The obvious way to write about a hero is to start at the (hopefully humble) beginning: shy and modest small-town boy has a dream—say, to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Paris, without stopping. Throw in some obstacles, even dangers, to overcome (no one's ever done it before, and many have died trying). Then finish triumphantly with success, against all odds and defying all expectation: he lands in Paris, and for a minute the world stops and everybody cheers. Curtain.

As I said, that's the obvious way. Playwright Garth Wingfield isn't interested in obvious, however, which is why his new play Flight is so interesting and so unusual. Subtitled "The rise and fall of Charles Lindbergh," it focuses not on the making of a hero but rather the unmaking of one: the consequences of heroism (and its inevitable metamorphosis into celebrityhood), in a particular place (the U.S.), at a particular time (the second quarter of the 20th century—the age of radio and movies—the moment when mass media was just learning to flex its muscle and become the dominant cultural influence in American life).

Flight starts in 1968, when Lindbergh is near the end of his life, 41 years after his history-making trip. He's visiting a group of astronauts about to take off for the moon, and though one of them tells him that his journey made space travel possible, the bureaucrat in charge of handling visitors doesn't even know who he is. Such is the fleeting nature of fame, then as now.

The play then flashes back to three pivotal points in Lindbergh's career as a public figure. The first is right after that remarkable flight, when he plays the bashful, ingenuous Midwestern kid to the hilt, balking at and then getting taken in by the press, soaking up the excitement and the publicity without really loving it and certainly without understanding it.

He meets Anne Morrow, the shy second daughter of a very rich and influential family, and they fall in love and marry. The story moves rapidly to the next milestone in Lindbergh's story, a few years later, when their son Charles, Jr., is kidnapped and killed. Wingfield once again avoids the obvious angle here, leaving to others the question of whether Bruno Richard Hauptmann really committed the crime; instead, the focus is on a devastating event at once public and private. Would the Lindbergh baby have ever even been kidnapped if Lindbergh weren't so famous? Would the outcome have been different? Who ultimately is responsible for scars on a family that never could heal: the public man, the private man, or the never-satiated media, longing for sensational material? (Did you know there was a popular song about the Lindbergh kidnapping?)

Act Two of Flight takes us to the years preceding World War II, when Lindbergh managed to engineer a fairly spectacular fall from grace by accepting a medal from the Nazi government and then speaking out—after years of shunning the spotlight, mind you—against American involvement in a war with Germany that he was convinced we could not win. It's fascinating and it's true—there are fragments of recordings and newsreels of the real Lindbergh interspersed with the action—and in a way it feels inevitable. Did Lindbergh mean to turn himself into a kind of ruined tragic hero? The arc of Wingfield's play seems to suggest that after sacrificing his personal life and his baby to the media gods, either destiny or hubris or both kicked in and pushed him down a path of self-destruction that served him and his public right.

So Flight feels, by its sad end, almost like Greek tragedy; in fact, it is because Wingfield has withheld so much information about his hero—especially the stuff that drove him toward his destiny in the first place; see paragraph one—that the play feels more abstract and less moralistic than, say, Oedipus Rex. But this is cautionary theatre nonetheless.

I left Flight wanting to know more about Lindbergh, wanting to fill in the play's gaps. What, I wondered, did Lindbergh do for the 40 or so years that he lived after disgracing himself with his apparent pro-Nazi leanings? Is it true that even while he was still alive he sank into obscurity? What do people know about him today?

The Melting Pot Theatre Company has gone to great expense in mounting Flight, enlisting some A-list actors who are all quite fine—Gregg Edelman as the stolid, stubborn, and usually sullen Lindbergh; Brian D'Arcy James as all the reporters who built and then tore down the legend around him; and especially Kerry O'Malley, who is quietly assured and centered as Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose own tragedy—less public and less grandiose than her husband's—might in many ways be the more enlightening one. I suspect that Melting Pot has overproduced the piece physically: the really nifty abstract unit set by Michael Deegan and Sarah Conly seems to overpower the proceedings much of the time, and I wonder if the use of so much video projection, music, and recorded sound doesn't detract from rather than enhance the power of Wingfield's contemplative story. The trappings seem to aspire to the epic, but Wingfield is resolutely looking the other way here: Flight is the tragedy of a man's brush with glory, not glory's brush with man.

As Exhibit A, we have Julie Andrews hosting yet another PBS documentary, "The Broadway Musical: The Next 100 Years," in which she bemoans "catalog shows" like All Shook Up and Good Vibrations (both heading to Broadway this winter). In Exhibit B, Rocky Horror's Frank N. Furter, The Lion King's Elton John, and a tappety-tapping 42nd Street chorus girl vow—along with mall-like Disney and Gap stores and mega-museum Madame Tussaud's—to "ruin Times Square again." And Exhibit C gives us a lively and larger-than-life Ethel Merman, backed by Rex Harrison, Yul Brynner, and Mary Martin, reminding us that there is no Broadway like their Broadway.

Exhibit D—something of a coda, really—pays loving tribute to Broadway's most recent entry, the revival of La Cage aux Folles. Forbidden Broadway's Gerard Alessandrini doesn't have to change the lyric of that show's biggest hit to promise us: "The best of times is now."

Well, Gerard, which is it? Alas, almost all of the evidence in the latest edition of his long-running revue, Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit, is for the prosecution. The state of the Broadway musical, and of Broadway theatre in general, is deplorable. Producers are greedy and they don't trust or respect audiences. Retreads of old shows that no one wants to see, starring washed-up TV personalities, are foisted on the public. British directors ruin classic American shows. Old movies and old songs are the only sources of "new" material.

Alessandrini has a point: he's right to be despairing. But his perspective makes for a sourer than usual experience at the current Forbidden Broadway. Clearly a show such as this, which parodies the shows and personalities on the Great White Way, rises and falls with its targets' fortunes. In a year that gave us musicals like Dracula, Brooklyn, a mangled Assassins, and a tepid Fiddler, the pickin's are ultra-lean.

Indeed, the material in Forbidden Broadway that's most fun is some of its oldest: the perennial 30-year-old Annie (who opens the show), the witty "Beauty's Been Decreased" number about Disney downsizing, and—my personal favorite—the deathless Lion King parody, where a baboon called "Rafreaky" sings about a "Circle of Mice" and an exhausted human cast member confides, to the tune of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?," how much she hates her director/costume designer Julie Taymor.

Newer shows yield some chuckles as well. The first act ends with a wicked Wicked parody, in which dueling stars Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel squabble after the latter wins the "Best Actress" Tony; the climax, shrieked by Megan Lewis as Menzel, is "Defying Audio," complete with cheesy flying effect (Lewis stands on a milk crate while a hand-held fan blows her billowing black skirt). Also dead-on is the Fiddler number, which contrasts current Tevye Alfred Molina with promised Tevye Harvey Fierstein (whose appearance provides the evening's funniest sight gag, which I won't give away).

Jennifer Simard emerges as the most priceless member of a terrific four-person cast, slaying us with her devastating impressions of Bernadette Peters (attempting to do "Rose's Turn"), Isabel Keating as Judy Garland (in a Boy from Oz skit), Melissa Jaret Winokur, Julie Andrews, and Brenda Blethyn (switching accents on a dime to tackle her current role in 'night, Mother). Megan Lewis, who is spelling for Christine Pedi at the moment (the latter is recovering from laryngitis, according to the press materials), shines particularly as Menzel and Merman. Ron Bohmer is hilarious as Molina and Fierstein (twice); Jason Mills is a hoot as Hugh Jackman and a Movin' Out Dancer who moves a lot like John Selya.

As ever, Alvin Colt's costumes and Alessandrini's clever lyrics are the real stars of the evening. I love what Colt has done with (to?) Wicked's flying monkeys and Fiddler's British-inflected cast; Alessandrini's barbs are almost testy in places, as when a disenchanted Japanese tourist joins Wonderful Town's Brooke Shields, Wicked's Stephen Schwartz, and Dracula's Tom Hewitt in "It Sucks to be Me" from Avenue Q. But some of his quips nail his targets perfectly: the lyric about Good Vibrations, to the tune of "Fun, Fun, Fun," made me laugh long and loud.

The good news of course is that there's life in the old girl yet: Broadway musicals are coming at us in fistfuls in 2005, and as Alessandrini hopefully suggests, one of them is going to be terrific. As for the ones that aren't, well—they'll be providing Forbidden Broadway with new material for its next edition.

I did not see the one-act version of Forbidden Fruit when it played at last summer's Fresh Fruit Festival; I kind of wish I had, because I am very curious to know how playwright/director Jeff Bedillion expanded his play into the 3-hour extravaganza that it has become. My sense is that at the core of this Fruit is a compelling story of coming out, intolerance, and self-acceptance. But that story has been so bloated by the addition of a bevy of unnecessary and clumsy song and dance sequences—not to mention a badly overused fog machine—that it's almost crushed under the weight of so much excess baggage.

There are two main through-lines in Forbidden Fruit, which intersect only at the very end. One concerns Brian, a young man in a committed relationship with a woman named Lisa; but the relationship is falling apart, because both of them have fallen in love with Brian's best friend, Michael. Brian's journey toward acceptance of himself as a gay man and away from his fantasy/infatuation with Michael (who is straight) propels half of the play. The other half revolves around Christian, a college student home for the summer and living with his very conservative, ultra-religious mother in a town in the American Midwest. Christian, too, has become aware of his homosexuality, and he is struggling to come to terms with it, in the face of his mother's vocal opposition and years of Bible School training that he is somehow "perverted" or "evil."

These are, to be sure, worthy subjects for dramatic exploration—perhaps even more so today than a few years ago, with issues like gay marriage so visible and hotly debated. Bedillion deals with his characters' anxieties and fears in interesting and sometimes authentic ways—scenes of Christian fantasizing how he will break the news to his mother, or of Brian's first tentative trip to a gay bathhouse, are both humorous and heartfelt. But too often, Forbidden Fruit concerns itself only with the sensational and the sensual: Brian, Lisa, and Michael in particular are depicted as preoccupied almost exclusively with sex (as opposed to love); this leaves big holes in the pictures of their lives.

