Bone up on your bible before going to see Delilah, the new musical based on the Samson and Delilah story, now playing at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. All I had really remembered of the story before going in was the bit about Delilah making Samson weak by shearing his manly locks, and then Samson getting mad and destroying a temple with his bare hands. In the event, my ignorance—combined with a lack of background information in the program, not to mention the sung-through performance itself—made it rather difficult to follow the events transpiring onstage.

Unfortunately, the sound mix didn’t help either: though the WorkShop Mainstage is not a large space, the keyboards were cranked so high that very few of the performers could be clearly heard throughout. Only Uzo Aduba in the title role had the vocal chops to make every word come out crystal clear, and I suppose it’s no coincidence that hers is also the standout emotional performance as well.

Aduba works against the material in interesting ways. As written and directed, the piece attempts to twist the ancient story into a position of current political relevance, with the unintended effect of making the material feel cold and distant; Aduba brings to it a warmth and passion that most of the other performances are missing. The piece is almost entirely without humor; only Aduba, at a few appropriate moments, lets the necessary light of levity shine briefly upon the proceedings.

Not that I entirely understand what it all adds up to. The story I managed to piece together goes something like this: after the murder of his wife by the Philistines, Samson (Carl Dowling), a superstrong Israelite, declares war and kills thousands of Philistines. In an attempt to bring him to his knees the Philistines commission Delilah, once a proud citizen but now reduced to prostitution, to bring him to bed and render him powerless. Then the hair thing happens, then the temple thing.

Ken Kurland‘s score, with its occasional jazzy inflections, is fairly smooth, but though Robin Brownfield’s lyrics are mostly simple and harmless, they don’t carry the storytelling in the way a bookless musical requires. Ditto Seth Duerr’s direction, which makes little attempt to translate the complicated dramatic situations into stage pictures. (Duerr also wrote “additional music/lyrics” for the piece.) Whole stretches of the action (such as the lengthy two-hander between Samson and Delilah that takes up most of the second half) are physically lax, which doesn’t help the story reach a dramatic momentum. It’s left to the performers to pick up the slack and only a few of them—including Aduba and Duerr himself as the Ahmed the King of the Philistines, an irredeemably self-serious slimeball deserving of gleeful hisses—manage to do so.

To be fair, though, the piece is new, and with further work more can be made of it. A visit to Sunday School could do Delilah some good.

Democracy is the biggest disappointment of the season. This has a lot to do with expectations: Democracy is the new play by Michael Frayn and director Michael Blakemore, who collaborated on the exquisite Copenhagen a few years back; the cast includes James Naughton, Richard Thomas, Robert Prosky, Michael Cumpsty, Terry Beaver, Richard Masur, John Dossett, and Lee Wilkof—none of whom is exactly a slouch in the acting department; and the buzz from England, where it won all sorts of awards, has been almost deafeningly encouraging.

But the proof is in the pudding, laying in a puzzlingly leaden lump on stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre: Democracy is, sadly, a terrible bore; a play that threatened to put me to sleep more than once during its 2-3/4 hour running time. I suspect that the production has been hurt by some serious miscasting, but I think that the major culprits are the script itself, which presents potentially intriguing material in an alienating and abstract format, and the staging, which is as static and uninteresting as watching an office full of bureaucrats work at their desks.

The central figures of the play are Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic Chancellor of West Germany from 1969-1974, and Gunter Guillaume, Brandt's personal assistant, who was revealed to be an East German spy in a scandal that brought down the administration. Brandt is depicted by Frayn as something of an enigma—an enormously skillful politico, hugely popular with the masses, successful at least in part because colleagues and strangers alike are able to project whatever they wish onto his disarming and often silent persona. Guillaume is portrayed as a dedicated Communist ideologue who finds his faith shaken as he learns more and more disturbing facts about the country he's supposed to be serving and becomes more and more enamored of the man he's supposed to betray.  There's a fascinating story to tell here, but Frayn resists telling it; instead, he pads this central relationship with lots of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the party leaders who helped Brandt achieve power, which grows tedious very quickly because (a) we know from the get-go that eventually they are going to find Guillaume out, and (b) we know from even a scant recollection of recent German history that Helmut Schmidt is going to be named Chancellor before the evening is over. Without any sort of suspense, the play's success hinges on deep insights into character—but these are few and far between, because Frayn insists of sticking to the historical record fairly relentlessly. Fictionalized versions of Brandt and Guillaume might have behaved in more dramatically interesting ways than their real-life counterparts actually did. But Frayn's Brandt engages in just the meagerest of cat-and-mouse with Guillaume, while Frayn's Guillaume never feels dangerous at all. (What exactly did East German spies hope to gain from their espionage? In America, the Cold War was all about deterring worldwide nuclear warfare: what were the stakes for the two demilitarized Germanys? The play never tells us.)

Now all of this said, I imagine that Democracy would be more compelling with different leading men. Richard Thomas is very gee-whiz All America as Guillaume, hardly the insidious mastermind who brought down a government. James Naughton is opaque and unapproachable as Brandt. The two actors have zero chemistry; whatever made each indispensable to the other is lacking from the relationship depicted here.

Others in the cast suggest what Democracy might be. Robert Prosky, as inner-circle grand old man Herbert Wehner is wily and charismatic; though he seems to be playing political games for their own sake rather than in pursuit of some particular policy objective, he at least engages us and makes us want to know more about what he's up to. Similarly, Michael Cumpsty as Arno Kretschmann (the one made-up character in the play, according to program notes—an amalgam of several of Guillaume's GDR "controllers"), is cool, aloof, and ruthless as he consistently fails to give Guillaume a straight answer about anything. But Cumpsty's role is almost entirely reactive, the structure of the play being a progression of status reports delivered to Arno by Guillaume (a very distracting, distancing device, by the way—why can't the story just unfold rather than being narrated: what happened to the theatre dictum of showing instead of telling?).

Peter J. Davison's set—a maze of office desks and chairs punctuated with color-coded cubby holes—is eye-catching but ultimately a waste of space, failing to provide the environment that the play actually requires and forcing moments like one where Thomas and Cumpsty actually line up half-a-dozen chairs at stage left to simulate a railroad car for an upcoming scene. Sue Willmington's costume design puts virtually all the characters into identical dark suits—to make an (obvious) point about bureaucrats, no doubt, but at the same time making it hard to tell who's who. Mark Henderson's lighting and Neil Alexander's sound are unobtrusive and unmemorable.

Copenhagen used real-life relationships and events to provide insights into history and science; I remember leaving the theatre invigorated by dazzling possibilities. A few audience members seemed to be grabbing at whatever they could find in Democracy's script to try to connect to it—some vaguely topical lines about Brandt's re-election earned some titters, for example—but I found myself dismayingly unable to pull anything out of this play at all. Which demonstrates, I guess, that there's no such thing as a sure thing in a theatre; but, alas, little else.

Frederick Bronsky is an elderly, cantankerous, work-obsessed abstract impressionist painter. One day, young ambitious art critic Whitney Beecham arrives to interview him. After sending her away once (he was in the middle of painting), Frederick reluctantly accedes to her questions. During the interview, he drinks a copious amount of vodka, insults her profession, and won’t give a straight answer to any of her questions. What’s a young mousy-but-sexy intellectual type to do? Well, this one falls madly in love and demands to be seduced.

The budding romance is met with no resistance, intrigue, or conflict from Frederick’s good-looking son Richard, a wealthy lawyer who is ending his third marriage. Despite the fact that Frederick and Richard have an argumentative relationship and have barely spoken for six months, Richard unexpectedly shows up to stay while his wife moves out of their apartment.

Soon after he arrives, Whitney tumbles barely dressed into the room. She has written a glowing article about Frederick, moved into his tiny apartment, changed her wardrobe according to his tastes, and is off to a job interview he has arranged for her. Richard is immediately taken with her, but as soon as they’re alone Whitney makes it clear her single heart belongs to his father. As they talk further, Whitney makes Richard see that Frederick’s insults are just “code” for his love. Almost immediately, Richard stops flirting, begins encouraging Whitney and Frederick’s relationship, and becomes Frederick’s tough-love best friend as well as Whitney’s big brother figure. Well! Thirty minutes in, and what seemed to be the central crisis of the play has been averted.

What happens for the next eighty minutes, you ask? Frederick and Whitney communicate in puns that would make a six-year-old cringe, their relationship a series of exchanges like: “And never the twain shall meet”/ “What’s a twain?”/ “Something that runs on a twack.” Their shared interest in this sort of humor clearly denotes a match made in heaven, and they marry.

But wait, all is not sunny. Act Two commences, we find out that Whitney is unhappy. She’s got a great new wardrobe, a sexy new job she adores, and a husband she’s madly in love with, but she needs something more. She needs independence! She needs to hang out with her friends and talk about Eminem! (“The candy?” Frederick ripostes.) She needs to be able to hang out until 3am without fuddy-duddy Frederick getting cross! She needs freedom! Will true love win?

Throughout the play, it is impossible to shake the impression that Frederick himself has written it, and what we see is what this proud, narcissistic man wants us to see. And he’s willing to admit some flaws about himself: he’s threatened by Whitney’s success even as he encourages it, he’s an irascible scoundrel who has temper tantrums and throws his food on the wall, and he likes to play Pygmalion to beautiful young women. But these are constantly tempered. We learn he’d happily be part of Whitney’s new successful life if only she’d let him, that the temper tantrum is just part of those “designer genes” that make him a successful artist, and that his ministrations actually make the beautiful but unrealized young ladies much happier. And although at the end Frederick officially has “changed” by realizing even the happiest of couples need a little personal space, he also makes clear to Whitney that if she moves back in nothing is going to be different. Whitney assures him nothing needs to be different—she’s done the changing, and he is free to stay the same.

It’s a sweet story, but it’s hard to buy that even Frederick believes it’s the whole one, and the experience of watching it is ultimately unfulfilling. Like many troubled families, the Bronsky family has their skeletons firmly in the closet, their official stories polished to a blinding gloss, and nothing, not even a paying audience, is going to make them crack the door and listen to the rattling bones.

The story at the heart of the new musical Dessa Rose is one that is very much worth telling. A sixteen-year-old slave, Dessa Rose, rebels against her master after he kills another slave who is her lover and the father of her unborn child. Dessa Rose and several other slaves are sold off the plantation, but while they're on the road they revolt once again, overcoming and even murdering some of their guards; she eventually winds up in prison, where she is sentenced to hang (her execution is held over until she gives birth—as a young man who comes to interview Dessa Rose in jail tells her, there's no way the powers that be will let a valuable commodity, i.e., her about-to-be-born child, slip through their fingers).

Dessa Rose manages to escape from prison, thanks to her own determination and the help of some of her friends, especially the kind but crafty Nathan. They take her to a remote plantation owned by Ruth Sutton, a 20-year-old white woman whose husband has more or less abandoned her; to make ends meet, she allows runaway slaves to work her land in exchange for a share of the profits plus her silence. Nathan devises a plan that will allow Ruth to make enough money to live comfortably and securely and will let the runaways make their way to the Northwest, where they will be able to live free without fear of being returned to their former masters (or worse). In the course of the execution of this plan, Ruth and Dessa Rose—both of them smart but wary women who have been conditioned since birth to mistrust people not of their own race—find common ground and learn to understand, and then love, one another.

The most moving moments in this musical, which is written by Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music), come whenever the two female protagonists get near each other: their initial missed connections are just as emotional and resonant as their eventual concordance. Also powerful is Dessa Rose's determination to name her daughter (who is born on the night that Dessa Rose arrives at Ruth's place) only after she's free—in the score's finest musical number, "Twelve Children," Dessa Rose sings to her baby about her heritage, eleven brothers and sisters who lived and died as slaves.

Unfortunately, such potent moments are relatively infrequent: the storytelling is generally clunky and awkward in Dessa Rose, most likely because there's so much story to tell. The ambience of this show is modest, with a dozen performers self-consciously acting out the tale in a manner reminiscent of Ahrens & Flaherty's own Once on this Island. But the plot is huge!—exposition takes up much of the first act, and narration intrudes throughout; far too often, events are told rather than shown to us. The effect is of hurrying through a long and complicated story when we want to be savoring rich emotions and ideas. Which is a shame—because the notions underlying this story are important and quite beautiful. I wanted Dessa Rose to work better than it does.

