I write this review as an eleven-year fan of Soho Think Tank and particularly their Ice Factory summer festival. I embrace their mission to strengthen, nurture, and promote independent theatre artists and theatre companies by developing and producing innovative experimental works that challenge the norms of contemporary theatre. According to the press materials, many shows previously produced at the Ice Factory have “gone on to Off-Broadway, the Joyce, PS 122, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, et al.” Having said all this, I have a question for the managing team of Soho Think Tank: Do Les Freres Corbusier and their production of The Franklin Thesis uphold the standards and match the integrity of the body of works you’ve produced in past seasons? From what I witnessed in the theatre—No.

Bradley Bazzle’s script seems to have been haphazardly constructed, like a misguided game of Theatresports. It’s as if he randomly pulled the statement “Ben Franklin is the Anti-Christ created by a Satan-Alien being” out of a hat, and then was given seven actors to construct an improvisation and told “go.” The play has no coherent message other than then an obvious (and very thin) plot line that centers on the corruption of America’s governing fathers, focusing on powerful “male” figures such as as the Old Testament God, The New Testament God, Nelson Rockefeller, Franz Liszt, a generic President of the United States, and good old Ben himself.

What’s the play about? Well, if you’ve read up to this point you already know—Ben Franklin is the Anti-Christ created by a vengeful Satan-Alien. I’m sounding redundant, I know. Ben has control of a time machine that manipulates the past and future, corrupting (and poisoning) America from the inside out. Much of the story centers on the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. The play seems to overly obsess over “lust,” which leads Ben to spread his seed through random acts of anal intercourse that appear more homophobic than politically illuminating; more an act of gay-bashing than a mirror up to the nature of our governing fathers. This story is told through media projections, robotic dances, and time travel, which are all valid theatrical constructs but fail to satisfy in this production because the projections are blocked by the actors, the dances are unskillfully choreographed (and executed), and time travel only convolutes the point of this 55-minute play.

Alex Timbers' direction lacks vision, clarity of action, and any sense of physical specificity. He desperately needs a choreographer and a dramaturg to strengthen the spine of his communicative skills.

The company of actors includes Boom Aglietti, Gideon Banner, Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum, Scott Hoffer, Ryan Karels, Jesse J. Perez, and Drew Seltzer. They all give earnest yet unpolished and under-realized performances—though this could be a fault of Bazzle’s play and Timbers’ direction. Even the more seasoned of performers, Banner and Perez, come off as novices.

David Evans Morris’ set design is practical but lacks visually stimulation. His walls form an undefined box that could be used for a multitude of plays from Moliere to Mamet but he has yet to figure out the specifics for this production. There is no metaphor to the design to assist in the attempted deconstruction of the play. Its most distinctive feature is its colors, baby blue and white, and the effect is as uninteresting as baby blue and white.

Jennifer Rogien costumes appropriately embody a blending of period styles with cartoonish flair, though Perez needs some help to look more like Mr. Franklin. Juliet Chia’s lighting is functional, but lacks an artist’s impression. And Joseph McGuire’s sound and video contributions are competently executed, yet the volume seems to be set at one level and music arbitrarily underscores long scenes, while projections of abstract figures and unreadable text fail to enhance the experience of the play.

I acknowledge that Ice Factory's mission statement embraces the development of new plays by emerging playwrights and the notion of works-in-progress, but it does not appear that the Soho Think Tank team took advantage of this process to address much needed developmental issues in the case of The Franklin Thesis. When I read my notes after seeing the play, I discovered that I was compelled to jot down only one line from Bazzle’s script that, ironically, articulates perfectly the inner monologue running through my thoughts as I sat in the Ohio Theatre—“God help us everyone!”

Dionysos, god of wine and drama, is distressed. The country—the world—has become a terrible place: our leaders have started a war for reasons that seem to change every day, and they lie to their people with alarming regularity about this and other important subjects. Hope has been replaced by fear in the hearts of men.

It would seem, then, to be just the right moment for The Frogs, the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes that is being brought to us by Lincoln Center as "freely adapted" by Burt Shevelove and "even more freely adapted" by Nathan Lane. To be sure, Aristophanes was fretting more about the state of dramatic poetry than the world at large back in 405 B.C., when he conceived of the idea of Dionysos heading to the underworld to bring the late, great playwright Euripides back to Earth to restore honor to the theatre festival. But Aristophanes was always concerned at least a little about politics, so it's not so much of a stretch for Shevelove, Lane, and their collaborator Stephen Sondheim to turn The Frogs into a commentary on the world of today, a world where citizens seem in danger of turning into conformist, apathetic frogs; where, as Sondheim puts it, we're content to

Let your leaders raise their voices for you
Let your critics make your choices for you

In their version of The Frogs, Dionysos seeks not Euripides but Shaw, a voice for intellect and reason in a troubled time. But once in Hades, the god finds that words and thoughts are less potent on their own than when they're combined with the passion of beautiful poetry; Shakespeare, not Shaw, is the dramatist that Dionysos decides the world needs now, to rouse it from its dismaying, fearful, comfortable inertia. The play ends with a call to action, or at least a plea for each of us to start thinking for ourselves: what message could be more resonant or pertinent at this precise historical moment?

And yet... all is not well with this show. I left The Frogs feeling both disappointed and depressed; the ostensible optimism of that final message is dissipated by a host of troubling problems surrounding the production itself. In a nutshell, this: The Frogs—a splashy-ish Broadway-style musical starring Nathan Lane and a host of well-known second bananas and directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman—is plagued by the very ills it seeks to banish. To justify a $95 ticket price and become hospitable to an audience that can afford to pay it, it's been bloated to 2-1/2 hours in length (at least an hour more than it needs to make its case); the role of Dionysos has been similarly built up to accommodate Lane; and the staging and design reflect safe choices, economically and artistically. The Frogs is about individuality, about pushing envelopes, about not saying "don't" (to quote a Sondheim lyric from another show); it's a stinging indictment against sitting complacently on your lily pad and letting your leaders turn you into a docile amphibian. Yet, the people behind this show have turned it into a packaged product, ripe for consumption by us toadies—er, toads. Shame on them.

All is not lost. Sondheim's score is indisputably the saving grace of The Frogs, loaded with wisdom and wit in the lyrics and soaring with passion, sometimes, in the music. Much of the material is from the original production of this musical, which happened in the 1970s at Yale University: the delightful "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience" which opens the show, as well as "It's Only a Play," the eerily prophetic chorale that includes the lines quoted above. New material, mostly in the first act, gives a couple of songs to Dionysos (one of them, "Ariadne," is a real gem) and another comic number to Herakles. All of it has merit, and it's gloriously orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick, though not always so gloriously sung—neither Lane nor his co-stars Michael Siberry (Shakespeare) and Peter Bartlett (Pluto) are particularly well-equipped to handle the songs they've been assigned.

Lane is at his crowd-pleasing best, though, cracking wise as a shrewdly anachronistic Dionysos; he deserves a nod, too, for his willingness to speak his mind so earnestly about what's disturbing him about our current political predicament. The terrifically engaging Roger Bart offers fine support as Dionysos' slave, Xanthias; and Daniel Davis is superb as the dead G.B. Shaw, evoking the great man in what feels like a letter-perfect portrait.

So I find myself of two minds about The Frogs. On the one hand, I'm really distressed by its commercially-motivated bloat and its utterly unimaginative and unenergetic production (Stroman, in particular, is nowhere near top form here). But on the other, I'm genuinely grateful that Sondheim's sage words and Lane's activist spirit have been given a high-profile platform. Overall, it's not an unentertaining show, and it does leave us with some food for thought. Broadway has certainly done much worse by the classics and the theatre of ideas than this production. Let us be hopeful, then, and, as Dionysos and Shakespeare suggest, let us look into our minds and hearts, and start.

When it comes to The Full Monty, it turns out that size totally matters: Small is better.

That's my conclusion after seeing the delightfully intimate—and extremely entertaining—revival of The Full Monty at Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and comparing it with my (mostly not very happy) memories of the Broadway production at the ten-times-as-large Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Everything about this spunky, scrappy mounting exceeds the overblown original—the performances are sharper, the songs are funnier and sweeter, the laughs are happier, and the energy and high spirits are genuine, outsized, and infectious. Director Matt Schicker has, to his great credit, located the joyful life-affirming center of this show, and every moment of his superb staging supports The Full Monty's singular defining idea: that life is hard and short and so may as well be enjoyed and celebrated, every chance we get. This is a show that reminds its audience that we're supposed to go the full monty in everything we do, everyday. And, God bless 'em, its six ballsy leading men do exactly that at the show's climax, to the hootin', howlin' delight of everybody in the room.

Just in case you don't know, The Full Monty is the musical comedy by Terrence McNally (book) and David Yazbek (lyrics & music) about six unemployed steelworkers in Buffalo, New York who decide to put on a one-night-only strip show in order to earn some quick cash and, just possibly, win back some much-needed self-esteem. It's based on the hit movie of the same name.

The primary focus here is on two of the men, Jerry Lukowski and Dave Bukatinsky. Jerry is a 32-year-old screw-up who has big dreams but little follow-through; he's more motivated than usual to make something of himself, however, because he's about to lose joint custody of his 12-year-old son, Nathan, unless he can pay some back child support. Dave, Jerry's best friend, is overweight and stuck in a huge funk because he can't find work. Though their wives (in Jerry's case, ex-wife) urge them to take jobs as security guards or cashiers at the local mall, neither is willing to sacrifice his pride. So when Jerry comes up with the wild idea to do the strip act, it makes a weird kind of sense.

Realizing that they need more than just a duo to make this act work, they hire four additional dancers from among the ranks of Buffalo's large un- or under-employed male population. Harold Nichols, their ex-boss, is brought on for his dancing skill, but he needs the gig just as much as Jerry and Dave do, for he's not only out of a job but hasn't had the guts to tell his wife, who continues to spend in accordance with their former upper-middle-class lifestyle. Jerry and Dave meet Malcolm MacGregor as he is attempting to commit suicide (they pull him out of the carbon monoxide-filled car he's locked himself into): he's a hopelessly shy young man still living at home with a domineering mother; but he's a night security guard at the old factory where they all used to work, providing them with a place to rehearse. Noah "Horse" Simmons, an older black gentleman, is added to the group unabashedly because they think women will like a "Big Black Man" (and Horse suggests that his nickname has something to do with his physical attributes). The sixth dancer is Ethan Girard, another former steelworker; sweet and well-meaning, he's a total klutz—but he's fearless, and when he drops trou and shows the others his stuff, they put him on the squad immediately.

The show alternates between the boys' rehearsals and more personal developments in their lives. We never find out much about Horse, but as The Full Monty progresses we learn about the solid marriages that both Dave and Harold enjoy (and come to appreciate their spouses—Georgie and Vicki, respectively), and we watch as Malcolm and Ethan's friendship blossoms into something deeper. (The most moving moment of the show is at the funeral of Malcolm's mother, where Malcolm and then Ethan sing the affirming hymn "You Walk With Me.") We also watch—and are continually frustrated by—Jerry's seeming inability to grow up.

At the last minute, as the appointed night for the show approaches, Jerry decides that the sextet will go "the full monty" when they strip—i.e., they will take off EVERYTHING, doing the Chippendale types one better.  This of course results in a flood of ticket sales, and supplies Jerry and the others with a final test. Will they go through with it? Well, I've already told you the answer—but the suspense and the tension mount with real exhilaration here anyway. The show is never about what we'll get to (pruriently) see, but what the guys are finally willing to let themselves do. The big finale is called "Let It Go" and that's exactly the right title.

