Sweetness & Light, the new play by Waterwell, is about a young inventor who works as a light bulb tester for a large corporation. He's trying to create a bulb that will burn forever, and his efforts apparently come to the attention of the company's head honcho, who hopes that he can achieve his breakthrough before the first of the month, because that's when the company's chief competitor, TechCo, has announced their own permanent light bulb. A representative from TechCo woos our inventor hero, to no avail. Meanwhile, he is doing some wooing himself—of a bright young photographer whom he meets on a park bench one afternoon; he gets her a job as a bulb tester and they fall in love. But she is heading to Paris on the first of the month for a photography gig.

Also in Paris (according to the notes in the press release), in 1784, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are debating the nature of the new government they are helping to establish in the United States of America; and also of their friendship/rivalry as heads of their country's two nascent political parties. (I'm pretty sure that the writings of these two gentlemen quoted in this play date from both before and after 1784, however.)

The inventor loses his girlfriend (she goes to Paris for her job); Jefferson's young wife dies; and Sweetness & Light ends with the cast of six singing a spirited political tune, the gist of which is that we should elect Thomas Edison the 44th president. It's a very catchy song, though somewhat confusing in its sentiments; I think the idea is that an inventor (like our hero or Thomas Jefferson) would make a better president than a man who makes decisions based on faith rather than science (like George W. Bush or, it's implied, John Adams; I may be introducing some of my own bias here).

No doubt about it, Sweetness & Light is a bit of a jumble in terms of its intentions and its presentation. It feels very much like what it is, which is a play created out of improvisations by the actors; a firmer editorial hand might be in order to help better shape and focus its scenes and ideas. That said, some of the segments are terrific, particularly those involving the inventor and his photographer-girlfriend. Portrayed with goofy, quirky charm by Arian Moayed, the inventor is a delightful character; when he teaches the girl how to test light bulbs, Moayed is at his comic best, especially when he can't quite get the bulb to screw into the lamp socket properly (this bit of shtick is beautifully timed, and hilarious). With Hanna Cheek (who plays the girl), he performs a dizzy, ditzy nonsense song that is enormous fun. Their scenes provide the sweetness of the show's title.

Less sure-footed are the moments involving the businessmen. Rodney Gardiner (as Moayed's boss) seems to be playing a couple of different takes on his character depending on the specific action. His scenes with Moayed involve a lot of physical business that never quite clicks. Mitchell Bisschop's role as the man from TechCo is little more than a cameo.

The Adams/Jefferson scenes, which consist of excerpts from their writings delivered by Happy Anderson (Adams) and Tom Ridgely (Jefferson) are interspersed with the present-day narrative. Their words are absolutely worth hearing; my sense is that the material was selected mostly for its contemporary resonance—e.g., Adams defends federal policies restricting free speech (I assume he's talking about the Alien & Sedition Acts) and accuses Jefferson of being "French." The point seems to be that there's nothing new under the sun, politically speaking, which is certainly worth remembering. As I said earlier, I think the show's creators are also trying to suggest that a rationalist, democratic man of science such as Jefferson is the kind of leader we need, now as then.

All of the scenes are punctuated and accented by country-style music, composed by Lauren Cregor and performed by Jeremy Daigle and Joe Morse. It's infectious and fun; one of the best-realized aspects of the piece.

This is my first encounter with Waterwell, and though I can't say that I completely understood or loved Sweetness & Light, there's enough here of interest to make me ready to see whatever they do next. Moayed, in particular, is a find: he's an expert comic actor with real stage presence, and I'll be eager to see his work elsewhere, too.

On paper, the concept of a fully abstract underwater puppet show set to the music of 19th-century composer Hector Berlioz has the potential to sound a bit, well, chimerical. That being said, I'm pleased to announce that Basil Twist's innovatively delightful Symphonie Fantastique, currently performing at the brand-new Dodger Stages complex, doesn't take place on paper; it takes place in a 1,000-gallon tank of water, where it presents a perfect illustration of how a risky vision can translate into a sublime theatrical event.

Symphonie Fantastique, which originally opened at the HERE Arts Center in 1998, is surely the world's first abstract underwater puppet show, making Twist the genre's undoubted standard-bearer (among Twist's credits in the program is “underwater puppetry consultant for the most recent Harry Potter film”). Having missed the premiere run, which utilized a measly 500-gallon tank, I can't say if the increased volume adds to the quality of the piece, but I can certainly rave that its current quality is impeccable.

To describe the piece without short-selling its beautiful singularity is a difficult task. The director's note opens with a quotation from the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, and I think that's a good place to start—for Symphonie Fantastique doesn't resemble live theatre as it is currently practiced in New York so much as the lively pageant of early 20th-century art. In addition to bringing the cacophonous swoops and swirls of Kandinsky's compositions to dazzling life, the viewer can discern the streamlined elegance of Constantin Brancusi's sculptures, the sly anthropomorphicism of Paul Klee, the passionately frivolous colors of Matisse—all in blissful, constant, kinetic motion.

All of which translates to non-art history buffs as: fascinating shapes, gorgeous colors, balletic movements, drifting continuously through the dreamy medium of H₂O. Bubbles rise in time to the rhythm; rich, velvety clouds fill the space before abruptly shrinking into nothing; dancing creatures expand and contract with the swelling of the strings, revealing fanciful illusions at every step. Seamlessly intertwined with the puppetry itself is the ambrosial lighting design of Andrew Hill, the nearly infinite tonal variations and clever uses of which are instrumental to the piece's success.

As a psychedelic experience, this sure beats the laser-light shows at your local planetarium; and, for my money, Berlioz's 1830 composition (for which the show itself is named) is a damn sight more evocative than the usual Pink Floyd score. If it all sounds a little bit abstract, that's because it is. But this is not abstract in the negative sense; every moment is a sorely needed reminder of the rich joys to be found in pure image. The experience is lusher than most anything I've seen this side of dreams.

Tabloid Caligula, now appearing as part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival, is a study in hero worship gone badly astray. Robert is a middle-aged petty criminal-turned-entrepreneur-wannabe. We meet him as he enters the shoddy basement storeroom that functions as headquarters for his exotic rugs business, followed immediately by Joe, a young man perhaps in his early 20s who is Robert's protégé and worshipful man Friday. Joe aspires to be the kind of man that Robert, who is nattily attired in a dark suit and nothing if not articulately self-possessed, appears to be. For a very long time, Robert—Pygmalion to Joe's still very unformed Galatea—teaches his charge about transference of power, image, and the importance of history. Robert fancies himself a modern-day Alexander the Great, and indeed the street and tube maps of London that are pasted all across the back wall of the office are criss-crossed with red yarn tracking Robert's "campaigns" as he builds his "empire." Joe hangs on every word.

Then a woman named Mary comes in. Mary has asked Robert to do a job for her; we're not sure at first what it is, but it's clear that it's something illegal—something that Robert used to do but now does only reluctantly (he claims) and for good cause. Mary knows Robert from a long time ago but he hasn't remembered her so far. What Mary wanted done (which, not surprisingly, Joe has bungled), and what she knows about Robert's past—why she's really here—get revealed in the final half of Tabloid Caligula, as the balance of power shifts and Robert's delusions about himself and his past crash to the ground.

It makes for a suspenseful 80 minutes of theatre, but it's not finally very compelling. I think a piece of the problem is Peter Tate's performance as Robert, which starts out so low-key as to be almost uninteresting, and ends up with some very over-the-top melodramatics as the would-be megalomaniac implodes. Tate's work contrasts unhappily with Chris Harper's very endearing turn as the dim but gullible Joe and Suzan Sylvester's assured take on shrewd, scheming Mary; both are endlessly more fascinating to us than Robert, but the play isn't really about either one of them.

Which leads to the other source of trouble in Tabloid Caligula, namely, Darren Murphy's script. Robert is clearly the protagonist, but I never cared about him, not for one minute, and this made it hard to sit through the play. Murphy gives everything about Robert away in about three minutes at the top of the evening: as soon as we start observing him strutting before his willing but obviously deficient pupil it's clear what an utter loser he is. Robert starts small and stays small in this play; though events take him on an arc that could be tragic, we don't feel the tragedy because he's such a trivial and insignificant character. (And, sure—that smallness all by itself is very much a part of Robert's tragedy: but it's not revealed to us dramatically, it's thrown at us the minute the play begins.)

There are other problems with Murphy's work here, most having to do with plausibility. Why does Robert leave Joe alone with Mary? Why is Mary's ultimate approach to Robert so indirect? And why doesn't Robert recognize Mary? (We learn that she played a very significant role in his life; it's hard to imagine that he would forget her.) Overall, Tabloid Caligula doesn't bear much scrutiny. And Tate's un-engrossing characterization of Robert makes it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the proceedings as they proceed.

Teacher's Lounge, a comedy in two acts by Max Langert, is a hilarious farce about what happens when a system gets so broken that it appears to be beyond fixing. (Whether there's pointed sociopolitical satire embedded in that notion, I leave to you to decide.) The system, in this particular case, is an ordinary high school in central Texas. Typical happenings here include a school bus being hijacked to Mexico by a renegade honors student, another student locking himself in the lavatory and threatening to stuff clothes from the Annual Clothing Drive into the toilets unless the person of his choice agrees to go to the prom with him, and, oh yes, the bludgeoning of the principal in the head.

Our vantage point is the eponymous teacher's lounge, where three likable but cynical burnouts—Wallace, Bendich, and Van Horn—observe and occasionally try to influence and/or manage events with spectacular detachment. Although apathy and inertia are the most natural responses to emergencies for these three—especially Wallace, who doesn't even seem to actually have any classes—they nonetheless find themselves embroiled in the various crises outlined above, along with the difficulties of Hopkins, another teacher who seems to have lost her classroom to the new "permanent substitute," Fonda. And against their will, all five are subject to the whims and arrogance of Norton, senior faculty member and inveterate harasser (sexual and otherwise), who is hatching an insidious plot to take over the school.

It's enormously funny, especially during the first act, when the over-the-top absurdity stays pitched at near-surreal levels: the non-sequitur irrationality just keeps mounting and mounting, an assault on the senses and sense that feels wackily improbable and yet somehow believable at the same time. In the second act, the principal's assault engenders more traditionally farcical shenanigans involving the stowing of his unconscious body in various hiding places; this strains the play's delicately high-strung structure. But the play's feverish climax, on prom night, with a deadly tornado aiming straight for the school building, is suitably outrageous and ties all the loose ends up rather nicely.

