I haven't yet had the urge to go back to The Producers; but I never get tired of seeing Marc Salem's Mindgames. This intelligent and personable performer—appellations like "mentalist" or "mind reader" feel too sideshow-y for him—is now on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, where his inimitable and unbeatable one-man show holds forth every Monday (I am my own wife's night off). Bring the husband or wife, bring the kids, bring some friends, and prepare to be mystified.

Bring some thoughts along, as well—not that you'll necessarily be keeping them to yourself. Mindgames is a show that climaxes with its star—blindfolded (with half dollars pasted over his eyelids with surgical tape)—calling out the names of audience members and telling them about trips they have taken. He'll call out: "Lisa!"... and then someone from the audience will say, usually timorously, "yes?"... "You're thinking about the Grand Canyon, right? You wanted to take the helicopter ride but you decided not to."

And Lisa (or Bob, or Charlie, or whatever the name of the surprised audience member happens to be) will say "yes" almost every time—and then will turn to her or his companions in utter stupefaction that, indeed, her or his mind has, apparently—and accurately—been read. This is how every Marc Salem show ends—I've been to five different ones over the last several years.

Salem astounds us in other ways. He will get random members of the audience to answer a series of random-seeming questions and, when done, produce ironclad proof that he had predicted these very answers sometime before the show.

He will ask someone to choose one envelope (out of three) that contains a large sum of money, and then somehow maneuver them into choosing the worthless one instead.

He'll "read" the serial number on a dollar bill while blindfolded. He'll tell you the first word on the page of a book you're holding—while you're in the audience and he's on stage. He'll make his pulse stop and start at will (to the really genuine surprise of the doctor whom he called from the audience to assist him at the performance reviewed). He'll make someone's watch run fast—he did this to my watch the last time I saw his show (note: within a few hours, it was back to normal).

He will, in short, perform things that seem impossible; and he does them with regularity and verve, all the while accompanying himself with engagingly humorous patter. He assures us that there's nothing occult about Mindgames—but then he kind-of takes it back. I have no idea how he does what he does, and I don't want to know.

The show moves a little more slowly in the bigger Broadway house than in previous years; that will likey improve over time. Otherwise, if you've seen Salem before, then you'll get more or less what you expect, namely, a couple of hours of old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness awe.

And if you've never seen Marc Salem's Mindgames before, then don't hesitate. There's not a more wondrous show in town.

Against all odds, marriage has become a hot-button issue. Who has the right to determine which people can or cannot participate in this legal form of union between two consenting adults—a union which, many will tell you, is the very mortar that prevents the highly-stacked bricks of our civilization from collapsing in on themselves? But before answering that question, we must first ask ourselves: what exactly is marriage anyway? The mutual mingling of the financial and material assets of two otherwise unrelated individuals? A state-sponsored approbation of the human sexual drive? A status symbol? A tonic for boredom?

According to Nikolay Gogol, marriage is all of these things, and oh so much less. Like its title, Gogol’s 1833 play Marriage is a direct, unfussy evocation of a complicated concept. But behind the play’s comedic simplicities runs a gently bitter vein of social criticism. In Marriage, the bustle and pomp of matchmaking and courtship obscure the reality that maybe there are better ways to go about securing a mate for life.

The first act begins with the foppish civil servant Podkolyosin (Christopher Moore), splayed out on a divan, contemplating the possibility of finding an eligible young woman to wife, having little better to do with his spare time in the provincial village in which he lives. The local matchmaker Fyokla (Carol Schultz) thinks she has just the ticket, but when Podkolyosin gets cold feet, his impish newlywed friend Kochkaryov (Sean McNall) decides that a guy can make matches just as well as a doll and takes over the project himself.

Act Two finds us in the home of Agafya (Allison Nichols), the eligible young woman in question, a well-to-do orphan who lives alone with her aunt Arina (Joanne Camp). It turns out that Podkolyosin isn’t the only iron Fyokla has put in the fire, and our ingénue must struggle to accommodate not one but four potential suitors, each one more ridiculous than the last: from the pasty-faced Podkolysin we go to an obese materialistic merchant with the unlikely moniker Omelet (Jon Tillotson); Anuchkin (Robert Hock) a human skeleton of a retired militiaman; and Zhevakin (Dominic Cuskern), a spectacularly pompous naval officer. But once Kochkaryov—whose attempts to marry off his friend smack of jealous revenge against all bachelorhood—determines to clear the field for his buddy, the groundwork is laid for a comedic structure as bold and curious as the society it mocks.

All the characters in Marriage are recognizable types from the history of comedy, from the Arlecchino-esque Kochkaryov to the bumbling suitors to the fresh-faced but rather sly Agafya. The danger here is to lapse into generality as a means of squeezing easy laughs, and the current Pearl production doesn’t always rise above the temptation. At times, the cast feels like it’s indicating rather than living fully through its performances, which has the effect of blurring some of Gogol’s already carefully blurred ambiguities. But the performers are uniformly professional and likeable, and the evening passes in a stream of fluid amusement.

Though it doesn’t quite betray the darker depths of his novel Dead Souls, or his surreal short stories such as "The Overcoat" and "The Nose," there’s something a bit sinister shuffling beneath the smooth surface of this comic confection. Like his best-known play, The Inspector General, Marriage examines the conformity and hypocrisy infecting Russia’s newly-burgeoning middle classes. And if you don’t think conformity and hypocrisy are still big social issues—especially in relation to the subject of marriage—then perhaps you’d better take a closer look at that brickwork.

The concept underlying Massholia, a new musical by Nathan Phillips, Joe Schiappa, and Brett Warwick, is that after the 2004 election the people of Massachusetts decided to secede from the Union and create their own country, with John Kerry as president. A potentially clever idea.

The actual story that Phillips, Schiappa, and Warwick have created is, alas, not so clever. It concerns a goofy but likeable young slacker named Robbie Cordeiro, a high school student in the newly-named Massholia City (Boston). One day he meets pretty and competent Jen Leonard on a tour bus, with whom he comes instantly infatuated, much to the consternation of his longtime pal, Juanita Pedro Marquis Sanchez O'Donald, a politically active and very serious student who is involved with Native American issues—especially the Pilgrims' alleged removal of the Magical Turkey, which supposedly still lurks in some Massholian forest. Robbie and Jen also encounter John Kerry, Jr., who accidentally drops a roll of microfilm containing details about his secret plan to blow up Fenway Park at the next Yankees/Red Sox game using a baseball filled with lethal cranberry gas. Kerry decides that Robbie will be the stooge who will throw out said baseball. He also leads Jen, a very ambitious budding journalist, to believe that he wants to date her, when all he really wants is to get back the incriminating microfilm. Also involved in the very complicated plot are George Steinbrenner, Barney Frank (who marries someone named Sergio Pombo in a gay wedding ceremony), Robbie's baseball-loving father, and a contemporary Pilgrim named Standish who runs some sort of slave labor camp in a cranberry bog.

I have to admit that I never quite sorted all of the details and complications out; suffice to say that Kerry does not get away with his fiendish scheme and that Robbie comes to understand that Juanita, not Jen, is the right girl for him.

The storyline allows for a number of in-jokes that might be funny to Bostonians (not being one, I can't tell for sure), as well as a lot of would-be satire that almost never lands properly. The gay marriage plot detour, for example, feels nearly homophobic; the central conflict, which posits Kerry's son as a terrorist willing to murder tens of thousands of civilians in order to further his aims to take over America, is in questionable taste at best. Indeed, I wondered as the show wore on and took more and more potshots at traditional liberal causes whether Phillips, Schiappa, and Warwick might actually be agents from the Other Side.

Massholia's a musical, and it's chockfull of musical numbers, most of them attempts at parody in the Urinetown vein, none of them particularly successful. Warwick does have a way with a rock tune and occasionally comes up with some clever lyrics; but a lot of the song ideas feel fairly pedestrian—there's one called "Hand Job Palace," performed by a bunch of horny students in the stadium bleachers, for example. Katie Workum's choreography sabotages just about all of them by setting complicated dance moves to virtually every note of every song; this is bad idea, tiring the performers and the audience with manic activity long before any of the songs are over with.

Workum's work suggests inexperience in the medium (though the program lists fairly numerous credits), and in fact that seems to be the main problem with Massholia: the creative team seem to be going for another Urinetown but do not seem to know much about how a musical works. Let me add that I have great respect for writers Phillips and Schiappa and director Kevin Scott, having seen many of their excellent comedy shows in the past. But the form seems to have somehow defeated them here.

A few members of the company manage to shine despite the sub-par material, notably Kimmy Gatewood, who is very funny and possesses real presence as Juanita, and Phillips himself, who is understatedly charming as the cute-but-dopey Robbie; he also seems to be a good dancer.

The great critic and director Robert Brustein, in his ongoing feud with August Wilson, has often argued that the problem with most modern depictions of African Americans onstage is that they are too facile, that they have assumed a "monotonous tone of victimization." Stephen Belber's new play McReele, just opened at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, should pique his interest.

Darius McReele (Anthony Mackie) is smarter than your average death-row inmate. Slick and articulate, the 30-ish McReele contends that he was framed for the drug-related murder of a judge's son that sent him up sixteen years ago. He enlists do-gooder journalist Rick Dayne (Michael O'Keefe) to look into his case, and lo, DNA evidence indicates that another youth had pulled the trigger, and McReele is freed. With Dayne's collaboration, McReele is thrust into the limelight, first as an anti-death penalty spokesperson, and then taking on a whole host of issues, using the local TV program of Dayne's girlfriend Katya (Jodi Long) as a rostrum.

His rise is rapid. So effective a speaker is McReele, that the state Democratic machine enlists him to be its candidate for senator, and Dayne becomes his campaign manager. McReele has the kind of charisma that sweeps a person off his feet, and if you fear such a person is not to be trusted, consider the character's name. While Darius doles out sweet helpings of McReality, his Fly Girl Opal (Portia) is determined to "keep it real." Thus it gradually emerges through her relentless influence that McReele may not be what he seems to be. The problem is that Opal has her own motivations for wanting McReele to fail. A straight-talking home girl from the 'hood, she is almost certain to lose him as he joins the power structure. So the question is, whom do we believe?

The play gives no clear answer, although judging from subtle aspects of Mackie's excellent performance, we can guess, and it isn't pretty. Belber is perceptive and honest enough to present a world in which a black man can be a genius capable of acquiring and wielding great power. In times when the likes of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice have bestrode the world like colossi, this really shouldn't be a revelation, but we don't see enough of it (if you'll excuse the expression) represented. Belber is also brave enough to tell us that such a person may not necessarily be a saint. Belber's instinct is not unprecedented—O'Neill presented such a character in The Great God Brown, but he was so crudely drawn as to resemble a sinister cousin of Stepin Fetchit. But African American characters who are not helpless and faultless pawns but real flesh-and-blood humans continue to be rara ava on the stage. McReele is no puppet, but a puppetmaster. Belber has written us a person, not a cardboard cut-out.

