spoken and sung lines in the show.

Someone should attend to that last complaint of mine; as for the rest, the target audience seems quite happy with what they're being given, so in the last analysis, who am I to judge? CCBB looks to be around for a long time, and if the hundreds of kiddies in the theatre last night are any indication, it's doing precisely the job it's supposed to.

In her new play Chopper, Leah Ryan takes a look at three young people in crisis. Kathleen has been on her own since the age of 16; we don't learn much about the problematic family life that she escaped, but we do know that she's now stuck in a thankless job at Rite-Aid (where her bosses don't "get" her), surviving on cigarettes and beer as she struggles to make ends meet. Her roommate is her childhood friend Emily, whose problems may or may not include some kind of learning disorder; her parents institutionalized her at about the same time that Kathleen left home, and Emily went directly from the hospital to Kathleen's apartment, and they've been living together ever since. She's a dishwasher at a local restaurant, but can't seem to hold onto her money at all. As the play begins, Kathleen and Emily are in desperate need of back rent—to the tune of $700—or they will be evicted.

Kathleen's ex-boyfriend (of long-standing) is Mick, a wannabe rock star who lives in his car. He's just returned to the northeastern college town where the play is set after an abortive trip to Texas which ended in a few-days' stay in Trenton, New Jersey.

One of the valuable things Ryan does here is remind us how simple it is to suddenly become homeless. These kids—for they are still very young, despite the tribulations facing them—are about to slip through society's safety net. Neither Kathleen nor Mick have any family connections to speak of, while Emily has been more or less disowned by her wealthy parents. Lacking skills, networks, and resources, they're headed toward the margins.  Nothing gets resolved during Chopper for Kathleen, Emily, and Mick; nothing much changes for them: Ryan's letting us have a look at them before they become invisible.

We do get to watch these three indulge in their dreams. The opening scene, between Kathleen and Emily, is a conversation about their crushes on, respectively, Chopper Dave the traffic guy on TV, and weatherman Keith Kane. Kathleen's fantasy world is both more and less constricted than Emily's—she's perfectly willing to let Mick believe Emily's lie that Kathleen has a new boyfriend named Dave, for example; she's also oftentimes unwilling to call things—or more properly, people—what they are: Mick is sometimes Fred, and Emily's college student pickup Craig is, a lot of the time, Chad or Greg.

For his part, Craig is Emily's dream realized: an emissary from the outside world very much the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie—a vision of a way out that can never come to pass. Like Jim O'Connor in that more famous play, Craig is a nice, ordinary young man—nothing more or less than that. If he's perhaps a little bit chastened and changed as a result of his encounter with Emily, Kathleen, and Mick, he's almost certainly going to be fundamentally unscathed by it—his world will keep turning as it always has, in a very different orbit from theirs.

Chopper paints its characters so vividly that I wanted more to happen in it; I see now that Ryan's design is, shrewdly, necessarily inert. (I'm still puzzled by her insistence that the play takes place in 1980, when nothing but the prices of items seems to reflect that period at all.) Director Ed Cheetham helps make Chopper vivid, but he seems hampered by the very boxy playing area (Ensemble Studio Theatre's small upstairs space): what could he and set designer Christina Aprea do to liberate their actors from the square confines they're relegated to?

The performances are exemplary. Jen Albano and Christiane Szabo do splendid work as Kathleen and Emily, the former delivering the vulnerability and resourcefulness of her character, and the latter locating unexpected reserves of strength underneath the flighty surface of hers. Paul Megna finds the nobility in the irresponsible Mick—when he makes a pass at a heroic gesture near the end of the play, it's impossible not to be moved. As Craig, the stranger adrift temporarily in this sad world, Jason Kaminsky is outstanding, the stable center of the piece and an enormously sympathetic one, despite his need to move away from it.

The production represents the second consecutive triumph for Wildfire Productions, the young theatre company that has mounted Chopper.  They've found a worthy script and presented it with respect and care; they've made us look, for a little while anyway, at people who we are otherwise inclined to look away from. How necessary is that?

Call me sentimental; call me an overgrown kid—I found parts of New York City Opera's production of Cinderella magical. There's that moment, for example, when the glittery silver carriage appears, led by four adorable white ponies, ready to take our heroine to the ball. And then there's the ball itself: 20 minutes or so of bliss, framed by two of Richard Rodgers' loveliest dance pieces, the "Gavotte" and "Cinderella's Waltz," with a pair of love songs ("Ten Minutes Ago" and "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?") in between and a can't-miss comic duet ("The Stepsisters' Lament": "Why would a fellow want a girl like her/A girl who's merely lovely?/Why can't a fellow ever once prefer/A girl who's merely me?") sandwiched in the middle. When Christopher Sieber's Prince waltzed Sarah Uriarte Berry's Cinderella around the ballroom floor, I was transported, for a minute, anyway.

