There may be a sweller way to pass an hour on a Tuesday night this fall than at Eisenstein's Monster at the Duplex, but I wouldn't bet on it. This blissful and often touching program of  six very short and very grown-up plays and monologues about love and desire by Linda Eisenstein is one of the sweetest and most rewarding evenings of theatre in recent memory; it's also a casebook on how to write and stage for the theatre with economy (in terms of time and money) and excellence.

The evening begins with its silliest and slightest offering, a short solo piece called Zombie Grrlz from the Crypt, delivered by a scary Goth chick named Magda (well-played by Holly Sheppard) who is obsessed with zombie girls and sick and tired of the bad rep she and her fellow zombie-chasers have gotten compared to, say, vampires.

F2F, also a monologue, shifts the tone considerably; this is my favorite of the six playlets comprising Eisenstein's Monster. Stephanie Deliani plays Helena, a middle-aged, admittedly not beautiful but very centered and self-confident writer who enjoys meeting people in chat rooms on the Internet and engages, when she travels, in "F2Fs"—i.e., face-to-face meetings—with some of her cyber-acquaintances. Sometimes an F2F turns out differently than expected, and that's certainly the case with Trudy, who turns out to be younger than anticipated and exquisitely beautiful to boot. Helena finds herself particularly enraptured by Trudy's swanlike neck and soft shoulders, so much so that their conversation quickly becomes strained and awkward. Trudy worries that Helena thinks she's boring; Helena's mind is somewhere else entirely.

What Eisenstein, director Rebecca Longworth, and Deliani do with this tender, intimate little play—I won't tell you what happens—is remarkable: Helena's anecdote resonates with rare authenticity and maturity. The tale takes the turn we're expecting and then a gratifying one we probably don't see coming at all. Lovely.

A Rustle of Wings is another charmer, about a woman who meets a stranger in a bar who has a pair of wings. What could be an ordinary pick-up turns into an extraordinary encounter, from which blossom love and self-affirmation. Anne Ashby plays the woman who is transformed by a unique and surprising experience.

The hilarious one-woman play Acme Temporary Services follows. Performed by Deliani, this satirical monologue is an employee's orientation to a company that believes in telling it like it is. Acme knows that its employees don't want permanent employment, just some bucks; and Acme knows that employers don't care about temps—they probably won't even notice if a different temp shows up each day. Temps, we are told, are the toilet paper of the business world. The audience laughs, but Eisenstein's not done with us; she goes on to spin this somewhat scatological metaphor brilliantly to a resoundingly bitter, comic conclusion. Funny stuff.

The final two items on the program are short plays. The first of these, Gentrification, is a smart, pointed piece about a lesbian couple who have bought a home in one of those gentrified areas in the City—maybe Williamsburg, maybe the Lower East Side—and find themselves surprised and conflicted by the various expectations they feel in this new circumstance from family and neighbors. The second is an Ibsen spoof entitled That Was No Lady from the Sea, in which a number of familiar stock characters from the master playwright's canon are twisted (but only a little) into unfamiliar shapes to tell the story of a young woman who is dissatisfied with her middle-aged husband and instead longs for a sailor with whom she had a long-ago one-night stand; meanwhile, her step-daughter is desperate to escape her home and finds a possible way out in the person of her butch schoolmistress. Kelly Fisher is magnificent as the heroine, Ellida, with her model-perfect beauty a delightful contrast to her Lucille Ball-like flair for broad physical comedy.

But Fisher is really first among equals; everybody contributing to this evening is in top form. The actors I haven't yet mentioned include Mary Louise Mooney, Liz Davito, Bob Cruz, and Morry Campbell, all of whom are terrific in multiple roles; Campbell also provides the evening's music (he is the composer and plays guitar and piano). The simple, spare sets are by Michael Muccio; the witty costumes are by Alicia Andrews. Directors Mark Finley and Rebecca Longworth keep the evening floating along splendidly, cleverly overlapping the individual pieces to eliminate any down time and also, I think, to point up the universality of Eisenstein's message in every one of these six pieces. All that any of us really want is to be loved, or appreciated, or cared about. We jump through all manner of crazy hoops to try to get that. What we need to remember, first and foremost, is to find a way to at least love ourselves.

Euripides is often considered the post-modernist of ancient Greece, a genre buster who combined tragedy, comedy, and ironic self-awareness to create something fresh. In a bow to that, the Polish company Gardzienice uses Euripides as a character, bringing him onstage at the top of their Elektra. Then all self-awareness is lost as they hurdle into bacchanal, creating a cathedral of energy that is decidedly pre-modern. The play is performed alternately in English, Polish, and ancient Greek, and the group also works with a vocabulary of gestures they call cheironomoia. The gestures for this piece are taken from every illustrated source on Hellenism imaginable—ancient vases, stone carvings, statues, friezes. The company also has a series of their own gestures, evoking archetypes such as mother, wife, father, man, and woman. Music is created from fragments of Euripides's original scores, and uses sound in all sorts of surprising ways. Sometimes two people singing put their mouths very close together, causing the sound to amplify and echo, and at one point Electra is trapped between two long horns that blow into her ears.

Unfortunately, the self-awareness reemerges and, as the appearance of Euripides suggests, Elektra is a deconstruction. The play is described as a “theatrical essay” and is divided into three parts (Mysteries/A Lecture/ A Spectacle) which comprise a total of twenty nine scenes, each described in detail in the program. “Mysteries” is a blitz of spectacle and sensation. “Lecture” is an explanation of their source material as well as the techniques they are using in performance. But by the third section things lose their center and become a chaos of noise, masks, and costumes. Gardzienice creates a powerful world, breaks it, gives us information, and asks us to reenter the world armed with that information. But partly because the production is in three languages, it is incredibly difficult to engage intellectually with the piece. Once the emotional tie is broken, it becomes more difficult, not less, to focus on the issues of gender that the piece seems eager to illuminate.

However, Gardzienice is up to the physical and emotional demands of performing these ancient texts, and there are some extraordinary scenes. Three that haunt are Electra’s rape scene, a scene where Electra breastfeeds Orestes as she convinces him to kill Clytemnestra, and an argument between Clytemnestra and Electra. And there are striking isolated images, like men holding masks in front of their genitals, a dancing woman in a mask with red veil over it, and a ninja girl with a fan that makes a gunshot sound.

The character Euripides ends the production. He wears a mask on his face and masks like scabs all over his robe, and the other actors pull the masks off him until his robe is torn away as well, leaving him naked and cowed. Because Gardzienice is able to stretch the boundaries of the everyday and showed us extremes of emotion we may never feel, it was that much more frustrating that I had to cross reference my experience with my program.

The daughter, Michelle, is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a hospital. The mother, Kathleen, is so terrified of dentists that she has to be given a teddy bear to get through an appointment. The father, Henry, is driving cross-country, from New Jersey to Arizona, with a mysterious hitchhiker.

And yet they're the most functional family I've seen on stage in a long, long time. Margie Stokley's Elephant, a gorgeous, inventive, and dazzlingly warm-hearted and theatrical new play, reminds us of the things that actually matter: spontaneity, respect, love; above all, caring about people, things, each other. It's being presented by the relatively young ANDHOW! Theatre Company, with a solid staging by artistic director Jessica Davis-Irons, exquisite performances by actors Arthur Aulisi, Amy Brienes, Maria Cellario, Jessica Dickey, and Stan Lachow, and superb design by Neal Wilkinson (sets), Joshua Briggs (lighting), Anastasia Williams (costumes), and Jill BC DuBoff (sound). Talented artists all, collaborating to create one of the most moving and rewarding theatre experiences of the year. This one's not to be missed.

Elephant is about a family dealing with grief. Jay, a marine in his twenties, has recently died in a car accident, leaving behind his parents, Henry and Kathleen, his sister Michelle, and his pregnant girlfriend, Ellen. Separately, they deal with their loss, and together, they find ways to move forward. The play has a fluid structure that takes us into the physical worlds of each of the living characters and also inside their heads as they remember times they spent with Jay. Michelle is in a hospital with an apparently ineffectual therapist named Rich, obsessively over-applying makeup and lashing out at the world as she battles her sadness. Henry is on the road, delivering Jay's German shepherd Blaze to the Arizona breeder where he was born. Ellen, an artist, is in her studio, painting over a big picture of an elephant. And Kathleen is at home alone, holding down the fort, checking in on (overseeing?) her family's progress toward healing.

The memories are vivid, funny, and real: Ellen recalls her first meeting with Jay, in college, loaded with awkwardness and resulting in an unintended rejection when he asks her for coffee and she replies "I don't drink coffee." Henry drives by the Grand Canyon and remembers a long-ago vacation when he watched his son stretch out his arms, dangerously near the edge. Michelle conjures random moments like one at a family gathering, playing a game with the just-found-out-they're-in-love Jay and Ellen. It's all gentle, sweet, inconsequential: trivial details that add up to a life.

I love that Stokley focuses on the ways that the members of this family love and care for each other: Mom is bossy and difficult, but also unwaveringly smart and nurturing; Dad is detached and impetuous, but also thoughtful and warm. Stokley's not interested in trading in stereotypes or archetypes, but instead in carving out real people with whom we eagerly empathize and whom we genuinely like.

I also love how Stokley constantly surprises us and makes us re-evaluate what we understand about these people and their relationships, springing new details on us as she cannily tells her story non-linearly and non-chronologically. There is, in particular, a wonderful revelation about midway through the play that I absolutely will not spoil for you here, for it's also the heart of Elephant—one family member coming to another's rescue in a truly remarkable way.