Mackie is in top form as the mercurial McReele, shifting gears between his two personalities (roughly: politician and punk) like a born huckster. The ensemble cast is equally fine. Jodi Long is hilarious and moving as a no-bullshit TV reporter who turns out to have surprising depth. O'Keefe seems taciturn and morose as the cynical reporter Dayne, but proves to be a volcano in his climactic confrontation with McReele. Portia's Opal is sympathetic as she battles against her own susceptibility to her husband's charms in order to get to the truth. And Henry Strozier is effective in a wide variety of utility parts. The bunch of them function together as a tight, well-tuned machine, thanks to Doug Hughes's deft direction and Belber's amazing script, which synthesizes all the best elements of political and racial drama and possesses the kind of clarity and moment-to-moment logic actors prize.

In fact, so dazzling is Belber's script that it effectively acts as a bait-and-switch worthy of the slick McReele himself. We are so blinded by its virtue that we catch ourselves ignoring two flaws in the script so glaring they ought to be fatal to the whole premise, but somehow are not.

The first is: how on earth, after sixteen years in prison, where his only companions were hardened, illiterate cons, did McReele get to be so slick? While still in the joint, he already talks like Dick Gephardt. The character tells us he has read a lot of books, but that doesn't explain how he is able to speak so effectively, particularly in "the man's" language. Public speaking takes practice. Speechifying no doubt happens in prisons but I can't imagine it doesn't happen in street language—how else would you win over your audience? Furthermore, McReele has spent his time on death row, separated from the bulk of the prison population. Even a natural politician like Bill Clinton didn¹t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. He practiced his art from the time he was a teenager.

Which leads us to the second implausibility. Clinton's presidency was nearly brought down by what most acknowledge was a fairly innocuous if reckless peccadillo. We still live in an age where sexual infidelity and past drug use spawn scandals that can ruin politicians. I'm not sure if Belber is being cynical or idealistic in imagining a major political party backing a former death row inmate for the Senate, but I do recognize the idea as pure science fiction. To offset the unreality of the premise, Belber has set the play in Delaware, a small state of the sort where it's relatively easy for a strange character to gain power. (Another Clinton parallel: it was in small, rural Arkansas that Clinton, a kid from a broken home, first gained notoriety as the nation's first Boy Governor, while still in his 20s). But the last time I checked, Delaware was still on planet earth, no matter how funny the people who live there talk.

But like I said, the play's charms compensate for these lapses. And like any good American, I'm a sucker for charms.

What happens when a government decides to enforce laws based on so-called morals? Shakespeare asked this still-relevant question some 500 years ago in Measure for Measure and its themes of religious hypocrisy, sexual mores, and (to steal from an intermission conversation I overheard the night I saw the play) the relationship of the individual versus the state, make for an interesting and surprising play.

In the play, the Duke of Vienna decides, because he has “let slip” Vienna’s “strict statutes and most biting laws” and wants them to be enforced, to temporarily assign his power to a deputy, Angelo. He then pretends to leave town, dressing in disguise as a Friar to observe what happens while he’s gone.

As his first act of power, Angelo sentences a citizen named Claudio to death for getting his lover Juliet pregnant outside of marriage. Normally, the couple would just get married, but Angelo wishes to make an example out of them because such sin is common in Vienna. Claudio’s sister Isabella, who is about to become a nun, pleads to Angelo for Claudio’s life and is given an offer: If she will give up her virginity to him, he will free her brother.

This fine production at the Astoria Performing Arts Center, directed by John Hurley, is staged so that the audience sits on either side of the playing space. There are several entrances and exits and the company also uses the more conventional proscenium stage.

The costumes, designed by Amy Backner, are modern and sometimes humorous. In one scene, a woman dressed as a school girl (drawing from a common, contemporary sexual fantasy) dances provocatively. In another, the prisoner Barnardine has several tattoos, rolled up long johns, and an unbuttoned shirt.

The set, designed by Brian Smallwood, is straightforward and economical. One common brown table serves as the station where the clerk of the court sits, but it is also the visitation table at the prison. There is a simple, white line in the center of the table, which evokes a prison. When the brother and sister reach across this line to touch hands, the provost interferes and gestures for them to stop. I remember while watching this scene that I liked the detail and that it was another instance where the law was once again standing in the way of necessary, human interaction.

Gus Schulenberg’s performance as Angelo has many levels; he takes his time to reveal this complicated character to us. Aaron Michael Zook stands out as the provost, as does Vira Slywotsky as Escalus. It's clear that these two disapprove of Angelo’s ruling but that they also feel that they have to obey their duty. Anna Chlumsky’s Isabella is frail, young, and vulnerable, yet strong in conviction. Hank Davies as Duke Vincentio always seems fair and balanced. Alok Tewari and Cassandra Kassell also stand out as Pompey and Mistress Overdone/Francisca the Nun.

I also enjoyed the music, composed by Michelle O’Connor. At the top of the second act, Alex Pappas plays guitar and Erin Jerozal sings beautifully. At the opening of the show, during a blackout, a chorus of female voices sings.

With its high production value, The Astoria Performing Arts Center is a company to watch out for. I was excited to discover their work by watching this play and look forward to seeing their productions to come.

It was truly a pleasure to attend Oberon Theatre Ensemble's Measure for Measure: it's a no-pomp/no-frills production to be sure, with a congenial, Casual Friday feel. It's classic, pearl-in-an-oyster off-off-Broadway, right down to the slightly scruffy 75-seat studio theatre venue.

The plot in a nutshell: Duke Vincentio, ruler of Vienna, decides to go undercover to find out why the domain has fallen into corruption and appoints Angelo, an upstanding, exemplary cold fish, to reign in his absence. After Vincentio makes his mysterious disappearance, Angelo quickly turns into a zealot attempting to purge Vienna of lust, debauchery, etc., etc. He tries to make an example of Claudio, a young man who has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, by sentencing him to death. Claudio’s sister, the ultra-virtuous Isabella, about to take her final vows as a nun, pleads with Angelo to be merciful. But instead of seeing reason, Angelo unexpectedly—and to his own great disgust—becomes consumed with lust for Isabella. His ultimatum: if Isabella abandons her holy values for one night and sleeps with him, then and only then will he spare Claudio’s life. Will she, won’t she? That is but one of the play’s questions and one of the few that actually gets answered.

Measure for Measure is widely acknowledged by critics and historians as Shakespeare's most serious (and least popular) comedy. Yet ironically, one of the most attractive production aspects of the play is that it's smaller in scope, more specific in plot and, even textually, more accessible to 21st century sensibilities than most of Shakespeare’s works. The characters, most of them unsympathetic and unsentimentally drawn, are, nonetheless, very engaging, very human, and very timeless.

Eric Parness' direction is refreshingly brisk and to the point. I particularly appreciated hearing the beautiful text spoken so naturally and elegantly by the diverse, all American cast. Fortunately, Parness never allows his actors to fall too much in love with their speeches, so the action rarely lags. The set consists of a chair here, a table there. The costuming by Sidney Shannon is modern era, although special mention should be made of Mistress Overdone's outfit, which should be seen rather than described. Some of the physical comedy, while appropriate to the characters, doesn't entirely work simply because it's a bit too over the top for such a small venue and sometimes appears forced. But these are minor quibbles. The performances are commendable all around.

In the lead role, Gordon Stanley is such a pro that he can make the Duke's theatrical machinations seem almost plausible. His Vincentio is as much a hypocrite as anyone in the play, but he doesn't bother with piety. His concern for the decline of morals in the duchy has more to do with his ego-bashed public image than altruism towards his subjects. He clearly enjoys stalking Angelo from the sidelines, and the way he manipulates Isabella into believing her brother is dead is downright cruel. Eloquent, maturely handsome and sexy, Stanley plays the Duke as smitten with Isabella early on, so the main driver of this production seems to be the Angelo-Isabella-Vincentio "love" triangle. But at the end, of course, the joke is on the Duke—though he wins Isabella's hand, he must resign himself to the fact that only God has her heart.

As Isabella and Angelo, Jessica Burr and Walter Brandes appear to be playing against type, which is interesting to watch. Mostly it works, but sometimes—in the most critical moments—it doesn’t quite. Both are talented, accomplished actors; both are very attractive, charming and (despite their characters) warm.

Brandes’s Angelo, at the beginning of the play, is less the righteous man whose urine comes out ice (as described by one character), more a sanctimonious, fresh-out-of-Princeton corporate brat made king for a day. But at the end, his encounter with Isabella has, for better AND worse, left him infinitely more human. Brandes is best when he is left alone on the stage to struggle with his stricken conscience and raging hormones, but losing the battle even while, quite literally, flagellating himself. He also has some wonderful Bill Clinton moments in the second half as he plays the cheesy, guilty-guilty-guilty politician pained at the accusations publicly leveled against him. Yet at the end it’s obvious his desire for Isabella still plagues him.

Jessica Burr is a lovely young woman with a natural effervescence that truly manifests itself in the scenes where Isabella collaborates with Vincentio and Mariana in Angelo’s downfall. It seems an odd moment for her to take such animated, girlish pleasure in the Duke’s machinations, especially since her brother is just supposed to have died. But Burr’s Isabella seems to have no use whatsoever for any man except the Son of God. Perhaps Burr and director Parness are, in fact, committing to the Elizabethan feminine ideal of unattainability—which would explain why I found the much-anticipated “seduction” scenes with Angelo frustrating. Even Isabella’s most eloquent entreaties for Claudio’s life are colored by a condescending remoteness and purity to the point of sexlessness. I had a hard time believing that Angelo could have any real attraction to her, save as an intellectual equal. I would have preferred to see Isabella allowed some sensuality which I’m quite sure would have better served Burr’s talent as well as the play.

Almost all the actors in supporting roles do double duty. Christine Verleny is all grace in the thankless role of Mariana, Angelo's unfairly spurned betrothed who gets a more-bitter-than-sweet second chance at the union. She's also very funny as Francesca, a nun in Isabella's order, who is all business with the novitiates but all girlish giggles in the presence of a strange man. Philip Emeott steals every scene he’s in as the very mercenary, very tacky bawd (pimp) Pompey and then turns up later as sedate Friar Peter. Similarly, Karen Sternberg does a delicious turn as trashy “working girl” Mistress Overdone watching her livelihood flash before her eyes. Sternberg later plays poor knocked-up Juliet, another undeserving  victim of Angelo’s “moral purge.”

