Guys and Dolls is so darned good that even a production like this one—uneven and oftentimes indifferent—can't help but be entertaining. The craft of the thing is a marvel: the book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows is solid and funny, and the score by Frank Loesser approaches genius—how many shows boast a collection of songs so authentically witty and heartfelt (and sometimes both at once)?

It's based on stories and characters created by Broadway scribe Damon Runyon; it's billed accurately as a musical fable, which is exactly right because the denizens of this vision of Manhattan never existed, no more than the boy who cried "wolf" or the fox who complained of sour grapes did. Yet their auras endure: we wish for a world of gamblers and cops and nightclub singers and mission dolls like the ones in this show.

At the center of Guys and Dolls is Nathan Detroit, an unassuming rascal who operates "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York." Nathan has two problems at the moment: his girlfriend of fourteen years, Miss Adelaide ("the well-known fiancee"), is turning up the heat and demanding that they finally marry; and his clientele—a colorful passel of shady gents with monikers like Harry the Horse and Rusty Charlie—are demanding some action, even as the cops (led by Lt. Brannigan) are turning up the heat and making it impossible for Nathan to find a spot to hold the game. The likeliest candidate is Joey Biltmore's garage, but he needs a thousand dollars up front to clinch the deal, and Nathan doesn't have a thousand dollars.

Enter Sky Masterson, the smoothest and suavest gambler imaginable, a guy who will bet on anything as long as it's unlikely enough—such as whether or not Nathan knows the color of the necktie he has on. Nathan makes a $1,000 wager with Sky that he's sure he can't lose: that Sky will not be able to get a date with any particular doll of Nathan's choosing. The reason Nathan feels so confident is that he chooses Miss Sarah Brown—Sergeant Sarah Brown, of the Save-a-Soul Mission, a lovely but utterly unworldly missionary for whom the gamblers' lifestyle is anathema.

Will Sky win the bet? Will Sarah and Sky discover that they are, against the odds, soul mates? Will Nathan find a place to have the crap game? Will Big Jule, the ferocious and scary visiting mobster from Chicago who just keeps saying "Let's shoot crap" over and over again, get his wish? Will Miss Adelaide get over her psychosomatic long-term cold? Will Nathan and Adelaide get married?

Well, of course the answer to all these questions is yes; but you'll have a terrific time tracking all of these good-naturedly foolish storylines, thanks to the matchless charm and joyous effervescence of this show. And even though Stafford Arima's staging and particularly Patricia Wilcox's choreography feel more stilted and static than they ought to, Guys and Dolls' innate likeability keeps the proceedings from ever souring.

Robert Cuccioli (still perhaps best-known as the original star of Broadway's Jekyll and Hyde) is the standout among the leads, portraying Sky with a nice blend of vitality and insouciance that's very appealing. He sings the role gloriously: his renditions of the haunting "My Time of Day" and the heartfelt "I've Never Been in Love Before" are highlights, and his exuberant and energetic "Luck Be a Lady" gives the show its only real show-stopper. As his love interest, the sweet and innocent Sarah, Kate Baldwin has the requisite pluck and a pleasing soprano; she makes Sarah's charm song "If I Were a Bell" a real treat.

Less fortuitous is the casting of the other leading pair. Karen Ziemba, a great dancer, hardly gets an opportunity to show off that talent as Adelaide; she's also both less drop-dead gorgeous and less comically gifted than the role calls for—her performance of "Adelaide's Lament," one of the funniest songs ever created for the theatre, falls fairly flat. Even more problematic is Michael Mastro's Nathan, whose marble-mouthed fidgetiness suggests the late Buddy Hackett—hardly the type required. Robert Creighton, another fine dancer, is trapped in the role of Nathan's henchman Nicely-Nicely and mugs in it as if he were Mario Cantone; Tony Cucci is at sea as the Sheldon Leonard-esque Big Jule. But Bob Dorian is a charmer as Sarah's grandfather, Arvide Abernathy (though his singing of "More I Cannot Wish You," perhaps the show's loveliest song, is less assured than we'd like). And Tia Speros makes the most of what amounts to a cameo as Sarah's boss, General Cartwright, infusing her scenes with much-needed pep.

The sets are the same ones that Tony Walton created for the last Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls, a dozen years ago, and the costumes are clearly based on William Ivey Long's designs for the same production: they're gaudier and busier than they need to be. Indeed, that's the main problem with the production as a whole—broad, frenetic activity takes the place of positive energy and authenticity. It's a shame, but even a less-than-wonderful Guys and Dolls is still a good deal more fun than most of the fare written for the musical theatre in the last fifty years. Especially if you've not seen this show before, a trip to Paper Mill could well belong on your to-do list this summer!

It's been 37 years since the dawning of the Age of Aquarius; the stuff we were promised—"Harmony and understanding / Sympathy and trust abounding"—well, it just hasn't come true. What happened to us?

This was the first and also the last thing that resonated in my mind while I was watching Gallery Players' thrilling revival of the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," Hair. See this show because it's simply terrific: an electric entertainment featuring a host of talented, enthusiastic young artists who make glorious theatre out of a work that was written before most of them were even born; yes, it's in Brooklyn, but it's the most vibrant and genuinely exciting musical in all of New York City this season.

But there's another reason why I want you to trek to Park Slope sometime during the next three weeks: See Hair to feel the innocence and passion of an era that feels as distant as mimeograph machines or the entire family sitting down together on Sunday night to watch the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. In 1967, authors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, composer Galt MacDermot, directors Gerald Freedman and Tom O'Horgan, and producers Joseph Papp and Michael Butler summoned up the energy of a generation and put what amounted to a 2-1/2 hour happening on the New York stage. Taboos toppled: actors sang about sodomy and used the "f" word; draft cards were burned on stage and the American flag was used irreverently as a prop; blacks and whites kissed each other and talked about having sex; young men and women took off all their clothes and faced the audience, defiantly naked (albeit in silhouette) at the first act curtain.

And it's just like that again in this thoughtful, faithful production, which is beautifully directed and choreographed by Steven Smeltzer. Hair in 2004 turns out to be not a museum piece but a time capsule. With protests against our war paling beside the protests against their war, and with a scary Establishment suppressing a complacent polity far more smoothly and covertly than Rado and Ragni could ever have imagined, the show's raw subversiveness is a pleasure. It has, of course, lost its power to shock us—although the matter-of-factness of the nude scene can still feel like a bit of a surprise—but it nevertheless produces a huge jolt. Its second act, in particular, which includes a long drug-induced hallucination in which the ostensible protagonist, Claude Bukowski, imagines the horrors that await him should he be sent to Vietnam, is a harrowing, bitter, and stark condemnation of war, and also, not at all incidentally, a biting criticism of the hypocrisy of American imperialism. The only difference between then and now is that a lot more kids went overseas in those days; there's a moment in the show when Claude, about to get mustered into the army, is hugged long and hard by his roommate/best friend Berger that made me think how lucky most of us in the United States still are—how relatively few of us have, to date, been touched personally by the unnecessary war being fought thousands of miles away in our name by our government.

But I am perhaps getting a little ahead of myself. Hair is anarchic—it revels in that fact—but it does also have a bit of a storyline. Claude ("human being number 1005963297 dash J, Area Code 609") lives in the East Village with his hippie pals Berger and Sheila, where they smoke pot, make out, protest the Johnson administration, and make out some more. Claude's sort-of girlfriend Jeanie is pregnant (but he's not the father). Claude has been called up by the Draft Board; though Berger and a couple of their other friends, Hud (who is black) and Woof (who may be gay), have burned their draft cards, Claude is ambivalent. In sketches and vignettes, Claude and his friends explain their ideals to us and illustrate their way of life. Part circus and part rebuttal to every well-shaped musical comedy in the Rodgers & Hammerstein mode, the play breaks all the rules of narrative and the fourth wall along with it. A stranger (billed in the program as "Margaret Mead") asks a question from the audience and gets invited onto the stage, where she and her husband Hubert participate in a couple of silly musical numbers. Act One is all about exploding assumptions about how a musical—and by extension, a society—should operate, and it reaches a dizzying climax at a "Be-In"  in Central Park, with Claude leading the company in asking

Where do I go
Follow the river
Where do I go
Follow the gulls....

Where will they lead me
And will I ever
Discover why
I live and die

Act Two changes course dramatically, picking up on Claude's question; after a giddy opening, it focuses very squarely on this young man facing up to growing up, making this very adult decision to serve his country or run away. (Claude's father apparently has no connections that could get his son into the National Guard.) I was honestly startled by how emotionally involved I got; Hair turns out to be far more serious and far more mature than it ever lets on. There's a moment of sweet release in "Good Morning, Starshine," and then the musical reaffirms its radical credentials, rocking the rafters with an anti-war finale ("Let the Sunshine In") as heartfelt as it is necessary.

I recommend this journey to everybody. Smeltzer is certainly one of the major heroes of the evening, providing an effervescent, high-energy staging that perfectly balances the show's sense of fun with its authentic sense of purpose. Smeltzer's choreography is even better, making excellent use of the entire company and emphasizing, as the authors intend, the tribal nature of the ensemble. His production spills out into the auditorium time and again, which is mostly great; only during "Starshine," when I really wanted to have a moment of introspection, was I bothered by Smeltzer's inclusiveness. The set by Roberto Sanchez-Camus is simple and ingenious, and the costumes by Jenna Rossi-Camus are colorful and deliciously suggestive of the period. Ken Legum (keyboards) leads an outstanding quintet of musicians, including Derek Baird (guitar), Ron Farricco (guitar), Nathan You (bass), and Jay Bolski (drums), who make the music sound great.

The cast—22 enthusiastic young performers—is smashing. Making particularly strong impressions are: Keith Broughton (very funny as Hubert and very appealing as one of the anonymous members of the Tribe); Adam Enright (doing some spectacular dancing as Woof), Barrett Hall (fearless and forward as Berger), Paul Lane (on-target as sad, conflicted Claude), Lisa Villalobos (who gets one of the choicest musical moments, the touching "Frank Mills"), and Aly Wirth (as sweet, pregnant Jeanie). I fully expect to see at least some of these names headlining on Broadway within the next few years—that's how good these folks are.

One interesting side note: I was surprised by the female characters in Hair, who are mostly portrayed as girlfriends—in fairly dysfunctional relationships, to boot—rather than as strong-minded individuals. For example, we see Sheila helping to organize the Be-In; but the only time we really hear her is when she sings "Easy to be Hard" to Berger, chiding him for neglecting her. I mention this only to point out that in this one respect, times have absolutely changed (hurrah!): when the next generation wrote their Hair--I'm talking about Rent—strong women abounded.

But to return to the main idea: See Hair. Now.

There is a moment in Happy Days that should resound: the moment Winnie realizes the audience is watching her. It’s a quiet moment, not the crux of the play. She simply says, “I feel like there are eyes on me.” It is the only time she is not speaking to her absurdly distant husband, Willie. It is the one moment in Happy Days that Samuel Beckett turns to the audience and winks.

This is one of the many moments that fall flat in the Worth Street Theater Company’s current production, now on at Classic Stage Company. This is because, as Winnie, famous queer comic Lea DeLaria never gives us the slightest impression she’s anywhere but on a stage, begging us to laugh at her raised eyebrows, funny voices, and ceaseless energy. She works against the text as hard as she possibly can, her eyes firmly on entertaining us. It is because of this that she fails with an impressive amount of gusto.