Ryan Baber's effervescent staging is more sure-footed in Act One, which sails by on non-stop hilarity. In the second act, he's constrained by the small size of the Abingdon Theatre's black box space, which puts audience members literally just inches away from actors, and therefore makes it difficult for the performers to dash about cartoonishly with the principal's wrapped-up body—this slows down the pacing of what should be a breakneck farce.

All six actors do terrific work. Tripp Hornick is deviously funny in a Daffy Duck-sort-of-way as the loopiest of our heroes, the wise-cracking, T-shirt-wearing, out-at-all-hours-drinking and-brawling Van Horn. Kelly Briscoe is cool yet winningly madcap as the unflappable Wallace, while David Blair gets the goofy, what-me-worry cluelessness of Bendich, the most affable of the three, exactly right. Bob Harbaum is appropriately slimy as the villainous Norton, and Lynn Mastio Rice is on-target as the new teacher Fonda, a quick study if ever there was one. Margot Bercy practically steals the show as the usually-hysterical Hopkins; her role in the surprise denouement of Teachers' Lounge very nearly amounts to comic tour de force.

The straightforward setting and lighting are by Lucrecia Briceno and Baber, respectively. Witty costumes (especially Bendich's ties) are by David Kaley.

Terrorism is a very dark, often sly comedy about the terrorist inside each and every one of us. It uses elements from the genres of farce and suspense thriller (which prove to be more overlapping that we might imagine) to play around with the notion of man's inhumanity to man and the kind of society that spawns and/or encourages such feelings. It's resolutely never political and always personal: the wicked and destructive impulses aired here arise from a search for gratification, though admittedly usually a perverse variety of same.

I don't think, however, that director Will Frears or co-producers Scott Elliott of The New Group and Kate Loewald of The Play Company would necessarily agree with the above assessment. Elliott and Loewald's program note—which includes the information that the play was written before 9/11/2001, as if events in our home town are going to suddenly fuel the artistic vision of a pair of writers who live in Siberia—says that "we think you'll find it deals with life as we know it right now." As if Americans live under constant fear of attack, the way that, say, people in Baghdad do.

In any event, the production they've mounted at the Clurman Theatre is a mire of sensationalism and portentousness. The play is a puzzle: in six scenes, the Presnyakov Brothers passel out clues to a dire and catastrophic set of events whose full nature and impact we can only understand when we've seen them all, key relationships and facts having been withheld from earlier segments and not divulged or fleshed out until later on. There's pleasure to be had in this, and also in the gleefully nasty events and admissions that comprise each of the scenes. But Frears and most of his cast members approach the material with such bleak gravity that the thing crawls where it might glide.

The one exception is Lola Pashalinski, who plays a deceptively sweet-and-helpless-looking old lady in Terrorism's most effective scene; sitting on a park bench with her pal (played by Laura Esterman) she gradually unveils first a horrifying intolerance and bigotry (talking venomously about these people and those people) and then a shocking aptitude and taste for doing evil in order to assure her own perceived safety and comfort. The attitudes that Pashalinski conveys here—accompanied always by the sense that she seems so nice, like one of us—go right to the core of what I think the Presnyakovs are going for in Terrorism; and it's effective, chilling, useful stuff.

But too often in this production the sense of ordinariness and reality is undercut by gratuitous effect. A scene involving a group of military men who have just been working in the wreckage of an exploded building features partial and/or full nudity by the four actors involved; this is enormously distracting and has no bearing on the matter at hand. Similarly, an early scene depicting a clandestine encounter between a bored housewife and a stranger whom she has invited to seduce her might be compelling if the actors were under the covers rather than naked (or half-naked) on top of them: it's hard to let yourself get caught up in the implications of a scary S&M scenario when you're worrying about Elizabeth Marvel getting hurt when she gets tied up and how she's managing the proximity of her scene partner's actual penis when he lays on top of her.

In other scenes, though the actors keep their clothes on, they seem to turn off their natural emotions. One involves a group in an office where a co-worker has just hanged herself, and I never felt the tension and/or release that would make it feel authentic instead of contrived; two more segments involve suspicious behavior at airports, but again there was nothing to connect us to it in a genuine way, with the suspense elements as overplayed and unsubtle as if Boris and Natasha had just dropped in from a Bullwinkle cartoon.

In the end, I was underwhelmed. I suspect that I wouldn't have been too compelled even if the staging's style more closely matched that of the text—I didn't see much evidence that this is that spectacular a script. Nevertheless, it's good to know what's on the minds of the folks who live on the other side of our planet. I'm glad to have gotten a look at the Presnyakovs' work and hope to see it again in more faithfully realized fashion sometime in the future.

Jan Buttram says, in an earnest program note, that her play Texas Homos is about the tragic consequences of repression. It seems to me, however, that this sad little drama is actually about power, and how somebody who has—or thinks he has—a lot of it might delude himself into believing that society's laws and rules don't apply to him.

I think that Reed Birney feels this way about Texas Homos too, because he plays his character, a prominent doctor whose sexual misconduct has caught up with him, as pretty much a ringer for Bill Clinton. And certainly Dr. Cecil Ray Bonner—a wealthy, handsome, glad-handing middle-aged butterfly in a marriage of convenience and with an eye for pretty young things of either gender—has the hubris of the former president, as well as his propensity for splitting hairs about sex acts and their terminology. When we first meet Cecil, he's being herded into a supply closet in his lawyer's office, awaiting arraignment for public lewdness—he has spent the night in jail following an arrest in a men's room in a public park. Yet he's cranky, even cocky, as he alternately coaxes and bosses his attorney Harold D. Carney into doing whatever it takes, from blackmail to outright lies, to fix the case. And he's buoyantly confident that he'll be waltzing out of this situation, reputation intact, in time to catch this afternoon's Longhorns game.

Is Cecil gay? His best friend and fellow arraignee Jim Bob Mason seems to think so (and I assume Buttram does as well). But on the evidence presented here, it's hard to make a convincing case. He's been married (three times!) to the same woman for several decades, and he's just recently ended a long affair with Harold D.'s comely secretary Judy Kay. He admits to many other affairs with women in the past. His voracious sexual appetite also includes anonymous trysts with strange men in places like the public bathroom where he met his would-be Waterloo; and it's hinted that he may have fooled around with Jim Bob from time to time. Does this make him a homosexual? Seems like he's bisexual, if you feel the need to label; more precisely, it seems like he's nursing some serious problems with inferiority rooted in his impoverished childhood (hinted at in the play) that make him "get off" on the power trip of seducing, well, everybody.

Now, I don't mean to psychoanalyze Buttram's fictional character, but her program note, in which she talks about the way her fellow Texans label certain people as "sissies" and "tomboys," begs the question. Cecil refuses to be pegged as gay because he doesn't want to risk losing the status and security that he believes (possibly correctly) his heterosexuality affords him in his conservative Texas town. But wouldn't someone who actually seems to have genuine feelings of affection for someone of the same sex make a better poster boy for Buttram's thesis? Doesn't building a play about tolerance for sexual orientation around a reprehensible sex addict counteract the playwright's good intentions? And—compounding the problem—why is the only openly gay character in the play so stupid and backward that he appears to be mentally deficient?

So Texas Homos backfires badly, from its offensive title to its near-constant allusions—often defensible in context—to a lying, cheating "faggot," i.e., Cecil, who is referred to in this manner more than once by both his wife and his former mistress. Buttram wants to enlighten the audience with a tragedy about the pitiful existence of closet cases in the Heartland—a really admirable objective. But what she's written almost never touches on that subject at all.

It's a shame because it needn't have been so: the ideas and impulses behind Texas Homos are humane and sound. I imagine that's what attracted such a top-notch team to try to bring it to life—in addition to Birney, the actors are the estimable Richard Bekins (as Jim Bob, who is a Methodist preacher), Karen Culp (as Judy Kay), David Van Pelt (as Harold D.), and Michael Busillo (as Delbert Simmons, the dim young man arrested with Cecil and Jim Bob); all but Busillo do excellent work, and Busillo fails to do so only because the character he's been given is nonsensical. Melvin Bernhardt's staging is straightforward and tight, and James F. Wolk's realistic set provides an appropriate environment for the drama to play out.

"Three saints, a martyr, and the Devil in the pub. What can go wrong?"

That's the blurb for That Men Do, a new play, written and directed by Adam T. Perkins, at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. I assumed it was meant jokingly, or ironically, or facetiously. I was wrong.

The play does take place in a pub—a bar, we'd call it (Perkins is from Australia, I believe), in a large city not unlike New York. Here we meet Mike, an overweight, middle-aged cop who is quick to anger, and John, a younger fireman who has a similarly short fuse. (John's rage has been triggered, at least in part, by the unsolved murder, a year ago, of the older brother whom he idolized; Mike's is more generalized.) They drink and banter and argue, with occasional input from Joe, the seemingly affable bartender. Then another man, Chris, enters; he has not been by for several months (away "up north," he explains); he breaks up a brawl between Mike and John and urges them to be peaceable and tolerant. Then a fifth man appears—his name is Devin, and he's nattily attired in a black suit with a blood-red necktie. He's the owner of the bar, but his main purpose seems to be to stir up discord among his customers.

That Men Do is, I think, a Christian allegory about the struggle between Good (Chris, or Jesus Christ) and Evil (Devin, or the Devil) for the allegiance of Man. It could be that I'm taking it too seriously and too much at face value, but it appears to me that Perkins is concerned that the Devil is winning: the play includes an assassination of the Christ character with no subsequent resurrection, after all; this comes just moments after "Chris" receives a phone call informing him that he's been "let go" because he is a myth.

It is, unfortunately, a very clumsy, heavy-handed, and ill-conceived allegory; it feels like a Sunday School pageant for recalcitrant grown-ups. Following Mel Gibson's lead, perhaps, Perkins' concept here is to cloak a religious story in violence, with generous helpings of rude language (the "F" word is spoken as much here as in a Mamet play) and gratuitous, disrespectful sex talk. In other words, Mike, John, and Joe may be Saints, but they ain't no saints—Perkins presents them as ordinary guys with foul mouths and low ideas, the better, I guess, for us to identify with them.