As Isabella's condemned brother, Jordan Meadows plays Claudio less as a man facing execution at dawn than as a man who has simply been extremely inconvenienced. (Well, he DOES wear a golf shirt…) Even in the scene when Claudio begs Isabella to give herself to Angelo so that he, Claudio, might be spared, I never got the sense that he ever had any terrifying moment of  desperation or comprehension that he MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE. But Meadows is a hoot in the smaller role of Froth, a clueless, taciturn yokel who gets called on the carpet for making a cuckold of Elbow the Constable, played with all the stops out by Brad Fryman. Jarel Davidow is quite memorable as Claudio's "friend" Lucio (the type that makes enemies unnecessary), a loud, very obnoxious liar and braggart, who doesn't realize he's slandering the Duke to his face.

Special commendation part 1 goes to Ian Pfister who plays the overworked, long-suffering Escalus, right-hand man to the Duke and then to upstart Angelo. Despite the façade of icy detachment, Pfister's Escalus watches Angelo's moral scouring of Vienna with a growing dismay in his eyes that proves he is truly a human being with a conscience—yet too loyalty-bound to his office to act. Then in the scene that gets the biggest laughs of the evening, Pfister also plays Abhorson, a stony faced, by-the-book, jarhead executioner who gets stuck with Pompey for an assistant. Pfister uses his lean physique and striking but ageless features to full advantage in each role, and he is unforgettable.

Special commendation part 2 goes to the fabulous James T. Ware as Provost, whose duty it is to carry out Angelo's order for Claudio's execution meanwhile seething inside at its injustice. Unlike Escalus, who remains a neutral spectator, Ware's guilt-ridden Provost immediately embraces his opportunity to act on principle—even surreptitiously—the moment a certain fake friar slips it into his “In” box. Ware delivers a tough, no-nonsense, but deeply compassionate performance that especially resonates in 2005 as America grapples with its own culpability in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

On that note, I highly recommend OTE's Measure for Measure, not only as a very entertaining production, but as a great way to initiate even the most vehement Shakespeare-phobe into the world of classic theater and prove just how relevant and accessible the Bard's work can really be— without any whiff of dummying down.

I think that what playwright Roger Kirby is attempting to do in Medea in Jerusalem is to draw parallels between the terrible events depicted in the classic Greek legend of ambition and vengeance and the equally terrible events that plague the Middle East today. Specifically, he wants us to think about the effects of brutal and systematic humiliation on a person, or a people; about the depths of desperation and hopelessness that can lead to irrevocable destruction in the name of redemption. How different, he asks, is a Palestinian mother who raises her babies to be suicide bombers from Medea?

It's an intriguing question, and valuable for the way it forces us to confront ugliness that, though omnipresent on the 6 o'clock news, we much prefer to ignore or neutralize with our entrenched "it can't happen here" mindset. Kirby is relentless in this play, and also careful: his Jason, a rising star in the Israeli power structure, is cruel and calculating but also complicated enough not to feel like an anti-Semitic caricature; his Medea, daughter of an Americanized Christian Palestinian father and a more traditional Arab mother, is likewise humanized enough so that her maltreatment at the hands of the bigots who surround her moves us. Kirby fills his play with authentic-sounding reports (broadcast on a radio) that collectively chart the progress, or lack thereof, of peace initiatives between the Palestinians and the Israelis; and he provides a grueling climax with a horrifyingly vivid description of the effects of a suicide bombing, observed dispassionately but graphically in all their gory reality. There's genuine distress at the endless and escalating cycle of retribution in the Middle East, and Kirby wants us to see it up close and personal, so that we will take it personally.

One of Kirby's key plot elements sent me to the Internet to do some research: I learned that marriages between Jews and Muslims (between Jews and members of any other faith, in fact) are not legally recognized in Israel. This strikes me as a pretty untenable position for the Israeli government to take, and I'm grateful to Kirby for pointing it out.

Which is just one reason why I wish that Medea in Jerusalem worked. It doesn't; the core of Medea—larger-than-life gods, inescapable destinies, supernatural powers—just don't parse in a contemporary context. Jason's back story here doesn't make sense, for example: he didn't slay a monster to win the golden fleece, he killed a Palestinian (under circumstances and for reasons that are never explained) and has risen in the Israeli power circle as a result. Euripides' tragedy trades in big, simple issues—ambition, hubris, and betrayal always carry a steep price, his play tells us. But the world of Middle Eastern politics nowadays is anything but simple. The swift, sure acts taken by the characters here never ring true, at least in part because they have so many more options than their ancient counterparts did.

The production suffers, too, from a kind of schizophrenia: Kirby's script feels straightforward enough, but director Steven Little's staging wants to indulge in all kinds of avant-garde tricks that distract from the work's ideas rather than enhance them. And some of the visual and design choices seem arbitrary: why are the women dressed in flowing gowns while the men wear modern-day military-style uniforms? Why does the radio appear in a flood of light some of the time, but not at other times?

The actors do good work, especially Rebecca Wisocky in the title role. But in the end, Medea in Jerusalem must be counted as a worthy but unsuccessful effort, one of this activist summer's politically engaged theatre alternatives.

Meet Me In St. Louis, in the Musicals Tonight! concert-style production at the 45th Street Theatre, is a family show if ever there was one. Sweeter than molasses and full of light, silly songs and simple dance numbers, it will surely bring a smile to even the most jaded theatregoer’s face. The stage musical was originally produced in 1960, based on the 1944 Vincente Minnelli movie starring Judy Garland—the two met making this movie. The show later made it to Broadway in 1989. The book by Hugh Wheeler is almost identical to the film, but there are additional songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, who wrote the music for the movie. Those of you who are fans of the movie will surely enjoy this charming production. Directed by Thomas Mills, with musical direction by James Stenborg, it is faithful in every way to the content and the innocent spirit of the film.

The show is set during the months leading up to the 1904 Worlds Fair, a major event in St. Louis’s history. The fair’s outdoor lighting, a relatively new phenomenon, was installed by Thomas Edison himself. Apache warrior Geronimo appeared, as did Teddy Roosevelt, the Liberty Bell, one of Lincoln’s cabins transported piece by piece, and a Ferris wheel capable of carrying 2,162 people at once. The hot dog, iced tea, and the ice cream cone were all invented there. As St. Louis prepares for this event that is destined to put the city prominently on the map, the Smith family, including five kids and grandpa, dance and sing their way through life’s unpredictable turns and predicaments.

Meet Me In St. Louis is so light and fluffy that you almost expect it to float away. Like many forties musicals, it is about a world gone by—or perhaps one that never existed—where the biggest conflict is a crush on the boy next door, or whether or not the family will have to move from their beloved St. Louis to big, bad New York City. Everything will, of course, work out in the end. Every tear shed over an unrequited crush will be remedied with a sappy love song and an awkward kiss. Every childish prank will bring a lesson learned, every family conflict, a down-home happy ending. I’m not giving anything away. You know the minute each simple plot point is introduced how it will be resolved. So just go along for the sweet ride and enjoy some memorable songs and nice performances.

Most of the songs which you will recognize—"The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"—are sung by Esther, the Judy Garland role, played here by Heather Parcells. Parcells, as the second-eldest Smith sister, has a strong and beautiful voice. She is lovely in the role and, to her credit, she never once borrows Garland’s style or phrasing. Shanara Gabrielle is also very strong as the eldest sister, Rose, who is trying to win the proposal of her hedging millionaire suitor. As nine-year-old Agnes and five-year-old Tootie, real-life sisters Danielle Nicole Piacentile and Gabrielle Joy Piacentile are terrific, with strong voices and great stage presences.

This not-for-profit company does a great job in the small space of the 45th Street Theatre, and I for one am enticed to check out some of their other events listed in the program and on their website, www.musicalstonight.org. Events this month include The Arts Hour @ Six, a series of topical lectures and concerts. Another that looks like great fun is called At This Performance, and features a rotating schedule of current musical hits performed by Broadway shows' understudies.

Dianne Wiest's tour de force performance is the main reason you will want to see Memory House—she's showcased so impressively here that it's absolutely worth a look. She plays Maggie, a woman of perhaps fifty, and as soon as we see her come on stage with her hair askew and her clothes looking more than a little lived-in, we can tell that personal vanity and ego are not going to get in the way of the honest, deeply-felt, warmly witty performance that we will ultimately be witnessing.

Maggie, once a dancer, is now a harried office worker, a woman neither more nor less unhappy or uncomfortable with her place in life than the norm. Her problem, this evening, centers around her teenage daughter Katia. It's 9pm on New Years Eve, and the deadline for Katia to postmark her admissions application to a prestigious university is just three hours away. But Katia has still not finished the essay, which calls for her to describe her "memory house"—the virtual structure where she stores her memories, dreams, and aspirations. She's blocked, or says she is: Maggie needs to talk her out of her funk so that at least this one seemingly momentous decision won't be allowed to go the wrong way.

Playwright Kathleen Tolan has provided a setup that is, alas, not terribly plausible; the specific elements of Katia's "problem" don't really feel very convincing either, as they are revealed. Briefly: Katia is not Maggie's natural child; she was at an orphanage in Russia in the mid-1980s when Maggie and her then-husband decided, following years of traditional attempts, to adopt. Katia was about four or five years old at the time, and although her new parents encouraged her to learn about her own history and heritage (and to not lose her facility with the Russian language), she mostly didn't do any of this. Now, today, faced with the memory house question, she's mad—at herself, at her parents—for her lack of knowledge about who she is (though her actions peg her, with great precision, as a very typically spoiled American teenager).

So Katia rails and wails about not knowing her birth mother and how she and other Russian orphans are the spoils of Reagan's "war" against the Soviet Union and how America has turned into a terrible bully in the world community. Maggie—and many of us in the audience, myself included—can agree with much of what Katia says and might even be glad to chat with her about it. But, emphatically, not tonight: tonight she needs to stop whining and finish her stinking essay.

Maggie is much more patient than I would be in her shoes. Memory House resolves nothing about Katia's anxieties about her past or future, and certainly offers no useful prescriptions for improving the moral reputation of the United States in the international community, but it does succeed in demonstrating that its leading character is a remarkable mother. Maggie guides her adopted offspring through the little crisis with tremendous skill and love, and Katia is as good as in college by the time the curtain falls.

So the play exists fundamentally to give the actress playing Maggie a lot of great stuff to do, and Wiest carries it off masterfully. She delivers deadpan put-downs about her ex-husband with the same aplomb that she brings to narrating touching reminiscences about when she first picked up Katia at the hospital in Russia or her own long-dead aspirations for a career as a dancer. She sings, dances, and otherwise entertains herself with a casual naturalness that makes us achingly aware of Maggie's loneliness and her pluckily unresigned accommodation to same; in many of these moments I felt a gallantry in Maggie that reminded of The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield.