Happy Days features a middle-aged woman, Winnie, buried up to her waist—and then neck—in sand. It is implied strongly that the Earth is barren of much life, and that she and Willie are resigned to living out what remains of their days within their limitations. Winnie speaks almost the entire text of the play. She wonders what she will do when words fail her, as they always do, writes Beckett. She enacts her rituals, her text economical, constructed as an exercise in futility. But throughout, she is given moments of profound beauty and yes, comic lines that ring with an ache of truth. “Oh earth,” she says, “You old extinguisher.”

Watching DeLaria perform this delicate text is like watching the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin perform Krapp’s Last Tape. She bellows lines that cry out to be whispered, she adds funny voices to long speeches, rushes through pauses and gesticulates wildly as if she’s drawing the audience a map to each joke. When there is no punch line or gag inherent in the text, she simply invents one. In the second act, when Winnie is buried up to her neck, there is only DeLaria’s head exposed. She manages to continue to overact under these circumstances, a feat that I found almost deserved a round of applause. Almost.

It’s frustrating for a Beckett-lover (and there are many of us) to see this work overrun by an artist with an agenda beyond illuminating an already difficult text. Happy Days has as many levels as can be found in a modern play. An exploration of marriage can be found here. A dissemination of how human beings find meaning within their limitations. A high stakes struggle for at least spiritual survival in a mundane and bleak landscape. Winnie is, like many of Beckett’s main characters, us. She speaks for the audience, for us. When she is larger than we are, a show-woman, she loses our sympathy and, in her impossible situation, our belief in her dilemma.

That’s not to say DeLaria is completely at fault. In fact, there are a few moments when she rests and simply speaks the text, exhausted, and becomes utterly compelling. It would have been a pleasure to see more of this. Instead, she finds herself unleashed and riffing.

For his part, as Willie, David Greenspan is clearly incredibly skilled, but misdirected in much the same way. In the first act, his work is detailed and specific, his voice ringing out the comedy of each of his few and poignant lines. Then, in the second half, he is reduced to a long comedy routine, near the play’s end, and the action jerks to a screeching halt as we wait for him to stop the haranguing and get to the heart of the matter.

Much of the responsibility for this falls on the shoulders of director Jeff Cohen. Cohen seems to be after the laughs in his version. There is an academic defense for this: much of Beckett’s work maps out silent movie or vaudeville routines. He is a comic writer in many ways, so it's the right instinct not to leave Happy Days in the throes of despair, letting Winnie languish in the pauses and enact only the hopelessness of her situation. The play is called, after all, Happy Days. Cohen paints some very pretty pictures, and takes a lot of creative license that sexes the play up a bit. But he overreaches, I fear, with the broad humor, particularly when such deft comic performers could have underplayed so beautifully. Where comedy could serve to highlight and enable the humanity of this bold play, Cohen’s version gives DeLaria wide berth, and she gets between the audience and this classic text.

While it’s always valuable and I would never discourage an audience from experiencing Beckett live (even a misfire performed is more powerful than a sit-down reading), Beckett’s work is a tightrope walk, and failure is more common than success. Much like Shakespeare. In Beckett, though, there are so few elements that a single actor or choice can take away most of the pleasures. So it is with this production, sadly. In Happy Days, Beckett quotes Shakespeare’s famous line: “Laughing wild amid severest woe.” This production seems stuck in the laugh, and certainly gets wild; but there is little evidence of the “severest woe” that might make such laughter necessary.

Musical theatre’s most powerful defense is that it allows emotional heights that the spoken word simply can’t achieve. When the emotional levels of joy and despair get too full and bristling, suddenly we are whisked into a surreal world of dance and song that expresses an inner life. In its best form, it’s a world of almost constant soliloquizing, of personal expression, of amazing freedom.

I imagine that this is why Harold Pinter doesn’t write musicals. And it's also why Harold & Maude: The Musical is such a faltering, uninspiring, and tiresome bore. The film, which ironically is known for its use of the Cat Stevens soundtrack to beautiful effect, is a cult classic of quiet understanding and freedom from the status quo. This musical takes the very things that made the film work, and throws them out in favor of pat moralizing and icky affirmations about how we should “embrace living, not dying.”

Harold & Maude, in both forms, tells the story of a 19-year-old man named Harold Chasen who is obsessed with suicide and death. He entertains himself, and the audience, with a series of creative mock suicides and ghastly acts. He meets Maude, a woman approaching her 80th birthday, at a funeral for someone neither of them knows. She is full of energy, of vitality, but both revolve around death like satellites. Their understanding becomes romance despite the generational chasm.

The musical version keeps the essential threads of the plot, but makes at every turn an artless, bloodless choice. The film takes place in the 1970s, and so the idea that Harold could be drafted into the Vietnam War weighs heavily. When we discover in the film that Maude may well be a Holocaust survivor, the way she lives takes on new resonance. The combination of these generations’ wars and fears deepens their connection in a subtle, subversive way. The Musical throws this all out, leaving Harold's death obsession without a context beyond what appears to be a squirrelly sense of self-imposed isolation. Maude is shown to have a history, but it’s entirely abstracted. The story takes place, we’re told in the program, at the “end of the last millennium.” But if this is supposed to be 1999 or thereabouts, the values of the characters, their technology, and their language, all seem still locked in the Vietnam era. The only thing that’s missing is that messy old war, and in this streamlined version, there’s just no room for it.

Harold is a very quiet young man in the beloved film. In The Musical, Harold sings what’s on his mind, and it’s never very profound. He stands up while his mother is babbling and sings “There must be something out there / Something more than this!” Underwhelming, to say the least. With words that uninteresting, he becomes so much less than a young man who feels and acts silenced. He becomes a cliché, the discontented youth. His suicides, in the film, constitute Harold's rare moments of self-expression. In The Musical, they’re sight gags used to show how unhappy he is. They are reduced to elaborate tantrums.

The book and lyrics are in the hands of Tom Jones, the 77-year old writer of The Fantasticks. His partner, the younger composer Joe Thalken, is a relative newcomer with a thin resume. While it would be fun to say that the difference in their ages brings them some needed perspective to this oddball project, their lack of depth seems to cross the generational divide rather effortlessly. Dull songs like “Round and Round (The Cosmic Dance),” “The Road Less Traveled,” and “A Song in my Pocket” could be entirely lifted from this piece and placed into any generic love story. The direction is squalid and unimaginative as well… little of the stage is used in most scenes, using tight black curtains to frame the scenes tightly on the large Paper Mill Stage.

The only pleasure comes from the performers. Estelle Parsons (known to many as the mother of TV’s Rosanne, leader of the Actor’s Studio, Oscar winner) graces the stage with effortless singing and performance as Maude. She’s right for the role: it just isn’t written to match her. Eric Millegan as Harold shows just why he is considered such a rising star. His voice and poise are second to none. His Harold might not be the ghostly and reserved Harold that many know and love, but that’s just not the Harold that’s written for him.

The other performers acquit themselves well, playing a series of smaller roles. The problem is not their talent, it's that much of what they have to work with is ethnic humor, sketch comedy humor, and defecation humor. They rise above the material as written; and that is no small feat.

Harold and Maude: The Musical is yet another in a long line of musicals inspired by movies, with similar results: pulling the life out of a story not naturally made for this medium. This is apparently the first “new” musical that Paper Mill has commissioned in years. It begs several questions: is this new at all? And, instead of returning to tried and true material to squeeze a few dollars from the curious, why not actually look for the wholly original? The results are more dependable at least: no unkind comparisons to something beloved, no struggling to re-create a magic that was probably a happy accident to begin with. Perhaps with a different creative team, a musical of this material would not be unsalvageable. I’d venture to guess that’s unlikely, though. The musical theatre genre just isn’t well suited to express the uniquely quiet angst of Harold & Maude.

“Did you know your soul is actually a harmful parasite?” Milo Farznik does. He’s got a cure and is ready to sell it to you, infomercial-style. Caveat emptor: it’s a soul-sucking camera. Farznik wants to take your picture, thereby taking your soul. This all fits nicely into his diabolical scheme to take over the world.

To do this, he enlists the help of his trusty dog, Nero. Nero is a rather special mutt—he walks upright, he’s got a penchant for philosophy and language, and is Farznik’s right-hand… um, er… “Man” for the soul-sucking job. He’s sweet, he’s smart. Oh, and he can sing and dance and is somewhat of a ladies man.

Sound a little strange? Well, my friend, these are strange times. Playwright/director Harold Lehmann understands this and offers Have U Seen My Soul? as an attempt to make light of the situation at hand while poking fun at it and questioning it in a metaphysical realm. What better way to do this than a musical!?

Have U Seen My Soul? is “a musical about morality in the digital age.” "Anti-musical” is actually more apropos for this piece; it is so far removed from the glitz and glamour of the lights of Broadway that you might forget you’re in a theatre in the first place. It is also so very smart and entertaining that you will probably have a really good time.

The design of the whole piece is very simple. There are a few standard plot lines: the evil-doer wants to rule the world, the secret agent steps in to foil the plan, the pretty girl steps in to scheme in her own special womanly way, and the dog that narrates is visited by his dead aunt and uncle who impart wisdom upon him… ok, maybe that last part isn’t so common, but you catch my drift. The madman’s laboratory of a set looks like it was drawn with a Sharpie onto one of mom’s old bed sheets (and it’s perfect!) and the one-man orchestra (the excellent Silas Hoover, who also composed the music) sits just off stage left to chime in musically.

The bare center stage is where the action takes place. The script seems simple but is layered with contemporary political satire. My favorite moment involved Hoover giving voice to “the President” on a phone call from the swash-buckling FBI agent. The agent is trying to secure a plan of action from the President and is under intense time constraints; the evil Farznik is about to put his soul-sucking into full-throttle. Completely oblivious to the urgency of the situation at hand, Hoover’s President, in a high-pitched cartoony garble, natters on about the mundane: most notably his golf game. The resemblance to our present day situation is strikingly comical.

Robert Weinstein is adorable as our hero, Nero the dog. Not since John Candy gave us his “Mog” (half man, half dog) in Spaceballs has there been a more charming man-beast. But the real show stopper here is Nicholas Jumara as Special Agent Boyd Lawsun. His TV cowboy entrance, swagger, and, honestly, his hilarious belt buckle, put him right up there with the likes of legendary crime fighters Starsky and Hutch or even Ponch and John.

Have U Seen My Soul? is a terrific example of how alive the theater scene is outside of Manhattan. So hop on the L train, get in there, grab a beer (Pabst in cans—after all, it’s Williamsburg, hipster), kick back and get ready to laugh.

Hazard County takes place in Kentucky (where, in fact, there is no actual Hazard County); it also sort of takes place in our common popular cultural memory, in the Hazzard County where Bo and Luke Duke used to race around (on TV) in their souped-up cars defying the local sheriff. (Bear with me, this will make sense in a minute.)

The play revolves around Ruth, a young woman with two small children (twins—Quinn and Quintin). Ruth's husband, Michael, was killed only a few weeks after the twins were born, and she has managed since then as a single parent. Her family's business, a local general store, has just failed (it's suggested that "big guys" like Wal-Mart had a role in this, although it's possible that there may be other reasons for its demise); Ruth now has a low-paying job at a local factory. She's lost her home and is living, at the moment, with her friend Camille; Quinn and Quintin camp out in sleeping bags on the living room floor. In every way, Ruth and her family seem to be among the millions of striving anonymous Americans without much of a lifeline, braving out threats of poverty and homelessness while community and government seem unequipped to provide any assistance.