Perkins supplies a by-the-numbers staging that is matched by performances that are either awkward or inert or both. Michael Lowry underplays Chris so much that he's barely there, Justin Levine and Ben Curtis substitute melodramatic bombast for characterization as Michael and John, and Joseph Brooke is an obvious, one-note Satan; only Sean Jarrell seems to be actually attempting to play a recognizable human being. Of course, recognizable human beings aren't necessarily what Perkins is going for in this play of archetypes. I wish he'd been less coy in his advance materials about his true intentions.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a diverting and entertaining little musical, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far at all: I was underwhelmed by this new show by Rachel Sheinkin and William Finn. Bee feels like what it is—a modest play with a cute concept (C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, by Rebecca Feldman), blown up into a Broadway musical, one that screeches "overkill" as it strains to justify a nearly two-hour running time and a $95 ticket price.

The idea of the show is to have grown-up actors play little kids who are competing in a local spelling bee. They're sort-of a microcosm of American kid-dom, or at least a skewed version of same. Chip Tolentino is a conscientious cub scout struggling against hormones (his big solo number is about his newly acquired penchant for inconvenient erections). Marcy Park is an Asian American whiz kid who speaks six languages, plays the piano (at one point pushing musical director Vadim Feichtner off his bench), excels at sports, and is—well—real tired. Leaf Coneybear is the child of aggressive hippies who have educated their child at home in everything except self-esteem. Logainne Schwartzandgrubnierre is the overachieving, lisping daughter of two gay fathers who are determined that she be a winner. Olive Ostrovsky is an insecure little girl with self-involved parents; she is fascinated by the magic of language and words (she's read the dictionary; at one point, she makes the dazzling observation that if you took the "w" from "answer," the "h" from "ghost," the extra "a" from "aardvark," and the "t" from "listen," you'd have the word "what," but no one would hear it because all the letters are silent"!).

William Barfee (pronounced Bar-FAY, as he endlessly reminds us) is the de facto hero of the piece: he's a fat, messy kid in shorts and an untucked-in shirt, who lost last year's spelling bee because his peanut allergy kicked in at a bad time. This year, he's cocky and confident, thanks to his "magic foot" (he "spells out" the words on the floor with his left shoe). Nevertheless, he quickly becomes the contestant to root for, notwithstanding all the good qualities that Olive seems to have, because he seems to want to win so badly. I won't say whether or not he does.

The bee part of Bee is fairly cute. Four additional "contestants" are recruited from the audience, and these unwitting cast members are integrated neatly into the proceedings. The rules allow the spellers to ask for a definition of any obscure word that's thrown at them, and also to ask to have it used in a sentence. This becomes a running joke in which Jay Reiss, as word "caller" Vice Principal Doug Panch, deadpans the reading of the abstruse definitions and then offers a ridiculously unhelpful sentence. Funny at first, this idea quickly runs out of steam.

Interspersed between the depiction of the spelling bee are fantasy-type sequences in which the participants recall or muse out loud about incidents in their short lives, almost all of which demonstrate that they are more mature than the so-called adults entrusted with raising them. All of the kids seem to have been indoctrinated, in various ways, with the notion that winning is everything; somehow the experience of this spelling bee is supposed to teach them that it's okay to come in second. The "moral" is as pat as it is unconvincing; the show's creators don't even really seem to believe it themselves.

Bee features a score by William Finn that sports the minimalist melodies and strained rhymes that are his trademark and weakness; nothing particularly interesting reached my ear. The book by Rachel Sheinkin is fitfully funny. The padding here shows rather baldly—there are endless reprises of a "goodbye" song and all sorts of stunts that feel rather desperate, like having Chip turn up selling candy in the auditorium or having Jesus appear in a vision to Marcy. The three adult characters—Vice Principal Panch, realtor/spelling bee maven Rona Lisa Peretti, and "Comfort Counselor" Mitch Mahoney, a parolee doing community service—are the broadest of caricatures. (Question for the casting director: why is the only African American in this show the guy who was in jail?)

Beowulf Borrit has transformed the whole of Circle in the Square (lobby included) into a gaudy all-American gymnasium: it's fun but too much; and the show fits awkwardly in the space anyhow. Costumes by Jennifer Caprio are caricatures that provide (not very funny) visual jokes and remove any sort of reality from the proceedings: no parent obsessed with winning would send his or her child anywhere, let alone to a spelling bee, looking as these motley kids do. Director James Lapine's work is unobtrusive to the point of absent. Choreographer Dan Knechtges has been given only a few opportunities here, and it seems to me that he muffs the main one—as far as I could tell, Barfee's "magic feet" dances don't spell out any letters at all.

The nine cast members mostly flounder. The exception is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who finds both depth and authentic humor in Leaf Coneybeare, and also (briefly) as one of Logainne's gay dads. The others have moments to shine, especially Jay Reiss when he first does his jokey Vice Principal shtick and Celia Keenan-Bolger, exploring the wonder of language as the most nearly normal character on stage, Olive. Sarah Saltzman and Dan Fogler play the most eccentric of the kids, Logainne and Barfee, and they mug and overact shamelessly. (Saltzman's lisp is particularly annoying.)

Now, all that said, Bee is not unenjoyable—it has moments of wit and laughter, if not so many of heart or warmth. It would be a lot of fun in a 100-seat house at half the length, maybe on a double bill with another short novelty musical as its companion. What it's not, I'm afraid, is a big budget Broadway musical—not with any degree of comfort or honesty, anyhow.

There's a fair amount of "site-specific" theatre going on in town this summer; oftentimes putting a play in a non-traditional venue like an art gallery or a pub feels like just a gimmick. Not so with The 29 Questions Project, which is being presented in Yaffa's T Room, a Tribeca restaurant that has given over its petite dining room (seats about 20) to Monday night performances of this 70-minute program of short plays. That's because these four pieces really belong here, and, as beautifully produced by The Bull Family Orchestra, they have been mounted snugly but comfortably in this unorthodox but entirely appropriate playing space.

A little back story is useful here. Yaffa's T Room is located on Greenwich Street, seven blocks north of the World Trade Center site; if you had stood in front of the restaurant before 9/11 and looked to your left, the big silver towers would have dominated the skyline. A program note tells us that after the towers fell, Yaffa's kept its doors open and served meals to rescue workers for weeks afterward; it was also used as an EMS station and in support of Salvation Army efforts for neighborhood relief.

So Yaffa's is part of the story of 9/11, and that's why The 29 Questions Project—an exploration of what 9/11 was and what 9/11 meant—is so at home here.

The evening begins with a short play by Katie Bull, Message from the Driver. Set about a month after the World Trade Center attacks, it takes place in a taxi cab traversing the length of Manhattan Island. The passenger is a panicky businesswoman and the driver is a too-calm, enigmatic Pakistani who seems to know more about the terrorist attacks than he has a right to. Bull captures the palpable scariness of the weeks following 9/11 in this piece, but her heroine acts too much like a horror movie character for my taste, failing to do the rational, sensible things that we hope we'd do under similar circumstances.

The evening thus commences with a jolt; it ends quietly and thoughtfully with a pair of compact, introspective pieces by Bull that offer glimpses into some of the attitudes and perspectives that made 9/11 possible in the first place. Arm juxtaposes an American anti-war activist finding real inspiration in the National Arboretum with a young American G.I. on the frontlines in Iraq getting a rude awakening during a peremptory TV interview. Hand takes place in the '80s in Jerusalem, and shows us a young American tourist briefly connecting with a Palestinian college student. Seeing these two strangers wend their way together through the Old City—Yaffa's aisles and nooks standing in for Jerusalem's narrow streets and passages—offers a palpable reminder of a path toward understanding and peace. If only...

At the center of The 29 Questions Project is Hillary Rollins' one-act play, whose title is 29 Questions. Based in fact, it revolves around two women—longtime friends who have recently separated, one having moved to the West Coast while the other remained in New York City. An email game—one of those chain letter-style questionnaires that circulate around the Internet—links the two at this particular moment; a moment in which one of them will be killed, doing temp work at Windows on the World at the top of one of the twin towers. Using the 29 frivolous questions posed by that email, playwright Hillary Rollins explores friendship and humanity with startling resonance. What do we ever know about each other? What's finally important in a world where random, devastating acts can separate us without warning?

9/11 and its important lessons seem to be fading from our consciousnesses as other, seemingly more urgent business floods in. We must guard against forgetting. Gathering in a place like Yaffa's T Room to see a work like The 29 Questions Project is necessary so that we don't.

Let me conclude by briefly telling you that all four of the plays comprising this worthy evening are finely crafted, smartly directed (by Kathryn Alexander, Leslie Kincaid Burby, and Katie Bull), and compellingly performed. Patricia Hart and Allison Wright, as the two friends in 29 Questions, are particularly memorable; the other members of the ensemble—Antonio Alvarez, David Dartley, Heather Oakley, Lillian Medville, Michael Robinson, Ashley Lambert, and Matt Sadewitz—all do commendable work. (I have to admit that I did wonder, though, why Middle Eastern actors weren't cast in the play's two Middle Eastern roles.)

New Yorkers rarely walk down the street without passing by, in some form or another, a pile of garbage. Whether it’s bulging Hefty bags, tossed-out TV’s, or soiled mattresses, we are up to our knees in refuse. Still, as the saying goes, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” A good artist will walk by a piece of trash and find inspiration. Rick Ebihara walked by the seedy hotel frequented by prostitutes and drug addicts, saw a pile of trash and thought, “if this trash could sing, what would it sing about?”

This is the sharp concept behind Ebihara’s new musical reviue The 47th St. Hotel. We hear from a singing butt thong, an angry used condom, a melancholy high heel, and a dejected porn video, among others. All the songs are very funny. I especially liked the song of the soiled mattress, “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” that opens the show. Puppeteer Peggy Cheng climbs into this larger-than-life mattress that is folded over to create a mouth for singing and uses her whole body to animate this character. The musical arrangements and performance by Roko Djokovic are a highlight of the show. Djokovic is a virtuoso on the classical guitar. He is also an accomplished accordion player. What’s better than a squeeze box to accompany a singing angry condom? I did think that the condom should have been ribbed, in accordance with the accordion.

I think the show would benefit from having a choreographer. There are some scenes, like the singing DVD’s, that look chaotic. The duet between the butt thong and the zipper on the giant trousers is hindered by attempts at movement that come across as clumsy.

Ebihara’s puppets are brilliantly conceived and his songs are funny—but the question is how long can you beat a dick joke over the head? (Pun intended.) I lost interest well before the show ended. It’s a shame really because the puppets are all so inventive and creatively constructed, but every song is like the musings of a horny teenager. Ebihara is most obviously a talented songwriter. But, in the end, I think New York trash would have a lot more to say.