Schicker's staging is hugely successful in every department. He's cast the show with actors who look like real guys, as opposed to pretty boys; all six of his leading men are very convincing, as well as quite talented. Mitchell Jarvis gets Jerry's immaturity and likeability exactly right, and he's also a terrific dancer, leading the group neatly through the rousing Act One finish, "Michael Jordan's Ball," in which Jerry explains that the dance routine should be as natural and graceful as a game of basketball. Scott Windham is fine as chubby, insecure Dave, really letting us see the good humored affability that has made him such a good friend to Jerry and good husband to Georgie all these years. Michael Roth is terrific as uptight Harold, and nimble Dann B. Black proves something of a scene-stealer as Horse, especially in his "audition" number, "Big Black Man." As Malcolm and Ethan, Darron Cardosa and Gavino Olvera play with real compassion and commitment; we're happy to see them find each other.

Other roles are just as propitiously cast. The wives—Patti McClure as Vicki, Aimee Trumbore as Pam, and Kim Ramsey as Georgie—are all portrayed with empathy and intelligence. Dennis Michael Keefe (who also plays in the band) is solid as Pam's sturdy new fiancé, Teddy, and young Julian Pavlin is perfect as Jerry's loving but pragmatic 12-year-old son. Brandon Straka is terrific as a "real" stripper named Keno—I love what Schicker and Straka have done with this character, ensuring he's not the flighty, arch stereotype that he was in the Broadway production. And then there's Tricia Norris, whose way with a wry one-liner wins her laugh after laugh as Jeanette Burmeister, the game old virtuosa who improbably shows up to be the boys' accompanist and main booster.

Sets (Timothy J. Amrhein), costumes (Melissa Beverage), lighting (Michael P. Jones), and live music (the 6-piece band is led by Ken Legum) are necessarily modest but entirely appropriate: one of the things that works best here is putting the boys' strip show into a theatre that actually looks like a Buffalo nightspot instead of a Vegas showplace. When the tacky spangly curtain falls into place onto stage and the ensemble fans out into the intimate auditorium to cheer the boys on, we feel like we're right in the middle of something real and special, which is just as it should be.

At $15 a pop, The Full Monty is the best theatre bargain in town right now; it's also one of the no-holds-barred best times to be found among any musical, at any price, on Broadway or way, way off. Hop on the F or R train and get over to Gallery Players. You owe yourself an evening this fun.

The Big Idea behind David Bell's The Gay Naked Play is full of promise: a young, idealistic theatre company, committed to doing work that's artistic and important, find themselves in dire need of money and wind up producing a blatantly commercial show with lots of male nudity in order to survive.

Alas, the execution is so-oooo disappointing. Bell has loaded up his play with a plethora of implausible plot points and characters that sink whatever opportunities for satire and/or thought-provoking commentary that this genuinely intriguing premise contained; he hasn't even crafted a particularly workable farce, though the ingredients on stage point more to that dramatic form than any other. Instead, The Gay Naked Play is mostly an occasion for a succession of tart, bitchy, and very "inside" one-liners. Jokes like one suggesting that Governor McGreevey frequents a Manhattan gay sex establishment or another which begins by referring to Avenue Q's book writer Jeff Whitty as "Miss Piggy" are pretty typical.

The Gay Naked Play begins at the final moments of the final performance of a terrible, terribly arty, off-off-Broadway play—an obviously pretentious and misbegotten verse concoction created by the members of the Integrity Theatre Company. These members number four: Dan, the  artistic director, who says things like "ars gratia artis" and seems actually to believe them; Amanda, his needy, whiny, and pregnant wife, who is also the company's lead actress; Harold J. Lichtenberger, the company's lead actor, a fellow as serious and brooding as his stock name suggests; and Tim, the stage manager, who is sort of sweet, dopey, and earnest. It is Tim—who turns out to be gay—who gets Integrity involved with Eddie Russini, impresario of gay naked theatre, and his "designers" Edonis and T. Scott. To cut a long story short, during a late night's carousing, Tim drunkenly invites Eddie & Company to help save Integrity after its sole investor—Amanda's mother—pulls out. Their proposition is a show for gay audiences, with lots of nudeness, to star porn actor Kit Swagger, who is apparently a big deal in adult films.

Bell proceeds from here, piling on all kinds of complications. Amanda's mother shows up, and decides (1) to bankroll the naked show and (2) to stipulate that her daughter appear naked in the show because Dan is against it and she thinks this will drive her son-in-law, whom she despises, away. Dan leaves Amanda—twice. Harold, meanwhile, finds a soulmate of sorts in Kit, whom he coaches in Uta Hagen acting technique.

It's fitfully funny, but never acquires much energy, mainly because Bell spends so much time stereotyping and/or making fun of the various characters that we don't care about any of them; in farce, something needs to be at stake for it to work, but here, nothing is. Bell wants us to believe that Integrity has gotten a rave review from the New York Times' Ben Brantley, and at the same time he wants us to think they're a pack of bumbling incompetents; that's hard to swallow or justify. The dumb-but-earnest porn star-turned-actor idea is pretty tired (Elaine May couldn't make it work in Adult Entertainment). The stupid Chelsea boy clones T. Scott and Edonis are offensive; the Mommie Dearest character of Amanda's mother is just vulgar.

As for the possibility of sexiness and/or skin, well, caveat emptor: Bell, sniping at a genre that doesn't even actually exist (excuse me: the last "gay naked play" in New York was Take Me Out, which won several Tony Awards), feels compelled to never deliver the goods. (Pity the poor actor who has to play a famous gay porn star: he can't deliver the goods.) So do not come to The Gay Naked Play expecting nudity: there's less here even than there was in The Full Monty.

I should say that the production, all of its problems notwithstanding, is actually quite well-mounted. Co-directors Christopher Borg and Jason Bowcutt keep things moving at an appropriately fast clip, and all of the actors do fine work despite the broad caricatures they're called upon to play. Particularly impressive are Dan Zalevsky, who almost makes the cowardly Dan into a likable man; Wayne Henry as the self-obsessed Harold; Jonas Gabriel, humorously self-aware as porn star Kit Swigger; and Karen Stanion, deliciously trashy as Amanda's nasty mom.

This is the fourth David Bell play I've seen in about two years: I keep having high hopes for this young writer, who obviously has talent but needs to spend more time on craft and structure and less time on crowd-pleasing jokes. The Gay Naked Play might have had some genuinely witty, interesting, or provocative things to say about art and commerce and sexuality and selling out; instead it settles for merely tossing out bon-mots to make its target audience guffaw in recognition.

If Seth Bisen-Hersh had been born a century earlier, I imagine that by this point in his career he'd be a fledgling Broadway composer, his apprenticeship as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger just behind him; hopefully he'd be taken under the wing of a Fields or Ziegfeld and turning out two or three shows a year, the better to learn his craft. (That's more or less how Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin got their starts.)

But Bisen-Hersh wasn't born until 1979, as we know from the song "Maturity," which celebrates his 25th birthday and which is one of the best numbers in his new cabaret show The Gayest Straight Man Alive; conditions along the Rialto being what they are these days, Bisen-Hersh has to produce his own musicals to ply his trade—this is his third one-man show in as many years. (He is also the composer of last year's FringeNYC audience favorite Meaningless Sex, and he has another musical called The Spickner Spin coming to this summer's festival.)

All of which is meant to say: see Bisen-Hersh's new show, because he's a talented young writer and because the way the theatre business works nowadays means that the only way he can get "discovered" and, more importantly, get better, is in an off-off-Broadway showcase like this one. The Gayest Straight Man Alive is a revue of eighteen songs, all but one with music and lyrics by Bisen-Hersh (the lone exception is a parody of a famous song, performed by Bisen-Hersh's very funny and entirely unexpected "alter ego"). Just about all of the material is autobiographical, at least sort-of; the show examines various facets of the life of a young musical theatre nut who likes girls—honest—even though his proclivities cause others to assume that he must be gay.

Bisen-Hersh is a good composer and a better lyricist, and much of the material is commendable. The aforementioned "Maturity" is one of just a handful of ballads on the bill; it has a pleasing melody and contains some insightful sentiments about moving toward adulthood that mark it as a keeper. The opening, title song has an insinuating tune that sticks with you and makes for a lively intro to the show. There are two excellent cabaret numbers—"Personal Ad," which manages to be both heartfelt and genuinely clever and has a neat surprise ending; and "Tivo, my Tivo," a tribute to new technology that lets Bisen-Hersh demonstrate his adeptness as a lyricist with its series of charming internal rhymes.

Bisen-Hersh is an ingratiating and enthusiastic performer. The patter that comes between the numbers is a blithe stream-of-consciousness ode to his one and only passion, which is musical theatre in its many manifestations.

The Gayest Straight Man Alive is certainly a fun way to pass an hour. Performances are at 5:00 and 10:30pm, so you can fit the show in before or after your evening's main event. The more people who see it, the better it will get; Bisen-Hersh is going to learn to tighten and polish his songs, but he needs audience reaction to do it right. So check it out. Who knows? You may be seeing Seth Bisen-Hersh's name on a Broadway marquee in a few years.

“Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks!” Laura Wingfield cautions Jim O’Connor, as he holds her favorite glass figurine, the unicorn. This is presumably the most trusting the bashful young woman has ever been with someone other than her gently restless brother, Tom, and her mother, Amanda, a former Southern belle for whom vivacity is an Olympic sport.

Jim works at the Continental Shoe Factory with Tom and has come over for dinner, unwittingly stepping into the role of Laura’s lone Gentleman Caller in almost a decade of eligibility. Despite her “inferiority complex” (as he armchair-diagnoses it) and her slight claudication, he cajoles her into a whirlwind of joy, climaxing in a dance during which the glass unicorn loses its horn, and ending with a kiss, during which Laura nearly loses her self-consciousness. At this moment, Jim realizes the fragility of this creature; he breathes an excuse (he is, in fact, romantically involved with someone else, and he realizes he has been leading Laura on), and shortly thereafter he is gone.

This is the final episode in our narrator Tom Wingfield’s homage to his sister—a few months later, he tells us, he was fired from the shoe factory and abandoned the two women, as his father (the “telephone man who fell in love with long distances) had done years before. Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is about the desire to both smother and smash those things that we hold most precious. This tragic memory play warns us that the more we keep ourselves out of harm’s way, the more vulnerable we become.

In Spain there is a civil war being waged, and the world without the United States is about to erupt in a second world war, but the memories Tom recounts take place in St. Louis, circa mid-1930s, where American dreams such as those of Amanda can still survive despite their being uprooted from a plantation on the Delta and stuffed into a cramped sunless apartment in industrial St. Louis. The Glass Menagerie has never struck me as a “political play,” but it seems all the more resonant now at a time when the current administration is doing everything in its power to preserve retrograde values, (willfully?) blind to the resultant atrocities that have occurred, and those that are on their way.