Well, every way but one: Camille keeps alluding to some kind of fund—money, we come to understand, donated after Michael's untimely death to help Ruth and her family survive. Right now, this money is in a bank in Atlanta and Ruth seems loath to touch it. What's going on here? As Hazard County plays itself out, details about Ruth's past—what actually happened to Michael, where the money really came from—are gradually revealed. And yes, in a way, Ruth's secrets have something to do with that popular TV show that starred John Schneider and Tom Wopat.

The Duke brothers, you may recall, were high-spirited good ol' boys, moonshiners who spent their days cheerfully evading the law. People who watched The Dukes of Hazzard loved it because it was a hoot; it was too good-natured to feel subversive, they would argue; too empty-headed to actually mean anything. But playwright Allison Moore doesn't buy that—she thinks (and I'm inclined to agree with her) that everything means something. Fun TV shows featuring leading characters who display a Confederate flag on their car are, at best, passive-aggressive racist. Dumb kids—like Michael, maybe—who don't understand this can easily get themselves into trouble. Smarter, more mature people—like Ruth, maybe—have difficulty closing their eyes to the deeper moral dilemmas that misappropriation of potent symbols like that flag can lead to.

Because Moore unravels Ruth's particular dilemma so gently and open-heartedly, we don't see it coming; Hazard County feels much more like a feel-good romantic comedy for its first hour and a half, as Ruth meets a Fox-TV news producer from Los Angeles named Blake in a local bar and the two find themselves increasingly attracted to one another. Blake seems like the godsend Ruth needs—a smart, compassionate guy who will rescue her from her bad fortune and help her start a new life, maybe as far away as Minnesota, Blake's home state. But the past—and the Dukes—catch up with her.

I find that Hazard County wears extremely well: days after seeing it, I'm still pondering some of the issues it raises, and contemplating the thorny and complicated scenarios that Moore has invented for her characters to cope with. I admire it most for doing two things: first, for looking at characters that almost never get looked at by contemporary art, save the broad stereotyping of shows like The Dukes of Hazzard—Ruth and Camille represent as taken-for-granted and/or ignored a demographic as any in this country, I reckon; so Moore is almost brave in giving them a voice here. Second, I love that Ruth and especially Camille are so darned smart and articulate. Camille's bar conversation ranges through economics, politics, and a variety of other social and cultural concerns. Moore is reminding us folks out on the edges that everybody in America's middle isn't uneducated or stupid. Good call.

Moore's play is receiving a splendid production from the new but very impressive Themantics Group. Producer Jay Aubrey has done a fine job marshaling resources to provide a polished, professional ambiance for this show; director Blake Lawrence does her customary thoughtful and unobtrusive best to bring the script to life on stage. Jeanne Slater (Ruth), Alice Barden (Camille), and Stephen Bienskie (Blake) all deliver outstanding performances—their characters are nuanced, interesting, admirable, flawed individuals. John Grady and Kate VanDevender, both adults, play the 8-year-old twins Quinn and Quintin (VanDevender is particularly persuasive and compelling as a little girl); they also take on a variety of anonymous roles as Dukes of Hazzard viewers whose commentary is peppered throughout the play as counterpoint to the main story—I'm not sure if this was primarily an artistic choice or an economic one, but it stretches these two actors somewhat thinly (and it's also fairly confusing, at least at first); it's the production's one misstep.

Jen Varbalow's set—a few spare renderings of rooms with just enough furniture to fill each one out, framed by a backdrop that looks like all the billboards and signs on the side of a country road collapsed together into a single glorious mural—is both beautiful and entirely functional. The other design elements—Erin Murphy's costumes, Daniel Ordower's lighting, and Joanna Lynne Staub's sound—all work together to further define the place and mood of this quirky and fascinating new play. This is a piece quite unlike anything else on the boards at the moment; I highly recommend it.

One of the numerous reasons I go to the theatre is to learn something—to have pulled forth from within me thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are surprising and stimulating. I am interested in seeing someone’s wonderful and horrifying discoveries and witnessing how they cope. It is no fun to simply have my currently-held beliefs reaffirmed, nor is it very exciting to watch an artist effectively lecture me on what he already knows, as though he is presenting a scientific paper.

Trauma—the shock that sends us into certain kinds of neurotic patterns of behavior, which fate us a life that is dissatisfying or frightening or dangerous to ourselves or others—is one name for the material of which drama is made. The dramatist shows us what happens when a person wishes to change his life or escape it, or when he is scared to change, but it is thrust upon him. Whether in the end, he breaks or perpetuates these mundane or deleterious cycles is almost beside the point; his struggle is what impresses me.

After hearing Michael Mack describe in his one man show, Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues), growing up with a mother who is schizophrenic to a brutal degree, I admire him for having the psychological wherewithal to organize this trauma in a coherent way; more so for developing and touring with this piece for years. In fact, he regularly presents it for consumers and providers of mental health services as well as at national conferences and for the faculty and students of medical schools.

His performance is part monologue, part poetry slam, and part oration—his words are well-chosen and his descriptions are often filled with lush imagery—but for most of the ninety minutes, I was not engaged. As an adult, his tone of voice is resigned and it trembles when he is a child, yet consistent throughout is a sing-song quality. This is very eerie. We are being protected from something. He tells us a number of harrowing stories and how they affected him, but we have to take his word for it.

In scientific circles, we believe you because you have a great deal of research rooted in rational thought; your feelings, your internecine emotional whims are of no interest, and are, in fact, detrimental to your presentation. The exact opposite is true of theatre. Whatever intellectual and philosophical skill you have used to fashion your play, if that irrational need is gone, that cabalistic spark from which you started the play has been snuffed out, we too remain in the dark.

It’s a rare event when an acting legend takes the stage, but even rarer still when one performs in a $15 basement showcase. Amazingly enough, famed acting teacher Kristin Linklater has chosen to take part in such a production, playing the title role in Friendly Fire Theatre’s presentation of Euripides’ Hecuba. The sparse production gives Linklater plenty of room to display her considerable skills, and director Alex Lippard has wisely decided to keep the action solidly focused on her.

That action takes place just after the fall of Troy. Hecuba, the former Trojan Queen, has entered into her new role as a slave. Only the thoughts of her two remaining children, Polyxena (played by Heather Tom) and Polydorus (Lucas Blondheim), keep her going, but through the course of the play, we learn that both are to be taken from her. Linklater captures the grief of a suffering mother perfectly, portraying these extreme emotions while remaining believable. Helmar Augustus Cooper stands out in his messenger’s role, and most of the cast is very strong, but soap opera star Tom unfortunately doesn’t have the acting chops to compete with her cast-mates (though it is exciting to see “Victoria” from The Young and the Restless in such a small venue). The production values are low, consistent with the ticket price, but Lippard makes the most of what’s available to him, using Aaron Black’s lighting design to full effect. Only the modern costumes jar with the ancient script, but this small detail is easily forgettable with such great performances on display.

Producer Les Gutman has done a great job bringing this production to fruition at a reasonable price. There should be more producers like him, presenting AFFORDABLE great theatre (and better than a lot of things on Broadway!). You won’t find a better deal in New York, for the next three weeks, anyway.

Discussing Hedda Gabler has never been easy. Unlike the social issues plays Ibsen’s audience had come to expect from him, Hedda was the author’s attempt to simply write about “human beings, human emotions, and human destinies.” The result is a play with a central character who is so complex, so human that contemporary theatergoers had no idea what to make of her. In fact, what to this day fascinates and discomfits about this now-classic work is the question of what, if anything, Ibsen made of his heroine himself.

To present an audience with such a volatile, destructive, covertly romantic, frigid and promiscuous, deeply caring and manipulative, vital and removed, depressed and livid—or as she describes herself, “bored”—character and neither condemn nor condone her actions is a dangerous choice. When a director and an actress work together to make sense of this character, to rationalize her actions, Ms. Gabler can become a tame and useful dramatic tool in learning, via theatre, the reasons people might have for behaving in certain frightening, “amoral” ways.

But, as wrought by Ibsen, she will not be tamed, nor will she be used by anyone. Pre-dating by forty years Freud’s writings on the subject, his title character has a death wish—that is, a wish to die in her own fashion. She is a scorpion who would rather poison herself than fall prey to any other creature. To “interpret” her would be to snuff out her essential self.

Utterly unclassifiable and contrary to the core, Elizabeth Marvel’s Hedda Gabler as directed by Ivo van Hove (in a production now running at New York Theatre Workshop) is a portrayal that satisfies as much as it confounds. She is not glamorous—in fact, she’s dressed as though she’s about to paint the bathroom—and she does not bother with trying to win you over. This is a selfish woman, and presented matter-of-factly, she may not gain your sympathy but you just might find yourself empathizing, against your better judgment.

Of course it is impossible to bring something to the stage without interpreting it. But perhaps the best description of van Hove’s “take” is that it is free of didacticism; that it is from Hedda’s perspective, the character least interested in moral instruction. Onstage throughout most of the play—quite often doing nothing, but doing it very well—Marvel shows us, without trying to hide, explain, or promote, the sheer hell of being Hedda: anhedonic, perpetually disappointed by the lack of heroism in the men in her life, and jealous or impatient with the women. In between every scene, Marvel steps to the end of the stage and pauses for a moment, giving us full access to her inner life; her expression is maddeningly opaque, as inaccessible to herself as she is to us. There are but few moments when she cracks open: once in a moment of rage (destroying vases of flowers to Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”), and once in a moment of victory (after successfully shaping another character’s destiny).

Jason Butler Harner is the scholarly George Tesman, her new husband with whom she has just returned from a lackluster (according to her) six-month honeymoon to a new yet fairly unfurnished house. (The wit of Jan Versweyveld’s set and lights makes the design a character unto itself.) Harner’s Tesman is at once sexy, bookish, and petulant; he is not obsequious to Hedda, but relatively immune. His aunt and former caretaker, Julia (Mary Beth Piel), however, is not. Also quite sexy, strutting around with the self-assurance of a real estate agent, she in fact cares a great deal about what Hedda thinks of her, and Piel’s performance of this is a little heartbreaking. And throughout the course of the evening, their servant Berte (in a hilarious, bone-dry portrayal by Elzbieta Czyzewska) cares less and less for her new mistress.

Eilert Lovborg (Glenn Fitzgerald) is the mentally unstable former lover and now best-selling author whose literary and personal destiny Hedda wishes to control both for reasons of her husband’s advancement and, paradoxically, out of a perverse desire to see him live (and die) heroically at a time when men’s lives are ruled by convention. Marvel and Fitzgerald are fire and fuse and their scenes together are dazzling when they are alone. Ana Reeder’s Mrs. Elvsted, the woman who pines for Lovborg, sobered him up, and assisted him on his most recent book, is a delightfully oblivious third-wheel. Finally, there is Judge Brack, (the gregariously menacing John Douglas Thompson), who turns out to be a greater manipulator than Hedda, and to whom she briefly submits before she takes her own life.

“People don’t do things like that,” Judge Brack utters on finding her body. The ending and many moments preceding it are still quite shocking in van Hove’s masterful production. He and Marvel (along with their fine collaborators) are offering us a Hedda Gabler that may be as jarring to today’s audiences as when the play premiered in 1890. And sadly, artists don’t often do things like that.