Every year at this time, at least one person reminds me that the holiday season has the highest suicide rate. The reason given, almost every time this factoid is retold, is that it is a time of reflection on one’s life, one’s relations, and one’s future prospects for the coming new year. The idea of sorrow and joy colliding in just such a way is what The 52nd Annual Davenport Clan Yearly Family X-Mas Spectacular is all about. The plot is simple: the eponymous Davenports have gathered to perform their annual Yuletide pageant, but there is one small problem this year—the two heads of the clan, Mr. and Mrs. Davenport, have recently died in a bizarre parasailing accident at Club Med. Determined to keep the Christmas spirit alive, the three children—Stanley, Violet, and Dickie—do the show anyway.

What follows is a manic breakdown of three lost souls, with musical numbers and slide shows. There are post-modern parodic renditions of holiday tunes (a lounge-style “Jingle Bells,” a heavy blues arrangement of “Feliz Navidad”); a Christmas-card-reading segment; a tap-danced timeline of the year’s events that takes all those annual Christmas newsletters to an (il)logical extreme; and a “Secret Santa” finale that unearths some unfinished business among the siblings. Arch, sometimes campy, and almost always darkly sardonic, it’s an off-kilter and unbalancing evening: like a ‘60s-era holiday TV special where Bing Crosby actually beat his kids on camera and David Bowie showed up stoned.

The three actors who created and perform this show—Richard DiBella, Violet Krumein, and Stan Richardson—are all very talented, funny people; and their sense of irony and fun gives the show life. As Dickie, the overbearing and slightly successful one of the trio, Richard DiBella is lots of fun. As the seemingly most together sibling, Stan Richardson is excellent. And Violet Krumein, as the most manic of the trio, is great fun. At one point in the evening, she gives a very strange, semi-striptease number that really captures the essence of what I think the show is about—a combination of intense sorrow and confusion and a need for tradition and to please other people.

The show itself could use a little editing and amending, after which this could become an annual favorite for the alternative theatre-goers. It’s dark, clever, and—against the odds—heartfelt.

When the actors in a play break character to tell me where a scene takes place or the name of the person who is about to speak, I tend to recoil. So it was at the beginning of Jeffrey Sweet's The Action Against Sol Schumann, a work of fiction inspired by true events, dressed up, apparently, to feel like docudrama.

As the play proceeded, however, the intensity and significance of the moral issues presented made me less and less aware of, and uncomfortable with, the artifice of the format. Finally, the question that I, as reviewer of Sol Schumann, had to answer was a mirror of the one asked in the play (though not nearly so weighty): is a play what it says or what it does?

What The Action Against Sol Schumann says is, briefly, that judgments about other human beings—about who they really are, about what we'd do in their shoes—are dangerous, scary things. The play tells the story of an old man named Sol Schumann—an observant Orthodox Jew living in Brooklyn; a Holocaust survivor. Sweet's efficient exposition quickly reveals that Sol has two sons: Aaron, the elder, is a substitute teacher, unmarried, devout, and activist (particularly in Survivors' organizations and politics); Michael, the younger, is married to a Gentile named Kate and has distanced himself from his cultural and religious roots. They're a close family nevertheless; and then suddenly their situation is entirely transformed when Sol is accused, by more than one person, of having been a kapo, one of the Jews selected by the Nazis to oversee the slave laborers in the concentration camps. Proceedings are launched by the INS to investigate whether Sol lied about his past when he emigrated to the United States; if this can be proved, Sol faces possible deportation.

Aaron and Michael react as we expect them to, which is to say that Aaron is at first repulsed by what he now knows about his father (though he does come around to helping him); Michael, the outsider, is drawn closer as the rest of the world turns away. (This by-the-numbers plotting is part of what The Action Against Sol Schumann does, so to speak; that's why my feelings about this piece are so mixed.) The sons enlist the aid of attorney Leah Abelson, who is Aaron's almost-girlfriend and herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, which means that she faces a quandary of her own, explaining to her still-living mother why she is defending Sol. As for Sol himself, he never denies what he did, though he always justifies it in terms of choosing the lesser of two evils to ensure the survival of as many people—himself, obviously, included—as possible.

What's powerful about this play is the fairly detached way that the myriad troubling and unanswerable questions are posed. Sweet makes us confront very tough issues while offering neither guidance nor solace to help us deal with them. Is Sol culpable? Do the lives he may have saved during the war offset the others he betrayed? Do his subsequent actions matter? Can we understand, let alone judge, such a man? Should other survivors try to? Should our government? Should an old man be deported after forty blameless years in the U.S., simply because he told a lie of omission when he arrived here as a refugee?

What weakens the play, though, is the excessive familiarity of its subjects and themes. From Q.B. VII to Judgment at Nuremberg, Nazi war criminals have had substantial airing in our popular culture; The Action Against Sol Schumann doesn't add a great deal to the mix. And in terms of family dynamics, I was reminded of All My Sons more than once during The Action; I'm not sure that Sweet ultimately has anything startling or new to say about children who discover that their fathers aren't who they think they are, either.

But it is in its emotional barrenness—the result of the documentary format that Sweet decided to adopt for this piece—that the play finally sort of fails for me as drama. We never really get inside anybody's head here; everything that happens always seems to be at the mythic/archetypal level. The evening was, for me, an intellectual exercise—an engaging one, to be sure. But I was never moved by anything on stage.

Which brings me back to my own conundrum, the one I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Do I endorse Sol Schumann or deride it? It turns out that my choice is relatively simple: I tell you simply to see the play for yourself, because the issues it raises are so powerful and so important that they are always worthy of examination.

Amy Feinberg's matter-of-fact staging takes its cue from Sweet's script, arraying the actors as observers on stage throughout. Some of the actors do outstanding work, by the way, notably Susan O'Connor as Leah, Douglas Dickerman as Aaron, and Nathan M. White as Michael.

The All-Male Importance of Being Earnest fails to live up to all it promises. What could have been a smart deconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners is actually a simple-minded send-up of negative gay stereotypes, tiresome attitudes, and shallow interpretations of highly complex issues and human beings.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not the script that is the problem. Hugh Hysell has very cleverly created a 75-minute contemporary American adaptation of Wilde’s Victorian English original. It’s a worthy adaptation that has a Gerald instead of a Gwendolyn and a Kurt for a Cecily. And the integrity of Wilde’s writing is maintained with the insertion of contemporary references, sexual innuendoes, and a very funny and timely acknowledgement of Governor McGreevey.

The story is the same. Algernon is visited by his friend Jack—known to everyone in Chelsea as "Ernest." Jack proclaims his love for Gerald and tells Algernon that he is going to propose marriage. Algernon refuses to support Jack’s matrimonial ambitions until Jack explains why the name Kurt is inscribed in his cigarette case. After making up a story about an old uncle, Jack finally admits to Algernon that Kurt is his ward who lives in the country. Jack also admits to Algernon that his name is not Ernest but rather Jack, which is what everyone in the Hamptons calls him. Algernon follows Jack, uninvited, to the Hamptons in hopes of uncovering the mystery of Kurt. It is there that this comedy spins out of control, love blossoms, and the true identity of Earnest is revealed.

But under Hysell’s direction and as the result of several flawed performances, this production falls apart. Hysell focuses primarily on dick references and queeny gesticulations. He fails to include Wilde’s reasons for writing the play in the first place and needs a dramaturg to remind him of these themes and social commentaries. He attempts to stage a mad farce, but forgets that there must be a grounded truth behind the gay camp. And his efforts to champion the cause for gay marriage (with his all male cast) is undercut primarily by his failure to enliven the values that underlie love, honor, and obey.

As Algernon and Jack, Joe LaRue and Jerry Marsini, respectively, are not as colorful as penned by Wilde. The problem here is that they rely on attitude rather than the character’s intentions. It puzzles me that their characters don’t seem to like each other, or to need each other’s friendship, or actually love the men they desire and want to marry. It’s possible that a more sensitive director could have guided Larue and Marsini in a manner that matched their potential in these roles. Adam Beckworth and Ricky Oliver, as Gerald and Kurt, are far more effective. They are both highlights of this production. But the Marsini/Beckworth and LaRue/Oliver couplings disappointingly have little chemistry.

As Gerald’s gay father Bracknell, John Kudan is a strangely uncouth and sweaty guardian. With a voice more hoarse than Harvey Feirstein’s, Kudan seems more suited for an episode of The Sopranos than this production of Earnest.

Lee Blair plays Kurt’s tutor Prism and William Reinking is Chasuble, the priest secretly in love with Prism. They each give simple and well-intentioned performances.

But just as some actors struggle to rise above the production's failings, others are at the mercy of its superficial renderings, as is the case with Kila Packett and Gary Hilborn, who play the houseboys Lane and Merriman. Packett’s only contributions as Lane are his bitter line deliveries and rolling eyes. And Hilborn is nothing more than a muscular sight gag, fodder for the eyes, yes, but is it helping to tell the story? Again, an opportunity has been missed. The interpretations of both of these characters (not the actors!) seem to only frustrate this gay man of 2004 who is aware of the progress of queer theory and gay sensibilities.

I was disappointed not to see the hysterical and decadent production promised by the press release and the ads in the gay rags. Where’s Charles Ludlam when you need him?

A young man tells us that he has written a poem that caused his apartment to explode: the walls and ceiling blew away, leaving him aloft, with the poem, above the city. The explosion led to a kind of cataclysm, with plaster raining down on the east side and splinters of wood falling to the west. Two more young men observe the catastrophe: the one, just departed from a Starbucks with a cup of coffee in his hand, finds himself covered in the white dust, lost in the morass; the other, in the middle of an apparently permanent and stalemated argument with his girlfriend, pushes the shards of woods off the stoop so he can take a smoke and watch the alarmed passers-by.

This, more or less, is the set-up of The Americans, the new play by Matthew Freeman; it also, more or less, is the drama's entire action. This is a sad, stirring, introspective piece, made up of three monologues chopped up so that they almost (but not quite) form a conversation. The auditor wonders: are there really three separate men here, or are they just aspects of one? They do have something in common, which is an absolute inability to move; even the one called "T," with the Starbucks cup, journeying dozens of blocks through a vanishing city, doesn't seem to actually get anywhere. These young men are inert; immobile: they can't find a way to act in the face of something unprecedented, spectacular, and frightening. They barely even react. The poet, called "D," tells us he's never experienced unfettered happiness and we know instinctively that the others, "T" and "F," would say the same thing.

