It is a rare entertainment that is both suitable and stimulating to “audiences of all ages.” But the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players are offering just that with their smartly silly revival of The Pirates of Penzance (currently running at City Center).

Perhaps a more accurate description of the breadth of appeal might be "fun for all audiences, whatever their level of attention and investment.” This delightful combination of expert players with exceptional material makes for an evening (or a matinee) where one can sit back and be entertained by the inspired buffoonery or lean forward and admire the art of Gilbert’s acuminous lyrics adroitly apace with Sullivan’s swift and sly melodies.

The story, independent of staging, is easy to follow: mistakenly indentured to a band of pirates when he was very small (his nursemaid misheard the word “pilots”), Frederic has, out of a sense of duty that trumps his feelings of disdain for this profession, fulfilled his obligation and on this, his 21st birthday, he’s finally a free man. Despite dearly loving his comrades as individuals, he announces his intention to participate in the eradication of piracy. Shortly after parting ways, Frederic encounters a gaggle of girls, all wards of Major-General Stanley, and falls in love with one of them, Mabel, tout de suite. All of a sudden, they are overtaken by Frederic’s former colleagues, who threaten to marry each of the girls (the ladies do protest not much). Just then, the Major-General arrives and in order to extricate his wards from the pirates, he tells them he is an orphan—the notoriously sentimental Pirates of Penzance are widely-known to be pushovers where such sensitive matters are concerned, and the girls are released immediately.

Time passes. The Major-General deeply regrets his deception, and in order to buoy the spirits of his soon-to-be father-in-law, Frederic organizes a group of police to defeat the pirates. On the eve of the attack, the Pirate King and Ruth (his former nursemaid and now a pirate herself) stealthily pull aside their former crony to let him know that since his birthday is February 29th (which occurs, of course, only during a leap year), Frederic has technically only had five birthdays and is in fact still indentured to them for another sixteen. Distressed but dutiful, he warns the pirates of the attack, bids Mabel goodbye (though they pledge to be true to each other for the next several decades), and goes to fight with his band. The cowardly police are easily disarmed, but the Major-General requests them to yield in “Queen Victoria’s name,” which they do. This reveals them to be “noblemen who have gone wrong,” earning them the Major-General’s pardon and his wards for marriage.

There is much to enjoy in this droll staging, but there are a few overarching commendations to be made. Artistic Director Albert Bergeret has done an all around terrific job both as the stage director and music director / conductor. The comic style—broadly specific (or specifically broad, however you like it)— is goofy, but disciplined. He and his cast clearly share a similar sensibility, resulting in a contagious playfulness that the audience quickly catches.

Hal Linden receives star billing as the doddering Major-General Stanley and deservedly so. His performance of the classic “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” is truly worthy of the phrase “a comic tour de force.” As the Pirate King, Ross David Crutchlow earns the right to be a show-off and his restraint at opportunities for indulgence is admirable. Also noteworthy are Andrew MacPhail and Laurelyn Watson as Frederic and Mabel, respectively, and Louis Dall’ava, as the cop who seriously cannot retain the choreography.

Whether you seek fun that is mindless, good and clean, or witty and erudite, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players have a deeply satisfying entertainment for you in their production of The Pirates of Penzance.

I was really looking forward to the Abbey Theatre production of The Playboy of the Western World because I had an idea that it would somehow be definitive and authentic: that Synge's play, performed by its "home" company (so to speak), would be revealed to me in an exciting and/or unexpected way.

This was not, alas, the case. The Abbey's current Playboy, which is touring the U.S. and then returning to Ireland in celebration of the theatre's 100th anniversary, is lifeless, pretentious, and dull. It's also meaner than Synge's play has ever seemed to me—it has the same dark-hearted bleakness of Martin McDonough's work, reveling in exposing the true nasty nature of humanity. This is particularly surprising given the prologue that director Ben Barnes has attached to this revival, from Synge's own published preface, which says in part that "on the stage one must have reality and one must have joy." Both admonitions appear to have been ignored.

The prologue is delivered by Simon O'Gorman as a character billed in the program as "Bellman" who is a sort of Brechtian master of ceremonies. He doesn't speak again, but he does return at pivotal moments to signal to us that something pivotal is about to happen; he has a pair of cymbals that he bangs together at such times, lest we fail to grasp the significance. Guido Tondino's stark, grey set, representing the mostly dank and empty interior of Michael James Flaherty's pub, where almost all the action takes place, is very big and overpowering, decorated only with a line of liquor bottles along its roof (too high for anyone to actually drink from); it does a cool trick, starting off as two side walls that then slide on a track, like the Les Miserables barricade, to form a single unit. The lighting, designed by Peter Mumford, similarly eschews realism by adjusting the illumination to reflect the dramatic mood, as in an early 20th century melodrama, so that for example when a character turns the one kerosene lamp in the room off, the stage nevertheless gets brighter. This is very jarring.

A brief synopsis may be in order. Michael James Flaherty owns this mangy pub in the County Mayo on Ireland's West Coast. He lives and works here with his daughter Margaret, called Pegeen Mike, who is about 20 but already resigned to the lonely and difficult existence that awaits her: she's to marry Shawn Keogh, a local farmer whom she obviously doesn't love (or even like very much); he's a bit of a coward and a nonentity. Suddenly into the pub this night comes Christy Mahon, a handsome (if dirty and tired) young stranger, who tells a tale that shocks and excites all who hear it. He says that he's killed his father, after an argument that was the last in a lifetime of arguments, and now he's on the run. Pegeen is instantly taken with Christy, though also wary of him; but her father decides that he can board with them, and her feelings for the young man soon intensify. Meanwhile, Widow Quin, the meddlesome neighbor next door, sets her sights on Christy, and in fact the whole village becomes infatuated with him, thanks to his glamorous and sensational story of patricide. But when Old Mahon himself turns up, clearly very much alive, Christy's status as a hero among the townspeople and, especially, with Pegeen, is jeopardized.

I think of Playboy as a prototype of what I like to call the Rainmaker genre, in which a repressed and/or lonely young woman (here, Pegeen) is transformed by an almost magical encounter with a stranger who lies about everything except her essential worth (Christy). This theme is reinforced in the present production, with Cathy Belton going all-out to make Pegeen as unattractively spinsterish as possible; she looks about twice Tom Vaughan Lawlor's age (he plays Christy), which makes for an interesting, if unhelpful, dynamic between them. Lawlor possesses a vague charm, but he doesn't demonstrate a charisma that explains why everyone on stage is, at least momentarily, entranced with him. One of director Ben Barnes' main ideas about Christy seems to be to get him bare-chested as frequently as possible, and so Lawlor spends a lot of his time changing clothes on stage. I'm not sure that either Christy's character or Lawlor's pale, non-buff physique warrants all of this exposure.