Is it cynical to not believe in miracles? Is utter certainty a virtue or a weakness? These and other questions of truth and its relativity form the core of John Belluso’s timely new play Henry Flamethrowa, now playing at Michael Imperioli’s posh Studio Dante.

The plot is much less dense than the subject matter. A reporter comes to a house where, reputedly, miracles have been occurring. The medium through which they occur is a young girl who has been in a catatonic state for almost a decade. Her father, a devout Catholic, believes that the holy blood and oils that have been seeping from the religious statues placed around her bed have healing powers. The word has gotten out and now people flock to his front lawn in the hopes of being healed. His son, Henry, is an intelligent and somewhat disturbed young man. He is obsessed with the idea that God wants him to pull the plug on his sister’s respirator because he believes the miracles to be a hoax perpetrated by his father. The father of course denies any wrongdoing, no matter how much proof is stacked up against him.

So Belluso raises the question of who to believe and cleverly never answers it. Instead he leaves it up to the audience to decide, and when it comes to miracles I think that’s the best policy. The question of removing the little girl’s life support is another one best left to the individual and considering all the media attention that surrounded the Schiavo case and, more recently, the fireman who actually woke up after a ten year coma, the subject is like a fresh wound in this country. This play is not an attempt to heal that wound. It’s not even a bandage. It pokes at the wound to see where it hurts. Belluso also shows us the power that belief holds to enlighten and to blind us.

All three characters are utterly certain of their respective positions and they all attempt to push their truth on the others. Belluso seems to be asking us whether it is a moral absolute that we not attempt to coerce those who we think are absolutely wrong. If everything is relative, including truth and morals, then how can this absolute (or any absolute) exist?

The fact that I find this sort of paradox infinitely interesting made it difficult for me to snap out of my pondering and become emotionally engaged with the characters. Belluso tries to balance heart and head in the story but it just didn’t work for me. The script is so bogged down with heady concepts from the existence of miracles to removal of life support that I found myself sitting in judgment and poking holes in the characters' logic when the playwright was clearly trying to get me to feel something. But I didn’t. I honestly don’t know if this is my fault, the script’s fault, or the actors'.

The ensemble is very strong. There is no lead character and each has a momentary revelation. Tim Daly as the spiritual, heart-driven father comes across as typecast because of his goody-goody persona but he manages to be convincing enough to cast doubt on his actions. However, he has several moments of intense emotion that I just didn’t buy. Yvonne Woods, on the other hand, plays the lovely young reporter with ulterior motives with such simple sincerity that I found myself tracking her every move on stage. Finally, Jake Smith as Henry is for the most part natural and unaffected. He is an impressive young actor with a lot of potential.

Director Nick Sandow does a fine job conducting his actors. He keeps the pace and the thoughtful acting style even and copes with the small playing space very well. Scenic designer Victoria Imperioli makes the set look great though a bit cluttered. The interior design of the whole theatre is really quite nice. It is like an 18th century French chateau.

I walked away from Henry Flamethrowa thinking. I like that. I didn’t come to any conclusions that I had not already considered. I still don’t believe in miracles—I believe that my perceptions are inadequate to know one way or another. I still would want my family to pull my plug—I just don’t find life that sacred. What this show has in abundance are timely issues that I don’t think will ever go away. For that reason alone I think it’s worth seeing.

"He was only dangerous when he got other people to follow blind, under his control.... And you followed him. Did nothing to stop him.... That ain't his fault. That's your fault. People like you. Because Evil knows exactly what it is. What are you, exactly?"

This is a dangerous play.

And that's almost all I am at liberty to tell you, without ruining the many grand surprises that playwright Brian Dykstra and director David Mogentale have cooked up for you in Hiding Behind Comets. Hands down one of the finest new plays of the season, this edgy suspense drama is both a superb ghost story and a joltingly subversive study of human politics. Go see it.

It takes place in a bar—a little out-of-the-way place in a little out-of-the-way town (the script says it's in California, but I think it could be anywhere in the U.S.A.) The location is brilliantly realized by set designer Mark Symczak, who has provided a cozy naturalistic set complete with working lighted signs and a full stock of beer and liquor, a good deal of which gets consumed during the play.

The bartender on duty this particular night is Troy, a good-looking but fairly ordinary-seeming young man of 22. His father owns the place; his twin sister, Honey, a scrappier, edgier version of himself, is hanging out with her friend Erin, who is Troy's current girlfriend. It's twenty minutes to one; all three are waiting to close the bar at 2:00am so that they can go to a party at Billy's house. They would leave right now, but they've got a customer, a middle-aged fellow whose name, we will soon learn, is Cole.

Events are set into motion—slowly, teasingly—when Cole asks if there's a cigarette machine. This occasions the first in a series of mini-diatribes that (a) define Cole as a maverick, or eccentric, or perhaps something worse; and (b) amuse, and then unsettle, the three young people. Cole has a way of getting under the skin: he's a vintage Dykstra creation, a mouthpiece against oppression like some latter-day Lenny Bruce. Plus, he's real creepy:

TROY: You can smoke outside.
COLE: Can I?
TROY: Yeah.
COLE: Gee.
TROY (to HONEY): ...So, if you guys can just wait--
COLE: You mean they haven't passed some law yet where I can only smoke in my own home?
TROY: What?
COLE: Or car, or private club, or tree house with its own air filtration system, or plane, or boat outside of territorial waters, or bomb shelter? Is that what you're telling me? ...I said: Is that what you're--
TROY: I don't know.
COLE: You don't know. Well, what do you think?

At Honey's suggestion, Troy and Erin go downstairs to the storeroom where they make love, and when they (presumably) climax, she does too, leaning against the bar, temporarily distracted from her conversation with Cole. Honey and Troy share things in that uncanny way twins sometimes do, she explains. And, well, okay—Honey is a little bit creepy too.

Honey and Cole the stranger talk alone for awhile, about, eventually, the bogeyman and whether Honey is adopted (she insists she is not). After Troy and Erin rejoin them, Cole tells them a very scary story about something that happened to him 22 years ago.

And so Dysktra builds his eerie tale, raising the weirdness bar with unexpected detours and revelations. Though there's something vexingly resonant in the stuff that's said, mostly it feels tantalizingly like a ghost story told around a campfire late one light. Someone's going to reach through some darkness and grab somebody—that is palpable. Someone is going to say, "If there's one person in this room who shouldn't walk out of here alive, it's you." There will be brawls, tests, drinking, guns, baseball bats. Dysktra and Mogentale will deliver the promised scare—Hiding Behind Comets works exactly like a great horror tale—and they'll also turn the world inside-out for a few minutes and make us look at perceived wisdom and wonder if any of it is actually wise. There will be moments when you'll be both afraid to look and unable to look away.

I love this play. I wish I could tell you more about it without giving important stuff away. But I can't.

I can say that Mogentale's direction is tight and effective and just the right amount showy; and that all four actors do outstanding work here, with Moira MacDonald in absolute command of her craft as the mercurial Honey, Amber Gallery fine as Erin, and Dan Moran and Robert Mollohan enormously compelling as Cole and Troy, respectively.

The rest you'll have to find out for yourself. Which is, on more than one level, exactly what Dykstra is daring you to do.

Last night at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I saw a show called History of the Word that will take its place on the very short list of shows I would describe as revelations, and I am sure I am not alone. The love child of Orin Wolf and Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, it is a celebration of music, dance, language, and the human spirit incorporating simple accompaniment and screen projections. History of the Word deserves a wide audience of all ages.

But how do I tell you about this show? To give a simple description of the content here might scare some people away. Much of the show, for instance, is poetry, which grew out of a workshop of spoken-word poets put together by Maharaj, the show’s director, to explore cultural and sexual identities. Some of you might not care much for poetry. I’m not crazy about most poetry myself. But the poetry here is alive, richly colorful, and vibrantly presented. It is urban, contemporary, and deeply human. You will relate to it and be shaken by it. You will not be able to keep from reacting out loud.

Also, the show is billed as a “hip-hop musical.” This will surely be a draw for many people. But I worry that there are a great many more who will automatically pass the show up because of this. Hip-hop, after all, is a movement of art and culture that grew out of urban youth communities of color and some people might assume this is show they will not relate to or be moved by. The term hip-hop has also of late become synonymous with rap, which, for some people, connotes negative things like violence, materialism, and misogyny. Well, the show is certainly a hip-hop musical in the purest sense. The story of a day in the lives of a group of high school students is told using all the classic artistic devices of hip-hop—rapping, MCing, DJing, break dancing, and beatboxing. But whether you usually like this stuff or not, you will be rocking in your seat from the opening number because of the powerful characters, the electric performances, and the revelation (yes, revelation) of the words. And no, the show does not shy away from the tough issues facing teens today, including violence, materialism, and misogyny, not to mention pregnancy, poverty, self-image, racial issues, religious issues, and the war in Iraq that is so deeply dividing us all. But the show, even in its darkest moments, is hopeful and life-affirming. It is about empowerment and human potential, about finding the best in ourselves and reaching out to help others. You will leave the theatre wanting to work harder to do whatever you do better.

The main characters of the show are high school seniors of different and mixed ethnicity, including African American, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian. The characters and their stories are, in fact, based on the lives of the members of the poetry group that provided the source material. But please don’t think this is an after-school special, or in any way targeted exclusively to a young audience. The material is sophisticated and completely engaging. The opening night audience ranged in age from twenty-five years younger than me to thirty-five years older, and it seemed as though the whole audience felt they were a part of this experience.

Beyond the poetry, the rapping, the exciting choreography (also by Director Maharaj), and some truly moving singing, there is a tight and witty script by Ben Snyder skillfully tying together the stories of the lead characters with warmth, humor, and real insight into the minds of today’s youth. The five students are played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, James DeLeon, Britton Jones, Angela Kariotis, and Angela Lewis. You will be hearing these names again, I’m sure. They are each uniquely talented performers who can command your complete attention, and they work beautifully as an ensemble as well. Jed Dickson is terrific as the teacher who serves as a catalyst for the students' growth, in tune with his kids, but never too hip to be believable. Akil Dasan shines brightly as a sort of narrator and guitar player, always there like a gentle thread holding the pieces together. Kheedim Oh at the turntables and Arthur C. Toombs on the bongos round out the full, rich sound of the show. More instruments could not have made it stronger.

The Crossroads Theatre is the first African American Regional Theatre Company to win a Tony Award. And yes, it’s in New Brunswick, New Jersey. But believe me, it’s not as far as it sounds. It was actually so easy to get to that I was forty five minutes early. And if by chance, you don’t get to New Brunswick for this too-short run, the show has the York Theatre Company behind it as an Associate Producer, and is planning a New York run in March. But if you can get to New Jersey, do yourself a favor and be one of the first to experience this event. You will be proud to be able to tell people you were there.

TheDrillingCompaNY is presenting an evening of newly-commissioned plays that explore the meaning of Honor. The seven playwrights cover a lot of ground, reflecting their own inventiveness as well as the unpredictable irregularity of the English language (definitions below are from the American Heritage Dictionary).

hon ∙ or  v. 1. To hold in respect; esteem.

Joanna Cherensky goes for a traditional usage of the word "honor," inside the wedding vow: to love, honor, and obey. In her humorous playlet Til Death Do Us Part, she introduces us to Sherry and Bill, a possibly mismatched couple whose self-written vows threaten to derail their marriage ceremony, at least temporarily. It's amusing if slightly predictable, put over with charm by Natasha Hanina and Dave Marantz as the squabbling pair and the very dry Bill Green as their Solomonic minister; Nancy Chu directs.

hon ∙ or  n. 3.a. Glory or recognition; distinction.  b. A mark, token, or gesture of respect or distinction.