The title of the play—which not all incidentally is also the title of the culprit poem—suggests not one man but all men. The Americans is very clearly Freeman's 9/11 play—9/11, that is, seen from a vantage point three years later: the inability of most of us to do anything but stand helplessly by then has been matched by our inability to make it mean anything or to change anything since. So the inertia of these young men is the inertia of a generation, of a historical moment turning back on itself. Maybe.

This is the fifth of Matthew Freeman's full-length plays that I have seen. (Full disclosure: I published one of them, in my anthology Plays and Playwrights 2002.) He's a remarkable young writer: still not thirty, he's prodigiously gifted, versatile, and smart. The other plays are a verse epic about King Arthur, a Beckettian tragicomedy about two neighbors trapped inside a tunnel under their homes, a contemporary take on medieval Mystery drama, and an absurdist farce about two siblings who hold their own mother hostage. So you see the range. With The Americans, Freeman once again heads off for uncharted terrain, dramatically and stylistically; stretches and extends himself. I won't claim to understand everything that happens in this very personal play, but I will tell you that I was strongly affected by it, maybe more than by any of the earlier works. See this to witness a significant youthful talent, on his way to finding his way.

Indeed, what moved me most in The Americans was the very candid, very naked confession of the poet, who talked about feeling used up and a has-been though still in his 20s. We live in a time of instant communication, of incredible access (e.g., the Internet), of something approaching pure democracy in terms of one's ability to put oneself "out there." But all the 'zine poets, bloggers, and off-off-Broadway playwrights almost never get any real measure of recognition; they just spill their guts into what must feel sometimes, from their end, like a vacuum or so much ether. The paradox of our time is that we can talk to each other more cheaply and easily than at any point in human history, but we hear—and are heard—less and less. Is it any wonder than D, F, and T can't find a way to react to an explosion that blows up their room and pelts them with plaster and wood?

The Americans is produced by Blue Coyote Theater Group, a young company as adventurous and versatile as this playwright. Director Gary Shrader has staged the piece with care; his choices seem fixed on adding texture and vitality to a script that is, after all, three dense monologues—very understandable, though it made me want to see a more spare production, for contrast. A simple design evoking a cityscape drifting toward unreality is provided by set/lighting designer Chris Jones and composer Margaret F. Heskin. The three roles are played by Vince Gatton (T), Kyle Ancowitz (F), and Freeman himself (D), and all do fine, precise work; if Freeman's performance feels more gapingly raw than the other two, well, that's understandable too, isn't it?

Who in the world but George Bernard Shaw would write a "political extravaganza" like The Apple Cart, half of whose action takes place at cabinet meetings? And where in the world would you hope to see a revival of this 1929 comedy except at a first-rate off-off-Broadway company such as Theater Ten Ten?

Well I say, bless 'em both: Shaw, even at his most cantankerous, is more amusing and edifying than almost anybody else who ever wrote a play; and Ten Ten, diverging here from their usual winter Shakespeare offering, is adventurous and high-spirited as ever, belying their uptown address. Director David Scott has assembled a splendid and versatile cast and staged Shaw's show with intelligence and humor; and he's abetted by designers Kristin Foti (sets), George Gountas (lighting), and especially Viviane Galloway and Marissa McCullough (costumes and hair/makeup, respectively) to create a relatively lavish and imaginative world in which to place Shaw's fanciful political vision. Indeed, one of my favorite moments in the production comes with the first entrance of the Cabinet, each of whom has been outfitted to look like one or another famous British archetype (Neville Chamberlain, for example; or that musty, infinitely elderly British aristocrat epitomized by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins).

The Apple Cart, more of a ramble on the themes of democracy and politics than a well-made play, charts a day in the lives of King Magnus of England and his closest associates. It begins with a "crisis" brewing in the papers and among the King's ministers, climaxes with a series of political maneuvers that would have done LBJ or Tricky Dick Nixon proud, and then wanes with a new looming crisis—a surprise that Shaw doesn't even try to work out. It's told in two acts and an interlude, each of them quite different thematically and stylistically from the others, which means that The Apple Cart is both looser and less satisfying that it could be.

But the stuff that gets talked about and articulated here! In Act I, the "crisis" revolves around the fact that the King has reminded the general population, in a speech, that he has the power of royal veto; his ministers are upset not that he has this power but that he has been talking about it. The Prime Minister, Proteus, gives Magnus an ultimatum, essentially forcing him to choose between being an absolute monarch, which he can not, or a figurehead "constitutional" monarch, which he will not. During the entertaining speechifying and posturing, Shaw's characters talk about all manner of interesting things, such as the dangers of big business, the worthlessness of most politicians, the public's fascination with royalty ("A king is not allowed the luxury of a good character. Our country has produced millions of blameless greengrocers but not one blameless monarch."), and the resemblance of any throng of common men to so many sheep. Shaw considers, but never decides, whether democracy can ever really work; and he debates (with startling prescience), the inertia of a complacent polity, well-fed by the spoils of their visionary imperialism. Almost as an after thought, he gives us rich, provocative arguments like this one:

MAGNUS: Is it not curious how people idealize their rulers? In the old days, the king—poor man!—was a god, and was actually called God and worshipped as infallible and omniscient. That was monstrous— But was it half so silly as our pretence that he is an indiarubber stamp? .... What man has ever been able to pick him up from the table and use him as one picks up and uses a piece of wood and brass and rubber? Permanent officials of your department will try to pick you up and use you like that. Nineteen times out of twenty you will have to let them do it, because you cannot know everything; and even if you could, you cannot do everything and be everywhere. But what about the twentieth time?.... The old divine theory worked because there is a divine spark in us all; and the stupidest or worst monarch or minister, if not wholly god, is a bit of a god—an attempt at a god—however little the bit and unsuccessful the attempt. But the indiarubber stamp theory breaks down in every real emergency, because no king or minister is the very least little bit like a stamp: he is a living soul.

The interlude, following intermission, finds Magnus in the company of his mistress, Orinthia; the feel of the piece now is high drawing room comedy, though there's still room for a kind of political discourse:

ORINTHIA: But do not pretend that people become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great.... Thank God my self-consciousness is something nobler than vulgar conceit in having done something. It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me. If you want deeds, go to your men and women of action, as you call them, who are all in a conspiracy to pretend that the mechanical things they do, the foolhardy way they risk their worthless lives, or their getting up in the morning at four and working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, like coral insects, make them great. What are they for? these dull slaves? To keep the streets swept for me.

In the final act, we meet the king's wife, Queen Jemima, who is quite Orinthia's opposite, and we meet an ambassador from America with a proposition that I'll not reveal here. And then the King comes back to face his ministers, and lays them an ingenious trap that proves who is the superior player of political games. It's satisfying in its way, but it has almost nothing to do with the philosophizing of Act One, which I found problematic.

Yet, see The Apple Cart because the density, probity, challenge, and sophistication is unmatched almost anywhere else. Scott's production keeps the talky text progressing at a swift clip, and emphasizes the humor and the irony, which are both abundant. The cast is led by Nicholas Martin-Smith, in fine form as the smooth and clever King, with able support from Cristiane Young as his strongest supporter in the cabinet, the Powermistress General Lysistrata; Damian Buzzerio as the excitable, kilt-clad Prime Minister Proteus; and Annalisa Loeffler as the glamorous Orinthia. Paula Hoza does double duty as Queen Jemima and Postmistress General Amanda, while Elizabeth Fountain tackles three roles as the King's secretary Sempronius, his daughter Alice, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pliny; both astound with quick changes in costume and demeanor that keep us guessing who's playing who until we consult the program.

Are photographs a true depiction of the world, or are they merely fragments of the whole that create a false image? What’s more, do the pictures of our lives lie? Are the memories created through photographs true memories? High Fidelity Theater’s remarkable new show The Architecture of Sight, now running at The Chocolate Factory, explores these questions using great music, interesting movement, a dash of multimedia and a script that’s insightful though at times a bit confusing.

I’m not sure if I lost track of the plot in places because parts of the story are told through song and movement or because of  the surrealistic nature of the script. But here’s what I saw: A photographer who has a deep belief in the power of the frozen image to create truth has been having a relationship with a women solely through the pictures he has taken of her from a distance. One day, as he’s snapping pictures of her, she jumps to her death and he captures the whole thing. However, for some reason at the beginning of the play he does not remember this. He moves through a series of distractions but eventually he is put on trial and forced to confront his memories of the event. He realizes that the frozen image is not truth and that memories will fade regardless of how much he tries to preserve them in pictures. His punishment for his misguided notion is severe but seems fitting in the world of the play.

Playwright Robert Lawson creates a fascinating world where pornography is a man taking pictures and defendants swear to tell the whole truth on a camera instead of a Bible; a world where speakeasies and digital cameras coexist. His language is lyrical and philosophical and his characters are over-the-top yet still sincerely passionate. His main character, the photographer Nick, is suffering from the effects of fragmentation and loss of meaning and he is struggling to reconnect to the whole. Ironically, Lawson’s script also suffers from fragmentation, and I had trouble connecting some scenes to the whole. I’m not sure if this is Lawson’s intention, for while it contributed to my confusion about the plot it did not distort the play's overall meaning.

The music, composed and performed by Uncle Moon, is entirely captivating. It reminded me of stripped-down Tom Waits (without Tom’s gritty voice). Just an accordion, a tenor sax, an upright bass, and a guitar is all the band needs to make this musical an extravaganza. Uncle Moon seamlessly changes from toe-tapping to heart-sapping and the actors adjust in stride.

The ensemble is a talented bunch. They all have strong voices, and musical director Carl Riehl (also Uncle Moon’s accordion player) keeps them all on the same atonal page. Jonathan Farmer plays the honesty in Nick the photographer very well but he is not as adept as some of the other cast members at playing the hyper-real/noir style. Liz Wisan, Nadia Taalbi, and Meridith Loren Nicholaev, on the other hand, are exceedingly deft at capturing this style. Taalbi also deserves a nod for her great 1930s period costumes. Rebecca Gomes, Shauna Kelly, Forrest Simmons, and Erik White round out this fine ensemble.