We must have no illusions about this, however: Cinderella is hardly great art, not even first-rate Rodgers & Hammerstein. But it is quintessential Rodgers & Hammerstein, in its way. The music soars in those dances and love songs I mentioned; there's also the infectious "Impossible," the charming "A Lovely Night," and the wistfully sweet "In My Own Little Corner," all to be heard here, in the New York State Theatre, unamplified and glorious, from an orchestra (conducted by Gerald Steichen) at least twice as big as what you'll find nowadays in a traditional Broadway house. The book and lyrics, meanwhile, offer a take on the famous tale that only Hammerstein could have supplied. Who else would have given Cinderella and her wicked step-sisters and step-mother a post-ball post-mortem that finds them all in happy, dizzy accord; who else would have come up a cockeyed optimist of  a fairy godmother who urges good old fashioned American determination as the way to make dreams come true:

But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don't believe in sensible rules
And won't believe what sensible people say
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible
Things are happening every day.

When I was a kid, seeing re-runs of the Lesley Anne Warren version of Cinderella on TV, I thought the songs were sappy. Now I find them all worth treasuring. What's terrific is, the folks at City Opera seem to think along these same lines. For the most part, they've mounted this show with great care and respect—not so much that it feels lifeless, happily, but in a way that lets us know they believe in its simple, homey message and that it's okay for us to believe it too. Even the casting, which looks terribly gimmicky on paper, is almost 100% successful: Berry and Sieber make a most attractive leading couple, Renee Taylor and Dick Van Patten are guileless and unassuming as the Queen and King (as she croaks her couple of tunes, you can almost feel her wonderment at being asked to do so from a grand opera house stage), Lea DeLaria and Ana Gasteyer are funny and childlike as the spoiled step-sisters, and Eartha Kitt is her usual force-of-nature self as the fairy godmother, looking spectacularly glamorous in a sparkly silver gown with a silly magic wand held tightly in her fist. The only missteps come from John "Lypsinka" Epperson, who plays the step-mother the way that he imagines Joan Crawford would have, which is a wrongheaded but hardly fatal choice.

The big stage fills with crowds in most of the scenes; at the ball, they're all clad in opulent, brightly-colored costumes (by Gregg Barnes). Cinderella's ball gown is beautiful and her wedding dress is even lovelier; the Prince's costumes are pretty glorious, too. Baayork Lee's direction and choreography, if not exactly imaginative, serves the piece nicely. No one is likely to be bored, not even the smallest of the small fry who make up about a quarter of the audience (at least at the performance I attended).

Cheap, it's not: tickets in the prime locations go for $115 apiece. But if money's not an issue, here's a chance to capture some of the magic that made American musical theatre so golden fifty years ago—gorgeous melodies, sweet and simple feelings, pretty stage pictures. (And the original television production, the one that starred Julie Andrews, is coming to PBS in December—truly something to look forward to whether you see this one at City Opera or not!)

Comedy 101 is based on a simple premise: we, the audience, are students attending the opening lecture of a college course on comedy. To this end, we are each presented with a detailed packet as we enter that includes a syllabus, book list, homework assignment, and take-home quiz. The professor is helped through the lecture by his graduate assistant, Miss Nomer (a joke that grows quickly wearing), who attempts to add some life to the dry lecture.

The show is filled with tons of fascinating facts about laughter (the topic of the first "lecture") and conceptually seems like a good idea, but is filled with many old gags (including a Miss Nomer who gets more and more drunk as the evening progresses) that add nothing to the proceedings. Jennifer Hogue tries her best as the graduate assistant, but seems to be working much too hard for the uncomplicated jokes. Mitch Hogue, the show’s creator, inhabits the role of the dry professor to such an extent that the show really seems like a college lecture, not a performance. The set, by Dan Balocca, makes the most of the small theatre, really giving it a collegiate feel.

Hogue has the ingredients for an entertaining show. The lecture portion of Comedy 101 is truly interesting; perhaps some more effort could be spent on the jokes in the script to make them more amusing, or, if Hogue could add some new takes on the old jokes, the show might really be fascinating.

Another chapter of World War II history is opened in Chungmi Kim’s new play, Comfort Women, which is currently playing at Urban Stages. The backdrop is the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of young Korean woman who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese Army. Both the playwright and the producing company are to be commended for bringing such an ugly and little-known part of history to light. Unfortunately, though, no matter how earnest and sincere their efforts may be, the finished product cannot be considered an exciting or fulfilling piece of theater.

Comfort Women centers on Grandma (yes, that’s really the character’s name), a crotchety Korean immigrant living in Queens. The time is 1994, around the time of the U.N. protests. One day, Grandma’s granddaughter, Jina, brings home two women who are planning on attending the protests, Soonja Park and Bokhi Lee. The women are roughly the same age as Grandma, and Jina introduces them in the hope that her reclusive and isolated grandmother will befriend them. Soon, it’s revealed that Park and Lee were “comfort women” during the war—a revelation that brings to light a dark secret that Grandma has been keeping for decades.