The play is further hampered by the addition of numerous dream sequence/musical numbers, many of which serve to showcase drag performer Kurt Alger, who appears in them variously as Jezebel, Mary Magdalene, and others. These numbers—poorly conceived and ineptly staged and performed, for the most part—do nothing but slow the action and add many minutes to the show's lengthy running time. Also problematic is the casting of Alger as Christian's mother: presenting this character as a drag queen, while highlighting some of her hypocrisy, severely undercuts the real seriousness of Christian's dilemma vis-à-vis his hyper-religious parent.

A prologue, entr'acte, and epilogue—all taking place at a gallery where the older and happier Christian is showing some of his paintings—feel tacked on and unnecessary. And a pre-prologue in which the cast members warn the audience that they're about to be assaulted, offended, and taught something is just gratutious—especially because the repeated warning about full-frontal male nudity presages just one very dimly-lit scene in which one of the men in the cast dances naked for a very short period of time. (On the other hand, there's a fair amount of female nudity—unexpected in a gay-themed show such as this.)

Bedillion has apparently absorbed lots of theatre technique during his career, and he's thrown many of them into the mix of his play, not always to great effect. Masks, movement, dance, and many variations of camp/pastiche fail to enhance the show; pulsing drumming by percussionist James Borcher is a great addition, though.

So Forbidden Fruit proves that more is not always more, and indeed is sometimes quite a bit less. Without knowing what Bedillion's shorter original was like, I can't say for certain how much his propensity for excess in this production is actually new. But I am positive that a concise, stripped-down, strongly focused rewrite of this piece could very well bring to the fore the important, brutal truths at Forbidden Fruit's center.

Rich Orloff takes his audience on a globe trot through seven countries, a different setting for each of his one-act plays, in an evening that is cumulatively called Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is not, however, about travel. Rather, location serves as a convenient device from which to extract stereotypes, which is where the plays begin. Orloff then moves beyond the predictable, turns sharply into new territory, and finishes almost every effort with a flourish. This format becomes apparent as the evening progresses. Along the way, he entertains with witty dialog that keeps the audience, if not always laughing, thoroughly amused. The cast brings the material to life, with Gary Mink and Gerrianne Raphael particularly standing out.

Starting with Berlin Promotion, we meet an indecisive bureaucrat whose domineering wife threatens to withhold sex unless he asks for his long-awaited promotion, which he cannot get unless he answers one significant question about his management style. Mink is delightfully wormy as the bureaucrat. Baz Snider succeeds as the boss, showing both authority and weakness within minutes of each other, while Kim Reed, as the wife, sets the stage for conflict.

In Prague Summer, a capitalist and his parasitic lover try to convince an old acquaintance to abandon his useless idealism and discover the benefits of converting proverbial crumbs into a whole loaf of bread. Reed, as the lover, commands attention. She is the only one in costume—a marvelous furry cockroach costume designed by Cheryl A. McCarron. She flips her limbs absently and with amusing effect while Mink as the idealist and Richard Kent Green as the capitalist effectively argue their points. It is magic realism, ending with a flight of fancy.

Poking at piety and bordering on satire, I Married a Pope: the Pilot Episode imagines an American pope the morning after a party where he passed out from drink, but not before marrying a showgirl. Laurie Ann Orr interprets the showgirl with powder puff sweetness, and leaves the tartiness to her brief, hot pink outfit. The real drama emerges some minutes later when the pope’s mother appears. Here, Raphael delivers some of the best lines of the evening and does so with the authority every mother wishes she had.

Orloff’s satire lands more firmly in Triumph in Argentina, where a kinky couple recruits an eager American who is willing to try group sex, is enthusiastic about seducing the wife, but sets his limits when he is asked to play the part of Hitler. Orloff doesn’t moralize. Instead, he goes on to say one more thing. And, Triumph in Argentina ends just right. Greg Skura’s All-American boob stands in stark relief against Green and Reed’s German-obsessed couple.

Marriage is the theme of Off the Map and Brazilian Wax Eloquent, both among the best pieces of the evening. In the first, Antarctica is a metaphor for a marriage gone cold. The concept is clever, and hats off again to McCarron for a costume so engaging that it helps Mink, as the local resident, steal the scene. In Brazilian, a middle aged couple arrives in Rio, where he hopes to gawk at the beautiful Brazilian women on the beach and she hopes to hide her cellulite and stretch marks. In one weak argument she blurts, “We’ll look ridiculous.” He responds, “We’re American. That’s our role.” Departing from his usual sequence, Orloff ends with something new—a tender monologue that Snider delivers from the heart, causing the audience to sigh audibly.

The final play, Bulgarian Rhapsody, is unfortunately one of the weaker entries. It finds an American visiting his Bulgarian relatives, only to realize that they would do anything to touch U.S. soil. As in the other pieces, there are funny lines, playful gags, an excellent prop courtesy of Yana Babaev, and a few surprises. Mostly, it is a vehicle for the ensemble to appear together, a nice concept, but no excuse for supplanting the stronger ending that Brazilian offered.

Holli Harms directs the ensemble of seven with brisk pace and precise timing, both necessary to highlight Orloff’s humor. She incorporates local accents, and while not entirely authentic, they work well enough for the fun at hand. Timothy R. Mackabee and Andrew Rothschild designed the sets and lighting, respectively. Co-produced by the Foolish Theatre Company, Foreign Affairs provides a thoroughly enjoyable evening at the WorkShop Theater Company.

The first thing that strikes you about the dancers in the current revival of Luis Bravo's Forever Tango is the one thing they lack: the inane ear-to-ear grins that that seem to be perma-affixed to the faces of too many Broadway hoofers. But neither do they confront the audience with the sullen glares of the Shubert Theatre's recent tenants from Chicago. Rather, these Porteños (or denizens of Buenos Aires) dance with supreme confidence and self-possession, daring the viewer to gaze at them—and, of course, we cannot resist.

Their attention seems simultaneously to transcend the auditorium's enclosure and to spiral inward to a point of private contemplation, that if it weren't so pure, would approach the narcissistic. This gazing game extends to their partners—they only rarely look in each other's eyes. Sometimes they focus together on a common directional goal; other times the woman looks at us, while her partner peers over her shoulder; sometimes they glance at the other in turn, only to both quickly look away. (The impression this makes is so distinctive, in fact, that we know immediately we're watching the "comic" dance when the couple performing it comes out and proceeds to look at each other far too much. Of course, the man's cowlick hairdo doesn't hurt in signaling this.) This continues even as the partners are executing complicated spins, performing athletic jumps and lifts, or slicing limbs into the open space around their bodies—the miracle is that never once is the precision of their dancing compromised. The overall effect is detached and modern and very grown-up. It reveals more about how two adults actually relate sexually than most of the more explicit bumping and grinding that passes for terpsichorean foreplay in post-millennial pop culture.

The company has managed to wring seemingly every movement possibility out of the form (each couple choreographed their own dance): legs snake around each other; dancers fly through the air; couples sink into impossibly low lunges and then snap up into balances that suspend forever. There's not a single weak link in the cast, and I would venture so far as to say they're quite possibly the strongest dance ensemble on Broadway at the moment.

While having the dancers create their duets certainly allows for the individuality not always apparent in the tango form to shine through, the lack of an overseeing choreographic eye is all-too apparent. The show's creator Luis Bravo is a musician, not a dancer, and the absence of any sense of dramatic build ultimately proves detrimental. The second act is two numbers too long, and one wishes that there were fewer instrumental-only sections. Then again, it’s a nice change of pace to see a show on Broadway where the guys behind the music stands are given the same consideration as the leggy girls dancing in front.

But these are minor quibbles in what's overall a terrific evening. Take someone you want to seduce, have some Argentinean wine beforehand, and make sure to bring enough pesos to go dancing afterwards. You'll want to.

After watching Fortune, a new play at the Midtown International Theatre Festival by Jesse Schmitt and Roger Awylard, I hesitate to comment or elaborate on the quality of the production because it is so obviously their first attempt at writing, directing, and producing (Awylard doubling as director and Schmitt doubling as actor). But I extend my sincerest congratulations to them for having accomplished it and my advice that they keep working at it because this current presentation falls way short of accomplishing any of its authors’ purest intents (I hope).

Fortune offers us the story of a teenage runaway who comes to NYC to escape his suburban malaise of detached emotions and detached parents. The play starts with a young man (Thomas Andrew Misner) pacing excitedly, with some romantic music underscoring and two glasses of wine sitting on a small end table. He awaits the arrival of his girlfriend of five weeks (Katharine Poklemba), who puts out his fire by informing him less than enthusiastically that she is pregnant. Despite her fears and doubts about being ready for motherhood, she listens to his arguments for keeping the baby, and when he finds out that she is contemplating an abortion, he proposes marriage to her.

The scene shifts abruptly in time and space to an ambiguous place where a philosophizing Fool (meaning, homeless person; played by Schmitt) rants a meaningless diatribe of pseudo-Beat prose as our young protagonist (Steve Warkentin) stumbles into this “home” under some bridge or in some alley, and it becomes obvious that this boy is the subject of the Scene I tension. The rest of the play flashes back and forth between these two scenarios: young Mom and Dad aging from idealistic hopeful puppy lovers into bitter, vengeful cynics, while Junior and the Fool spend the night pontificating in clichéd postmodernisms. Dad travels for business incessantly to provide a comfortable home and life for Mom, who sacrificed her career and dream of being a painter to raise their boy. So of course, they don’t have sex and communicate only by bickering or arguing. The result is that Junior’s angst is just petty bourgeois whining, not unlike countless stories of divorce, culture detachment, and middle class oblivion. I won’t give away the twist at the end, but let’s say it has an oedipal connotation.

I must admit that there is some genuine passion in parts of Fortune—the ideas and concepts and the commitment of the actors. But overall, the production lacks a singular cohesive direction with which to clearly articulate its themes, which are in themselves often trite.