In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound draws a distinction between (and stresses the equal importance of) two kinds of books: “wheelbarrows” (books that we use for work; or perhaps more accurately, books that make us work) and “beds” (books we use for entertainment, pleasure, and comfort).

Theatregoers have their own unique problems that those sit-at-home-reading-novels-types do not. It is much easier to set down your Ezra Pound and pick up your Dan Brown than it is to get up in the middle of Democracy and cab down a few blocks to Beauty and the Beast (cheaper, too). And so it is, that if any piece of theatre is too much of a bed, people will fall asleep; if any work of art is too much of a wheelbarrow, people feel they have done a lot of work for little pay(-off), or they may fall asleep at the prospect of it (uncomfortable, wheelbarrows, but some people can sleep anywhere). Artistically successful pieces of theatre must make us work for our comfort (usually, a catharsis of laughter or tears). Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is just that kind of theatre.

Beckett’s oeuvre raises low humor to high art, both lampooning and evoking the worldview that is given the intimidating term “Existentialism” (“a philosophy,” as defined by American Heritage dictionary, “that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts”). But interpreters doggedly insist on approaching his plays as entertainments that are pleasure-free with a certain amount of erudition, thus sending the audience to sleep on their landscaping equipment.

It is a relief to report that the Irish Repertory Theatre has a sense of humor. Their current production of Endgame so finds the playfulness in the pathos (and vice versa), so unleashes the energy of the characters’ idiosyncratic language that we often forget that they rarely move from the waist down. Indeed, director Charlotte Moore and her expert cast find a wellspring of physical comedy as well within such narrow limitations. Of these folks who appear to be the last living inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Earth, one (Hamm) is lame and bound to an ersatz wheelchair, and two (his ancient parents, Nag and Nell) live in trashcans, leaving one (Clov, Hamm’s companion) who cannot sit to fetch ladders, deliver biscuits, and move Hamm’s chair, as necessary.

Tony Roberts is a generous presence on stage, managing to be a mischievous but not-too-hammy Hamm. His garrulous stories are engaging because he wants so badly for them to be appreciated in their verbose entirety. Such moments are delightfully augmented by the weary reactions of Alvin Epstein’s Nag, who is listening to his son’s endless spiel only because he has been promised a gumdrop for doing so. In fact, Epstein—who played Clov in the American premiere of Endgame, some 47 years ago—is so funny that it is difficult to watch anyone else when his trashcan is ajar. Kathryn Grody is a game match for him as Nell, Nag’s companion in second infancy. And as Clov, Adam Heller nails the unique physical life of his character and lands the one-liners, but hasn’t yet the elegance that marks his fellow actors’ performances (though he is well on his way).

Beckett’s jokes are so truthful and so deftly delivered that interpreters of his plays need to reassure us (and themselves) that it is not only okay, but important to laugh. He is, in fact, intent on having us “laughing wild amid severest woe,” and the Irish Repertory Theatre achieves this countless times throughout their production. For me, this Endgame is ultimately more of a bed than a wheelbarrow; it’s good to be reminded that there are/were/will be other times and places that seem as unexplainable and hopeless as a Bush-administered America.

Entrenched in the Oath, presented by the Kiva Theatre Company as part of the UnConvention, avoids the pitfalls of self-consciously political theatre: it neither lectures nor rants; its ideological positions are complex; and most important, its characters are more than mouthpieces for one viewpoint. This last notion is helped by the fact that Entrenched is a documentary theatre piece composed of interviews with soldiers who have served in Iraq and their families.

Playwright Jessica Jill Turner and dramaturg Anne Gridley resist embellishing the stories, which means the piece is exactly as compelling as its characters—its strength and its weakness. They’ve astutely assembled widely differing perspectives, but some stories inevitably have more power, more surprises, than others. The soldier who served in Iraq (the excellent Max Leavitt), or the mother who lost her son (Marci Adilman)—these stories hit with much more force than, for example, that of the teenaged stepdaughter of a soldier (Gridley), who misses her father but doesn’t bring a whole lot of feeling into her interview. I wish that Turner and Gridley had been able to interview a more diverse group—the performers (and I assume the interviewees) are all Caucasian, with the exception of the Reader, a figure in fatigues who acts almost as “drill sergeant” to the other characters (and is placed behind a scrim, quoting the words of others rather than telling his own story, so his role in the piece is different). I found the Reader a bit of a distraction, rather than an effective structuring device, as well.

The staging is simple and elegant. Directors Melissa Boswell and Jane Steinberg have a keen eye for a strong tableau, and use these tableaus, along with some unexpectedly effective choral sequences, to break up the monologues. I’m ambivalent about their decision to cast only actors in their twenties and thirties (the characters are of more varied ages)—since no actor plays more than one role, they’ve got a fairly large cast; I think filling the stage with only one generation undercuts the wider themes and reach of the material. Lauren Weber’s excellent costumes, street clothes in an olive color scheme, provide a visual link among the characters that would underscore the connections between them no matter how the piece was cast.

Program notes indicate that this is just the beginning of an ongoing project, which is exciting. I hope that as the team continues, they will be able to broaden the scope of their interview pool—and possibly their casting pool—to keep the piece as varied, complex, and multi-vocal as possible. I think they’re doing important work—and that the piece will get richer and more important as it continues to develop.

Press materials for Hilary Illick and Jennifer Krier’s new play Eve-olution describe how this collaborative piece came about. Both women are writers and mothers who met in a “Mommy and Me” gymnastics class and found that their lives were in a similar stage—both were balancing their professional ambitions and the demands of raising their children, and both were looking for a new creative outlet. Illick was a home-based freelance writer seeking a collaborator and Krier had been a Professor of Anthropology and had recently left her university to be able to live in the same city as her husband. The two women began sharing stories of the challenges they had faced in career, motherhood, and marriage, with a particular emphasis on confessing the moments when they hadn’t lived up to their image of the Perfect Working Mother. They related these stories as friends and then collaborated as writers. They first produced an autobiographical piece which they performed themselves in a yoga studio called Venus de Minivan. They then rewrote the play to be performed by others and changed the speakers from themselves to two characters, “Liza” and “Alison.” The result is Eve-olution, which is premiering at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

I share the story of the creation of Eve-olution, because I think the autobiographical nature of the play, and the confessional style of its storytelling, are at the heart of what does and doesn’t work in the piece. In the play, both women are onstage throughout, addressing the audience directly in alternating monologues. Each monologue moves chronologically through the different stages of their adulthood and motherhood, and the alternation from one speaker to the other segments their monologues into episodes.

Though the two monologues complement each other by covering similar doubts and struggles, I found myself wishing that the experiences of the two women were more different, so that the one monologue could provide a dramatic counterpoint to the other. The larger issues of the play are the demands of motherhood and the challenge of maintaining your own identity and professional and personal goals, while at the same time taking care of your family. But both of these women are raising their children with husbands, both are well-educated and upper-middle class, and the kinds of professions they are trying to maintain while raising their children, namely academia and writing, are flexible and family-friendly compared to most jobs.

Many of the dramatic issues involved with many working families, such as being able to afford child care or being able to afford to stay home with young children, as well as the challenge of prioritizing the needs of your children against the demands of your employer, do not seem to apply here. Toward the end of the play, Liza recalls interviewing a working single parent for a magazine article. The woman she describes is also raising several children, but doing it alone while also working two jobs. Liza wonders how she does it. Rather than such a momentary pondering, I would have been glad to give this 90 minute play another 45 minutes if that women being described were added as a third voice—to hear what that woman had to say about the balance between work and home. But perhaps a woman like that is too busy with the balance to have time to write.

These side-by-side monologues have many vivid and nakedly honest stories to tell; there are certainly two skillful writers at work, and it seems that it is the strength of their collaboration that brought these stories out of each other. But the stories feel like two essays—two particularly good magazine articles, perhaps, being performed on a stage; they are interesting to hear, but there is not the dramatic satisfaction or sense of completeness that you look for in a well-written play. And at no point does the play allow us to get a sense of the ways in which these two women, when they met, may have challenged or embraced in each other’s ideas, because there is no interaction. No scene or meeting between them, just their two separate stories directly addressed to the audience.

Though I have issues with the script, I must say that it could not have been put in better hands. Carolyn McCormick (Alison) and Sabrina Le Beauf (Liza) are best known for their television roles on Law & Order and The Cosby Show, respectively, but they are also seasoned stage actors, and it shows. In their performances, these past-tense monologues become fully present and alive. They both have a way of connecting to the audience which makes public address feel like an intimate confession. Carolyn Cantor’s direction strikes an effective balance between pacing the more expository details in a simple way, and then giving time, and often a physical position or activity, to the most important moments to make them vivid.

Richard and Jenny are an archetypal suburban couple of the 1960s, trying to make ends meet while they desperately scramble to keep up with the Joneses. Richard (Eric Deskin), a research chemist, doesn't make enough at his job to satisfy his pretty, proper wife (Dina Ann Comolli), and though the resourceful Jenny is eager to take a job herself, Richard, in his masculine pride, will not allow her to demean his image as a breadwinner. Yet keeping up appearances is everything, and the impossibility of doing so creates a tense and untenable situation. With the arrival of Mrs. Toothe, a mysterious Englishwoman with a bold proposition for Jenny, the stage is set for another delightfully pained comedy of social and cultural criticism from the pen of Edward Albee…

And let it be said that Albee's pen doesn't let us down. Though little novelty remains in the notion of equating marriage with prostitution, or of the suburbs as the home of soul-crushing hypocrisy (American women have come a long way in staking out territory beyond the domestic sphere), Albee's poison quill spatters drops of deadly ink over all the characters' faces, male and female alike, creating a tidily grotesque portrait of moral decay without any chance of easy reprieve.