One of the clumsier of its devices is the use of both Ruth and Dessa Rose as narrators. The entire play is a flashback, or more accurately, two flashbacks, interwoven, narrated by 80-year-old versions of its two heroines. How I wished for their commentary to be dispensed with, allowing the story to flow on its own and tell itself.

Ahrens & Flaherty's score, responding to the expository demands of the piece, has more song fragments and recitative than most of their work, and fewer soaring melodies. It's nevertheless beautifully sung here, by as accomplished and committed a cast as any currently working on or off Broadway. La Chanze and Rachel York are the superb anchors as Dessa Rose and Ruth, respectively; offering worthy support are Norm Lewis as Nathan; Kecia Lewis as Ruth's "Mammy," Dorcas; Eric Jordan Young as Dessa Rose's lover, Kaine; and Soara-Joye Ross in several smaller roles. Michael Hayden plays Adam Nehemiah, the writer who interviews Dessa Rose in prison, and he does what he can with a thankless part that probably should have been cut. The rest of the ensemble—Tina Fabrique, Rebecca Eichenberger, David Hess, William Parry, and James Stovall—all do admirable work.

The show looks beautiful, too, with a lovely abstract set by Loy Arcenas that morphs easily into all of the many requisite locales, abetted by Jules Fisher & Peggy Eisenhauer's evocative lighting and the audience's imagination. Toni-Leslie James's costumes are appropriate and, for Ruth, very pretty (most of the characters are runaway slaves—not much room for glamour there).

Dessa Rose stands alone among this season's high-profile musicals as the only one with something serious on its mind and in its heart; for that it has my admiration and respect. But in terms of execution, it cannot finally be counted as a success. Nevertheless, for those in search of something deeper and more thoughtful than the frivolity that's currently dominating our musical stages, Dessa Rose will be a relief and a reassurance.

As diabolically charming as its leading character, Dial "M" for Murder tells the fiendishly clever tale of Tony Wendice, an aging tennis star-party boy who conceives what he thinks to be the perfect crime. Though she's unaware of the fact, Tony married his wife Margot for her money; that's why her own indiscreet affair with American writer Max Halliday—which she believes Tony doesn't know about—plays so neatly into Tony's plans. He contrives to get Margot and the visiting Max out of the house for an evening, so that he can conspire with a duplicitous gentleman who will kill Margot for £1,000; that's in Scene 2. In Scene 4, the plan is put in motion... except Margot doesn't just passively allow herself to be killed. (If you've seen the famous movie starring Grace Kelly then you know what happens; if you haven't, I'll allow you to discover for yourself what it is that she does.)

And then in Act II, with Margot not dead (but someone else very much murdered),  the thousand pounds unaccounted for, and a life of leisure and luxury not yet a foregone conclusion for the conniving Tony—well, things really start to get interesting.

What's ultimately so neat about Dial "M" for Murder (which was penned by Frederick Knott, whose works also include Wait Until Dark) is that it's almost an anti-thriller:  the audience watches Tony plot his masterful crime, and also sees Margot foil it—we know all the facts all the time, and yet the suspense is both palpable and relentless. That's because the fun of the play is in watching Tony wriggle his way out of each unforeseen setback, making one swift and sneaky move after another to try to keep his various opponents off-balance and get what he wants (i.e., his hands all over his wife's money). And even though we don't ever particularly doubt that Tony won't actually get away with anything—the presence of the stalwart detective Inspector Hubbard assures us of that—it's hard not to root for this rotter of an anti-hero, whose gleeful amorality is almost awesome.

The present production of Dial "M" for Murder comes to us from Theatre By The Blind, which means that there's yet another twist to the proceedings. For this company, which is dedicated to changing the popular image of the blind from one of dependence to independence, includes a number of sight-impaired or blind actors among its ranks (including George Ashiotis, who plays Tony). As in all of their productions, we quickly forget to keep track of which actors are sighted and which are not as we get caught up in the events unfolding on stage. (But when we stop to think about the remarkable concentration required by an actor such as Ashiotis to behave as if he can see the telephone that he's dialing or the glass of port that he's pouring, we necessarily must be impressed.)

Theatre By The Blind has enhanced this production so that it can be enjoyed by blind audience members. This is accomplish through the use of a narrator, who provides occasional, always unobtrusive descriptions of important action ("He picks up the scarf and starts to strangle her"—that sort of thing.) It's a great concept, expanding the play's audience without in any way impinging on the experience of those who don't require the narration. In some places, the simultaneous depiction and description of the same action even seemed to enhance the excitement.

The detailed set by Merope Vachlioti provides the perfect backdrop for this sophisticated thriller; Christine Field's period costumes work well, too. Ike Schambelan's staging is quite effective. The cast, led by the formidable Ashiotis, also includes Pamela Sabaugh, who gets the blend of vulnerability and toughness just right in her portrayal of Margot; Nick Viselli, leading-man handsome and solid as Margot's former lover Max; Xen Theo as Tony's mysterious accomplice; and the excellent J.M. McDonough, who manages a few neat surprises of his own as the thoroughly competent Inspector Hubbard. Gary Bergman is delightful as on-stage musical director/sound effects guy and in a number of cameos as various policemen.

Nestled among the multitudinous producers' credits in the playbill for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels are such names as David Belasco and the Entire Prussian Army. The whole marketing campaign for this new musical comedy has been focused around its con-man heroes: a good-natured, exaggerated bait-and-switching to prepare audiences for the merry mischief that the show's eponymous crooks cook up. I like it: it's cheeky and fun. And for the first hour or so, so is the show itself.

Unfortunately, things fall apart in Act Two, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels never quite recovers. In a season that has thus far given us Brooklyn, Dracula, and Little Women, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—tuneful, funny, peppy, generally well-crafted—is a breath of fresh air. But alas, it's just a breath: it doesn't even work up to being a light breeze. I don't think it's quite got the stuff to satisfy my longing for a genuinely terrific new musical comedy on Broadway.

But it's a step in the right direction. I pretty much loved the first act. The show begins by introducing us to Lawrence Jameson (John Lithgow), a middle-aged con man who has made a living, for a long time now, cheating rich ladies out of their money on the Riviera. His secret is revealed in the title of the opening number—"Give Them What They Want." What they seem to want at the moment is to spend time in the company of ravished nobility: Jameson is impersonating a prince (of an undesignated country) who is involved in a revolution (equally vague). His most recent conquest is dotty Muriel Eubanks; but he's setting his sights on a newer, if not necessarily bigger, fish, Oklahoma oil heiress Jolene Oakes.

At the same time, Jameson has to deal with an unwelcome guest, a fellow crook named Freddy Benson (Norbert Leo Butz). Freddy and Lawrence meet on a train, and shortly afterward Freddy turns up, Eliza Doolittle-like, on Lawrence's doorstep, determined to learn all he can about the con game from the master. Thanks to a little blackmail, Freddy gets Lawrence to agree to the project, and the transformation begins. It's not particularly successful, but Freddy turns out to be very useful to Lawrence in his scamming of Jolene. After which, the two decide not to join forces, but to compete for a $50,000 purse—the one that belongs to naive American blonde beauty Christine Colgate, who has just arrived at the boys' hotel, apparently loaded.

Now, all of this happens in about an hour; an hour filled with delicious and colorful musical numbers and dance sequences and lots of silly, airy dialogue (with the occasional broad and/or gross joke thrown in for good measure). We meet ditzy Muriel in a goofy number called "What Was a Woman To Do?" which is put over by Joanna Gleason with such guileless panache that it's impossible not to love her. The transformation of Freddy is accomplished in two comic tour de forces—a rap called "Great Big Stuff," in which Butz almost stops the show, and then a hilariously busy song called "Chimp in a Suit" in which choreographer Jerry Mitchell keeps the chorus hopping all over the stage, spinning the set round and round with dizzying and ebullient glee.

Sara Gettelfinger, who plays Jolene, leads the ensemble in the rousing faux-Country & Western ditty "Oklahoma?" (which explodes into a lively line dance), and immediately thereafter joins Butz and Lithgow in the giddy, silly "All About Ruprecht," in which Butz cavorts around the stage in his boxer shorts and does a number of disgusting things, much to the audience's delight.

Christine's entrance at the hotel is occasion for yet another deluxe song and dance number, this one called "Here I Am," in which Sherie Rene Scott gets the first of several moments to shine. There's even a (kind-of) love song for Scott and Butz near the end of Act I called "Nothing Is Too Wonderful To Be True," which is a hummable tune reminiscent of Golden Age musical comedy standards.

Throughout, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels keeps its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and its eye on the sole objective of tickling its audience's fancy without ever taking anything the least bit seriously. Characters break the fourth wall constantly; Gleason's last line in the antic Act I finale is something to the effect that she has checked back in to the hotel because she's sure she'll be needed in Act II. It is light-hearted and light-headed: to borrow a song title from one of this season's more misbegotten entries, it's fun, fun, fun.

And then, after intermission, the tenor of the thing changes. O'Brien and his collaborators—notably book-writer Jeffrey Lane and composer-lyricist David Yazbek—seem determined to stick to the story at all costs. Attention focuses on the competition between Freddy and Lawrence for Christine's money (and, evidently, heart: Lawrence even sings a song called "Love Sneaks In" in which he professes sincere admiration). I'm all for heart, but this particular show screeches to a halt when it tries to accommodate it; so, too, does the ingenuous goodwill dissipate into mean-spirited slapstick and vulgarity as the plot takes center stage. It's funny if you like that sort of thing, but it's never charming. The story hurtles on toward an end that is very predictable, even if, like me, you haven't seen the movie.

There's a last gasp of the know-how that makes Act I so wonderful in the 11-o'clock song "Dirty Rotten Number." But mostly the show has run out of steam long before the curtain rings down. Lithgow's performance, which is very funny most of the time, does too; Butz's turn is terrific but finally fails to show off his range very impressively. Scott is probably best-served by the material, and she's spectacularly good. Even better is Joanna Gleason, luminous and daffy as ever in a role that's too small for her talents; Gregory Jbara, who plays a French police officer (Pickering to Lithgow's Henry Higgins, sort of) is also fine, but underused.

Mitchell's dancers come off nicely, but they're mostly missing from the second act as well. His choreography is witty and sublime throughout; with his work on La Cage aux Folles he's emerging this season as one of the theatre's invaluable pros. The show looks great: sleek sets (David Rockwell), chic costumes (Gregg Barnes), and buoyant lighting (Kenneth Posner) contribute merrily to the ambience.

So here's the scorecard: On the one hand (and to employ the kind of hype that it debunks so brilliantly when it's at its best), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is indisputably the best new musical on Broadway so far this season. On the other hand, I left feeling let-down and disappointed.  I hate to be picky, but what can I say? The magic combination of gossamer, glitter, and humbug—or whatever it is that a great musical comedy is created from—doesn't quite do what it needs to here.

President Nixon resigned two days after my 13th birthday. I tell you this not so you'll send me a card next August, but to let you know that my memories of Watergate in general and of Martha Mitchell in particular, though vivid, are those of a teenager. What I mostly recall about Mrs. Mitchell is that she was a noisy, bothersome, vaguely laughable figure far off on the sidelines of that all-consuming scandal. I knew she was John Mitchell's wife (who was Attorney General, until he quit to become the head of the President's re-election campaign, CREEP); I remember that there was a loud and messy divorce and that she died of cancer just a few years after Nixon's resignation. And that's about all.

The trouble with John Jeter's new play Dirty Tricks is that, 30 years after the fact, it adds very little to Mrs. Mitchell's story beyond those adolescent memories. The show's ad campaign suggests otherwise, making reference to a quote from one of Richard Nixon's famous interviews with David Frost: ("If it hadn't been for Martha there'd have been no Watergate"). But the script doesn't provide any compelling evidence (and Nixon meant it, I think, ironically, his point being that if Mitchell hadn't had to spend time handling his troublesome wife he might have done a better job covering up CREEP's criminal activities). What we're left with is a sad, meager play about a pathetic and unhappy woman who wanted to be more than an odd footnote to history—but wasn't.