Schmitt and Awylard have bitten off more than they can chew. They have attempted to create an allegory within a contemporary realist context sprinkled with metaphysical psychobabble, but what they really come up with is more of an after-school special about runaways and the detached parents that make them that way. But I feel that this inequity is due more to inexperience than arrogance, to immaturity rather than incompetence; sometimes all it takes is a little growing up to make the difference.

One of the things I love best about Feed the Herd Theatre Company is that you never really know what to expect when you show up to see one of their shows—except that you're about to embark on some kind of an adventure. So it is with Fragments of Ricky the Superhero, their latest offering, which plays Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday nights at Siberia, a bar—politer words like "pub" or "saloon" don't do it justice—located across the street from the Port Authority on 40th Street. The play happens in the basement, in a small yet strangely comfortable room where fourteen chairs are arranged casually in a "U" shape in front of a raised platform that will serve as the principal—but not the only—stage. For indeed this is environmental theatre, using every inch of the dim cellar space (including, for a brief but climactic moment, the stairs leading up and out). And somehow, this story of a lost but questing young man who is trying to figure out whether or not he's a superhero—moody, apocalyptic—seems to belong in this off-the-beaten-track underground cavern of a theatre.

The narrative gleefully warps time as it relates the saga of Ricky, an earnest young man in a James Dean leather jacket, and his search for love and/or understanding. Ricky, an orphan, is discovered and adopted by an archetypal American suburban married couple—an eerily off-kilter and vaguely dysfunctional version of the pair that took in baby Clark Kent. Ricky grows up being told that he has superpowers, which might be true or might be an exaggeration of another archetype, that of the Golden Boy/Football Hero/High School BMOC. He has a girlfriend named Mickey who may or may not apprehend his supernatural uniqueness (which, recall, may or may not exist). And he's got a nemesis named Fred (Lex Luthor to his Superman?) who seems to know the truth about his origins and his superhero status. Or maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he's Ricky's alter ego; or maybe he's not really there.

Playwright Eric Michael Kochmer keeps things deliberately uncertain in his play, which wavers between post-modern sci-fi parody and post-millennial beat poetics. There's a chorus clad in fragments of superhero drag except for one that looks like a cat and another one that looks like an ordinary man—still more fragments of Ricky, though. There's an insistent, percussive score (sound design by Chris Meade) that keeps the play's momentum from ever getting close to flagging. And there's a series of effortless, ever-surprising transformations of the set-less room into visceral locales: the stage area turns into a kind of torture chamber where Fred has tied up Ricky's Mother and Father; the cellar's rear wall becomes Ricky's bedroom, where he tries out a painfully uninspired superhero uniform concept (costume design by Erica Kenia) before a supportive but doubtful Mickey.

Indeed, Ross Peabody's staging is a wizardly match for Kochmer's quirky coming-of-age epic. Finally more about how it makes us feel than what it actually is, Fragments of Ricky, tearing at its protagonist's childhood illusions with a scary combination of heightened reality and self-awareness, leaves us a little bit off-balance and, seemingly against the odds, satisfyingly entertained.

Kochmer, who has an immense magnetic stage presence, appears in the drama in a spy's trench coat and Groucho moustache as the menacing and mysterious Fred. Stefano Brancato is a vulnerable and sympathetic Ricky. Kevin Kaine and Heather Carmichael are his klugy parents; Pauline Luppert is the nymphet girlfriend Mickey; and Paul Bomba, Gregory Nye, Joe Serpa, Kate Serpa, and Patrick Yeoman are the chorus.

I won't pretend that I think I got everything about Fragments of Ricky the Superhero. But Kochmer's voice—neatly abetted by Peabody's inventive staging—is original and interesting. This is untraditional, uncompromising, but not necessarily entirely successful or decipherable theatre—which is often the very best kind there is.

I've seen lots of versions of Frankenstein in my life. But I've never one remotely like The Flying Machine's, which is now on stage at Soho Rep, where it's offering audiences a far-out ride that theatregoers will not want to miss.

It spins around a puzzle box, a gift from Mama Frankenstein to her little son Victor. "First find the lock, and then find the key," she tells her son about this intellectual toy that will pervade his young life. "Don't think too much. Let your intuition be your guide."

Director Joshua Carlebach (founder and co-artistic director of The Flying Machine) and set designer Marisa Frantz have literalized Victor's puzzle box in the stunning, startling environment they've created for their Frankenstein. It's framed by a geometric maze of dirty windows and dark panels that look like a Rubik's cube unfolded and that slide and twist into new shapes and mutations; actors open and close them (they're hinged like the swinging doors of an old-time saloon) to reveal and hide the dark, stark, Escherian landscape inside, a spare depiction of early 19th-century London that is more suggested by shapes and shadows than realistically fleshed out. James Japhy Weideman's gloriously gloomy lighting completes the stygian landscape.

In this eccentric space plays out a take on the famous Mary Shelley story that's half psychological thriller, half horror farce, and half sneakily gentle morality tale. Yes, that's three halves: there's a lot going on here, and it's all terrific.

After the childhood prologue, we find Victor enrolled in some kind of graduate science seminar, where his current project is the redesign of a swamp toad: he figures that by grafting a more powerful set of legs onto the creature, and somehow animating them, he will enable the animal to more readily escape its predators and thereby "correct" nature. His teacher, Professor Waldman, cautions that natural processes, whether they accord with Darwin or not, are always correct and mustn't be interfered with. But Victor is undaunted, and when a thuggish bully called Gershon is run down by a carriage late one night, he can't resist carrying the lifeless body home with him and trying to "correct" it.

It's a fascinating route to the building of the monster that's the center of the story; to this point, Victor's fancies have seemed just that—a good deal of the first half of this Frankenstein happens in a pub where collegiate Victor deduces how many marbles are in a jar so that one of his schoolmates can win some free booze—but from the moment of creation matters turn deadly serious. The "monster" Gershon, undead and misunderstood, terrorizes the neighborhood and the play starts to feel a little scary. Victor realizes his culpability and his hubris and seeks to right the horrible thing he's wrought.

Carlebach and his collaborators balance the truly frightening with a delicious sardonic wit; and there's a good-natured, gentle morality flowing through as well that facilitates a quick and satisfying conclusion to the tale that's in synch with our expectations and also edifying. Mother Frankenstein's dicta carry the day: what Victor learns from his experience is to let his brain relax once a while.

The production is staged with wit, precision, and elegance; there's a sort of formalized whimsicality to the proceedings that gives the thing a netherworldly fairy-tale quality that works neatly. All the actors are outfitted with gnomish pointy ears and false teeth and they move at a not-quite-human tempo. Robert Ross Parker plays Victor with a touching blend of forlorn melancholy and profound but overreaching braininess—as lovable a portrayal of the doctor as I've ever seen. Richard Crawford, The Flying Machine's other co-artistic director, plays the monster and, earlier, the man Gershon; it's an eerie and brutal performance. Crawford and Parker bring enormous concentration and detail to their work, conjuring invisible props and scenic elements (a tea cup, a bottle of whiskey, a delicate music box) with remarkable acuity. Six other actors—Damian Baldet, Adrienne Kapstein, Joshua Koehn, Jason Lindner, Carine Montbertrand, and Tami Stronach—take all of the other roles in the story (sharing some 20 characters among them); they fill out the world of the play with impressive skill and energy.

Frankenstein marks my introduction to The Flying Machine; I will certainly be waiting eagerly for their next project. Meanwhile, this show turns out to be splendid holiday fare for the adventurous playgoer: a genuinely diverting evening with a brain and a heart that takes its audience on a fun and imaginative one-of-a-kind journey.

Frankenstein… Do You Dream is a musical adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s well-known gothic novel, with music, libretto, and lyrics by Robert George Asselstine. The captain of a ship stranded in the Arctic encounters Dr. Victor Frankenstein and writes a letter to his sister as Frankenstein recounts what brought him there, framing the action of the play.

The songs are not particularly melodic, more like sung dialogue, but all of the singers are top-notch. Vocally, Amy Russ stands out as Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée/wife, as does Philip Hernández as Daemon, the monster. Craig Schulman is well-cast as Victor Frankenstein and carries his songs nicely. The wedding song, in the second act, has an interesting, catchy melody and when it becomes a three-part harmony, sung by Schulman, Hernández, and Lavenza, it is quite beautiful. Another interesting part, musically, comes when a kind of choir forms at the trial of a girl who is accused of one of Daemon’s murders.

The Belt Theatre is probably too small a stage for this show and the staging of the play became boring as the story progressed. Too many times, the characters sing about how they feel and there is not a lot of action actually taking place on stage. The spaces on the stage are not clearly established and this makes it unclear when scenes are changing, especially with such a minimal set. It might have been impossible to follow the play if not for the plot synopsis written in the program.

Also, the characters are not clearly drawn. The character Daemon is inflamed with passion but does not have a clear progression. And though Daemon refers several times to looking monstrous, that was not reflected either through make-up or any physical choice on the part of the actor; he looks like a rather normal man dressed all in black, sometimes with a cape. Several times, he appears onstage and watches the action, but the other actors cannot see him, while sometimes, they can see him. It is not clear why this is so.

Overall, the play was not a successful adaptation of the novel, though with the cast of talented singers, it may be more enjoyable to listen to than watch.

Fruit Flavored, the Fresh Fruit Festival’s night of solo performances, starts small and gets only a little bit bigger. Each of the three works presented as part of this hour-and-a-half evening of theater has strengths, sometimes owing to the smallness of the plays, and sometimes in spite of it.

Kelli Dunham’s Bad Habits (Lesbian Nun Tells All) is chock-full of witty lines about her experiences as a Mission of Charity nun. After a stint as a well-intentioned but aimless volunteer stuck in Haiti without an assignment, Dunham lusts after a Mission of Charity nun, and, eventually, falls in love with the concept of joining the team. She winds up at a convent in the Bronx, where she becomes Sister Mercy and both despises and enjoys the strict tutelage of a dominatrix-like Mistress, who trains the nuns-to-be. Dunham is an understated performer; perhaps too understated, as her quiet demeanor borders on difficult-to-watch. Still, her material is compelling, and her writing is often hilarious. I was captivated by the story and Dunham’s writing, but perhaps would’ve preferred to read this work rather than watching her performance.

