Communion is about a young Irish man, Jordan McHenry, who has come to his boyhood home to die. He has a brain tumor in its advanced stages; he's on strong doses of morphine to relieve his pain and, as far as we can tell, he's pretty much immobile and needs around-the-clock care. Tending to him are his mother, Martha; his younger brother, Marcus; his neighbor, Arthur McLoughlin; a priest, Father Anthony O'Driscoll; and, more fitfully, Marcus's girlfriend, Felicity.

I said Communion is about Jordan just now, but that's not really accurate. Communion happens around Jordan; what it's really about is the way that his imminent death affects these five people, who would have trouble getting along with one another even under less challenging of circumstances. The key conflict in the play is between Martha and Marcus. He is mentally disabled—I think bipolar?—and on medication to control his symptoms; he spent several years institutionalized. Martha is long-suffering by nature and passive-aggressive with regard to this younger son who has yielded nothing but disappointment; she's not above telling him that she wishes he were the one dying.

The other three characters float around this relationship like satellites. Father Anthony tries to offer comfort but winds up challenging both mother son, though for different reasons. Felicity seems to offer some hope for Marcus's personal growth into responsible adulthood, but Martha seldom moves beyond kneejerk dislike for the girl. Arthur, gently annoying and—this is important to Martha, who is Catholic—a Methodist, feels something like comic relief. Playwright Aidan Mathews makes all of his characters interesting, and even provides tantalizing details about them—Father Anthony has just returned from Rwanda, Arthur has a greenhouse full of marijuana on his property—that are never quite filled in and ultimately don't seem to add up to anything significant.

I felt distanced from the play because the only character I felt any empathy for was the dying Jordan, who turns out to be, as I've already suggested, not protagonist but catalyst: he's made peace with his fate, his faith, and his God long before the action of Communion begins, and so his particular journey, interesting and fruitful though it must have been, is not charted here.

I felt confused by the play because its actual protagonists, Martha and Marcus, are so disagreeable and narrow. The program makes a point of telling us that the house is in a "fashionable" suburb of Dublin: the McHenrys clearly have money. So why are these two remaining family members saddled together for what seems like eternity in this day and age? Surely Martha can afford to leave the son she so ardently dislikes behind forever. (If she behaved as a real person surely would, though, Mathews would have no play.)

One thing that I found quite special about the production, though, was the palpable, very affecting way that Jordan's room—the one he grew up in, where he has now come to live out his final days—felt so authentic. From the moment Communion began, I was always aware that we were in a very personal, private place of respite and sanctuary. I'm not exactly sure how director M. Burke Walker, set designer Michael V. Moore, and actor Ean Sheehy (giving the play's one emotionally resonant performance as Jordan) accomplished this, but they definitely made this particular concept vivid.

All the world’s a double-entendre! (Or at the very least a corny pun.) And in the hysterical world of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) all the men and women (and children) of the audience are surely gigglers; we have our guffaws and our groans and in our hour and a half spent in the theatre we laugh at many parts.

The Gallery Players revival of this show that’s been running for the past nine years in London is a great reason to hop the F train and head out to Park Slope. The cast is a bottomless pit of energy and the direction is as fast paced. You can have fun and laugh at this show whether you consider yourself an aficionado of the Bard or if you just remember something about “to be or not be” from high school.

The show opens with a preface that digresses into an evangelistic rant, “May the Bard be with you”, and that is followed by biographical information on Shakespeare that gradually morphs into a biography of Hitler (I never knew Shakespeare invaded Poland). This funny opening sequence pretty much sets up the rest of the evening. We see Titus Andronicus done as a cooking show. The histories are lumped into a single scoring drive of a football game. (American football that is!) The comedies are also lumped together but this sequence is ironically not funny. But they admit that. Shakespeare just wasn’t that funny unless he was writing tragedy.

As the evening was getting on I kept thinking, “Where’s Hamlet? They can’t just blow past Hamlet!” When they finally realize that they have yet to tackle the “greatest play written in the English language” one of the actors refuses to do it and has to be chased down somewhere outside. The Hamlet sequence, which claims the entire second act, could stand alone. It is absolutely hilarious! They do a workshop on Ophelia’s scream that is itself a scream. And they cap it off with a thirty second backward version of the play.

I think what I like best about this show is that it provides its audience with a good perspective on Shakespeare’s formula. It makes Shakespeare seem much less intimidating and, dare I say, just like an average guy trying to make a buck giving the people what they wanted. It helps you realize that if Shakespeare were alive today his plays would be the equivalent of a John Woo movie. He likely wouldn’t even bother with theatre and instead would be Hollywood’s most sought-after writer/director.

The director of this production, Neal Freeman, does a really great job coordinating this highly physical show. I don’t have a copy of the script so at times it is hard to tell where the script ends and Freeman begins, but regardless of that I was very impressed by the pace and timing he sets. Freeman also uses the space well, breaking the fourth wall and finding use for every corner of the playing area. I’m sure his task was made easier through the support of his great cast.

Composed of Alex Domeyko, Rob Seitelman and Patrick Toon, this cast is an absolute power trio. Each of them has impeccable timing and something endearing about his stage persona. Domeyko plays a soulful and way wacky Hamlet. He seems to be the straight-man of the crew. Seitelman gets the most laughs with his hammy if not somewhat bizarre portrayal of the Bard’s heroines with a penchant for vomiting on the audience. Toon’s regal stature earns him most of the kingly roles. He seems to be our vessel into the world of the play because he speaks to us the most. Together these guys pull off a show that, considering all the cliché sex jokes and cheesy pop cultures references, might fall flat if the actors were not committed to the material.

This show is undeniably fun. When you go to a show and you see kids and adults laughing in the audience you know they got the formula right on stage. Shakespeare could have learned a few things from these guys. Or at least “burrowed” some of their gags.

“A contract is an exchange of consideration… between a promisor and promisee.” With this dry proclamation from Professor Kappeter to his class of first year contracts students, playwright Justin Deabler sets the stage for his emotional new play Contracts, about a year in the lives of four first-year Harvard Law students. “In a liberal state, our words are law,” Kappeter tells the unprepared students. “We make the law… when we say ‘I promise’.” Through this lens of basic contract law, and the pressure-cooker backdrop of first-year law school, the four students and two of their moms take us on an exploration of relationships and the promises we make to each other. I left the theatre with more questions than answers. The terrain here is rocky, but with some nice acting, and a script that refuses to be simplistic, the trip is both fun and thought-provoking.

You might know playwright Deabler as “the gay guy” on Real World: Hawaii. He was at Harvard Law School at the time, and did some work there on gay adoption and the Massachusetts same-sex marriage litigation. Given these credentials, you might expect the play to be a pitch for gay marriage. Three of the characters are gay (though open, at times, to youthful exploration). Actually the play doesn’t particularly focus on gay marriage at all. In fact, the play deals with a wide array of relationships and promises, including heterosexual marriage, gay partnership, committed friendship, ex-lovers, and parents and their children.

The play moves back and forth each scene between the classroom and the apartment shard by serious Sarah (Aileen Barry) and flighty Katherine (Joy Marr). They are lovers, though Sarah hasn’t yet told her family. Classmates Jason (Christian Young) and Daniel (Mark O’Connell) are frequent visitors and study partners with the women. Jason is gay and has known Sarah since they were kids. They’ve been planning on Harvard Law School since eighth grade. Daniel is Katherine’s ex, and has been in a wheelchair since birth, we are told. He is also an artist, and does drawings and paintings of Katherine. Jason’s mom, Vivian (Betsy Johnson), is in the middle of a messy divorce from Jason’s adulterous father. Daniel’s mom, Joanne (Joy Besozzi), is doting and overly involved in his life. There is something behind her behavior that we are not being told.

As the intensity of law school sets in, things begin to crack open. Tough Sarah develops psychosomatic physical symptoms from the stress and starts missing classes, which is troubling Jason, who is trying to keep her up to date on schoolwork. His mom, in the meantime, is having trouble letting go of the husband who walked out on her. This might account for Jason’s inability to trust in pursuing a relationship of his own. Daniel, we learn, was not handicapped from birth at all, and the truth is crippling his mom and their relationship. Daniel still has strong feelings for Katherine, who blew her first semester. She loses funding and has to get a work-study job and buckle down, which adds to the stress between herself and Sarah, who still isn’t out to her folks.

In each of these relationships there are promises made and promises implied: the promise of a married couple to be faithful, the promise of life-long friends to see each other through law school, the promise of parents to provide a safe and stable home, the promise of loving partners to treat their relationship with respect by coming out to their families. So what is the nature of these promises? Can we rely on them, or ever hope to enforce them? Can a one-sided contract ever be valid, or does the doctrine of mutuality—you have to give to get—always apply? And what about marriage? “Prenuptial contracts, alimony, settlement agreements. Divorce is just math with a lot of crying,” Katherine argues. Or is Sarah right: these relationships aren’t bargainable at all because “love is a gift…a gratuitous promise”?

Director Ari Laura Kreith gets solid work from the cast in roles that are not at all simple to pin down. Even the most cerebral moments of legal discourse are never too dry thanks to the animated and fleshed-out performances of all the actors. Joy Marr is terrific as Katherine, evolving from laid-back confidence to overwhelmed confusion, questioning so many of the things she took for granted. As Jason, Christian Young gives a full and sharp performance, showing us layers of decisive adult clarity and childhood pain at the same time. Michael Lopez nails the role of the reality-focused contracts professor, whose class is never a “safe space.”

There must be a way to restage the show so that we go from scene to scene without the clunky set changes—nine in all. Smoothing out these transitions, and getting rid of the unnecessary intermission, would trim the two-hour-plus show down a bit and make it crisper. There should be nothing to pull your attention from the engaging script and the terrific cast.