Most showily, Wiest makes a pie, from scratch and from start to finish, during the 80-minute running time of Memory House. She makes Maggie's ineptitude as a baker—this is, apparently, a freshman attempt—both hilarious and heart-warming; what could feel only like very obvious stage business designed to add some action to a rather inert dramatic setup becomes revelatory, giddy fun. (I found out from a staff member at Playwrights Horizons after the show that the pies are pretty tasty, too.)

I enjoyed spending the evening with Wiest, her vehicle's limitations notwithstanding. She is, as fans of her films know, a superb comedienne; her considerable abilities as a dramatic actress may be more of a surprise. Bravo to Playwrights Horizons for giving her a chance to flex her acting muscles in this sweet-natured (and by no means uninteresting) new play.

Afraid that a 175-year-old American melodrama may not have much relevance to your life? Sample this bit of dialogue from Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags:

We are informed that thou gavest shelter to a banished man, whose deeds unchristian met our just reproof--one by our holy synod doomed--whom it is said you housed, and thereby hast incurred our church's censure--and given just cause to doubt thy honesty.

Or, to put it another way:  if you're not for us, you're against us. What's ever new under the sun?—to Metropolitan Playhouse, producers of this fascinating revival, goes my extreme gratitude, for reminding us that we can run, but we can't hide, from our shared social history.

Metamora, written in 1829 by a playwright that you have probably never heard of named John Augustus Stone, takes place in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677 and tells a fictionalized version of the story of Metacom (called King Phillip by the colonists), leader of the local Wampanoag tribe and antagonist of the early American-Indian conflict called King Phillip's War. In the play, Metamora and his wife Nahmeokee find themselves making a last stand against the English settlers who have taken over their ancestral land. Leading the charge against them are Eddington, chief of the colonists' governing council, and a new arrival from England, Lord Fitzarnold; caught in the middle are Walter, an orphan who respects Metamora greatly, and Oceana, the beautiful young woman Walter loves. Further complicating matters is the fact that Fitzarnold intends to wed Oceana himself, and because of some murky but important information that he possesses about that lady's father, Mordaunt, he seems likely to get his way.

One of the most interesting things about this play is the rather spectacular contrast between the way it tells the story of Oceana's romantic affairs and the way it treats the tragic demise of Metamora. The former feels like vintage melodrama, hopelessly naive and clichéd—Fitzarnold may as well twirl a handlebar moustache and tie Oceana to a railroad track, for all the nuance and motivation that he's allowed here.

But the treatment of the Indian King is something else again. Stone was a contemporary of James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans came out in 1826), and his Metamora is the same kind of "noble savage" that Cooper immortalized. He is in almost every way a model citizen—loyal, trustworthy, and so on—and a splendid tragic hero, choosing to die bravely as the last of his line rather than yield to the White Men's entreaties to assimilate.

Except, of course, that he's also portrayed as a murderous villain—a heathen who refuses to accept the "gift" of Christianity and thinks nothing of destroying his enemies or taking truly awful vengeance when he thinks he has been wronged. For all the admirable qualities that Stone gives his leading character, he never lets us forget—via the foolishly stilted language that became the model for 150 years of "Red Man" talk in plays and movies, through Tonto and beyond; and via the willful stereotyping that equates un-Englishness with backward barbarianism—that Metamora is one of "them," i.e., the bad guys. Neither Stone nor, I reckon, anybody whom he expected to be in an audience watching this play could ever imagine something other than an American manifest destiny: the savage is noble by virtue of his willingness to step aside and let the foreigners conquer his land.

Are we still so romantic? I wonder how a play that cast a Muslim suicide bomber as a modern-day "noble savage" would be received—by either side.

Alex Roe, Metropolitan's artistic director, has staged this revival in a way that puts its old-fashioned-ness right up front. He's charged set designer Ryan Scott to build a jewel box-style stage on the Metropolitan's floor, framed by a very conspicuous proscenium arch and ringed by old-time footlights (lighting is by Douglas Filomena). The actors wear heavy pancake-y makeup and some perform in the broad manner we associate with 19th century melodrama. The effect of all of this is to remind us continuously that we are observing not just a play but a whole bygone world—this ambience makes us confront the America that adored theatre like Metamora as well as this specific drama itself.

It's a risky choice that mostly pays off. I got irritated with the actors who overplayed—evoking, sometimes, laughs that were certainly unintended by Stone—but I loved the homely simplicity of the design and staging. Matthew Trumbull and Adriane Erdos are nothing short of triumphant as Metamora and Nahmeokee, creating characters we admire and respect, despite the ridiculous way Stone makes them speak and the ultimately demeaning things he makes them do. These actors, and Roe, justify the gamble of mounting this obscure play, making the attitudes of nearly two centuries ago live and breathe, and showing us—as this kind of theatre always does, better than almost anything I know of—how far we've come as a nation... and how far we still have to go.

I witness many people who wish never to talk about how they are affected by what happened at the World Trade Center in September of 2001, especially New Yorkers. As if not talking about it would help the pain to subside and disintegrate from our memories. The playwright of Mind the Gap, Tom Grady, and the Actors Stock Company have decided to take a different approach by bringing it into the foreground. Instead of reliving our past, they ask us to step outside ourselves and watch how it is affecting other people today.

This solo piece, performed by Annmarie Benedict, introduces us to the lives of several characters, all experiencing the same isolation many feel, even when surrounded by people. Beginning in complete darkness, we can only hear the curious antics of a toddler mumbling around in her crib, soon to introduce the ideals of unadulterated love. From there a woman from Minnesota, on an impromptu hiatus from a religious church crawl, searches for herself in the city of no limits and finds her way to the fences lining the World Trade Center, as we know it today. There we come across a brooding architect in the midst of her vision of the future World Trade Center, as we will know it. She stumbles across a homeless woman helplessly searching for the only person in the world who cared about how she lived, her social worker who worked in the Towers. We are then led to an elderly French woman who has flown over from her homeland, for her first visit ever, to come to grips with the site where her son was buried not three years ago. And finally, we see how large the circle of tragedy reaches as a daughter in Brooklyn tries to connect with her Hindu roots as she prepares to visit her father’s perishing ground.

All these characters are brought together in a performance seamlessly directed by Keith Oncale. Dressed all in black, Benedict is captivating to watch. She moved me in multiple ways and on more than one occasion, transforming in front of the audience into various personalities at the shift of a light. Her eyes even exhibit how each character has a new energy and charisma about them, distinct from the one before. The writing in the play is solid and clearly reveals the emotional value of each character's battle, without burdening the audience. Aside from a folding chair, their lighting is the only design element. It works marvelously and helps to accentuate the play's many well- crafted moments. Even the ending fade to black shows, perhaps, the ghosts of the past that still linger in our fair city.

Hard work certainly shows itself when you can perform gracefully and not disclose any sign of effort. There should be more theatre in New York stimulating audiences like Mind the Gap. For a subject that is already tired out in our emotional minds, this play challenges us to see it once more. Not from our eyes, but through the eyes of others.

Naturalism is what August Strindberg intended when he wrote Miss Julie in 1888, so it’s puzzling why the current rendering of the play at the Cherry Lane Theatre has snowballed into an unrealistic, over-the-top melodrama. Is it Truda Stockenstrom’s new translation, set in the present-day Middle East? Is it Scott Schwartz’s direction? Is it Mimi Bilinski’s portrayal of Julie? On all accounts—I say, “yes.”

This play dissects gender issues (including sexual repression) and the clashing struggles between the upper and lower classes. Matching the original setting as prescribed by Strindberg, Stockenstrom sets the play in the kitchen of a Count’s home on a midsummer evening. The Count’s daughter, Julie, is an aristocratic young woman who ultimately seduces her father’s ambitious valet, Jean. After the sexual thrill is gone, the couple finds that they have nothing in common, and Julie struggles with the consequences of her actions. In the context of this play, there is a battle for power between Julie and Jean. Strindberg’s misogynistic nature is revealed through Jean, who feels superior to Julie because he is a man, superiority he can use to combat her superiority to him in terms of class. The tension of being a man relating to a woman and also a servant relating to a mistress stirs this play into conflict.

Okay—read the play at home and you can figure out the plot and it’s themes; so why do we need to witness it in the theatre? This is a question I wish Schwartz had pondered more effectively in the production's rehearsal process. His staging is self conscious, awkward, and overtly theatrical (which counters the potent naturalism intended by Strindberg). Re-conceive—fine. Deconstruct—fine. But retain and unearth the inherent and integral honesty of a moment between two people. This production feels pre-packaged; nothing is discovered on the stage in front of the audience. It’s choreographed to such a point that there is no possibility for the characters to live in the world of their drama, resulting in an experience where you are continually reminded that you are watching actors who are “acting”—really hard! When does “being” enter the equation? The scene where Jean and Julie finally ravish each other with over-stimulated passion is nothing more than a series of planned poses, more grotesque than sensual, more laughable (literally) than arousing.

As Julie, Mimi Bilinski is strangely gawky and oddly too contemporary in this contemporary re-telling of her story. She gives a performance that is independent of anyone else on stage. She screams much of her text, without the motivation inciting her to do so. She is uncharismatic and fails to deliver the sexual appeal needed to convey the dimensional nature of Julie. The director in me wanted to call out: “breathe”—“slow down”—“listen”—“really kiss him”—“truly want what you don’t have”—but this is an incomplete and overworked performance, and a disappointment.

Michael Aronov is much stronger as Jean—finessing each scene with nuances of honesty. I wish he had embodied more of the characteristics of the lower class servant, as he seemed too "equal" to Julie, preventing the full range of the class struggle to be realized. Opal Alladin is most effective as Jean’s fiancée, Kristine, the smallest of the roles—her performance is the truest in relation to the moment-to-moment realization of the play.

Stockenstrom’s translation is interesting. I appreciate the contemporary setting of the Middle East as it speaks directly to a culture that represses female identity (sexually, religiously and socially) and glorifies the position of the male in all arenas—adding a potent reality to the Kristine and Jean relationship (both Middle Eastern) and Kristine’s take on Julie (a Westerner). But the writing seems to jump too drastically into outbursts of rage and sentiment, which turns this drama into a distracting comedy. All around, the script, direction, and the performances (mostly Bilinski’s) long for subtext and subtlety.

Beowulf Boritt’s set design is a highly visual instillation of exposed brick walls and wooden flooring covered with dirt, sand, and pieces of crumbling clay—all colored the deep, rich tones of the earth baked by the scorching sun. Tyler Micoleau’s lighting highlights the heat of the environment and the tensions of the play. And Mark Simon’s costumes succeed with their Middle Eastern accuracy and Western contrast—clothes in perfect conflict. The design aspects of the production have provided a perfect world to play the play—if only this production wasn’t playing “at” it.