Though neither his most well-known nor his best play, Everything in the Garden (adapted from a piece by British playwright Giles Cooper, though this isn't acknowledged in the program) is never dull. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the current production. With a few notable exceptions, the mise en scene is almost entirely lacking Albee’s sinister zip, the elusive, Astaire/Rogers quality of his banter that prevents the whole affair from coming off as a prurient, stultifying sitcom.

The main exception is Dina Ann Comolli who, as Jenny, carries the entire production from beginning to end. Her performance encompasses the despair and humanity beneath the chipper façade and absurd situation, creating a character of compromised courage who makes her dubious decisions appear ever so reasonable to the audience. Thanks to Comolli's alert, quizzical face and beleaguered sense of dignity, Jenny ensures our sympathy while never quite gaining our approval—a delicate balance Albee would be pleased with.

As in any good marriage, the script calls for the husband to shoulder half of the burden, but though Deskin's Richard initially makes sense as the petty patriarch of a wood-paneled purgatory, he gets left behind as the stakes rise throughout the play. Likewise, as the pivotal character of their drunken, independently wealthy friend Jack (who, in a peculiar twist, is the only character who speaks directly to the audience), Bob Brader feels miscast; and on top of that, the group of friends and neighbors who show up for an impromptu party after Jenny's ill-begotten windfall veer a bit too close to caricature to make the play's final scene as chilling and dangerous as it should be. Only Barbara Drum Sullivan, as the imperious Mrs. Toothe, and Peter Martin as Roger, Richard and Jenny's teenage son just returned home from boarding school, fare nearly as well as Comolli in bringing Albee's heartfelt sangfroid to life.

Though times have changed since the play was written, they probably haven't changed enough. We still live in a grimly materialist culture, and women are still clutching the short end of the stick. Though certain aspects of Everything in the Garden have either gone out of style or congealed into cliché, Albee's wit, incisiveness and sense of higher purpose are for the ages. Whatever the final result, Big Break Productions deserves credit for bringing this corrosive, compelling play back into the public eye.

Before I had the pleasure of seeing Everything Will Be Different, a friend of mine and I amused ourselves over a beer by clicking off a few playwriting clichés we feared we’d be witnessing. The press release describes the play as an “exploration of teenage sexuality” so in our cynical way, we expected lines like “No one understands me.” A scene where the teenage girl is taken in by an older, more experienced guy. A long awkward scene where the action stops and we watch characters kiss or engage in sexual activity. Haughty arguments with a parent. The now completely expected gay best friend. The list was rather long.

Well... except for the gay best friend, quite a few of these moments, in some form, are on stage here. The shock of it is that this play is uniformly smashing: heartbreaking, hilarious, and tragic. Playwright Marc Schultz and director Daniel Aukin have taken what could well have been yet another after school special about teenage confusion and extracted the essential elements, satirized the right moments, taken cliché and transformed it into a cathartic, intensely personal experience. And they took my cynicism and used it for skeet shooting.

Schultz’s script tells the story of Charlotte, a 15 or 16 year-old teen, who, along with her father, lives in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Four parts, all introduced as Charlotte’s school paper on Helen of Troy, frame the play. We see her impotency in the face of her father’s bereavement and derision. We see her desperate desire to be desired. We see her off-color relationship with the men (and boys) that make up a teen’s life. And we see her fantasies clashing with the hard realities around her.

Despite the trappings of a traditional play, it’s the “beauty myth” that is being explored and exposed here. It becomes striking that what we hear about her mother is rarely anything but how she looked: how beautiful she was. Charlotte is an awkward girl, with acne, who feels ugly, whose maturity and sexual confusion are battling each other. Further aggravating her discomfort is the feeling that she must replace, reach the standard of, or simply forgive her lost mother. In the narrative, Charlotte isn’t comparing herself to Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, but to Helen’s daughter Hermione. All these clashing emotions make Charlotte one of the best on-stage examples of "damage" you’re likely to find. And this play is an uncompromising gaze at how the obsession with beauty can turn young women against themselves.

Helping the productions immensely is the first-rate cast. Laura Heisler's performance as Charlotte demands to be seen. She elevates the broadest outpouring of pain and the tiniest moment of thought. Knowing that she is playing far below her age, without a hint of condescension, just makes it all the more exciting a performance. But she’s supported on all sides by top-flight work. Geoffrey Nauffts is especially “on” as her guidance counselor, playing with the repetitions in the writing, pulling the audience into both his comedic and desperate moments without skipping a beat. Each member of the cast generously performs, though, from Naomi Aborn’s delivery as Charlotte's best friend, the deliciously vacuous Heather, doles out advice; to Jason Jurman’s winning portrayal as the not-so-vulnerable introvert Franklin; Reynaldo Valentin’s dead-on popular jock; and Christopher McCann’s casually cruel and emotionally crippled father.

The set and lighting are expert as well, using minimal indications of changing scenes in a warmly lit stage that puts us in what amounts to a barren home. It’s used to perfection by director Aukin, who adds just the right mix of simple imagery. Nothing is static, and the performances have room to breathe.

Everything Will Be Different takes what could have been My So-Called Life for library members, and turns it into a succinct and truthful experience. The writing soars above its genre, and the direction and acting are in rare form. If a cynic like me could walk out this enthusiastic, I expect that this gem will convince many others as well. See for yourself.

This is an extraordinary work of theatre: powerful, mind-bending, gut-wrenching stuff. I have not seen work by Josh Fox and the International WOW Company before, but I won't be missing it from now on—for The Expense of Spirit is indisputably the creation of talented, committed, and smart artists. It's pertinent, potent, and breathtakingly inventive.

It happens in a video store in Brooklyn on Christmas Eve, 2004. Marty, the proprietress, is preparing for her annual holiday dinner—a kind of block party for her neighbors and regular customers that she hosts every year inside her large and homey shop. She does all the cooking herself, including a bouillabaisse, a seafood lasagna, and her famous "North By Northwest Chicken"; her two employees, Jo and Alicia, are trying to help out but Marty's mood is dark this Christmas Eve and she's none too tolerant of anyone, friend or foe. The important thing is to keep the phone line clear, because Marty's daughter Jane, who is serving in the army in Iraq, is almost certainly going to call to wish her mother Merry Christmas.

Just before the party starts, two soldiers turn up at the video store.

And then the party starts—the locals queue up and then march into the now-cheerily decorated store, ready to partake of Marty's delicious food and breezy companionship. We briefly get to know some of them: Mitch, Marty's landlord, who drinks far too much and ends up making a fool of himself (as, we imagine, he does every year); Bernie, quintessential loser and Marty's fastest friend, who is currently fixated on Isabella Rossellini; a college professor who rents the complete works of Bergman each winter; a down-on-her-luck black woman who likes Buster Keaton.

Jo, who has worked for Marty for seven years, is about to move to Oregon, seeking something different from Brooklyn in a life that we suspect is fairly humdrum. Alicia, the new employee, is determined to make good; her favorite movie is Cassavettes' Love Streams.

The cranberry sauce has been made by Fred, a nice guy who has been hanging around the store for the past year, following a difficult divorce. Marty is severely behind on her rent. The bathroom is out of order.

And so it goes. The party peaks, valleys, and then plays itself out. Marty gets mad and sends everybody home. Except the "family"—Bernie, Jo, and Alicia; they are allowed to stay till the evening's conclusion. Which is violent, unexpected. Cathartic.

The miracle of The Expense of Spirit is that from a morass of random—what? trivia... detritus... Fox creates an astonishing tour de force where the mundane collides with the fanciful and the untouched find themselves face-to-face with the unwished-for. The Expense of Spirit is about the new loss of innocence in a world post-9/11 and post-Iraqi Freedom. Fox holds a mirror up to his audience and shows it a scary reality for which it does not wish to be culpable. And he does so with an exquisite, masterly hand that conjures, at various points, disparate influences such as Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King and Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (to cite just two).

The party, which covers the majority of the play's running time, is staged as a sequence of vignettes, crosscut the way that a movie would be, showing us different sets of people in different corners of Marty's store, sometimes in real-time and sometimes in a ghostly slow-motion. Some of these segments are very funny, while others are achingly beautiful. Fox and his actors have a command of movement and a sense of time and space that makes for stage pictures that are unforgettable and endlessly affecting.

Deborah Wallace, who plays Marty, gives a layered, complicated, emotional performance as a woman whose assumptions about what the world is supposed to be like have been blown to bits and who is now desperately trying to find something safe to hold on to. Wallace is on stage for virtually the entire play and finds reserves of energy to sustain a characterization that would tax the abilities of most lesser mortals; she is The Expense of Spirit's solid anchor, and when she sinks, we must also. Her excellent work is matched by the sixteen other members of the ensemble, who work together with admirable precision and lack of ego. Nevertheless, a few stand out: Robert Saietta as the sad but somehow dependable Bernie, Lester Shamsky as the hapless Fred, Ikuko Ikari as enthusiastic young Alicia, and Nick Jaeger and Thomas Westphal as the two soliders.

Charles Foster's lighting and David Esler's set design contribute mightily to Fox's vision. But this is, finally and foremost, a triumph of staging—Fox seamlessly moves materials and people around the space to create moment after moment of unfettered depth, clarity, and beauty.

You'll have observed that I've told you very little about what actually transpires in The Expense of Spirit, or what specific concepts and resonances Fox and his collaborators elicit therein; that's because I want you to experience this remarkable play for yourself, and I have no intention of giving anything away. Just know this: The Expense of Spirit is among the most engrossing, involving, and challenging new stage works to arrive this season. Anyone who longs for an authentic visceral adventure in theatre needs to see it; so does anyone who cares about the future of American drama.