So Dirty Tricks is sort of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of the Watergate drama, but without the sense of existential purpose. It takes place on August 8, 1974; at the very beginning of the piece, Martha picks up a newspaper and discovers that the President has scheduled a television broadcast that evening in which, so the speculation goes, he will announce his resignation. (At the end of the play, he does.) Martha howls with glee, calls her friend, reporter Helen Thomas, to get confirmation, and then takes a phone call from CBS, who want to reschedule her upcoming 60 Minutes interview to this very evening, so they can get her fresh reaction to Nixon's speech. Martha spends the rest of the show's 90-minute running time tidying up her hotel suite and remembering the turbulent events of the past six years that have led up to this particular moment.

She talks about her early notoriety, speaking her mind at press conferences and similar events where cabinet wives ordinarily kept their mouths shut. She re-creates a drunken late-night phone call to the Arkansas Gazette in which she denounced Senator J.W. Fulbright for not voting to confirm one of Nixon's Supreme Court appointees. She narrates the harrowing story of a 1972 campaign stop gone badly awry, climaxing in her apparent abduction by thugs hired, perhaps, by her own husband, to try to keep her from accidentally revealing the little she did know about the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

It's diverting, as far as it goes; but it doesn't finally amount to very much, and as I've already suggested, there's nothing terribly new or exciting in any of it—Mrs. Mitchell is not, for example, revealed to be Deep Throat. Indeed, if anything, the play makes it clear that she couldn't possibly have been that mysterious figure: she clearly knew very, very little about what was going on during those dark days of dirty tricks and cover-ups.

Judith Ivey tries gamely to make something of this non-heroine; she succeeds frequently in channeling Mrs. Mitchell's essence, and transforms herself into an eerie facsimile of the actual woman, particularly in a late scene in which she is interviewed by some TV newscasters while gussied up in incognito drag consisting of a trench coat, kerchief, and dark glasses. But her efforts to make a three-dimensional protagonist are stifled by the script's limitations, and so instead she gives us a chronically unhappy, insecure woman, drowning undefined sorrows in drink and excess. It's a bravura turn, but it's all surface—we never get under Mrs. Mitchell's skin, because Jeter hasn't.

Ivey is also hampered by lots of unnecessary stage business that results from the play's problematic structure, which flashes back to various times and locations in Mrs. Mitchell's life. Ivey accessorizes the nightgown/housecoat ensemble that she wears throughout to conjure places/events such as the first meeting of the Nixon Cabinet Wives, campaign stops, and television interviews; she rearranges the furniture when she has to, as well, and there's concordant shifting of the lights and, sometimes, rear-wall projections of illustrative photos/footage. It's director Margaret Whitton's attempt to keep things lively, I suppose, and it's entirely unnecessary, because Jeter has solved the central problem of the one-person show so cannily in his script: he posits a Martha Mitchell anxiously prepping herself for a big-time national TV interview, and it makes perfect sense for her to go through her scrapbooks and talk/think aloud about what she finds there as she reminisces. But having her physically depart from her surroundings by journeying through time and space breaks the rules that Jeter has set up for us; it's never anything other than silly. Not to mention the wear and tear on poor Ivey.

Dirty Tricks does provide us with a reminder of how corrupt a previous Republican administration managed to become, so I suppose we can read it as a cautionary tale. But in the final analysis, the play is a disappointment--not very interesting as either history or theatre.

After their inaugural production of Phillip Ridley’s London Fringe play The Pitchfork Disney, Stiff Upper Lip’s sophomore effort is Dirty Works, a new play by the New York-based British expatriate Jamie Linley. The play is a dark slice of life from a working class neighborhood in London and concerns itself with drug addicts exploiting themselves and others as they try get out or get ahead. But in the play’s intermissionless 90 minutes, they remain trapped right where they are.

The program notes that this is Linley’s first full-length play and that is somewhat evident in the progress of the plot from scene to scene; the clarity of events and the sense of building towards a resolution may not be as tight as one would expect from a more experienced playwright. And the play is divided into many, often short scenes in a variety of locations, which sometimes makes it feel more like a screenplay. These criticisms aside, it is very clear from this first effort that Linley has a bold voice, memorable characterization, and a great ear for dialogue, particularly for the profanity that is so ubiquitous that it becomes musical—underscoring the play as a coarse poetic meter. Like a cockney David Mamet, Linley could make an HBO executive blush. And it makes for entertaining listening, especially as so sharply and ably performed by the authentic British and Irish cast. Here is an exchange between the play’s main character, Darren and his friend Gary as they plot to rob the post office where they cash their unemployment checks. Put simply, they are not criminal masterminds:

GARY: How you gonna get behind that glass fing she hides behind?
DARREN: She’ll fucking shit herself if we got a shooter.
GARY: But we ain’t.
DARREN: Your old man has.
GARY: That’s a fucking starter pistol for the ‘orses.
DARREN: She aint gonna fucking know is she.
GARY: ‘Sa bit fucking mickey mouse innit?
DARREN: Whatsisname. That fat cunt? He done one wiv a paper folded over a bread knife.
GARY: E’s still banged up.
DARREN: E dint get away wiv it but they give him the money.
GARY: They got alarms and that ya know.
DARREN: You get that shooter stuffed in her boat tell her not to touch fuck all or.......
GARY: You’ll start the race?

The play is filled with scenes like this—characters making terrible decisions and going from bad to worse—but Linley makes it compelling and darkly funny. I was left unclear on what the larger ideas behind the play are. None of the characters seem to change or come to any great realizations in the course of the play. Things are done to them, they prostitute themselves or victimize others, but these are not character arcs, they are downward spirals. As the play does not provide a point of view on the events, the experience eventually verges on voyeurism—watching these characters implode, detail by sordid detail, like rubbernecking past a road accident.

Stiff Upper Lip has a great resource in the actors it has assembled for this production. Not only are they a talented and experienced ensemble with no weak links, they are also all originally from the British Isles, which adds an authentic weight to their portrayals (and eliminates any of the dialect concerns that are often connected with cross-cultural casting). As Darren, Victor Villar-Hauser is able to make us care about this charming loser—a flawed man who seems to bring trouble to everyone around him. It is hard to avoid a comparison with Ewan McGregor’s breakout role in Trainspotting—both McGregor’s Renton and Villar-Hauser’s Darren are people you would not want in your life, but they are engaging and charismatic all the same. Polly Lee does excellent and brave work as Tracey, Darren’s former lover who has left him to make a clean start, but in the course of the play returns to heroin. Needing new ways to afford her addiction, we see her first learn to make money as an exotic dancer and later as a prostitute. Of all the lives in decline in the play, hers is the hardest fall to watch, which is a compliment to Lee’s committed work. Martin Hillier is effectively menacing and unpredictable as Tommo, a pimp and drug dealer who still tries to care for his alcoholic mother. Playwright Jamie Linley is also part of the cast as Lanky—a far-gone junkie and friend of Darren’s. Linley, and Micky Campbell who plays two roles, succeed at some of the best kind of character acting. Both are not only interesting types to look at, but they also embody their roles so fully, that I could have believed they were not professional actors, but rather unusual private citizens whom the producers talked into playing characters much like themselves. They are that convincing.

It is a credit to director Kevin Kittle, one of the the companies “American collaborators,” and set designer Mark Symczak, that they are able to carve out the many locations of play from the Greenwich Street Theatre’s small black box stage. Kittle should also be credited for the performances he has created with these actors, and he keeps the scenes dynamic and fast-paced. I do wish he had not chosen to use blackouts for all of the play's frequent scene transitions. The drive and momentum of the scene drops away and we are left watching the actors shift around in semi-darkness, accompanied by distant-sounding music. I would have preferred if Kittle had found another, perhaps more theatrical way to quickly bridge or overlap the scenes. As the set is all black, the color in the production is provided by Tina Nigro’s costumes. From Tommo’s skeezy brown track suit to the sad, cheap-looking underwear that the women have bought to dance in, it is an excellent design which helps establish not only these characters but their environment as well.

Stiff Upper Lip is a talented company of artists that deserves watching, and while this play has some rough edges, it is a strong premiere for a new writer and an adventurous night of theatre for all but the faint-hearted.

Do You Have Anything Closer?, written by Matthew Aibel and Lawrence Paone and performed by Paone, is a delightfully comic view of Broadway—via the ticket booth. The show tells the story of one man’s dream to pursue a career in writing while working as a box-office sales representative for Broadway shows, which is certainly a subject with universal appeal to any artist who has to work at a "day job." Paone delivers this story of his life in a confident manner that invites us into his world. Through detailed stories of encounters with demanding tourists and the occasional brush with (ahh!) celebrities, Paone allows us to see Broadway from another angle.

Matthew Aibel's staging is simple and effective, placing Paone (most of the time) behind a screen that represents the box office window. The stage is amply doused with programs hanging from the ceiling and there is even a red-velvet rope, reminding us of standing in tension-filled ticket lines. Paone begins the show by jumping right into his work, recalling a few interesting questions he is asked by customers. The material is painfully hilarious. I especially enjoyed hearing about the "C word"—Comps. Some moments in his story are hysterical, especially when he politely informs us that industry people despise “regular” people for using industry terms, such as “When do you release house seats?” The notion that there may be a private club going on in the theatre industry is affirmed in Paone’s delivery.

Although Paone is a little one-note in his performance, he still commits to sharing his dream with us, as he grows from being a writer who feels sucked into a job to acceptance of both aspects of his life as a dual reality. He makes us believe that both realities are possible, and that working in a job like his does not have to deaden our goals. It is a touching journey.

I would have liked to see Paone "become" some of the colorful characters he encounters, as opposed to just describing all of them (especially when he shares his curious Tony Randall story). While the writing is thorough, the style never departs from straight narrative and some of its punch is lost in the jump to stage. Still, the throughline of Do You Have Anything Closer? is humble and thoroughly entertaining. I would be interested to see if Paone does become famous as a writer—he and Aibel have already proven that they are amply talented.
 

What you see when you enter the theatre for Doctor Tedrow's Last Breath is almost spectacularly striking: sand and earth where the stage floor should be, and on it—in addition to a bit of fence, a table holding a lighted globe, and an enticingly incongruous bathtub—lay five people, tempest-tossed but now eerily still. We understand from the playbill that this tableau represents Bantam, Texas after the killer 1900 hurricane. And we're ready to receive whatever writer/director Matthew Earnest and deep ellum ensemble are about to show us.

Thus the disappointment that, in the end, they show us very little indeed. Or, rather, they show us a lot: the play is filled with gorgeous and memorable stage pictures, such as the one depicted in the photo—Doctor Thaddeus Tedrow, Bantam's weatherman, caught alone in a freakish onstage storm. But all the stage pyrotechnics add up to practically zero, I'm afraid; I left Doctor Tedrow's Last Breath very much in doubt as to what Earnest and his collaborators intended me to understand from their work.

The story line—which is presented non-linearly and in a variety of theatrical styles—traces the history of a freakish hurricane that defied prediction and came ashore on the rich island city of Bantam, Texas in early September, 1900, pretty much leveling the entire town in the process and killing some 8,000 people. Some of the ways that Earnest and his actors tell this gripping story include: projections on the rear screen of (presumably authentic) telegraph messages; musical numbers and movement/dance sequences; monologues, the best of which—a splendid account of the aftermath of the storm, narrated by Tedrow's assistant Elmer Cohen, who was one of the survivors—momentarily engulfs the theatre with the epic sweep of nature at its most majestically horrific, but the worst of which are either bland or gratuitous; and numerous sketches and scenes, involving Doctor Tedrow and one or more of his relatives or neighbors.

The general drift of the information presented in the play seems to be that Doctor Tedrow is somehow to blame for the hurricane, or at least for his own failure to warn his fellow citizens off the island. There's also an undercurrent, I think, that prosperous American communities like Bantam in 1900 or New York City in 2001 are also somehow to blame for the devastation visited on them; this confusion of a natural catastrophe for a political one strikes me as very sloppy thinking.