Witnessing August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie is like taking a bubble bath with your blow dryer. Or so it is with Rattlestick Theatre’s new production. First and foremost, credit should go to Craig Lucas for his new translation which is as silky as a warm bath—that is, until an electrical appliance splashes through the surface, and that tub becomes a frying pan.

Miss Julie is a play of constant reversals, as incremental as a falling elevator. It is the midsummer night’s festival and fiancés Jean, the butler, and Kristine, the cook, are listing off to one another a litany of their mistress’s reputation-tarnishing behavior. A perfect example of this is Miss Julie’s insistence that Jean come upstairs and dance with her, a sight that will only cause people to “talk.” Later, when Kristine goes to sleep, the fickle Miss Julie initiates a more daring dance: seducing Jean to her and then reprimanding him away. The other servants get wind of their interaction and, drunkenly caterwauling a vulgar song about the lady and her servant, they descend into the servants' quarters. While the mob turns the place upside down, Jean hides Miss Julie in his room and she makes good on her flirtation.

When they emerge, things have changed. Sex and Violence, the great equalizers (after Time, of course), have rendered their social status meaningless. In addition to a shattered sense of status, the two are in big trouble: her reputation (and her father’s) may be irreparably damaged by her class-less indiscretion; he, on the other hand, could verily lose his fiancée and his livelihood if this transgression is brought to light.

The second success of Rattlestick’s production is the superb work of director Anders Cato and his indefatigably mutable cast—Marin Hinkle, Reg Rogers, and Julia Gibson—in the archetypal roles of Miss Julie, Jean and Kristine, respectively.

Hinkle’s Miss Julie vacillates so between imperious and imperiled that I couldn’t decide if I wanted her good name saved or her good neck snapped. As Kristine, Gibson begins with a sweet modesty and ends with a steely piety; her power drill of a diatribe at Jean, not for his infidelity, but for “forgetting his place,” is one of the more breathtaking moments in this ninety-minute bullet of a play. Rogers, as Jean, starts as a pinball smacked between the women, and morphs into a wrecking ball that, once set in motion, can only be stopped when one or both are destroyed.

The third success of Rattlestick’s production is the physical world itself: a pristine servants' kitchen with a hulky hunk of meat hanging on one side and, standing in the middle of the floor, a tall pair of black boots (Miss Julie’s father's, and his disapproving presence is consequently felt throughout). This is John McDermott’s evocative set, sensitively/sinisterly lit by Ed McCarthy. Scott Killian’s sound design creates a convincing world without and his original music suggests the turbulent world within. Olivera Gajic’s costumes can turn from prim-and-proper to down-and-dirty with just one rip: Miss Julie is in tatters by the end of play (perhaps it is appropriate to mention here that Rick Sordelet’s fight choreography is as elegant and visceral as any other element in this production).

The menacing (indeed, often violent) way of its characters makes Miss Julie shocking, but it is the brutal words they use to denigrate one another is what truly stuns. Craig Lucas’ superb translation, brought to thrilling life by Rattlestick Theatre, is so conductive to Strindberg’s linguistic-electricity, allowing English-speaking audiences to truly feel the jolt of it all. Don’t miss it.

The second word of this play's title is the operative one—Missouri Legend, by Elizabeth Beall Ginty, is a charmer of a tall tale about outlaw Jesse James and his last stand in the Ozarks and St. Joe in 1882. It's a delightful bit of Americana, all about conniving bankers cheating innocent widows out of their land and big-hearted bank robbers saving the day with ingenuity and panache. It's a story that folks love to watch and love to believe: just try and get out of Missouri Legend without a soft spot for its hero, a man who in real life was a killer, thief, and devout son of the Confederacy.

But real life has little to do with the fanciful fairy tale that Ginty has set before us, and that's just fine. It begins in the parlor of Thomas Howard, the wealthy and upright Missouri citizen (involved, fuzzily, in the "grain trade") who is actually notorious bandit Jesse James. Jesse's reserves are a little low, and his pride is a touch wounded by the current bounty on his head—a meager thousand dollars. So he's meeting with his brother Frank and his colleagues Jim Cummins and Charlie Johnson to plan a robbery—they're going to heist stockpiles of gold from a train as it rolls through the nearby Ozark Mountains.

Ginty quickly reveals, with good-natured humor, the contradictions of Jesse's life. On the one hand, he's tough, rough, and ready: willing, for example, to pretend to aim his pistols at his adoring pal Billy Gashade as a practical joke. On the other, he's a devout Baptist who won't have playing cards in his home, and he yearns for respectability so much that he's just taken out a loan from a local bank, leaving a promissory note to pay the money back in two weeks time—and he means to do just that. Jesse's wife, Zerelda (called Zee by just about everybody) echoes his desire for middle class stability, threatening to leave him whenever it looks like he's about to revert to his old ways as an outlaw.

But we know that loyal Zee will never leave her man, any more than Jesse will ever give up the romance and honor of the caper. On his way to rendezvousing with his colleagues, Jesse stops at an Ozark farmhouse for some refreshment. Here he meets the Widder Weeks, a scrappy woman, old before her time, who is initially suspicious of this stranger but warms up to him when he reveals his Baptist faith and his affinity for her father, whom he knew long ago. The Widder—think a younger version of Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies—serves up some vittles and draws some sweet water from the well, and tells Jesse (never knowing who he really is, of course) the terrible story of how her no-'count husband mortgaged everything he owned and then died, leaving her in debt to the sinister bank. The note is due today, and the man from the bank is coming around for the $200 plus interest and if he doesn't get it, she will lose everything. (Her two surviving children—out of nine—have already been taken away from her by her equally dastardly in-laws.)

Well, darn it all if Jesse doesn't take pity on Widder Weeks, and quickly devises a plot to pay off her farm free and clear and steal back the money from the bank to boot. Leaving her with the cash and a "recipe" that she must get the bank representative to sign, he heads off to the train robbery, and then returns to the bank where he took out his loan, which naturally is the same one that's trying to cheat the Widder. Improbable, entertaining shenanigans ensue.

The third act plays out the end of Jesse's life as folk tragedy, as he is betrayed by a friend who is revealed to be both turncoat and coward. Truest to the record, it's just as lively and watchable as everything that comes before. As a finale, Jesse's buddy Billy Gashade leads the company in singing a song he wrote, "The Ballade of Jesse James." We are encouraged to join in (the words are in the program).

This can be, I think, a more rollicking, light-hearted show than Yvonne Conybeare's staging suggests: this production feels more like an apologia for Jesse James than the homespun celebration that I think Ginty was going for. That said, this Missouri Legend is a great deal of fun, especially in the scene at the bank, where Mike Durkin brings to life every lowdown 19th century melodrama villain ever conceived in his oily performance as greedy capitalist Hosea Hickey, with fellow cast members Lance Olds (as the nervous bank teller George), Marc Donovan (as a slow-witted deputy named Sam), and Teresa Kelsey (as another of the bank's victims, a mountain gal named Liza who fumes bitterly over the 15% interest that Hickey wants to charge her) all rising to the occasion as well.

As Jesse, Alex Roe, brooding and bearded, is commanding and complicated—he shows us the feisty crook of legend as well as the pious, longing-to-be-domesticated family man. Putnam Smith, who plays the worshipful Billy Gashade, is at his best on his banjo, leading the company in rousing singing of period folk and gospel tunes at suitable moments between and during the play's several scenes.

Missouri Legend conjures not only a unique life story but a whole kind of American myth, our own version of Robin Hood—the noble outlaw who lives by a chivalrous code equal to any Arthurian knight's, carving out the frontier with courage, pride, firearms, and all-American spunk. I am delighted to have made this play's acquaintance—it's a keeper, a lost treasure that the Metropolitan Playhouse deserves praise for unearthing.

Modern Orthodox, a new play by Daniel Goldfarb, is about a thirty-something couple who live together in Manhattan. He's a financial consultant and she's a doctor; his name is Ben Jacobson and hers is Hannah Ziggelstein (Goldfarb is telegraphing that they're Jewish) but neither is particularly devout and they don't go to synagogue or keep kosher.

Ben has impulsively decided that he wants to get married, and so in Scene One we see him buying an engagement ring from an Orthodox diamond merchant named Hershel Klein. Hersch (as he asks to be called), a youthful and very hyper 27-year-old, arrives 45 minutes late. He peppers his speech with Yiddish, begins many of his sentences with the Hebrew phrase Baruch Hashem, and makes endless self-deprecating remarks about himself and his people. ("There is no word for thin in Yiddish," for example.) He also carries a gun, but except for that he's a poster-boy anti-Semitic caricature—right up to his willingness to doff his yarmulke (flouting a significant tradition and, one presumes, a deeply held faith) in order to clinch the sale (Ben having asked him to "take off the beanie").  I mean, Shakespeare couldn't have made Shylock more alien or more grasping with this much economy.

So ten minutes into Modern Orthodox, I had a big problem: I hated the people in this play. I hated Ben's self-loathing Jew for asking another Jew to take off his beanie, and I hated Hershel for being such a walking, talking stereotype and for allowing greed to compromise his faith. Mostly, I hated Daniel Goldfarb for creating these reprehensible characters. Is this what he thinks Jewish people are like? (Is this what he thinks people are like?)

Now, I should hasten to add that many people in the audience laughed long and hard at Modern Orthodox, which continues along these lines for another 80 minutes or so. I also had a conversation with a colleague afterward and she assured me that Goldfarb's message here is one of tolerance—that the understanding that Ben will (inevitably) develop for Hersh's religious traditions represents personal growth for this secular Jew.

But I was only aware of the meanness and the improbableness of Goldfarb's story. Scene Two finds Ben attempting to propose to Hannah, only to be immediately rebuffed because she's had a hard day at work. Then they're interrupted by Hersh, who has run away from home because his mail-order bride in Belgium supposedly killed herself after receiving his photo; he has decided to move in with Ben and Hannah until they find him a new woman. (And they allow him to do so!) They also eventually find him the woman of his dreams: a smart and articulate Columbia graduate named Rachel Feinberger whose goal in life—against the odds, I'd argue—is to marry an orthodox Jewish diamond merchant and cook and clean for him.

Sorry, but I never worked up a lick of empathy for any of these people. Nor did I believe one word of this play.

I suspect, having had a chance to peruse a copy of the script subsequently, that James Lapine's antic production and the entirely unnuanced performances of Craig Bierko (Ben), Jenn Harris (Rachel), and Jason Biggs (Hershel) make Modern Orthodox seem crasser and coarser than it actually is. (Molly Ringwald is fairly believable as Hannah, however.) Biggs in particular yuks it up at the expense of anything resembling reality or truth: his Hershel is a nitwit and a buffoon, a hormone-addled adolescent who would be more at home in Porky's than in shul. Some restraint in this and other characterizations might have helped us understand these people a little better.

In the end, the stylish set  by Derek McLane, depicting the Manhattan skyline, proves to be the best thing about the production.