There’s a lot of talk in Eyewitness Blues, a new theatre piece written by Mildred Ruiz and Steven Sapp, co-founders of the hip-hop theatre troupe Universes. And talk is a fine basis for theatre, as long as it’s sharp and incisive, or at least entertaining. However, despite its title, Eyewitness Blues does a lot of telling with little to show for it.

The show’s conceit is that a rising trumpet star by the name of Junior McCullough (Sapp) has momentarily “lost his breath” before an audience; as his life flashes before his eyes (as such lives tend to), a flamenco-dancing muse who specializes in trumpeters (Ruiz) battles to help him get it back. This back-and-forth is presented as a kind of verbal duet between the two performers in the no-man’s-land of McCullough’s subconscious, interspersed with flashes of music, singing, and dance.

The journey of the troubled artist is well-worn territory, and this one includes many of the obligatory stops, such as the home of McCullough’s dysfunctional family and the vibrant Bronx neighborhood he left behind on his search for fame, money, and purpose. At various junctures both Sapp and Ruiz channel the personas that populate his past, such as McCullough’s parents, a salacious old hag, and the benevolent African immigrant who was the only one who truly understood the young artist.

Familiar stuff, in other words, but with its hip-hop trappings it occasionally threatens to become more interesting. As the houselights came on after the show, the gentleman sitting next to me stood up and solemnly announced to his wife, “Too much rapping.” I don’t think there was enough. The text, an intertwining drone of sketchy monologues in the overcooked, declamatory style that passes for poetry in so many quarters these days, lacks the spontaneity, stylization, and playfulness of rap, or any kind of successful pop music for that matter. Rather than being energized by this ceaseless flow of verbiage, I found myself mostly bored, with little incentive to care about either of the two characters on the stage.

There are moments that rise above the monotony, of course: for instance, a feverish sequence in which McCullough describes his own imaginary death at the hands of a Wynton Marsalis drive-by (with Ken Burns in shotgun, filming the whole thing), followed by a comic funeral that serves as a biting satire of contemporary jazz. But for the most part the language only flirts with resonance and specificity; the words keep coming, but they never add up to anything new or meaningful.

All of which would be less problematic if the performances managed to overcome the limitations of the text. Ruiz has a somewhat prosaic presence for a muse; she’s pleasant enough to watch and listen to, but she falls wide of the mythic, and the harder she tries the less convincing she is. Sapp has a more energetic presence, especially during some of the flashier scenes in which he stomps and seethes in furious confusion, but his efforts to inhabit figures from McCullough’s past are shaky, with the side effect that his main role of McCullough comes off as all the more indistinct.

There are also problems with director Talvin Wilks’s staging, which never ties all these impressionistic elements into a satisfying whole. He’s not helped in this task by NYTW’s current thrust stage setup: having to play separately to each third of the audience in turn prevents Sapp and Ruiz from embracing the audience whole, which would have been an immense benefit to such a fractured drama. A case could probably be made that this fragmentation is an essential aspect of McCullough’s story, but I’d wager that there are far more effective ways of displaying it.

Instead, I found myself drawn to the music (credited to Antoine Drye, Paul Jonathan Thompson, and Carlos Pimentel) and sound design (by Darron L. West and Bray Poor). Crisply and confidently performed in cozy little living-room areas on the sidelines by Drye and Thompson (one of whom dresses and plays in the mode of Louis Armstrong, the other in that of Miles Davis), the score spans a wide range of territory, from electronica to jazz to the flamenco that supports the Muse’s more arbitrary-feeling efforts to win McCullough back to art.

The rest of the production is as polished and professional as the music—scenic designer Narelle Sissons’s sumptuous red curtains and giant mirrors give the room an electric atmosphere which is enhanced by Heather Carson’s flashy lighting design. However, these trappings aren’t able to mask the fact that the show consists primarily of two people on the stage speaking words that, in one variation or other, we’ve already heard many times before.

Playwrights Horizons current offering, Lynn Nottage’s new play, Fabulation, or The Reeducation of Undine, is a riches-to-rags-to-reinvention tale that follows Undine, an upwardly mobile African American woman with a booming publicity firm, who exhibits all of the egomaniacal qualities we associate with straight white business men: narcissism, xenophobia, and a certain affliction that prevents them from getting their own damn coffee. Due to a sudden, unfortunate, and faithfully formulaic turn-of-events, she loses her business, her savings, her apartment, her husband, and all of her friends at which point she realizes just how rootless she really is. Undine has forgotten herself, her family, her community, her race, her history, and her herstory. Now she must start her life over again, but not before she discovers she’s pregnant, gets arrested for buying drugs, and goes to Duane Reade for herself (and enjoys it!).

Director Kate Whoriskey takes her cues from Nottage’s script, which means to go from a very heightened theatricality (fast, funny, and scathing stereotypes) to a more naturalistic form of storytelling (Undine et al become three-dimensional human beings with hearts); in theory they accomplish this, but they don’t generate much interest along the way. If we accept the fantastic catalyzers that bring about these situations then Nottage has afforded herself the opportunity to explore The System as it applies to the ambitious, urban, African American female—the courts, the clinics, the Welfare line and the drug rehabilitation programs. But there is not enough political/sociological specificity to make this an engaging satire, nor is there enough emotional/psychological substance to Undine to make us care about her in any deep and meaningful way.

Charlayne Woodard’s Undine is convincingly guarded, but never surrenders to the vulnerability and (relative) peace we are asked to believe that her character achieves. She yells, cries, and bemoans her circumstances so much that there’s little opportunity for the audience to share the catharsis (though the script and direction share the blame for this, too). The rest of the cast does fine, with the exception of Myra Lucretia Taylor, whose work as Undine’s grandmother and the employee at the Welfare Office (among other characters) is remarkable.

Ultimately there’s little to do but sit back and feel either guilty or self-righteous, depending on whether you think you are responsible for or a fellow victim of these serious societal problems. There are places for such a drama that ventures only so far: one is television, another is Broadway, and sadly now more often than not, off-Broadway. (This play would never survive off-off-Broadway; it’d be eaten alive.) Some joking aside, Fabulation would probably make for a very good Lifetime made-for-cable movie: "Waiting To Fabulate, or How Undine Got Her Groove Back."

In the middle of Fade Out, or, The Imperfections of a Man, writer/performer V. Stephen Bauer, as the late actor Anthony Perkins, illustrates some of his signature quirks, including that slightly stooped, loping walk that helped define Norman Bates. Bauer's reproduction of the walk, which lasts maybe two or three seconds, is dead-on perfect; so cannily accurate that we have to catch our breath for a second.

With further development, this promising and interesting one-man play might be that terrific from end to end. As it stands, Fade Out is a fine, brief showcase for a young actor with clear talent and ambition. Lasting less than an hour, the play depicts a turning point in the life of the famous actor: he has just learned that his live-in girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) is pregnant with their child. This is particularly earth-shattering for Perkins, who professes to never having wanted a child and whose sexual preference and partners have been (presumably) exclusively homosexual until now. As he talks on the phone to his friend Stephen Sondheim (with whom he is collaborating on the screenplay that will become The Last of Sheila) and to his mother, and as he replays key moments from his life in his head, we learn that he is currently undergoing "therapy" to "cure" his homosexuality, and that he yearns for a normalcy that has heretofore eluded him.

Bauer peppers his script with anecdotes about Perkins's career—the obligatory stuff about Psycho, plus some gossipy material about his most recent movie, Catch 22—along with some information about his personal life. Perkins was born late to the actor Osgood Perkins and his wife (whose first name is not spoken here). After his father died, Tony's mother—certainly no Mrs. Bates, but hardly the ideal parent either—began a long-term lesbian affair; Bauer suggests that this may have been one of the crucial influences on the formative actor's life.

Bauer—lanky and boyish looking—suggests Perkins without imitating or channeling him; this is a real performance, and if Bauer the writer can come up with a little meat for the script's bones, there's a potentially fascinating portrait of a very conflicted man brewing here. Fade Out is just too short and superficial in its present state to do much more than pique our curiosity about Perkins. Some more details about Perkins' romantic life, his attitudes toward his sexuality as a young man, his perceptions about how being gay would impact his career and image, and his battle against typecasting before and after Norman Bates—all of these would help round out the characterization and turn a story that currently feels like a view through a peephole into a genuinely insightful cautionary tale about not understanding who you are until it's far too late.

Heading into the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, I was a bit excited about Falling Off Broadway by David Black. Here, I thought, was a play about a man who had lived history (“18 Broadway shows, and one story” according to the press materials). Plus, I had just read a book about the intense workings of the failings and successes of Broadway Musical Theatre through the eyes of Stuart Ostrow, another man who had lived it. A producer’s journey is such an interesting topic to me, as it’s something continually hidden from the public, and there they are in the thick of creating theatrical history.

David Black recites his life from his early childhood memories to three years ago, when he began this show. That’s coverage of almost 60 years. From being a five year old learning from his father, to a Harvard graduate working at a shoe shop, to falling into being a Broadway producer, and then finding his way into the world of painting, we follow him retelling these happenings and many more. It's a life filled with unique experiences where he is just trying to work the hardest he can at not having to work.