Mostly, though, Doctor Tedrow's Last Breath feels like an excuse for Earnest and his company to indulge in neat theatrics. The performers are continuously called upon to do very technically arduous things, such as emerging naked from a bathtub (Thae Hicks as Tedrow gets this honor; he later emerges half-dressed from the same bathtub and spends the better part of the next five minutes trying to get his upper body into his dripping wet costume). Though they strive mightily, the performers generally seem out of their depth (for example, the five-person chorus was never able to speak in unison, causing most of what they said to be lost to imprecise garble); the net effect of the show is an awareness of effort rather than artistry, in service of only the cloudiest of concepts.

The Peanuts gang have grown up—and what young adults they have become! In this quick-paced take-off of Charles Schultz mythology, each of our favorite characters—Charlie Brown (CB), Linus (Van), Lucy (Van’s Sister), Sally (CB’s Sister), Marcy (Marcy), Peppermint Patty (Tricia York), Schroeder (Beethoven), and Pigpen (Matt)—have passed puberty with a vengeance, and have to cope with the issues of becoming adults: acting on our identity; integrating death into life; discrimination and understanding the incomprehensible genesis of violence.

The play opens with the funeral of CB’s nameless dog—you know who—who contracted rabies, slaughtered his little yellow bird friend, and was executed by Animal Control. This sudden loss of man’s best friend sends CB into a metaphysical spiral, asking his friends what happens to dogs when they die. This seemingly childlike theme will be CB’s farewell to childhood and the last of his innocent questions.

At school, CB has evolved into one of a cool group populated by Tricia, who nature has endowed with two apparent answers to the question of her gender; Matt, a germiphobe who has lost his companion cloud of debris but who violently reacts to his former cruel nickname; Van, whose contemplative self has led him to seek answers not in books but in herb; and Marcy, who has lost her physical awkwardness but who is as shy as ever when it comes to CB. On the fringe are CB’s Sister, a performance artist in training; Van’s Sister, who has been removed from society because of the danger she represents to humanity; and Beethoven, the effeminate pianist who has been the target of years of abuse both at school and at home. Ironically, Pigpen is the most vicious aggressor, threatening Beethoven verbally and abusing him with the labels “fag” and “queer.”

The meat of the story is CB’s confrontation with the clique culture his friends represent, propelled by the emergence of his deeper feelings for his old friend Beethoven. CB decides to finally do something other than what’s expected of him. This decision pushes much of the tragic action, the surprise turns of which make up most of the play’s entertaining vitality.

By far, the standout aspect of Dog Sees God is the performances, which are by turns light, poignant, and frightening. Michael Gladis creates a CB whose past life we are familiar with and who we believe has grown into the character before us. Benjamin Schrader is an excellent Beethoven, convincing in his disappointment of lost friendship and balance between worldly cynicism and idealistic hope. Jay Sullivan’s Matt is appreciatively nasty, making us despise what became of amiable young Pigpen, the dirty kid we all knew and liked. Bridget Barkan is a riot as Tricia, still in-control, and still with plenty to say about everything. Stelianie Tekmitchov gives a wonderful performance as the feckless sidekick, willing to play along as she waits for CB to finally notice her. Karen DiConcetto as CB’s Sister seamlessly changes from an annoying little sibling to a caring friend. Tate Ellington adds potent comic irony as the big-thinking Van, whose childhood wisdom has turned to banal pothead contemplation. And Melissa Picarello gives us a multi-faceted Lucy (Van’s Sister) who truly cares about CB.

Some people might consider the notion of too much sex an outrageous proposition. I would count myself among them. However, after seeing the Personal Space Theatrics revival of David Ives’s hilarious farce, Don Juan in Chicago, I was forced to reconsider.

The setup is quite clever, Don Juan is a Renaissance man in the year 1599 who is so immersed in the attainment of knowledge that, at the age of 30, he has forgotten to give sex a try. His servant, Leporello, tries in vain to explain the virtues of sex while Don Juan is in the middle of conjuring the Devil. When the Devil appears, in a cloud of smoke and a coughing fit due to his asthma, he has overheard the conversation between Don Juan and his servant and takes advantage of it. Don Juan asks the Devil to grant him eternal life in exchange for his soul. The Devil agrees but with one simple stipulation: Don Juan must have sex with a different woman every night before midnight or he forfeits his soul. Don Juan, knowing nothing of knowing women, quickly agrees and signs the contract. (In blood, naturally.) Unbeknownst to Leporello, the Devil agrees to let Don Juan keep him as a servant for all eternity.

Immediately after the signing, Dona Elvira, who has been in love with Don Juan since they were kids, struts through the front door and seduces him. However, this means that he can never have sex with her again. She is crushed by his rejection. The omnipresent Devil takes advantage of the situation and tricks Elvira into signing a contract for eternal life that is the opposite of Don Juan’s. Elvira will live until she has had sex with Don Juan once more. This propels them into a game of cat and mouse that lasts for centuries.

Four hundred years later, we meet up with Don Juan (now Don Johnson) and Leporello (now aptly named Lefty) in a dumpy apartment on the south side of Chicago. By this time Don Juan has become a reluctant expert in chasing (and catching) tail. He mistakenly brings home a girl with whom he made it twenty-something years earlier. Her blind-without-his-glasses boyfriend barges in and an umbrella sword fight ensues. In a scramble to beat the clock he then tries to bed his neighbor’s girlfriend, who turns out to be his daughter. It’s all rather predictable and I felt the ending coming for a long time. But that’s to be expected in a farce.

What I didn’t expect was all the rhyming. There should be a rhyming couplet warning in the program. Ives loops language in tongue-in-cheek(y) verse. Most of the rhyming is funny and clever but some of it falls into the realm of a rhyming contest. Ives endears his characters to his audience by having some of them break through fourth wall allowing the audience in on the joke. His writing is crisp and full of energy. It accelerates to 6 jokes in less than 60 seconds. Nevertheless, timing in at about two and half hours, I think this three act play is an act too long.

However, thanks to the sharp direction of Stephen Wargo, I hardly noticed the time ticking away. Wargo feels the energy in Ives’s writing and translates it into action on stage that is constantly engaging. He uses what little space he has at Theatre 54 to its utmost. His actors enter from all around the audience. I felt completely wrapped up in the action. He guides all of his actors down a perfect path of big, farcical characters.

Wargo has a great cast to work with. Michael Poignand as Don Juan is quite at home playing the greatest lover of all time. I always pictured Don Juan as looking a little more debonair, but somehow this more or less average Don Juan works well for this production. As his sidekick, Leporello, Erik Gratton is a scream. Hank Davies is properly pompous as Mephistopheles and Jennifer Dorr White and Josh Elliot get some laughs as the fighting couple that Don Juan comes between. Melissa Center and Jamie Carmichael wholly assume their roles as Don Juan’s daughter and neighbor, respectively (especially Carmichael). However, it is Elizabeth Ruelas as Dona Elvira who turns in the most memorable performance. She is absolutely hilarious and her timing and delivery is dead on.

So what does all this messin’ around mean? Ives makes his point half way through the second act when Don Juan begins to see the consequences of his actions. He has hurt hundreds of women and impregnated who knows how many since his sex marathon started centuries earlier. He realizes that he needs to take some responsibility for his actions. He is also responsible for the life of his servant who will burn in hell with him if doesn’t do the deed every night. Ives is showing us that innocence needs to be protected. We have an obligation to the innocent, to our children, to the environment and the animals, and also to the soldiers we send to war, among others.

Don’t get me wrong, though: corruption of innocence will not be weighing heavy on your mind as you watch Don Juan in Chicago. You will laugh and think about sex just like everybody else. This play is Ives at his best and PST breaths fresh life into it.

John Patrick Shanley's new play Doubt is almost certainly the most pointed and pertinent work to arrive on or off Broadway this season. But not for the reason you might think. The synopsis goes like this: At a Catholic School in the Bronx in 1964, Sister Aloysius, the principal, becomes concerned that one of her students is possibly being sexually abused by the basketball coach, Father Flynn. So the resonance of Doubt must lie in the simmering and still unsatisfactorily resolved scandal involving pedophile priests and the wicked cover-ups perpetrated at various levels of the Church hierarchy—right?

Wrong. Though Shanley touches upon the very troubling notion of a priest abusing one of his altar boys, this is assuredly not the subject of this challenging and intelligent play. Doubt is about doubt, and more importantly its opposite, blind faith. This is not a whodunnit but a whydoit: Sister Aloysius builds her case against Father Flynn from the inside out, with its fueling core composed of nothing stronger than unempirical conviction. Of course, it is often true that nothing is stronger than unempirical conviction—that's precisely the point.

Shanley builds the play cannily. We meet Father Flynn first—strapping, easy-going, clearly fond of his students and apparently well-liked by them; possibly troubled and maybe a little furtive. Then we meet Sister Aloysius, who is a remarkable personality: a woman who came to the Church after her husband died in World War II; steely, difficult, unmovable, and impenetrable; hard to get close to and hard to like but very easy to admire and impossible NOT to respect. Sister James, the younger teacher whose help she enlists in her quest to learn the truth about Father Flynn, tells her that all of the students are terrified of her—which is exactly what she thinks they should be. Duty to her work and faith in her beliefs are her unwavering priorities.

So when she begins to suspect that something is amiss between Father Flynn and an eighth-grader, she is single-minded and unscrupulous in ascertaining the truth, at least to her own satisfaction. Sister James thinks the boy may have been behaving strangely after a private session with Flynn; she reports her vague observations to Sister Aloysius and sets the investigation in motion. The obstacles Sister Aloysius faces are formidable: women are not decision-makers in the Church; she is very much at the mercy of the Monsignor, who favors Flynn and is unlikely to believe any allegations against him. The boy's mother, who is summoned by Sister Aloysius for an interview that is at once the most emotional and the least convincing scene in the play, seems to know something about what's going on, but prefers to ignore it for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he's the first and only black child in the school, and that he is "that way" and if his father finds out, he'll kill him (her word, not mine).

And so the story proceeds, relentlessly. There are not one but two confrontations between nun and priest. Agendas are forced; truth is always blurry and out of reach. Is Father Flynn a slick, sick predator? Or is Sister Aloysius, acting on a vendetta that even she may not fully understand, unjustly persecuting him?

I can't think of another play that explores the construction of a ruinous truth out of innuendo from the accuser's point of view; the usual tactic taken by playwrights—Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellmann are the ones that first come to mind—is to place sympathy with the accused. Doubt surprises us because we assume—conditioned, as we are, by the Church scandals I mentioned at the beginning—that Father Flynn must be guilty. Doubt elevates us because it examines Sister Aloysius's process, which is either courageously vigorous or insidiously vile.

Shanley's excellent script is served up beautifully in a production at Manhattan Theatre Club that's equal to anything currently on stage in New York. Doug Hughes's low-key direction is taut and unobtrusive, while the simple but elegant design by John Lee Beatty (sets), Catherine Zuber (costumes), Pat Collins (lighting), and David Van Tieghem (sound and music) frames the piece superbly without any one element threatening to overwhelm or distract.

Adriane Lenox plays Mrs. Muller, mother of the possible victim, with a smart mix of courtesy and fear. Heather Goldenhersh plays to type as the inexperienced Sister James, indulging perhaps more than necessary in the wispy simpering that is becoming her trademark but nevertheless turning in a credible performance.

The play's antagonists are brilliantly played by Cherry Jones and Brian F. O'Byrne, the latter delivering a thoughtful, textured characterization that highlights the various aspects of Father Flynn's possibly conflicted personality with real incisiveness. As Sister Aloysius, Jones is nothing short of astonishing, imbuing this woman with enormous intelligence, fortitude, and no small amount of humor; the unshakable faith that she has in her religion and herself is at once hugely admirable and a little scary. She provides the strong but finally doubtful presence at the center of this remarkable play.

The relevance of Shanley's exploration here will hopefully not be lost on anyone, by the way: firm, unwavering belief in a thing that has yet to be proven seems to be one of the guideposts of our present administration's policies, after all. Doubt sheds needed light on such a system of belief and action, and reminds us of its potentially catastrophic consequences, not only for our so-called and supposed opponents, but for ourselves.