FADE IN ON:

The Movie Producer’s office on the studio lot, early on a Monday morning. Having shut down production on his troubled, multi-million dollar blockbuster and fired his director, The Producer has called an emergency meeting with The New Director and The Script Doctor in the hopes of salvaging the film’s unwieldy script and writing a new one before the week is out—even if that means staying in his office until it’s done.

If this sounds like your average movie production meeting, think again. The circumstances here are quite different. The Producer is none other than legendary movie mogul David O. Selznick; The New Director is Wizard of Oz helmer Victor Fleming; and The Script Doctor is newspaperman-turned-screenwriter Ben Hecht, co-author of The Front Page and winner of the first screenwriting Oscar. The movie they are trying to salvage is Selznick’s years-in-the-making pet project, Gone With the Wind, and their meeting is the setting for Ron Hutchison’s boisterous and hilarious new comedy, Moonlight and Magnolias.

The play’s title comes from Hecht’s opinion of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. “It’s just moonlight and magnolias,” he tells Selznick. “Yuck!” But Hecht hasn’t actually read the book, only the first page—which is more than enough. To him, Gone With the Wind is just melodramatic tripe—an opinion shared by Fleming, who thinks that writers and actors get in the way of making good movies. But, he takes enough pride in his craft to do his job without letting personal taste get in the way. Besides, Fleming doesn’t ever want to go back to where he started: as a chauffeur. Only Selznick believes in the commercial and artistic potential of Gone With the Wind, and he sets out to convince both men that it is movie magic waiting to happen. Since Hecht hasn’t read the book, Selznick and Fleming act out every scene within its 1,000-plus pages—to give him an idea of the story.

Hecht has more on his mind than a hefty paycheck, though. As the story unfolds before his eyes, Hecht spots an unsettling corollary between Mitchell’s endorsement of the pro-slavery Confederacy and America’s then-current practice of turning a blind eye to Hitler’s activities in Europe (Moonlight and Magnolias takes place in February, 1939, a few years before the United States entered World War II). He begins to feel that if moviegoers can embrace a lying, slave-owning, morally reprehensible heroine like Scarlett O’Hara, they can just as easily ignore the growing persecution and genocide of the Jews—thereby endorsing it.

As serious as that may sound, let me assure you that Moonlight and Magnolias is clearly focused on the comedy. Every time Hecht voices a moral concern, Selznick meets it head-on with enough flowery love-of-the-movies rhetoric to make one think he’d stepped out of a best-selling potboiler himself. And the scenes with Selznick and Fleming acting out Gone With the Wind are priceless, with Selznick always playing Scarlett, and the macho Fleming playing everyone else. An Act II highlight in which both men play Melanie’s childbirth scene—with Fleming filling in as both Melanie and Prissy (“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies, Miss Scarlett!”)—is particularly uproarious.

Hutchison’s writing is sharp and clean. The jokes are funny, but more importantly the characters are too. Hutchison knows that comedy erupts best when characters are placed uncomfortably between the actual outcome of a given situation and their expectation of what that outcome will be. By locking the three men in Selznick’s office for five days under such a high-pressure circumstance, with nothing but peanuts and bananas (“brain food,” as Selznick calls it) to live on, he gives each of them ample opportunity to vent their comic spleen.

Hutchison also puts a lot at stake for everyone. For Fleming, it’s his career; for Hecht, his conscience; for Selznick, it is his dignity and his legacy. If Gone With the Wind fails the studio will go bankrupt, and he will have to go back to work for his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer. But, if it succeeds, Selznick knows he will have produced the greatest movie ever made. “Movies are the only place I know where the dead can walk,” he tells Hecht and Fleming late in the play, then asks, “Who wants to live forever?”

Hutchison also does a terrific job with the weightier parts of the play, keeping Hecht’s moral outrage general and palatable without making it feel like we’re taking our medicine.

Director Lynne Meadow keeps Moonlight and Magnolias moving fast and furious, focusing the momentum so that it hits all the right comedic notes. She is ably assisted by an excellent cast: Douglas Sills marks Selznick with a charming leading-man brio and a convincing sensitivity. David Rasche is believably (and hilariously) no-nonsense as the tough-and-gruff Fleming. Matthew Arkin’s Hecht is a jaded (and equally funny) creation. And Margo Skinner shines in the smaller role of Selznick’s put-upon secretary. (Special mention must also go to Santo Loquasto’s gorgeously realized set, a part of old Hollywood brought brilliantly to life.)

Most impressive of all is the fact that Moonlight and Magnolias manages to breathe life into a tried-and-true theme: no matter what your political beliefs are, no matter what race you are, no matter what your economic status is—when it comes to filmmaking, love of the movies conquers all.

Mortal Ladies Possessed, an adaptation of a number of Tennessee Williams short stories, hodgepodged into a one-woman show for the actress Linda Marlowe, is untidy but not entirely unengaging. Simply put, it’s hard to follow what’s going on.

Adaptor Matthew Hurt has selected interesting and underexplored source material—the Williams’s stories concerned include “The Coming of Something to Widow Holly,” “The Interval,” “Man Bring Up This Road,” “In Memory of an Aristocrat,” and “Oriflamme”— but said material has been left as it was found: interesting and underexplored.

I gather that the meta-story concerns Widow Holly and her reflections about the various women who have breezed and busted through her boarding house: desperate, distraught, and eccentric ladies, chasing the men who haven’t made good on their promises, who have abandoned them. The most involving of these stories is “The Interval,” in which a woman named Gretchen meets on Laguna Beach a young Hollywood hopeful, who’s certain to be “as big as Cary Grant. Bigger.” Not surprisingly, she starts supporting him emotionally and financially, sending him to New York, joining him to meet all his new male friends who “all talk and act like they’re in a drawing room comedy,” reveals that she is pregnant, and is summarily dumped.

It is Williams’s language that makes such stories meaningful and Hurt understands that, but he seems to use only three techniques to try to make the prose theatrical: recorded voices overheard by the Widow, direct address to the audience, and responses to imaginary scene partners. Thus the script already relies a great deal on the interpretive artists to make this an exciting watch.

Director Stuart Mullins and actress Marlowe seem more invested in making this a tour-de-force than in helping the audience understand a) what we are watching and b) why. Marlowe is clearly brimming with passion and ability, but stops short of being captivating by a muddy Southern accent that can only be described as Scottish, and her physicality communicates two qualities: old and young. Mullins might have helped her develop more distinct (and accurate) voices and physical characterizations. He also could have made better use of the black box theatre, making some bolder staging choices to further delineate time and place.

Set designer Rachana Jadhav’s one notable set piece—a wooden frame on wheels with a full-length shade—is sometimes used as a closed door, sometimes as an open door, and sometimes Marlowe turns the frame so it pivots on its stand and lies flat like a surfboard or an examination table, but I can’t figure out why she does that. Phil Hewitt's lighting and Simon McCorry’s sound are serviceable, but feel similarly unguided.

Mortal Ladies Possessed, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59, may not be “the best in new British theatre” but at least it keeps us acquainted with the considerable talents of Marlowe and introduces us to some unfamiliar short stories by Williams that are indeed worthy of further exploration.

La MaMa ETC caps its 2004 International Puppet Series with a little morsel of living history with its revival of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Motel. Motel was originally produced in 1965 under the title America Hurrah. Van Itallie subsequently transferred that title onto a trilogy that includes Interview and TV and made Motel the puppet cherry on the cake of that seminal anti-Vietnam War play. The play has traveled throughout the world and through time and has not lost any of its relevance. I was completely wrapped up in the history and performance of this play. The minute the curtain opened I felt a rush of excitement that took root in me and sprouted as the show rose to its destructive climax.

Motel is a 15-minute monologue delivered by an aging caretaker of a thoroughly modern and yet homey motel along Route 666. She boasts that the rooms have luxuries such as toilets that flush by themselves and TV at the push of a button. (Van Itallie’s irony turns into prophecy here.) There is also a young couple who have rented out one of the rooms. It is their job to provide contrast to all the niceties spouted by the narrator. They do not speak but we see them in the background stripping down to their undies and trashing the place like rock stars. (A note to La MaMa: I saw at least one audience member get hit with flying glass. You might consider placing the TV further upstage.) As the action on stage rises to its peak the narrator’s speech transforms into a frenzy of words that comment on the shallow materialism of American society. Saying one thing and showing another has always been one of my favorite theatrical conventions. Van Itallie shows his mastery of this convention here.

The characters all wear giant heads on their real heads. The giant heads were originally designed by New York’s notorious experimental director, Robert Wilson. The ones for this show are re-created with wonderful detail by Jane Catherine Shaw. Shaw brings out the caretaker’s age and character brilliantly by using a deep grey to color her skin. The caretaker’s body is boxy and she moves smoothly and robotically about the stage on hidden castors. Rosemary Quinn voices the character with unforgettable veal and focus. The other two character’s bodies are padded exaggerations of the human form. The puppeteers for this show (Allison Hiroto, Chriztopher Zaborowski, and Shawneeka Woodward) literally climb into their puppets, embodying their characters with eye-popping results. Woodward, who plays the busty female guest, is especially animated.

Under the direction of George Ferencz the show flows at a steadily inclining pace. Pete Case’s set design is properly pink and decorated to perfection. It also has a little hidden magic that I won’t give away here. The sound design, provided by Tim Schellenbuam, is a constant droning traffic noise that puts you in the location of the play and doesn’t let you out.

Before the show began, the legendary founder/artistic director of La MaMa, Ellen Stewart, bestowed on us a little history of the show. She told us a story of their trip to France in which, after the performance, she was told to get out of the country or she’d have her passport revoked. In Australia, patrons of the show formed a barricade to prevent the police from arresting the actors. This revival of Motel isn’t going to bring the police storming to the theatre, but it should bring storming audiences. I have nothing but gratitude to offer La MaMa for giving New York this fantastic festival of creativity. All the programs in this year’s Puppet Series have shown La MaMa’s dedication to bringing us high quality experimental theatre and eccentric international acts. If you missed this year, or the 42 previous years, do yourself a great favor next year and catch each and every one.

The tradition of Shakespeare in the Park—long lines, big stars, packed houses—continues this summer with the Public Theatre's latest offering, Much Ado About Nothing. Year after year we see these splashy productions, with big sets and bigger names, take over the park each summer—and though audience members prize the celebrity sightings, the artistic value of the shows is occasionally lacking. Thankfully, the current production housed in the Delacorte delivers artistically what it delivers in star power, providing a pleasant evening’s entertainment worth the day’s wait for tickets.

Much Ado, one of Shakespeare’s most romantic tales, follows the fates of two couples: Hero & Claudio, whose courtship is relatively straightforward, and Beatrice and Benedick, each purporting to hate the other, while hiding their true feelings of love. No Shakespeare comedy would be complete without mistaken identities, which Much Ado provides, but of course it ends happily, and is one of the most enjoyable plays in the canon.