It is billed as an exploration of Broadway—from the name of the show to the press release hand-out, the focus is on his journey of “Falling Off Broadway.” But in fact, the show has little to do with Broadway at all, and as a result my interest in the show flagged considerably. Falling Off Broadway does not have much of a storyline or journey for us to follow, either—it seemed more like a history book being read aloud. And unfortunately, David Black has little stage presence to speak of—he’s very disengaged from the story he’s telling (even though it's his own!) and there were many times I wondered if he even had the lines memorized. I was a little shocked at how abruptly the show began—there was no introduction, no welcome, no "foreplay" before getting on with it. He was clearly addressing the audience, as he was the only one on stage, but it felt as if he didn’t even recognize our existence and was reading the script he had written.

On the other hand, the production values of the show are great. Tal Sanders is responsible for everything on the stage, basically, which helps ensure that the show work seamlessly. There are a few comic bits with the set that helped me realize the "cap" at the ending of the play. The costume design, by Mimi Maxmen, is well-done even though Black has only one costume to wear. Brian Hurley’s sound design helps move the story along. And John Handy does a wonderful job managing all the elements, as he always does.

Far From the Madding Crowd tells the story of Bathsheba Everdene, a young woman in rural England in 1859, who inherits a farm and decides to run it herself (unheard of for a woman in her time). There are three men who come into her life: Gabriel Oak, a kind-hearted shepherd who has lost his own farm and is seeking employment; Frank Troy, a handsome but pompous military man who is supposed to marry one of Bathsheba's employees (whom he has gotten pregnant); and William Boldwood, the older next door neighbor who has never loved before meeting Bathsheba. As a childish prank Bathsheba sends Mr. Boldwood a small, unsigned Valentine's Day card and sets in motion events that snowball into tragedy.

The music by Gary Schocker blends new music with English folk songs. The adapted folk songs come off the best, while the original music is rather old-fashioned and dull, and the same can be said of the somewhat clunky lyrics by Barbara Campbell. The adaptation of the Thomas Hardy classic, also by Campbell, tries to cover too much material in too short a time, and yet still feels too long and slow-moving. Most of the characters just end up as cardboard cutouts rather than three-dimensional people. In addition, the direction by Jamibeth Margolis is generally sloppy and unimaginative.

The acting is extremely uneven. There are some nice performances from D.B. Bonds as Gabriel and Kate Fisher as Bathsheba (who both also have beautiful singing voices), but Richard Todd Adams as Frank and William Broderick as Mr. Boldwood do not fare as well. Overall, this entry in the New York Musical Theatre Festival ranks as a major disappointment.

Earlier this week I read a story on MSNBC.com about the problems faced by gay teenagers growing up in the Bible Belt in Oklahoma (it's here). So the impulse behind Amy Fox and Dean Gray's new play Farm Boys is realer and more pertinent than we New Yorkers might realize. Based on a nonfiction book by WIll Fellows called Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, the play tells the story of three generations of gay men in Wisconsin, and the ways each copes with a sexuality that seems out-of-synch, if not downright unacceptable, in the small-town community where they live.

The play takes place mostly in the present, with occasional flashbacks to the early 1980s. John and Kim have traveled from New York City to a rural area of Wisconsin because John has just inherited a farm. Together for four years, the two men are at a crossroads in both their relationship and careers: John has recently been laid off from his job in publishing, and Kim, a choreographer, is waiting to hear about a $25,000 grant he's applied for; they seem to be committed to one another but there's clearly still some ambiguity in their feelings.

The farm holds lots of memories for John. In the summer before he went to college, about 20 years before, John had a fight with his father and moved in with Lyle, the farm's owner. Lyle had recently attempted suicide, bringing to a head his own serious unhappiness in a marriage to a woman (Lois) that was clearly a lie. John knows that he's gay and he's trying to find a way to feel good about it; he senses in Lyle not just someone like himself but a possible soulmate. Indeed, he eventually becomes Lyle's lover (the older man's first male partner, in fact), but the relationship is doomed because Lyle is afraid to live openly as a gay man in this restrictive farm community. John runs away to New York and never looks back—until Lyle's surprising legacy forces him to.

Now, John has to decide what to do. Will he keep the farm? Will he, as Kim briefly fantasizes, move with his lover back to Wisconsin and open an arts colony in the middle of this conservative community? Will he sell the farm to a local corporation that has taken over numerous family farms and turned them into dairy factories? Meanwhile, another challenge presents itself, in the person of Keith, an 18-year-old boy who is hanging around the place, aware of how much he has in common with John and Kim, who fascinate and repel him; scared that someone will find out he's gay; uncertain how or where to be gay in a world where the only option seems to be running a farm or going to Bible college. What, if anything, can John do to help this sad, contemporary version of his younger self?

Thomas James O'Leary and David Drake do expert work as John and Kim, respectively; Joan Grant (Lois), Jim Madden (Lyle), and Craig Jorczak (Keith) offer sturdy support. Jim Pelegano provides a clear-eyed staging.

What I liked best about Farm Boys is that, with all kinds of romantic and sentimental choices available, Fox and Grey let John choose the mature path—reality is compelling. The stories in this play—John's, Lyle's, and Keith's—feel authentic and resonant (Lyle's lonely immersion in work after the forced break-up with John is particularly affecting); they deserve to be told. I wish that the telling here was a bit more skillful: the play is a bit choppier than it might be, and though the flashbacks are generally pretty seamless, several conversations between John and (I guess) Lyle's ghost feel awkward. Lyle's infatuation with cruising the boys on Fire Island comes across as slightly embarrassing.

But Fox and Grey and their collaborators are to be commended for putting on the stage a subject that still needs airing. Farm Boys would do a lot of good touring the Heartland, helping people to discover, as Lois does in the play, that love comes in all shapes, sizes, and combinations.

“He likes to provoke people. Get ‘em riled up,” one character says about another early on in Neil LaBute’s terrific new play, Fat Pig. The same thing could be said about LaBute himself, a writer who specializes in the uglier, more unseemly sides of human nature. A brief look at both his film (Your Friends and Neighbors, In the Company of Men) and stage (The Mercy Seat, The Shape of Things) work reveals a rogue’s gallery of characters who inflict cruelty on others—either knowingly or unknowingly, and in surprisingly avaricious ways—for their own selfish reasons. LaBute has been accused of misogyny, sadism, and every other negative adjective one can think of. He is, at least, never less than provocative.

But, for supporters of LaBute’s work (among whom I count myself), he is not so much a button-pushing provocateur as he is a much-needed truth-teller. In an age where advertising agencies and corporate media outlets continue to make the country’s population toe the line by perennially ramming their idea of The American Dream (i.e., personal happiness as birthright and entitlement) down everyone’s throats, LaBute’s work is a refreshing antidote. He reminds us that this so-called American Dream can never be attained as long as people have fear and hatred in their hearts. Maybe the real reason LaBute’s detractors have such a problem with him is not because he embraces cynicism and darkness so extremely, but because his observations about people who are under the influence of both qualities are written with such alarming precision, that watching his work can often, uncomfortably, feel like you’re staring at yourself in the mirror.

Such is the case with Fat Pig, in which LaBute tackles the societal taboo of dating a plus-size woman. The lady in question is Helen, a single librarian with a fondness for war movies and biographies. “Fiction is for the weak and faint-of-heart,” she says, giving us a glimpse of the kind of honesty she seeks in all aspects of her life (and throughout the play). Into her life walks Tom, an up-and-coming corporate executive, who seems to have everything going for him: he’s handsome, witty, intelligent, and charming. The two fall for each other, and theirs seems like a perfectly-made match: Tom is refreshed by Helen’s candor; and she is taken with his sweetness.

But, Tom’s co-workers think differently. Both Carter (Tom’s best friend at the office) and Jeannie (Tom’s former office squeeze) cannot wrap their minds around the idea that Tom wants to date “a fat sow,” as one of them calls Helen, and they encourage him to “do the right thing” and dump her. Before long Tom is forced to question both of their perceptions of physical beauty, as well as his own.

Naturally, when a play is as evocatively titled as Fat Pig, the outcome is never really in question. The audience becomes wrapped up in guessing how and when Tom will break up with Helen, instead of if. Will it be after Jeannie’s raging diatribe against him in the middle of his office (she cannot fathom that Tom prefers Helen’s girth to her slim, trim figure)? Or will he buckle under the pressure of Carter’s sincere counsel that, if he continues to see Helen, he will have “a long road ahead” of him? Perhaps he will do it as he snuggles with Helen in bed, watching war movies. Knowing LaBute’s previous work, one expects the outcome to arrive in an explosive and hateful manner. But, LaBute surprises the audience with both the timing and the gentle tone of Tom’s decision. Some epiphanies come quietly, without flourishes or fireworks, and LaBute’s acknowledgement of that indicates a sign of artistic growth on his part, and makes his writing here that much stronger.

LaBute’s entire handling of Tom’s moral dilemma is another sign of his growth as writer. In previous works, Tom might very well have been another one of LaBute’s now-patented misanthropic, foul-mouthed cads. In Fat Pig, LaBute goes in a different direction and makes Tom a genuinely nice guy: he’s funny, considerate, and polite, never wanting to make waves or cause anyone harm. But, he also doesn’t want to be the subject of ridicule. Hence, Tom’s fatal flaw: he’s a coward. This explains why, even though he cares deeply about Helen, he drags his heels on introducing her to his friends. By focusing on Tom, LaBute steers Fat Pig away from being a call-to-arms against prejudice, and more towards being a statement about what happens when weak men try to be something they are not—strong. (I should also mention that all is not drama or discomfort with Fat Pig: much of it is extremely funny.)

Jo Bonney directs the production with a strong and invisible hand. Her work here is, in some ways, the best kind: it goes largely unnoticed by the casual viewer, but maximizes the skills and efforts of everyone involved. Both the acting and the scene transitions flow with a precision, clarity, and smoothness that is absent from most theatre today. Her work with the actors is especially astonishing because she allows them a degree of leeway that, while resulting in the aforementioned precision, also produces a charmingly productive looseness.