Henry Akona’s direction is the cornerstone of what I liked about this production. His vision is clear and his choreography is well articulated. He stages the action right down the middle of the audience and he works that straight line for the levels he can wrench from it. He maintains pace and style with steady, even strokes and the slide projections and short films are perfectly placed. There are parts of the story that I may not have understood were it not for his unique staging.

Ultimately, I found The Architecture of Sight to be thought-provoking and entertaining, and that’s exactly what I like to see in the theatre. The fact that I sometimes got lost in the plot did not take away from my understanding of the play’s themes nor did it detract from the entertainment value. This show can be enjoyed for its fragments: the music by Uncle Moon, the astute script, or the très-cool, noir style… but I enjoyed it as a whole.

Expectation doesn’t do much to help The Argument; it features the formidable talents of Melissa Leo and Jay O. Sanders as the middle-aged couple Sophie and Phillip and a script by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, a Pulitzer finalist. As the play opens, Sophie and Phillip are crashing their way awkwardly through a one-night stand. She is 42, he is 49. She is a painter, he is a stock trader. Neither of them has children. They fall, or so they say, in love.

In this play, about a relationship and how it’s lost, there is something I found immediately missing: a sense that something important is happening. Both of these characters are fleshed out with such arbitrary details (he eats Cheerios; she talks about how she can’t eat overcooked pasta) that you can almost hear someone raising their hand in a workshop requesting their inclusion. Beyond this, even as thinly sketched as they are, they are also immediately displayed to be a mismatch.

This comment would be enough to render the play inert, you’d think, but the nature of their relationship quickly takes a backseat when we discover that Sophie is pregnant. At first we’re searching the play for clues as to what makes these two people tick; then deus-ex-pregnancy kicks in and drives a truck through the play. From that point on, the dumbfounding lack of communication, ridiculous discussions, and ungrounded behavior of the two careens the play off the side of the road and leaves it in a ditch.

Perhaps there is a play in Gersten-Vassilaros about how the nature of love or the ability to love is changed by age and experience. Instead, we get this sophomoric argument. Watching an argument on stage can be thrilling if the characters involved have not only stakes, but some sort of middle ground. When the two characters are at such opposite poles, and unable to hear one another, it feels like they are both repeatedly throwing themselves headfirst into a brick wall.

Phillip, for his part, is written as a traditionally-minded, childish man, veering into the realm of the boorish as he gives an extended monologue about fake poop; suddenly the voice of reason in a mystifyingly pointless scene with a therapist; and then, at last, utterly out of his mind. Jay O. Sanders, a fine actor, does the best he can with the material, and tries to find the underlying likeability in Phillip. When we finally hit The Argument itself, in the play's last few scenes, he seems unable to do much but shout.

It’s clear that Gersten-Vassilaros has more sympathy for Sophie. Sophie has some passionate, if slapdash, speeches about art; she is the more idealistic of the two, and I’m sure her passion for her art and resistance to motherhood are intended to be viewed as strengths of some sort. But as she fails to listen, over and over, and re-explains her position in new and stunningly inept ways, failure to communicate turns to self-obsession. Melissa Leo, a fantastic and mature performer, is not at home in the childish Sophie’s skin.

There is also the odd inclusion of a Christopher Durang-lite scene with a couples therapist, who doles out such bizarre new-age tripe that we know he’s not to be taken seriously. That Sophie does and Phillip does not makes the end of the play that much less interesting, when we’re expected to sympathize in a serious way with a woman who becomes the butt of a joke in a single scene. The therapist is played by film and stage veteran John Rothman. He is funny in moments, but ultimately inconsequential. He plays the character as written: a one-note gag.

One would hope that a play with such heavy-hitting actors and so highly-touted a writer could provide more than this uneven and awkwardly plotted mess. The Argument, in the end, is unconvincing.

The love triangle gets a loving new look in The Astronomer’s Triangle. now playing at the downtown warehouse/loft space Studio 5. Using clippings and influences from everything from CNN to Charles Mee, playwright Jordan Seavey and Collaboration Town announce themselves as far more than a young Open Theatre retread. There is mathematics, astronomy, music, and stagecraft here. But it’s sentiment that holds the center of this new, involving play... and it’s sentiment this deftly integrated that makes this play such a rare entertainment.

The Astronomer’s Triangle is the third New York City appearance of Collaboration Town, a young group of Boston University graduates who may just turn the term “groupthink” into a fashionable one. After their introduction to the New York stage with the satirical This is a Newspaper at the FringeNYC Festival two years ago, they came roaring with The Trading Floor, a fictionalized reenactment of the ACT UP protests of the price of AIDS medication. While it’s early to call this newest work a departure, it has the trappings of one. And a successful one at that.

The story is often told: boy meets girl, boy introduces girl to friend, friend and girl fall in love, and jealousy rears its ugly head. The twist? Our “boy” is the Cartographer, who is partial to unorthodox maps, “touchmaps” for example, and his “girl” is a waitress who can locate her as-yet-unmapped star by its location in her body. The Cartographer’s friend is the Astronomer: a young misanthrope who is obsessed with celestial bodies.

As the play progresses, narrated by the Cartographer, it forms a mishmash memory play, complete with well-written comedy, carefully composed dance pieces, and explorations of the relationship between the world around us and the world inside us. While I’m a bit hazy on what exactly the piece is trying to say about love and people and the stars, what struck me is how adept they seem to be at building connections. Seavey’s work is pulled from countless pieces and clips; the effect is of a patchwork that finds his waitress, mathematics, map-making, love, physics, music, astronomy, and astrology as pieces of a tapestry.

In the main roles are playwright Seavey as the Cartographer, Boo Killebrew as the Waitress, and Geoffrey Decas as the Astronomer. Of the three, Decas presents his role with the least amount of effort and is therefore the most engaging. Killebrew is a force, perhaps a bit too forceful for a Waitress, and her tightly wound persona occasionally becomes uncorked when it seems better bottled. Nonetheless, at her best, she’s eminently charming and inventive. Seavey’s Cartographer doubles as the Narrator and is therefore the most detached, which plays well to his strengths.

Supporting the trio as actors are Matthew Hopkins, listed as “head director” as well as performing the role of a rather foppish Astrologer; the charming Terri Gabriel, who is deftly paired with TJ Witham in one of the play’s more magical moments; and Jack Wernke, whose main supporting role is the Mathematician, in a sweet side story. As an ensemble and in their small roles, they are uniformly excellent.

The look of the show is a mixed bag of found objects and odd costume design. I found the ensemble’s design initially distracting (green tights are a hard sell in 2005) but the group commit and make it work. They make excellent use of the far edges of “Studio 5,” which is essentially a white loft space. Curtains frame the central playing area and hide the diner and the astronomer’s home respectively; it’s a surrounding, visually catchy choice. The music, by company member (and actress) Jesica Avellone and Brandon Walcot, moves us from the folksy into musical theatre and even a little bit of pop, well establishing the play's tone.

As Collaboration Town moves forward, I expect that we’ll see them return to both satire and politics from time to time. I hope they return to this more sentimental place as well. It’s a challenging and well traveled place for a young company to go while resisting cliché (they seemed stumped by how to end it, for example), but The Astronomer’s Triangle proves them more than up to the task. It is a true pleasure, having familiarity with this group from previous works, to see them adventure and grow.

For nearly four years now, the folks behind the Atrainplays have been putting together delightfully entertaining evenings of new short plays and musicals, all created more or less on the fly in a single day's time, starting with a journey along the full length of the New York subway's A line, from 207th Street to Far Rockaway. That's where the playwright does his or her thing, armed only with a bundle of headshots (of the actors who will be in their play) and the knowledge that their show must take place on the same A train they're riding on. 90 minutes later, the writer meets the director, and then these randomly selected collaborators get back on the subway and ride as far as 59th Street to meet up with the designated actors.

The next night, about 20 hours after the ink is dry, the play gets its premiere.

Consistency suggests more than luck is at work here: Lawrence Feeney (who had the original idea), Michael Pemberton, Andrew Donovan, Craig Pospisil, and David Riedy—the five "founders" of the Atrainplays—clearly have noses for the rare combination of talent, nerve, imagination, humility, and adrenalin that makes this process come together so successfully. And perhaps a touch of alchemy, as well.

They certainly deserve to pat themselves on the backs as they do in the two-week Atrain(re)plays, a retrospective/compendium of the best of some 96 original plays and musicals produced since the project started in May 2002. That's because their best is very, very good: never less than merrily diverting, often terrific, and sometimes downright miraculous. The nature of the process means that nothing here is deep, subtle, or richly nuanced; but for sheer high-spirited, high-energy hijinks, there are few short play anthology shows—few shows period—that can touch this one.

I caught Program 1, which runs March 1 - 6 (an entirely different bill, the aptly named Program 2, runs the following week). The pieces run the gamut from "Surfin Turf," a cheerfully tasteless, darkly comic musical about subway surfing (written by Shawn Nacol with lyrics by Simone Wells and music by Lanny Meyers), to "A Short Distance Correctly," a sweet, zany fantasy by Michael Rhodes in which a middle-aged man's musings about the pretty young woman he always holds the car door open for take on a surprising life of their own, to David Riedy's thoughtful, comic parable about communication, loneliness, and connection, "Everything You Want." Renee Flemings and Jeremy Schonfeld's collaboration, "Heart & Home," features a bickering young couple—he's a street entertainer, she's recovering from same, trying to make a living and find a decent apartment within the boundaries of the system—who are taught a refreshing life lesson by an older couple, a magician and a down-on-her-luck actress who are working the same subway car. Another musical, "The Light in Me," by Erica Silberman and Cornell Womack, starts with a trio of frustrated yoga students and then takes a slightly surreal turn with the arrival of their crazy Irish instructor Niall. Yet another, Craig Pospisil and Joanna Parsons's "Wedding Train," puts a runaway bride on the train, where she bumps into—of all people—her former boyfriend.

My favorites among the nine items on the agenda—yours may well be different, of course—are "Howard Hopped the A-Train" by Anthony P. Pennino, a very funny and surprisingly insightful comedy in which a construction worker who has just been laid off meets up with someone who very much appears to be Jesus Christ; "Free," another Pospisil piece, in which a young man in the throes of a panic attack gets a sudden inspiration to take off all his clothes on an empty subway car; and "City of Freaks," by Riedy, Marcy Heisler & Zina Goldrich, far and away the most well-realized work here, a musical about a tourist from Minnesota and the three typically nutty New Yorkers he meets on his first ride on the A train—a miracle of brilliant construction whose witty book and toe-tapping tunes are better than just about anything currently showing on Broadway.