John Patrick Shanley's new play Doubt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and almost certainly many other awards this spring) is the most pointed and pertinent new play to arrive on Broadway this season. But not for the reason you might think. The synopsis goes like this: At a Catholic School in the Bronx in 1964, Sister Aloysius, the principal, becomes concerned that one of her students is possibly being sexually abused by the basketball coach, Father Flynn. So the resonance of Doubt must lie in the simmering and still unsatisfactorily resolved scandal involving pedophile priests and the wicked cover-ups perpetrated at various levels of the Church hierarchy—right?

Wrong. Though Shanley touches upon the very troubling notion of a priest abusing one of his altar boys, this is assuredly not the subject of this challenging and intelligent play. Doubt is about doubt, and more importantly its opposite, blind faith. This is not a whodunnit but a whydoit: Sister Aloysius builds her case against Father Flynn from the inside out, with its fueling core composed of nothing stronger than unempirical conviction. Of course, it is often true that nothing is stronger than unempirical conviction—that's precisely the point.

Shanley builds the play cannily. We meet Father Flynn first—strapping, easy-going, clearly fond of his students and apparently well-liked by them; possibly troubled and maybe a little furtive. Then we meet Sister Aloysius, who is a remarkable personality: a woman who came to the Church after her husband died in World War II; steely, difficult, unmovable, and impenetrable; hard to get close to and hard to like but very easy to admire and impossible NOT to respect. Sister James, the younger teacher whose help she enlists in her quest to learn the truth about Father Flynn, tells her that all of the students are terrified of her—which is exactly what she thinks they should be. Duty to her work and faith in her beliefs are her unwavering priorities.

So when she begins to suspect that something is amiss between Father Flynn and an eighth-grader, she is single-minded and unscrupulous in ascertaining the truth, at least to her own satisfaction. Sister James thinks the boy may have been behaving strangely after a private session with Flynn; she reports her vague observations to Sister Aloysius and sets the investigation in motion. The obstacles Sister Aloysius faces are formidable: women are not decision-makers in the Church; she is very much at the mercy of the Monsignor, who favors Flynn and is unlikely to believe any allegations against him. The boy's mother, who is summoned by Sister Aloysius for an interview that is at once the most emotional and most harrowing scene in the play, chooses to close her eyes to whatever may or may not be going on for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he's the first and only black child in the school, and that he is "that way" and if his father finds out, he'll kill him (her words, not mine).

And so the story proceeds, relentlessly. There are not one but two confrontations between nun and priest. Agendas are forced; truth is always blurry and out of reach. Is Father Flynn a slick, sick predator? Or is Sister Aloysius, acting on a vendetta that even she may not fully understand, unjustly persecuting him?

Shanley's fine, brilliantly-constructed script is served up beautifully. Doug Hughes's low-key direction is taut and unobtrusive, while the simple but elegant design by John Lee Beatty (sets), Catherine Zuber (costumes), Pat Collins (lighting), and David Van Tieghem (sound and music) frames the piece superbly without any one element threatening to overwhelm or distract.

Adriane Lenox gives a powerful performance as Mrs. Muller, the mother of the possible victim; we sense this woman's fear and otherness at first, and later get a glimpse at her remarkable courage and determination. Heather Goldenhersh plays to type as the inexperienced Sister James, indulging perhaps more than necessary in the wispy simpering that is becoming her trademark but nevertheless turning in a credible performance.

The play's antagonists are brilliantly played by Cherry Jones and Brian F. O'Byrne, the latter delivering a thoughtful, textured characterization that highlights the various aspects of Father Flynn's possibly conflicted personality with real incisiveness. As Sister Aloysius, Jones is nothing short of astonishing, imbuing this woman with enormous intelligence, fortitude, and no small amount of humor; the unshakable faith that she has in her religion and herself is at once hugely admirable and a little scary. She provides the strong but finally doubtful presence at the center of this remarkable play.

The relevance of Shanley's exploration here will hopefully not be lost on anyone, by the way: firm, unwavering belief in a thing that has yet to be proven seems to be one of the guideposts of our present administration's policies, after all. Doubt sheds needed light on such a system of belief and action, and reminds us of its potentially catastrophic consequences, not only for our so-called and supposed opponents, but for ourselves.

This was the experience I had this week as I was slated to check out a new version of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and the Seven Deadly Sins at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. My usual companion backed out on me at the eleventh hour claiming, of all things, a headache. Not wanting to face the number seven train on my own, I made a few last ditch efforts to find another date, but no dice. One mention of an “outer borough” made my Manhattan-centric friends wince and wish me luck on my solo journey.

Well, shame on you, friends. Because boy, did you miss out on a doozy! I will admit that I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and got really nervous when artistic director Brian Rogers ushered us from the toasty lobby with a rousing “Ok, everybody. Put on your coats and let’s go outside.” I thought he must be kidding—maybe he’d been inside since last summer and didn’t realize that it was about a billion below out there. As my fellow audience members bundled and shuffled outside, I realized that there was exactly no joke involved. The show starts outside.

As we stood for a few moments, we the audience then began to get our collective minds around the game. Everyone who walked down the street became suspect. Is that girl on the cell phone in the play? Pizza delivery boy on a bike? Nah. Wait. This guy. The dude in the dirty overcoat pushing the cart with the boom box. That’s not just happenstance. He! He will start the play! And lead us in from the cold! Hurrah!

The Vagrant, as he is listed in the program, delivers his prologue out on 49th Avenue. I was intrigued by the idea of Marlowe’s language being overheard by whomever might just pass by. The language of a 400+ year-old play set against the streets of Queens with the Manhattan Skyline just off in the distance. Very cool. As my body temperature starts to level out, the sound of a heavy duty metal gate crashes open and we are led inside to a dark and sloping hallway. Here we have our first encounter with Faustus, who is sitting in his “library” awaiting our arrival, not really knowing that he’s on the verge of a big deal with the devil.

It is at this point in the piece that I fully realize that to be here requires full participation. Whispers of “Faustus” seem to come from out of nowhere. Out of the darkness these sylph-like creatures slither in from holes in the walls and up from under the stairs. There are seven of them: the deadly sins of the title. It is starting to make sense. I’m mildly freaked out when, as instructed, I make my way up the stairs and my leg is grabbed by one of the creatures from the dark. It’s creepy, I’m intrigued but I’m game and locked in for the ride.

We are led upstairs and into the Chocolate Factory’s main playing space. It’s pretty much empty. No place to sit. Instinctually, most of the audience, myself included, stick to the walls. It seems to be our best bet so as not to get in the way. Or is getting “in the way” actually the point?

I'm loathe to give away anymore specifics, because the excitement of the experience truly comes moment to moment and out of nowhere. I’m sure this piece changes every night. The seven “Sins” play as much with the audience as with Faustus and Mephistopheles, taunting, guiding and nudging us throughout the piece. What I will say is that the ingenuity here is astounding. Director (and CF associate artistic director) Aaron Rosenblum’s deft use of space forces the audience out of a passivity that unfortunately has become rote in much of the theatre of today. A stranger trekking about an unfamiliar territory fits this piece like a glove. He gives us license to move about the space and follow Faustus from heaven to hell and back. It is a confident and trusting director who lets the audience choose its own vantage point.

It is easy to take such risks when your support staff is equally as creative and talented. The technical design of the piece is subtle yet provocative. Sparse lighting by Carrie Wood at times made me wonder if my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, especially down in “hell.” Emily DeCola and Tony Fuemmeler created masks for some all-too-brief bits of commedia that had a life of their own. The costumes designed by Tara Hawks put the “Sins” in sexy Dickens-Goes-Goth garb which is at once period and present, in the same vein as pieces of this play being done in the street unites then and now. The scenic design and original musical composition (Brad Kisicki and Jeff Arnal, respectively) work hand-in-hand to accentuate the bare rooms of the Chocolate Factory and turn them into an imagined heaven, hell, and everything in between.

The young and uber-talented cast turn in jarring and wonderful performances. The Sins (Mierya Lucio, Marina Libel, Emily Alpren, Laura Riley, Anna Hopkins, Saori Tzukada, and Melaena Cadiz) are fearless and commanding in their assault on the audience, turning from mischievous tour guides to demanding task masters on a dime. Kate Donnelly is visually and aurally stunning as a sexy Mephistopheles, with her blood red hair and young Kathleen Turner rasp. Joe Randazzo as the Vagrant fills many shoes as the one-man chorus. And Nick Capodice is endearing on his mission as Faustus. Through his eager quest, the moral of “be careful of what you ask for because you just might get it” comes blazing at us.

On my quick trip home (yes, I was back downtown in less that twenty minutes) I was still reeling. Theatre is alive and well in Queens, kids. And it’s not so far away. Go check this out—they’re really taking it in new and exciting directions at the Chocolate Factory!

One doesn't want to begrudge Broadway producers their shortcuts to success—theirs it, at best, a very risky business. So doing things like latching onto a famous title by a dead writer who doesn't need to be paid a royalty (or, apparently, even need to be given credit in the playbill) or drumming up publicity during previews (via a non-controversy about a pair of very brief and very gratuitous nude scenes) in order to try to create a hit new musical are, in general, to be tolerated, even indulged.

But Dodger Stage Holding, Joop van den Ende, and Clear Channel Entertainment have a lot to answer for by foisting Dracula, The Musical on an unsuspecting and obliging public. Artistic merits (or lack thereof) aside, this crass and shoddy travesty represents a new low in production standards on Broadway. Audiences and reviewers alike need to tell these producers—a pair of corporations plus a rich businessman—that we won't allow ourselves to be insulted by:

- large objects masquerading as a set design that slide up and down and back and forth on stage, often obscuring the view for a large portion of the audience (I was in D8 in the Orchestra and wound up with an obstructed view a good deal of the time)

- muddy sound design/quality, causing a good deal of the lyrics to be inaudible and/or incomprehensible

- insufficient lighting instruments (e.g., no follow spots) that left the proceedings in the dark much of the time

- a six-person orchestra (three keyboards, reeds, cello, and percussion) rendering a potentially lush score as hollow synthesized noise (didn't there used to be union requirements for a certain number of instruments in a Broadway musical pit?)

- an "ensemble" of four (seven if you count the three vampires) who gamely and lamely are made to "fill" the stage (there's a particularly ludicrous musical number in which this quartet pretend to be the entire crew of a ship, crossing the stage back and forth in what amounts to a pathetic parody of the opening scene of the musical Titanic; do the producers really think the audience is too stupid to realize there are only four people in the chorus?)

For this, we are charged $100 (plus theatre restoration fee). We must, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, Just Say No.

It would help, of course, if the work itself were suitable and sufficient to offer to audiences, on Broadway or anywhere else for that matter. It is not. Musicalizing Dracula is probably a terrible idea under any circumstances: we know the story so well that it can't scare us anymore; it can really only work as fodder for camp or parody. Composer Frank Wildhorn and co-librettist/lyricists Don Black and Christopher Hampton mean this to be serious, though; audiences tried to titter as Tom Hewitt in the title role famously refused a glass of wine, but sensed quickly that nothing on stage was, or ever would be, funny. Instead, Dracula is a workmanlike and uninspired rendering of gothic horror in the same vein as Wildhorn's earlier Jekyll and Hyde or, stretching things, Webber's Phantom of the Opera, though not as good even as the former. Set designer Heidi Ettinger was clearly given the lion's share of the budget, and the set pieces are impressively large and numerous, though they never come close to defining either space or location. Other design elements are dark, dark, dark. Special effects, including a good deal of flying, abound, but thanks to Des McAnuff's direction—or lack of it—barely register. (Can this be the same man who directed Tommy a decade ago?)

The actors are pretty much stranded: Hewitt tries unsuccessfully to make us forget Bela Lugosi, while Melissa Errico, as Dracula's intended victim Mina, sings prettily and acts woodenly, victim of McAnuff's apparent laxity. Kelli O'Hara (Lucy) and Don Stephenson (Renfield) fare slightly better.

But I found it more interesting to watch a stagehand help Hewitt change costume and get into rigging for his next flight across the stage—yes, I could see this offstage, behind-the-scenes activity quite clearly from D8. Was anybody on the production team paying any attention? Does anybody care?