Taking a break from the kind of snarky wiseacres he usually plays (see his acidic portrayal of Ari, the super-agent, on the HBO series Entourage), Jeremy Piven is triumphant as Tom. He demonstrates both sensitivity and a vulnerability that the public has not seen from him before, and both qualities suit Tom perfectly. He has impeccable comic timing, and is utterly convincing throughout. Piven’s Tom is believably in love with Helen; and believably conflicted whenever he tries to politely stand his ground with his officemates.

Ashlie Atkinson is every bit Piven’s equal as Helen. She brings both an earthy sexiness and a sharp sense of humor that are just right for the part. It is very easy to see why Tom falls for her. Later on, when Helen’s confident demeanor begins to give way to bits of well-hidden insecurity, Atkinson makes Helen soulfully sympathetic without making her predictably maudlin or bitter.

Andrew McCarthy is revelatory as the charming but poisonous Carter (a role that might usually be reserved for Piven), giving ample evidence that rudeness and thoughtlessness are both well within his range of (e)motion as an actor. Jeannie is the only underwritten role in the play—her harassment of Tom is a little too myopic and one-dimensional—but Keri Russell’s performance goes a long way towards making her believable. Trading in the All-American Girl image she created on the TV series Felicity, Russell is an absolute raging shrew here. She does an excellent job of making Jeannie’s indignation both understandable and frightening.

Fat Pig is a must-see for anyone interested in seeing the best that theatre has to offer: an excellent writer developing his prowess even further; a cast of talented actors showing that there is much more to them than was previously thought; and a director weaving it all together with a symmetry that is enviable. Just be prepared to look in the mirror.

Alter Ego Productions presents the world premiere of Fatwa, a satire in which two attention-seeking friends learn that it is not an easy task to try and acquire a fatwa, the ultimate Islamic death edict. The premise surrounds a competitive friendship between two not-so-famous authors, Michael Jordan (Joe Jamrog) and Mohammed Ali (Jerry Matz), whose recognizable names have so far brought them little of the acclaim they've been seeking.

As authors, both Michael and Mohammed have written similar works, with Michael’s being more outrageously blasphemous in its content than Mohammed’s poetic output. Michael desires fame and hopes to earn it through a decree of fatwa. The plot ensues when Michael causes Mohammed to believe that a fatwa has been set for Michael’s death. The two then advance into a scheme to fake Michael’s death, in the hopes that as a result, the public would come to see the fatwa as reality, and the sales of Michael's book would soar above the total of eighty copies.

Explosive in its irony, Fatwa is written with impeccable wit by Anuvab Pal. The dialogue is entertaining and engaging. And it is a treat to see two veteran and seasoned actors like Jamrog and Matz take the stage at Fringe NYC. What I felt was missing from the play, though, was drawn out when it was revealed that Michael had caused an accident which killed Mohammed’s wife. Suddenly, there was a back-story to this story that received no emotional attention. I believe it would be not only insightful to learn how this traumatic incident has impacted the two friends, but also essential to the nature of the plot.

Without revealing the end, I will just say that the closing moments of the show lose the gained intensity that was built up in earlier parts. Thus, the end becomes quite predictable, and once again, the closing scene lacks the emotional depth it needs. The author would do well to shorten some of the sections that seem to ramble on toward the end and replace them with a fuller picture of the aftermath of the situation.

Nevertheless, Fatwa is a show that should be seen for the unique wit of its writing and the cleverness of the story that it tells.

Target Margin’s second installment of their intended three part epic adaptation of the whole of Goethe’s Faust is a lofty affair that left me with a lot of questions.

They say that it’s the part of the story with which everyone is familiar, where Faust falls in love with Gretchen. I might be in the minority here, but I’m more familiar with the Marlowe play, and think of Faustus as he who makes the deal with the devil. I never really knew of Gretchen. In the Goethe version, Mephistopheles serves as less of an enticer and more of a “wing man” to Faust, doing his bidding in the vein of an evil fairy godmother. I was excited to see something new in a tale with which I feel fairly familiar.

The show is in process as the audience enters, with Gretchen sitting on stage reading and other actors behind curtains (that the audience has to walk by) going over last minute bits. I have yet to see this used effectively in a piece, from the pros to the rank amateurs. I never pegged myself such a stickler for tradition, but I like to know definitively when a piece begins. I wasn’t sure if I should have been craning my neck around other audience members who were chatting away before the show began for fear of missing something that I might need later. Is she just reading? What is she reading? Is this important? Did the show actually start at eight on the dot? Frankly, it makes me nervous.

Faust sees Gretchen. Faust wants Gretchen. Faust instructs Mephistopheles to get him the girl. Snag: the girl is devoutly religious (as is her mother) and doesn’t so easily fall for the entrapments set up by the devil. Of course, Gretchen is also immediately smitten by the look of Faust. Intrigued, she slowly comes around and they fall passionately in love.

A fairly simple boy-meets-girl (with the help of the dark side) sort of tale told in many short scenes. Why, I wonder, does it seem so much more complicated (and longer) than it actually is? David Herskovits’s direction, in an attempt to keep things moving at breakneck speed, derails the inherent simplicity and makes for a very self-conscious production.

The design elements also seem plagued by this.

Costume designer Kaye Voyce has outfitted Faust in red plaid flannel pajamas and robe (when he gets all fancy, he puts a necktie on with this garb). I was constantly distracted by this—why is he in his pajamas? Is she trying to speak to his life of leisure? How is it that he manages to combine this with combat boots? The same carries over to Gretchen, layered in some sort of 1980s-punk-meets-Eastern-Bloc-peasant-girl ensemble. Again, why? Is this to speak to her poverty in comparison to Faust? The only costume that made sense to me was Mephistopheles's just-off-white three piece suit over sharp black shirt. He looks like Mr. Rourke on Fantasy Island, the guy who, upon arrival, makes your dreams come true. This makes sense.

The lighting design by Lenore Doxsee and sound by John Collins left me baffled. Did I see a night with a bunch of technical difficulties? Did the actors just not make it into their light a bunch of times? Was the sound supposed to be barely audible, then blast to eleven in the middle of a scene? There seemed to be too many “accidents” the evening I was there for it not to be intentional. But why would professional designers with hefty resumes make distracting choices? Am I not “getting” something? Is it suddenly ok to have actors “out of their light” or have raucous sound cues overpowering the text?

The three main actors, however, did much to put me at ease and tell their story. George Hannah as Faust and Eunice Wong as Gretchen both turn in subtle yet strong performances. Yet as appealing as the young lovers are, they are no match for the mesmerizing presence of David Greenspan as Mephistopheles. It is such a rare treat to watch an actor so casually precise and commanding. His character is written as the show-stopper, and Greenspan takes it and runs. He’s impishly charming (shouldn’t every devil be?). And the man can totally pull off the white suit.

There is a lot to take in here in a mere seventy minutes. The story gets told, and after a little sifting it does come clear. And while I am curious about their plan to present the whole of Goethe’s epic, I do hope Herskovits revisits his choices and refines them before putting up six hours of Faust.

When I walked into Where Eagles Dare, as awesome as a 38-seat theater can be, she stood at the mic already engaged in chit-chat with the audience. Pandora Scooter’s Fear Junkie has not officially begun, but its writer/performer begins this experiment on the topic of anxiety before we’ve even found our seats. Designed as a multi-layered presentation and interaction, Fear Junkie disguises itself as a polemic against the “fiscal Darwinism” that generates most of the controlling fears thrust upon us by American corporate consumerism. But the piece is really the aforementioned warm-up act followed by a “rhythmic rant” full of spoken word jams and a capella songs, culminating in a conversation (read: feedback session) with the audience.

The cozy confines, the lack of distracting soundtrack, the presence of a performer breaking the supposed fourth wall, the little sheets of paper taped to the back of each chair featuring paranoid mantras. My God, this no-tech experience is really a bombardment on the senses. And such is part of the point of Pandora’s exercise (her real name, unless you know it already, I’ll keep secret since she will tell you at the show)… but only part of it, I’m sure. The main event is that rhythmic rant which she segues into deliberately from her choppy, spontaneous pre-show of banter with the audience. Trained as a director, Pandora understands theatre and manifests the techniques of pace, rhythm, and articulation. Her themes are well developed: anxiety and its connection to us viscerally, culturally, subliminally; the Fear culture compelled upon us by corporate greed and consumerism; the biological and physiological effect that fear-based propaganda has on us and how this is the ultimate evil we allow to be perpetrated on us. Referencing pop culture, “the Media,” Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the bulk of the material is weighted to general current events, and she makes direct reference in her supporting material to these works. The program is more like endnotes with bibliography, web links, and personal disclaimers:

Fear Junkie isn’t about being fear free, it’s about being aware of which fears are generated by the fiscal Darwinism in which we Americans live and which are necessary for our day-to-day survival.

For 35 minutes, she sings, sermonizes, and entertains masterfully, albeit riding a moderately mainstream course (with due notice of her multi-ethnic declaration). I wanted only for her to extend the breadth of her argument to include a further exploration of fear within the ecclesiastic hierarchy and how it’s permeated our government in spite of Constitutional mandates to separate the influence of such authority from civil institutions. At just 35 minutes, the "rant" section of Fear Junkie wouldn’t suffer from going further.