Derek Zasky’s TIMEBOMB or Bobby Brady Was a Homosexual suffers from the opposite problem. Shirt-and-tie-clad Zasky is a vivacious performer. His put-on comic mini-accent, great timing, and energetic delivery offer a nice share of laugh-out-loud moments. His material, a summary of Brady Bunch episodes with an overlay of psychodrama, has a singular challenge: there’s only one joke. Zasky incorporates personality details and inner monologues of various Brady characters in an intermittently amusing way, but it’s mostly a retread; between the Brady Bunch stage plays and movies, countless comedians, and cable TV’s obsession with retrospective, we’ve seen this all before. Zasky doesn’t offer much new in the way of interpretation of his characters, and the show runs too long in its current structure. But when it works—and there are moments when it does—Derek Zasky is fun to watch.

In Skinny Isn’t Sexy or Why I Never Had an Eating Disorder, Elizabeth Whitney builds on the best aspects of both of her colleagues’ work. Opening in a bubble-gum pink, cheerleader outfit, dancing to Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” Whitney leads the audience through her journey to self-acceptance. She turns her story of a rail-thin, high-femme, confused lesbian teen with a Tom Selleck-loving butch gym teacher as her only role model into a funny, captivating, and high-energy performance that sparkles with keen commentary. Sure, Whitney is a skilled comedienne with a Kristin Chenoweth voice and excellent timing; but she’s also thought-provoking and insightful. She shares the ways that her identity was obscured by everything from others’ perceptions of her body to the limited worldview of 1970s feminism, all while wearing wrists-full of jelly bracelets and maintaining sunny self-expression. Elizabeth Whitney may be performing solo, but she—along with Zasky and Dunham, and everyone who puts together the community-building Fresh Fruit Festival—is most certainly not alone.

The subtitle of Gehri Dosti is "5 Short Plays with a South Asian Bent ;-)"; that final winking emoticon is meant to signify the pun on "bent," i.e., that all of these plays are concerned with the relatively invisible (taboo?) subject of same-sex love among South Asians. Its author, Paul Knox, has steered into this territory before—his play Kalighat, which premiered last year, brought a few gay men (one of them an Indian) into one of Mother Teresa's homes for the dying and destitute. These five plays are even bolder than that one in exploring not only the expression of love between men or women but also the active denial/repression of such love in countries and cultures that are home to a huge number of the world's population. As a plea for attention, Gehri Dosti packs a very powerful wallop indeed.

The evening begins with its shortest, slightest piece, Loving Japamala. It's also the only one that doesn't take place on the Indian subcontinent, set instead in a convent in the South Bronx, where a Puerto Rican man named Tommy helps out the nuns once a week in the kitchen. On this particular Monday, Sister Japamala is about to return to her native India, and has come to say goodbye to Tommy, with whom she believes she has fallen in love (hence her dismissal from this convent). Tommy is gay, and works as a go-go dancer; he tries to explain some of this to Sister Japamala, though he doesn't really finish. This play—a vignette, really—is more about different kinds of love that can exist between people than the issues of sexuality that pervade the remainder of the program.

The next piece, Eating Jain, tackles such issues head-on. Set in a compartment of a train on its way from Calcutta to Puri, it begins with two naked men sleeping in each other's arms, presumably after having made love. One of the men, Mahvi, is an Indian and a follower of the Jain religion; the other, Bobby, is a New Yorker. Their relationship has been intermittent, brief, but intense, and now Bobby is accompanying Mahvi to his home where he thinks he's going to "meet the in-laws." But Mahvi has no intention of revealing his sexual orientation to his family, or, we discover, of shirking his duty to get married and have sons. Bobby, bound by western mores, has the idea that he and Mahvi can be in love and live together as a couple; Mahvi can't or won't turn away from his own traditions, feelings of love and/or lust notwithstanding. The power of this play comes from Knox's refusal to judge or take sides: Eating Jain reveals the depth, complexity, and strength of cultural and religious barriers, even as it celebrates, with its lovely romantic opening tableau, the perfect possibility of pure love.

The tragic consequences of religious intolerance of homosexuality are exposed in I Am Mou, the final play before intermission. Structured as a series of overlapping monologues spoken by an upper-class woman, her husband, and their maidservant, I Am Mou lays bare the bored, unfulfilled life of the privileged wife in a loveless marriage. When she finds herself attracted to the maid, something awakens within her. But when the husband discovers the two women together in bed making love, her world explodes. The brutal ending isn't exactly a surprise but it nevertheless jolts us: prejudice against lesbians and gays is indeed institutionalized in lots of cultures and we need to be reminded of this.

The evening's most ambitious and affecting play comes next, after the break. Entitled Two Men in Shoulder Stand, it's told in poetic dialogue and a sequence of yoga movements and poses. Two men, Hasan and Sarath, are alone together on a beach on the Arabian Sea. One is Hindu, the other is Muslim. They are lovers. One is dying of AIDS. Knox explores here several kinds of oppression—of battling religions that are nevertheless united in their intolerance for gay love; of a terrible disease whose devastation is greater in a place where they are no resources available to battle it; of an outside, supposedly "enlightened" culture that is uninterested and uninvolved with the plights of gays or AIDS victims outside of their narrow world. All of this is set against the calm, intoxicating backdrop of yoga on a beautiful beach—Knox is nothing if not masterfully ironic.

Nearly as ambitious—and definitely more audacious—is Gehri Dosti's final piece, Tara Tara Didi. This light-hearted (but pointed) satire of Bollywood films brings the entire cast together (in multiple roles) to tell, in song, dance, and verse, the story of two mismatched couples who discover their true sexual natures while trying to complete a pair of arranged mail-order marriages. The boys end up together and the girls end up together, thanks to the machinations of a visiting band of eunuchs ("hijrahs") who had been hired to provide entertainment at the weddings. Knox has fun here sending up the conventions of Bollywood cinema and a good deal of more familiar western pop culture. By the end, somehow, everyone winds up dancing the hora.

Clocking in at 2-1/2 hours, Gehri Dosti makes for a very full evening. It certainly challenges its nine-member cast, not all of whom are completely up to all of the tasks (dancing, singing, advanced yoga, virtuosic acting) that they're called upon to undertake (on the other hand, they're all game and energetic, and they will learn and improve as they continue working on the plays). Standouts among the actors include Michael Ellis and Bobby Abid, who are excellent as the lovers in Eating Jain, and Brenden Varma and Abid, who get the style and spirit of the Bollywood parody exactly right. Knox's staging is simple and spare, with occasional interludes of movement used as transitions between the plays.

African American history and mythology collide in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean; they spill into each other and all over a young black man named Citizen Barlow who has come north from Alabama to Pittsburgh in 1904, away from a newly energized Klan and in search of that elusive thing—freedom—that his people have been striving toward throughout the four decades since emancipation. Almost immediately upon arrival he finds himself in trouble, and so he seeks out the legendary ancient Aunt Ester (who will be a familiar presence to viewers of other Wilson plays). She understands the nature and the roots of his spiritual crisis and helps him through it by taking him on a voyage through his heritage that cleanses his soul and strengthens his resolve.

Aunt Ester, who the press release says is 287 years old, is just one of the archetypal figures occupying the extraordinary Pittsburgh parlor where Gem of the Ocean takes place and where Citizen comes to discover what his name and birthright are all about. Another is Solly Two Kings, a former slave who escaped to Canada in the 1850s and then worked with Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad; now well advanced in years himself, he makes a living selling dog manure and earns his keep telling stories about a courageous career whose victories are literally recorded as notches in his gnarled walking stick.

And another is Caesar, a representative of a new generation of American Negro, one not brought up in bondage but instead in pursuit of a distorted and bastardized American Dream. He has trampled on the backs of his brethren to become rich: he now owns the mill where most of the neighborhood's black men work (and where he tries in vain to break up a union he can no longer countenance now that he's the boss); he's also landlord to most of his workers, one with the soul (and taste for self-aggrandizing power trips) of, say, Donald Trump.

Which of these men is truly free? That's one of the questions at the heart of this complicated, dense, intimately epic play. Another is how does your history define you: do you live through it, or past it? Can you simply deny it? Can you ignore it?

Citizen Barlow comes calling on Aunt Ester because everyone in town tells him she's the one can cure his ailing soul. He joins a household whose regular members include Black Mary, Caesar's sister, now more or less estranged from his ways if not his person; and Eli, a contemporary of Solly Two Kings whose current project is erecting a fence between this house and the one next door, which belongs to Caesar. Solly drops by from time to time, as does Rutherford Selig, a white man, an itinerant peddler who has become a friend to the residents here. All will figure, one way or another, in Aunt Ester's project to clean Citizen's soul and lead him on a path toward redemption.

That endeavor climaxes in a remarkable, possibly supernatural journey to the City of Bones, which is quite literally a leap of faith that this young African American man makes, guided by his elders and his ancestors, to (re)discover his slave roots. Wilson blends the mythic and the natural rather daringly here in a scene that maybe doesn't quite work but is nevertheless unforgettable. In his risk taking and barrier breaking, Wilson stands alone and above his contemporaries among well-established American playwrights, and for that we must all be grateful.

I have reservations about this production of Gem of the Ocean. The design is impeccable, especially the set by David Gallo, which is dominated by a massive staircase that just goes up and up at stage right, a giant visual metaphor for a lot of what's going on in Wilson's play. But the direction by Kenny Leon feels a little sluggish and underdone: big moments that ought to reverberate grandly pass by like blips on a screen; we miss these guideposts that would mark out Gem's majestic course if they were there. The cast is uneven: Phylicia Rashad is gloriously life-embracing and appealing as Aunt Ester, but she doesn't quite have the timeless, ageless quality that the role seems to require, and as a result the play's climax didn't feel as magical as I thought it could. LisaGay Hamilton is quietly proud and stately as Black Mary and Eugene Lee and Anthony Chisholm register strongly as Eli and Solly; Raynor Scheine is solidly resourceful and sympathetic as Selig. But I never understood how Ruben Santiago-Hudson's Caesar had gotten to be the man he is; nor did John Earl Jelks convince me that he had really seen the City of Bones.