David Leveaux’s production suffers from a major casting mistake—Christian Slater as Tom— that causes all sorts of problems. Tom is a poet and it is with lush language that he conjures this portrait of his family. He is both an artist and a homosexual (or certainly of a sexual orientation that he is not comfortable sharing with his family, and Amanda is oddly not hounding him about marriage). He has escaped from that dismal apartment, job, life, but his sister and mother have not, and he feels very guilty for it. Yet Slater does not savor the language; he dumps it out of his mouth. This may be his way of playing guilt, but it comes off as a kind of shrugging resignation. His regard for his sister and mother feels more sexual than affectionate, and his need to get the hell out of Dodge seems to be more out of annoyance with his mother than the longing to explore a sexual life that he could not begin to describe to her. And without the sensitivity and linguistic relish of the writer or the fugitiveness of the closeted homosexual, it is hard to understand why he so desperately has to get out.

I did not want to blink when Jessica Lange was on stage—her Amanda reminisces about her days of courtship with a sensuality that borders on the erotic. Even listening to her voice from offstage as she phone-plagues friendly acquaintances to renew their expiring subscriptions to the "Companion" (“just when that wonderful new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper is getting off to such an exciting start!”) is a vivid experience. She seems to experience a two-second delay between her impulsive looks of disgust or air-grasps when someone pulls away and her realization that these expressions and gestures are unflattering and reveal too much. But with the sluggish Slater as her most frequent scene partner in the first half, this thrillingly theatrical creature seems to be in a play of her own.

However, Josh Lucas’s arrival as the Gentlemen Caller in the second half of the play is exactly the beacon of light they (and we) were hoping for. His can-do self-made-man-ner brings Laura out of her mother’s aggressively upbeat shadow. Positively radiant in his glow, Sarah Paulson’s Laura makes each monosyllabic answer sound like a poem, and her momentary foray into durability from delicacy is convincing and so moving. The brilliance of Lucas’s performance is the way he uses his sunny gestures, sparkling plaudits, and sprightly smile to distract her (and us) from the darkness of self-doubt that surrounds him. When he finally fathoms Laura’s longing to see herself as he sees her, to believe in the possibilities he purports, he sees a burdensome commitment coming his way and makes a hasty (and guilty) exit.

Lucas’s and Paulson’s time together is captivating and that alone is reason to see this gorgeous play. Even Slater does not ultimately harm the evening for, while Williams’s play is about all sorts of fragile things—glass animals, human hearts, American dreams— The Glass Menagerie is the farthest thing from breakable.

Richard Bean’s play The God Botherers is a sharp, dark comedy about volunteerism, third world culture clash, and the lack of idealism in most so-called idealists. A "God Botherer" according to Bean (in an interview on Synapse Productions' website) is someone who “shoves their faith down your throat.” The play is full of botherers of all stripes, shoving secularism, Christianity, Islam—you name it—down everyone else’s throats.

Set in a made up country called Tambia, the play follows the adventures of Laura, an American bombshell with a penchant for People magazine, whose good intentions are hampered by a tremendous lack of knowledge of the local customs. Laura has somehow recently graduated from Brown University—which in the world of the play is a place where apparently anyone can get a degree—and for reasons that are never that clear, has joined an NGO (non-governmental organization, like C.A.R.E.). The NGO she works for has been in Tambia for some time, helping set up water works and storage bins for corn; the actual work that the organization does is never given much focus in the script, which I think is a minor fault of the play. Laura is the novice, the audience surrogate through whose eyes we experience this story.

She is partnered with Keith, a wise, curmudgeonly, and totally jaded turd of a man who calls himself a Christian. Keith has been in the business of nonprofit volunteer work in aboriginal countries for years, drinks like a fish, and has several ex-wives. He also, unfortunately for him, has a dim memory of what it means to be ethical. Keith and Heidi employ a local Christian/Muslim/Pagan by the name of Monday—who, of course, turns out be the wise fool. Rounding out the cast of characters is Ibrahima, a pregnant local woman who is part-time prostitute, part-time maid.

The main conflict in the play is the clash of beliefs about how people should function in society—every character in the play has his or her own idea of morality, God, how men and women should intermingle, etc. Both Keith and Laura become involved with the locals, telling them how behind the times they are, and handing out cell phones. The locals are equally adept at telling the Westerners that it is they who have the wrong idea about how to go about living; that it’s the Westerners who are backward. In short, every character is his or her own God Botherer. It makes for a bleak vision of what goes on in all those poor countries Sally Struthers is always talking about, but a smart, funny vision, too. Really makes you want to keep sending money to organizations like C.A.R.E. and Amnesty, doesn’t it? This is black comedy at it’s bleakest, a world full of whackos with no voice of reason to be found—like M*A*S*H minus Hawkeye.

Bean, a popular playwright in England, gets his American premiere with this production. His dialogue is sharp, his characters well defined, and his story compelling. David Travis directs the play at a frenetic pace, which fits the tone of the show. The cast is excellent. As Keith, Michael Warner gives a pitch-perfect portrayal of a man who is a shadow of his former self. As Laura, Heidi Armbruster reminds you of those annoying people on the street who always want you to sign a petition for Greenpeace or Amnesty or PETA; but she also lets a small amount of dignity seep through the character, so that you don’t hate her. Kola Ogundiran is excellent as Monday—he captures the madness of the situation and plays it to the hilt for both comic and dramatic effect. Rounding out the cast as Ibrahima is Tinashe Kajese, who is hilarious.

While probably not the feel good hit of the season, The God Botherers is an excellent comedy of ideas, and certainly worth seeing.

Richard Foreman’s tenure as East Village mainstay is coming to a close with The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah). His Ontological Hysteric Theater, at St. Marks Church, has produced 50 of his pieces, a metaphysical, theatrical hodgepodge of symbols, metaphor, and academia. This show, billed as his final one (at least for now), is said to be the culmination of his unique ruminations. The experience of watching The Gods Are Pounding My Head! is one of watching a man wrestle with heady concepts, very much on his own, for an audience of faithful cult-followers. All others need not apply, I fear.

There is a lot that happens in The Gods Are Pounding My Head!, but I’m not sure if they’d qualify as dramatic incidents in any conventional sense. Two lumberjacks named Dutch and Frenchie come across a young blonde nymph named Maude and wander in a dream of technology and biology, or so it seems. The chorus wear black hats with crucifixes on them, bearing everything from black buckets to papier maché heads to large black charts bearing magic square numbers. What is happening? Foreman tells us he’s wrestling with the Western mind, the mind of those who cut down, like lumberjacks, old things to make way for new ones. He fears that this society, as it acquires more and more speed and immediacy, will become more "thin," that a deeper, more meditative psychology is being supplanted by a wider “super-consciousness” that may or may not be an improvement. To be honest, though, that explanation comes from the program notes. It was not explicitly on the stage.

It’s an argument in modern art: should the art speak for itself without the artist providing his own context (in the form of a statement, for example) or is providing a context part of the art? Why should an artist accept the pre-determined context of what we bring with us when we walk in the door…can’t he put us in another mindset? Or does the theatrical piece that fails to engage without prior explanation lack integrity?

Of course, there’s no solid answer to this question. It’s entirely up to taste, to the audience, and to theoreticians. In Foreman’s defense, he certainly will bring to the surface a person’s inherent prejudices or lack thereof when it comes to art. The casual observer or uninitiated into this sort of active participation, someone who isn’t a big reader of Foucault perhaps, might just find themselves rightly sitting there thinking: “What the heck am I doing here?”

So in reviewing Foreman the question becomes how is this valuable? It is because of the debate it may spark, it isn’t because of the ideas. When the giant paisley bird is rolled onto the stage late in the play, anyone who doesn’t roll their eyes is more than likely so indoctrinated that Foreman would have to literally stand up and say “This random bird means nothing to anyone but me!” And even then, they’d likely applaud him as a genius. But there are charms in the performances, humorous juxtapositions of language and image, that are intentional and very under control. He’s an artist, above all things, being allowed to work purely in his medium, and for that reason alone, he’s an increasingly rare bird.

There were moments of stagecraft here that I was simply floored by, and others that left me utterly cold. Besides a dedicated and specific chorus, there are three actors on the stage to try to decipher: Jay Smith’s odd deadpan as Dutch; T. Ryder Smith’s laconic Frenchie, and Charlotta Mohlin’s pixie Maude. As performers, they are all about as different in style and appearance as possible, absolutely unsettling as a trio. The language of play did more for me than the images, which often seemed to be coming from a Jungian mish-mash, but the mix of the visceral (a giant encased heart) and the technological (an engine that rides back on forth on a track) creates a gut-reaction that rises above simple understanding.

The final result was a resounding shrug of my shoulders, at first. But as I’ve taken time away from the actual performance, I've realized that it certainly challenged my sensibilities. And really, when so much of theatre is either preaching to the converted or grappling with such immense questions as “Can I be happy?” or “How do single moms do it?” the questions of modern art, consciousness, and the Western mind are worth at least trying to tap into. And few, I’d say try with as much audacity and bravery as Foreman.

Eve Ensler would make a killing as a motivational speaker.

On the evening I saw The Good Body, Ensler’s one-woman-show currently running on Broadway, the audience was composed primarily of white, middle-aged women whose enthusiastic response to her 90 minute testimonial surely rivaled a Southern Baptist revival meeting. Ensler is a master storyteller—this particular one is about her journey towards accepting her protruding stomach; on the way, she encounters a number of women who each have something to unconvincingly praise or harshly criticize about their physical selves. So powerful is her rapport with her audience that the theatre rumbles with gratified guffaws and half-aspirated responses. The atmosphere is one of delight—informal, informative, and healing: everything Ensler seems to have intended.

But is it theatre?

Well, it’s in a Broadway house; there’s a set (apropos of a modeling shoot with garment racks and manikins); there are props (a few abdominal balls and a bowl of ice cream); there are costumes (adornments, really, to Ensler’s basic black—a hoodie, a scarf, a sari, etc.); and in addition to addressing the audience directly, she plays a variety of women (among them, a fat farm resident, the leader of a support group for women who wish to tighten their vaginas through laser surgery, and Isabella Rossellini).

Ensler’s strength is not as an actress. While her numerous portrayals are adequately distinguishable from each other and though she makes bold stabs at a number of accents, her own distinct way of speaking feels at some points irrepressible. Too, her physicalization of her subjects leaves much to be desired: they move much like the actress herself, with very limited awareness south of their stomachs. I guess this limitation is inherently acknowledged in her bellyphobic piece; she feels paralyzed by this self-proclaimed (and some would say “imaginary”) deformity, and thus her characters (be they a fat Latina woman at Weight Watchers or Helen Gurley Brown) ambulate in roughly the same way. Ensler makes no claims at total recovery by the end, but does ultimately concede that ice cream may not be manufactured by Satan himself.

Most of what is theatrical about The Good Body (which isn’t a whole lot) is technical and can be credited to director Peter Askin and his fine bunch of designers (in particular, Kevin Adams’s lights and Wendall K. Harrington’s video design). For example, within the first few moments a single curtain-raising is so intuitively timed that it causes gasps. Yet the staging is ultimately static—there’s an entire set waiting to be explored, but she barely strolls through half of it.

Still, Ensler has compiled some hilarious and harrowing tales and delivers them with her natural timing and inflection (which is, as I mentioned before, almost irrepressible), making for a deeply involving experience. Her exploration of women’s physical “imperfections” is inevitably incomplete and I could have done with a little less “navel gazing,” but I would bet anything that her audience left feeling very good about their bodies. That’s no small task and any event that can do it is a rare and important entertainment.