Olwen Fouere is more lively as the Widow Quin, but she's been given mannish togs and a mane of dyed blonde hair (costumes are by Monica Frawley) that make her look more like Calamity Jane than an Irish woman of the early 1900s. Frawley's costumes for the women all defy period, in fact, while for the men—especially Shawn Keogh, who sports what looks like a brand new bright green Polo shirt—they're surprisingly dapper. Speaking of Shawn, Andrew Bennett walks through the role like a frightened zombie. John Olohan and Maeliosa Stafford, who look very much alike, are blustery but uninteresting as Pegeen Mike and Christy's dads, respectively. Only David Herlihy and Brendan Conroy, who play a pair of drunken town gossips, ever achieve anything resembling a spark onstage, particularly in the opening scene of the final act, as they squeeze every last drop of liquor from a nearly empty bottle that has been abandoned on the pub's floor.

The entire company speaks in authentic Irish brogue, which is to say that a good deal of the dialogue is incomprehensible to the untrained American ear. There is a two-page glossary provided in the program.

What a disappointingly pallid, alienating production! I never found myself caring about Christy or Pegeen Mike; I was just eager to see the thing resolve itself so I could go home. (This takes longer than necessary, for Barnes elongates the climactic horse-racing scene and subsequent fight scene, which cap the third act, with stylized, unbearably slow choreography.)  I guess I should know better than to bank on this or that famous company delivering the "perfect" rendition of a play solely on the basis of their reputation. As things are, the Abbey has made no new friend of me (though the space, the brand new Skirball Center on the campus of New York University certainly has; it's lovely). Synge's play remains unscathed. I await the revival that will really bring it to life.

The time: 9am sharp.
The place: A large American corporation.
The situation: The always-tense job interview.

That's the setup for Kevin Doyle's new, very interesting, not completely intelligible play, The Position. Five men, dressed identically in grey suits, blue cotton oxford shirts with button-down collars, and sharp-but-not-flashy red power ties, wait their turn as the secretary calls them in. Each has a slim, expensive-looking leather briefcase. Each enters, sizes up the room while the others size him up, and sits in the next available seat. Man  Number 1 takes out a notebook and a pencil. Number 2 works with his PDA. 3 is plugged into a brand new iPod. 4 reads New York magazine. 5 browses the Job Market section of last Sunday's Times.

Typical, obviously. The rhythms of the ritual are captured to perfection by Doyle and his cast, who repeat movements, actions, and even conversations with a fugue-like precision. And indeed, the harmony and the structure of the thing—though never the meaning—achieves a kind of beautiful comic perfection as we watch it unfold in predictable fashion—an ode to empty capitalist conformity.

And then Man Number 6 enters, the same but quite different. The hair isn't neatly styled, the suit is rumpled, the shoes are sneakers, the tie is a wide orange striped affair that, as one of the other men correctly remarks, looks like it was borrowed from a circus clown. The briefcase—battered and ungainly—is empty, containing not even a resume.

With the arrival of this man, Doyle changes the rules of what had heretofore felt like one of those modern Eastern European absurdist satires about  conformity, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism; he also ups the stakes, with some sacrifice of clarity. Man Number 6 sees the world differently from 1 through 5, which is to say that he actually pays attention to things. Such as, for example, the fact that the secretary's hair color is different each time she steps out of her office; or that all of the men waiting to be interviewed seem to have the same name.

But 6's reality itself may somehow be different, and here's where Doyle started to lose me. Our hero—for he plainly is that—was called on the phone by the secretary, invited to come to this interview in a bizarrely oblique way that nevertheless suggests a kind of insider status. Yet his non-conformity seems to stem as much from ignorance as from asocial impulses: he's not so much a rebel as an outsider in this button-down, 9-to-5 world, even though he talks about prior employment (at least in terms of his current situation, unemployment). He's convincing himself, further, of a strange conspiracy theory involving rocks and minerals.

With 6, The Position's absurdism gives way to a kind of surrealist political drama, half rage against the machine, half far-out fantasy. Once the other five have disappeared into the interview room (no one ever comes out of there except the secretary), 6 is left alone for a very long monologue that amplifies these two dramaturgical threads without clarifying either one. So I was left intrigued but not entirely satisfied by the play. Man Number 6's final reluctant journey into the interview room didn't carry the weight of tragedy that I expected it to have; and the play continues afterward with a coda that I didn't follow at all.

Doyle has directed his script, and with his cast he has mastered the complicated business required by its farcical opening, but the pace flags during the play's second half. (It occurred to me that staging the piece in a regular theatre with lighting instruments might mitigate this problem—in this production, the lighting never changes, and that's hard on the eyes.) The seven actors are generally fine, with Paul Newport in the marathon role of Man Number 6 especially impressive. Mark Gindick (1), Wilson McGrory (3), and Gregory Gilmore (4) seem particularly comfortable with the style and rhythms of the piece; Gindick is very funny and gets the evening's funniest gag, which I won't divulge here but will identify as laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Doyle, whose earlier play Styrofoam I heartily enjoyed, is clearly a writer of talent and intelligence, and I hope that he learns about his craft from the creation of this play. I will certainly be interested in what he does next.

The Pull of Negative Gravity, a British play about a wounded soldier’s return home from the current war in Iraq, packs an emotional punch. It provides a slightly unfamiliar lens through which to view a situation that grows more common the longer the war continues—though in truth the story could well be plucked from the newspaper of a small Midwestern American town. Two brothers, running a failing family farm after their father’s death, flip a coin to see who goes off to war and who stays behind with their mother. The one who goes, Dai, leaves behind a fiancée, Bethan, a nurse who herself yearns for a life of adventure and excitement. The one who stays, Rhys, is also a little bit in love with Bethan, and Bethan is perfectly happy to dally with him while Dai is away. Then Dai returns home, seriously wounded in both body and spirit.

The heart of the piece is the wrenching struggle of the family to re-form itself. The play’s most powerful moments are the tiny, often wordless, recognitions of how terribly things have changed for all four of these people: the stunned silence of Dai’s first entrance in a wheelchair, paralyzed on one side and barely able to speak; the look on Bethan’s face as her new husband begs her to kiss him and her only response is nausea; Rhys’s matter-of-fact adjustment to carrying his older brother around as if he were a suitcase, so that Dai can get outside. Bethan goes through with the wedding even though she can barely bring herself to look Dai full in the face, let alone touch him. Dai’s mother, Vi, had let herself believe that Dai’s injuries were negligible, and doesn’t quite know how to share either her strength or her grief with him.