Now, I think some of my particular experience is owed to an oddly out-of-sorts karma that pervaded the Walter Kerr Theatre the night I saw the play—it was one of those performances where patrons kept coughing and shifting in their seats and cell phones kept ringing all night long. Actors can feel and hear this; I know I didn't see the show at its best. Give Gem of the Ocean your attention, then, not least because it's that absolute rarity: an original American play on Broadway that seeks to enlarge and challenge its audience.

To get the most out of Karen Finley’s George & Martha (now playing at Collective: Unconscious), do NOT go and see it. Rather, take a moment to savor the tremendous potential of the clever idea of placing George Bush and Martha Stewart in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You may even enjoy the ads, in which Finley bears a striking resemblance to Stewart while baring her breasts, painted with horizontal black and white inmate-stripes.

Whatever die-hard Republicans exist in New York City, they are not a significant percentage of the off-off-Broadway theatregoing audience, so most of the overly-earnest, well-meaning, and (in some cases) well-made plays pleading for us to can Bush on November 2nd fall on liberal ears. Thus Finley’s play may seem like a refreshing opportunity to have some raunchy, subversive fun.

Raunchy, it is. Finley's Martha rambles around completely naked (though zebra-ed with paint), lambasting Neal Medlyn’s George (also naked, but ornately decorated with red, white, and blue paint and glitter) when she is not (simulating) fellating him or pinching her own nipples. Aside from the names and casual allusions to the play, the only thing Albee’s masterpiece and Finley’s attempt have in common is alcoholism.

As for subversive: the ads are, the idea is, but after the initial shock (but-not-really-because-you-saw-it-on-the-ads-and-you-know-you-are-going-to-see-a-play-by-Karen-Finley) of the nudity, there is nothing dangerous or exciting going on. Whatever fascinating scenarios that might possibly occur, what revealing implications that might possibly be uncovered in a world where Bush and Stewart are the Mommy and Daddy of our country, remain exclusively in the buzzing mind of the expectant theatregoer and are not explored on stage. If anyone who has come to see this show hasn't already heard that George Bush used to be a cokehead then god bless ‘em.

Is it fun? Perhaps if you are a drunk close friend of the performers. It is as aimless as a sketch slated for the last ten minutes of Saturday Night Live, but it lasts as long as an entire episode. Finley’s dumb George hems and haws and her Martha brays and brays, but there is not a fraction of the wit of their literary ancestors. There's also nothing dramaturgically at stake (Why are they fighting? Why are they even in a hotel room together?); just too many lame jokes.

What would happen if Finley took her idea seriously for a moment? How truly terrifying would it be to see Bush and Stewart actually in love, actually sneaking away to screw during the Republican National Convention (which you may find yourself watching as it is plays on the television throughout the entire show), actually conferring about what is going on in our country?

The act of putting up this play may be subversive. But without a bit of truth, a touch of humanity, a satire is as mindlessly one-sided as the politicos it rails against.

Kevin Jones’ new play, Getting It, has the ingredients of a racy, door-slamming comedy: love, surprise twists, gender bending, infidelity, and deceit. Unfortunately, the elements never fully come together, ultimately leaving the show under-baked.

Getting It follows Ricky and Beth, a well-to-do, middle-aged couple about to have a baby. When they invite young newlyweds Sandy and George to their Manhattan penthouse for dinner, it is with the intention of seducing them. Beth is able to attract George’s attention and, a few days later, the two begin having an affair. However, things aren’t exactly what they seem in Ricky and Beth’s household and, as the arrival of their baby draws closer, it gets harder for them to keep their secrets.

As a writer, Jones creates witty dialogue that yields a lot of solid laughs throughout the show. The show’s big twist is clever and there are subtle clues that don’t give it away but build nicely to the reveal. Yet, Jones does very little to create likeable characters. The characters behave so deplorably that is hard to invest in hoping for a happy ending.

Jones’ direction is also uneven. He makes good use of Kermit Medsker’s living room set, which includes three doors that are used perfectly for hiding behind and unexpected entrances. However, the physical bits in the show, which could yield big laughs, are lackluster. And, the show’s pacing is too slow to really keep the mirth moving.

The cast never seems to quite gel as an ensemble. Both Jay Rogers and Karen Case Cook as Ricky and Beth do a wonderful job of playing the absurd humor of the situation without going over the top. Although Katherine Dillingham and Mitch Maguire are likeable as the naive young couple, they both slip into playing some scenes as if they were in a real drama, not a melodrama.

Even still, Getting It has fun moments and there is room for it to grow into a full-blown comedy buffet. Perhaps it just needs to simmer a little longer to really get cookin’.

It was a moment theatre lovers will speak of forever: the 1982 Tony Awards. The cast of the pop opera Dreamgirls performs the final moments of the first act, in which dethroned diva, Effie White, confronts Michelle “Who’s She?” Morris, the woman replacing Effie on stage, and Deena “Nothing But Common” Jones, the woman replacing Effie in her man Curtis's bed and heart. Strikingly talented black artists in fabulous costumes are tearing apart a Broadway stage in a powerful, contemporary new way. Well, nowhere did that moment resonate more strongly than it did in the Pittsburgh home of thirteen-year-old Billy Porter, Ghetto Superstar in training. Relegated to character roles, like Fagan in Oliver!, the self-proclaimed most talented performer in his junior high—and who am I to argue—realized at that moment that there was, indeed, a place on the Great White Way for a black Broadway bitch from the ghetto. And by the time he gets halfway through "Black Broadway Bitch," the opening number of his six-week run at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, I guarantee you will be sold as well. Porter packs Ghetto Superstar, The Man That I Am with fierce vocal styling, sharp wit, and smooth dance moves that don’t stop.

Porter is known to Broadway audiences for his work in Miss Saigon, Five Guys Named Moe, Grease, and Smokey Joe’s Café. His film credits include Noel and the gay independent, The Broken Hearts Club. But this autobiographical musical memoir is about more than the peaks and pitfalls of show business. Ghetto Superstar is the Pittsburgh story August Wilson never told—the journey of a gay African American boy raised in a religious family. And although the evening is mostly glittering, musical fun, there are many heart-in-your-mouth moments as well. The rise of this shining star took detours through the harsh realities of childhood sexual abuse, a mother’s rejection, and more than one painful gay bashing. There’s also a religious journey here, as Porter grapples with the condemnation of his sexual orientation, and ultimately reconciles with the church that was the birthplace of his public singing career.

That the show never gets bogged down in the drama is a tribute to Porter’s keen artistry as both a performer and writer. There is enough detail to make it personal and moving, with a broad enough range of experiences to keep it from being boring or alienating. At the performance I saw, the room was, in fact, strikingly diverse in terms of age, race, and orientation, and everyone seemed to find something in the evening that made the show personal for them. I’m sure not everyone’s palms were sweating, as mine were, during the reenactment of the Dreamgirls epiphany. During some of the more religious moments, which I don’t personally relate to, there were plenty of audience members making it clear they had experience with such battles and revelations.

The music is a little theatre, a little R&B, and a lot of soul, with some covers and a lot of originals. The four-piece band, headed by musical director David Cook, is furious enough to keep up with Porter, and subtle enough to help him tell his many stories. Sasha Allen and Brandi Chavonne Massey, the two, strong backup singers in slinky, black dresses, give the show a stylized ambience, and more than a few moments of clever humor.

But more than anything else on that stage, there is sweat to spare. With the kind of striking vocal talent Porter possesses, many performers wouldn’t work half as hard to fill an-hour-and-three-quarters. Ghetto Superstar, The Man That I Am is a blood-and-guts, in-your-teeth performance that earns every clap and every shout and holler. Porter is a force of nature on that stage, and this is the perfect vehicle to let him show just how much damage he can do.

Joe’s Pub is a cabaret, and you can just order drinks if you like. There’s also a reasonably priced full menu, including a $25 prix-fixe full dinner, and many appetizers and a la carte items.

I swear... it's not a world of men... it's not a world of men, Machine... it's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders... what it is, it's a fucked-up world... there's no adventure to it.

This, I believe is the center and main idea of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross. It's from the middle of a speech spoken by Richard Roma, the high-powered, ruthless real estate salesman who is the play's riveting anti-hero—a guy who has convinced himself that if he does his white-collar job of glad-handing customers and filling out paperwork with sufficient savagery then he's somehow a cowboy or an astronaut or something. Glengarry tears at the myth of the American Dream from its underside, from the perspective of the also-rans and wannabes who always think they're this close to attaining it; the kind of people who will vote for tax cuts for the rich on the premise that any minute now they'll be on the inside, riding the loopholes on the backs of some other poor schmucks.

I think, in 1984 (when Glengarry premiered and won the Pulitzer Prize), there was irony here. Today, at least in the stifling and curiously dispassionate new Broadway production directed by Joe Mantello, there's nothing but hollow resonance.

This is despite the efforts of a celebrity-laden cast that is headed by Alan Alda, who is at the top of his form and effortlessly in command of this production as washed-up Shelly Levine, whether soliloquizing like a latter-day Willy Loman about his pathetic fall from grace in his company's pecking order or, most satisfyingly, exercising his brilliant comic timing whilst working a miniature con game with Liev Schreiber against Tom Wopat. These latter-named two gentlemen are also impressive to observe here: Schreiber is smooth and assured as the salesman Roma (though perhaps not so seething as he might be); while Wopat is convincingly whipped and used-up as a husband so beaten down that he has to apologize to Schreiber for not standing up to him and turning him down. Jeffrey Tambor (of TV's Arrested Development) is alternately restrained and manic as another salesman by the name of Aaronow, while Gordon Clapp (of TV's NYPD Blue), as still another salesman, is all bluster and brawn as he delivers the Mametian rat-a-tat-tat dialogue with machine-gun precision. (Frederick Weller, oddly wooden as the office manager, is the sixth of the show's above-the-title stars.)