Before I saw Coole Lady, all that I really knew about Lady Gregory was that she was an Irish writer who, with William Butler Yeats, founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904. Now that I've seen Coole Lady, a thoughtful one-person play performed by Joan McCready and written and directed by her husband, Sam, I know a great deal more. Better than that, my interest is piqued to discover still more about this fascinating woman who was a poet, playwright, folklorist, entrepreneur, and patriot.

Isabella Augusta Persse was born in 1852 in County Galway, Ireland, the daughter of two devout Protestants (the father was a proselytizer, the mother an evangelical). She lived at home until a trip to Cannes, caring for an older brother who had taken ill, led to a friendship with Sir William Gregory, former governor of Ceylon, now retired at his estate Coole Park, a few miles from the Persse place. The friendship evolved into a courtship and they married in 1880; she was 27, he was 63. They had one son, Robert; perhaps even more life-changing was Augusta's exposure to the rich intellectual life at Coole Park after years of hunting, farming, and the Bible at home.

The new Lady Gregory's artistic awakening reached its pinnacle with her introduction to Yeats, shortly after the death of her husband. Soon, the young poet and playwright, some 13 years her junior, was spending a great deal of time at Coole Park; she wasn't precisely his muse, but she made him hunker down and write. Eventually, the two hatched a scheme to found an Irish national theatre, inspired by twin desires to put Yeats's works on stage and to bring honor to the rich storytelling traditions of their native country. This theatre became the Abbey, and made Lady Gregory famous in theatrical circles, launching the careers of John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (whose plays—The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars, respectively—aroused enormous controversies at their premieres in Dublin and elsewhere).

Lady Gregory also wrote plays herself, along with volumes collecting Irish folklore and a biography of her nephew, Sir Hugh Lane, who was killed on the Lusitania and whose bequest of valuable artwork to his native Ireland was appropriated by the English, leading to a protracted legal battle that Lady Gregory fought until her death.

All of this and much more is covered in Coole Lady, whose pretense is that a 79-year-old Lady Gregory is rummaging through old letters and books and reminiscing to herself, with the audience as grateful eavesdroppers. She recalls her life chronologically, peppering what amounts to a survey of its events and accomplishments with anecdotes about the people who made the biggest impressions on her, some of them famous like Yeats, Shaw, and O'Casey, and others not-so-well-known, such as the two men with whom she had affairs (at opposite ends of her life) or various members of her family. The McCreadys' goals are clarity and granting this somewhat forgotten figure her due: the play is straightforward and even-handed, if less theatrical and passionate that it could be.

Although it feels like all of Lady Gregory's achievements and endeavors are well-represented here, her writing is mostly absent from it: there is only one excerpt from one early sonnet in Coole Lady—the rest of Lady Gregory's prolific oeuvre is somewhat conspicuously missing. I would have liked to hear excerpts from her plays and prose—I think that would help complete the picture of this remarkable woman (plus it would give us a welcome glimpse at her writing, which I suspect most contemporary theatregoers have not encountered).

Nevertheless, this is a most interesting evening of theatre, and one that anyone curious about the Irish Renaissance of the early 20th century will certainly want to take in. Some of the best bits have to do with what it was like to live in that time of radical historical change: Lady Gregory's accounts of life on the Coole Park estate before and after the Easter Rebellion are particularly enlightening. Bravo to the McCreadys for bringing Lady Gregory's story to the stage, where it certainly belongs; and to Handcart Ensemble for bringing the McCreadys to New York.

From what I can tell, the theme that ties together the eight characters in Blake Cass's new play Copito is that each character has lost his or her family. These characters include Copito, the world’s only known albino gorilla; Michael, a man who has left his family; Julia, a woman left by her parents at a zoo in front of Copito’s cage when she was a child; the wife and sons whom Michael left behind, who are trying to find one another at the zoo; and a zoo sweeper.

Through double-casting, the play emphasizes the characters’ connections, especially that between Copito and Julia, who are played by the same actress. Julia is now married to Michael and seems to have a very dysfunctional relationship with him. As Copito expresses how horrible it is to be confined, Julia says she feels she is in a cage.

Kara Peters plays Copito and Julia in white pants and a white shirt; I like the simplicity of asking the audience to fill in the details with its imagination. Peters portrays the gorilla without stereotypical ape-like movements or features, but sits still and looks downtrodden, sometimes commenting on the action around him.

Father and son Michael and Mickey are also played by one actor, Jefferson C. Post. I couldn’t figure out how young Mickey was, and I felt this took away from the story because I didn’t know if Michael left his family five years before the action of the play or twelve years. As Michael, Post's acting choices are clearer.

The dialogue is full of overlap and some philosophical musings, and I did like the rhythm of it. The sweeper talks about having had other ambitions—to be an astronaut, etc. The sons talk about how one can die within as well as without.

If all of this is a bit muddled, well, maybe that is what I thought didn’t work about the play. In a certain sense, I feel that I didn’t quite get Copito. The idea of tying together Michael and his lost family with Julia and Copito is interesting and original, and the themes as I understand them are worthy. But I left the play with a feeling of confusion.
 

I think what Karin Coonrod wants to show us in her new production of Coriolanus is how quickly a crowd can turn into a mob—how, in the hands of a despot or demagogue, the rabble can become truly irresponsible, truly dangerous. It's a theme that's supported by the play, but I don't think it's the play's main theme. As a result, Coonrod's staging—presented by Theatre for a New Audience—bogs down and grows tiresomely repetitive: once the "mob" on stage (portrayed vigorously by just 14 actors) has written "The People Are the City" graffitoes all over the three walls of the stage about halfway through the so-called first "movement" of the play, there's really nowhere else to take this idea. And there's still something like two hours to go.

What I would have liked to see more of is a deeper exploration of the title character. Christian Camargo, a good actor with a deep and sonorous voice that's not a little redolent of the young Richard Burton's, gives us a Coriolanus who is mostly on the surface: a brave soldier, an ambitious but clumsy politician, a vengeful warrior, and—finally—a repentant son.  I felt intimations of idealism, perhaps misplaced; of a man too noble and too proud to live long among others; of a Lancelot type whose greatness and bravery turns into a kind of Achilles' heel. But I never sensed any of this coalescing into a characterization. I suspect that had that happened, we would have here a much more interesting Coriolanus.

But instead, Coonrod seems focused on her dissonant, turncoat chorus; and also on making this early 17th century Shakespeare tragedy into something akin to Brechtian epic theatre. The actors remain onstage throughout the entire long first "movement," and all except Camargo play multiple characters, often in the same scene and without any change to their appearance. Much of the dialogue is recited "out" to the audience rather than spoken realistically between characters facing one another. Massive footlights frame the front of the stage and, at various times, shadows of the lighting grid are projected onto the rear wall; in "Movement 2," sections of the set are cut away to reveal technical elements and exposed brick. An actor billed in the program as "Theatrical Assist" portentously announces the beginning of each scene. The intent certainly is that we never forget that we're in a theatre, seeing a play; but the reason for it is never particularly clear.

Coonrod's cast is admirably diverse, and I suspect that she wants the different colors and accents and vocal tones to suggest the cacophony of the Tower of Babel, providing a neat contrast to the quick and seamless unity that her chorus achieves every time a persuasive leader gives them something to rally 'round (or against). But the result feels surprisingly jarring: Michael Rogers's heavily accented English lilts while Simeon Moore's nasal whine sounds like Snideley Whiplash on helium; Jonathan Fried (as the senior political manipulator in charge of Coriolanus) reminded me of Frasier Crane mellowly telling his radio audience "I'm listening." Roberta Maxwell, meanwhile, fumbles over line after line in her long speeches as Coriolanus's domineering mother, Volumnia.

John Conklin's set is bare save several metal chairs and tables are rearranged to suggest various locations (with differing degrees of success). Actors move this furniture around so often that, at times,  the play threatens to be about little else. Anita Yavich's costumes are variations on a theme—blousy jackets and slacks that look a little like the uniforms that the Robinson family wore in Lost in Space, decked out with various combinations of belts, buttons, and zippers so that, for example, Camargo can transform his smart suit into a tattered version of same by just unzipping in a few strategic spots and exposing the bare flesh beneath. Again, there is so much fussing with the clothing that the final effect is distracting rather than helpful in terms of enhancing our understanding of what's going on.

And what goes on is, against the odds, actually quite compelling; that's the big disappointment of this production. Coriolanus, not too often performed, deserves a staging more coherent than this one. As things stand, the play drags on for nearly three hours; the first of these, especially, is a real snoozer, what with all the exposition being provided at what seems like excessive length. Nevertheless, I was glad to stick it out—never having seen the play before, I find that I can recommend it even in less-than-optimal circumstances.

From Albania’s defining fourteenth-century legal code up to the present day, in the native land and in expatriate communities, Albanian culture has been severely misogynist. To an Albanian family, a daughter is worthless compared to a son; a daughter cannot inherit from a parent even in the absence of sons; and a woman’s primary role is endurance and survival.

Elza Zagreda, writer and performer of Corn Bread And Feta Cheese, grew up in an Albanian-American household, one of four daughters. She was expected, like all Albanian daughters, to master the arts of cooking and serving native food, needlepointing the contents of her hope chest, and denigrating her own gender. As a young woman, her family’s only goal for her was that she marry a man from a good Albanian family—even if he was an illiterate sheepherder. And to top it off, she was fat. And yet Zagreda stands before us today: elegant, confident, a professional actress with a graduate degree, and presumably not married to a sheepherder.

Corn Bread And Feta Cheese should be the story of how, exactly, she escaped that destiny: what makes Zagreda—her family, her story—different from the destiny laid out for her by the rules of her culture. But the play is frustratingly short on both an organizing principle for the story and the specific texture of Zagreda’s life. Much of the time it feels more like a documentary about Albanian culture in general than the story of any individual, let alone the personal story of the performer. Far too much of the play is narrated either in the plural (“we Albanians” do this) or the distancing second person (“this is what happens to you”), which makes everything feel general, even incidents and descriptions that may in fact be drawn from specific memories of Zagreda’s life.