All four actors give very strong, and very distinct, performances. Joanne Howarth as Vi is all nuance—Vi is stoic, unsentimental; she feels deeply but wouldn’t dream of discussing it with anyone. Louise Collins as Bethan is just the opposite—an exposed nerve ending, bubbling over with the desire to feel, smell, taste the world, and without the good sense to know when to close off a little. Lee Haven-Jones as Dai has the most physically challenging role, shuttling back and forth in flashbacks and/or fantasy sequences between the strong, joyful Dai of last year and the grievously wounded man of today, desperate to communicate and to love and to be touched, and barely able to make his simplest statements understood. You feel his frustration and his rage almost coming off his twisted form in waves, and it’s a release for both audience and actor when the flashbacks and fantasy sequences come and he can walk and speak again. And Daniel Hawksford as Rhys is simply, often painfully honest—the man who says what he thinks, knows what he feels, and all too often pays a terrible price for it.

Director Gregory Thompson has a strong, graceful touch with the play’s physical vocabulary, deftly smoothing over potentially awkward transitions from present to past, from location to location, and from reality to dream. Ellen Cairns’s set helps enormously by lightly layering the natural world of the countryside—drystone walls, boulders, sky—over the solidly literal furniture of a farmhouse living room.

Although the play is affecting, it can also be frustrating. Playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein piles trauma upon trauma on this poor family to a point that almost defies belief. The farm fails due to the foot-and-mouth epidemic; the brothers betray each other; their father may have committed suicide; Bethan cheats on her fiancé with his brother. There’s an incidental and somewhat baffling subplot about a severely burned patient of Bethan’s, also a wounded soldier, who has no ID and might in fact be an “enemy combatant” accidentally flown to a British hospital. I also found some of the choices of what to show onstage and what to elide between scenes a little arbitrary, especially the choice to skip immediately from the moment of Dai’s entrance straight to the wedding. It makes the wedding scene more harrowing, true, but also more implausible, as nothing about the lusty, romantic Bethan of the first part of the play explains why she stands by Dai.

Bethan in general is a much less well-developed character than the others. She’s set up as sort of a life-force—a caring nurse filled with lust and sensation—but this seems to me to be an ineffective metaphor overlaying a character who is shallow, thoughtless, and overwrought. She cheats on her fiancé with his brother without a drop of remorse; she then rejects Rhys over and over until Dai returns crippled; she marries Dai and then leaves him almost immediately; and when we see her last she’s throwing herself at Rhys again. I wanted there to be more to her than her sexuality.

Although the play is flawed, its emotional core and Lichtenstein’s blazing passion for his material and his story make it work. It’s less about the war in Iraq, or even war in general, than the aftermath of war, the terrible damage a war thousands of miles away has done to a family. The world will be living with the aftermath of this conflict for many years to come. And as citizens of the nation most responsible for the war, I think we Americans, in particular, should see works like this, that give us a perspective different from our own. As hard as it sometimes is to watch The Pull of Negative Gravity, we dare not look away.

Anyone interested in the future of musical theatre should hightail it down to the East Village and catch the Prospect Theater Company’s wonderful new production, The Pursuit of Persephone. Musical aficionados will be heartened to see that it lies, in part, in the capable hands of Peter Mills and Cara Reichel, a talented composer-lyricist-bookwriter-director team who would make several of their musical predecessors—Cole Porter, Comden & Green, Stephen Sondheim—proud of their accomplishments here. It is to their further credit that they load the stage of the Connelly Theatre with an army of up-and-coming talent that is almost comparable to their own.

Based on true events, The Pursuit of Persephone begins in 1937, as the famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is about to lunch with his college sweetheart, Ginevra King, for the first time in twenty years. As Fitzgerald reminisces with the restaurant bartender, Persephone flashes back to Fitzgerald’s college years at Princeton, circa 1915-1917. He and his friends—who include future literary giants Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop (or J.P.)—spend their time socializing, carousing, and trying to woo the Ivy League’s never-ending line of debutantes. They also write and produce plays for Princeton’s legendary Triangle Club, billed as “the oldest collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the nation.” On one of Triangle’s annual cross-country tours, Scott (as Fitzgerald is called by his friends) falls under the spell of debutante heiress Ginevra King, and sets out to win her. Even though they are smitten with each other, Ginevra, who always has an eye on furthering her already considerable social standing, fears that Scott, the child of a working class Midwestern family, will never be able to provide the kind of life that she’s used to. Thus, the wheels are set in motion for what would turn out to be one of the defining events in Fitzgerald’s life. Their romance would become the basis for his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and Ginevra would later serve as his model for Daisy Buchanan in his most famous work, The Great Gatsby.

If this sounds like a lot to tackle in one show, especially a musical, fear not. Mills and Reichel handle it all with a dexterous craftsmanship. They manage to keep Persephone’s cavalcade of characters, events, and information clear for the audience throughout. Their book, while too long by about ten to fifteen minutes, is still a model of clarity considering everything happening in it. And, Reichel’s fluid direction helps Persephone immensely. She knows exactly where both the physical and thematic focus of every scene is, and how to complement the main action with secondary action (as in large group scenes) without taking away from it. Her work here is marvelous.

Mills’s score is a welcome respite from other new musicals in that it draws inspiration more from old-fashioned Broadway scores (like those by the aforementioned Comden & Green, Porter, and Sondheim, and a host of others) than it does from modern pop music, thereby making Persephone feel and sound more substantial than many other current musical offerings. Mills’s lyrics display a facility for wit, humor, and narrative that will charm audiences and his melodies will make them tap their toes and sway in their seats. There are at least a half dozen standout numbers in Persephone, among which are: “Class,” in which Scott cleverly describes what he has while Edmund and J.P. tell him what he has to attend; “The Black Ball,” a rousing group number about an elite social club Scott and J.P. try to become members of; and “The Blue Slip,” which chronicles Scott’s increasing difficulty in balancing the demands of both the Triangle Club and his homework. Because of the score’s classic nature, Mills forces the cast to adopt more a traditional, straightforward vocal approach (once again, no pop music influence here) that is refreshing to hear. (And, in yet another throwback to a bygone era, The Pursuit of Persephone is completely unamplified. No microphones for the cast or the orchestra: they all get by on the strength of their talent and skill. Hearing the show like this, in an age where one almost never encounters a musical without amplification, makes it feel like a more authentic theatre-going experience.)

The musical numbers are also enhanced Tesha Buss’s wonderful choreography. She understands the strengths (and the limits) of the cast, and never makes them look anything less than terrific. Her inventive dances supplement the story perfectly, but never threaten to overshadow it.

Chris Fuller and Jessica Grové are the perfect ingénue couple as Scott and Ginevra. Both actors have lovely singing voices, and they create a convincing rapport together. David Abeles, Benjamin Sands, and Piper Goodeve all lend ample support as Edmund, J.P., and Scott’s long-suffering friend Marie, respectively. Abeles, especially, shines in two fine numbers: the hilarious “Poseidon Myself,” an example of the Triangle Club’s songwriting prowess; and “Let’s Don’t,” a lovely duet with Goodeve. Daniel Yates also does good work as the Older Scott, who frequents the stage almost the entire show, and manages to speak volumes with his haunted eyes.