If we don't let producers know that we won't stand for being treated this way—that they can't regard us so cynically and cavalierly when they present a so-called "Broadway musical"—then guess what? We'll have more Dracula, The Musicals in our future. If Dodger, van den Ende, and Clear Channel respected Broadway audiences or cared about the quality of their experience, they would have pulled the plug on this fiasco—or worked diligently to upgrade and improve it—long before the first preview. But they appear to only care about our hundred bucks. Resolutely do not give it to them.

Drat! The Cat! was seen on Broadway for a week in October 1965. There's a CD preserving the original cast (from bootleg tapes; no record company brought it into a studio)—other than that, it's gone. Until, that is, Mel Miller and the Musicals Tonight! gang got their hands on it, bringing this very odd musical comedy back to the New York stage for two weeks. It's a fascinating show to behold. In forty more years, maybe someone will bring it back again, and that will be soon enough.

Which is to suggest that Drat! The Cat! is one of Broadway's deserving failures: this show is a mess. But don't let that keep you from taking in this production, which presents it in all its unfettered weird glory: buffs of the musical theatre history, in particular, will not want to forego this wonderful and rare opportunity. You'll also get to see a very talented young man named Scott Evans in the leading role—his performance as the goofy ingratiating juvenile who is Drat! The Cat!'s leading man is as good as any on stage right now. He's got genuine star quality.

A synopsis is certainly in order. Drat! The Cat! is set in New York City during the 1890s, where a rather fearless jewel thief has been terrorizing the city's wealthiest citizens with a number of brazen robberies, stealing diamonds and such right out from under rich people's noses. Early on, Alice Van Guilder, the attractive and impetuous daughter of one of the city's leading families, confesses to us that she's the "Cat" (the burglar is so-named because she's disguised as one). It's never entirely clear why Alice has turned to crime, but it's suggested that she intends to flout her privileged background and, perhaps, that she enjoys annoying her parents' snooty friends.

Bob Purefoy, the bumbling son of the legendary Roger "Bulldog" Purefoy (who, we are told, was one of the very finest of New York's Finest), has been assigned to catch the Cat. He of course does not know that Alice is the burglar; so it's just dumb luck that he is sent to attend a party at the Van Guilders' home, where he will hunt, incognito, for his prey. When Alice discovers what Bob is up to, she craftily cozies up to him and offers to assist him (in a song called "Holmes and Watson"), but she instead manipulates poor dumb Bob and by the end of Act One—the Cat having struck once again at the Van Guilders' soiree—she has framed Bob for the crime and taken him hostage in the cellar.

In the second act, Alice is forced by her father to free Bob and, to keep herself out of prison, agrees to escape to the country with Bob. (Did I mention that Bob fell head-over-heels in love with Alice as soon as he laid eyes on her? Sorry.) Bob then contrives, in very convoluted fashion, to take the rap for Alice's crimes and eventually have her released into his custody in a "happy ending" set in a courtroom.

Everything I've read about Drat! The Cat! suggests that book-writer/lyricist Ira Levin and composer Milton Schafer were going for a parody of 19th century cops & robbers melodrama here. I don't know if director Thomas Mills has layered something onto their composition (I doubt it), but the piece sure doesn't feel like parody, or melodrama either: instead it feels like a very uncomfortable hybrid of satirical social criticism with screwball romantic comedy—sort of like what might have happened if Bertolt Brecht had written Bringing Up Baby.

The songs, interestingly, are the strongest component of the work. There's one you've heard before, probably: "She Touched Me," which became famous after Barbra Streisand recorded it. Here, it's a sweetly naive confession of love at first sight, put over with delightfully un-self-conscious enthusiasm by Evans. He has another charming number about falling in love, "She's Roses," sung with Celia Tackaberry as his mom. Also terrific are a couple of choral numbers, "Today is a Day for a Band to Play" and  "A Pox Upon the Traitor's Brow," both sung by members of the police force before and after Bob has been captured for his alleged crimes. Levin's lyrics here are clever and Schafer's music is catchy.

Besides Evans and Tackaberry, this production boasts some other fine talent, including Lew Lloyd, who looks and behaves like a cross between Fatty Arbuckle and Stubby Kaye, which turns out to be just perfect for Police Superintendent Pincer; Nick Locilento as his accomplice, Mallet; Steve Brady as Bob's father "Bulldog" Purefoy; and Verna Pierce as Alice's excitable mother. The male chorus shines here as well: Richard Barth, Ryan Dunkin, Cooper Grodin, Erik McEwen, and Jake Speck harmonize admirably.

All in all, it's a completely respectable rendition of a show that will never be revived anywhere else anytime soon: I love Musicals Tonight! precisely for shows like this, that have almost nothing but curiosity value going for them. It's fun and enlightening to get a gander at Drat! The Cat!, especially under these modest circumstances (no production values per se and with the actors still "on book"). I can't wait to see what Miller digs up for us to enjoy next season.

I was pacing around, waiting to go into Julien Mellano’s Mon Oeil, when an odd-looking man strolled up to the crowd and began to examine our clothing. He spoke with a thick French accent (and in French) and had a device for tagging garments in his hand. After politely turning each patron around a few times he found the perfect flap of material and tagged us. Then he had us line up according to our height and made a short speech before taking us into the theatre.

As we enter the space we find Mellano sitting behind a work table covered with a black cloth and littered with all the tools of a tailor. There is an old-style sewing machine on his left with strings streaming off of it. A small radio that is covered with a dingy yellow towel is playing some sort of talk show but the words keep warping and warbling. A bundle held up by strings dangles over the table. A swing-arm lamp hovers above the table as well, and for the most part is the show’s sole source of light. Mellano pulls it in closer at times and pushes it away at others. I was sitting about three feet away from the action and I’m glad I was because the Mellano’s movements are so intricate and precise.

He begins the program with a puppet made out of terrycloth that has four fingers and slips over his arm. Three of the fingers represent legs and one the head of some strange creature that sniffs about the table. Then Mellano pulls the poor creature’s head off and it fumbles around looking for its lost head but can’t find it anywhere. Soon after that Mellano pulls the light directly behind the radio to reveal the word “interlude” written in towel by a thinning of the material to create the letters. He pops a cassette tape in and plays Ween’s “Johnny on the Spot” while he drinks a beer. From there the show escalates its bizarre happenings. He reveals so many neat little gadgets and mechanisms that he has rigged up on and underneath the table and he controls many of the devices with a crafty slight of hand. Things pop out of the table and out of his puppets. At one point he uses spoons to surgically extract puppet guts only to reveal another puppet in need of surgery.

Mon Oeil (My Eye) is the kind of show that pulls you into its world and makes you completely forget about the outside world. I’ve seen quite a bit of puppet theatre over the past few weeks and this so far has been my favorite. This is not because of its high production value but because Mon Oeil for me is about discovery. We enter into Mellano’s world (and it most definitely is his world), but at the same time we discover the occurrences right along with him. He sometimes seems as surprised we are when he discovers the hidden things inside his puppets. This lends an already intimate show a higher degree of intimacy. I only wish the program was longer. I could have discovered a lot more along Mellano. If you decide to see Mon Oeil (and you most certainly should), you may enjoy a more full evening if you see one of the other puppet programs offered at HERE as a part of the Dream Music Trio. They have them running with enough time in between shows so you can see two in one night. And get your tickets early. Because of the aforementioned intimacy, they limit seating to only 30 people. This is a wise decision. This show would not work with a large audience or in a large space. This is Theatre of Minutia. The proof is in the proximity.

*** *** *** ***

What’s Inside the Egg is like a whimsical breeze that circles around you and lifts you up a little. The show has a certain joie de vive that compelled me to want to be a part of the action. Although I’m normally an independent person, I wanted to pull a reverse Pinocchio and transform from a human into a puppet. I felt that smiling and laughing at the show’s lighthearted motions and gestures was simply not enough.

The show’s creator Lake Simons also stars as Louise, a content old lady with a spring in her tiny step. Chad Lynch plays the equally contented and aptly named Happy, her husband. Both of their performances are so heart-warming that now I can’t wait to grow old with my spouse. I really enjoyed the filmed flashback to their youth that is projected onto Louise’s shawl. It is little inventive things like this that characterize what is so wonderful about this show. There are very few words spoken. In work such as this very few are needed. It gives the show an international feel to it. Simons could take this program around the world and it would be universally understood and enjoyed. She could even wow them in Prague, the puppetry capitol of world.

The puppeteers, Chris Green, Erin Orr and Eric Wright, do fantastic work with their respective puppets. All three perform as a family of puppets that moves in under the old couple’s dining table. One of the puppeteers, I’m not sure which one, also operates a marionette. He is highly skilled at manipulating the intricate details of every movement. I also liked that this trio of puppeteers are all dressed in 1940’s Americana. It conveys a sense of unity as they all move together with dance-like precision. The music for the show is live. It is composed and performed by John Dyer, along with a little help from Michael Bodycomb on upright bass. It’s all so jazzy and happy (in a good way, not in a "please take your bouncy joy elsewhere" sort of way) and it fits the show to a "T." Dyer’s music and sound effects do flips and perform amazing feats of dexterity to fill the gap left by the absence of words. Andrew Hill’s lighting design is another element of the show that leaves an impression. It is simple and yet at the same time it evokes an emotional response.

Simons writes in her program notes that she used to keep a sewing basket filled with little trinkets of interest. Even though she knew quite well what was in the basket she still enjoyed the rush of imagination and wonder she felt when she would open it. That feeling of wonderment and imagination is a good way to describe the feeling that What’s Inside the Egg will give you. Sure, there are a few moments when it’s a little slow and artsy and maybe the youngsters will feel the urge to verbalize their impatience and confusion, but these moments are few and far between. Overall, the show feels like the four winds of euphoria meet right before your eyes.

I admit that I haven't actually sat down and tried to write one, but it seems to me that there's more than enough fodder in the current election and the current administration to write an effectively pungent and satisfyingly venomous political satire about President Bush. I've yet to see one—and I have been looking. The present one, Dubya and the Gang of Seven, is written by Leon Katz (book and lyrics) and Clifford J. Tasner (music), two gentlemen with impressive credentials (the former is a long-time academic and prolific playwright; the latter is composer/arranger/lyricist for the street theatre/protest troupe Billionaires for Bush). But the show they have come up with—presented in a concert staging at Theater for the New City on the same four nights as the Republican National Convention—is a disappointment.

The idea here is that Dubya, our Chief Executive, believes that he receives messages from God that direct him to enact various policies and programs, such as tax breaks to wealthy Americans and large corporations, removing or weakening environmental protections, and invading Iraq. It's not clear whether Dubya has deluded himself into thinking he's on speaking terms with God, or if he's just misconstruing and misinterpreting the messages—either way, God's not happy with how things are going. (Though, puzzlingly, he doesn't seem to be planning to do anything about it, other than contemplate the apathy/stupidity of His creation in a finale entitled "What Is a Human Being?")

When it's not grappling confusingly with the Eternal, however, Dubya and the Gang of Seven offers some lucid and often wickedly funny perspectives on the powerful folk who run our country at the moment. Perhaps the sharpest of the show's barbs comes in the song "What Would Jesus Do," which has a refrain that goes "Kill kill kill for Jesus!" as the Cabinet gleefully uses religion to justify a new "crusade" against foreign countries. Karl Rove is given a terrific patter song called "Born to Serve" in which he enumerates the many beneficiaries of Bush policies (Enron, Haliburton, etc.). And in a welcome rebuttal to the myth that our President isn't very bright, a song by Dubya called "Dumb As I Am" reveals him to be as wily and self-aware as I am sure he actually is.

Dubya and the Gang of Seven is ultimately too full of dismay at the state of our country to sustain humor in the way a satire ought—a climactic exchange in which the ghost of Hitler tells Dubya and the Gang that he has no advice for them because they've already gone farther than he ever dreamed of doing is too scary to be funny, whether you agree with the ghost or not. Katz and Tasner certainly have worthy instincts—puncturing leaders is a hallowed, important, and wonderful American tradition—but I fear that they're too angry to manage the job soundly. Jed Allen Harris provides useful staging to this concert (script-in-hand) performance, and the cast of fourteen is generally very good, in particular Michael J. Miller as a sinister-but-likable Dubya, Jason Howard as Cheney, Jim Brigman as Rove, and Nicholas Webber as the Press Secretary/Narrator.