Director Vincent Marano doesn’t seem to have pushed Zagreda toward greater specificity. Many of the acting and storytelling choices are very broad, and sometimes the blocking is actively distracting in its choppiness.

Zagreda is an engaging performer and a gifted mimic, but I never felt like the performance or the writing presented any challenges for her. She seems to have no emotional reaction to any of the terrible ways her culture treated her gender and therefore herself; no emotional consequences of being raised as she was. The play seems to be at its most personal when she is recounting her triumphs—her graduate school thesis, her family’s reaction to her school prizes—and at its most impersonal when she describes the obstacles she faced to achieve them. It felt to me like Zagreda shied away from risky material, material that might have forced her as both writer and performer to delve beneath the generic surface of Albanian life in America and face the difficult, contradictory, and messy truths of her own story.

The play is at its strongest and most emotionally genuine when Zagreda slips into the stories of others—most notably, her great-aunt in Albania, who was forced into an arranged marriage at a young age. She also speaks in passing of numerous other Albanian women whom she interviewed for her graduate thesis; it is only in impersonating others that Zagreda seems able to tap into deep and compelling emotion. These moments are heart-breaking, and made me wish that perhaps, if Zagreda isn’t ready or willing to take risks in telling her own story, she will someday write a piece that tells these other stories, in all their depth.

Old fogies such as myself—who don't keep current with the latest movies, TV shows, recordings, and other pop culture phenomena—are not the target audience of Corporate Rock. This new "tragicomedy" by Will Bennett is set in the world of music journalism, in the offices of Rolling Stone, where a maverick reporter tries to put the art back into rock and the music back into MTV.

His name is Dylan, and as portrayed by the very talented young actor Travis York we absolutely want to root for him and his somewhat quixotic quest. We watch him get berated by his boss, crass magazine editor Marcus (shades of Tootsie: no one will work with you, Dylan), who then reassigns this clearly talented journalist to be the assistant-cum-ghost writer for the rag's celebrity hack, a drugged-out wiseguy named Nathaniel. Then, we watch Dylan overhear (from a stall in the company men's room) a pair of thugs abduct and apparently murder Nathaniel over a gambling debt; and then (shades of Some Like It Hot), Dylan takes over Nathaniel's identity at the magazine and starts pitching--and winning--stories of his choosing.

A promising start (and as you can see, I even got some of the pop culture references!); alas, Bennett's script bogs down badly at this point. The storyline that we want to follow—Dylan's triumphant rise to fame and fortune in the music biz, with concomitant purging of the evil commercial brass who have been bringing the industry down—is shunted aside; Bennett is more interested in pursuing a far less compelling by-the-numbers action/adventure plot involving Nathaniel's captors, who are led by a French Mafia boss (who reminds us, as he strokes his pet turtle, of some James Bond villain or other). The boss is having trouble with his son, who wants to be a heavy metal rock star; the son wants to blackmail Nathaniel into helping him make it in the music business. Cartoonish action scenes ensue throughout the second act as Dylan and some of his coworkers try to rescue Nathaniel; but Dylan's integrity, redemption, maturation, and/or comeuppance—any of which would be worthy fodder for exploration, not to mention offering York something challenging to play—are pretty much ignored.

So Corporate Rock's script ultimately disappoints, whether or not you get the myriad allusions to bands, movies, TV shows, and other stuff that, as I've already explained, frequently went over my head. That said, director Timothy Haskell has striven mightily to dress the play up with a splashy, high-energy staging that is often extremely entertaining. Haskell's opening sequence—a dream scene in which Dylan imagines himself winning (and then turning down) a special MTV Award for his contributions to American music—is brilliantly executed; in fact, it sets the bar so high for Corporate Rock that everything that follows is something of a letdown. Just as fun and imaginative are an extended musical number that recreates/parodies Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video, and another action sequence that, I am told, is a tribute to The Matrix.

York, equally adept at the "tragicomedy" as at the singing and dancing that his role requires, is Corporate Rock's strong anchor. Aaron Haskell comes close to stealing the show, though, in the dance segments (choreography is by Rebecca Ramirez and fight choreography is by DeeAnn Weir). Kellie Arens, as a not-as-dumb-as-she-looks blonde rival reporter demonstrates real comic talent as well.

The laughter all around me throughout Corporate Rock told me that this show was hitting its marks with its intended audience; thanks to the strong work by both York, Arens, and both Haskells, this show makes up for its deficiencies in the script department with plenty of exuberantly irreverent stagecraft. So if you know anything about some of the music or movies that have come out since the Reagan administration, this may prove to be an enjoyable evening's entertainment.

Aaron Petrovitch is a very interesting, funny, manic performer—and his current one-man show, part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival, lets him strut his stuff. Over the course of half an hour, Petrovich leads us through the byzantine maze of his mind, or of his alter ego’s mind—his performance is so smooth and centered, I couldn’t tell if he was letting us see what his mind is like when allowed to roam unfettered; or if he was portraying his idea of the modern everyman. Maybe it’s a little of both. Petrovich is a sort of cross between Spaulding Gray, Forrest Gump, and John Leguizamo.

The show itself is a long, energized rant by Petrovich about everything from the nature of life to the most insignificant of observations. The full title of the show tells you a lot about the author’s sensibility: A Cosmic Mishap in an Accidental Universe in America, a Monologue from the Monoculture, Grown from the Waters of an Expendable Income, in the Controlled Ecosphere of Progress, Under a Synthetic Bubble of an Atomized Republic, in the Otherwise Barren Desert of Complicit Corporate Sponsorship. The author seems to be trying to convey the mad, incomprehensible state of things in the modern world, and to that end he is very effective.

The show starts with Petrovich facing upstage, delivering the first several minutes of his monologue to the back curtain. At first I was worried that I would be spending the next thirty minutes looking at another actor's hind end—but I am happy to report that after a few minutes, and a quick blackout, the performance shifts, and  Petrovich faces stage left. After several minutes of this position, the lights again go out, and come back up with Petrovich facing front. This pattern continues throughout the show, like a theatrical version of the restaurant at the top of the Marriott Marquis, slowly revolving.

The show itself flies by at a breakneck pace. Watching it is like being corralled at a party by someone who has had too many cocktails and can’t stop talking. Most of this is very funny. My favorite line is when Petrovich asks, dead serious, “If I keep my eye on the prize, what am I not seeing?” I do wish that he would take a little more time to let some of the more complex ideas land. I got the idea of how confusing and lost a person can be in this day and age very early on, and would have liked to have heard something else—maybe a little more personalization on the part of the author. But this is a small complaint. Aaron Petrovich is a talent, and you should go see him.

The theme of sexual violence makes its first festival appearance in Country Dark, a two-act thriller by Robert McIlwaine staged at the Workshop Jewel Box Theater. The characters of the play are all “damaged goods” sporting wounds both internal and external. Revelations come readily in a plot-heavy ninety-minutes, but due to some odd choices in the late scenes, little of my curiosity was ultimately sated.

It isn’t apparent immediately, however, that this will be the case. Country Dark’s first act, in which a young handsome man named Charles brings his New York lover Lisa “home” to meet his brother Leo in a decrepit cabin in the woods of upstate New York, wreaks of Pinter’s Homecoming in the best sense. The play stays firmly grounded in believable psychology and mounting fear, with cleverly obtuse dialogue. The brothers, raised by each other alone, have a distance from real life that’s palpably creepy; their misogynistic ritual of photographing women like dolls seems comfortably part of this isolation.

The problem is that Lisa seems unlikely to be easily manipulated by these two, especially given her hardened history and her honest care for Charles. Her billing as a heroine powerful enough to take on Leo, who inhabits his home with an effective mix of menace and charm, makes her actions seem both troubling and puzzling as the play deepens. While several explanations are given as to why she doesn’t immediately leave the cabin when it’s abundantly clear that she’s in real physical danger, none of them seems compelling enough to keep her baiting and confronting her clearly unstable captors until it’s far too late.

Nonetheless, there is plenty of compelling action and acting in this compact piece. Clyde Baldo’s direction is careful and specific, making excellent use of his intimate constraints. Country Dark, though, definitely belongs to the actors. Gerry Hildebrandt, perhaps a bit too young and spry to play Leo, uncovers the brokenness behind his character’s mind with snarling confidence. Krista Braun’s Lisa may find herself unduly underwritten, but never seems to shrink or lose the earned chip on her shoulder. Arguably, the best performance is given by Eric Martin Brown: in a role that could crumble under the weight of helpless childishness, he infuses Charles with adult-sized doubt and impressive specificity.

While inconsistencies of character ultimately mar Country Dark’s overall success, it’s an involving play with more than involving performers; a worthy addition to the summer festival fare.

There's a lot going on in Ross Maxwell's new play Croatoan—too much for it's own good, I think. The play's title is explained in the very first scene, in which a 13-year-old girl named Zoe reads aloud from a postcard she has received from her father. In it, he sketches out the history of the Roanoke Island Lost Colony, the first American English settlement in the 1590s—the one that gave us Virginia Dare, the one that disappeared without a trace save the word "CROATOAN" carved into a rock. Zoe's father, a historian, has disappeared without a trace, too, except for occasional postcards like this one, from all over the United States, each containing no return address and a miniature American history lesson.