Mills and Reichel’s decision to keep the Older Scott around for much of Persephone is a good one because it places the carefree high jinks on stage into a broader, bittersweet historical context. Older Scott looks on the younger versions of himself, his friends, and Ginevra, and experiences the hindsight that comes with time: he laughs, winces, and cries over events that cannot change. He can only stand by, helplessly, and watch his relationship with Ginevra unravel. But, one person’s misery is another person’s gift. The audience watches the Older Scott, and experiences a different kind of hindsight that he never will: we know that all his pain—and happiness—will create one of the most celebrated literary canons of the 20th century.

This is pretty heady stuff for a musical—especially one that, for all its heartbreak and poignancy, is still joyous, fun, and hilarious. It is a measure of Mills and Reichel’s talents that they succeed on all fronts. How many shows can say that? The Pursuit of Persephone can. Which is more than enough reason to run right out and see it.

Plays like The Rivals don't get done on Broadway very often these days—they are viewed, unfortunately, as too big and too complicated to make economic sense in our biggest theatres. So we should be grateful when a large institutional theatre like Lincoln Center decides to give us a fairly grand production of one of the English canon's classic comedies, complete with luscious and eye-catching costumes, an ensemble of A-list actors, and scads of chandeliers. Such a show gives us a look at the theatre our grandparents took for granted, not to mention an elegant and diverting evening of entertainment.

The story of The Rivals revolves around Captain Jack Absolute, a handsome fellow in love with a young lady named Lydia Languish whose romantic whims have made her prefer a poor lover to a rich one. So Jack, who is of very good stock indeed, has masqueraded as the lowly Ensign Beverley to woo Lydia, to her delight and to the consternation of her aunt, Mrs. Malaprop. Jack's father, Sir Anthony Absolute, meanwhile (and unawares), has decided to marry Jack off to Lydia, and he contracts with Mrs. Malaprop to do so, thus putting the younger Absolute in the singular position of being his own rival for the affections of the woman he loves.

Two additional rivals emerge as well: Bob Acres, a good-natured but fairly empty-headed provincial; and Sir Lucius O'Trigger, a peevish Irishman who is conducting a secret correspondence with Lydia, or so he thinks—it turns out that the love letters he's been receiving come from none other than Mrs. Malaprop.

A second romance between Jack's pal Faulkland and Lydia's cousin Julia serves as the principal subplot. Faulkland is a preternatural worrier, fretting over any sign of trouble in his relationship with the more level-headed Julia, almost all of which exist only in his imagination. The play also includes a famous running gag, whereby Mrs. Malaprop continuously substitutes one word for another (she's the kind of woman who boasts of the "derangement" of her "epitaphs" when what she probably means is the "arrangement" of her "epithets"; she gave her name to this condition).

The Rivals, half merry satire of pomposity and affectation, half frothy romantic farce, is great fun, for us and for the actors who get to play it. Giving (and, as far as I can tell, having) the most fun here is the estimable Richard Easton, whose Sir Anthony Absolute is a towering comic creation, far and away the finest performance in a worthy production. Easton relishes the overblown explosions that constitute the dialogue assigned to this dithering, blustering old fellow who demands total subservience from his grown-up son and is ready to blow up in a million pieces at the least provocation. Easton's Absolute gets so caught up in his self-indulgences that, when Jack's charade as Ensign Beverley is finally exposed, he is so thrown by his son's misbehavior that he finds himself genuinely unsure who Jack really is.

Easton is just about matched by Matt Letscher, a young actor who proves himself an outstanding find in the role of Jack. Letscher has the requisite good looks and manners, but he doesn't stop there in creating a delightfully likable rascal, one who is amused by his overbearing parent, dismayed by his friend Faulkland's self-defeating follies, and honestly distraught at the collapse of his own romantic schemes. There's a place in the play's second half when Letscher delivers one of Jack's many asides, a strategically necessary "What shall I do?"—but instead of merely telegraphing a moment of panic, he breaks the fourth wall for a second, genuinely seeming to want our advice. A nice touch, I thought.

A pair of other young actors acquit themselves quite well. James Urbaniak, a downtown stalwart in his Broadway debut, is deliciously on-target as Jack's pretentious, gossipy servant Mr. Fag. And Jeremy Shamos, another rising star whose roots are off- and off-off-Broadway, has some splendid moments as the rustically comic Bob Acres.

The evening's two biggest names, Dana Ivey and Brian Murray, do not let us down. Murray has the relatively small role of Lucius O'Trigger, and he mines it for comic gold with his customary aplomb (though I was surprised that the Irish accent he affected in the first half completely disappeared during the second). Ivey is exquisitely cast as the always foolish and often sour Mrs. Malaprop, and delivers the expert performance that her fans will expect; if I'm not so enthusiastic about her work here, it's because I find that Mrs. Malaprop's slips of the tongue wear out their welcome sooner than Sheridan did.

Jess Goldstein's costumes are colorful, witty, and plentiful. John Lee Beatty's set includes no fewer than three different pairs of chandeliers, which are very pretty; but its centerpiece—a big, bright, round gingerbread house that occupies most of the Beaumont's thrust stage—turns out only to be a backdrop for spare interior and exterior settings; a bit of disappointment given how inviting it looks. Mark Lamos's direction is brisk and effective, but he's chosen to begin the evening with a dumb-show prologue that serves no purpose save to delay the evening's fun.

I wish that producers could/would charge less than $55 - $85 for tickets to a show like this; students and young actors would really get a lot out of seeing such a first-rate mounting of a classic work (and they'd likely enjoy it as well, as would plenty of other non-rich folk). But if the tariff doesn't faze you, then I heartily recommend The Rivals: it's deft, diverting, and a real charmer.

Here is a Seagull full of surface passions. Its most vivid presence is Masha, the preternaturally unhappy girl who is the first character we meet—asked why she always dresses in black, she replies "I'm in mourning for my life." She's the daughter of Shamrayev, the upwardly mobile petty tyrant who is manager of a country Russian estate owned by Sorin (Shamrayev is gradually wresting control of the land, and the assets, from his boss, who, by the end of the play, is dying). Masha is in love—grandly and unrequitedly—with Konstantin, Sorin's nephew, who lives on the estate with his uncle. Here he broods about how his mother, the famous actress Arkadina, ignores him; he also dabbles at creating a new kind of theatre (for which he shows only limited aptitude), and he has in fact written a bizarre play for Nina, the neighbor girl with whom he is head-over-heels in love. Nina wants to be an actress and, more important, to be famous. When Arkadina arrives at the estate for summer vacation with the popular novelist Trigorin in tow, Nina is enraptured: the great celebrity that Trigorin has is exactly what she thinks she wants.