My major complaint (and that is too harsh a word for it) is that at least 50% of the show consists of an academic feedback session for the artist. The audience I shared the evening with was a mix of friends/acquaintances of Pandora’s and newcomers like me. But this was a theatre-friendly audience, a peer group, and she benefited greatly from their (our) willingness, even desire, to participate in the “performance.” Meaning that, rather than fully exploring the theme of “fear” within the group structure, we acted like a focus group, giving comments, asking and answering questions, and giving our personal thoughts directly to the artist. Kudos to Pandora for fulfilling the creative cycle from concept to realization to analysis all in one bundled event. But I would have preferred to hear more Pandora rhythmic ranting and less talking.

From the moment I met Linda and Michael—bantering in a Parisian cafe, weighing and toying with their words as if hoping Edward Albee would come along and put them into a play—I disliked them intensely. Steven Dietz did put them into a play, Fiction: I'm sorry to report that they didn't get more appealing as I got to know them better; instead, familiarity with this hopelessly selfish couple only bred, as they say, contempt.

Let me try to explain. Here's a woman who learns that she has three weeks to live, and decides to use that time to read her husband's journals, to catch him—and don't let sentiment or faith in randomness cloud your assessment here—at an infidelity she almost certainly suspected, one that happened many years ago but that he, for reasons not at all made clear, never got over. She sets ground rules for her dying task: he is not allowed to read her journals until she's gone, and he's not allowed to be in the house while she's reading.

Maybe it's just me, but if I had a fatal illness with the prospect of only—as Linda herself puts it in the play—20 dinners left to eat, I'd sure want to spend them as blissfully and selflessly as possible in the company of my significant other.

But that's me: I never found a way past Linda's colossal egoism, and therefore never found a way into Dietz's oh-so-literate but heartless play. Linda, Michael, and Abby—she's the woman with whom Michael committed that ancient adultery; she's also tied into Linda's past in a way that I won't reveal but that you will guess at least 15 minutes before the play's denouement should you decide to see it—are all writers, or at least people who work with words for a living; Fiction wants to be about the ways that we never know the truth about anything or anybody, or the ways we deceive ourselves and our loved ones, or some such abstract, quasi-intellectual thing. But Dietz's heavy hand is omnipresent: his characters relentlessly fail to behave like actual human beings, instead they either talk elegantly and wordily about trivia or they undermine any chance for happiness or honesty by doing horror-movie nonsense such as, say, not telling your wife that the secret journals that you're about to let her read contain some potentially incriminating (yet ultimately innocent) entries. There was a moment in Fiction when I actually started caring about these insufferable people—the one where we learn that Linda has terminal brain cancer—but even that gets squandered by the playwright, with a misguided second act deus ex machina plot twist in which we are told that the doctors were kidding or the tests were wrong or something (I forget exactly what) and that's she's gonna live. Huh?

The production itself feels generally blameless, by the way: David Warren's direction is well-paced and the design, especially the elegant, impressionistic wall fragments that slide in and out of James Youmans' stylish set, serves the piece nicely. Emily Bergl plays Abby with lots of reserves of hidden strength that work well for the character (it's puzzling, though, that this actor is so much younger than her co-stars when all three characters are approximately the same age). Tom Irwin is very likable as Michael. Julie White, giving very much the same performance that she gave in Barbra's Wedding and Dinner With Friends, wins audience sympathy in the showiest role of Linda.

Kim Merrill’s engaging new play, Finding Claire, is a moody, wrenching, and often touching look into the emotional lives of four women, each in her own way struggling to find her identity. Rachel, a wealthy young New York City dancer, goes on a search for her birth mother when her adopted mother is killed in an accident. Her adopted father has been out of the picture since she was very young, and she now wishes to fill this void for family connection by reaching out to the biological family she has never met. She somehow gets the address of her birth mom, Claire, and the two begin a relationship through letters.

Claire, it turns out, lives in poverty in an old farmhouse in upstate New York with her invalid mother, Lily, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Bridget, who has just revealed that she is pregnant. When Bridget insists, against Claire’s wishes, that she plans to give her unborn baby up for adoption, Claire decides to tell her about Rachel, the child she regrets giving up, and shows Bridget the many letters she has received. To Bridget’s dismay, Claire has never bothered to tell Rachel that she has a sister. Bridget decides to start her own letter-writing relationship with her New York City sister, and eventually invites her to surprise Claire with a visit.

But Claire is not ready to be confronted this closely with her mistakes, or with the harsh reality of her impoverished life. Rachel’s adopted mother ran an art foundation, and Rachel has been around the world. Claire, on the other hand, is trapped in a broken-down house where there once was a farm, and creates art of her own by chipping away at large rocks when she is angry or frustrated.

As the four women are forced to confront each other, layers of secrets are revealed, and we learn how each woman has searched for freedom, and how each has been trapped by her own generational circumstances and moralities. With clean, insightful direction by Susan Einhorn, all four actresses rise to the level demanded by Merrill’s script, rich with very real family dialogue and many emotional moments for each character. Fiery Shana Dowdeswell, as the young Bridget, vividly expresses both her deep frustration at the lot life has dealt her and the youthful hope that there might still be a way to escape. Tony-winner Helen Gallagher, as grandmother Lily, is both infuriating in her constant demanding gloom, and completely sympathetic as the woman who must witness yet another generation make the same mistake. Geneva Carr is charming and intelligent as the wealthy Rachel, who realizes she has taken on more than she anticipated in her well-meaning attempt to help her newfound family in complete crisis.

The character of Claire is probably the one who goes through the most self-reflection, and experiences the most change. It is her responsibility to keep this household from falling apart—her lost child who has unexpectedly returned, and her young daughter who is about to make the same tragic mistake that she has always regretted. It is, in fact, Claire’s world that the show is most about, as is made clear by Ursula Belden’s evocative, multi-leveled set, completely covered in textured gray canvas. It is a world of hard stone, like the stone Claire chips away at to get away from—or get to—something that always seems to elude her. Deirdre Madigan gives a powerful performance in this emotionally demanding role. She is usually restrained, as if she knows she might easily explode if she is not careful. And yet there is so much going on in her small body movements and subtle facial expressions. When she breaks down upon receiving the letter from the daughter she has never known, it is all the more powerful a moment because, even at this early moment in the play, Madigan has well established that Claire is not the type of woman to be easily broken down. When she finally turns to face her long-lost daughter for the first time, it is a breathtaking moment, both beautiful and terrifying, full of desperate longing and deep resentment.

The only thing that bothers me about the play is its sometimes condescending view of poverty. The daughter who was adopted seems to have led a close-to-perfect life simply by virtue of her money and the freedom and experiences it has afforded her. When she uses her money to buy some “freedom” for her new family—I won’t give away all the details here—the path to spiritual discovery and emotional growth is suddenly set in rapid motion for her sister, mom, and grandmother. Is it really that simple? Is money really the key to self-understanding and the contentment it brings? Are people in poverty not capable of achieving similar spiritual and emotional growth?

The play, nonetheless, is a mostly-satisfying journey. It is a rocky road, with many moments that all families will recognize, and lessons we all need to learn, for in the end, it is Claire who finally begins to find Claire.

The seven characters that Don Carter introduces us to in his one-man show Finding Pieces share an intoxicating appreciation of the wonder of everyday life; I was put in mind of Thornton Wilder more than once during this delightful evening, which is a series of monologues that muse incisively on the nature of time, and the ways we spend it, and the ways we sometimes waste it.

Finding Pieces begins with Carl, an eager beaver of a fellow who is quite clearly a stand-in for Carter himself. His disarming, rambling talk—a friendly discourse about all the things that are going on right this minute somewhere in the world—sets the stage for what's to come. What a marvelous, curious fellow this is!: shouldn't we always try to be even a little bit aware of the births and deaths and marriages and fights and countless other little miracles that are going on every minute that we're doing whatever we're doing, saying whatever we're saying?

That's what Carl is about, and Finding Pieces, too. Carter transforms himself next into Bill, an older gentleman who reminisces about what it was like to buy cheese at the market ("dry goods store") with his mother when he was a boy. There is real joy to be had in such a simple pleasure. Next, Carter morphs into Henry, a suburban home owner and upstanding citizen with a rather remarkable secret; and after that, we meet Gordy, a dog who talks to us about his "roommate" and the cycle of his well-observed days. Funny, sweet, smart stuff.

A longish segment that takes place at a wedding reception rest room is Finding Pieces' least effective piece, with Carter slightly uncomfortable in drag as a woman looking back on some of her own marital problems during a temporary respite from her youngest sister's own nuptials. But Carter hits his stride again as Chet, a just-terminated employee whose obsession with time nails many of the themes that are echoed over and over in Finding Pieces (I totally identified with his rant against daylight savings time, a particular pet peeve of mine). Chet's monologue is less focused than the other material in the show—my companion theorized that it might be a newer piece; I'd love to see it smoothed out and centered, for it contains lots of valuable insights.

But Carter saves his most inspired creation for the end. Faraday is a caveman—Carter humorously hypothesizes that the early Homo sapiens who painted in caves talked like English aristocrats—and he is relating the story and lessons of today's hunt. It turns out that we have much to learn in 2004 from such a wise ancestor.

Carter, who has been acting and writing plays in New York for quite some time (most recently in TheDrillingCompaNY's Honor), proves himself very talented at both endeavors here. His sensibility is what excites me: a genuine awe at the simple truths of existence. Finding Pieces, brimming with humanity, offers much insight about the way to live.

Carter is spelled, during scene/costume changes, by Karl Lorenzen, a generous, unassuming musician, who plays on African thumb pianos—lovely and fascinating interludes.

Playwright Adam Rapp uses the members of an East Village rock band to illustrate the disastrous effects of drug addiction in his new drama, Finer Noble Gases. His is obviously an anti-drug stance, since he paints a severely unflattering picture of a day in the life of these users. Rapp’s position would be better served, however, if he’d bothered to include one essential ingredient—namely, drama.