The nine shows are directed and choreographed by a host of talented folks, with the most impressive work coming from Mark Lonergan ("Free"), Edie Cowan ("Surfin Turf" and "City of Freaks"), and Christopher Windom (the choreography for "City of Freaks"). Some 21 actors bring the plays to life, many in multiple roles: all are terrific, but permit me to single out, as especially effective and memorable, Christine Pedi (as the homeless ex-actress in "Heart & Home"), Scott Wood (as the panicky young man in "Free"), Natalie Douglas (as one of the kooky New Yorkers in "City of Freaks" and one of the yoga students in "The Light in Me"), Pierre-Marc Diennet and Ron Stetson (as Jesus and Howard in "Howard Hopped the A-Train"), Donovan Patton (as the exuberant tourist in "City of Freaks"), and David Hilder (as one of the oddball surfers in "Surfin' Turf").

Nine is probably one or two more shows than strictly necessary; the evening felt a little long by its end. But that is in no way a reflection on the astonishing excellence of all the work on view here. With the Atrainplays, Feeney and his colleagues have found a formula for sheer joyous fun. This celebration of the best of their inspiration is worth the trip, whatever subway line you take to get to it.

The Audience is really nineteen playlets (many of them musicals), written by a team of twenty-eight playwrights, lyricists, and composers, woven together into an uneven but striking piece of meta-theatre. My friend Patrick, who came to the show with me, called it A Chorus Line about us, the audience. And, like A Chorus Line, the show does sometimes feel a bit scattered, a little bit too determined to give everyone their equal time in the spotlight rather than tell a unified story. But, also like A Chorus Line, it’s ultimately about loving the theatre.

I am only a little embarrassed to admit that I found myself tearing up a little (okay, more than once) during The Audience—most notably in the song “I Like What I See,” performed by a little boy from Texas (Eamon Foley) who didn’t want to come to the theatre in the first place. As his red-state parents grow increasingly horrified by the not-entirely-child-friendly show they’re watching (think gay Sondheim), young Carson grows increasingly entranced: “It’s like real life only faster / And it means a whole lot more / And though they’re living a disaster / It’s so much cooler to explore.” I think that all of us who go to the theatre as adults had a moment like that in our childhood or our adolescence. I’m not sure The Audience itself would inspire one of those moments for the novice, but for the already converted, it’s a pleasure—a slightly self-referential one—to watch actors playing ourselves as we watch them.

The premise is simple: the play takes place in the orchestra section of a Broadway musical on closing night. Its characters are forty-three audience members, two ushers, and the writer, who huddles anonymous in the midst of the self-absorbed crowd, trying by force of will to get them to pay more attention to his work than their own personal dramas. The audience members include the Broadway-house stereotypes you might expect—Japanese tourists, four old Jews (the program’s title, not mine!), an out-of-town family, a first-date couple, three secretaries from Staten Island on a girls’ night out, two aspiring actresses, and more.

The execution of the piece, which is full of Broadway-veteran actors, must have been almost mind-bogglingly complex. Because, you see, the forty-three audience members, two ushers, and playwright break down into nineteen groups of characters, each of which has back story, internal rifts, and a story arc developing during the play we are watching. Some of those stories are impacted by interaction between the groups; some of them occur in internal group dynamics; some of them occur in song. All of them occur while these forty-six people are nominally watching (and reacting appropriately to) a Broadway musical with two acts and an intermission. And remember, the dialogue for each of these groups was written by a different playwright. And there are eleven musical numbers, each featuring between one and forty-six performers. Director/conceiver Jack Cummings III gets points for sheer bravado and inventiveness.

Some of the high points: Adam Bock’s “The Japanese Women,” which delights even though the characters are speaking Japanese ninety percent of the time, and Nancy Shayne’s “The Out-of-Town Parents and Their Manhattan Daughter,” which is sad and subtly creepy while being all-too-familiar. The most toe-tapping show-stopping musical number is definitely “Little White Lies,” written by Lewis Flinn and Brian Crawley, and performed by Gerry McIntyre, an upper-crust African-American yuppie who’s not enjoying himself overmuch at this play, with the three Japanese women (Yuka Takara, MaryAnn Hu, and Mika Saburi) as Tokyo-meets-Motown backup singers. On the down side, a lot of the playlets, taken individually, do feel a little contrived, wrap up a little too neatly, or just plain don’t pan out.

Kathryn Rohe’s pitch-perfect costumes are worth singling out—her sharp eye for characterization through fashion says more about these people than an extra half-hour of exposition.

Yes, some of the individual stories work better than others; yes, some of the songs and some of the performances are much stronger than others—but the whole thing somehow comes together to be much more than the sum of its parts. It’s a true theatre-lover’s evening of theatre, giving us the chance to look into our own minds and watch a group of artists grapple with the question of what we are doing here. Not in any big, existential way—but the very literal question of what we, the audience, are doing here, in the theatre, watching a musical. Why do we go? Why do we care? Do we care? What is the act of alchemy that brings a group of disparate individuals together in the dark to watch imaginary strangers sing and dance a few feet away? I’m not sure The Audience answers any of these questions in an earth-shattering way, but the pleasures of asking them, and of watching a representation of one’s own experience as a theatre-goer, are considerable.

Last night I went to my high school prom… well, someone else’s high school prom, actually, but I’ll play along. It was The Awesome 80s Prom at Webster Hall, one of those shows where you participate and move around, like Tamara or Tony n' Tina’s Wedding. The actors interact with the audience members as if we are all their classmates, running from group to group, letting us in on gossip that will help us follow some of the subplots of the evening. It didn’t take long for the audience I was with to get into the groove, and for two hours we all left our adult responsibilities behind and had a harmless, silly party together, each of us inserting our own memories. The show is conceived, written, and directed by Ken Davenport. The cast is large and everyone is terrific; by the end, each gets his or her moment to shine.

So maybe you were there, or maybe you weren’t: it’s 1989 in a completely white, middle-class suburb of New Jersey. In any case, we all saw the movies and the music videos that are freely referenced throughout, like Sixteen Candles, Footloose, and Dirty Dancing. Yes, there is a brain, a princess, a nerd, a jock, and a rebel, plus a drama queen, a cheerleader, an uptight principal, and others. And of course, there is the music, with something for almost anyone under fifty. A lot of it was music I would never have chosen but secretly love; extremely white, pop rock like Air Supply, Bonnie Tyler, and Journey. Some of it was more my speed, like Cindi Lauper and Prince. There were things conspicuously missing, like Janet Jackson and, to my great shock, there was only about three seconds of Madonna used in a funny bit. I imagine the live deejays are free to mix it up a little from night to night in between the planned moments. Whatever. It’s all harmless fun. The bar is open for the “adults” (note: I did not say there is an open bar), and the evening is as enjoyable as you make it.

So what, you may ask, is “the play” about? Good question. Depending on where you are in the room, and how much you choose to interact, you will catch different parts of the characters' stories (when my partner went to the men’s room, there were a few thugs in there picking on a nerd). There’s an oddball girl secretly in love with the captain of the football team, a rivalry between the head cheerleader and the head of the prom committee, and a few teen dramas. There are a few more structured scenes as well. Early on we meet the candidates for prom king and queen, and we all get to vote (there’s a surprise ending to this, of course). There’s a “Walk Like an Egyptian” contest with a few audience members participating. At one point, three cheerleaders give a great performance on the dance floor.

There’s a lot of time in between these moments, however, and depending on how much you feel like drinking and dancing, you may find yourself more or less entertained. The Awesome 80s Prom feels, in a lot of places, much more like a theme party than a play. Rather than merely taking us to a time and place, a generic prom filled with archetypes of the era, it might have been more interesting if there was a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end; a reason to take us through this particular prom of all the proms in the history of proms. I know when the prom king and queen were crowned ninety percent of the audience was waiting for the pig’s blood to fall. Oh well. If you remember the '80s (and this reviewer remembers the '80s…okay, the '70s…okay, I know where I was when Kennedy was shot) it’s a fun theme party for sure; a loosely structured evening of friendly, forced socializing and nostalgia to take the edge off of your workday.

Martin Bard, the writer and director (and occasional uncredited performer) of the Axis of Evil Vaudeville Revue—II, clearly has strong opinions about the current state of America—the war on Iraq, the Republican administration, job loss in urban areas—and I would tend to agree with many of his opinions. But in constructing the show, Bard seems to have let his desire to make his point trump his desire to make compelling theatre.

The show’s definition of “vaudeville” is somewhat unusual: although it does include the expected musical numbers and some comic scenes, more than half of the running time is taken up with extremely serious and often quite long scenes—almost a set of short plays sandwiched in among the lighter material Act 1 is titled “Our Iraqi Adventure,” so the scenes feature soldiers in battle analyzing their situation, an Iraqi mother pleading with the troops to help her get medical attention for her wounded son, and the like; in Act 2, “An American Odyssey,” the scenes involve such topics as federal agents threatening a Muslim graduate student, or a young white man learning about the life of an older African American woman and the problems of the ghetto.

These serious scenes unquestionably raise important topics and provide food for thought. But the writing throughout is so heavy-handed and lacking in complexity in terms of both character and viewpoint that the effectiveness of the scenes’ political commentary is blunted. Granted, the vaudeville form tends to trade in caricature rather than character, but in the lengthier scenes, caricature isn’t sufficient to tell a compelling story. And in the serious scenes in particular, without the leavening of satire that can make a caricature enjoyable, I found some of the characters trite and almost offensively stereotypical—the wailing, groveling Iraqi mother who has no identity or purpose other than to care for her children; the wise, church-going African American woman who barely leaves her rent-controlled apartment; the ham-handed federal agents who terrorize a young Muslim man.

Songs and comic scenes do break up the dark mood, but the songs, too, feel like they’re desperately trying to cram in the maximum amount of commentary per square inch. Even in the comic numbers, the lyrics are basically long lists of complaints with barely a rhyme or a bit of wordplay to be found. The funniest moments are between scenes, when a disheveled, shady low-price travel planner emerges to shill budget tours of the Middle East.

The ensemble does its best with the material; they are spirited, enthusiastic, and committed throughout.

The production design has an intentionally homespun, cobbled-together feel about it, which is at times effective and at times a little surreal. Many of the performers have single, basic costumes that they wear throughout, with the addition or subtraction of different accessories, which creates occasionally bizarre juxtapositions, like the homebound African American woman in sparkling fishnets, or the Muslim graduate student who resembles nothing so much as a mime, with red suspenders, gloves, and a bowler hat.