With the Republican National Convention turning our town—or at least a large chunk of its middle—into Fortress New York, and an election that just about anybody you speak to thinks is the most important one in decades just a couple of months off, theatre needs to be a vibrant forum for discussion and dissent. Satire is a terrific tool: well-executed, it can jolt, jar, and maybe even change some minds; it can also provide something like release in the frustrating heat of a vigorous election. So I applaud Katz and Tasner's spirit. I just wish they'd hit the mark a bit more effectively.

Review of Series A (January 29, 2005)

What does it mean to come to America—to leave behind a country that was home, and embrace a new existence in a new world very different from the old one? That's the question tackled in "The First Generation," Series A of East Village Chronicles Volume 2, the new program of short plays about life in New York's Lower East Side, now on view at Metropolitan Playhouse. (My review of Series B is just below this one.) In four terrific, diverse plays, Anthony P. Pennino, Trav S.D., Saviana Stanescu, and Adrian Rodriguez offer very different but equally insightful answers, making this—in some ways—the most necessary of all the new works evenings presented at this Alphabet City company to date.

The first two pieces on the bill, Pennino's Commedia della Poca Italia and Trav S.D.'s The Irish Melodrama, use iconic cultural theatre traditions to tell stories of young love among two of New York's most priominent immigrant communities. Commedia, unabashedly rooted family history, is about Antonio Pennino, a young shoemaker who set out for the New World in order to escape military service in the Italian colony of Libya in the 1910s, and now lives on Mulberry Street in burgeoning Little Italy. When he sees lovely Nunziatta standing at her window one night, it is love at first sight; but she, daughter of a Padrone, is above his lowly station, or so it seems: how can the two meet, court, and marry? The answer is provided, delightfully, in Pennino's charming episodic play, narrated by Harlequino, that staple of Italian commedia dell'arte, who offers not only sharp-witted commentary but plays the parts of everyone else in Antonio and Nunziatta's romance. In the end, their (true!) story is a tribute to authentic American democracy. The tour that Pennino takes us on includes sojourns to many other ethnic enclaves of the Lower East Side, including (most memorably) a dinner at an Irish saloon where Antonio has his first ale and Nunziatta learns about unspiced food: the melting pot brought to life.

Trav S.D. hearkens back to mid-19th century burlesques of the kind popularized by Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart with his Irish Melodrama, a broad and fanciful tale of a dutiful son named Danny who promises his dying Da that he will watch over his dear sister Mary. When we next see the family, Mary's brought home a big, rowdy longshoreman named Tommy as her latest beau. Will the mild-mannered, poetical Danny be able to protect his sister's (dubious) honor? Mr. S.D. follows—and lovingly twits—the conventions of period melodrama to provide a comical and good-natured conclusion.

The evening's second pair of pieces are contemporary, set in present-day Manhattan where a new generation of immigrants, in search of political freedom as much as economic opportunity, are trying to make their way in a strange land. Ukrainian Blues is by Saviana Stanescu, herself a Romanian émigré in New York. She charts the colliding, divergent, and ultimately triumphantly similar experiences of a mother and daughter from Kiev who have arrived in the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. The daughter, Ivanka, wants to embrace the bohemian lifestyle surging in her East Village neighborhood, and—not at all incidentally—needs to break the news to her mother that her lesbian lover Leslie is moving into the apartment next week. The mother, Gorana, meanwhile, draws on seemingly bottomless reserves of resilience and fortitude to cope with every happenstance, this latest unexpected one included. Her ability to make the same bohemian neighborhood—which houses the Ukrainian church as well as Ivanka's funky friends—into a welcoming home is inspiration to her daughter and all of us in the audience.

Abel, the protagonist of Adrian Rodriguez's Floating Home, came to this country while just a little boy, fleeing with his family from Castro's Cuba. Now a grown man, divorced and with a small son, Abel is conflicted about where his roots are. His brother Juan has no doubt that New York is his home, but Abel is becoming increasingly obsessed with the notion that he's a visitor, or an alien; he's hatching a scatterbrained and surreal scheme to return back to Cuba with the son that he calls Miguel and everyone else calls Michael. Floating Home, abstract and performed in both Spanish and English (the way that Cuban Americans actually speak), is a more difficult and complex play than the other three on the bill. It makes for a thoughtful and effective counterpoint to the rest of East Village Chronicles' exploration of the immigrant experience.

All four of the plays in Series A are directed by Derek Jamison, who does a generally fine job across the board. Six actors reveal their range playing all the roles, with Melanie Rey a particular standout as Nunziatta, Ivanka, and Rosa (Abel's mother in Floating Home), a trio of very different ladies. Barbara J. Spence creates perhaps the strongest characterization of the evening as the indomitable Gorana in Ukrainian Blues, and also plays Danny's Da, Ma, and a Barfly in The Irish Melodrama. Aaron Munoz is very appealing as Antonio in Commedia and turns in solid performances as the rowdy Tommy and Abel's father Ramon. Rob Pedini's best moments are as Harlequino (he also plays Danny); Alberto Bonilla is excellent as the conflicted Abel and silly (in drag) as Mary. Scott D. Phillips is Abel's brother Juan and, in a connecting device threading through the entire evening, reads from Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

Review of Series B (January 21, 2005)

The short new plays comprising East Village Chronicles are a celebration of the diversity of the Lower East Side, which is home to Metropolitan Playhouse, the fine and plucky theatre company on East 4th Street near Avenue B that spends most of the rest of its year re-examining classic works about the American experience. Under the leadership of artistic director Alex Roe and new works director Anthony P. Pennino, Metropolitan first commissioned two evenings about the history of its neighborhood last year, and the success of that endeavor has led directly to this current offering, East Village Chronicles Volume 2, two more programs of original one-acts that focus on some of the ethnic and cultural communities that make up this vibrant and noisy section of New York City. I've just seen one of the two evenings so far (a review of the second evening will come along shortly). So far, even more than last year's effort, East Village Chronicles is a resounding success.

Dubbed "Series B: The Second Generation," this evening contains three sharp, rich short plays that pit subculture against subculture; wrapped around them is a monologue called East Village Kaddish in which a middle-aged Jewish man talks about how his own upbringing as the son of an Orthodox rabbi was affected by the pull of other cultures away from his own. Kaddish is performed by Rob Pedini, who delivers the piece gamely despite the fact that he's certainly a generation or more younger than the character he's playing (his black sneakers feel particularly incongruous). It's written by Pennino, who in it touches on a variety of important subjects such as religious tolerance, the Holocaust, and the difficulties of cultural assimilation. If it feels perhaps a bit perfunctory it nevertheless functions neatly as a frame for the rest of the program's more vividly realized works.

The first of these others is Renee Flemings's Beat, which takes place in a cemetery near the Five Points, the notorious Lower Manhattan neighborhood that, in the mid-1800s, was home to the city's most recent immigrants, who fought brutally for respect and turf in a tough, crowded territory. Flemings leaves this largely in the background, though, as she tells two linked stories of love and conflict involving denizens of the Irish and African American communities who called this area home. The tales, a hundred years apart, tangle in taboos that are still not fully exorcised from our culture. Flemings tells her stories with economy, warmth, and compassion; that's all I will say—see Beat for yourself to learn its surprising twists. The piece is thoughtfully performed by Michael Colby Jones and Scott Phillips as two hot-blooded young Irish Americans and Cherita A. Armstrong and Kwaku Driskell as the African Americans they love.

Gino Di Iorio's play The Pigeon Tree takes place in the early 1970s at the time of the Tompkins Square Riots, which pitted the desperate drug dealers for whom the Alphabet City park was a haven against cops bent on cleaning up the area. Against this volatile backdrop, Di Iorio gives us a taut, incisive drama about a young dealer named GT (who is a heroin addict himself) and his confrontation with a mysterious customer named Charlotte. Di Iorio writes here about people who are seldom given a voice: the kids who are turned onto drugs and turned into junkies, the real victims of the so-called "drug wars." With swift, sharp strokes, the playwright paints a bleak, despairing picture of a tragedy that's all the worse for being so easily preventable. Arthur Acuna and Cherita Armstrong are excellent as GT and Charlotte.

The evening concludes with its longest entry, Qui Nguyen's satire Bike Wreck. Set in the present day, Nguyen's hilarious and on-target comedy involves a triangle whose points are familiar to anybody with even a passing acquaintance with downtown Manhattan: a black Messenger, a Chinese food Delivery Boy, and a designer-suited, six-or-seven-figures-a-year Wall Street type billed in the program simply and directly as The Man. The Messenger and the Delivery Boy, who make their livings on their bicycles, have become friends of a sort as their routes have criss-crossed; The Man is a frequent client of the Messenger and, as a result of chance and chutzpah, the target of the Delivery Boy in a mugging that turns potentially deadly. Bike Wreck is about the economic food chain of modern life, and also about racism and stereotyping; Nguyen and his actors—especially Arthur Acuna as the Delivery Boy and Michael Colby Jones as the soulless white yuppie—fearlessly exploit the racial profiles that we're generally unwilling to admit we carry around in our heads, making us both laugh at and confront the thoughtless, superficial bigotry that pervades any multicultural community. Bike Wreck is funny and scary: a cautionary tale that pokes holes in our assumptions about ourselves and each other with panache, wit, and intelligence.

The whole evening is staged in a seamless, intermissionless 90-minutes by Jude Domski, who is particularly strong realizing the intimate personal stories of Beat and The Pigeon Tree but somewhat less assured with the cadences of Bike Wreck's epic comedy. A simple unit set by Ryan Scott and spare, evocative lighting by Sean Kane serve all of the pieces nicely. Alberto Bonilla has provided some very effective fight direction for Pigeon Tree and Bike Wreck.

East Village Chronicles just seems to get better and better, providing real food for thought about hidden histories and cultures that we consider far too infrequently, and—not at all incidentally—a terrific showcase for some very talented and diverse young playwrights and actors.

It's 2008. The Bush administration is finishing up its second term* and its members are making plans for the future. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in particular, is contemplating a big career change: he wants to star in a one-man musical on Broadway. And he wants the creative team behind Urinetown to write it for him.

That's the premise of Eat the Taste, a new 65-minute trifle by Greg Kotis, who was the librettist and co-lyricist of Urinetown, the musical parody that won three Tony Awards in 2002. Like Urinetown, Eat the Taste is loaded with self-referential and inside jokes and pokes fun at a variety of theatrical conventions. It's funny, and it's sharply directed by John Clancy and beautifully performed by a company of six, the standouts of which are Paul Urcioli, Bill Coelius, and Eva van Dok as three government agents who are working on Mr. Ashcroft's behalf to recruit (coerce?) Kotis to come to work for him. Kotis appears as himself, and his writing partner Mark Hollmann turns up before the thing is over, also as himself, mostly to sing a catchy new number that he has written to open Ashcroft's show. Matthew Rego, of the Araca Group (co-producers of Urinetown, though not of Eat the Taste), shows up too (not in person; he's played by Gibson Frazier).

As I said, it's funny. Coelius's character, Number 3, is a dull-witted bumbler who can never manage to get his gun back into his holster on the first attempt; he gets the lion's share of the physical comedy here, including a subtle but hilarious bit involving the alleged carbonation of some water. Urcioli's guy, Number 72, is smarter but stagestruck, which sometimes threatens to render him just as useless. Urcioli is a master at the deadpan silliness this role requires; I especially enjoyed watching the G-Man stiffness melt away as he gets swept up in Hollmann's bouncy song. Van Dok, all business as the senior Agent 20, combines the tyrannical insincerity of the Broadway producer of your nightmares with the bureaucratic starchiness of the prototypical career government official. Kotis's script gives these three characters a lot of silly and unexpected things to do, and we love them for it.

But unfortunately he gives himself very little to do except react to a premise that, once divulged, fails to develop in interesting ways. Eat the Taste, again like Urinetown, looks like it's going to be insightful, but then isn't: the satire here never rises above a running gag about Vice President Cheney wanting to sabotage Ashcroft's show because he doesn't have any talent of his own. Most of the other barbs are about the theatre (references to Wicked, another Araca show that didn't win the Best Musical Tony Award, abound); they wear thin; and I wonder how much they'll mean to an audience not composed of aficionados and insiders. So ultimately my reaction to Eat the Taste is pretty much exactly the same as my reaction was to Urinetown: it's not smart enough to engage us as satire, and it's not hysterically funny enough to allow us not to care.