Back to Masha: she is being pursued by the dull but earnest schoolteacher, Medvedenko. She can see that she's doomed to live the way her mother has, in a loveless marriage (Masha's mom, Paulina, married to the boor Shamrayev, is in love with the sophisticated doctor, Dorn). Adaptor/director Michael Barakiva puts Masha on stage even before the play starts, on a swing in the estate's backyard, telegraphing her boredom and anomie by alternately lolling about lazily and then pushing off and soaring with aggressive discontentedness. In chic black spectacles of the type now very much in style among young people, Kelly Hutchinson plays Masha with a boiling rage just beneath a veneer of cool (and hip) post-modern/goth aloofness that feels at least a century ahead of its time (the program puts the play in its origin period, 1895).

Elsewhere, Barakiva and his actors stress the big emotions as the various characters follow their hormones to push their lives/the story along. Shamrayev (David A. Green) flaunts his self-importance and his contempt for his so-called "betters" as he orders people about and flouts Arkadina and Sorin's commands. Arkadina (Barbara Garrick) literally throws herself at Trigorin when she suspects he's becoming infatuated with Nina, and she and Konstantin (David Barlow) snipe and parry like boxers in a ring. Barlow's Konstantin is manic and not a little wild-eyed; the psychological damage inflicted by Arkadina seems to be compounded by a chemical imbalance that was already rendering him unstable.

What's missing in all of this is the trivial detail, the ordinariness, the repetitive but comforting grind that we usually see in Chekhov's work. The relationships here are not deeply etched: I didn't feel the unqualified adoration of Shamrayev and Dorn for Arkadina, for example, that I've noted in other productions; or the unshakable familial bond between Arkadina, Sorin, and Konstantin; or the resigned hopeful/less-ness pervading Paulina and, later Masha's spirit. When the actors in this production aren't displaying grand passion they're generally withdrawing into themselves, magnifying little reveries of foolish self-indulgence into crass selfishness and turning brief moments of introspection into soliloquies; Curzon Dobell's Dorn and Saxon Palmer's Trigorin come off as so self-absorbed as to never connect with anyone at all. The result is a watchable and entertaining rendition of The Seagull, but one that sacrifices a good deal of the work's innate humanity and truth.

Linda Marie Larson (Paulina) and Garrett Neergaard (Medvedenko) turn in very affecting performances, and lots of Barakiva's staging ideas are arresting and interesting. (I particularly liked the idea of a slapstick finish to Act I.) Other choices are problematic, however: Oana Botez-Ban's costumes defy the play's setting and period and, in some cases, are downright peculiar (Konstantin and Trigorin wear brightly-colored striped shirts and socks, like carnival roustabouts or clowns). The set, designed by Mimi Lien—a view of the estate's garden and yard—is lovely and appropriate for the first half of the play, but in the second half, which takes place inside the house, it becomes confusing and cumbersome (why would a parlor's window curtain open from the outside?). And Barakiva needs to be more mindful of spatial relationships on the stage—he has Nina and Konstantin reciting away from their audience in the first act's play-within-a-play; and in the last act he has them use different routes to go in and out of the parlor—distractions that could easily have been avoided. As adaptor, Barakiva allows himself some indulgences that he probably should have resisted, such as having Trigorin make several unforgivable (and out-of-character) sexual puns and making Arakdina's catch-phrase "Que sera, sera."

The Seagull remains a strong and compelling play, and it's great to see all of these folks working hard to bring it off. The producing company, the Roundtable Ensemble, partner with a variety of organizations to provide subsidized or free tickets to their shows to people who don't ordinarily get to see theatre—this is certainly a terrific work with which to make such an introduction.

Gordon Cox's new play The Secret Narrative of the Phone Book is billed as "a romantic comedy hijacked by a conspiracy thriller." Exactly; or maybe it's really the other way around. Either way, it's very cool, very entertaining—a satisfying work by a talented playwright that begs to be even better than it is.

The beginning is terrific. An attractive, smart, neurotic woman brings a sexy, articulate, jeans-clad intellectual to her apartment. They met at a movie theatre and now the question is, will they or won't they? Her name is Oona; his, improbably, is Grassy Noel. They talk like this:

GRASSY NOEL: I'm an artist. Right now I'm very interested in collage dispersal.
OONA: I've never heard of that.
GRASSY NOEL: I take apart collages by other people. I call it collage éclaté.
OONA: Do other people call it vandalism?
GRASSY NOEL: Other people call it nihilism, but they're wrong. I have beliefs.

Obviously made for each other, the two connect. Blackout. Then, lights up, Grassy Noel lying naked on the bed. Under the covers is... Seth. An attractive, smart, neurotic man. Noel (that's what he likes to be called) is playing on both sides of the fence, as they say; he's also playing an even more dangerous and mysterious game, we realize, as he surreptitious scrutinizes Seth's laptop.

By Scene Three, the conspiracy thriller has started oozing its way onto the comic romance. The place is the Information Oversight Room at the Phone Company, which turns out to be where both Oona and Seth work. Their job is to monitor phone conversations and other information streams to make sure that nothing "unapproved" leaks out into the media. Their immediate boss is a super-efficient bureaucrat named Bud who spouts New Age Management aphorisms like "Crises are opportunities to fortify your inner achiever." Their organization is an Illuminati-like conglomerate that aims to control all of the information, and therefore all of the thoughts, coursing through the earth's myriad communication networks. If something crops up that's counter to their aims, it gets deleted. If someone crosses the organization, he or she gets eliminated. One of its weapons is a sinister-sounding operation called Identity Proliferation, which results in carbon copies of a person being substituted for the original.

It's a grand plot concept for our increasingly paranoid times, and Cox almost makes it work. Where it falls short is in the detail, of which there is too much, and in the scope, of which there is too little. This global meta-meta-agency seems far too focused on problems that feel trivial in the greater scheme of things (the storyline is tangled around a Matthew Shepard-like hate crime—important, yes, but surely in a world of Korean nukes and Social Security "reform" there are bigger fish to fry). And Bud, Oona, and Seth seem to be the only people doing a job that is almost inconceivably complex: banks of others need to be alluded to in order to give the Company the scary critical mass that it really needs.

Nevertheless, Cox does a good job weaving his web of conspiracy-theory suspense around his four characters. I will not tell you how Grassy Noel ultimately fits into things (but note his name). And I won't give any more of the convoluted story away, except to say that it's fanciful yet convincing. We leave the theatre asking: could this happen? (Or even: is this happening?) Cox should be pleased.