Allison Moore's CUTRS! postulates awards for consumerism, with one winner of such an accolade delivering a speech/rant about the American duty to save the world via shopping. Delivered by Michelle Maxson, it's a clever if somewhat repetitive monologue, stylishly directed by Hamilton Clancy (who puts several pairs of shoppers' legs behind a rear curtain to offer silent, amusing commentary).

And Scott Baker's For the Benefit of Alfred Beamer gives us a man (the eponymous Beamer) planning a public tribute to himself, since no one else will; the kilted man whom he meets unexpectedly adds some philosophical weight to this whimsical comic portrait, neatly balancing its gentle pathos. Directed by Richard Harden, it's performed by Don Baker and Michael McMonagle.

hon ∙ or  n. 2.a. Good name; reputation.

More serious is Andrea Moon's beautiful one-act A Friday Night Trans Am Ride. What does any of us have, finally, except this flimsy thing called honor? In this play, Moon depicts visitor's day at a prison, where three disparate women—the upwardly mobile Caroline, the spiritual but down-trodden Evangeline, and the feisty Latina Theresa—meet as they prepare to see their incarcerated boyfriends. Moon covers a lot of ground here, including some incisive observations about the off-hand but systematized dehumanization of prisoners and their loved ones; the meat of her play, though, is in a poetic anecdote delivered by Evangeline (whose nickname turns out to be "Angel") which explains why it's okay for her fiancé to love his car more than her. This piece is perhaps a little longer than it needs to be, but it's wise and moving; it's lovingly directed by Hamilton Clancy and features superlative work by actresses Karen Kitz, Colleen Cosgrove, and Nicole Longchamp as the three visiting women.

hon ∙ or  n. 9.a. A code of integrity, dignity, and pride, chiefly among men...

Duty Honor Country is Honor's inevitable war play. Written by Stephen Bittrich, it examines men in combat in general and American soldiers in Iraq in particular. Bobeck is a good ole boy from the American South who joined the army, he says, to avoid jail; he has no illusions about the war's meaning or value and cares little how he treats his newly acquired Iraqi "prisoner" so long as he keeps himself alive. His comrade LaBonne is an African American who says he believes what this war is supposed to be about and holds firm to obeying orders and honoring his Commander-in-Chief. Who's right?—or perhaps the question is: Is anybody right? Their prisoner longs only for peace.

This is a stirring and obviously very timely drama that helps focus some of our thinking about the current Iraqi conflict. Kevin Draine (Bobeck), Clinton Faulkner (LaBonne), and Mousa Kraish (Prisoner) are all terrifically compelling in this piece, which is tautly directed by Edwin Owens.

hon ∙ or  n. 9.b. Principled uprightness of character; personal integrity.

The attention-getter on Honor's itinerary is Brian Dykstra's Mick Just Shrugs, which opens the evening. It's about a high school student named Mick whose art project features an American flag getting soaked in lighter fluid and then set afire by a Bunsen burner; the press release promises that a flag will indeed be burned during the performance. I wondered how it would feel; Dykstra makes it a supremely cathartic act of desperation, signifying where too many of us seem to be vis-a-vis rousing ourselves to activism against the current regime in this country: Mick Just Shrugs—such the right title, by the way—is about anomie fueled by inertia among grown-ups who ought to know better. It's very much a play for our time, superbly performed by Keith Fasciani as the boy and especially Tom Demenkoff as the troubled high school principal. Margarett Perry is the director.

hon ∙ or  n. 4. Nobility of mind; probity.

As it begins with an explosive bang, so does Honor end with a magnificent jolting yawp, with Don Carter's remarkable short abstract play Coming to the Table. It begins with a pair of what appear to be bureaucrats organizing disparate figures on the stage (some of whom seem to be refugees from earlier plays) into a semblance of order. These characters are, we come to understand, us: America, or the world, in microcosm. To one of them, something happens, and that act changes all the others; and that's, finally, our story. To tell you more would be to diminish the impact of this extraordinary visceral work. Carter's play demands to be seen.

This, then, is the journey of Honor. As compendiums of one-act plays go, this ranks among the finest I've seen; there's much here to both entertain and challenge the audience. TheDrillingCompaNY is to be commended for bringing artists of such integrity and commitment together and to our attention. Give them your eyes and ears.

TheDrillingCompaNY, a few times a year, commissions playwrights from all over the country to write short original plays on a particular theme. This year's topic is "Honor," and resulted in enough worthy entries that artistic director Hamilton Clancy decided to put together two evenings instead of the customary one. The first Honor was seen at 78th Street Theatre Lab last June; now we have the sequel, Honor part 2, featuring seven one-acts ranging from a new look at the story of Antigone to a fanciful account of how the traditional wedding vow got stitched together.

The evening begins with Waiting for Henry to Snow by Rodes Fishburne, a quirky series of vignettes about a middle-aged man named Peter Snow whose father has just made a miraculous recovery from what doctors told him was inoperable cancer and is now, apparently, moving in on Peter's wife. Directed by Dave Marantz, this darkish comedy has choice bits but doesn't add up to much; I wasn't sure how it related to the theme of "honor" at all. But Dan Teachout as the befuddled Peter and James Tully as the expansive, exuberant father do fine work here.

Next on the agenda is Neil Olsen's Pec, which is probably the most completely successful piece on the roster. In it, a young American man named Marko argues with his Uncle Zef against flying to their Balkan homeland to commit murder, to settle an old score. Is family honor more important than living ethically? Does family honor even mean anything? What's the difference between a duel and a Mafia hit? These are some of the questions that Olsen explores in this thoughtful play. Richard Harden is the director; Laurent Nahon (Zef) and Peter Ruvolu (Marko) are the commendable actors.

The Antigone legend gets an intriguing update by Drew Sachs in Anya, which relocates the famous story among a family of Orthodox Jews in contemporary America. Anya defies her uncle Pasca, who has become the community's chief rabbi following the death of Anya's father, to bury her brother, Ezra. Pasca had forbidden Ezra traditional Jewish burial rites because he died of AIDS. Anya and her sister Irene must now face the consequences of this act, with possibly life-changing results. Sachs sticks closely to the structure and themes of the original, focusing on the question of whether it's more important to be true to one's principles or to the law. Directed by Tim Artz, Anya—unlike all of the other plays in Honor part 2—is hurt by somewhat indifferent acting, especially that of Laura Moss in the pivotal title role.

Right before intermission comes Titus Lucretius Carus, by Edward Manning, which tells the story of the last night of the life of the Roman poet mentioned in the title. I didn't know this—and I imagine most people don't—but apparently Carus died after overdosing on a drug that caused him to have an erection for several painful hours. The play riffs on some of Carus's poetry to examine the ways that artists are—and are not—honored by society and the state. It's an amusing and interesting piece, nicely staged by Clancy and wittily played by Clancy, Teachout, and Michael Gnat; but it didn't mean much to me because I was unaware of its authentic classical heritage (neither the name, story, or poetry of Carus rang any bells).

Act Two commences with Legend, a touching though perhaps over-reaching little romance, written and directed by Renee Flemings. In it, two co-workers, Louis and Donna, meet at a New Jersey Holiday Inn for a clandestine afternoon rendezvous. They're both decent, happily married people who are looking for connection and adventure; can they go through with it? A spectral Frank Sinatra, well-played by Tom Demenkoff, narrates and urges the would-be lovers on (they're portrayed with real intelligence by Clancy and Kelly J. Grant). Flemings provides a neat twist at the end that tugs at the heartstrings. But Sinatra doesn't feel like the right choice for this piece, which finally celebrates a flight of fancy more weightless than earthbound; maybe the right legend would have been Astaire?

P. Seth Bauer's First Time Out of Bounds is a lovely one-act about two teenagers on a first date. Their necking is interrupted by the Boy's nagging doubts about whether it's "honorable" to "go all the way." Bauer dances around the dilemma with wit and heart; the piece is neither judgmental nor mawkish. Christian Haines gives the evening's most effective performance as the young man—I completely bought in to his innocence and his admirable desire to do the right thing, and was ultimately moved by his final decision. Maria McConville seems significantly older as the Girl, but otherwise is a worthy match to Haines' Boy. The sensitive direction is by Gabriele Forster.

Honor part 2 concludes on a light-hearted, charming note with Bill's Woe, in which playwright Kerry Logan fancifully imagines a young "Bill" Shakespeare polishing the marriage vows that have been drafted by Francis Bacon and others. It's a fun, witty piece; even though the punchline is never in doubt (obviously, given the title of the evening, he's going to come up with "to love and to honor"), this is still a pleasingly anachronistic romp. Eric Inglemann is a delicious Joseph Fiennes-like Shakespeare; Tamara Reynolds is his buoyant collaborator, someone named Clara. Clancy directs.

Honor part 2 is exceedingly well-produced, using a simple unit set and just the right amount of furniture to define the space for each of the seven plays. It's an enjoyable evening of theatre, mining the diversity and variety of the best of off-off-Broadway.

Hoover: A Love Story is the show that puts the stormy romance between America's Top Cop J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant/protégé Clyde Tolson on stage in all its steamy, torrid glory. It's got everything: gunned-down gangsters (John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al); cloak-and-dagger intrigue; conspiracy theories linking the Mob to both Kennedy assassinations; a stunning Red Baiting tableau vivant featuring Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and Richard Nixon parading around Hoover like Ziegfeld showgirls whilst chanting "Are you now or have you ever been?"; Ginger Rogers' mother; and a grand climactic eleven o'clock number in which Hoover himself sings "My Way" in a full-length evening gown. What's not to love?

This is, evidently, satire—very over-the-top satire, which is why it's so much fun; harmless and yet startlingly resonant as it shoots down familiar political targets one after another. Nothing is sacred in Paul Wells' deliberately racy and outrageous treatment of the life and loves of the not-at-all-beloved Chief G-Man; ditto Rick Vorndran's endlessly witty stylized staging, which has FDR crawling to his desk on his knees to simulate a wheelchair and includes more than one hilarious simulated sex scene between Hoover and Tolson, both fully clothed in 3-piece suits, banging and spanking away at one another with terrifying glee.

Wells and Vorndran omit no tasteless sexual pun or vulgar sight gag in their effort to amuse us at the expense of a man whose clout was shockingly enormous. Hoover: A Love Story asks how the hypocrites always seem to wind up on top; it's a treacherous melodramatic farce about the excessively rich and powerful looking after their own at the expense of everybody else, and thus sadly timely. Only one historical personage—President Harry Truman—comes off as remotely statesmanlike; everyone else, from Nixon to Roosevelt and back again, is presented as only too ready to compromise integrity in the name of self-interest. Historical purists will quibble over the liberties that Wells may be taking with facts here, but aficionados of good old-fashioned American pamphleteering are going to recognize the genuine article in this cheerfully venomous assault on cherished manners and institutions.