One of these missives—which Zoe reads and re-reads obsessively, and hides, with all the others, inside one of her absent father's history books—talks about Christopher Columbus and how, in re-inventing himself from obscure Italian sailor to self-promoting Master of the New World, he was authentically the First American. This would seem to have relevance vis-a-vis Zoe's mother, Trudy, a Native American whom Zoe's Dad met on the road (she was running away from home) and, after a whirlwind courtship, married. Following Columbus's example, Trudy transformed herself into someone completely different—a faded Southern Belle, living alone with her daughter on one of the barrier islands off the North Carolina coast, doggedly clinging to an ante-bellum tradition of gentility and graciousness that she can only have seen in movies like Gone With the Wind or A Streetcar Named Desire. Indeed, Blanche DuBois-like, Trudy now lives off the kindness of strangers, renting rooms to young men like her current boarder, Clinton York, and keeping company with handsome young passers-by such as Avery Jay, the rugged hitchhiking bible salesman whom she picked up this particular afternoon.

Clinton is a graduate student from up north, studying the descendants of African American slaves who still live on the Gullah Islands. He has just completed his research, having recorded the oldest living woman on the islands singing an indigenous funeral song that links this group to their African roots. He's got it on a miniature computer disk whose permanence he makes a big show of proclaiming; oral history, he says, is dying, to be replaced by the seductive power of digitized 1s and 0s.

Avery Jay has an agenda of his own, meanwhile, which does not become clear until Act Two, and which seems to involve both mother and daughter as well as the ghost and left-behind remnants of Zoe's missing father. (I should mention here that the walls of Trudy's home are decorated with what seem to be very valuable historical documents and artifacts.)

And I also need to tell you that a severe hurricane is headed straight toward the island. As the play proceeds, it becomes clear that Trudy's home—and life—could well meet the same fate as the Lost Colony if she and her makeshift brood don't quickly evacuate.

So, as I said: there's a lot going on here in Croatoan. I'm not sure that Maxwell could ever make total sense of it without some judicious excision—there are simply too many threads and themes to pull together. Each of the key elements of this play is tantalizing and thought-provoking. But they wind up getting tangled together into a big metaphorical ball of wool that, while colorful, amounts only to so much twisted yarn.

Director Aimée Hayes isn't able to make things clearer in a production that feels slower-moving and less-involving than we might wish. The play's design elements are intriguing but confusing: Why does what looks like a slave auctioneer's block sit in the back of Trudy's living room? Why is the only item of clothing left behind by Trudy's husband (and borrowed by Clinton, who is African American), a Confederate Army uniform?

The play's five actors work hard to keep us involved in the proceedings and to try and make some sense out of them. Only Brennan Roberts, as handyman Jarrel, actually succeeds, in part because his role is almost entirely expository; but he does have one darkly comic monologue about his past battles with killer hurricanes that is probably the most effective scene in the play. (A running "joke" about him getting progressively more bloodied as he fights the elements falls flat, however.) Chad Beckim is appealing and enigmatic as Avery Jay, though he's not finally able to make the resolution of his story (which hinges, improbably, on the order in which the states entered the Union) believable. Sekou Campbell, as Clinton, is assigned some of the piece's most potentially intriguing material, about the nature of history and the importance of technology, but he's finally not able to make much out of it. Sara Barnett, as Zoe, is convincingly thirteen and hits all the right emotional notes as this sad and desperate child, but her performance becomes increasingly shrill as the play progresses.

Saddled with the play's toughest role, the fine young actress Alyssa Simon strives mightily and gamely as Trudy. But, continuously interesting and changeable as her portrayal is, she can't rise above the sheer improbability of this woman, who resembles the aforementioned Blanche DuBois crossed with the brooding mother Beatrice from Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, with a bit of Amanda Wingfield thrown in for good measure. Plus, she's supposed to be Native American; plus, the chronology—though neither her attitudes nor actions—suggests that she is not much older than thirty. Simon wants her to be the ultimate survivor, and that may be Maxwell's intention; but she's the weirdest sort of dinosaur nevertheless.

In a world where too many theatre pieces feel empty-headed, attempting to do very little except entertain and/or make money, an effort like Croatoan is certainly to be applauded. But I'm afraid that Maxwell needs to put this piece back on the drawing board, a big red pen in hand, to focus and reshape it. There are many fascinating ideas buried inside this play; with time and patience, he may coax some of them out into the open.

Some works of theatre provoke hours of lively discussion and debate—on the walk to the subway, and then on the train, we talk animatedly about the play's themes and perspectives and test them against our own. Other productions, though, hit us someplace deeper, and so the journey home after the performance is subdued: we're still and contemplative as we ponder what the experience meant to us. Such was certainly the case with Joseph Langham's new play, Crux, which is running at the Under St. Marks Theatre in the East Village. This philosophical, apocalyptic comedy-drama lives up to its title (my dictionary has two definitions for "crux": "The basic, central, or critical point or feature" and "A puzzling or apparently insoluble problem"; Crux trades in both meanings). It makes for a quietly powerful evening.

Crux takes place on a street corner in some great city in the middle of a terrible and seemingly endless war. Three ragged survivors, Cleep, Slope, and Nora, keep each other company on and around a bench that is more or less the last remnant of civility amidst the bombed-out rubble; when passers-by, invisible to us, infrequently approach, the trio snap to attention and try to sell their meager wares, a bucketful of roses. Most of the time, though, there's no one else around, and so they pass the time of day in conversation: Cleep and Slope converse, that is, while Nora, who seems to have stopped talking, observes them silently or sleeps.

These tramps will remind you of Waiting for Godot's Estragon and Vladimir, at least superficially; Langham acknowledges as much in an author's note that informs us of his debt not only to Beckett, but also to Pinter, Ionesco, and the other absurdists. These antecedents are truly just a starting point: did any of those writers really imagine obliteration of the species the way that Langham sadly hints at it here?

Cleep and Slope do indulge in some of the same kinds of word games as the Godot pair: they spar and bicker and take genuine delight in one another as, for example, they startle themselves by speaking in perfect unison. Rather than symbolizing ego and id, Cleep and Slope represent, quite plainly, the past and the present, the one "cogitating" about the current state of affairs and the other "reminiscing" about the way things used to be. Nora becomes the necessary third element of this triad as "prognosticator," manifested in very literal and tangible terms— she is pregnant.

There's not much more to tell: that's the crux of Crux, a tiny cross-section of humanity, frightened, sad, and hopeful, scurrying to eke out an existence while the anonymous bombs fall and the unconcerned masses rush past.

Langham has directed his play with the spare, minimalist style that it requires; his sure comic sense gives the piece solid timing and pacing that it needs to keep us listening. Anne Lee has provided a suitably distressing bombed-out urban landscape to serve as the play's set, with Erica Frank's tramp costumes and Rik Sansone's stark lighting completing the picture. Langham's soundscape of explosions and other noises of destruction is also effective. Crux's actors are Matthew Barton (Cleep), Monica Cortez (Nora), and Alvin Lotspeich (Slope); Lotspeich is particularly affecting as perhaps the saddest—or at least the most romantic—member of the trio.

Crux, which is not overtly a political play or even an anti-war one, is nevertheless a powerful indictment of the status quo in America circa 2004. It asks: Can things come to this? And though it offers, via the life growing in Nora's belly, a ray of hope, there's a profound despair at the heart of this quietly moving play that reflects our society's seemingly inexorable march away from democratic ideals like compassion and tolerance and toward meaner ones like greed and complacency.

I wrote one statement on my notepad as I sat watching Daniel MacIvor perform his solo play at Performance Space 122: “It’s not about the story, but the purpose of the story, and this story is about transformation.” The essence of a theatrical expression wrapped up in one sentence. MacIvor’s play, Cul-de-sac, is about the instant of this transformation, more specifically, that moment between life and death. And for Cul-de-sac, this moment happens at 2:02am, in a suburb, on a dead end street, amidst the haze of a mysterious rainy night. Cul-de-sac is MacIvor’s own urban legend. You know, the kind of tale that begins with two lovers “making out” in a car (drop, drop falls the blood onto the roof of the car!), or a babysitter watching TV alone after having put the kids to sleep upstairs (ring, ring cries the phone when the stranger calls!). Cul-de-sac offers the truth behind the tale through the perspectives of nine lives, including a bickering couple, an opera diva, a crusty old man, a 13-year-old girl and a drugged-up, raging young hustler—as MacIvor chronicles a man named Leonard’s last moments on earth.

MacIvor is a Canadian actor, playwright, and director, originally from Nova Scotia, educated in Toronto, and artistic director of the theatre company da da kamera. During the last fifteen years, MacIvor has written and performed in dozens of plays, most of them solo works: In On It, You Are Here, Monster, The Soldier Dreams, Here Lies Henry, Excerpts From the Emo Journals, White Biting Dog, Never Swim Alone, and House, among many others. As a writer and performer he is a master of extreme physical gesture and poetic language brought into balance by an inclination to tell a simple story. For every truth he reveals, there are multitudes of secrets left unspoken. He lives in an artistic world that is mysterious, sexual, vulnerable, and stimulating of the mind and spirit.

In Cul-de-sac he is all this and more. His Leonard is oddly normal (or as normal as can be for a sexually promiscuous, slightly effeminate gay man living in suburbia!) traveling throughout the play with the understated energy of a soul without a home, forever existing in purgatory. MacIvor finds his extremes in the almost caricatured machinations of his other characters, gleaning onto bold gestures and vocal patterns to illuminate the emotional and psychological realities of his cast of witnesses (the most realized and effective are his 13-year old girl and the raging hustler). In this 75-minute staging of Leonard’s cold, dreary night, the truth is realized like a puzzle being put together, as each character unravels the mystery of what happened at 2:02 am.

Daniel Brooks’s direction metaphorically juxtaposes the economy of breath and clean lines with the violent surges of thunder blasts and life-ending kicks to the stomach and face. He places MacIvor on a 12 x 18 low platform with only a chair. And through the clarity of his imagination, he takes us on a journey that allows us to zoom in, so specifically, on the street where Leonard lives.