When I think back to my attending a recent performance of The Great American Trailer Park Musical one thing sticks in my mind above everything else—I had a smile on my face for the whole evening. From the opening number through the finale I was amused. Is this really a “great” musical? Probably not. But in these days when all the news seems to be bad and the world ugly, this show is a welcome tonic.

Reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors in structure, the story is set out for us at the top by a chorus of three women. In this case, they are Betty, Pickles, and Lin, who each are residents of a North Florida trailer park called Armadillo Acres. During the evening, they will provide scene set-ups, connecting commentary, and plot analysis, while also portraying a number of minor characters and maintaining an almost Brechtian relationship with the audience. Possibly a tall order, but Robin Baxter (Betty), Amanda Ryan Paige (Pickles), and Marya Grandy (Lin) are all highly skilled individuals who are a delight to watch. (They also sing "real good" and are ‘"darn" funny!)

The story concerns agoraphobic Jeannie (Carter Calvert), her long-suffering (he thinks) husband Norbert (Dan Sharkey), and what happens when an "exotic dancer" named Pippi (Jenn Colella) moves into a nearby trailer. Jeannie hasn’t left their trailer in twenty years, Norbert hasn’t had sex in about that long, and Pippi is on the run from Oklahoma and a young man aptly named Duke (Geoffry Scheer). As the chorus tells us in “It Doesn’t Take a Genius,” Norbert and Pippi fall for each other and the plot ensues. To reveal more would spoil the fun. Suffice to say that there is an interesting plot twist at the end and it all finishes splendidly and happily.

The technical aspects of the production are terrific. Joseph J. Egan has designed a clever set and costumes that are perfect for the characters. The wigs are by Greg Baccarini and what a clever job he has done—they suit each character to a “T”—and it is a near monumental job due to the many roles the chorus portray. The lighting by Stephen Tucker is also well done—rich saturated color evoking HOT Florida and the various scenic locales (including a fun disco number).

Betsy Kelso directs the production from her own book. Forgive the alliteration, but this Floridian farce is fittingly fast-paced! Music direction is by the man who wrote the show’s music and lyrics, David Nehls. He leads a four-piece country/rock combo that seems just right for this production. The music itself is based in Country, though there are Rock elements and even Disco. You probably won’t come away from the evening humming any one tune, but they are all sung well. Calvert and Colella have particularly strong voices for Nehls’s music. By the way, Nehls’s lyrics are clever and often use an unexpected rhyme to witty effect.

Yes, as soon as I sat down and spied the set I started to smile and kept it up for the whole two hours. Or, maybe that smile was a stupid grin, which considering the subject matter, may be apropos.

Is The Great Escape—rising young playwright Matt Freeman's first foray into theatre of the absurd—actually an allegory about GenNext life under George W. Bush?

I think that's one way to read this unsettling, funny, and smart new play. It's about two adult children who return to their childhood home after their mother's remarriage, only to end up trapped in her living room inside a pair of burlap sacks.

There are certainly other possible interpretations: The Great Escape is exciting because it's packed with rich ideas and terrific writing; it's being presented off-off-Broadway by the always-interesting Blue Coyote Theatre Group in a polished and well-nourished mounting under the direction of Kyle Ancowitz;  it pretty much demands your attention.

At the center of The Great Escape is young man named Henry, who has been away from home for a long while without actually making a new home for himself somewhere else. He skipped his mother's recent wedding to a man named Walter because, quite clearly, he couldn't bear to witness it; now he's come for a short visit and it's going disastrously badly. After an (unseen) cataclysmic blow-up, his mother has locked herself in her room; or, to put it more accurately, she's locked Henry out. He's in trouble; he's in pain; he's horribly stuck.

The Great Escape is about, mostly, what Henry wants. For most of the play, he says he wants to live "the Happy Life of Well-Meaning People" (a brilliantly pathetic statement of compromised vision, don't you think?). After he and his sister Catherine conspire to kidnap their mother and hold her hostage in her own living room, he becomes more articulate: "I demand retribution for the sins perpetrated on my family during the Middle Passage," he begins; and then the floodgates are opened. Pent-up impotencies and impossibilities fall out of him in torrents in a spectacularly cathartic monologue:

I demand the heads of the foreign generals [he continues], assurances for the state department, representation without taxation, and an end to crony-ism. I demand nuclear proliferation, coupled with increased military spending. I demand a Department of War.

 And later:

I demand rest, at last, in the bunk bed I grew up in. Or for men to come and give me drugs and give me clothes with neutral colors so I never get upset. I demand the return of all borrowed books to my personal collection. A series of uncomfortable silences. I demand better access to health care and I demand that the man who cut me in line at the Deli be killed with his own baseball cap.

Freeman's writing is remarkably strong here—vivid and exact and astonishingly far-reaching. It's at this point that The Great Escape, on its surface a bitter comedy of rampant familial dysfunction, becomes a portrait of a generation that can't see its way out of the mire and muck that constitutes its inheritance.

It's also very funny, crafted with the same crackerjack precision that characterizes works by Beckett or Ionesco; like them, The Great Escape teeters on the border between the hilarious and the hysterical, where it's never clear if laughter or tears is the right response.

Ancowitz's production shrewdly grounds the play. There's a beautifully-realized naturalistic set by Paul Gelinas and realistic lighting by Dana Sterling; the only hint we get from the environment that things are askew comes from Margaret F. Heskin's weirdly off-kilter score, used sparingly and therefore effectively. Robert Buckwalter and Laura Desmond deliver exceptional performances as Henry and Catherine; I was less sure about Stephen Nisbet as Walter and Charlotte Patton as Henry and Catherine's mother Susan, neither of whom quite achieves the monolithic quality that their characters seem to require. (It should be noted that I attended the very first performance of The Great Escape, and that nuances of characterization may develop over time.)

The world we live in seems so big and scary these days; how are we to function when dysfunctionality is the norm? Tackling that fundamental question in a manner that is as entertaining as it is alarming and as provocative as it is provoking, The Great Escape proves to be must-see theatre.

To actually produce six hours of theatre about Greek mythology—ten plays, drawn from the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Homer, with 40 actors playing 100 different characters—bespeaks a special kind of brave ambition. To do it on an off-off-Broadway budget suggests either pixilation or chutzpah or both. To do it well—resoundingly, meaningfully, brilliantly, as Kaipo Schwab and his Imua! Theatre Company have done—well, that smacks of inordinate talent or, just maybe, some kind of gift from the gods.

Assigning honors for The Greeks, the epic 10-play cycle by John Barton and Kenneth Cavander that is only now getting its New York premiere, some 25 years after it premiered in England, is entirely to the point. For this remarkable dramatic chronicle, which encompasses the stories of the Trojan War and the fall of the House of Atreus, is all about responsibility and accountability, public burdens and posterity. The chorus that echoes through every one of the ten segments of The Greeks is "Who is to blame?"... which usually translates into "Can I find someone else to blame?"... which turns out to finally mean "What's my place in all this, i.e., the universe?"

Such were the fundamental and timeless questions that the Greeks sought to answer in their mythology; they remain potent subjects for exploration today, of course, which is why The Greeks can be such essential theatre. There is, though, much else in these stories that makes them resonant in our particular troubled historic moment: like—to choose just the most obvious example—a war fought over riches but advertised as being about honor. See these potent, seminal dramas and you will find much to ponder and wonder at.

Imua! has divided the ten component plays of The Greeks into two three-hour programs, which you can see on successive nights or, if you're up for it, a single Saturday afternoon and evening (that's what I did, and I had one of my best days in the theatre ever). Part I is subtitled "The War and The Murders," and chronicles the conquest of Troy. The cycle begins on that fateful day in Aulis where King Agamemnon's ships, poised to sail east to win back his sister-in-law Helen from her Trojan captor Paris, are stalled until the princess Iphigenia is sacrificed to the goddess Artemis. It ends ten years later, with Agamemnon's triumphant return home; Troy has been destroyed and its women enslaved, and now the victorious king is to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra to avenge the death of their daughter. Part II, "The Murders and The Gods," continues the story, from Clytemnestra's murder at the hands of her son Orestes through his final redemption, with the help of his sister Iphigenia, at Tauris.

Imua!'s production is exemplary in its consistency and care. The plays are all done on a simple unit set, designed by Antje Ellermann, whose main elements are a classical temple-like structure and several lengths of metal chain-link fence. The costumes, by Deanne Berg, similarly blend the timeless and the contemporary, with Cassandra clad in a flowing white robe and Electra and Orestes dressed in punk/goth black. A soundscape by Mark Huang and Walter Trarbach provides perfect compliment to the action and themes; ditto the evocative lighting by Shawn K. Kaufman. Schwab's staging is straightforward, brisk, and enormously effective, keeping us engaged—nay, riveted—for the full six hours.

The ensemble—more than three dozen dedicated, hard-working actors—does excellent work. The leading roles are all masterfully played: Karl Herlinger is spectacularly good as Agamemnon, capturing the multiple facets and points of view that this conflicted, larger-than-life general embodies; likewise, Kathleen O'Neill is grandly outsized as his vengeful wife Clytemnestra. As their children, Jennifer Robinson (Iphigenia), Danielle Chiminelli (Electra), Gregg Mozgala (Orestes), and Gillian Sheffler (Chrysothemis, the lesser known third daughter, who plays a significant part in the story of Andromache in Part II) are all fine, finding the complexities of each of these tortured siblings. Among the other players, standouts include Matthew Johnson as Talthybius, Agamemnon's herald; Susan Hyon as Thetis, goddess-mother to Achilles; Sandi Carroll as Hecuba, the fallen Queen of Troy; and Inga Wilson as Cassandra, the Trojan princess who is cursed by Apollo to see the future but never have her prophesies believed. And more or less holding the whole enterprise together are Johanna Cox and Jocelyn O'Neil, who turn up in just about segment as members of a female chorus that—in various guises—anchors The Greeks and pulls us into it.

One of the things that I treasure most about The Greeks is that it allows us to witness the great myths in just a couple of sittings; usually we only get a piece of the story, but here the whole panorama plays out before us in all its compelling, messy glory. If you're not familiar with these tales, by the way, don't fear: Barton and Cavander supply all the back-story you require to follow the complicated chronology. Indeed, trying to figure out what actually happened is very much a part of their modus operandi here: in a prologue and then in assorted digressions, they tell and retell myths of creation, of the curse of Atreus, of the wedding of Achilles' mother Thetis, and many others, always in pursuit of the (very elusive) truth. They ask: where does such truth finally reside? And they leave it to Athene, the goddess of wisdom, to finally suggest an answer.

One normally doesn’t associate Oscar Wilde with children's literature, but he did write a collection of short stories for his own children entitled The Happy Prince and Other Tales. These tales are moralistic in nature, intended to deter children from the evils of selfishness, arrogance, and hypocrisy, all with a healthy dose of Christian didacticism. Of course they were eventually published so that kids everywhere could learn from the adventures of “The Remarkable Rocket”, “The Selfish Giant,” and Wilde’s other fables.

"The Happy Prince" is about a jewel-encrusted statue of a—well, Prince who looks happy. The Prince statue (who can see and speak, but not move) can see all of the hardships of the people around him, but cannot do anything to alleviate the suffering he observes (so he only LOOKS happy). He meets a Swallow who’s migrating south, and convinces the bird to stay and spread wealth to the poor, by plucking out the statue’s jewels and distributing them to the hungry and sick. Through the statue's acts of generosity, the Swallow (and the audience) learn the lesson of self sacrifice.