I applaud Martin Bard’s desire to use his art to proclaim his convictions and to incite the world to action—as the finale of the show reminds us, “the future of our democracy is in our hands.” But I do wish that he’d found a way to make his point with a little more originality and artistry.

The Baby Monitor, written by Jude Albert and directed by Marc-Anthony Thomas, is an amusing tale about two couples, each with their own newborn daughter, who overhear each other’s lives via the frequency of their mildly defective baby monitors. This “audio voyeurism” first entrances them—“It’s like a soap opera, but it’s real!” enthuses one of the characters. Ultimately, by listening in on each other, the couples learn about the pitfalls and pressures that a new baby can put on a relationship and how to overcome them. The baby monitors bring the quartet together in interesting, if at times predictable, ways.

Kevin believes that his wife Darlene’s post-partum depression has driven him to find another girlfriend. Linda and Mark (dubbed “The Bickersons” by Darlene and Kevin) find that arguing leads them to the bedroom, and thus keeps the spark in their marriage going strong.

Most notable in the cast is Elyssa Phillips, whose Linda is brash, bright, outspoken, and quite funny. Her husband Mark, played by Michael Morano, charmingly complements her aggressiveness with behavioral pyrotechnics of his own. Kevin’s girlfriend Laura is played by Mary Trosclair, who makes the most of an insufficiently written character. Her amusement when she learns how Kevin was “busted by a baby monitor” is infectious and engaging. Brad Alperin (Kevin) seems uncomfortable playing the philandering husband, but comes alive when he listens in on Mark musing about the love he has for his daughter and family.  Lori Russo, who plays Darlene, gives a comic touch to playing an overwhelmed mother, and the tears she sheds after accidentally discovering her husband’s infidelity are both touching and funny.

The inter-scene music is repetitive and somewhat annoying, seeming to leech energy of the previous scene and, at times, slowing the pace. Jude Albert’s script has some entertaining and comical moments, but sometimes feels more like a sitcom instead of a play (and one of his main plot devices has already been used in two Woody Allen films). Nonetheless, the director and actors’ enthusiasm for the story rises above the play's sometimes bland tone and delivers a charming evening of theatre.

It must be spring, because everything is bursting, including the cast in the latest rendition of The Baker’s Wife, the musical that started on wobbly legs back in the ‘70s and evolved into the current exuberant piece of perfection now at Paper Mill Playhouse. Thirty years worth of tweaking is a long gestation period for any production, but old pros like Stephen Schwartz, who wrote music and lyrics, and Joseph Stein, who wrote the book, revised until they got it right. And, boy, did they!

At long last we have a good old-fashioned musical with story, sets, cast, choreography, music, lyrics, lighting, and costumes that fit together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The story, based on the film La Femme du Boulanger by Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono, revolves around a middle-aged baker and his young, attractive wife, who move to a small, French village. The villagers, without bread since the death of the previous baker some weeks earlier, have become ill-humored and impatiently await their arrival. Once they arrive complications ensue. The baker, inspired by his love for his wife, bakes delicious bread. When she is lured away by a handsome young man, the baker can no longer bake and the townspeople again suffer. They take matters into their own hands, and in doing so, resolve many of the petty arguments that have been festering among them for years.

Stein wastes no time in establishing the character of the village and the intricate relationships among its inhabitants. He passes out humor and barbs generously, and we get to know nearly every villager and his beef as if he is a next door neighbor. That is no easy task with a cast of 18. These relationships develop into subplots that support the larger plot of the baker and his wife. But actually, the big spotlight is on the tiny village as the focal point of the play.

Anna Louizos’s set easily transports us to a vintage French town nestled at the base of the mountains. Narrow, winding alleyways squeeze between and around the tiny shops whose owners live in the intimate quarters above. Nothing is extraneous. Louver windows open onto the square and small balconies prove useful for a breath of fresh air, serenading, and escape. Ivy covers the side of one building, making it easy to scale the wall. There are only two stores, the café and the boulangerie, but the square feels like it is teeming with the comings and goings of townsfolk, thanks to the intimacy of the set and to Gordon Greenberg’s superb direction and Christopher Gattelli’s artful choreography. Together, they have created a memorable town with real people who actually have things to do other than listen to an actor belt out a song. In one brilliant stroke of wit, the set revolves, introducing the warmth of the bakery’s interior with all its baguettes and brioches. At the same time, we see the townspeople, noses pressed against the glass, waiting for the opening of their new bakery. In their eagerness, you can almost smell the bread.

The music, like once upon a time, is tuneful and melodic. It is Schwartz’s talent to be able to identify with all the characters, giving each one lyrics that ‘up’ the emotional ante. In the ballad “Meadowlark,” the baker’s wife, Genevieve, struggles between her loyalty to her husband and the lure of the young man who is pursuing her. In an early number entitled “Bread,” Schwartz makes it clear where the passion of the villagers lies. It is the one subject that unites them, the only topic on which they all agree; and the villagers sing it with gusto. “If I Have to Live Alone” demonstrates the melancholic resignation of a middle-aged man and it is delivered with the sadness of real loss. And “Where Is the Warmth” reveals the painful recognition of a young woman’s mistake.

Alison Franck has cast this production impeccably. The baker, Aimable Castagnet, is played by Lenny Wolpe. He extracts genuine affection from the audience with his endearing demeanor. Alice Ripley, as his beautiful wife, provides the perfect contrast. When she enters the village square—and she is the last to do so—it is clear she does not belong. She knows it, we know it, and so do the villagers. While the village brims with vitality, it is not the same as Genevieve’s. Standing perfectly still, she sizzles. Her voice is beautiful, and it adds another dimension to a role filled with longing, missed opportunity, ambivalence, and passion. Max Von Essen exudes energy and confidence as the handsome ladies’ man, Dominique. Genevieve and Dominique make an attractive couple, raising the question: How will Schwartz and Stein resolve this to the audience’s satisfaction? Not to worry.

As Denise and Claude, the proprietors of the café, Gay Marshall and Richard Pruitt portray a couple whose love has been buried by time and the bustle of serving their customers. Pruitt gives Claude both sides of a coin—the bonhomie of a tavern-owner toward his customers and the bully who hurls taunts at his wife. Marshall demonstrates a sad vulnerability and wistfulness in Denise. The audience audibly reacts to the hurtful stings and quietly roots for her character to find the appropriate words to fight back.

Lighting and costume design by Jeff Croiter and Catherine Zuber, respectively, also contribute to the effective collaborative feeling.

It is refreshing to see that strong story-telling without superfluous razzle-dazzle can captivate an audience for two hours and forty minutes. It may have taken thirty years of rewrites to get The Baker’s Wife just the way they wanted it, but Schwartz and Stein should feel like they have a hit on their hands. It is a Broadway-caliber gem. Playing at Paper Mill in Millburn, NJ, this production is easily accessible by New Jersey Transit and is within walking distance of the train station and a number of restaurants. It is a must-see.

Numerous, if not all, of Eugene Ionesco’s plays are concerned with the unexamined life—that is, the areas of life we would prefer not to examine—and the consequences of such blissful ignorance. In Rhinoceros, Berenger is willfully, defensively uninterested in the phenomenon of his fellow citizens turning into ungulates and stampeding across the town until he realizes that he is the only man left. Exit the King’s monarch staunchly refuses to admit his own mortality (despite the announcement at the beginning of the play that his majesty will die by the final curtain) until he actually begins to disappear. In Amédée, or How To Get Rid of It, a bickering married couple try not to concern themselves with the corpse in the next room until it begins to grow, taking over the entire apartment.

Ionesco’s two most popular short plays, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson (currently being performed at The Atlantic in a smart and pithy translation by Tina Howe) are no less theatrical, yet the terror his characters so doggedly avoid is less tangible, more insidious.

The former play begins in an English sitting room where a clock strikes seventeen times: Mrs. Smith announces it is nine o’clock and commences prattling to Mr. Smith, who sits reading his newspaper, about their dinner, their maid, their neighbors, and a family they know composed entirely of traveling salesmen who all go by the name Bobby Watson. Soon they are joined by a second couple, the Martins, who, though they have arrived together, seem to be perfect strangers until they deduce that, because they live in the same flat on the same street and sleep in the same bed, they must be married.

The origin of The Bald Soprano was Ionesco’s attempt to learn English via a French-English guide in which truisms such as “The ceiling is up, the floor is down” were used in exchanges meant to resemble reasonable conversations. All that these two couples wish to do is to have such civilized conversations, but some underlying anxiety sabotages communication, and the more they try to use words to make sense, the more estranged they become to each other and themselves.

The Lesson is less silly, more vicious. From the innocuous premise of a pupil’s first meeting with her professor comes a parable about the power of knowledge, the violence of logic. The student seems well on her way to acing her full doctoral examination until her instructor realizes that all of her correct answers are a result not of reasoning, but of memorization (i.e., unable to understand the principle of multiplication, she has learned a seemingly infinite number of multiplicative equations). His attempts to instill in her his notion of sense go from charming to savage without turning back.

These plays are tragicomedies and the results are seriously funny, as exemplified by Carl Forsman’s arresting production. Guided by Howe’s fluidly stilted translation, each cast expertly navigates its troublous course. However, in The Bald Soprano, Jan Maxwell is particularly outstanding as Mrs. Smith—to watch her vacillate between sexual repression and abandon is to watch a gorgeous flower wilt and bloom at sudden, irregular intervals. And The Lesson belongs to Steven Skybell, whose Professor is a smiling, panting ulcer just waiting for the slightest irritation to unleash a limitless reservoir of rage.

Ionesco’s folks are idealists—putting all of their faith, hope, and trust in facts while failing to acknowledge sometimes unfortunate, sometimes terrifying truths. Language and logic (which in Ionesco’s world are synonymous) become the driftwood to which these characters cling as they are carried away by the rough current of their unfathomable desires.

Of all the political satire being presented, all the ancient plays being recostumed to address our current political situation, very little of it is as potent, subversive, and frighteningly accurate as these two plays in depicting the attitude of our current administration: so reliant on word-choice and intricate reasoning so as to obfuscate the issues, to manipulate the country (and themselves) into believing that certain reprehensible actions are humane, justified and inevitable. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason,” GK Chesterton wrote. “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”