It's also more or less in spite of the crackling, snarling poetry that Mamet has given his characters to deliver here. Mantello seems to direct against the rhythms of the text, making the carefully crafted interruptions and repetitions feel like random noise rather than meticulous music. Mantello generally places his actors side-by-side in their conversations, rather than in the more natural face-to-face position, so that they're made to talk out to the audience rather than interact with each other. This problem is reinforced by Santo Loquasto's mammoth, horizontal sets, which—for all their supposed attention to detail—actually give the actors less to work with than if they were sparer and not so expansive.

The pace—slow throughout; relentless in Act One—gives us time to ponder the implausibilities of Mamet's plot, which includes an intricate plan to rob a real estate office and a couple of detailed depictions of selling, essentially, ice to Eskimos. It also gives us time to luxuriate in Mamet's trademark language, and to notice (a) how uninteresting it is, all these years later; (b) how offensive it is, especially the use of words like "cocksucker" (many, many times) to indicate a lower form of male homo sapiens; and (c) how unnecessary and out-of-touch its numerous ethnic slurs are, especially the ones directed against Indians.

The more I see of Mamet's work, the less impressive I find it: what exactly are we supposed to take away from a play like Glengarry Glen Ross once the shock value of giving voice to impotent middle-class white men has disappeared?

God Hates the Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny follows the travels of its title character, who is the first completely armless son in a line of one-armed men. The story begins when Johnny’s father, Da, decides this is the day for him to hang himself, as all of his male ancestors have done before him, ostensibly for the shame of having a completely armless son. Da is unable to tie a noose with his single arm, so his wife, Ma, obliges and he succeeds in killing himself while Johnny looks on, helpless.

The next step in the family tradition is that the son must cut his father down, just as Johnny’s father did before him. Of course, Johnny is unable to carry out his part in this rite of passage because, well, he has no arms.

These are the jokes, folks.

A pair of corrupt police officers accuse Ma of Da’s death, and in the course of torturing her to get a confession, they kill her and decide to string her up next to Da. Unable to cut either of them down, Johnny decides to travel to America (sure, why not?), but keeps getting lost. He meets a variety of cartoonish characters along his way, almost all of whom wind up getting killed. This happens with such regularity, in fact, that at some point the dramaturgy started to feel more like a video game than an actual play: It is as if the character at hand must be destroyed before Johnny may proceed to the next scene.

Johnny continues to get lost on his odyssey, kills, is castrated, ends up in places like Ethiopia (again, why not? Just going to Ethiopia must be funny, right?), picking up an understanding, two-armed love interest along the way and returns with her to his Irish village and hanging parents. I thought he was headed to America for some reason, but I guess he was just looking for love. Oh, and she kills people, too, so she may be useful to have around in case Johnny needs to get anywhere in the future.

Songs, though well-scored, are lyrically weak and add little to the plot or stakes; they often feel tacked-on, as if they are remainders written for a different piece.

I should note that the producers have assembled a solid cast—a mix of Broadway and off-Broadway regulars plus some very talented relative newcomers making their off-Broadway debuts. Hardworking downtown composer Michael Friedman of the Civilians continues to show his versatility (this is, I believe, at least his third score this season, after All Wear Bowlers and Splatter Pattern). But these artists are stuck in a pointless, unentertaining show.

According to publicity materials, God Hates the Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny is supposed to be a “satirical farce that has something to offend just about everyone.” Unfortunately, playwright Sean Cunningham seems to have prioritized offending audiences over delivering effective satire or enjoyable farce. And, to be honest, after a long 2 hours, 10 minutes, and 13 songs, I can’t say that the production even succeeded at offending me. It checks down a thorough list of explicit material—plenty of vulgarity and racist epithets, loads of scatological details, simulated sex, all sorts of violence and cruelty—but this is form without content, a lot of empty shocks thrown at a canvas to see what sticks. There's a difference between being made to feel uncomfortable by a provocative image or idea and being simply turned off by a lot of bad taste. The former can be theatrically compelling, but the latter merely makes for a long, rough night.

Sarah Fraunfelder and Timothy Ryan Olson are a very attractive and charismatic pair of actors, but they cannot make Theatre Faction’s God is a DJ (now in performances at the Ontological) a tolerable experience. They play a hip young couple—he a DJ, she a filmmaker—who are being paid $2000 a session to have their day-to-day existence broadcast over the Internet. Perhaps if we were a party to just that, we might learn something about how they/we live, but instead of behaving and interacting, they present to us their lives in lectures, both pleonastic and pedestrian.

For the first twenty minutes, we watch (and watch them watch) a video he has made about his trip through the American Southwest, filled with trite and unamusing musings on the nature of perception et cetera. (Though it is 19.5 minutes too long, the cinematography and editing by Greg Emetaz and Erik Nelson, and the score, also by Nelson, are well-done.) For the next hour and a half, She (Fraunfelder) and He (Olson) take turns telling us via microphone their tedious solipsistically-detailed versions of how they met and their courtship, peppered with anecdotes about her unremarkable career and hyperbolic stories from his childhood. The one distinctly enjoyable sequence, coming near the end of the intermissionless 110 minutes, is a videotaped interview of She on the subject of her latest film given by a vaguely European interviewer (Nina Egli) who is credited as a “psychoanalyst/jeweler” and who cannot, in her bewildered but persistent attempts to analyze the film’s essence, come up with a single question except for “Can I say that?”

I realize that a thematic aim of the play is for us to realize that, in a Reality-TV-saturated culture, we are hypnotized by the trivial and mundane aspects of other people’s lives, luxuriously ignorant of the really terrifying problems in the world. But perhaps there is a better way of conveying this than repeating the experience—the witless monotony of pseudo-intellectualisms, void of the human element. After all, one can develop empathy for burn victims without immolating oneself.

Falk Richter’s five-year-old play, first produced in Germany in 1999 (and produced internationally since) is far from pioneering (since the early '90s countless plays and films have been dealing with similar kinds of voyeurism, i.e., Jerry Springer, public access, and the dawn of the website) and even farther from prescient (in 1999, MTV’s The Real World was already in its seventh season). To say that it has not “aged well” presumes that there was real substance to begin with. Translated here from the original German into “American” by director Yuval Sharon, it is unclear whether he or Richter is more responsible for the pretentiousness and the obfuscation.

Even if it is Richter’s “fault,” Sharon has done little to make meaningful sense of all of this for the audience. Why do He and She (who are in their apartment, ten feet away) address us with microphones? Are we their studio audience, and if so, what sort of cut are they getting for this behind-the-scenes look at their reality webcast? My level of confusion as to who is watching whom, when, why, and via what kind of technology outweighed by far my tepid desire to sort it all out.

Katya Blumberg’s gorgeous and expensive set is diverting to stare at, likewise are Fraunfelder and Olson, but the play as a whole left me feeling polluted—not by some subversive ideas or even some offensive ones (though He has a rather off-putting five minute pederastic and scatological diatribe). Instead I felt like an overfull recycling bin, forced to accommodate so much outmoded news; I left depleted when I had hoped to feel energized.

Cori Archer thinks she’s living proof that you can’t go home again. Since leaving the small-town South at eighteen, she hasn’t spoken to her father, and in fact has grown up to be everything a Southern Baptist preacher hates: a hard-drinking, urban, bisexual atheist who writes books about why religion is a sham. But when Winnie Sutherlin, her father’s lover, calls to plead with Cori to visit her dying father, Cori goes. She plans to help Winnie get her father into a nursing home and then head back to her life, but she winds up staying to see her father through this final illness.

Such a description makes God’s Daughter sound both predictable and potentially saccharine, but it’s refreshingly unsentimental and full of small surprises. Barton Bishop, the very young playwright, is wise enough to evade the easy traps set by the premise. Cori doesn’t head south because she’s reminded how much she loves her father after all. She goes for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that her life in New York is pretty well a mess these days, both professionally and personally. And she brings with her a complicated mix of emotions, including guilt and rage and a desire for revenge on both the father who rejected her and the woman who Cori feels has taken the place of her dead mother. Even her decision to stay with Jeb as he dies is motivated primarily by negative emotions—her sick fascination with seeing the towering figure of her youth cut down, her stubborn need to reclaim emotional territory from Winnie, her desire to flaunt how far she’s come from her roots.

Cori Archer isn’t a nice person, or a particularly likable character. Nor are Jeb, an autocratic Southern preacher whose decline has made him both fearful and easily enraged, and Winnie, a timid woman who wants to do what’s right but isn’t strong enough to stand up for her own ideas. But it’s precisely the bracing contrast between the soft-focus movie-of-the-week plot and the sharp, surprising edges of the characters and relationships that makes the play work.

The three leading actors all succeed marvelously at giving depth and complexity to their prickly characters, and in making us feel for them, even if we might not enjoy having dinner with them. Anne DuPont, as Cori, has the hardest job. In addition to her scenes with the others, Cori serves as the narrator, telling us her memories, her thoughts about the action, and her analyses of the situation.

Although these monologues handle some necessary exposition, the writing in them is denser than the rest of the play—full of metaphors and images that sometimes feel like unnecessary diversions for both the character and the audience. The monologues also occasionally over-explain situations and scenes within the play. But DuPont handles them with a light touch, and a lovely ability to show Cori as self-deprecating and self-pitying at the same time. Where she really shines, though, is in her restraint. Where the obvious choice might be to let the audience see how much Cori has grown, how much of a better person she is at the end of the play, DuPont—and director Alex Dmitriev—make the more surprising, more honest, and much more complex choice. Cori has learned some things, maybe; she’s laid a few demons to rest, but her core—for good or for ill—remains the same. Although religion is a theme of the play, redemption is only the vaguest undercurrent.