Director Suzanne Agins keeps it moving at the requisite fast clip, so that we mostly don't have time to think hard about what's happening but instead get swept up by the escalation of events. John C. Vennema is spectacularly good as Bud, who figures more importantly in the story than we initially assume; he anchors the play in a wild, subversive reality that suits it beautifully. Brandon Miller (Seth) and Natalie Gold (Oona) are also very effective, but Bill Dawes doesn't deliver the rugged romantic hero/anti-hero that Grassy Noel seems to be. Kimo DeSean's set is wonderfully inventive, using a small number of set pieces in ingenious ways; I particularly liked that the attractive geometric design on the stage floor turned out to be the "guide tape" used by the actors to correctly place the furniture—what a great idea!

The Secret Narrative of the Phone Book is a lot of fun. It's so well-crafted and so clever that I wanted it to be flawless. It's not, but it's at least several notches above most of the fare on offer at the moment (it is, for example, far more interesting and entertaining than Democracy). Give it a look.

I count on Peter Dobbins and his Storm Theatre to uncover buried dramatic treasure, revealing hidden gems that should be part of the so-called canon but, for one reason or another, are not. I refer you to, for example, Andre Obey's Noah and Stewart Parker's Spokesong, two exquisite works that Storm mounted recently which, I suspect, no other company would have given a second thought to; each proved to be something of a masterpiece yet had faded into a kind of undeserved obscurity. This time around, Dobbins has dug much further back to reveal to us Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, a British Renaissance comedy from the late 1590s that is as delightful as it is pertinent. I highly recommend a trip to the Storm's headquarters on 46th Street to catch this sprightly, touching Elizabethan "valentine."

Dekker, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is not the poet that the Bard of Avon was; but he seems to have been not so much the snob, either, which makes Shoemaker deliciously refreshing. Instead of relegating to the background the working people who were, more and more, becoming the heart and soul of English society (as happens in, say, Midsummer Night's Dream), Dekker places them front and center in this comedy, which is about, as much as anything, the glory of earning an honest living and the pride and power of the rising middle class. I was surprised at how "American" this English play seems to be, celebrating as it does the values of hard work, harder play, egalitarianism, and freedom of opportunity.

But lest I suggest that Shoemaker is anything other than a romp, let me assure you now that this is, for all its sociopolitical subtext, a very pleasing, very sweet, and frequently rowdy good time of a play, brought lovingly and vividly to life by Dobbins and his high-energy cast. At its center is newcomer Gabriel Vaughan who is very appealing as handsome and romantic young Rowland Lacy, nephew to the Earl of Lincoln, so in love with pretty Rose Oateley that he buys himself out of serving in King Henry V's army in France, in order to disguise himself as a shoemaker and be near his beloved. The Earl opposes the match because Rose lacks noble blood—she is the daughter of Sir Roger Oateley, a member of the middle class who is now Lord Mayor of London. Sir Roger's reverse snobbery stands as an obstacle as well. But Rowland, fortunately skilled in the "gentle craft" of shoemaking, is undaunted: donning more modest garb and a garbled Dutch accent, he assumes the role of a Flemish craftsman called Hans Meulter and finds work in the prosperous house of Simon Eyre.

And it's here that the play really takes off. Simon is unabashedly common folk; he's the Ralph Kramden of 16th century shoemakers, with a tart-tongued wife named Margery who refuses to be cowed by his blustery insults. Simon's staff consists of the earnest foreman Hodge, a hearty boy apprentice, and a journeyman named Firk who finds himself constantly and comically in the thick of, well, everything: Norton to Simon's Ralph; or, much more accurately—especially in the person of the remarkably nimble young actor Josh Vasquez—Daffy Duck to Simon's Porky Pig.

Together, Simon's men abet Hans/Rowland in his cause (the happy ending is never in doubt), and they also help another of their number, Ralph Damport, reunite with his wife Jane after he returns from the wars in France. Dobbins doesn't ease over the implications of Ralph's having to fight in the bloody conflict that our hero Rowland has bought his way out of; the play becomes unexpectedly sorrowful and profound in a few places as the weight of this inequity is allowed to register. But most of the time, Dobbins keeps the tone lighter than air and giddily joyful. There's a scene near the end, at a pancake breakfast being given the shoemakers by Simon Eyre, who by now has (somewhat inexplicably) been made Lord Mayor himself, in which Dobbins lets out all the stops, having his relatively small ensemble cavort like mad children all over the playing area, creating the very satisfying illusion of a cast of thousands. This staging definitely ranks among Dobbins' very best work.

I've already mentioned a few of the actors; let me stop here to acknowledge the rest, including Hugh Brandon Kelly, ingratiatingly commanding and just a wee bit foolish as Simon Eyre; Elizabeth Roby, seemingly having a blast in a fat suit as his much-maligned bride Margery; Jose Sanchez, plausibly proletarian as Hodge; Julia Motyka, lovely and appealing as Rose; Amanda Cronk, playing the wily soubrette as her maid Sybil; Ashton Crosby, suitably supercilious as Sir Roger; and Paul Jackel, entirely insufferable as Lincoln. Rounding out the large company are Jason Adams, Kevin Prowse, Kelleigh Miller, Greg Jackson, Travis Walters, and Brad Coolidge, many of whom are double- or even triple-cast, all to fine effect. They're all well-served by Erin Murphy's excellent costumes, which allow the actors to transform themselves nearly instantaneously from one character to another while preserving the world of the play. Michael Abrams's lighting is invaluable in setting mood and establishing time/place on Paul Hudson's lovely but spare set, which is framed by a trio of intersecting hearts.

The hearts are completely apropos, of course: love conquers all in The Shoemaker's Holiday—not just romantic love, but love for one's vocation, in this case, the making of shoes. Dekker and Dobbins have indeed collaborated to create a valentine for the audience here, and the timing—just a week before Valentine's Day—is propitious. A 1599 verse comedy as date play?—Why not! Take your sweetheart to The Shoemaker's Holiday, and have a ball.

Pedophilia feels like such a fundamental violation of the way humans are supposed to behave—it takes a village to raise a child, and all that: on some level, aren't all grown-ups culpable for the well-being of all children? So it's an uncomfortable subject for a play; The Shooting Stage, which dances around pedophilia and other provoking issues of sexuality and violence, is almost creepy at times, but it gets under your skin.

The question is, when is something obscene? Is a photo of an obviously aroused 16-year old boy wearing a dress child pornography? Is it if the person who took the photo is a 14-year-old friend of the subject? Is it if, 25 years later, the now grown-up taker of said photo displays it with other photos in a gallery? Is the same man's photograph of his baby goddaughter, naked in a bathtub, obscene?

Is a 16-year-old boy old enough to consent to sex? If I told you that the boy from that first photo was an actor in a popular TV show and was having sex regularly with his producer, would that be child abuse or a love affair? If I added that when the boy grew into a man—a successful lawyer, now, with a recently deceased wife and a teenage son—who entered into a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a video arcade—would that be child abuse?