Annie Wood has adapted Wilde's story into a children's theatre project, with puppets, musical numbers, and the prerequisite audience interaction. The adaptation is a pretty good reformatting of Wilde's story, and Wood has the integrity to keep Wilde's bittersweet ending, in which one character dies. The greatest deviation from Wilde is the addition of a framing device; in order to pad the short story up to an hour, about one third of the stage time is devoted to a story about two children who stumble across a magic garden, where one of the children tells the other child the tale of the Happy Prince.

The two children (and every other role) are played by the team of Paul Cunningham and Veronica Leer, with Cunningham later playing the Prince and Leer as the Swallow. Some of the supporting characters are puppets, so the duo not only demonstrate fine acting, but also prove to be skilled puppeteers as well. There’s a gentleness to their performance that helps soften the sometimes dark themes of the show.

Another deviation from the original story is that there’re a lot of references to modern popular entertainment in the show; the sort of gags that will go over well with American kids, such as lines about Disney characters and Shrek (Paul Cunningham, who plays the Prince, speaks with a Glasgow accent and sounds a lot like Mike Meyers’s various Scottish characters, including Shrek). There are also a few extremely topical jokes, like one about Martha Stewart. This feels a bit like pandering to the kids in the audience, but they don’t seem to mind being pandered to.

The play takes place in an enchanted garden which has a talking lion statue, among other wonders. The lion perfectly blends into the stonework of the surrounding garden, and when he first speaks, it's a magical moment for the children in the audience, thanks to excellent design by Karen Tennent.

There's plenty of child-friendly theatre sensibility here. Some of the songs have sing-a-long aspects ("Twinkle, twinkle little"- blank), and the staff at the New Victory Theatre wear paper prince crowns (these are available for the audience too and kids can “design [their] own happiness crown” if they show up an hour before the show).

This is quality children's entertainment, and reasonably fun for grown-ups too. The moral message of Wilde's original work—that self sacrifice really requires sacrifice—is a message kids ought to hear, and this show might give you a chance to introduce your children to Oscar Wilde. (But save Dorian Gray until they’re older.)

Report from the Hell Festival #16
by Stan Richardson (8/8)

My favorite aspect of The Hell Festival is the giddy ambience—the contagious delight of the producers and the performers as each work is presented (some for the first time) before a game audience. This is no-budget theatre, fringier than FringeNYC, open to anything. And the quality of the works themselves is secondary to this inspiriting environment.

Jody Strimling’s Hell Inside is a brief glimpse into a woman’s excited and turmoiled spirit as she tries to appear self-possessed. Claire, the woman, is trying to keep her inner self (or perhaps younger self), an eager, gushing girl named Clarisse, tied to a chair, but this conceit is neither interesting nor innovative enough to help one endure the austerity of this oblique play. But it is short and Carol London and Rebecca Thomas (as the two ladies, respectively) pull it off without any arty self-consciousness under the direction of Don Bill.

More genuinely arcane is Erin Andrea’s The Suicidal Violinists. This work too is quite short and, aside from a philosophic prologue about the relativity of time, it is wordless. This monologue, though rather opaque, is engagingly delivered by the attractive and charismatic Michael Schreiber. What follows is a movement piece set on a subway train which ends in a gruesome series of attacks. The dancers, Emily Alpren, Elizabeth Dykes, Jennifer Savage, Elizabeth Stewart, and Schreiber, are fun to watch, even if the connection between word and action is not apparent, and the result, unilluminating.

Blue Puppies in Hell, written and directed by David Vining, has enough of a sense of humor for the all of the plays combined, but in common with them, it is unclear what the creator wishes to communicate. Lew C. Frrrr, a door-to-door soul-buyer, calls upon Tom and Pamela Christianson, a bright dimwitted suburban couple with a blue puppy dog named Rudolf, who secretly identifies herself to Frrr as a venerable old acquaintance. I’m not sure what is dramatically accomplished, but at the end, Frrr is turned to plasma and the couple and the dog dance around. Christina Nicosia is particularly droll as the chirpy Christianson wife who is always up for burlesque.

The most comprehensible of these plays is Jonathan Valuckas’ The Iron Wig, in which Pezzo Rodigliani, a world-renowned hair dresser, is hastily summoned to the penthouse of Martin Kane, a power executive, by Kane’s assistant, Clark. The young man has noticed some erratic behavior from his employer since the man’s hair began falling out in clumps. There are a number of twists and turns in this often funny play, which makes interesting connections between hair and history, the style of power and the power of style.

Overall, this festival is a refreshing experience: a hell-hole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Report from the Hell Festival #15
by Matthew Trumbull (8/14)

The Devil and his minions as characters; the fiery canyons of Hell as setting; the fall from grace into damnation as plot: where did all these occultish story elements find genesis? Credit—or rebuke—should be given where it's due.

Plumbing the depths of this academic territory for our entertainment and edification is the Reverend Jason Robert Bell, M.F.A, in his multimedia presentation Lucifer is Jesus or Holy Frankenstein!: A History of God, Hell, and Other Gnostic Flaptrap. Bell attacks religious hypocrisy with a hip disdain, citing etymological origins of Underworld buzzwords, and threading events and themes together as he progresses through the history of Evil as a concept. Meanwhile, a screen center-stage silently flickers with a continuous hodge-podge of demonic film clips. The intelligent Reverend Bell makes a humorous and persuasive attempt to uproot the idea of damnation, but the speech eventually takes on a classroom feel. The subject is fascinating, but the presentation lacks enough tension to sustain a theatre piece. Bell’s talking points rarely correlate with the projected images on-screen, and a duel for attention emerges between man and media. It is an unfair battle: the screen has the advantages of center-stage placement and perpetual, dancing light, whereas Bell, lit only by the dim glow of his reading lamp, restricts himself to the lectern off to the side. If the lectern and screen were reversed, and the attention-pulling film clips used sparingly, the real star of the show—Bell’s witty delivery—would have its rightful focus.

The evening’s vibrant second installment, Hell’s Belles, shifts the audience’s focus from words to dance, in a bubbly tale of three she-devils (Katie Brack, Robin Reed, and Jessi Gotta) who throw a young man’s life into chaos. Cleverly and slickly directed by Jeffrey A. Lewonczyk, Hell’s Belles contains no dialogue, but the pace is joyful and kinetic, like a classic cartoon. Devon Ludlow is engaging as the bewildered Everyman, tormented by the three young Furies, and also visions of a ghostly woman (Hope Cartelli), who eerily sings the line “You used to say I was your angel…” Brack, Reed, and Gotta vivaciously swish their hips and synchronize their steps to Ellington as they tease Ludlow with flirtation and mischief. Appearing and vanishing fluidly from all possible directions, they seem to shape-shift as they assume various female identities, one earning Ludlow’s trust, and another reducing him to the fetal position moments later. The ensemble works together beautifully, and demonstrates the power of bodies to create status difference, using no words. The clear narrative and high stakes that are conveyed on the faces and bodies of the dancers are universal, and we need no dialogue to recognize ourselves in such a precise dance work.

Report from the Hell Festival #14
by Trav S.D. (8/12)

Red Bastard is a testament to truth in advertising. He’s nothing if not red, and definitely a bastard.

His 45-minute act Red Bastard is a Star! Are You? is almost entirely improvised, combining impish head-games with the audience with a rich vocabulary of gestures reminiscent of commedia dell’arte. He calls the style “bouffon”—whether anyone besides Red Bastard practices it is unknown to this reviewer. Dressed in a union suit full of what I imagine to be soccer balls, the performer resembles a tumorous tomato and comes across like the evil cousin of one of the Fruit of the Loom guys. This Red Bastard, too, seems a descendent of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen. Like a Wonderland character, he combines a harsh, school-teacherish authoritarianism with arbitrary (but comical) cruelty. Audience members are picked on, and then berated for doing the very thing he requested. Archly pacing the stage like Don Rickles in some demented dream sequence, he savors the audience’s uncertainty and embarrassment, enjoying the spectacle of the fucked-with almost as much as the audience does itself.

The star of the show is perhaps his enormous, baboon-like ass. When he passes a hat around for contributions and comes up with a dollar and change, he invites members of the audience to stick their hands up there. To our childish delight, a piñata's worth of treasure emerges: perhaps magic’s first recorded instance of sleigh-of-buttocks.

If I have one negative criticism to make, it is that (perhaps not surprisingly), Mr. Bastard doesn’t know when to quit. Engrossed in his narcissistic character he hogs the stage like a square bogarts a joint. He needs a confederate (or a better internal egg-timer) to tell him when to clear the stage. Other than this, his nonsense is heartily reccommended.

Report from the Hell Festival #13
by Eric Pliner (8/7)

Jon Bulette, Nils d’Aulaire, and Jay Klaitz’s enticingly-named Who is Wilford Brimley? The Musical is an amusing-enough revisionist history of America’s favorite jolly oats spokesman. Beginning with Brimley’s ostensible early adulthood (he looks exactly the same at thirty-two as he does now), the writer-actors take the audience from the salt mines of Utah straight to Los Angeles. Along the way, Brimley rejects his father’s values (finding “the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it,” a phrase that will come back to haunt him), is seduced into signing with a satanic Hollywood agent, and hoofs it through a few awkward song and dance numbers (well-choreographed by Jenny Schmermund). The portly Cocoon star ends up living a fast life, from a volatile friendship with Steve Guttenberg to rumors of orgies with Jessica Tandy.

If Who is Wilford Brimley? sounds like the stuff of over-the-top sketch comedy, well, that’s because mostly, it is. But a few details elevate this production from the run-of-the-mill to something worth noting. First off, the company’s computerized slide shows, which precede every scene and superimpose images of Brimley into absurd situations, are laugh-out-loud hysterical. Shin-pei Tsay’s lighting design is crisp and complements the production nicely. And as the title character—clad in a comb-over bald cap and gray moustache—Jay Klaitz is letter-perfect. He combines impeccable timing, true acting skill, and solid singing and dancing to turn this goofy caricature into someone we actually care about. The company of Who is Wilford Brimley? may be a way off from the right thing to do, but they’ve certainly found a tasty way to do it.

Report from the Hell Festival #12
by Matthew Trumbull (8/7)

I have had another rewarding day at Hell.

The latest Hell Festival play I dropped in to see was The Unspeakable Act, based on a Japanese fairy tale. Steven Hess has directed a jubilant, motley blend of ancient parable, 80s pop music, sexual deviancy, and symbolic dance, choreographed with precision and beauty by deeAnn Nelson. Originally created through improvisation for the 2001 FringeNYC, this tale of sexual repression is told with stellar ensemble creativity.

The story is regal and grand, like all fairy tales, and immediately I was swept away upon witnessing the madness of our main character, the Empress, played coyly by Bidalia E. Hess-Albanese. The Empress has gone ages without any intimacy from her cold, imperious husband, the Emperor (Chris Lanzetta), and it has driven her into a lunacy the palace cannot comprehend. The wise Hermit in the mountains (Scott Brocious) is summoned to diagnose her and provide a cure. The Hermit quickly understands what the Empress craves, and is overcome with the desire to provide it. Upon being caught and banished by the Emperor for secretly watching her bathe, the Hermit transforms himself into a sex demon (played by director Hess), re-enters the palace, and throws all lives into disarray as he and the Empress frolic about like two teenagers.