Richard Feren’s sound and music design manipulate the experience like that of a movie soundtrack (maybe Scream, maybe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, maybe Jacob's Ladder?). It’s funny, it’s sensationalized, and it’s the truth.

The extremeness of Kimberly Purtell’s lighting is both clean with sharp edges and heart stopping with its blinding (literally) flashes of thunderclouds crashing and character gestures extinguishing a life.

MacIvor’s dialogue is at times too casual and too untheatrical, but it is placed into perfect balance by passages of poetic expression that seem to capture all the sensations and implications of a moment, a feeling, a want. MacIvor’s Leonard is an “Everyman” for the gay man, told with universality. His is a story for the masses with a lesson for humanity reminding that a loss of life is a loss for all.

Midway through Jeffrey Marshek’s one-man show Cul De Sac Rock comes a particularly arresting moment: Jeffrey and his mother are having lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Cleveland during his first visit home from college, and after casually mentioning his break-up with a recent girlfriend, he tells his mother he’s seeing someone new.

That he is about to come out to her is no surprise. But when Marshek switches to the character of his mother, giddily asking after this “new person,” we see the chirpy questions stop and her acquisitive stare go blank. A moment later, a series of sensations sweep across her face: she is at McDonald’s and they have given her the wrong order; she is at a foreign airport and there’s a problem with her passport; she is bound with rope watching her entire family be sliced up and then she is made to lick the knife. Then her withered face droops down to her formerly tasty moo shoo chicken and she mumbles something before imploring him not to tell his father who is “under a lot of pressure right now,” etc.

Nothing that precedes or follows is as genuine and alive as this brief devastation. Marshek proffers a buffet of indistinct sadness, served by the five members of his immediate family—a group of generally well-observed caricatures that are rarely inhabited by the playwright/performer. He knows how to get his laughs, having collected a plethora of familiar verbal and gestural idiosyncrasies (particularly recognizable to ex-pats of the Midwest) and he is also adept at doing voices. Marshek’s physicality, however, leaves something to be desired; very little seems to be happening above the ribcage and some characterizations are altogether murky (I had difficulty distinguishing between his two pot-smoking brothers).

The songs I found lyrically lacking, but musically quite impressive until I realized near the end that the taped accompaniment was from songs by artists such as Radiohead and The Strokes, reworded by Marshek. The reason for this choice is unclear to me as the songs sampled are not contemporaneous with the time of the play (presumably late 80’s, early 90’s) and have no relationship to these, their relyricked incarnations. The songs comprise at least a fourth of the evening, but credit or acknowledgement of this is not given in the program—a choice with which I fervently disagree.

Tired of spending 45 minutes in your dermatologist's waiting room only to see him for about 45 seconds once your name is called? (True story!) Discouraged by reduced service and cost-cutting on your healthcare plan? Worried about whether your doctor will return your email and how much you will have to pay for it?

Damaged Care, a musical comedy/cabaret show written and performed by two medical doctors, Dr. Greg LaGana and Dr. Barry Levy, explores some of the specific complaints doctors and patients may have regarding healthcare in America today. The doctors do this exploration through song. And, what better way is there to discuss, for example, organ transplants than singing "The Spare Parts Blues"? Most of the songs in the show are parodies of popular show tunes. Thus, "I Feel Pretty" becomes "Doctors in Cyberspace" and "That's Entertainment" becomes "That's Cost Containment." The musical director and piano accompanist, Brad Ross, wrote four of the 15 songs for the show.

In order to hold their discussion from two points of view, the doctors have created two very different characters. Dr. LaGana plays the part of the "idealist" who is frustrated by not having enough time to care for his patients and by the business side of things. Dr. Levy, playing the "devil's advocate," scolds Dr. LaGana for "being so negative" and urges LaGana to look at things from a more “profitable” viewpoint. The doctors also come together sometimes by lamenting about "the good old days" of practicing medicine.

LaGana and Levy, clearly close friends, have a nice chemistry on stage and their voices aren't so bad either. They bring up a lot of problems rather than explore a few in depth and so the show seems to aim to spark conversation and allow for venting rather than offer any definite solutions.

In one satirical bit, the doctors put on devil's horns and carry pitchforks as they plot how to get around the Patient's Bill of Rights by creating a healthcare plan that doesn't cover much of anything at all (one lyric to the song they sing is "We do not cover oral health or anything that's dental..." ). In another, the men fight about whom to admit into a hospital. Levy 's character advises LaGana to try a more lucrative policy as he sings to imaginary patients, "You're sick; go home."

Overall, the show is funny and corny (that's a good thing) and enjoyable to watch and listen to. At the performance I attended, I was able to stick around for the short, informal Q&A held afterward for a more serious discussion of the issues.

If you've never seen Dame Edna in action, then by all means hurry over to the Music Box Theatre and do so; she's become, like Las Vegas or the Pyramids of Egypt, a sort of necessary cultural edifice—there's nothing quite like her anywhere else in the world. As she will tell you herself from the stage, no other show gives audiences what hers does: you won't see Brenda Blethyn (of Dame Edna's across-the-street neighbor 'night, Mother) asking unwary ladies in the front rows to send their shoes onto the stage in an oversized fishing net; nor will Blethyn or even her co-star Edie Falco invite a married couple to sit with her for the better part of fifteen minutes to discuss marital troubles they didn't know they had, or cast an impromptu reading of a play based on her life with five hapless members of the audience. But that's all in an evening's work for the Dame.

For the uninitiated—of whom there are presumably fewer than there were five years ago, when this Australian housewife-turned megastar made her Tony-winning Broadway debut—let me explain that Dame Edna Everage is the waaaay-larger-than-life creation of actor Barry Humphries. When he first invented her, an astonishing 50 years ago, she was just a simple housewife, but since then, as her ego has careened out of control (and her popularity and fame have almost, but not quite, managed to keep pace with it), she acquired her title, a series of stage and TV shows, and the genuine adoration of legions of fans all over the world. She now calls herself a "giga-star"; she is, as far as I know, the only one. Not quite camp or conventional female impersonation, Humphries's creation is the quintessential self-invented celebrity—what Andy Warhol, Cher, or Madonna would have been had any of them had the nerve. Dame Edna doesn't "do" anything, except remind us how much better than us she is, either directly, in hilarious and timely comic monologues whose subjects include, at the moment, Condaleeza Rice, George and Laura Bush, and Barbra Streisand (among many others); or indirectly, by having "caring and nurturing" conversations with women in the front rows of the audience, whom she will quiz about such personal topics such as the way they spell their names or the color schemes of their bathrooms.

As befits a giga-star, Dame Edna does have an entourage, of course. Its most famous member, her "New Zealand bridesmaid" Madge Allsop, does not appear in her stage show; instead, she's surrounded/abetted by pianist Wayne Barker, The Gorgeous Ednaettes (Teri DiGianfelice and Michelle Pampena), and The Equally Gorgeous TestEdnarones (Randy Aaron and Gerrard Carter), who flank her in the four deliberately tacky musical numbers that open and close each act, as well as perform various duties such as helping her hand out her signature gladioli to hundreds of audience members. (All five of these young performers are quite good.)

The show is breezy, silly, and very funny. Dame Edna thinks faster on her feet than just anybody I can think of, and she's got charisma to spare. Some of the material—about her children Kenny and Valmai, about the less fortunate audience members sitting in the boxes (or "ashtrays," as she calls them) or mezzanine ("paupers"), even many of the questions posed to audience members—is essentially the same as her last show, but the interactivity (not to mention daily headlines) keeps it fresh and spontaneous. Every show is indeed different.

But not that different, I'm afraid: those who have seen the Dame before and not become her fawning subjects may not feel the need to see her now, particularly because the new show is, if anything, tamer and more homogenized than the last one. Again like the Pyramids, Dame Edna has lost both her novelty and some of her sharpness—the dangerous edge is missing from her work, replaced with the reassuring familiarity that necessarily accompanies excessive fame. (Dame Edna's merciless quest to embarrass audience members feels more acceptable too, thanks to reality TV.)

Fans, of course, will have to come. They're the ones who know exactly what she's talking about when she inquires whether there are any "friends of Kenny" in the crowd (alluding to her gay son), who will howl with delight at each of the exotic gowns in which she appears (designed by Will Goodwin and Stephen Adnitt, who make Bob Mackie look downright conservative), and will joyously sing along with the naughtily suggestive finale, which is punctuated by some impromptu choreography involving the dozens of gladioli stalks that have been distributed to members of the audience.

It is lovely to have Dame Edna back, and if the enormously happy and enthusiastic crowd that I saw her with is any indication, she'll be here for quite some time.

Funny and chipper and eager to please, Jean Cocteau Repertory's new production of Dames at Sea feels like a hit—a big, big hit—and boy, ain't that great news. This paean to movie musicals of the '30s and '40s—a species of entertainment whose one and only mission in life was to lighten the spirits of a country mired in Great Depression and then World War—is at once giddy parody and joyous recreation. Not so long ago, producers used to put on shows in this town for what was called "the tired businessman": well, aren't we all plenty tired of all the business we've got to deal with these days? An authentic escapist entertainment, Dames at Sea can feel downright euphoric right about now.

The story couldn't be simpler. Mona Kent, the Famous Musical Comedy Star, is headlining a new Broadway Show called "Dames at Sea" for Hennessey, a producer who had once seen Better Days but lately has only suffered Flop After Flop. Mona is, in a word, difficult. But she's not Hennessey's only problem, or even his worst one—that would be the bulldozer just outside, getting ready to demolish the theatre, even though this is Opening Night.