Susanne Marley and Peter Brouwer also give strong, nuanced performances. Brouwer’s depiction of a proud man slowly crumbling into senility shows both Jeb’s lifelong strength and his encroaching fragility. Marley gives backbone to a character who initially seems to take the path of least resistance. Again, smart and counterintuitive choices by both the director and the performer complement, without ever giving away, the unpredictability inherent in the writing.

God’s Daughter works because the writer, director, and performers all resist the simple and the obvious. And by doing so, they’ve made a play that offers at every turn a little bit more than you think it’s going to. Bishop is a promising young writer, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll do in the future.

What would you do if your son was a monster, a dictator of an "empire" who murdered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen?  That's one of the central questions in Lee Blessing's compelling play Going to St. Ives, which is receiving a belated New York debut at Primary Stages (it was seen in 2000 in Los Angeles). And lest you think, well, very few of us are going to ever have to face such a monumental dilemma—think again: Blessing indicts every one of us for that son's crimes, very convincingly.

May N'Kame is willful, self-reliant, smart, shrewd, and articulate. She has glaucoma, and her son—emperor of an unnamed country in central Africa—has sent her to England to have laser surgery, performed by Dr. Cora Gage, the pre-eminent practitioner in this field. On the day before the surgery, Mme. N'Kame and Dr. Gage meet uneasily over tea at the latter's home in St. Ives, a rural community outside Cambridge. They talk about their pasts and, specifically, their sons. The doctor's is dead, the result of a terrible accident for which she still blames herself. MMe. M'Kame's is of course still very much alive, having his despotic way, unchecked by a world that doesn't seem too concerned about who he butchers, as long as they're his own people. Dr. Gage wants Mme. M'Kame to persuade her son to commute the death sentences of four prominent physicians who refused to carry out his orders. Mme. M'Kame is willing to grant this favor—if the doctor will grant a genuinely uncommon one in return.

These women are remarkable creations; Blessing shows us that one whose only reason for being is predicated on saving lives and that another whose only child seems bent on destroying as many lives as he can, have, in the final analysis, almost everything in common. He also confronts us with an ugly and important truth: that every person, safe and comfortable in a relatively affluent nation like Great Britain or the United States, who fails to heed to calls for help coming from the less fortunate—in our own hemisphere or in another one—is culpable for every life lost there. Whether we stand by and let foreign tyrants commit genocide or merely under-fund emergency services in inner cities, we're responsible. Going to St. Ives is about two disparate women trying to own up to their responsibilities; to make some kind of difference in a seemingly indifferent world.

Now, I've perhaps made Going to St. Ives sound woefully polemical, which is neither fair nor accurate. What it is, mostly, is a splendidly vivid clash between these two magnetic, strong personalities. In the hands of Vivienne Benesch, who shows us the careful, cautious, soulful British doctor, and especially L. Scott Caldwell, who gives a bravura performance as the courageous force of nature that is May M'Kame, these women come to life, engaging us for every moment of the play, and for many more thereafter as we wonder whether we would have the guts to do the things that each eventually finds herself called upon to do.

Director Maria Mileaf's production is exemplary, featuring a stunning set by Neil Patel that is transformed painstakingly at intermission from a proper English sitting room to a rather barren African courtyard garden. Appropriate lighting by David Lander and music by Michael Roth enhance the design; Ann Hould-Ward's costumes—dazzlingly colorful and bold for the African lady, perfectly ordinary and nondescript for the Brit—brilliantly highlight the cultural differences between the two women.

 Blessing's play has its weaknesses: there are places where the dialogue sounds more writerly than it should (particularly when May quotes from a poem in the middle of one of her sentences), and the attempts to draw perfect parallels between the lives and values of the two characters occasionally feel forced. Allusions to the poem from which he drew his play's title and the use of Blue Willow china as an important symbol also falter. Nevertheless, Going to St. Ives is not only an enormously watchable play, it's an important one, that makes us take a hard look at some issues we'd rather complacently ignore. Ignorance may be bliss, but compassion is one of the things that makes us human—we need to be reminded of our duty to all who dwell on this planet with us. Here's a powerful, involving drama that does just that.

What if the gang from the Archies comic books graduated from Riverdale High and became real-life adults? What if Archie were gay, came out to his Dad, moved to New York City and became a writer, dating a Jimmy Olsen-like cub reporter? What if Veronica, the spoiled rich girl, roomed with Archie, Jughead, and Betty in an Alphabet City apartment and worked at the Whitney? What if Reggie, Archie's sometime nemesis, came down with a mysterious AIDS-like disease?

All of these what-ifs and more are examined by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa in his new play Golden Age. Following the lead of last year's FringeNYC hit Dog Sees God (which did the same sort of thing for the Peanuts gang), Aguirre-Sacasa has taken America's Favorite Teenagers and turned them into very troubled adults with very adult troubles. They've got new names: Archie is called Buddy Baxter here, but he's still the freckle-faced, friendly, carrot-topped All-American boy, even if he does tell us that he's been making out with school nerd Herbert Humphries for years now. Tapeworm Smith is the Jughead character, dim and perpetually hungry; perky blonde Rosemary Hope stands in for Betty; egotistical Freddie Smith is a ringer for Reggie; and of course spoiled heiress-type Monica Posh is Veronica.

Buddy leaves Riverdale for the University of Chicago, where he meets and eventually becomes roommate and lover to Nathan Leopold. Yes, that Nathan Leopold: the one who killed a 13-year-old boy for kicks with his pal Richard Loeb. A few years later, we find Buddy in the Big Apple, where he gets a job working for William Gaines at E.C. Comics, writing storylines for early horror and sci-fi comic books like "Tales of the Crypt." (This is the William Gaines who goes on to found MAD Magazine.) E.C. comes under fire for promoting juvenile delinquency, with a writer/psychologist named Frederic Wertham leading the charge; eventually there's a Congressional investigation and the magazine is ruined.

In Act Three of Golden Age, Buddy is working for Pixar and in a committed relationship with Jerry Youngman, a former cub reporter who has become moderately famous after surviving a bout with the scary plague that killed Buddy's old pal Freddie. They want to have a family, and in fact Rosemary is carrying their first child. But their hopes and dreams are dashed when Archie gets some disturbing, life-changing news.

If all of this plot summary makes you a little nervous about Golden Age, you're right: Aguirre-Sacasa has taken on way more here than he (or anyone else) can properly manage, and that's even before he introduces the two (contradictory) bombshells that facilitate his ironic, tragicomic ending. On the one hand, the playwright seems to want to comment on American life then and now using these archetypal comic book characters as fuel/ammunition: this is the part of Golden Age that works best. Scenes in which Buddy falls in love and, especially, in which Buddy comes out to his father feel authentic, honest, and warm; they offer the audience something genuine to react to.

But there's this whole weird Zelig thing going on in the play that never made sense to me: what is Buddy doing with Leopold and Loeb (and how/why does he time travel to the mid-1920s when the play is clearly set in contemporary times)? Similarly, the E.C. Comics episode turns out also to be based heavily in fact (though I didn't know that until I read the press kit after the show: is the average theatregoer really going to know this story?)—it's a piece of obscure history worth talking about, but what does it have to do with Buddy and his pals?

Pirandellian and metaphysical notions figure in the hasty resolution, along with an homage to Our Town that dissolves into post-modern parody. The net effect is: whazzat? What's going on here? I'm all for a playwright with ambition, but four divergent themes in a single two-hour play is going too far. Aguirre-Sacasa can write, especially resonant sincere stuff; what he needs to do is get a grip on his fancies and develop the several different play ideas included here (all promising, by the way) into several different plays.

The production is cleanly directed by Claire Lundberg and has been produced with immense care and attention to detail by Tobacco Bar Theatre Company. The acting is especially impressive: Christopher J. Hanke is terrific as Buddy, embodying all the iconography of Archie and making him into a flesh-and-blood, living man. Michael Chernus (Tapeworm), Sarah Elliott (Rosemary), Christopher Kromer (Freddie), and especially Tami Mansfield (Monica) nail their comic-book characters; Mansfield has the most to do, because Aguirre-Sacasa has a blast turning Monica loose in a variety of surprising situations in his play. Charles F. Wagner IV plays Buddy's Dad and a couple of other "father figures" with the proper authority. Greg Felden is excellent as Buddy's high school sweetheart Herbert and, less showily, as Gaines's assistant Al Feldstein at E.C. Comics (Kromer doubles, smartly, as Gaines). Cameron Cash is perfectly menacing and scuzzy as Richard Loeb. Only Patch Darragh seems miscast as the weak-willed Nathan and, particularly, as Buddy's main squeeze Jerry; Hanke deserves a cuter, more solid leading man than Darragh provides.

Golden Age is, for the most part, very entertaining. It would probably benefit from a few lines of dialogue that help audiences understand that the William Gaines/Frederic Wertham segment is based on fact (Monica and Rosemary are seen reading newspaper accounts of the Leopold and Loeb trial; that kind of verisimilitude would be useful for this sequence). And it would certainly benefit from significant sharpening of focus: it's just not clear to me what Aguirre-Sacasa is trying to tell us in this provocative play. And I think he does have quite a bit to say.

Fun fun fun ‘til Daddy takes the T-bird away.

That’s what the creators of Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys-inspired musical currently playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, want you to have when you see their show. You can tell by the non-stop barrage of energy, smiles, and gyrating flesh they throw at the audience. But, it’s hard at first to know how to feel about this confusing, garish spectacle of a show. Why does Good Vibrations inspire a reaction of utter indifference towards it? My friend who accompanied me to the opening night performance summed it up best: “It’s the kind of show you’d see on a cruise ship,” she said, and added that even though she enjoyed the show, she wouldn’t recommend that anyone pay money to see it.

And, therein lies the problem with Good Vibrations: the creators go all out trying to make it entertaining, but they never try to make it good. There is a difference.

For the record: the plot concerns three teenage boys from an unnamed Eastern town who decide to leave home after high school graduation and drive west to California. Since none of them owns a car, they dupe the local geek girl (who has secretly had a crush on one of the boys her entire life) into chauffeuring them cross country in hers. Once in California, the boys slowly fade into beach bum anonymity while the geek girl transforms into a swan whom everyone wants to date.