Hess, Nelson, and the ensemble playfully wink at their audience by casting a contemporary glow over musical aspects of their play, such as two climatic love scenes, choreographed in dance to Lionel Riche's “Hello.” The Demon, who normally speaks in monster-babble translated by the Narrator (Sulai Lopez), finds the inspiration to sweetly croon “Misty” to the Empress while playing a soft guitar.

All the performers work together expertly, and clearly have a ball. And who wouldn’t, playing such saucy bits as the Emperor’s emphatic fan-snapping, the Hermit/Demon switch behind a labeled “Magic Transformation Sheet,” and the absurd spanking game between the Empress and two servants (Wade Dunham and Jen Nevergole)? These rollicking moments contrast with the eccentric poignancy of forbidden love between the Empress and Demon. It is a spellbinding work, and a highlight of the festival.

Report from the Hell Festival #11
by Matthew Trumbull (8/6)

The devil comes in many forms. I went to the Hell Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and saw three of them.

My favorite little piece of the evening’s evil was certainly How to Invoke Pan, starring Tom X. Chao, written by Chao and Craig Heimbichner, who lives in California. Why mention this dry, insignificant detail? Because Chao does in his introduction, and gets a laugh on it. His delivery of the mundane is alive with timing, and his mundane delivery of this step-by-step demon recipe is a gold value that alone outweighs the $10 fee at the door. Chao patiently and warmly guides us laymen through the very unfamiliar territory of hell-devil confrontation and mastery. I found tremendous adventure in this piece, and it lies in the simple details. With dead-pan flatness, Chao’s narration brilliantly serves up the items we would need to bring Pan into our lives. Some are easily found around the average house, such as a rope, a can of paint, and a gag. Others—one magic sword, one house in France, one human sacrifice—require a bit of footwork to obtain. But as Chao soberly emphasizes, these instructions are meant to give the summoner every chance of staying alive and eventually taking ownership of Pan’s will. It sounds great, but let Chao take you through it first before trying it at home. You will laugh up a storm, and that will be as much summoning as one should mess around with.

Indeed, too often in our rush to indulge in the perks of black magic, we get carried away, and we start to make mistakes. We bungle the terms of the devil’s contract, and that’s how the Dark Lord makes a living. Such is the case with Hannah (Mary Round) and her husband, Herman (Frank Manzi), in the evening’s comic morality tale, Hell-O, written by Dame Lisa Ferber and directed by Andrea Modica. To understand the dynamic of their marriage, just think of the archetypal Jewish parents in any Woody Allen movie—love that comes from the heart, by way of an occasionally sharp tongue. Hannah hears an ad on the radio for Hell-O gelatin, which promises to be both tasty and capable of granting the deepest wish of the eater. The radio spokesperson also motor-mouths through possible side effects, including everlasting torment in Hell’s hot fires. Hannah and Herman assume this risk, and create the gelatin in their living room. But in her giddiness, Hannah forgets the egg whites, and the magic gelatin goes horribly astray, summoning a surprisingly sensitive and vulnerable Lucifer (Matthew Hanley). Ferber’s script is delightfully absurd (Lucifer: Aren’t I impressive? Herman: So, you want your parade up 5th Avenue or down 5th Avenue?). Round and Manzi are sweet together, and their back-and-forth marital chatter seems seasoned by decades of familiarity. Hanley cleverly plays his devil to be  a lonely and pathetic failure, and his pitiful attempts at ferocity are fun for us to watch. As the play travels forward, the pace sabotages some of the one-liners, and all the performers would do well to take some of the air out between lines and bits. Ferber has created a hilarious and zany half-hour in the lives of Hannah and Herman, and at its zippiest points, the bits flow as easily as the egg whites Hannah forgot.

The final piece of this trio, The Kindly Ones, does not flow so easily. The program says it’s a work-in-progress, but this tone poem/movement piece about a woman’s descent into madness is murky at present. The Kindly Ones, directed and choreographed by Michael Freeman, does succeed at establishing a raw, eerie comic book atmosphere (it is based on characters in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series). As the ensemble continues to fine-tune, I hope they are able to further pinpoint what each character is after. That will help the audience invest in the story. I look forward to the next opportunity to see this piece.

Report from the Hell Festival #10
by Jo Ann Rosen (8/3)

It is always a pleasure when a troop of actors brings intelligence and passion to material that is not always comprehensible. That is what the 15 players do in Moloch and Other Demons, a contemporary political commentary written by Jason Grote and directed by Noel Salzman. Saber-rattling quotes from the current administration and gruesome newspaper and TV articles set the stage for a debased society where one man, Moloch, played expertly by Dale Fuller, decides who lives and who dies. Among the living are intimidating guards, assigned killers, and those who eviscerate the dead and turn them into chopped meat. The latter is an effective routine performed by Art Goyette and Devin Burnam, who are aided by convincing sound effects. And, then there are the victims, some anonymous, the others fearing imminent war. Incest adds sufficient baseness to the tableau to make sure the audience knows that this is the suburbs—of Hell, that is. Act II takes us into war and then AWOL. It is away from war that the trained killers (Gabriel Silva and Daniel Manley) find peace, living with the newly-pregnant Dawn (Laura Esposito) on rations of beef, soda, genetically modified produce, and kindness. The topic is timely and there are many fine moments. But by cutting and slashing as much as his characters do, Grote could increase the clarity of his script and drive home his premise in far less than 2½ hours.

Report from the Hell Festival #9
by Matt Freeman (8/1)

Let me be honest: I don’t cherish trekking into Williamsburg. I live in Brooklyn myself; but Williamsburg has it’s own special (and earned) reputation of trust-fund trendiness, the latest in the offensive “white trash fashion” and for being possibly the last great bastion of icky Heroin chic. I was pleasantly surprised to be spared the oft-cloying pretensions that I feared "Billyburg" ensured; instead I was treated to an earnest band of smiling, sheepish producers, presenting the equally earnest Anhedonia Road.

This was my first exposure to solo performer Chris Harcum’s work. The text of Anhedonia Road sounds like Eric Bogosian running smack into The Wizard of Oz. Performing multiple roles to varying degrees of success, Harcum leads his audience into the “Heartland,” feverishly driving after a floating yellow balloon. On his travel down the barren and mysterious Anhedonia Road, Harcum’s narrator faces a number of Americana stock characters including Tom Sawyer, Professor Granville Barker of the “Ten for One” Sideshow, and a Midwestern snake-oil salesman. His canvas is certainly colorful, even if the brush strokes get a little too broad at times.

Harcum’s turns of phrase and dreamlike details kept me engaged; he’s a charming and intense performer. I wished that he, on occasion, would let go of some of the poetry during the narrative portions of the piece; there is a distancing “literary” or spoken word quality to much of the play. There are also moments that he gives the audience information that seems to diffuse the magic: “I don’t know if this really happened, or if it was all in my head,” he intones as he nears the conclusion. Given the impossible events, it’s clear that Anhedonia Road is an allegory. No explanation is needed.

Dramaturgical nitpicking notwithstanding, Chris Harcum’s performance and conjurations are easily worth a ride to Williamsburg. The Brick and Brooklyn’s theatre scene are clearly coming into their own. They might even warm me to the G Train… and that’s high praise.

Report from the Hell Festival #8
by Martin Denton (8/1)

If Hell is even 1% as entertaining as Trav S.D.'s Hell Festival offering Cold Fire, well. then thousands of years of religious teaching will need to be revised. Don't sweat the theology, though: the important point is that Cold Fire is hilarious, certainly one of the high points of this terrifically scrappy and energetic young festival: go see it. It's a radio play, performed live by Mr. S.D. and a cast of downtown theatre luminaries including Bryan Enk, Art Wallace, Matt Gray, Peter Bean, and the too-long-absent Ian W. Hill, whose booming voice is heard from offstage as the program's announcer and pitchman for the real but obscure miracle beverage Moxie, cans of which are available for sale before the show. (Moira Stone was absent from the cast at the performance attended, and her roles were divided among Messrs. Enk, Wallace, Gray, and Bean—utterly seamlessly, I might add.)

Cold Fire is about a "paranormal detective" named Ward Burns who is trying to figure out who or what is behind a sudden rash of deaths by spontaneous combustion. The script is at once a paean to noir pulp and the golden age of radio and also a broad satire of same: Mr. S.D.'s barrage of puns, gags, shtick, topical allusions, and non-sequiturs is like a machine gun, only much funnier, with enough of the jokes hitting their targets to keep yours truly laughing more or less nonstop for the entire hour. There are wall-to-wall references to heat and fire, in keeping with the festival theme; the soundtrack for this faux broadcast hits all the expected marks from the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" to Springsteen's "I'm on Fire."

There's even, happily, a point to it all: originally conceived in the late '80s as a response to the latter-day Cold War cloak-and-daggerism of Reagan's Star Wars project, Cold Fire's barbed parody of a New York summer filled with paranoia, ineffectual G-Men, and unexplainable threats of terror is eerily timely right now. There's not a weak link in the entire enterprise, with Mr. S.D.'s performance as Burns the rock-solid comic anchor that his fans will expect and the supporting actors providing eclectically silly voices for the assortment of suspense story archetypes that otherwise populate the play.  Funny, funny, funny.

Report from the Hell Festival #7
by Terri Galvin (7/30)

Given the right set of circumstances, anyone is capable of conceding Sartre’s maxim that hell is “other people.” But for those of us unfortunately self-aware enough to harbor the sobering suspicion that sometimes hell is simply ourselves? Well, if you’re Kevin Draine, a.k.a. The Bitter Poet, you take a long, hard look at yourself in the solipsistic mirror of self-dissatisfaction, compose a sardonic, if at times unsettling, litany of your personal shortcomings, frustrations, and romantic disappointments and then present it as part of the fortuitously titled Hell Festival. Veering from Borscht Belt comic to troubled troubadour—complete with sexually graphic rhymed couplets set to guitar accompaniment —Draine‘s material can be scathingly incisive, but would benefit from more focus in both its tenor and format. Self-deprecating to the point of self-loathing, the show lurches awkwardly from caustically clever poetry/songs, to woodenly staged two-person sketches, to arbitrary, distracting interludes by a lip-synching, hula-hoop-swirling female stripper. Draine is not the first under-appreciated artist to be fueled by exasperated rage and thwarted desire, but this obviously talented performer needs to trust more in the artifice required to shape his personal misery into a more coherent artistic experience. Until then, audiences should commend his bravery—and perhaps wince in recognition—for such raw, ferocious wrath. Evidently, hell hath no fury like a poet scorned.

Report from the Hell Festival #6
by Hieu Tran (7/30)

Christina Nicosia’s one-woman show, Man of Infinite Desire, is an interesting, ambitious attempt to retell the story of Faust from the perspective of its primary emblem of temptation, the devil Mephistopheles. Aside from the fact that the said servant of Lucifer now happens to be female—which in itself is a novel concept, but unfortunately passes as little more than that in the course of the show—Nicosia also chooses to adorn her show with a mixture of monologues, puppetry, and even a burlesque striptease. The result? An earnest attempt to enliven, and perhaps even modestly redefine, a classic legend bespeaking of one of man’s fundamental flaws: his, as the title indicates, infinite capacity for desire.