But it's still pretty funny; you can absolutely do worse than spend an hour on a Monday night on your way to or from whatever else you're doing, having a laugh and a lark in the company of Kotis and his collaborators.

* The assumption that Bush wins a second term was hard for my companion at the theatre to take. And then there's the question of whether they'll stop at just two terms... but that's another story.

There are eight new short plays in three different evenings at this fall's EATFest; I saw Series C, which includes Ted LoRusso's Woman with Coffee and Emily Mitchell's Book Signing, two superbly written, beautifully realized pieces that make me wish my schedule would allow me to sample the other two evenings.

Woman with Coffee is an elegant, jolting little play about a man with a brain disorder—maybe Alzheimer's, maybe something else—that has wiped out short-term and parts of long-term memory. He cannot, for example, remember that he just asked for a cup of coffee, and so is alternately delighted or irritated when a woman—whom he does not think he knows—brings it to him. The accompanying cream and sugar are surprises, as well: what are they? what are they for?

Now if this sounds like fodder for a marginally tasteless Saturday Night Live sketch, let me assure you that Woman with Coffee is as far removed from that plane as it's possible to be: this is a sharp, sad, sensitive look at a situation that's about as devastating as anything I can imagine. Which is more painful, LoRusso asks here: knowing somewhere down deep that you can no longer process the multitudinous data in the world, that you can't make sense of anything? Or being married to, and deeply in love, with that person? LoRusso's writing is gorgeous, startling us with insight and unexpected humor, as when the man "reads" the morning paper by stringing random words from each page into a single astonishing non-sequitur "story." Under Steven McElroy's seamless direction, Kurt Kingsley and Ellen Reilly give enormously effective performances in this remarkably moving, compact drama.

Book Signing follows a successful novelist on several stops of his current book tour. Carson dreads his visits at these Barnes & Nobles and Borders, each so alike and full of artifice no matter what city it's actually in. The play begins flippantly, mirroring Carson's feelings; but as he settles into a particular event where a budding and admiring young poet is his "handler" at the store, Carson and the play as a whole lift their cynical facades and let some of their humanity shine through. It's a neat and lovely transformation.

Jason O'Connell is terrific as the trying-to-be-jaded writer, while Aimee Howard delivers a miniature tour de force as everyone else in the play, from the fawning book store clerk to the disengaged store manager to a variety of customers who have lined up to get their copies signed (most memorably, an elderly man who comes to book signings as a kind of tribute to his late wife, who loved them). Rasa Allan Kaslas's direction is excellent, keeping the story moving as Howard dashes on and off stage to modify her costume slightly for each new persona. Mitchell's writing is funny, lively, observant, and deeply felt.

The whole evening lasts just about an hour, but the work is so thoughtful and involving that it makes for a thoroughly satisfying evening. Production values are well above average for a short-play festival; Emerging Artists Theatre Company is clearly a class act. It's probably safe to infer that the other two evenings will offer similarly worthy fare; this is an event that theatre-goers should definitely check out.

Emerging Artist Theatre’s semi-annual EATFest is a mixed bag of unrelated short plays presented in a three-series rotating schedule. Festivals of this nature offer a welcome opportunity for writers, directors, and performers to experiment with ideas and genres that might not be easy to sell as full-length plays. As you might expect, some of the eight plays in the festival are more successful than others. All are worthy attempts to push the limits of content.

Series A begins with Foreign Bodies, by Andrew Biss. A couple on a budget vacation in a developing oil nation find themselves in the middle of a culture clash. It’s absurd, sketch comedy with strange, witty twists. Laura Fois as the wife is the evening’s standout performance. The second play, Asteroid Belt, by Lauren Feldman, is both fascinating and disturbing. A college girl is late coming home. As her parents worry about where she might be, she is somehow there in the room with them, unseen, describing the horrible car accident that is happening to her, and that she is unable to stop. It’s an interesting and original idea, well carried out by the writer. The audience is kept on edge from beginning to end. The third play of the evening, Marc Castle’s Invisible, is another sketch comedy piece that takes a simple stereotype and turns it into a clever parody with many laughs. A gay man who has just turned forty finds that he is now literally “invisible” to the twenty-something men he’s been trying to pick up. Later a gay senior shows up and tries to lure him to “the other side.”

Series B starts with Kevin Drzakowski’s A Watched Pot, which takes place in the bathroom of the President of the United States. A global catastrophe is suddenly taking place as the President is in the middle of… well… reading the newspaper. It’s funny, sharp and creative, carried to the extreme. The rest of Series B is the longest play of the series, Ry Herman’s Man On Dog. A young bisexual woman gets involved in a long-term three-way relationship with a couple. There are a few twists later on that make it even stranger. Without giving it all away, this play is like several months of a soap opera all crammed into less than an hour. It starts out as an exploration of an “alternative family structure”—a difficult enough task—but then goes in too many sensational directions to keep any point from getting lost. The play jumps back and forth in time, and is hard to follow because of this. I will also confess that I still haven’t figured out the title.

The short and very amusing Roast Beef and the Rare Kiss by Gregory Fletcher opens Series C. The play begins with the kiss. We then realize that the two people kissing are not a couple, but rather each is part of another couple, and the two couples are spending an evening together at one of their homes. The rest of the play is nervous choreography as the two who kissed try to deal with what they have just done, while their partners bounce in and out of the room, cleaning up after dinner and making popcorn for the movie they rented. There’s a delightful and clever twist at the end. Next up is The Child by Kerri Kochanski. A childless middle-aged couple have their peaceful afternoon interrupted by the sound of a child screaming somewhere nearby. It is a simple piece about the choices we make, and the voices that we hear because of them; the “what ifs” that won’t go away. Sadly, the piece gets cluttered in the middle with unnecessary sidetracks, and the monologue at the end where the woman explains the point of the play is not needed. The final piece, Sheldon Senek’s Twelve Rounds, take the knock-down, drag-out world of heterosexual dating and transposes it to a boxing ring. It is another piece that is perfect for a venue like this; a simple funny idea that is nicely carried out.

The programs are all quite short. B is about 80 minutes, but A is more like 55, and C only 50. Sets, lighting, and costumes are all very simple and sufficient. The festival is not about production value. It’s about new writers, directors and actors—emerging artists—spreading their wings a bit. That’s always fun to watch.

Echoes of the War, the program of two one-act plays by J.M. Barrie now at the Mint Theater Company, offers theatregoers a glimpse—or rather, a pair of glimpses—at one of the last century's least-appreciated playwrights. There's real value in this, the kind that has made the Mint, under the stewardship of artistic director Jonathan Bank, one of New York's most important off-Broadway theatre companies; the kind that attracts actors of the caliber of Frances Sternhagen and Richard Easton to this growing, thriving, but still relatively young organization. What a pleasure to be able to spend an hour and a half in the presence of superlative talents like these!

Sternhagen appears in the second, longer piece on the bill, a sentimental comedy entitled The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. Originally produced in 1917, this play is steeped in the wartime patriotism that certainly overtook Britain at that moment in its history, i.e., the height of World War I. Mrs. Dowey (Sternhagen), a charwoman, is feeling left out of the all-consuming war effort, and so in an attempt to get involved, she invents a "son" at the frontlines, who writes her weekly letters and to whom she sends care packages—and about whom she can brag to her pals Mrs. Twymley, Mrs. Mickleham, and The Haggarty Woman, all of whom have authentic offspring serving in some branch of the armed forces. But when a Private Kenneth Dowey actually turns up at the old lady's apartment, the jig, as they say, seems to be up.

Not to worry though, for while Mrs. Dowey gets a comeuppance, it's a wee one; turns out that Private Dowey is as much in need of a mother as the old lady wants a son. (This is, in fact, the plot point that links Old Lady to Barrie's most famous work, Peter Pan; it also leaves a vaguely creepy aftertaste: what sort of soldier on leave elects to spend all of his free nights with an adopted mother instead of, say, a pretty young lady?)

The Old Lady Shows Her Medals is very sweet-natured and very well-built. Its opening scene, with Mrs. Dowey and her chums gossiping about fashion and the War over tea, is a deft satire of contemporaneous comedies of manners, and there's no denying that both adopted mother and adopted son are lovable characters whom we are happy to meet. This is especially so thanks to Sternhagen, dithery but stolid as the old lady, and Gareth Saxe, guileless and sturdy as Kenneth.

Sternhagen's co-star Richard Easton makes a brief (and delightful!) appearance in Old Lady as a local vicar; he's the rock at the center of the evening's first selection, the earlier (1915) The New Word. Shorter than Old Lady but no less sentimental, this family comedy is about the farewell conversation between reticent father and reticent son, on the eve of the latter's departure with his unit for the War. It's a one-joke play, but a masterfully sketched-out one: how will Mr. Torrance overcome his British stiff-upper-lip to tell his first-born Roger how he really feels about him? Barrie blends gentle satire with a winning naturalness to paint a warm, loving portrait of the bonds between a father and son—one that anyone who ever loved their father is going to identify with. Easton is terrific as Torrance, blustering and blundering his way through the painful interview, with Aaron Krohn matching him beautifully as the equally reluctant Roger.

Eleanor Reissa has staged both of the plays with genuine affection for the material (and the program includes a lovely essay by Reissa that sets them up neatly for us). Set designer Vicki R. Davis works her usual miracles to transfer the small Mint space into two distinct London "drawing rooms," the one appropriately lush and conservative, the other much more homey and careworn. The rest of the design team—Bruce Ellman (sound), Traci Klainer (lighting), and Debra Stein (costumes)—provide able support.

Echoes of the War might strike some as timely given our nation's current situation, and indeed an essay by Gad Guterman excerpted in the program suggests that these two plays might be construed as anti-war. I disagree: these pieces are rally-round-the-flag jingoism at its subtle best, an entirely appropriate notion during that war that was billed as the one to end all wars. The unambiguous innocence of those days is enormously appealing, but sadly not especially resonant nowadays. Nevertheless, Barrie's sense of duty and honor and familial love is not just inspiring, it's infectious and comforting, and it makes both parts of Echoes of the War thoroughly engaging. Bravo to the Mint for rediscovering them!

There is nothing quite so exciting for an audience member as to be welcomed, in a show’s opening moments, into a strange new world. Ed the 4th, appearing as part of the Midtown International Theater Festival, does just that—a pitch-perfect parody of saccharine morning news anchors introduces us to a world dominated by the Church of Elvis and fear of disease in the giant “towers” which have evolved from our cities. Our main character, Ed the 2nd (Marc Fine), goes on to bluster about the state of the world in the year 2049 and paints a comically bleak picture of intense overcrowding and very closely regulated reproduction.

Unfortunately at this point, playwright Joe Hartin allows his Brave New World to be taken over by a very sit-com-esque plot. Ed’s son, Ed the 3rd (Dave Konig), and his wife, Lovey (Deborah Clifford), desperately want to have a baby, so badly, in fact, that they have displayed the reproductive cells in a blue gelatinous smear on the wall. The twist? They need to get Ed committed to some sort of an asylum to make room for the baby, and along come Ed’s wife (Stephanie Hepburn)), Ed’s nurse (Nancy Sigworth), and a Doctor (Kurt Lauer) to testify as to whether it’s time for Ed to be shipped out to make room for his grandson.

Once the situation is set up, nothing much seems to happen. The characters (under the direction of Nancy Larsen, in performances so broad as to be almost completely un-nuanced) articulate and rearticulate their cases for having or not having Ed shipped out. There are a few genuinely funny moments when the show addresses its universe—the family argues viciously at regular intervals through the ceiling with neighbors upstairs, Lovey exhibits a surreal bit of grief when she drops the gelatinous smear she considers to be her son; and the Doctor’s is almost psychotically proud about the fact that from his apartment he can see a bit of park. But the majority of the play is wasted on incoherent arguing and physical comedy for its own sake.

If you’re in the mood for some extremely broad comedy set in a potentially very interesting place, check out Ed the 4th, but you may be disappointed as the comic gold of this universe goes, for the most part, un-mined.