Wells' script saunters through nearly fifty years of American history with the faux solemnity of a '50s B-movie bodice ripper; Vorndran's direction tempers the thing with a gallery of exquisitely-timed and -realized effects that turn Hoover into Grade-A avant-garde downtown theatre. A superlative cast brings it all to life, headed by Stephen Cabral's nasty, neurotic J. Edgar and Rob Brown's worshipful, vaguely masochistic Clyde, and including the astoundingly versatile Johanna Bon, Stephanie Bush, James Ferazzi, Jennifer Gill, and David Skigen, among them playing what feels like a hundred different roles, everything and everybody from the windshield wipers of a Washington, D.C. taxi cab to a prematurely senile Ronald Reagan at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Skigen and Ferazzi come close to stopping the show as, respectively, Roosevelt and Nixon (these two are uncanny mimics as well as fine comic actors); Bon and Bush have fun as the women in Hoover's life, respectively, Lela Rogers and his mother. Gill gets the most dangerous moment, in Jackie Kennedy's signature pink suit and pillbox hat, in the recreation of an assassination that Wells says Hoover helped engineer in a bad-taste moment that totally works in this context.

Witty costumes by Claudia Cahill make an important contribution, too, with my personal favorite being Lela Rogers' grotesque party dress, made of the same tacky floral print fabric as Mama Hoover's apron.

Don't expect literal truth, naturally; do expect something like catharsis, though, from laughing so hard. And there may be some food for thought buried in all this stuff as well...

When you walk into La MaMa’s Annex Theatre to see Tom Lee's Hoplite Diary, the first thing you notice is that Lee has turned the playing area sideways. We are seated alone the right side of the stage. There are large set pieces stuffed into the corners presumably for future use. A very large white sheet is dropped down in the middle towards the back. We all know that the show is multimedia so we figure that’s the screen we will be watching. Sitting in the bleachers are two musicians, both holding strange-looking instruments. When the stage manager came out and gave her little speech, she only had to mention Lee’s name and the audience applauded. All of this amounted to raised expectations for the impending event. This opening night audience knew something that I didn’t and I was about to find out.

Raised expectations can be deadly. It is obvious that a lot (and I mean tons) of hard work has gone into this production. There are aspects of the show that are most certainly artistic and beautiful. Lee’s use of gesture and symbolism is praiseworthy. His brilliant mixture of shadow and bunraku puppetry creates a world that is altogether unique. But I just was not swept away. Hoplite Diary is valiant in its effort to transport its audience but, for me, it fails because it uses such complex stage machinery and other conventions to create what should be the simplest of sequences. And the show’s sleepy pace doesn’t help either.

Hoplite Diary tells the story of a hoplite, an ancient Greek foot soldier, who is fighting in the Trojan War. His singular wish is to return home to his family. The story is distinctive in that it tells the tale of a nobody. Unlike most heroes of ancient Greek sagas, the gods aren’t smiling on this fellow. He doesn’t have any special powers or weapons. He’s just a gear in the war machine.

We first see him as a two-dimensional puppet sitting by a fire the night before a battle. The puppeteers roll out the first of progressively larger and larger pieces of stage machinery. This first one has a large head with flaps that open to reveal a scrim with which the puppeteers use shadow puppetry to expose the inner thoughts of our hoplite. I enjoyed this sequence. The music, provided by Ilya Temkin and Julian Kytasty, sets the mood very well. (Although—and I’m not sure who was playing what—the flute player seemed to lose his breath.)

After this section we see the first film sequence. The images are animated figures taken from Greek vase paintings. The film work is truly inspired and most definitely a highlight of the show. Lee also has a panorama with some of the same images from the film that he scrolls through while doing some shadow puppet work behind it. But other pieces of stage machinery that are slowly and methodically rolled out serve little purpose. One presents an army in a phalanx (a densely packed formation) and an even larger one is supposed to represent a battlefield. But a large section of this battlefield goes unused. And the battle itself has no vigor, no rage, no sense of impending doom; it’s just a bunch of hands grabbing soldiers and pulling them into the earth. It seems to me that these large pieces of machinery are so unnecessary. A battle can be depicted with tremendous ferocity with much simpler gestures and movements. Lee could have utilized light and sound and his battalion of puppeteers to present to us a story with more power and less clunky convention.

At the end the flute player sings a song in a flat and off-key tone that reminded me of a priest singing a liturgy. That was just about all I could bear.

Yet it was hard not to like this piece. When someone works so hard on something you feel like you just want to give them props and say it was what it was. Hoplite Diary has so much potential. The story is distinctive, the puppet work is remarkable, most of the music is marvelous, but the show as a whole comes across like a requiem for a puppet show. I sincerely hope that Lee reconceives this show in simpler terms as if he were going to be performing this on the street or on the road. This story deserves a second change to come to life.

I respect Paula Vogel. I’m always happy to see a play of hers. She finds dark humor and an idiosyncratic theatricality in every important and exciting subject she chooses to explore. I find her plays to have certain flaws that leave me dramatically dissatisfied, but the flaws can be fascinating and do not detract from the ultimate power of each work.

Case in point: her new play, Hot ‘N’ Throbbing, which is receiving a first-class production under the direction of Les Waters at the Signature Theatre Company. It is the mid-'90s and Charlene, an ordinary single mom of two teenagers in suburban Maryland, is screenlighting as a scriptwriter for Gyno Productions (an adult entertainment company with a feminist bent). Like most writers, Charlene has a double awareness: her imagination—or at least, her writerly voices (personified by an adult film actress, called “The Voice-over,” and a noirish detective known as “the Voice”)— is always at play, transforming the most banal family conflicts into fodder for her almost-past-its-deadline script.

Charlene is also a pushover—she is an occasional member of A.A. and not a terribly effective disciplinarian for her two teenagers. She can’t keep her rebellious, mini-skirted daughter Leslie Ann from going out with her sexually-advanced friends, and can’t encourage her bookwormy and mother-protective son, Calvin, to do something other than stay home and read Moby Dick. So it comes as no surprise that when Clyde, her alcoholic, abusive ex-husband shows up and drunkdoorbells her, she ultimately lets him in. Then, clearly aware of how dangerous he is, she removes a gun from her robe and commands him to go home; when he does not, she shoots near him, grazing him in the butt. Then she goes for the hydrogen peroxide and Band-aids. Then before taking him to the hospital, they sit (as best they can) and discuss old times and why their marriage didn’t work and why it’s not a good idea to try it again but how they’re still attracted to one another and why don’t they have sex one more time. I won’t tell you what happens, but it turns out not to be a good idea.

In Hot ’N’ Throbbing, Vogel is dealing with objectification of and violence towards women in a very skillful and layered way. Charlene’s script, as gutturally uttered by the Voice-over, begins: “She was hot. She was throbbing. But she was in control. Control of her body. Control of her thoughts. Control of…. him.” That a former beaten-wife (and endurer, perhaps, of many other atrocious behaviors in her past) would be drawn to “reclaiming” the erotic female form and putting it on a pedestal to tantalize the men who once abused it, makes perfect sense. But Vogel seems to be asking if having women “in control” of manufacturing heterosexual males’ fantasies is a kind of empowerment or merely a form of enabling.

Shedding beer-tears, Clyde explains how he’d been out that evening looking for some hot action, but in every instance, he was becoming aware of the truth behind the fantasy—the women who stoke his fantasies may be mothers or wives, women just trying to make a buck, with no sincere sexual interest in him. There is a fascinating speech ensconced within this longwinded monologue Vogel has given him, and it was at this point that the play began to feel more intellectual to me, losing a kind of visceral momentum. Charlene decides she will treat him to a little fantasy herself, and the result is a tragedy. But the means of getting there felt a little contrived, which is not the case with the preceding 80 minutes.

Still, I’ve been thinking about Hot ‘N’ Throbbing for days after I saw it. This is helped by Waters’ exceptionally vivid production. First of all, he’s picked excellent designers—Mark Wendland’s set is wide and flat, the first floor living / dining room of a middle-middle-class single-parent home; Robert Wierzel’s lighting and Darron L. West’s sound work in tandem to create an atmosphere that is alternately sexy and spooky; and the costumes by Ilona Somogyi are spot-on, particularly Charlene’s dowdy housewear and the Voice-over’s shiny black dominatrix duds. Lisa Emery is in expert control of the wishy-washy protagonist, and Suli Holum has a vulnerable volatility as her daughter—they stand out in an all-together stellar cast.

My theatre-going companion and I left the theatre with a lot to talk about, and that to me is the sign of a smart, ambitious, and generous dramatist. Paula Vogel is writing about some timely and terrifying stuff, and Les Waters is bringing it to rich and full life. Don’t miss this show.

There’s plenty of room for debate among theatergoers as to what constitutes a good musical. Some extol the intellectually rigorous works of Sondheim as the pinnacle of American musical theatre, while many prefer the comfortably classic Rodgers & Hammerstein sound. Still others wouldn’t set foot in a Broadway house unless the score throbbed with a rock & roll beat, as in Hair or Rent; and a sizable population remain easily delighted by the spectacle and “Broadway-Lite” melodies of Frank Wildhorn.

Houdini, The Musical, presented this week as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, bypasses niche limitations and aims to please, pure and simple. The life of the great escape artist Harry Houdini (born Eric Weiss, in Hungary in 1872) has a universally appealing show-biz “rags to riches” trajectory: a Jewish immigrant who began as a vaudeville magician and wound up a world phenomenon, Houdini is portrayed as a man of resilience, passion, and innovation, with a sense of humor and enough mythic proportion (“No chain, no lock in the world can hold me!”) to capture the world’s (and an audience’s) imagination. His outsized persona, and the backdrop of history during his lifetime, fit the scope and sweep of old-school Broadway musicals to a tee. It’s a perfect marriage of subject and genre.

And you get a heaping plate full, with all the basic food groups and then some: generous spectacles from the early days of vaudeville, the romance of circus life, the hard knocks of trying out the act and rejection after rejection; a tortuous love triangle involving his wife and his brother, and a subplot with his devoted mother and the psychic who claims to be able to contact her from beyond; an educating and steady parade of cameos by famous names from history—Buffalo Bill, P.T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Arthur Conan Doyle; the rapturous cliché of the fateful “Ah ha!” when Houdini stumbles upon his true calling as a master of escapes; and, best of all, a glorious helping of real, old-time magic tricks, oversized stage illusions and heart-stopping escape routines, all very well integrated into the natural flow of the show. Your jaw drops like a kid's, you clamor for more, and it feels great.

William Scott Duffield’s music succeeds best when delivered in the vernacular of a Coney Island strolling barbershop quartet in juicy numbers typical of that bygone era. But the subplots and private soliloquies, in which the characters reflect on their struggles, are composed using an anachronistic pop modality. Each modern song bursts the bubble that would have kept the audience fully transported back in time. I suppose they do lend a sense of serious “This Is The Moment” purpose to the evening, useful for teaching your kids how to sit still in the theatre while people sing about "grown-up stuff" like envying your brother and running off with his wife. Thankfully, they tend to seep in one ear and quickly exit the other, making way for an old-fashioned razzle-dazzle number sung by some famous historical personage. A big water-torture escape trick gets wheeled on stage, and everyone’s happy again.

And while the creators collectively have distilled an admirably clear and progressing plot—easy enough for kids to follow yet complex enough for adults to become absorbed—there are plenty of shrug-inducing short cuts. James Racheff’s book, chock full of colorfully drawn characters, repeatedly favors a bright, darting quick-strike approach that tells you information and leapfrogs over important events with terse summaries and snapshots. I’d welcome news of an overhaul, but so much of the show is cheerful, warm-hearted and moving, it’s more than possible to forgive, relax, and enjoy.