Unfortunately, the presentation doesn't live up to the potential behind the idea. The writing is clipped and oblique, replete with truncated allegories and aphorisms. Part of this may be explained by the manner in which Nicosia wrote the piece. She used computer software to help her translate the text, sometimes proceeding from German to Spanish to French until finally reaching English. The show's press materials quote her as saying, “What emerged from this journey through nonsense by the hyper-literal translation software was language that was strangely more poetic than the original.” Perhaps some might agree, but for me, the lack of cohesion in her literary parlance often translated to a disconnecting experience. As hard as I tried to become involved in the story, the scattered verbal and visual theatrics of the piece left me disengaged.

Nicosia’s decision to present Mephistopheles almost uniformly as a smarmy, self-satisfied demon—save near the end, when she admits to the emptiness of her existence since Faust has left her, and much of humanity has since ignored her—does little to evince any sense of complexity within such a fascinating character; or, for that matter, make me connect to her at all. True, devils may have feelings too, but it is difficult to feel pathos for them when they think they’re better than you.

Report from the Hell Festival #5
by Martin Denton (7/29)

My second excursion to Hell was to see John DeVore's new existential tragicomedy Martian Holiday. The premise of this scary Twilight Zone-y sci-fi think piece is terrific: a manned mission to Mars, financed by a nameless Corporation, has gone awry and possibly been forgotten while apocalyptic wars rage on Earth. It's a great starting point because it's not too far-out fantastical to feel implausible.

Martian Holiday begins at the makeshift funeral for Rabinowitz, one of the last three surviving crew members of this interplanetary mission. Now there are only two—Ray, the thoughtful, pragmatic ego/Vladimir type, whose main goal seems to be survival at all costs; and Edgar, whose personality is more mercurial and childlike, the id/Estragon stand-in. DeVore's script plays out as a sequence of encounters between these two as they wait for a very remote Godot to arrive from Earth and rescue them; interspersed among these are replays of transmissions from Ray's wife Vera. As Martian Holiday progresses, it becomes clear that these high-tech emails are not of recent vintage; the hopelessness becomes palpable as Ray plots what he must do to endure and to save his comrade.

The writing is sharp and incisive and memorable (though I wish DeVore would let his characters talk about sex a little less often; it makes a potentially timeless play feel more gratuitously contemporary than it ought to). His staging is not very inspired, no doubt reflecting the limitations of festival presentation—a future mounting, which Martian Adventure emphatically deserves, should address this issue. DeVore is served extremely well by his leading actor Robert Honeywell as Ray, whose performance here is immeasurably affecting (he swallows his words more than he should, however). Mikki Baloy (Vera) and David Cote (Edgar) round out the cast.

Report from the Hell Festival #4
by Jocelyn Szabo (7/29)

Before leaving my East Village apartment to see the Brick Theater’s Hell Festival I was nervous about what I might be getting myself into, but I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. The small theater space is charming. You enter the space through a small door that is cut out of a large garage door. The Brick Theater is the perfect space for performance art pieces such as the two I saw. Kudos to Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner for converting the once brick-walled garage into a homey space ideal for experimental works. After having the misfortune of riding in an un-air-conditioned subway car and then entering the un-air-conditioned Brick, I briefly thought I might have entered Hell—but fortunately that was not the case at all.

The first piece, Euridice’s Abandon, fell a bit flat. Director Rosalie Purvis, who also plays Euridice, sets out to retell “the Orpheus Myth with song, dance and an evocative, original soundscape.” While this particular rendition of the myth is visually interesting, there are moments where the story becomes lost. For instance, it is not clear that Euridice does not make it out of the Underworld because Orpheus cannot resist looking back at her as they exit Hades. Nor is it apparent that the nymph, lackadaisically played by Eunjee Lee, murders Orpheus (Roxane Heinze) because he refuses to sing his cheerful melodies after Euridice’s death. But kudos are due Patrick McCarthy, whose sound design is fabulous. Song and sounds alike come from the actors and the sound system, evoking a perfect setting for this myth. Additionally, Heinze’s voice is great! Even I felt put under a spell by her melodies. The rest of the cast—Emma Devine Warman, Kathy Devine, and Paul Newport—hold their own, but leave little to talk about after the show is over, other than perhaps the alarmingly bright red lipstick that young Warman wears.

The second piece on the bill, Balleto Inferno, was an absolute delight. Having a sister who studied with the Kirov Academy and Joffrey Ballet, I am always cautious when going to see a piece that involves dance, but I thoroughly enjoyed all fifteen minutes of this dance/theatre adaptation of Dario Argentio’s horror film Susperia. It is the perfect combination of homage and spoof. Lucy Brown leaves the comforts of her home to attend a prestigious dance academy, but upon her arrival realizes that the academy is not at all what she expected. Balleto Inferno merrily pokes fun at itself every step of the way—in the entire show, I don't think there is one serious dance move. In fact, the only serious part of the entire production is the actors themselves. How any of them managed to keep a straight face the whole time baffles me. Lucy Brown, played by Katie Workum, comes the closest to appearing to know how to dance as she eagerly tries to impress the Directress of the academy. Skylar is perfectly cast as the favorite male student. His angular features, lanky body, and hair parted to one side only make him funnier as he jumps about the stage. And Leigh Garrett, her hair in a decidedly Asian updo as the Directress Madame Blount, is hilarious.

Report from the Hell Festival #3
by Jo Ann Rosen (7/28)

Picture yourself on a vacation tour with a “kvetching widower, an ADD boy scout, a Russian nanny, and a cursed diva.” If you imagine it to be a trip from Hell you are not entirely wrong. More accurately, however, it is a free vacation to Hell for these characters, and the backdrop for Tanya Krohn to display her writing and performance talents in this one-woman show. Directed by Sheila Bandyopadhyay, Puddlejump allows Krohn to transform herself into four very different characters with the help of accents and minimal props: a scarf and a shawl hanging for her convenience on two hooks dangling mid-air. Krohn’s most resourceful tool, however, is her body and the way she moves. Precise, dramatic, artful, and humorous, she portrays with confidence four people who swap what they believe to be sheer hell on earth for the real thing. Special note goes to Dean Parker for his imaginative music. Lighting, by Stephen Boulemtis, adds welcome ghoulish touches.

Report from the Hell Festival #2
by David Johnston (7/27)

It’s official. Brooklyn is the new Lower East Side. With the Hell Festival, the Brick Theater in Williamsburg carries on the venerable New York theatrical tradition of scruffy, slapdash performance art, complete with uncomfortable chairs, technical difficulties, and no air conditioning. Some works, some falls flat on its youthful artistic face. No matter. It’s more fun than TV and a lot cheaper than Mamma Mia. [Editor's Note: I don't think the chairs are that uncomfortable!]

The first piece of the evening, How to Invoke Pan, was the jewel. This was my first encounter with the sly performance artist Tom X. Chao. Chao, a lanky, nerdish performer, stiffly stands at a microphone and reads detailed instructions for unleashing the powers of darkness and chaos. The text, by Chao and Craig Heimbichner, is clever, but the star is Chao’s deadpan hipster delivery. He has a gorgeous way of saying a line, then patiently staring into the distance while waiting for the audience to catch up to the joke.

The next piece didn’t fare so well. In Evil is Kewl, Satan and his sidekick Scott talk to America’s youth in the style of feel-good chat TV. Satan, with requisite horns and cape, fields questions from plants in the house and exhorts kids to stay off drugs and wait till they’re 18 to fully come out as Satanists. Both Fred Backus and Chris Harcum capture the whiff of showbiz smarminess, but the set-up and jokes aren’t enough to lift this off the ground.

The last piece, Balleto Inferno, is a dance-theatre adaptation of Dario Argento’s nightmarish horror film Suspiria. Young Lucy Brown (Katie Workum) goes off to a prestigious dance academy where all is not well. There is the blind accompanist, the blank, handsome male student and the sinister teacher. (Mention must be made here of Leigh Garrett as the teacher Madame Blount, who earns most of the laughs by channeling Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein.) There are red lights, spooky music, and bad choreography. But it doesn’t add up to much. Balleto Inferno is too club-footed to succeed as tribute or send-up, but it does have a goofy charm.

Report from the Hell Festival #1
by Martin Denton (7/26)

With stacks of postcards bearing slogans like "Hell is other playwrights" and "Go to Hell," and with the inevitable caution hanging in the lobby ("Quiet. Damnation In Progress."), the Brick Theater's Hell Festival got off to a delicious start on Monday, July 26. I caught the first two attractions, and if they're any indication of the quality, charm and inventiveness of what's to follow, well, we're in for a terrific month of demonically fun, blazingly hot theatre. (There, I've gotten that out of my system.)

Seriously—the Hell Festival is cooking. First up on Monday was Project: Projekt, which is the comedy duo Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa, with their improv comedy-music show Tummy of the Beast. I've not seen these guys before, and I'm very impressed: they're smart, engaging, and very funny (especially Phillips, who generally plays clown to Schiappa's straight man; Phillips' persona alternates between brash and quietly deranged, like a ticking time bomb). Their show includes several songs built around suggestions from the audience—in keeping with the festival theme, on subjects such as being buried alive or a just-deceased grandmother who was cavorting with the singer's college roommate. There are also some improv games (I liked "186," in which one-liners are built around a sentence "186 ____ walk into a bar," with the blank filled in by the audience). Phillips and Schiappa add their own original twist to these games, by the way, by introducing the "Bowl of Pain," in which one member of the duo can be ordered by the audience to inflict a particular harm on the other as punishment for a lousy joke. Rounding out Tummy of the Beast is a continuing story, again inspired by audience suggestions, which plays out in between the other bits. Think the Bullwinkle Show and you'll have an idea of the format. Tummy of the Beast promises to get even funnier as the festival continues, with guest stars promised for later shows. I'll be keeping my eyes on these guys—they're very talented.

The second event of the evening was a double bill comprised of Step on Beelzebub's Toes Aphrodite, Crush Them, written and directed by Angela Lewonczyk, and excerpts from Animal by Kevin Augustine. (There will be lots of double- and triple-bills scattered throughout the festival, made up of short pieces and totaling no more than an hour in length; great concept!) Beelzebub is Lewonczyk's NYC debut and it's a really auspicious one—this young performer/writer/director has created a charming, playful, 30-minute musical that pits the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite against Satan's daughter Beelzebub in a contest of wills. Does love or evil triumph? Actually, it hardly matters in this loose, jovial piece; the fun is all in the storytelling, be it Aphrodite firing arrows (belonging to her son, Eros) to make Beelzebub fall in love; or Beelzebub creating a witch's brew of evil whose ingredients include snakes, a picture of President Bush, and a jar of Jif peanut butter; or Lewonczyk herself, accompanying the tale with witty folk-style tunes (vocals and guitar). Sure, it's slight and even a little silly—but a great time is had by all. Liz Capinera (Aphrodite) and Marisa Marquez (Beelzebub) join Lewonczyk in the romp.

Animal has been reviewed on this website before (I saw it last year, in its entirety, when it premiered at HERE). Augustine's artistry as actor/puppet handler never fails to astonish me; he's also a fine playwright, and he's done a masterful job excerpting this story of a shaman-in-training for whom a genetically altered "assistant" is being created in a brutal, futuristic cloning lab. Augustine's subject is almost always the terrifying edges of existence and creation, and in Animal he hypothesizes a couple of different kinds of hell from which his characters seem destined never to be quite able to escape. What's on view here is 25 minutes of utter genius—gorgeous and scary and heartbreaking. It will almost certainly whet your appetite for the entire show, which returns to HERE briefly in October. Meanwhile, it makes for a stunning conclusion to a very successful and exciting evening at New York's newest theatre festival.