Enter Ruby, a fresh-faced kid from Centerville, Utah with hope in her heart, a song on her lips, and tap shoes on her feet. She has arrived in New York to become a Big Star on Broadway, and turns up at Hennessey's theatre in search of work. There's no work for her, of course, it being the Depression and all—but wait, Joan, the happy-go-lucky, tart-tongued chorus girl, reminds Hennessey that one of the other girls has gotten married, so there's a slot for Ruby after all! Can she learn all the routines in just a few hours?

Now enter Dick, a sailor who found Ruby's suitcase on the bus and has come to return it to her. He just happens to be from Centerville too, and they fall instantly in love (this moment, by the way, is staged deliciously by director David Fuller, along with so many others). Dick also just happens to be a brilliant songwriter—"DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson rolled into one," proclaims Mona, who would know—and it's not long before he's playing his tunes for the star and heading off with her to lunch, much to Ruby's consternation.

A whole bunch of other stuff happens next—all of which you've seen in some vintage movie made by Warner Brothers or MGM, only funnier here—with the upshot being that, because the theatre is about to be destroyed, "Dames at Sea" is produced instead on a battleship. Joan's boyfriend Lucky, also a sailor and, coincidentally, a terrific dancer, chips in with Dick and the ship's captain to make the show come off. And when Mona gets too seasick to go on with the show... well, guess what chipper All-American chorus girl is brought in at the last minute to save the day and become a star?

Dames at Sea revels in the innocent and mindless entertainment that it sends up, which is why it works: even though the clichés have been endlessly parodied and/or parroted in the 35 years since this show was written, by everything from Sondheim's Follies to The Carol Burnett Show to two(!) Broadway productions of 42nd Street, the freshness of this, a bona fide original, shines through. And even though the allusions in Jim Wise, George Haimsohn, and Robin Miller's songs are often really unfamiliar (do a lot of people younger than me know who Charlie Farrell and Nancy Carroll are, to quote just one of their witty couplets?), Dames at Sea's hokey, high-spirited, can-do-American philosophy rings out loud and clear. In a way, Dames at Sea is entirely about how six performers can seem to be a cast of thousands: this is the quintessential little-off-off-Broadway-show-that-could, a downtown upstart so darned ingratiating and entertaining that it puts all those bigger and more expensive mega-musicals in midtown to shame.

Certainly these six performers are powerhouses. As Ruby, Kathleen White not only looks the part but invests everything she's got in it, whether she's belting out a love-forsaken ditty called "Raining in My Heart" or just tappety-tappety-tapping across the stage. As her opposite, Andy Meyers is equally engaging, especially on the two occasions when he sits down, with all the seriousness of, say, Mickey Rooney as Lorenz Hart, to treat us to one of his improbably professional compositions. Chrysten Peddie, in the Joan (Blondell) role is sassy and adorable and a swell singer and dancer; Joey Stocks (Lucky; think Donald O'Connor or Bobby Van) is funny, warm, and hands-down this company's strongest hoofer. Judith Jarosz has a blast being imperious and impossible as Mona, and comes close to stopping the show with the score's wittiest entry, a dead-on parody of "My Man," "Bill," and other done-me-wrong songs called "That Mister Man of Mine." Campbell Bridges, double cast as the hapless Hennessey and the gruff but ineffectual ship's captain, is at his best duetting with Jarosz on a faux-operetta ditty (and tribute to Cole Porter) called "The Beguine."

Fuller's direction feels just about perfect, and he's really pulled out the stops here, gimmick-wise, what with a smoke machine and a bubble machine and a scrim that allows him to stage fantasy sequences with effortless economy. Fuller is also the producing artistic director of Jean Cocteau, and Dames at Sea is a huge departure for the company—a step away from the very serious fare that has been their calling card and a clear step up in terms of production values and professionalism. Regulars at this theatre are going to be dazzled by Roman Tatarowicz's gloriously inventive sets, Joanne Haas's sparkly, spangly costumes, and Giles Hogya's sunny lighting. Barbara Brandt's choreography is especially impressive, recalling iconic moments from seemingly dozens of classic films without ever feeling anything but fresh and endearing.

So, as the first act finale has it, "Good Times are Here to Stay" at the Cocteau; or at least 'til November 28 (but if we're lucky maybe the show can go on even longer—goodness knows we deserve it). For two hours, anyway, we get to trade Dubya and Laura for Franklin and Eleanor and a war we don't understand for one we do. Viva nostalgia. Viva innocence. Enjoy Dames at Sea.

Inquisitive, impulsive, and self-effacing, British writer/performer Dave Gorman makes himself the absurd hero of self-imposed odysseys, and then turns these adventures into stage shows. In a prior work, Are You Dave Gorman?, he told the story of a time when he decided to meet and shake the hands of other Dave Gormans around the world. That show has toured worldwide, winning a Drama Desk Award for its New York production and resulted in a best-selling companion book. It also led Gorman to be hired by a major publisher to apply his wit to write a novel, a work of fiction. This is where the story of Googlewhack begins—he is 31, he has grown a beard to reinforce the idea that he is now a serious adult who has a hefty advance to write a novel, and he sits at a computer to do his work of making things up. However, like so many whose work is on computers connected to the Internet, he finds all the distractions he wants online.

A chain of events begins when Gorman receives an email informing him that his website, davegorman.com, contains a Googlewhack. A Googlewhack, is a set of two words that, when entered into the search engine Google, produce one and only one search result. Considering that Google is able to search over 4 billion web pages, and most queries come back with tens of thousands of results, a Googlewhack is no small numerical event. The search for Googlewhacks is time-consuming and can be addictive, especially for fans of probability and language. For Dave Gorman, it is exactly the new obsession to keep him from writing his novel. Now turned onto the game of finding Googlewhacks—and following up by emailing a website’s owner to let them know they have a Googlewhack on their page—Gorman becomes intrigued by the people he is now discovering, as behind every website there is at least one person, with some interest or identity they are posting for the world to possibly browse. Corresponding with these strangers, found amongst the billions of Internet pages, Gorman envisions a chain of Googlewhack connections—in which a person he has found by a Googlewhack is then prompted to find two more Googlewhacks and on and on it goes. When another Dave Gorman—who our Gorman befriended on his Are You Dave Gorman? adventure—challenges him to find and meet an unbroken chain of 10 Googlewhacks before his 32nd birthday, a new world-spanning quest begins.

With his 32nd birthday only a few months away (the age at which, he thinks, he must truly grow up and stop doing these things) Gorman travels to meet the people that his Google searches have put into his sights, and get them to Googlewhack to continue the chain and his adventure. The result is an international race against the calendar.

Energetically on the front of his feet the whole show, Gorman is an enthusiastic and wonderfully entertaining storyteller. Though he has already toured this story around the world, he relates it to the audience as if he just got back, and they are the friends in the pub who he just couldn’t wait to tell it to first. Drawing on his skills as a stand-up comic, he gets the audience liking him and comfortable laughing at him right away. Throughout the performance, he rapidly clicks through projections of graphics and photographs to make details and characters vivid, and reinforce the fact that this is a true story.

Since the rules of the game he is playing give him very little control over where he will go next, his adventure becomes an exploration of how a device like a search engine can sift through a world of individuals and the expressions of themselves they put online. And it is remarkable throughout how many people—when contacted by Gorman, a stranger to them on his absurd journey—will meet him, play along, and often even take him into their homes. There are probably many philosophical levels that could be seen in Gorman’s adventure, as it touches on subjects such as fate, chance, and the signal of personal connection amongst all the noise of information. But really, by the end, I found myself enjoying the journey too much to think of any of that, and just rooting for him to win.

Like his last show, Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure also has a companion book.

Dead Woman Home, a solo show written and performed by May Nazareno, vigorously illustrates the nature and consequences of grief and fear across the world. The play alternates between New York City and Iraq as it weaves the true story of a Filipina UN aide who is reported dead after the 2003 bombing of the United Nations mission in Baghdad. As Nazareno portrays Marilyn, the fictionalized version of this UN aide, she bravely represents an individual's emotion regarding the current war. Nazareno also portrays members of Marilyn’s family, and their reaction to the news. We see each character go through his or her despair. Their shock and denial to losing a loved one is gripping. These characters include Tito (middle-aged brother to Marilyn), Lola (her mother), and Rick (her son). Nazareno also plays Victoria Burns, a passionate freelance reporter working in Iraq. I felt that this was the most effective and well-written character, as she relentlessly follows the news in Baghdad and is determined to show us (and politicians) how much crisis the world faces.

Although the message of this show is familiar—war is scary and death through war is horrible—Nazareno pursues this theme from a very human level, using this international family as an example. She rushes through some of the moments in the play too quickly, and at times does not enable us to see the vulnerability of each character. This is particularly true when she jumps from Lola to Rick, not stopping to let us see the transformation in her body or change of attitude. But the text is rich with emotion and fully defines each member of the family.

Perfectly complementing the mood of Dead Woman Home is a video display, designed by Mark Ramquist, that shows staunch images of Baghdad in the background. The moment that Victoria Burns questions U.S. politicians, shown on-screen, is captivating. She has perfectly timed her questions about the toll of war with their prerecorded responses. We feel as if the politicians are giving all of us their vague answers, leaving us empty-handed. These designs, along with a beautiful score by Anthony Rios (sound design) and Blair Jensen (composer), create multimedia poetry.

I admire Nazareno for speaking to something human in all of us. I hope that she continues her explorations.

A troublesome play, is Catherine Allen's Dear Vienna. I think that what the playwright is going for is a concept comedy along the lines of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile. That piece postulated a meeting between the young Albert Einstein and the young Picasso in a Parisian cafe, an event that supposedly changes the course of history (i.e., to what actually happened); it's fanciful and smart and off-the-wall, like its author's best work, and a neat tribute to its subjects.