The current production provides a very credible idea of how a Broadway evening of Houdini, The Musical—if tinkered with no further—would feel. Though few of the current performances include nuance, the whole affair is well staged by Gabriel Barre, and the all-Equity cast offers a uniformly healthy and committed gusto. Kudos especially to Timothy Gulan, who embodies the legend and amazing courage of Houdini while making him very approachable and sympathetic. He’s also mastered the physicality of the escapes and handling of the magic with an authority that grounds the entire show.

I’d take kids and out-of-towners in a heartbeat, knowing they’d see an uplifting show about an American legend who gave inspiration to an entire generation by never giving up. It’s unabashedly splashy with rousing old-time spirit and plenty of quality magic. I’d also bank on enjoying a first-class lobby concession at intermission, replete with magic tricks and books for sale, old-time photos of all the historical figures from the era and plenty of nostalgia. Sondheim-worshippers and “Rent-Heads” may opt to stay home, but they’d be missing a grand old time.

In House/Boy, the new solo show at La MaMa, writer-performer Nicky Paraiso takes us on a musical trip to his childhood home; a red brick house in Flushing, Queens. This is the third part in Paraiso’s "Asian Boys Trilogy," examining his life as a gay Filipino. Like many autobiographical solo shows, there is nothing really profound here. But it’s all fun and performed with an infectious energy. Paraiso keeps the show moving with great songs.

The house in Flushing was bought for Nicky. It was a legacy to be handed down to him, the manifestation of his Filipino immigrant parents’ American achievement. “The only thing is,” he tells us, “I don’t want to be here. I want to escape this house. I want to escape Flushing, Queens. Take the #7 train to the City.” From here, Paraiso begins a personal journey to find his own identity as a Filipino American. Talking to the audience, and slipping into characters from his life, Paraiso introduces us to the people and events that affected him most growing up.

When he was five he fell in love with the piano, and begged his parents to buy him one. The piano became his secret world, his refuge. He also spent time at the movies, searching for Filipino role models. At the time there weren’t many Filipinos on screen in America, of course, so he became a bit obsessed with the few there were. His favorite was Zorro David, who played Julie Harris’s aging houseboy in the John Huston film Reflections in a Golden Eye. The other Filipino role model was Patrick Adiarte who played the number-one son Prince Chulalongkhorn in The King and I. We meet Paraiso's family members as well, including his mother, who ended up back in the Philippines with a houseboy of her own tending to her in her old age.

Paraiso is a graceful performer. There are seats on all four sides of the stage space at The Club at La MaMa.  Under Ralph Peña’s energetic direction, Paraiso fills the space well, playing the piano one minute, and then getting up and going into stories, sometimes incorporating dance. The music takes up much of the evening, giving the show a real cabaret feel. The songs include Paul Simon, Rodgers & Hammerstein, a traditional Visayan love song, and a song of his own. Paraiso is a gifted musician and singer, and the music all works nicely with the piece. He is also strong when he breaks into characters from his life and from the silver screen.

Paraiso’s story is not that unique—it is the story of many immigrants’ children; of many gay boys in the outer boroughs, longing to escape to the island of Manhattan. The characters he creates are sweet, but they're not always strikingly interesting. His work might benefit by taking a cue from some of the more successful "autobiographers"—Margaret Cho and John Leguizamo, for instance—and not being too hung up on reality. Paraiso is a natural storyteller. With even more interesting material, his many talents would surely shine even brighter.

Though Scrooge hypothesized that his spectral vision of Marley might simply be a bit of undigested pudding, his creator Charles Dickens knew better—that Marley was a full-fledged spirit, here to haunt his former partner whether he wanted haunting or not.

So why do playwrights seem so eager lately to set their characters on equal footing with their ghosts? In How to Build a Better Tulip, playwright Mark R. Giesser has not one but two of his main characters share brain space with distant ancestors. But both Audrey Braddock and Adrian Vanderpol seem to be very much in command of their "voices," carrying on reasonable-sounding conversations with them and complaining about the inconvenience of their visits. Are they in fact schizophrenic?

Or am I, in fact, the odd one: does everyone except me have invisible historical figures to chit-chat with during their waking hours?

Ugh. How to Build a Better Tulip is one of those fiascos that I absolutely dread in the theatre, and I have to confess that I left at intermission with nary a thought for returning to see how this mess might work itself out. Giesser, who is a competent playwright (I've seen other of his works), has devised as foolish a plot as I can remember, involving a pair of research botanists who are sharing a greenhouse at an obscure upstate New York college, but are in fact competing to win a 300-year-old prize for developing the world's first black tulip. Giesser includes absurdly unbelievable details, such as the fact that this college has exactly one botany student, a lovably anal woman named Sheila Crouch who is assigned to be lab assistant to both professors. He also relies on ridiculous coincidences, like having Audrey's estranged daughter (whose name is Perci but everybody calls her Lois) be the lover of her competitor Adrian. Some of the stuff that unfolds is just ravingly obtuse—Perci/Lois, for example, works for the CIA. There's also some sort of  Brazilian connection, and a Dutch one (natch, on account of the tulips).

It might have been howlingly funny, a la Airplane, if it weren't all delivered in seeming deadly earnest (and Giesser himself is the director so he knows best, I guess). Lois Nettleton and Mitchell Greenberg, two fine veteran actors, certainly can't make anything sensible out of this (and indeed Nettleton tripped over her lines more than once, suggesting either that Giesser was still re-writing during press previews or that Nettleton's sub-conscious just won't let her remember stuff this silly).

When Nettleton's Audrey Braddock—a botanist, supposedly—reverted to Southern baby talk to try to win over the town sheriff, to keep him from arresting her for breaking into her own greenhouse with her own daughter (who, recall, is a spy, but on our side)... well, I knew it was time to bail out. Better luck next time for Giesser, Nettleton, and the rest of the folks mixed up in this debacle.

It's too long, too shrill, and too excessive for its own good; it wallows self-importantly in a nasty misogynism that becomes dully repetitive and gratuitous; it relies too much on rough language and rough drugs to jolt its audience. Hurlyburly is like its title (I looked it up: it means "Noisy confusion; tumult"); it's like its hard-to-like and impossible-to-respect protagonists, a group of immature, unruly, unreliable guys who can't or won't connect realistically with women or the world, who are articulate and self-involved but not eloquent or self-aware and certainly not self-actualized. Yet, I wound up liking Hurlyburly more than I ever thought I would; was compelled and engaged by it for all of its three-plus hours; definitely entertained and grudgingly admiring.

So David Rabe has either aced the form-as-content/content-as-form thing, or he's just crafted a piece of theatre that works in spite of (because of?) many apparent dramaturgical deficiencies. There's stuff that doesn't really fly in Hurlyburly—dialogue that wants to mimic the poetry of everyday speech, but fails to: that heavily-cadenced, you know, speech that's, uh, supposed to sound, you know, natural and real but sounds instead like bad Woody Allen; not to mention plot points piled on top of plot points in the last fifteen minutes or so that try to explain away the behaviors of some of the characters but never feel anything but contrived and arbitrary—but it finally fails to matter. The noise carries us along; it's easy and even appealing somehow to surrender to the thing and let it sweep us along to its late and bitter conclusion.

It's about four guys. Eddie and Mickey, both casting agents, both in their early 30s, share an apartment somewhere in Hollywood. Not a great apartment, so we conclude that they're not massively successful. Eddie's divorced, with two kids; Mickey wears a wedding ring but is on hiatus from his marriage at the moment (he tells us at one point that he will be going back to his wife someday, but it's not clear whether that's actually true). Both play the system and play around, with differing results: Eddie's personality is obsessive and distorted by severe tunnel vision, while Mickey is aloof and detached to the extent that he's barely with you even when he is. When we meet them they're feuding over a woman, Darlene, and it's clear that (a) Mickey will have her when he wants her, and (b) Eddie will be in agony whether he has her or not.

Eddie's best friend is Phil, an actor-wannabe with a violent streak who's in an on-again/off-again marriage with his second wife, Suzy. There's jail time in Phil's past. Mickey doesn't much like Phil and accurately sizes up the dysfunctional, enabling relationship that Eddie sustains for his pal. It seemed to me that director Scott Elliott and actor Ethan Hawke, who plays Eddie, have introduced a repressed homosexual thing into the mix, which didn't ring true (Elliott overdoes homoerotic subtext in other places too, such as having Mickey parade around for an inordinately long time in bikini briefs in front of his roommate).

Friend to all three, sort of, is the older Artie, another not-very-important cog in Hollywood's machine, but one who's done well enough to feel superior to Eddie, Phil, and Mickey. Artie delivers to them, somewhat startlingly, a pretty young teenage girl named Donna who, he says, was living in the elevator of his apartment building.

We meet a third woman, Bonnie, in the second half of the play: she makes her living as a nude dancer who is famous for using a balloon in provocative ways in her act and for being what we used to call "easy"; Eddie fixes her up with Phil after the latter finally divorces his wife, with disastrous consequences.

Apart from what happens to Phil and Bonnie, which is really ugly, not much else actually occurs in Hurlyburly, except that these people talk endlessly about themselves and their stymied lives. They drink, they do drugs (lots). They talk about having sex but we never actually see them do so.

Now it struck me that if Hurlyburly were set in the present day, these guys would have cell phones and pagers to constantly be answering, providing a distraction from the desperation that dominates their lives and of which they are very much aware. But in the '80s, the only available diversions were coke and scotch and the sound of one's own voice.

So Hurlyburly is a talky, talky play; so how did Rabe and Elliott keep me involved without giving me characters to sympathize or even empathize with? By giving actors so much fodder for their talent: Ethan Hawke, in the marathon role of Eddie, deserves praise just for endurance, but earns it finally for making Eddie layered and believable. Bobby Cannavale, similarly, mines the explosive Phil for complexity and delivers a characterization of surprising depth. Josh Hamilton, as Mickey, has less to work with but he's never less than interesting. Wallace Shawn exploits his own persona as Artie but he's enjoyable to watch. My favorite performance was Halley Wegryn Gross's turn as the teenage pickup Bonnie—she somehow seemed to be the most together person on stage, against the odds. Only Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey, as Bonnie and Darlene respectively, failed to satisfy, with Kellner giving her bimbo rather more intelligence, and Posey rather less, than seemed warranted.

Rabe's portrayal of women, by the way, interested me enormously. On the surface Hurlyburly feels offensively anti-woman; Rabe nails the dumb tough talk of immature men who seem to think of women only as bitches. But brute force excepted, women have all the power in the relationships in this play. I don't know if that's Rabe's point or not, but I was intrigued by it.

Elliott's staging is mostly gripping, though things do flag a bit in the second half. The set design by Derek McLane and, to a lesser extent, the costumes by Jeff Mahshie, seem less naturalistic than the play calls for—there were times when I wondered if Elliott was trying to evoke a heightened reality instead of a normal one. Yet there are things in the script that suggest this as well: such a messy, chaotic play about messy, chaotic lives this turns out to be, with no hope of redemption in sight for the characters or the meandering piece itself. Which is probably the point.