If a 16-year-old boy (a different one, now) dressed up in a white evening dress and feather boa and lip-synched "I Will Survive" at a gay club, we'd feel pretty sure that he's pretty sure about his sexuality. But if a friend of his from school, who has been giving off all kinds of ambiguous signals, saw him at the club and then let him do oral sex on him—is the friend gay? Is a boy who has sex regularly with an adult gay? Is the adult in that pair gay?

These labels all mean different things and have different consequences. In The Shooting Stage, they are vital, not only because they influence the ways the various characters understand themselves—which is very important—but also because in some cases they determine who goes to jail and who gets to go on doing what he does with impunity.

The Shooting Stage is structured kind of like a suspense thriller, which is why I have been deliberately vague in identifying who's who and what the relationships are among the five men—two adults, three teenage boys—who are its subjects. Playwright Michael Lewis Maclennan prods and pokes around the secrets and desires of his characters without finally revealing much about them except the details, which often feel sordid, of their sexual lives. As a result, a play that might have delved into the psychologies of these men instead stays on the surface of their personalities, eventually dissipating into melodrama just when it feels like it might turn insightful. That's a disappointment, though it doesn't make this compellingly off-putting work any less watchable.

Director John Pinckard has staged the American debut of this 1999 Canadian play tautly and stylishly, if also a bit portentously. He uses the deep playing space at 45 Below to generally good effect, keeping some major set pieces that designate different locations in place throughout, and designating the very furthest reach of the stage as a sort of dream state where characters desires are realized, sometimes literally and sometimes fantastically (and sometimes, as in the drag number, a bit of both). He feeds the audience's prurient instincts in a really unsettling manner that I think is deliberate in some of the play's more sexually charged scenes: one depicting two of the teenage boys lifting weights together, for example, feels enough like soft porn to be discomfiting.

The spare set is by Jason Lajka, Robert W. Henderson, Jr.'s lighting is suitably moody, and Alexis Hadsall's costumes are appropriate. The cast is anchored by two experienced actors, Ben Masur as the photographer on trial for obscenity and Christopher Durham as the lawyer who is helping him behind-the-scenes with his case. They both turn in nuanced, surprisingly sympathetically, complex performances. The younger cast members—Robin Lord Taylor, Noah Peters, and Hunter Gilmore—are not as effective, but note that Maclennan hasn't given them roles with much depth to play.

Does The Shooting Stage, to borrow a phrase from the world of obscenity hearings, have redeeming social value? I don't know: it's riveting in its way, but by not finally pushing beneath the surfaces of its damaged adult characters, I'm not sure how much it has to tell us about the issues it raises. I felt manipulated more than enlightened when it was over. But it certainly put some provocative questions into my head, about subjects I don't tend to want to think much about.

The Soldier Dreams, a play by Daniel MacIvor from the late 1990s, is being given its New York debut by Spiral, Inc. The company deserves nothing but our praise and gratitude for bringing this work to our attention. Why is it that Canadian writers like MacIvor remain mostly marginalized in American theatre?

This is a sharp, affecting, fever dream of a play, set in at least a couple of alternate universes. One is real-time reality, the place where we spend our waking moments, and in it we see the last days in the life of a young gay man named David who is dying of AIDS, in his own bed but hooked up to an IV, attended by a nurse and his four closest family members.

The other location is inside David's head, and just possibly inside the heads of the others on death watch as well. These people include David's lover, Richard; his two sisters, Tish (older than him) and Judy (younger); and Tish's husband, Sam. All—David included—agree that David would rather everyone were dancing, not grimly hovering over his deathbed. And all—again, David included—are soliloquizing, having what a few of them call "moments for David," making sense of a life or, more accurately, what that life meant to them. MacIvor shows us a family with a capacity for caring and understanding no larger or smaller than yours or mine—and exposes the sad, lonely fact that none of us ever knows anyone except ourselves.

So all the "moments for David" are actually about the others. Tish and Richard each fancies her/himself chief mourner; the grudge they've been nursing against one another for years gets exposed in the course of the play, with surprising results. Judy wants to mourn in her own eccentric way. Sam retreats into his journal. Tish wants to make Jell-O. Tish and Judy want to know what happened to the carpet mom promised to them. And everybody wants to know what the unconscious David means when he utters the words "matchbook," "Ottawa," and "German doctor."

MacIvor is masterful as he doles out the bits of David's life—to us and to his characters—making it clear that whatever the medium, there is no way to capture the totality or even a tiny part of another human being. David, we are told, developed an aversion to having his picture taken—he wanted to remember experiences without artificial aids. And so the slide show, the video, and the numerous anecdotes dance around a whole (hole?) that's always much larger. Even the truth that David himself tries to tell us—a story about a student whom he met the night before Tish and Sam's wedding—is elusive, fragmentary, incomplete. Before he can finish, his "real" self has disappeared (without our even noticing), and even what he knew about what he was trying to tell us remains finally unknown and unknowable.

The Soldier Dreams is a delicate, impressionistic, ephemeral play: I found that I was experiencing it on an emotional rather than intellectual level, and when it was done I could still somehow feel it in my guts. It's definitely a play worth doing, and director Janis Powell and her cast and crew have given a good account of it here. Particularly effective are Powell's staging and Tom Crossman's set, which together provide clear boundaries for the worlds of the play (reality vs. the subconscious).  Among the actors, Patrick Lacey as David's spirit, watching his body fade away, is perhaps the most vivid presence; Morgan Foxworth (Richard), Timothy Macht (Sam), Janine McGrath (Tish), and Allyson Ryan (Judy) are at times somewhat unsteady in their roles, but each has at least one scene in which they shine, revealing their characters to us with raw and unfettered honesty. Matt Munroe as the student, Shelley Dague as the nurse, and Joseph Schommer as the "real" David dying in his bed complete the ensemble.

Let me begin by saying that I liked the current revival of the musical The Spitfire Grill at Gallery Players a lot. It is an enjoyable and worthwhile experience, and an unexpectedly moving one, as well, in spite of some occasionally flat acting and directing. You may wonder how that’s possible, to which I can only say: my enjoyment of The Spitfire Grill relied as much on what I, as an audience member, brought with me as anything that happened on stage.

But, first thing's first. The Spitfire Grill tells the story of Percy, a young woman recently released from prison who moves to Gilead, a small Midwestern town, to start her life over. She is not exactly welcomed into the tight-knit community with open arms, especially when she starts working at the town’s central hub—the Spitfire Grill. Hannah, the stoic proprietor of the café, takes Percy on against her better judgment: Hannah is tired of running the joint, and disappointed in her nephew Caleb’s failure to sell the place. So Percy and her co-worker Shelby (Caleb’s wife) devise a plan to raffle off the Spitfire Grill—a plan that, naturally, meets with considerable resistance.