Kristen Johnston and Jimmy Smits lead the cast as Beatrice and Bendick, setting the tone and expertly executing the light-hearted sparring that fills the play. It’s always amazing to see the most obscure Shakespearian verse transformed into comprehensible language in gifted hands; Johnston and Smits make every word as relevant as the current evening’s news. It’s nice to see them given the chance to headline a production after their supporting performances in 2002’s Twelfth Night—they prove here that they are up to the task. Sam Waterston and Dominic Chianese do fine work as brothers Leonato and Antonio; unfortunately Waterston’s daughter Elizabeth, who plays Hero in this production, doesn’t fare so well, especially in comparison to the rest of the cast. Jess Goldstein’s set captures the mood and locale perfectly, but the real star of this production is David Esbjornson’s direction; in his Post-WWI setting, he keeps the show moving briskly along and the comedy fresh.

It’s rare to see a theatre director wrangle luminaries into a cohesive unit, yet Esbjornson does so with aplomb. The stars, though big, may not be the film personalities that often grace the stage of the Delacorte, however, the production seems to fare better for this, with the cast working as a cast, not as stars in solitary orbits.

There seems to be a universal fascination with the mystery surrounding British author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), much better known as Lewis Carroll, the man who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Were these bedtime stories meant to entertain ten-year-old Alice Liddell, the source of his inspiration, or to seduce her? Did he write them to purge his own personal demons on the page or to make scathing allegorical comment about the state of the British Empire under Queen Victoria? Dodgson always claimed the stories were “just nonsense.” Freud, Jung, and a host of other academics insisted otherwise.

Dodgson had a penchant for sketching and photographing semi-nude little girls, and, in the company of adults, is purported to have had a terrible stammer that earned him the cruel nickname “Dodo”—most unfortunate given that he was a math teacher/lecturer and an ordained minister. He was very close to the Liddell family, particularly Alice, when in 1863 some publicly undisclosed event took place that estranged Dodgson from the Liddells almost until the end of his days when he finally made peace with Alice and her mother. The pages detailing his years in the family’s company were ripped from his well-kept journal by Dodgson himself, and more information was later removed by the nephew who inherited his estate. The Liddell family refused to publish any of his letters to them. Dodgson never took a wife, although he apparently maintained long friendships with “mature” women. A hundred years after his death, allusions that he was a pedophile (albeit probably a celibate one) persist while the mystique around him continues to grow.

In her play Mushroom In Her Hands, produced by the Milk Can Theatre Company, playwright Anne Phelan does her own decidedly adult but wistful take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wherein Dodgson actually becomes a character—many characters, in fact, leading right back to the one—as a different kind of Alice dream-tumbles down her rabbit hole into the quagmire of self-awareness. Initially set in 1866 Oxford, England, the play starts with (according to the program) 14-year-old Alice posing restlessly for Dodgson behind his camera. She giggles, flirts, and teases alluringly, wonders aloud about the man she’ll marry someday, then cruelly goads Dodgson about his stammer in front of adults, most especially her mother. Throughout—and always remaining at arm’s length—Dodgson is sad, patient, indulgent and calmly acknowledges the inevitability of Alice’s growing up. Calm, that is, until she matter-of-factly suggests he ask her father for her hand in marriage. So, at its heart, this story is of a doomed non-romance and love mutually unrequited.

When Alice finally reaches Wonderland, some classic characters are there to greet her and guide—or mislead—her along the path. We have the Mouse, a French “itinerant ballet teacher” who instructs Alice in a water ballet; the timid, deferential Dodo/Dodgson who, nonetheless, cannot take his eyes off Alice; Cedric Caterpillar-about-to-be -Butterfly/Dodgson, less timid than Dodo but just as terrified of his certifiably mad, hyper-carnivorous father (in this case, Father William, as in the parody poem “You are old, Father William, the young man said…”) and just as aroused by Alice. He goads her into taking a toke from his hookah pipe, which takes her on to the next level, where she meets Mrs. Hargreaves (who turns out to be Alice as an adult), a sad, lonely woman sitting on an empty nest who warns a befuddled Alice to protect her eggs at all cost. Act One closes with Alice meeting the Frog Footman, a self-styled “villain” and very inept seducer/rapist, who turns squeamish when Alice asks him if he intends to take away her eggs. Villain he may be, he exclaims scandalized, but even HE would not be so reprehensible as to discuss biology with a lady.

Act Two brings Alice face-to-face with the Duchess, a theatrical, self-consumed harpy so enthralled with her own delusions of grandeur and martyrdom that she can’t be bothered with her baby son Pig, whom the drunken Cook is trying (unsuccessfully) to drown and chop up in a stew pot. Meanwhile, the Cheshire Cat/Dodgson pops his masked smile in and out of the action with some frequency. Alice’s attempts to save and nurture Pig (who is about ten years older in the next scene) lead her only to realize that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and that he’s every bit as horrible as his mother. Pig insists, in literally porcine fashion, that Alice is really nothing but breeding stock and a commodity that her beloved father can bid and bargain with. Horrified, Alice takes some consolation in posing for the photographs that the unabashedly sensual, seductive Cheshire Cat/Dodgson takes of her. But even these moments are tainted for both of them as she changes from schoolgirl flats to high heels. Alice’s final tour of Wonderland is the mad tea party, wherein the Mad Hatter/Dodgson, the March Hare, and the Dormouse subject her to nothing less than gang rape.

In some terrific casting, four actors perform Mushroom In Her Hands. The very beautiful, winsome Jessi Gotta is always Alice; Reed Prescott plays Charles Dodgson and all his manifestations; Carolyn McDermott and Daryl Lathon do multiple duty as the various denizens of Wonderland. I felt in the initial “real time” exchanges between Alice and Dodgson that Gotta was playing more of a bratty nine- or ten-year-old rather than a coquettish 14-year-old, who by now, especially in the Victorian era, is certainly being groomed for a suitable marriage. But her tantrums and occasional bouts of infantilism are appropriate to a dream state and the emotional evolution of her journey through Wonderland. She has a great moment with a line ripped off from The Wizard of Oz, and Gotta looks great in a white blouse that she is innocently about to pop out of.

Reed Prescott’s Dodgson is very much the tragic romantic hero—part Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, not the cartoon cat), part Lolita’s Humbert Humbert. It’s interesting to note that the real Charles Dodgson was himself, for the era, considered an extraordinarily handsome man, and Prescott has movie star good looks. This might have been more distracting had Prescott not given a performance of some depth. Gorgeous and affectionate, but also reserved and elusive, it makes sense in this play’s context that he could make Alice discover her hormones. Each time we encounter him in Wonderland, he grows more aggressively sexual, right up to becoming the Mad Hatter and leading the gang rape.

Carolyn McDermott plays the Mouse, Mrs. Hargreaves (older Alice), Cook, and the traumatized-into-madness March Hare. I didn’t care much for the Mouse and water ballet scenes as they seemed to go on and on and on (but then, alas, so do some dreams), but McDermott does make an interesting, soul-weary older Alice, and her Cook’s song-and-dance number with the Duchess is an absolute hoot.

The performer who truly shines is Daryl Lathon, stealing the show in just about every scene he’s in. He’s particularly delightful as the “villain” Frog Footman who tries to terrify/seduce Alice into submission with impromptu violent mini-plays with paper-doll stick puppets he pulls out of an always-handy coffer, and seems quite hurt when Alice remains oblivious to his intent. His Duchess is a combination of Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Quentin Tarantino meeting Gilbert and Sullivan. I was almost dismayed at the drop of the energy level when in the final scenes he plays the mopey, drowsy Dormouse.

I wasn’t crazy about the technical staging of Mushroom In Her Hands. There are some admirable artistic ideas about how to present the more surreal moments of Alice’s journey through the use of computerized projection and image collages, I’m just not sure how well in this instance they worked. Perhaps it was the fact that where I ended up sitting didn’t have the best view, but it took me a moment or two to catch on that I should be looking at the images changing on the stage left wall. And even as the images emerged (and it seemed to take a long time), I felt what I was seeing was more clever effect than actually a part of the play. In fact, my biggest criticism would be the clunkiness of the transitions and set changes, which are very distracting and interrupt the flow of events that, given the nature of the story, should be seamless. It also would have helped if in Alice’s lost and alone moments, Gotta had been given a little more to do than run circles around the set blocks, wring her hands and cry. And I wish the Cheshire Cat’s appearances could be handled more subtly than popping in and out from behind the upstage curtain.

But I really liked the costuming by Marija Djorjevic, especially the Duchess’s and March Hare’s outfits, and the musical number (original music by Nick Moore) with the Duchess and the Cook is very, very entertaining and the highlight of the show. The text sounds true and faithful to Lewis Carroll’s story and style, and the actors carry it off beautifully. I was a bit confused by the final real-time moments between Alice and Dodgson and wished that playwright Phelan had taken a few more risks in Wonderland. But for the most part it’s a lovely, speculative story that has a lot of potential to make really great theatre as long as it focuses on what kind of story it wants to be. The Milk Can Theatre Company’s production gives it a good try but this time doesn’t quite make the mark.

I really started to like Jill Dalton’s one-woman show My Life in the Trenches about ten minutes in, when she dons a feather headband and dances to the guitar accompaniment of a Janis Joplin song. In that scene, Dalton seemed to loosen up, and she sustained that looseness for the rest of this funny and enjoyable show. Dalton’s script is full of punch lines (demonstrating her background in stand-up comedy), such as (I’m paraphrasing here) "My mother was a Quaker, my father was in the Army, so I became passive-aggressive."

The show details her journey from South Carolina to New York City, where she moves to become an actress but first supports her husband through law school. Much of the show is about her frustration in waiting to become an actress, so the show itself is a testament to her having achieved her dream. The story is told in chronological order, except for a quick introductory section, and she plays several characters, including her father, her husband, her younger self, her mother, and her shrink, all with great detail. One of her strongest, funniest moments is when she does aerobics and speaks in aerobic-instructor rhythm. Her portrayal of her mother, who quit painting in order to raise her children, is especially effective—it's so specific and so different from Dalton's own personality that she surprised me.

Jack McCullough’s direction has her using the space well and interacting with the audience.

Overall, the story has a lot of heart and Dalton is very likable, but I would like to see her explore some of the more complex elements of her personality and story without hiding behind the wit and humor she does so well.

After a splash success at the 1999 FringeNYC Festival, and a subsequent Off-Broadway production in 2001, Toronto playwright Daniel MacIvor’s 1992 drama Never Swim Alone must qualify as some sort of local favorite. It’s rare for any play to have three separate productions in six years, let alone a one-act by a Canadian. And, after seeing the Bridge Company’s new production at Theater 54 (on a double bill with another MacIvor one-act), I have to say I don’t know what the fuss is all about.