Not that the story matters. The creative team crams so many Beach Boys hits into Good Vibrations—33 in all—that book writer Richard Dresser’s efforts to find dramatic justification for most of them fail. Only the ballads “In My Room” and “Warmth of the Sun” work as feasible musical numbers. Good Vibrations also suffers from poor internal logic: any musical as concerned with surfing and warm weather as this one is that doesn’t reach the beach until the end of Act I—and then ends on a snowy night in Central Park—clearly doesn’t make much sense.

Director-choreographer John Carrafa provides undistinguished work here. He’s also hampered by a male ensemble that can neither sing nor dance—all of whom look doubly inept next to a female ensemble that can do both. Point of focus is also a problem: there is so much going on at all times that it’s hard for the audience to know where they should be looking. The rest of Good Vibrations feels random (belly rings and Brian Wilson do not go together) and sloppy (body mike cords cannot be hidden when one is shirtless).

Miraculously, one of the actors comes out of this morass looking good. As geek girl Caroline, Kate Reinders possesses the right loony energy for Good Vibrations. It also helps that she’s the only person on stage that doesn’t look like she’s embarrassed to be there.

Thankfully, composer Brian Wilson’s wonderful songs emerge unscathed. The company’s failure to do his work justice only reflects poorly on them, not him. Anyone seeking the magical, sun-soaked world that is conjured in his melodies, lyrics, and harmonies need look no further than the Beach Boys’ classic 1966 album Pet Sounds, or their definitive best-of Endless Summer. For there is none of that world to be found in Good Vibrations.

Like its title character, Gorilla Man is in an arrested state of evolutionary development. Crude and shallow, it makes no concessions towards the enduring complexities involved in being a human creature. In another show this might not be a problem—I’m by no means against wacky entertainment for wacky entertainment’s sake—but considering that this complexity is the very theme of the play, its lack of inclusion in the grain of the production presents something of a problem.

Gorilla Man is the latest from playwright Kyle Jarrow, whose work on such pieces as President Harding Is a Rock Star and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant have given him a reputation in some quarters as a mischievous wunderkind. In this new musical, Jarrow, who also composed, is placed center stage for the entire show, comically mincing and swaying at the piano like a hipster Liberace. A shrewder production might have placed the musicians on the sidelines and allowed the story—of a boy named Billy who discovers that he is the spawn of a violent circus freak—to take the primary focus. Instead, Jarrow remains the focus throughout, and it’s difficult to refrain from making him the butt of the play’s deficiencies.

The director, Habib Azar, is obviously responsible in part for this decision. And unfortunately, the story itself proves more absorbing in theory than in execution. Billy (Jason Fuchs) wakes up one morning with fur-covered arms, prompting his Mother (Stephanie Bast) to tell him the truth about his birth: that his father was the Gorilla Man, a hirsute carnival performer who was put in a high-security prison after a bloody killing spree. Initially intending to murder her son (who she had hoped would not grow up to be like his dad), she instead banishes him from home, sending him on a picaresque journey to discover the consequences of his genes.

This could be wonderfully heady, pop-opera stuff, but the relationship between the play’s broad comedy and its attempts to explore its emotional underpinning is shaky, with neither element bold enough to support the other. The creakiest jokes and the hoariest clichés are presented with great self-satisfaction, as if no one had ever deconstructed a horror film before. The wise truck driver; the cynical politician; the boozy, down-on-her-luck beauty; all of these characters and more appear to earnestly—but not too earnestly—debate the intertwining themes of fate and character as they apply to Billy’s simian future. Rather than deepening or subverting these archetypes, Jarrow merely uses them as cardboard signposts leading to the inevitable confrontation between Billy and his father (Matt Walton) in the loomingly portentous Prison on the Mountains.

The book’s problems, unfortunately, are not helped by the songs, which strain for rock-n-roll catharsis but lack character, especially when they wind up as platforms for American Idol-style pyrotechnics. Every mark, both musical and situational, is hit with dutiful predictability and the requisite amount of cheeky cuteness, resulting in a show so eager to please in its throwaway strenuousness that it becomes dull to watch: it strives to do all the work for you, yet doesn’t have dash enough to make it seem effortless.

In the end, little happens in Gorilla Man that couldn’t have been extrapolated by a brief description of its premise. In almost every calculated detail it neglects to leaves room for breath in its characters and situations, and, therefore, for the audience. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon; the raucous audience I sat with seemed to be highly entertained, and the cast and crew were obviously putting forth a great deal of effort. But is it too much to expect a play about humanity to feel human, even if it does feature gorilla men in the primary roles?

Walking in to be seated, I am greeted with no real set, just one black folding chair, stage left, and a large speaker stage right, from which is booming forth the disco song “I Love America.” Then the lights dim and a small spotlight illuminates the face of Ms. Fiona Walsh, who is about to be abducted by aliens who wish to take her to their ship to study, because she is, after all, a very special child. Thus begins Great White American Teeth, a delightful solo performance journey through Walsh's childhood from the age of eight until her landing upon American soil, in New York City, as an adult in 1994.

The once bare stage becomes filled with our imagination as we travel to the town of Roscrea, in the county of Tipperrary in Ireland. There, through Walsh's versatile artistry, we are introduced to a colorful roster of local characters. There’s Liam, the gossipy butcher who thinks he knows everyone’s business; the minister with the voice so booming you couldn’t sleep through a sermon if you wanted to; and the nun who spits when she speaks. The young Walsh longs to escape the conventions of her small town, where, “if you part your hair a different way, they would talk about you for weeks,” and feels she is destined for greater things. When she reads a magazine article on New York City she feels she has found her paradise.

We follow along through many adventures: her girlish infatuation with Warren Beatty and his big white American teeth, the “co-ed” community center disco dance for teens (some of the dancing alone is worth the price of admission), and, finally, winning a visa lottery to come to America. There’s much more, and each episode is loads of fun. When she finally gets to the Big Apple, her lively descriptions of what goes on in the city remind me of what it’s like when a relative comes to visit, and you see through their eyes all of the wonderful, amazing things in New York that we residents tend to take for granted.

Though director Virginia Scott keeps the action moving, I found myself wanting to know more about what happens to Fiona after she arrived in New York. Some slight trimming to the Ireland section, an intermission, and then a second act in New York City would be grand! But either way, with her sparkling energy, masterful mimicry, colorful phrasing, and dead-on comic timing, Walsh has the audience in her hand and almost constantly, erupting with laughter.

The oversized program supplied at Guantanamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" contains an impressive 19 pages of documentation about the alleged rights abuses against the prisoners interred at that American naval base. (It also includes a one-page advertisement for a nonprofit organization called The Center for Constitutional Rights and another for a book, co-authored by CCR's president Michael Ratner, entitled Guantanamo: What the World Should Know.)

What it doesn't include is a clear statement identifying the sources of Guantanamo's text: this is a documentary play, but the names and dates of the underlying interviews aren't provided anywhere. This is a serious problem for a work whose main arguments include the assertion that the U.S. government is lying to its people and the international community about what's really going on in this now-notorious military prison. I am entirely prepared to accept and embrace the damning information presented here—as is, I assume, practically everyone who will pay the 55 or 60 dollars to see this play—but I need some solid facts to support what's shown and said on stage. Without them, I can't tell the difference between artistic license and documentary truth—or, to put it another way, where persuasive political discourse ends and propaganda begins.

The shape of Guantanamo is docudrama, the form most famously molded by Moises Kaufman in The Laramie Project. Actors playing real people deliver lines that (I assume) these people actually said; some of the people represented here are a British Lord of Appeal (I guess that's a lawyer or judge) named Lord Steyn, a Major in the U.S. armed forces, a British MP, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, several Muslim men who were (and in some cases, still are) detained at Guantanamo, and members of some of their families. Names of all these people are given in the program, but it was sometimes hard to know who was who; there is, for example, a character in the play whose sister was killed in the World Trade Center attacks—I have no idea what his name was (or, for that matter, how he ultimately fit into the overall framework of the piece). Believe me, I cringe when actors on stage step forward and solemnly intone the name of whoever's speaking (the clumsy device that replaces an on-screen "title" in a documentary film)—but it sure is helpful.

So the script of Guantanamo, "by" Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo "from spoken evidence," is on the sloppy side. It is, nevertheless, provocative and compelling. In Act One, we hear from one of the detainees, the brother of another, and the father of one more about the back stories leading up to capture and imprisonment. Bisher al-Rawi, scion of a wealthy Iraqi family (residing in Britain since the rise of Saddam Hussein), was picked up in The Gambia, where he was helping his brother set up a food processing business. Moazzam Begg, a devout Muslim born in the U.K., was doing charitable work in Afghanistan. Jamal al-Harith was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, deciding to make a journey (for reasons never clear to me) to Pakistan and Afghanistan in October 2001. All three, innocent of any crimes as far as we can tell, are among the prisoners at Guantanamo; in Act Two, we learn about what happened to them and several other inmates, as well as anecdotal accounts of U.S. treatment of the prisoners and the cavalier disregard of international law by the Bush administration. (This last part rings truest in these ears.)

It's pretty difficult not to be moved by the sad story of a prisoner like Ruhel Ahmed, who left Guantanamo with his eyes badly damaged because he wasn't able to wear his contact lenses for two years; likewise it's tough not to get incensed by the hollow and changing rhetoric offered by our Secretary of Defense as the legal wrangling over the detainees' status progresses. But as I have already suggested, it's just as tough to imagine that the folks in the audience don't already know and firmly ascribe to what they're hearing: this is very much a case of preaching to the converted.

So I have to ask: what is Guantanamo for? My reaction, finally, is much the same as it was to Tim Robbins' anti-war satire Embedded earlier this year—at a relatively high ticket price, only well-heeled liberals are likely to show up to partake of what amounts to a group guilt trip. Wouldn't the resources and money be better used for a more direct style of activism?