Alas, Sigmund Freud, influential fellow though he may have been, was no Einstein or Picasso; and Allen is no Steve Martin: Dear Vienna, big on ambition, takes two and a half hours to go almost nowhere at all. The conceit of the play is that young Freud, just graduated from medical school and eking out a youthful existence in Vienna in 1881, has set his heart on becoming a playwright. He is befriended by two men—a blustery, self-important bore of a philosopher called Gilbert Bruckholdt, and a magazine editor named Horst Kritsky. Bruckholdt wants Kritsky to publish one of his papers in the magazine. Kritsky doesn't like Bruckholdt's writing, but is desirous of a meeting with Freud, whom Bruckholdt claims to know. (Why Kritsky is so obsessed with getting to know Freud is never explained; it's implied, vaguely, that Kritsky, who is homosexual, is sexually attracted to the young doctor, but that notion is hardly explored.)

To cut a long story short, Kritsky and Bruckholdt strike a bargain: the one will publish the other if he secures the desired introduction. To effect the meeting, Bruckholdt and Kritsky prevail upon the great retired actress Diamanthe LaBerge to read Freud's play. Complications follow: LaBerge, who is Kritsky's patroness, is wooing a vehemently anti-Semitic young writer named Sir Rudolph DerVanderhoff, who just happens to be Kritsky's ex-lover (they broke up because Kritsky couldn't stand DerVanderhoff's politics). And of course, the play turns out to be just terrible, although for a while Freud is so convinced that it's a masterpiece that he tells everyone to call him "Golden Ziggy."

What Allen intends this morass of plot to coalesce into, I think, is a humorous explosion that forces Freud to pursue the path that we know he will, having acquired wisdom and insight inadvertently from his association with this eclectic pack of fictional characters. Dear Vienna does end with Freud chucking the theatre for psychology, and with several of the male characters sucking contentedly on cigars—food for, er, thought. But Allen never convincingly makes her case. Indeed, the entire enterprise only feels foolish from the get-go. The nebulous plotting is weighted down throughout by a poor attempt at authenticity that comes out as verbose, stilted dialogue. Worst of all, Allen's efforts to make the play relevant, via the anti-Semitism theme and the gay love story, backfire badly: people in the play refer to Freud as "that Jew" a lot, and DerVanderhoff is essentially ruined when the secret of his sexuality is exposed, but there's no counterbalance, and the play winds up feeling—unintentionally I am sure—both anti-Semitic and homophobic.

All of these problems notwithstanding, Dear Vienna has been given a lavish production (by off-off-Broadway standards) by Vital Theatre Company at their lovely new home uptown at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre. Brandon Matthews has provided a stunning set, with more than half the stage given over to a tasteful and luxuriously appointed rendition of LaBerge's drawing room that rivals what you'd see at MTC or Roundabout. Vanessa Lueck's costumes are similarly lush and period-appropriate. Strauss waltzes drift in and out. The cast, unfortunately, is more uneven: the very accomplished Judith Hawking completely dominates the proceedings as LaBerge, which is problematic as hers is actually a minor character; neither Ross Beschler (Freud) nor G.R. Johnson (Kritsky) ever engages us nearly so much in the play's two central roles. Ron McClary works gamely as Bruckholdt, but his part is badly underwritten; Jessi Gotta rises nicely to the occasion when her character, LaBerge's French maid Yvette, finally is given something to do near the end of Act Two. Tug Coker is an indifferent VanDerhoff.

Director Julie Hamberg keeps things moving, but she hasn't really done much to solve the problems of this unwieldy script. Dear Vienna is an interesting idea gone awry. I advise all concerned to put it in the drawer and focus on something new as soon the run is done with.

Ann Marie Healy's new play Dearest Eugenia Haggis, which is part of Summerworks 2005, Clubbed Thumb's mini-new-works festival, focuses on three eccentric characters. Two of them are women—the title character, a plainspoken (and plain-looking) middle-aged lady who is as stubbornly intolerant of others' foibles as she is blindly unaware of her own; and the much younger Pauline Khenghis, a dreamy and perennially unhappy schemer who seems to understand that she's already irretrievably stuck in a rut from which she is unwilling and/or unable to extract herself. Both compete, more or less, for a stable future working for Blind Johnny Knoll, whose main attribute is described in his name. Healy sets up a kind of contest between the two women, and though their respective psychological baggage would seem to result in an even match, the outcome is anything but a draw. That said, it shouldn't surprise you that no one seems to win, either.

It's a bleak world depicted in this play; Healy coyly describes it in the program as "Someplace very far away from many things; almost everything. Most definitely the furthest outskirts of a tiny copper town called Calumet in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan." This same kind of cutesy indecisiveness pervades the entire show: we're aware that Healy is trafficking in the saddest and deepest reaches of loneliness in spinning this tale, but at the same time she keeps pulling back and away, almost postmodernly, calling attention to the folly of her creations in jarringly whimsical ways. Pauline lapses into self-conscious daydream/fantasies in which she darts about the small house like a vampire or some other B-movie monster; for Eugenia, Healy has devised an equally self-conscious set of speech patterns and catch phrases that make her sound like a cliché patchwork of '30s-era maiden lady next-door neighbors (think Margaret Hamilton as Miss Gulch, but not so malevolent). The effect of this is to intentionally distance us from a story that might otherwise be allowed to touch us; I'm not sure why Healy wants to do this.

I'm not sure, either, why Healy navigates her story the way it finally wends. Pauline, already employed by Blind Johnny Knoll when Miss Haggis arrives in the household, launches a cunning and dirty campaign to get rid of her rival. We think that Eugenia will respond in kind; at first, she almost does. But then the balance of power tilts fairly decisively in one direction—and everyone involved is sent, almost as if by an otherwordly force, to an existential, possibly deserved, destiny.

The ending feels enigmatic, deliberately so. This all by itself is very likely Healy's modest point in this play. I'm not sure it's sufficient payoff for what comes before; I do know that because Healy seems so determined to keep us from empathizing with any of her characters that I finally didn't much care what happened to any of them.

Dearest Eugenia Haggis has been given an almost lavish mounting by Clubbed Thumb, particularly given the festival setting. Raul Abrego's set, consisting of a couple of rooms in Blind Johnny's home, is detailed and interesting; Josh Epstein's lighting is similarly vivid and evocative, and costumes by Anne Kenney provide a period flavor that Healy occasionally works against (why?) in her writing. Melissa Kievman's staging is precise and thoughtful. Matthew Cowles and Caitlin Miller as Blind Johnny Knoll and Pauline Khenghis create intriguing, fully-fleshed-out characters. Special mention needs to be made of Mara Stephens, as Eugenia Haggis, who stepped into the role less than a week before opening night and performs with almost miraculous assurance; even though occasionally still on book, she dominates the proceedings and makes the title character of this unusual and perhaps under-written play someone we wish we could know much, much better.

With the possible exception of birth, which people don’t tend to spend their whole lives obsessing over, there simply isn’t a more universal subject than death. Almost every great play ever written is concerned in some way with the final end of the individual. Death and the Ploughman, written by the Bohemian Johannes von Saaz in 1401, makes the maddening, terrifying, unavoidable mystery of death its sole subject. Whether it is a great play dramatically isn’t entirely clear, but it’s a beautiful piece of poetic, philosophical writing around which Anne Bogart has crafted an equally beautiful production.

The play is in the form of a simple dialogue: a common ploughman, desperately bereaved over the recent loss of his wife while in the bloom of her youth, takes Death to task for his sins towards mankind. Death attempts to acquit himself by explaining his indispensability in God’s great scheme. Back and forth they go, prosecuting and defending, expressing, respectively, a bottomless grief and a condescending, at times irritated, patience.

What prevents this exchange from becoming tedious is the sheer virtuosity of von Saaz’s ideas and language (the translation is by Michael West). Nearly every poetic and rhetorical device is employed by either party, making the series of verbal thrusts and parries as entertaining and immediate as a sword fight between two dissimilar but evenly matched opponents: Death, a seasoned, nearly omnipotent professional, and the Ploughman, an underdog who rises to the occasion on pure passion.

For the most part, Bogart and her collaborators in the SITI Company have complemented this fascinating text with a spare, limpid performance of great power. As the Ploughman, Will Bond is contorted at every moment by the exertions of grief, through which his probing words and questions erupt by the sheer force of their conviction. In contrast, Death, essayed here by Stephen Webber, is cool, collected, and slightly fatuous, down to the bowler and umbrella snatched from a Magritte

All the more surprising, then, when Death breaks into a ragged, earnest blues lament, or when the Ploughman temporarily paints Death into a logical corner. Rather than allow themselves to be confined by the incessant duality of the text, Bogart and Co. find as many opportunities as they can to find the complexity and contradictions located within the characters. From time to time the seriousness of purpose is waylaid by a vaudeville routine or wacky sound effect. The result of these intrusions isn’t to distract, but to deepen the characters’ arguments in counterintuitive ways, and for the most part, despite some affected avant-garde gestures that occasionally muddy the waters, these gambits succeed.

Supporting the main conflict, tipping the scales now one way now another, is Ellen Lauren, whose role is simply listed as Woman. Sometimes she appears explicitly as the spirit of the Ploughman’s wife, and at others she appears to be little more than Death’s personal lackey; at the end, she proves to be something neither adversary had counted on. Throughout, her presence is essential to the texture of the piece, a human example of the stakes being played as well as a physical manifestation of the ambiguities undercutting the arguments.

The carefully lucid enigmas of the production are dependent upon some quietly stunning design work. James Schuette’s sets and costumes—all in black and white and shades of gray—are a perfect visual counterpart to Bogart’s interpretation of the text. Brian H. Scott’s lighting helps delineate the many steps on the Ploughman’s progress to a kind of understanding, and Darron L. West’s soundscape pervades every moment of the play, which helps to heighten the action to the stylized, nearly ritual level on which it dwells. All parties involved contribute to the production’s undeniable universality.