Finer Noble Gases centers on four musicians living an almost reclusive existence in their decimated Lower East Side apartment: Staples and Chase (Robert Beitzel and Paul Sparks) sit on the couch watching TV, popping pills, and making juvenile small talk; Speed (Ray Rizzo) wanders around the house in a near catatonic stupor wearing nothing but his underwear, his body covered in bathroom stall scrawl. Occasionally, he pulls himself together long enough to urinate in a drum (in full view of the audience, by the way). The fourth roommate, Lynch (Michael Chernus), comes and goes from the apartment randomly, and is a man of few words. He prefers to communicate by spitting on his roommates, and kicking in the screen of their TV. Later in the play, a fifth character—the band’s nervous, socially inept downstairs neighbor, Gray (Connor Barrett)—is introduced when Staples and Chase hatch a plan to steal his TV.

That’s about it as far as plot and story go. And therein lays the problem with Finer Noble Gases: shabby writing. Rapp jettisons plot in favor of character study, which would be a valid choice, except that the author never establishes enough character to study. The audience never learns who these guys are, or how they got to where they are, which prevents us from connecting with (and caring about) them. Plus, the characters never learn anything or change. They are all exactly the same at the end of the play as they were at the beginning. Therefore, their situation never generates any surprise. There is never any doubt in the audience’s mind where the bandmates are headed: right down the toilet. Finer Noble Gases also gets bogged down by muddy symbolism. A character’s recurring dream about robots, and the introduction of a dead child later in the play are both supposed to mean… something, I’m sure, but I couldn’t tell you what.

Director Michael John Garces does nothing to help matters. He paces the production at the speed at which the addicts think and move. Coupled with Rapp’s aforementioned script problems, the result is a boring and slow production of a play that lacks internal logic. At an intermissionless hour-and-forty-five minutes, this is absolutely inexcusable.

So, what is the point of all this supposed to be? Don’t do drugs? If so, that’s nice and all, but that message has been conveyed better in other places. The designers—Van Santvoord (sets), Elizabeth Hope Clancy (costumes), Ben Stanton (lights), and Eric Shim (sound)—all make solid contributions, as does the entire cast. But, it would be more satisfying to see their efforts aiding a worthier play.

Very late in the play, Rapp flashes back to a time when the bandmates were all younger and more coherent, in which they conduct a full-on band rehearsal in the middle of their apartment. The purpose of this is unclear, but watching the band in action is electrifying. In those final minutes, they provide the kind of charge and energy that the rest of Finer Noble Gases desperately needs.

Victor L. Cahn’s Fit to Kill is a frustrating piece of theatre. Frustrating in that it never lets itself go all the way in any direction, in terms of its characters, action, or mood. The potential for a good show is there—it just never takes off.

The play begins with a chess game—actually several chess games—being played over the telephone between Adrian and a host of unseen and unheard adversaries. Adrian, played by Patrick Melville, is a chess master, a snotty wunderkind who has married a rich but not-so-nice woman by the name of Janice for her money. Janice, played by Jana Robbins, is a boorish, pushy business woman—in fact the character is precariously close to the stereotype of the woman who, because she is successful in the business world, has become mannish and therefore supposedly unattractive.

Adrian, we are told, is a genius. He can play twenty chess games at the same time, without having to look at an actual board to remember where all the pieces are in each game. You’d think a man so smart would have some interesting things to say in a play—but such is not the case. The character as written comes across like your standard goldbrick husband who has married for money and now is trying to figure out how to get rid of the wife and keep the dough.

The third and final character in the show is the sultry Amy—a woman from Janice’s past who may or may not be seeking revenge. Amy, played by Lanie MacEwan, comes to the opulent mansion where Adrian and Janice live under the guise of being a reporter, but it soon becomes clear that she is there to both seduce Adrian and convince him to help her in her plans for revenge upon Janice. What follows is a game of cat and mouse that is a pale imitation of such great shows as Sleuth and Deathtrap. But whereas those thrillers have realistic characters and intricate plotlines that keep the audience guessing, Fit to Kill's script is pallid, with characters who are obvious, a plot that's too simple to figure out, and an ending that's far from shocking.

The actors do as well as they can with the material they’ve been given. All three have charisma and ability—but it seems to me that they just don’t have much to work with here. Eric Parness directs the show at a quick pace, but falters here and there. There are several times when the actors move on the chessboard-patterned floor like chess pieces, which comes across as an obvious attempt to match the movement of the characters with movements of a chess game. And there are bits of stage violence (the fight choreographer is Ray A. Rodriguez) that don't work at all: I won’t say what it is, because it would spoil some of the plot, but suffice to say that if you want to make people believe something violent is happening on stage, you should think twice about having said violence occur at the furthest downstage area. For example, at one point, one of the actors strikes one of the other actors in the face. From where I sat (four rows back) I could clearly see the actor miss the other actors face by a good two feet. At another point, one of the characters is repeatedly stabbed in the chest with a knife. This takes place centerstage, in plain view of the audience, leaving little room for the audience’s imagination, and highlighting the lack of imagination that pervades the entire show.

Nevertheless, the main problem with the show, I believe, is the script. It’s not smart enough for a mystery, and not deep enough for a drama. There are plenty of opportunities in the story to explore such themes as greed, lust and paranoia. But, frustratingly, those opportunities are never explored.

There is one compelling reason to see Five By Tenn, a collection of newly discovered and rare short plays by Tennessee Williams, assembled and directed by Michael Kahn and currently being presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. The cast is generally excellent and the plays enjoyable, but Cameron Folmar’s performance as a lonely drag queen in the French Quarter who invites a handsome and barbaric sailor to stay for the night (and possibly longer) demands to be seen.

And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens is the third play of the evening, closing the first half. Written in 1959, after Orpheus Descending, before Night of the Iguana, and perhaps contemporaneously with Sweet Bird of Youth, And Tell Sad Stories was understandably “lost” as it deals openly with so-called “gay themes”—a popular phrase meant, I think, as shorthand for a work of art that depicts closeted/out homosexuals and/or the heterosexual men/women who love/hate them. (Unless “gay themes” means isolation, loneliness, and shame, in which case essays about the abundance of gay themes in modern drama—say, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, 'night, Mother, and Proof, among many others—would be particularly fecund ground for pioneering scholars of the American theatre.)

I bring up this point because Williams’s oeuvre defies the genres we set up to measure (and restrict) our empathy—his plays, which are rife with allusions to homosexuality, are no more “gay plays” than Three Sisters and Top Girls are the theatrical equivalent of “chick flicks.” At its best, Williams’s language is both active and rhetorical, his proud characters grab at what they can while clinging to their slippery senses of identity. This is what keeps them balanced on a tightrope between dignity and desperation and what gives his plays their indefatigable relevance and human (not just homosexual) appeal. And Tell Sad Stories, particularly as presented here under Kahn’s fine direction and with Folmar as the play’s rapidly beating heart, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

“I know, it’s abnormal, isn’t it,” remarks Candy Delaney with a resigned smile as he enters the room in drag, much to Karl’s horror: the semi-oblivious, alcoholic sailor came back to Candy’s pad for drinks and perhaps to make a few bucks if Candy wished to play around. But Candy is looking for love and is willing to pay for it. His lover of seventeen years recently left him for a younger man and he is getting old (that is, about to turn 35) and he vows to keep Karl’s shot glass and his wallet full—even to procure women for him—if when he’s ashore, Karl will be his platonic partner and call Candy’s apartment “home.”

The ending is violent and almost tragic, but what is so devastating is Folmar’s composure throughout: he is not a beggar, but a businessman proposing a merger of sorts. As Karl, Myk Watford’s increasing volatility is evenly matched by Folmar’s calm pragmatism. It is difficult not to read this as an allegory for Williams’s own talent for professional survival—the ability to dress up his plays for a largely homophobic mainstream’s acceptance. Like Albee and Inge (and Miller, though he was known to be heterosexual), Williams faced hateful accusations that his female characters were actually gay men in drag. I wonder if And Tell Sad Stories had been produced when it was written, the impact might have been comparable to Albee’s The Zoo Story—another powerful, though in some ways not as dangerous, plea for recognition.

In its wake, the other four plays seem unremarkable. Summer at the Lake features a mother-son relationship en route to becoming Amanda and Tom Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie. Donald is a bit more angsty and less articulate than Tom, whilst his mother, Mrs. Fenway, does not quite possess Mrs. Wingfield’s robust resilience. The Fat Man’s Wife, in which a playwright tries to convince his producer’s underappreciated spouse to leave the country (and her husband) and sail around the world with him, is sweet, but unremarkable. An American woman seeking D.H. Lawrence’s advice about an almost-sexual-encounter she had is the plot of Adam and Eve On a Ferry, which is more of a skit than a play. And rounding out the bunch is I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow (part of Williams’s trilogy, Dragon Country), which is a “little known gem” for a reason: the playwright’s role has been entirely usurped by the poet—nearly nothing is left unspoken, despite a story revolving around two people who have trouble finishing sentences.

In the midst of a terrific ensemble, there are some exceptional turns by Penny Fuller (Mrs. Fenway and the American woman), Kathleen Chalfant (particularly in her smaller roles—e.g., Anna, Mrs. Fenway’s beleaguered maid) and Jeremy Lawrence as Williams himself who contextualizes each play with intriguingly elusive patter. But it is Folmar’s performance that must be seen in a “lost” play that in Kahn’s production feels as fresh and ferocious as any new play currently on offer.