Someone I know recently remarked to me that Shaw's plays seem like the old man just having debates with himself; I don't know if that's so, but it certainly feels like an apt description for J.B. Priestley's I Have Been Here Before. Presented (for the first time in New York since its premiere 60-odd years ago) by Pearl Theatre Company in an excellent staging by Gus Kaikkonen, this suspense drama is an excursion into mysticism. Priestley the playwright behaves here like a man obsessed with a new toy, building a startlingly sophisticated melodrama around two theories, since lost to the ages, one from a fellow named J.W. Dunne, the other borrowed (his word) from one P.D. Ouspensky. He bothers, in the published version of the play, to disavow belief in these: he's playing a game with himself here, seeing if these ideas that obviously fascinate him can hold water and hold an audience. We're eavesdropping on the match and get to decide who wins.

I call it a draw: the notions that inspire I Have Been Here Before—that it's possible to see future events clearly, and consequently to alter them, because we live our lives over and over again—feel to me like fanciful wishful thinking, like in the movie Groundhog Day; and what's more, I think Priestley didn't really buy them either. But he managed to create a really enticing, entertaining thriller out of them. The Pearl is only to be congratulated for bringing it out of mothballs and back on stage, where it belongs.

In a room filled with clocks—the drawing room of a Yorkshire inn called the Black Bull, to be precise—six disparate people converge for a strange, life-changing weekend. The inn is run by a gentle old soul named Sam Shipley and his fretful daughter Sally Pratt, who came to work for her father after her husband died a couple years back. Both are made uneasy by the appearance of Dr. Görtler, who arrives unannounced, asks whether a woman married to an older man and another younger man are staying here, and—when the reply is negative—wonders whether it's the wrong year. He disappears; the phone rings, bringing news that the three ladies from Manchester who were supposed to be coming down for the weekend have to cancel; then it rings again—a wealthy married couple, Walter and Janet Ormund book two rooms. He's quite a bit older than she. A younger man, meanwhile—the personable schoolmaster Oliver Farrant—is already in residence at the inn. Suddenly, Dr. Görtler's enigmatic mumblings seem to have real significance. And of course, it's not long before he's back at the Black Bull, ready to take the last available room.

So what's going on? I Have Been Here Before is the kind of play whose secrets would be revealed only by an evil theatre reviewer; you'll have to go to the Pearl to find out. Your interest will not flag, I don't think. The only hint I can give is the one Priestley gives, in the title.

The characters are delightful, and they're brought to vivid life by the six-member cast, all of them Pearl regulars. Robin Leslie Brown is funny and touching as Sally, a widow before her time now fussing about her dad, the inn, and her son Charlie, who is away at school. Sean McNall makes Farrant quite the charmer, but doesn't neglect the darker shades to his character that are occasionally revealed when he lets his guard down. As the sometimes menacing, always mysterious foreigner Görtler, Dominic Cuskern is suitably enigmatic and mercurial.

Rachel Botchan gives us a beautiful, deep, and fascinating Janet Ormund, struggling mightily to be a good wife to a man who seems to resist her at every turn. Dan Daily is commanding yet sympathetic as her mate, the overbearing businessman Walter Ormund; he captures the Type A arrogance along with the substantial and genuine pain beneath the surface. He only seems completely relaxed in the rare moments when he's enjoying the company of his splendidly uncomplicated landlord, Sam (beautifully played—nay, inhabited, with Spencer Tracy-ish ease—by Edward Seamon); he, with us, takes real pleasure as Sam reminisces about his wedding day:

SAM: We wor wed early an' then I took her down to Leeds—eh, an' it wor a grand day an' all—Wharfedale shining an' smiling all t'way down—an' Yorkshire wor playing Surrey at Headingley, an' so o' course we went—an' Brown an' Tunnicliffe an' F.S. Jackson knocked them Surrey bowlers silly—an' then we went back to big high tea at Queen's Hotel. Eh, what a day!

If Priestley's characters have anything to teach us, Sam does. Ormund replies, for once as completely at peace as Sam always seems to be, "Yes, that would be worth having again." And Sam says: "Well, I says to him, 'Nah is that day coming round again?' An' he says, 'Yes, it's on its way. Same bright morning,' he says, 'same blushing girl,' he says, 'same sun on t'same fields—everything.' That'll do me, I says."

Ultimately time is both enemy and ally to these people—hence all the clocks. Sam has the right idea.

Kaikkonen stages the piece admirably, keeping us breathlessly awaiting each new development and revelation for the entire 2-1/2 hours of the play. The production design is masterful, especially Takeshi Kata's detailed set; this is the Pearl—and therefore off-Broadway theatre—at its absolute finest. Priestley's play, a neat discovery, is not going to set the world afire; but it's novel and it's well-crafted and it's performed with the utmost respect and care. I heartily recommend it.

I Love Paris is a one-man show in which an actor pretends to be a woman so infatuated with her own superiority as a mega-celebrity that she'll say just about anything about anybody as long as we keep looking at her.

If you realize that I have also just described the premise of Dame Edna's shows, you've got the picture. I Love Paris, written by Doug Field and directed by Timothy Haskell, offers us Paris Hilton as a lower-rent, lower-brow, lower-IQ version of Barry Humphries's fabulous creation; as a result—and because Paris is a real person who has already caricatured herself more than Dame Edna can ever hope to caricature whatever it is that she's caricaturing—it is somewhat less fabulous. The central gag wears thin very quickly: Paris is a media whore, a slut, and not very bright—what else is new? But the show's modus operandi—which reminded me of nothing so much as Joan Rivers's bread-and-butter comedy routines during her heyday as Johnny Carson's favorite guest some 20-odd years ago—actually works pretty well. "She is my best gal pal," our faux-Paris will announce, pointing to an issue of Vogue or Us or something similar on which Christina Aguilar or Julia Roberts is the cover girl; and then Paris will lower the boom, usually in a vulgar or off-color way, scoring the laugh.

Now, familiarity with very contemporary (well, at least the past year or so) pop culture will enhance your understanding of the gags in I Love Paris. I admit that there was at least one "best gal pal" that I had never heard of. But on the plus side, you don't really have to know very much about, say, Nicole Richie, to titter at a crude put-down at her expense.

One of the things that Paris attempts that Dame Edna does not is a commentary on sexual politics. The actor playing our young wannabe-wannabe is not in drag; in fact, he appears only in his underpants when the show begins, very clearly male, and slowly does a reverse striptease to fully dress himself by the time the thing is over. I'm not entirely sure what point Field and Haskell are hoping to make with this arresting choice; I am positive, though, that a woman doing the same thing would have altered the dynamic catastrophically, turning something like satire into sheer offense. So, good call, gentlemen.

Casting Aaron Haskell as Paris is also a good call. (He's the third actor to take the part, but the only one I've seen.) Haskell, who is the director's younger brother, is one of New York's most talented and versatile young actors, and it's great to see him in a role that lets his show off his chops as clown, dancer, and comedian. He captures the clueless faux-ingenuous-guilelessness perfectly, and holds our attention from first moment to last.

The framing device that Field has provided for I Love Paris—that Hilton is waiting in her dressing room for an audition to be on The View—makes no sense and should be dispensed with. I suggest, instead, more interactivity with the voyeuristic audience that is flocking to this show. The real Paris wouldn't be above borrowing a usable idea from her betters; this Paris should be similarly fearless, and go all the way in bringing the Dame Edna experience to the young, skanky demographic where she's kind of star.

It wasn't until I was on the sidewalk, discussing I See Fire in the Dead Man's Eye with my companion, that I understood that the reason why some of the characters in the play were listening to a soap opera on the radio was that the story takes place in the 1940s or '50s. Now, I'm a pretty alert (not to mention experienced) theatregoer: I can usually pick up stuff like that right away. But Kirk Marcoe's new play is resolutely oblique.

I can tell you what happens in it. David Chandler plays a man named Bob Wright who is very ill and unable to communicate with those around him. The family living room has been transformed into his at-home treatment center, with a hospital bed dead center and a big easy chair just to its right—these are the places where he spends all his time now, except for when he falls on the floor. It's stated at one point that he has lots of tumors, and it's suggested in flashbacks that he was badly wounded in battle (presumably during World War II). It's also suggested, at first, that not only can't he talk—he can't even think straight, or linearly; Marcoe seems to abandon the device of giving Bob his own strange language to communicate with us midway through the play, however, only to pick it up again near the end. What are we supposed to understand about this man?

Around him, his family is falling apart. His wife, Alice, is utterly unable to cope with Bob's illness, and spends her time feeling sorry for herself, yelling at their son, and drinking. Jennifer Van Dyck plays her as all flutter, and Marcoe gives her and us woefully little context with which to frame it. The son, Timothy, is having a particularly bad adolescence: he's clearly alienated by his father's enforced inattention to him and his mother's apparent indifference. He drinks vodka, smokes, and tries to have sex with a neighbor girl and the daughter of the Wrights' maid; later, he burns down a stable on their property. The neighbor girl is the child of a white woman and a long-gone Mexican man; the maid and her daughter are African American (with an offensively stereotyped family life—worthless, out-of-work husband, pregnant daughter, etc,). Bob, in one of his odd reveries, notes that his son is trying to bed a "United Nations" of young ladies (another offensive idea, by the way).

It is noted more than once that the family lives on an island, though which one is never said. Maybe Marcoe means that the United States is an island. Maybe he intends the Wright family, distorted mirror image of 1950s normalcy that they are, to be an ironically-named commentary on the rot at the core of American life. (I think he does, actually.)

Unfortunately, his intentions prove very unclear. What we're left with is time spent with some very unpleasant people behaving (mostly) selfishly. It's a hard sit, and lacks the potent pay-off we keep hoping will occur.

Takeshi Kata's deliberately quirky set puts Bob and his hospital apparatus in a literal sandbox (don't know why). But Matthew Richards's lighting, which makes frequent use of a fluorescent rectangle frame at the rear of the stage, is very cool. Chandler, a fine actor, does what he can with Bob but in the end the character neither appeals to us nor makes much sense. And I don't know why it's called I See Fire in the Dead Man's Eye. In sum—a very confusing, very unsatisfying work of theatre.

What’s an “icon?” Definition number three in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says that an icon is “an object of uncritical devotion.” Which is one of the problems with ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1, written and performed by Jade Esteban Estrada. One by one, Sappho, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Stonewall activist Sylvia Rivera, and Ellen DeGeneres are hauled out as objects of uncritical devotion. Each gives a Cliff Notes version of his or her life and achievements. There are several songs. But the feel of the evening is of an earnest history lesson. We learn nothing new about these figures, and there is no glimpse of their ambiguities and contradictions.

Jade Esteban Estrada is an energetic performer with a pleasant pop voice, but as a writer, he barely scratches the surface: Sappho is the first "lesbian"; Oscar Wilde is bitchy, witty, and flamboyant; Ellen DeGeneres' career is sketched out in broad outlines familiar to anyone in this country with a TV. Estrada is more engaged as a singer than actor, but the songs are rarely better than serviceable. More often they simply reiterate what has already been spelled out in the text. And they are plagued with a pop sameness that points to Estrada’s limitations as a songwriter more than they illuminate the characters. Oddly, the character Estrada seems to connect to most is the dour, pugnacious Stein. Her moments of stillness tell us more of her fierce and uncompromising nature than ten minutes of historical dates.

MITF did not provide a program for this show, so I have no idea if there was a director. [Editor's Note: Jeff Wills was credited as director in the show's advance press release.]  My sense is it needs one. The evening needs shaping, structure and a ruthless editor with a big red pen. It needs tightening to eliminate those endless vamping onstage costume changes, the bane of one-performer shows. Estrada has charm, appeal, and works like a field hand, but if ICONS is ever to become more than good intentions, he needs collaborators to bring it to life.