The plot, which seems too convenient throughout, hinges on a contrivance—i.e., the introduction of the two comfort women—that feels clunky and obvious. It’s clear from the start that their presence exists solely as a device to propel the story towards the grandmother’s revelation. When a plot device is that obvious, it makes any play feel unauthentic.

The characters are equally contrived, never rising above established stereotypes. There is The Curmudgeonly Elder; The Progressive, Modern Youngster; and The Truth-Telling Outsiders. The Elder is characterized by a dominating sense of propriety, honor, loyalty, pride, and shame. The Youngster is marked by her struggle to reconcile the traditions of old with modern sensibilities. The Outsiders… well, they just tell the truth, which is always upsetting to somebody. In other words, Comfort Women tells us nothing new about East Asian culture or humanity, in general.

Director Frances W. Hill plays right into Comfort Women’s weaknesses, staging the action with grave uncertainty and instructing the actors to telegraph their emotions and intentions. This keeps the audience one step ahead of the story, and crushes any possibility of surprise. Hill also encourages the actors to endow everything with equal value. One character’s big epiphany is just as important as another character looking for an ashtray. Such an approach causes the cast to run roughshod over important moments and suffocate them.

Roman Tatarowicz’s set doesn’t help matters either. While beautiful to look at, it is cramped and not user-friendly for the actors. It substantially reduces the playing area in Urban Stages’s already cozy theater, and is too small to accommodate the amount of people on stage (sometimes as many as four or five, just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here). The tightness of the playing area restricts the dramatic flow of the play. Comfort Women’s emotional peaks ring false because the characters are just too (unconvincingly) close to each other.

So, what’s an actor to do under these circumstances? Well, the cast does their best, but their performances lack heat or urgency, and they all look extremely uncomfortable with any display of emotion. Who can blame them? Their collaborators have sabotaged them at every turn.

Admittedly, the historical back-story of Comfort Women is important and fascinating, and ripe for dramatic interpretation. But, it—and the kidnapped women who make up that history—deserves far better than the treatment it is currently getting.

According to program notes, the story told in Commedia Dell'Artemisia is more or less true: Artemisia Gentileschi, the teenage daughter of a successful Italian painter, was raped by one of her father's colleagues, Agostino Tassi; she gave in to his violent sexual advances only because he promised to marry her. When he didn't, the elder Gentileschi sued Tassi for violation of his daughter's chastity and reputation.

Commedia dell'arte-inspired farce is not, it would seem, the most obvious choice of theatrical styles to tell such a tale. But that's exactly what Commedia Dell'Artemisia does, recounting the story—in somewhat bowdlerized form—as if it were a short comedy by Moliere, substituting stock characters for the actual personages involved (Pantalone for the father, Columbine for the next-door neighbor, Il Dottore for the judge who hears Gentileschi's lawsuit against Tassi), and incorporating the naughty wordplay and antic slapstick that are this genre's staples. The original script, by Kiran Rikhye, is in rhymed couplets and is mostly good enough to sound like a Wilbur translation of the master; some of the intricate polysyllabic rhymes are especially impressive. The staging, surrounding the audience in the intimate backroom quasi-theatre of CB's Gallery, is dizzying and fun; it's by the show's creator, Jon Stancato, and promises to find its legs as the performers grow accustomed to the space and the rhythms of this complicated, brand-new piece.

So this quirky little show, a sex comedy turned on its head, works on its own terms. Except that fairly early on, we become aware that there's something essentially distasteful—disconcerting, even—about it. Is rape really a subject for bawdy, giddy farce? The answer, clearly, is no; and at the same time, the answer is, alas, yes—rape was and has been the subject of lightheaded entertainment for centuries. This is, I think, the key to this intriguing project of Stolen Chair Theatre Company: by going only a little further than archetypal commedia usually does, Commedia Dell'Artemisia makes some salient points about violence against women and society's culpability thereto. Making an audience think about gender politics in the middle of a raucous seduction scene is undeniably an achievement.

The show also manages more direct satire in its final scene, a perversion of justice disguised as a trial that quickly devolves into a media circus of the sort we can all recognize. Stancato, Rikhye, and their collaborators score some points about reality TV and celebrity-obsession here.

Stancato appears as the foolish, greedy father, and turns in a fine performance that's niftily rooted in movement rather than words. Jon Campbell is appealingly dastardly as Tassi, and Alexia Vernon is effective in the soubrette role of next-door neighbor Tuzia. Jennifer Wren doubles as the title character and the pompous ignoramus judge; she's particularly delightful as the latter.

It all happens in under one hour, and that's including a bizarre little curtain raiser, "The Crazy House," in which Sam Dingman and Benjamin Camp enact true anecdotes from the former's day job as a bellhop. This is the first event of the month-long Stampede Festival, a showcase of under-the-radar theatre that you won't see anywhere else in town. My past experiences at Stampede have taught me that this is where I can go for theatre that will surprise and challenge me in weird and unexpected ways. This off-kilter, stylized, marching-to-its-own-drummer composition feels right at home here.