Death is universal. It will eventually come to us all. It is the greatest mystery of our time on the planet, questioned by philosophers and pedestrians since the dawn of time.

But what does it have to do with whipped cream?

That’s what I was asking myself on the way to see Death and Whipped Cream, the new "Romantic Comedy about Death by Kostia Rubchinsky" at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. When I walked out, I was 90 minutes closer to death, but none the wiser.

The piece begins with a decrepit old man attempting to leave a video message from his deathbed. His struggle with the digital video camera goes on ad nauseum, so much so that I started to wonder whether it was an actual technical snag or a heavy-handed directorial choice. Either way it wouldn’t have made the piece any more engaging.

The brief glimmer of a live feed from the camera onto the flat-screen TV produced nothing more than a super-close shot of the man’s costume. It was like looking at a photo blocked by the thumb of a novice photographer. I’m guessing that was supposed to be the “multimedia” aspect of the piece.

After watching the old man approach death for what seems like a lifetime, we flashback to his twenties. Here, the relationship between the young man and a woman has the allure of a drunken one night stand, yet the text tells us they’ve been married long enough to have a baby. The young actors Evan Matthew Weinstein and Traven Rice make equally valiant efforts, but just didn’t have much to work with. Whatever choices they might have made seemed thwarted by Rubchinsky’s heavy directorial hand.

When the titular Whipped Cream finally shows up after a Godot-like buildup, it serves as the vehicle for a tentative and downright lame food fight. In an attempt to be safe, the one part that these young actors could have had fun with was stifled. The only genuine moments on that stage were the happy accidents where their real personalities shone through—Weinstein accidentally knocked Rice in the teeth with a glass and it was the first time it seemed that they truly cared about each other. Rubchinsky had nothing to do with it and it was the only unforced and charming moment of the evening.

Death and Whipped Cream tackles the question of death but doesn’t offer much more than some pseudo-philosophical queries that are tantamount to what you might overhear in a college dorm. A perpetual misfiring of clichés does not a philosopher make.

According to program notes, Death Party is the first play by author John Pastore and based on some of his own experiences growing up in a violent household. It's an impressive debut. There are truly funny moments, truly harrowing moments, some fine acting, and—very importantly—it’s unlikely that you and the friend(s) you came with will leave the theatre without something to argue over later. It will, in any event, live with you.

25-year-old Joe is a self-consumed, aggressively blunt, obnoxious “asshole.” (He is, in fact, called that several times by various characters during the course of the play and, for most of the play, he more than lives up to the description.) When we first meet him, knocking back beers on a Brooklyn stoop with his long-suffering best friend Will, Joe is in rare form. His outwardly decent cop father has suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. We see through flashbacks that behind closed doors, the man was boorish, violent and abusive to his wife and two sons. Joe rages on ad nauseum that he is expected to put on a show at the wake and act respectful when, frankly, he mourns only to have not been the one to send the old S.O.B. to his grave. And what is this wake really but a party of pretense? Sorry for your loss, ma’am, but how’s the DJ and where’s the bar and the conga line?

And then we meet Alex, Joe’s quiet, gentle-natured younger brother who, for their mother’s sake, has come to commandeer Joe back to the wake. Alex is no happier about this than Joe but stands firm to his charge. When drunk-as-a-skunk Joe promises to go only if Alex can beat him in a boxing spar, anguished Alex takes him out in a punch. Act Two begins with Joe honoring his promise in the most blasphemous way. He shows up at his mother’s house toting balloons and party music cds and wearing a clown costume. In his goody bag are a dildo—a “present” for his mother—and his father’s loaded gun. His diatribes against his parents reach fevered, nearly orgasmic pitch when Alex finally steps forward to divulge his own secrets that quite take away Joe’s spotlight. What those secrets are—well, let’s just say there are no warm fuzzies or Kodak moments in this play, but at least Joe is finally left speechless.

Max Rishoj has a grand time playing Joe, a decidedly unsympathetic character who never apologizes (until the end, anyway, when it’s far too late) and believes 100% that the victimization by his father and the silent, clueless culpability of his mother entitle him to behave the way he does. Joe believes that all he’s doing, in his show-no-mercy/take-no-prisoners way, is telling it like it is. And very often in the course of the play that is exactly what he does, as much as we might hate to admit it. It’s the part where psychologically he’s more his loathsome father’s son than he realizes—if not potentially worse—that kills his credibility.

Zac Springer gives an inspired, shattering performance as Alex, Joe’s strait-laced but desperately vulnerable younger brother who, like Joe, proves through his own demons that the apple never falls too far from the family tree. And Taylor Girard is terrific—albeit sorely underused—as Will, the brothers’ infinitely patient, supportive, low-fat/low-carb eating friend who tries too late to extricate himself from the escalation of nastiness at the death party.

There are nice performances as well in small peripheral comic roles from Nick Amick as another of Joe’s neighborhood friends, Ricky, and Hilary Thompson as Ricky’s brainy fiancée Vanessa. Alas, I found these characters unnecessary, even distracting to the action. They seem to serve only to show what a jerk Joe is, but, trust me, we DON’T need any more reminders. The same applies to the character of Ano, played by Albert Sanchez, Jr., a friend of Joe’s father who also shows up very briefly to entreat Joe to go home to the wake.

Less effective are the portrayals of Joe’s parents, but this is not necessarily criticism of the actors. Lucianna Magnoli, as Joe’s mother Sally, has very little to do on stage but look downtrodden, shell-shocked, and washed-out. As father John, shown in the short flashbacks, Steven Devito only shouts, threatens, and throws things. Especially given their dialogue, these two characters come off as cookie cutter clichés, not people. I think the playwright will have more of a play if we are given a few more clues about why Sally stayed with this brute and is so paralyzed by his loss. And I think Pastore will have an even better play if we don’t see the dead father at all, even in memories or flashbacks. Giving the audience different glimpses of John through the characters—especially Sally—will make us wonder if Joe really is only being a whiny martyr and will give Alex’s final revelations greater impact.

On the technical side, there’s some nice staging by director Marc Eardley, especially Joe and Alex’s boxing scene. Casey Smith’s set is instantly recognizable as blue collar Brooklyn.

Death Party needs a bit more work before it’s really a finished piece and reaches its full potential. But even as it exists now, it’s still quite a remarkable achievement, especially for a first-time playwright. And I applaud the courage it must have taken to write such a play to begin with.

Tamara de Lempicka enters. It’s a simple artist’s studio with an easel, paints on a table, and several pictures on stands. Lampicka is wearing a wrap, a very deco black hat, and a thin-strapped full-length dress of a striking green color that is almost identical to the color of the Bugatti she is driving in her most famous self-portrait. She has walked in on an interviewer who has been waiting for her. She tells the interviewer that she must paint now, and that he can stay and watch. She will be happy to tell him stories about her life while she paints, but he can ask no questions.

It's a bit of an awkward and contrived script set up—let me get this out of the way—to allow playwright/actress Kara Wilson to freely tell the story of Tamara de Lempicka, one of the most exotic characters of the 1920s and 1930s, and most recognizable artists of the art deco style. Once the set up is complete, however, Wilson can go just about anywhere with the story of Tamara’s life, a story she is clearly fascinated by, and committed to, and that she tells heartily, capturing Tamara’s ego, tenacity, and lust for life.

Lempicka’s story has always interested me. It was the subject of another play, Tamara, depicting a particular night when many of the historic characters she knew came together. She married well, lived an opulent life, and had the time and space—and fortunately the talent—to paint many well-known works. Because of the circles she traveled in, her life story has become renowned where many others have not. And so she has become an emblem of an era.

Her story is the story of a time and place where so much happened in the world, both great and terrifying. Born in Poland, her childhood was spent in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Monte Carlo. In Italy she got the painting bug. After boarding school in Lausanne, she moved in with her aunt in St. Petersburg, right before the start of the Russian Revolution. She married an aristocrat who was arrested when the Revolution began. Much of her family escaped from Poland, and she escaped to Helsinki with the help of the Swedish consul, who also arranged for her husband’s release. Settling in Paris, her art education became quite serious, with her discovering Art Deco at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in 1925. Within a few years, she was selling her paintings along with her friends Picasso, Laurencin, Leger, and Modigliani, and being dressed by Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret.

This and the rest of Tamara’s life, spent mostly in the company of European and American nobility and glitterati, is a lot to squeeze into a show of little more than an hour. In an attempt to tell the whole story, much of the script sounds like exposition rather than monologue, and still we get only a glimpse of what was clearly a decadent and extraordinary adventure. But it is not Wilson’s intention to tell the detailed autobiography of her subject, so much as to paint a character. This she deliciously accomplishes in several ways. First of all, much of the show concerns her relationship to her art and to her subjects: who they were, how she found them—or they her—and the experience of working with them, disrobing them, posing them. Some she knew only fleetingly, some for much longer. Some of them, including many women, became intimate obsessions. It is the most personal part of Deco Diva, and the most revealing.

Also, throughout the play Wilson paints a replica of one of de Lempicka’s paintings of a woman named Rafaela, whom she discovered in the Bois de Boulogne. At first I thought this might clutter the play with unnecessary business, but as she tells Rafaela’s story, it is hard not to watch her apply the color to the canvas and wonder if de Lempicka applied it in the same way, with the same sort of strokes and the same attention or rhythm. It also forces the audience to think about the style of art deco itself, to notice the hard lines separating colors, how the soft skin tones contrast with the darker synthetic and metallic tones. The painting is, in fact, auctioned after each show.

Deco Diva is a loving and passionate tribute from an avid fan. Wilson, who is credited with the direction as well, adapted the play from Passion By Design, a 1987 biography by Tamara’s daughter, Baroness Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall. I am inspired by Wilson’s passion to find this book and learn more about this intriguing woman and her work.