The bulk of the play consists of a sort of masculinity contest between two young businessmen, Bill and Frank. And when I say contest I mean it literally: this is a competition, divided into rounds, in which each man tries to raise his status at the expense of the other in the fields of sex, business, personal dress, etc. The contest is officiated by a young woman in a swimsuit who sits in a lifeguard chair and makes the calls—the winner of each round gets to direct a short, self-justifying monologue to the audience. As the game proceeds, facts about the men’s lives and their boyhood pasts together are revealed with increasing detail, building up to a general indictment of modern manhood.

If this sounds like a lot of concept, it is; and that’s about all it is. The play is heavy on structure, light on depth. There’s no context, no impetus for this struggle, except that the play calls for it. The only thing we really find out about the characters in this dramatic neverland is that one’s a failure, the other’s a success, and both are schmucks. The piece’s formal playfulness can’t mask a soulless knee-jerk misanthropy reminiscent of Neil LaBute—and just because it was written before LaBute’s rise to fame doesn’t make it any better.

I have to admit this is a shame, because I liked the acting and direction almost as much as I disliked the script. Amos Crawley and Dustin Olson are good actors, and though I found them more believable as good actors than as the cynical back-slapping (and -stabbing) automatons the script calls for, their general likeability and technical skills (especially during some of the play’s athletic bouts of stylistic repetition) make the bitter pill go down a bit more smoothly. Jennifer Laine Williams, in the utterly thankless female role, makes you wish she had more to do than repeat the same few lines and blow a whistle every now and again.

The evening’s curtain-raiser, This Is a Play is a bit more amusing, if only because it’s content to be a simple entertainment. Employing a facile meta-theatrical conceit (the actors toggle back and forth between speaking their lines and subjectively describing their actions and feelings while doing so), the script occasionally manages to cut through its postmodern trappings and get off a few decent zingers at the expense of pretentious self-serving theatre folk—though that stereotype is in itself a cliché on par with the hoary Tennessee Williams parody that constitutes the play-within-a-play (think “The Lettuce Tattoo”). Again, the whole affair is offset by a fine cast (Esther Barlow, Lori Lane Jefferson, and Robin Mervin), whose graceful comic aplomb is more than the material deserves.

Throughout the whole evening, I found myself impressed with the well-oiled production put together by director Jason Fraser. His pacing and stage imagery are spot-on, every line and movement taut and precise. I’d be thrilled to see what his exacting approach does for material that has assets to enlighten, rather than flaws to expose.

Newsical, the topical musical revue by Rick Crom, is diverting, good-natured fun. Four energetic young performers—Kim Cea, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Todd Alan Johnson, and Jeff Skowron (for whom Jim Newman subbed on the night I attended)—poke fun at current events, attitudes, and newsmakers in a series of musical numbers and comedy sketches that are easy on the eye and ear. Don't expect penetrating political insight here—just some low-key ribbing at the state of our world and the state of our minds that's often very funny and occasionally clever and/or pointed. It's terrific entertainment for this post-election, pre-holiday time of year, ideal for the weary desperate shopper or despairing Democrat.

Politics, in fact, dominates the first part of Newsical, with cute numbers about George Bush and John Kerry setting the tone for the evening nicely; a running gag about color-coded terror alerts finds fresh fodder for laughs in a concept we're all tired of hearing about. (Note that Crom is updating the show on regular basis to reflect the latest happenings; by the time you see it, some of these bits may be replaced by newer, timelier ones.)

Some of Crom's ideas are very smart, such as a musical sketch about a family whose membership is entirely addicted to lifestyle-enhancing drugs such as Prozac or Timespa, or a piece in which an excessively loony Michael Jackson is visited by the REAL inhabitant of Neverland (i.e., Peter Pan, played with devilish good humor by Johnson). Other concepts are less well realized: a sketch about Liza Minnelli's apparent propensity for beating up men takes far too long to get to its (very witty) punchline (pun intended), a deft parody of "Liza with a 'Z'" incorporating boxing metaphors.

A few of the skits feel dated already. There's a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy number, for example, that's cute but ho-hum, and a song about Internet dating that's light-years passé in cybertime.  The first act finale—a musical about Martha Stewart—has also already been done before (over and over again, on the fringe circuit if not elsewhere).

But the song called "Who Do You Have to Screw to Get a Flu Shot?" which is sung by a chorus of very annoyed rich people who assume they're entitled to never get sick is hilarious and on the money.

Crom's music is varied and tuneful and the lyrics are consistently clever. Donna Drake's direction and choreography is terrific, keeping the show moving effortlessly and making excellent use of the small but friendly Upstairs at Studio 54 space. The four actors all do fine work and are each given at least one moment to shine. Newman does a very funny George Bush and is joined by Johnson for a silly but well-executed piece about "Hooters Airline." Kurtzuba, a versatile singer/comedienne, garners big laughs as a hyper kid on Ritalin and as a wigged-out Liza. The scene-stealer of the evening for me, however, is Cea, who delivers a deathless Barbra Streisand parody in a sketch about celebrities expressing their political opinions that is one Newsical's undisputed highlights.

There is, perhaps, a slight homophobic cast to some of the material; Crom may want to guard against that. But overall, Newsical's satire is easy-going and gentle, never pushing too hard in any particular direction and therefore quite enjoyable regardless of one's particular political persuasion. Thanks to Drake's expert guiding hand and the fine work of its enthusiastic cast, Newsical is the perfect low-impact entertainment after a busy day of shopping, sightseeing, or the daily grind.

What's most interesting to me about Julian Schwab's new play Nicotine is its shape—it begins in the middle of a set of stories that, cumulatively, depict the progress of four different romantic relationships; after a brief prologue that happens, chronologically, at the end of the tale, it moves forward, then backward, and then in both directions as it runs its course. Not earth-shattering, perhaps, but it's certainly an intriguing way to frame a drama that, otherwise, is mostly pretty mundane.

Nick and Elora meet cute in an alley behind a movie theatre, where they have both sneaked out to smoke during an unsatisfying afternoon flick. They hook up later that night at her place, at first tentatively and then rather passionately. They seem to click; and then, for reasons never really made clear, six months later Nick starts flirting with a pretty but ill-dispositioned young woman named Nicky whom he sees every day on the subway platform. The two decide to have sex on the same day that Elora goes to the doctor to find out if she's pregnant with Nick's baby. In Act Two, we get back story about Elora's ex-husband, the very serious Peter, who had a brief affair after he found out Elora had lied to him about something really important. We also learn about Nick's past, engaged to his college sweetheart Beth (who will also turn out to be Elora's nurse at the doctor's office; it's that kind of play).

Unfortunately, all five of these people are so self-involved and pitiless that I found it impossible to like or care about any of them. The three women, in particular, are portrayed as manipulative, controlling, and catastrophically selfish: I don't know what we're supposed to think when we watch, in very short order, Beth turn Nick's marriage proposal down with a deflating sneer, Elora tell her ex-husband that even though she deceived him throughout their entire marriage he needs to come with her to the doctor's office anyway, and  Nicky ask Nick for money after their short-lived foray under the covers. Schwab may want to guard against such rampant misogynism in future work.

Not that Nick or Peter are ultimately much more appealing, although the former emerges as far and away the most likable figure on stage thanks  to Eric Miller, who turns in a performance of great earnestness and attractiveness against the odds. The other cast members all give us resolute self-absorption mixed with deserved self-loathing—true to their characters, I guess, but not much fun to watch. I wanted to say to Schwab and his actors: Hey, Seinfeld's passé. Let's do theatre about people who care about something besides themselves!

Nicholas Cotz's staging at least strives to be as quirky as Schwab's nonlinear layout. Personal Space Theatrics' mission (stated in the program) is to put  "actors, audiences and plays in the same literal space"; so David Esler has built a set that looks something like a tic-tac-toe board, with the play's action occurring mostly on the lines and the audience mostly in the blank squares. Alas, this leaves the actors precious little room to do their work in—it's an experiment that probably should have been aborted before the first paying customers ever arrived.

It all looks and sounds familiar. A sunken living room, outfitted with smart, stark modern furniture, framed by a startling polygonal window of frosted glass, with a long hallway trailing offstage to an unseen entryway: a room that's spare and cold and claustrophobic all at once. A young man is lying on the sofa, fitfully reading from a book. A young woman walks in and we immediately comprehend that theirs is a relationship in peril. She doesn't understand him, she says; he never goes out; he never does anything; he hasn't got a job; none of her friends will come to visit anymore because he's gotten so dour. He has no response.

His parents come, and the awkwardness is so thick that it hangs in the air; the mother is all cheerful artifice but in a terrible hurry, while the father hovers over the furniture as if afraid to get anything on his skin. They've come to see their new grandson, and they see him; and then they leave.

More recrimination between the couple follows, and then she, exasperated, announces that she's going out on the town with her friend Marta—she's so clearly enervated and in need of escape that we empathize.

And then... the trappings of alienation and anomie that felt strangely comforting and clichéd start to waver; so does the balance of power; so does our understanding of who this play is about—it seems at first to be about him, but now it feels like the story that's being told here is hers. (Things will shift once more before the play ends, and we'll discover that indeed he is the protagonist of this play.)

And Night Sings Its Songs, this solemn, moody play by Norwegian author Jon Fosse, acquires unexpected heft and emotion: the silent moments that the young man marks, alone on stage as he waits for the young woman to come home, are filled with feeling; his slow, deliberate footsteps back to the bedroom—when she finally does return and some unspoken things at last come out into the open—signal a heaviness located deep inside his soul. I was surprised by the way this story ended, especially by the stunning decision that gets made at its climax—one that's either measured or romantic, depending upon your point of view. Especially by how gut-wrenchingly effective and eloquent this fraught, stylized play that we think we've sized up as soon as it begins turns out to be.

So see Night Sings Its Songs. It's been produced here, in its American debut, by a consortium that includes Oslo Elsewhere, The Unbound Theatre, and the excellent young company Spring Theatreworks; bravo to all three for bringing this European playwright to our shores and to our attention. His talent is such that we ought to see more of his work, and soon.

It's directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde, who also translated; she clearly has a deep affinity for this piece, making every moment count in an intense, intermissionless hour-and-a-half of almost impossible tautness. It's performed by a cast of five who do remarkable work: Peter Davies and Diane Ciesla are the discomfited parents; Anna Guttormsgaard is the young woman torn apart by a romance that is being eaten away from within, as if by cancer; George Hannah arrives late on the scene as a man named Baste. Most impressive of all is Louis Cancelmi, in an extraordinary performance as the inert and hollow young man, whose every move feels like a silent, ineffable, horrible cry of pain.