Have you ever been to a show which has pure joy spilling over its brim to the point that it makes you want to get up and dance with the abandon of a two-year-old? The annual offering of Ralph Lee’s Mattawee River Theatre Company does just that. I only wish that I had acted on my impulse and gotten up and danced, but thankfully another audience member (who was fortunate enough to actually be two years old) expressed that impulse for all of us who had gathered there under the cool night sky.

This year master puppet and mask maker Ralph Lee and his company bring us two tales from Turkey and Greece in a show entitled The Heroic and Pathetic Escapades of Karagiozis. Lee used his 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to those countries and research their rich folk puppet traditions. Customarily these tales were told by a single puppeteer who would hold as many as 30 to 40 stories in his/her head and could perform them at the drop of a hat. However, we are blessed here with a seasoned company of performers who breathe life into their respective masks and puppets. Evan Zes, who plays Karagiozis, is exceptionally animated and engaging. The rest of the company all take on multiple roles with excessive wit and grace. The music, provided by Bruce Huron and Colin McGrath, is fantastic. They expertly play everything from soprano sax to the slide whistle, creating for us mood and humor that more than complement the show. Lee’s masks and puppets are wonderful examples of this New York icon’s unbridled imagination. Among my favorites are the dragon characters, one made from an old-style baby carriage and the other from an old shopping cart, and the gangster character whose sly expression is so human-like that sometimes I forgot that I was looking at a mask.

The tales are simple. An inept hero and trickster uses his wit to outfox villains and aristocrats. In the first episode, he stands by and collects the left-over possessions of those who try and fail to slay the dragon and win the hand of the princess. In the second episode, he falls into the position of town baker and cleverly swindles everyone out of their food to feed himself and his three sons. The script, written by Dave Hunsaker, is tailored for all ages. There are potty jokes for the kids (and for those of you like me who can but snicker at a good fart joke) and there are rehashed old jokes, "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!" for the adults. There are even a few political references. Overall, Hunsaker’s script has a lighthearted, vaudevillian feel to it. However, there are moments when you may feel like you're watching a Saturday morning cartoon when you should be working on your tax return or something more adult-like. Also, there are a couple of masks which the performers wear on their heads, leaving their faces exposed. I found that I lost sight of the exquisite detail in the masks and focused on the expressions of the performers instead. However, this is but a quibble. The show is dazzling and entertaining in an unforgettable way.

For those downtowners who rarely make their way to the distant land of upper Manhattan, hop on the 1 or 9 train and get your butts up to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The garden setting on a beautiful fall night is alone worth the price of the ticket. Pack up your blankets along with your childhood and unfurl them under the stars. Make it a family tradition. Make it a night on the town. Whatever you do, make it this year and every year to Ralph Lee’s annual gift to New York City.

I remember that I had to read The House of Bernarda Alba for a class in college, and getting through it was like torture. I've read and seen it a few times since and never really been affected by it. So I'm grateful to director Shepard Sobel, translator Caridad Svich, and their colleagues at Pearl Theatre Company for their new production of this famous play, which at long last, thanks to them, I have found a way into. Their Bernarda moved me intellectually and emotionally; it entertained as well, for this is a raw and earthy rendition of this play. I recommend it highly.

The House of Bernarda Alba is a study of dictatorship. Bernarda, proud, hard, and immoveable, decrees that her five grown daughters will observe eight years of mourning following the death of her husband. "Mourning" is something like a prison sentence—the women must remain in the house, away from the windows (to maintain their "respectability"), sewing trousseaus for weddings that seem unlikely to ever occur.

Angustias, the eldest at 39, is from Bernarda's first marriage and has an income of her own from her father; because she's so eligible, the handsome and much younger Pepe el Romano asks to marry her, despite her plainness and apparent lack of any other good qualities. Bernarda is quick to agree to the match, and so the rules for Angustias are bent a little, to allow for her courtship.

But the other four—Amelia, Magdalena, Adela, and Martirio—lacking the almost-independence that a dowry can bring them, remain at their mother's mercy. Magdalena, the most pragmatic, takes it as her due; Amelia, the most good-natured, takes it in stride. But the younger girls bristle, partly (or perhaps mostly) because they've both fallen under the spell of Pepe el Romano themselves. Adela, the beautiful and willful one, acts on her desire and starts to meet Pepe in secret. This leads, eventually, to confrontation and then, inevitably to dire consequences. The play is a tragedy, and not just because someone winds up dead at the end.

Director Sobel notes in the program that The House of Bernarda Alba is generally viewed as an allegory about the coming of fascism to Spain in the 1930s, when it was written. This production certainly trades in that idea, but not in the way I expected it to. Sobel's Bernarda is about complicity more than oppression; Bernarda and her five daughters together construct the tyrannical reign of terror—it's not simply that the one imposes it on the others.

For at the center of this production, and providing it with a very earthbound kind of grounding, are Bernarda's two servants. The senior one, Poncia, in particular serves as our guide into the world of the play; she watches the ugly story play out, sees what is happening, but does not finally stop it—whether because she can not or because she will not, each of us must decide for ourselves. So the play takes on a classist angle: the Haves locked in an eternal, internal power struggle; the Have Nots, too poor and impotent to be affected by the outcome. Or to put it another, more contemporized way: Bernarda is the President, her daughters are the Cabinet; and the staff are the Rest of Us.

At least that's what I thought; this production feels sufficiently potent and enlarging to allow for other interpretations, I am sure. Svich's translation is sort of deliberately anti-poetic, but it's very accessible. Sobel's staging is naturalistic throughout, so that we get caught up in the sweep of events (which really picks up in the show's final two acts), leaving us to ponder what it all means later. I like that he's respected the play's three-act structure, providing two intermissions despite the show's shorter-than-two-hour running time so that we can start digesting the meaty messages of the piece before it's all over with.

The production design is simplicity itself; Stephen Petrilli's lighting is especially noteworthy, directing us to specific areas of the stage with canny exactitude, and building striking effects and images throughout. Jane Shaw's sound design is also impressive; there's a place where she creates the illusion of a group of men passing outside the house that feels remarkably realistic.

Twelve actresses comprise the ensemble. The formidable Carmen de Lavallade plays Bernarda's mother with a kind of gentle ferocity that's very effective; her dancer's grace informs her every movement and she's a treat to watch. Pearl stalwarts Carol Schultz, Robin Leslie Brown, and Joanne Camp play Bernarda, Angustias, and Poncia, respectively; they're all fine, especially the latter two—Brown fearlessly making Bernarda's eldest daughter at once a figure of fun and thoroughly unlikable, Camp anchoring the play with warmth and wit that is necessarily lacking from the other characterizations. Fulvia Vergel delivers a very strong performance as the younger servant, and Melissa Maxwell does a noteworthy job as the realist, Magdalena.

John Guare’s landmark 1971 play The House of Blue Leaves is a good challenge for acting students. It mixes equal parts comedy and drama with a dash of absurdism and satire—along with the playwright’s trademark brand of direct address—giving any up-and-comers an opportunity to cover a large part of the acting spectrum. For the most part the acting students of the T. Schreiber Studio, who are currently reviving Guare’s most famous play, handle this difficult script well. The production still falls a bit short emotionally, though, due to a pair of unfulfilled performances in key roles and the writing itself.

The action of the play covers a single day in 1965, when the Pope is visiting New York to address the United Nations about ending the war in Vietnam. Queens native Artie Shaughnessy wants to quit his job as a Central Park zookeeper, pack up his girlfriend Bunny Flingus, and move to California to pursue his dream of being a Hollywood songwriter. But, first he needs to get a Mexican divorce from his mentally unstable wife, Bananas, and have her committed. Standing in the way of Artie’s escape are a trio of renegade nuns trying to watch the Pope on TV, a hearing-impaired movie star, and his homicidal son, Ronnie.

The cast does a great job with the smaller supporting roles. Cate Beehan is wonderful as the deaf starlet trying to hide her ailment from everyone. Sarah-Ann Rodgers, Erica Wendal, and Kitty Lindsay all shine as the hilarious Pope-hungry nuns. Collin McGee hits all the right notes as Ronnie, but tries a little too hard to be funny. A little less muscling on his part will make those laughs come easier.

When it comes to the protagonists, though, the cast hits a bit of a snag. Jason Tomarken and Jane O’Leary both seem to understand the arcs of their respective characters, Artie and Bunny, and they each have strong technique: their intentions, beats, and transitions are all clear and well executed. But, they each lack the inner spark of inspiration that hides technique and makes acting fluid and seamless. This will come with time, as they are both clearly good actors. But, for now, this missing ingredient makes it difficult to empathize with either character because the audience feels distanced from Artie and Bunny’s plight. (This is also a weakness in Guare’s writing: he focuses so much on the theme—the cultural prioritization of fame and celebrity over personal relationships—that he fails to create sympathetic characters.) Of the three leads, only Tatjana Vujosevic manages to create a full-bodied, three-dimensional character. Her performance as Bananas is excellent.

Director Ted Sod does a terrific job of blending and balancing the play’s many elements. No matter how serious, absurdist, satirical, or madcap The House of Blue Leaves becomes, everything seems like it’s part of the same play. He also makes the most of the theatre’s cozy playing space, blocking the action in a manner that never makes the stage look or feel crowded. Sod could stand to modulate the production’s levels of urgency, though—right now the show starts at high urgency, giving the cast nowhere to go later. And, he would do well not to instruct the actors not to speak one-on-one with audience members. Even though Guare uses a lot of direct address, involving the audience in the action of the play like that makes them uncomfortable. Overall, though, Sod does a very solid job.

Set designer John McDermott, costume designer Karen A. Ledger, lighting designer Thomas Dunn, and sound designer Christopher J. Bailey must all be singled out for their exemplary work, as well. Their significant contributions are all as instrumental as the director’s and the cast’s in telling the story.

The T. Schreiber Studio is doing its students a good service by producing a full season of shows for them each year. The constant opportunities to perform can only help them all develop their art and craft, and I look forward to seeing how they continue to grow.

The Pearl Theatre Company begins its 21st season with Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid (English version by Earle Edgerton), which will run in repertory with Gogol’s The Marriage. Molière’s enduring farce is the story of Argan, the would-be invalid of the title, who spends his time and wealth obsessing over what he perceives as his chronic bad health, and following the many orders of his doctor, who seems to have a particular fondness for enemas. Filling out his farcical household are Angelique, his daughter of marriageable age; Beline, his cheating second wife who is after his estate; and Toinette, his willful servant whose tricks take better care of Argan than his doctors. Most of the plot involves Angelique’s rival suitors (Thomas, the one that Argan prefers, is of course a doctor) and the efforts of those who truly care for Argan to wean him away from his doctor’s control.

The primary target of the play’s humor is the medical profession. Molière was an outspoken critic on this subject, and portrays the medicine of his time as trickery, which is even worse than quackery, designed to milk their patients’ purses by keeping them in the belief that they are sick. And this perpetual sickness has brought out the worst in Argan, whose self-love, it seems, would put this imaginary sickness ahead of everything else, including his daughter’s happiness.

This production, directed by Eleanor Holdridge is workmanlike and good, but not great. Her production begins with a frenetic pantomime that neither entertains nor seems to tell any kind of story. It is rather just some unclear silly business, and unfortunately it sets the tone for much of the production—comedy that is general rather than pointed and doesn’t take the kinds o