Fred Alley and James Valcq’s book is good, and Alley’s lyrics are serviceable. Both are greatly enhanced, though, by Valcq’s gorgeous score, which is a pastiche of pop music Americana. The music broods and smiles along with the characters, and soars when they do, as well. One of the score’s two high points is “The Colors of Paradise,” Percy and Shelby’s duet in which their raffle plan is joyously born. The other is “Shine,” Percy’s second act solo in which she emerges from her guarded emotional cocoon and comes alive again. Both the music and Libby Winters’s performance lift the song to the cathartic heights it aspires to.

Overall, the cast is good, even if their skills are not always up to the task of fulfilling the demands of The Spitfire Grill. On their own, the singing voices are sometimes tentative and one-dimensional. But in the group numbers, they combine powerfully to great effect. Note also that I saw the company’s first performance, so they have time to polish their performances to a shine. In the meantime, they're making up for their shortcomings with all the fun they are having. Every actor seems happy to be doing this show, and it shows.

Timothy J. Amrhein’s set design brings The Spitfire Grill vividly to life. And the orchestra—conductor/pianist Marcus Baker, keyboardist John Kramer, and guitarist Craig Magnano—swings, swoons, and sways to perfection.

The whole enterprise reminded me fondly of the kind of summer stock shows I grew up watching and doing. Every element of The Spitfire Grill set off fierce waves of nostalgia and sentimentality inside of me, and I was magically transported back to the days when I first started out as an actor. (Not to mention that I was reminded why I wanted to be one in the first place: because it’s fun.) As I watched The Spitfire Grill, I was not only almost overwhelmed by tears, but my dreams of being in show business were renewed and invigorated. I felt as free as Percy does at the climax of “Shine.”

So, obviously, while the contributions of the company are crucial to the success of The Spitfire Grill, what I brought to my viewing of it was what led me to the epiphanies I experienced. Those who venture out to Brooklyn to see The Spitfire Grill will be won over by its charm and enthusiasm. And, for those who are lucky enough to have as strong a personal reaction to it as I did, you will be rewarded with a deep and enriching evening of theatre.

The Straits, only the second play by young British author Gregory Burke, is fine, insightful and pertinent. It's been given an excellent production by director John Tiffany and the London-based theatre company Paines Plough, as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59. The show runs only through this Sunday, which is a shame, because it absolutely deserves to be seen. If your 4th of July weekend plans allow it, take in The Straits before it closes.

It takes place in May, 1982, on Gibraltar, the tiny bit of rock at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea that remains a British outpost for reasons that don't seem to make a great deal of sense anymore; here four British teens—three boys and one girl—are stuck, their parents having been assigned to this archaic remnant of the Empire, and are trying to figure out how to grow up and become whoever it is they are going to be.

May 1982 was the month that Great Britain attacked Argentine forces that had attempted to take over the Falkland Islands (and by June, this little snippet of a war was over, the British victorious). The four characters in The Straits feel the effects of this war more keenly than most, for the native Gibraltarians are Spanish; the two older boys in particular are disposed to the notion that these local "Spics" (for that's what they call them) are suitable stand-ins for the ones battling their brethren overseas. That word brethren is literally true for one of the boys, by the way: the one nicknamed Doink, who dreams of the day he can join the Marines. His brother is in the thick of things, in the Navy, stationed on the HMS Sheffield in the South Atlantic.

This is the background of The Straits; the main plot concerns Darren, 15, who has just arrived on Gibraltar with his parents and older sister, Tracy. Darren is smarter and more sensitive than Doink, but as new kid on the block he discovers that he has a lot to prove. The Straits follows Darren's clashes with the rougher and tougher Doink, and on one level it proceeds just the way you think it will.  But what gives this drama its remarkable power is that you keep hoping it won't. The third boy, Jock, is the wild card, more mature than Doink but even more unsettled inside, if that's possible; like most people in the universe, his sins are more of omission than commission, which makes him our guide into the world of the play and its conscience.

There are no adults in the play, but The Straits is entirely about what they—we—have taught four these young people about life. Darren gets his ideas about being grown-up by watching a pirated Rambo tape. Doink sums things rather succinctly and chillingly, thus:

It goes all the way back, don't it? England an fightin an that. War's what we do innit. What we do best. Don't matter who we fight either. Spics or Germans or French or whatever. Reckon we'll always be at war with someone and we always win.

Tiffany's production uses Neil Warmington's remarkable unit set—a big rock, like Gibraltar itself, that represents a sandy cliff overlooking the Mediterranean—to great advantage. Transitions between scenes are marked by the characters changing position, costume, etc. in military march formation—it's brilliantly and precisely executed, resulting in some astonishingly eloquent stage pictures whilst commenting incisively on the play's themes (movement is by Steven Hoggett). The four young actors are outstanding as well: Peter McNicholl is sympathetic (and convincingly fifteen) as Darren, Alice O'Connell is riveting as his sister Tracy, James Marchant, all poses and bottled-up energy as Doink, is constantly compelling, and Freddy White gets the dangerous balance of raging hormones, unchecked conscience, and teenage confusion that is Jock exactly right.

The Straits is a terrific find; kudos to the folks at the Brits Off Broadway festival for bringing it to New York. It deserves a longer stay. And I will certainly be hoping for new work by playwright Burke, director Tiffany, and producing company Paines Plough to arrive on our shores in the future.

I first encountered this play by Frank D. Gilroy at the public library, and was struck by its quiet strengths on the page. Although The Subject Was Roses has a cast of only three actors, one simple set, and roles with the emotional depth that actors long to perform, it is rarely done. I was happy when it was finally revived by the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 2001, and pleasantly surprised to see it listed as part of this year's Midtown International Theater Festival.

The piece takes place in 1946 in the Bronx, and is a poignant slice-of-life portrayal of a family upon the return home of their son from the war, a situation that unfortunately continues to resonate for families today. The play has a beautifully balanced script of scenes between the three strong characters—the abusive and frustrated husband, the weary wife who has put up with marital betrayal, and the son who returns home from war with no real sense of accomplishment and views his parents' strained relationship with a more mature eye. As with any dysfunctional family situation (and who of us hasn’t experienced at least one?) what is spoken is usually not as profound as what is left unsaid.

In a piece like this, it is the underlying tension that is the key to the energy of the performances. This production only achieves this in fits and starts. The actors seem under-rehearsed and unsure of their lines in many places, and as a result the pacing (and the tension) drags. Perhaps with more time this can be remedied. Kenneth John McGregor finds some of the strengths of husband and father, John Cleary, and Phil Horton displays emotional range as the son, Timmy Cleary. Both actors have considerable stage presence. As wife and mother Nettie Cleary, Diane Shilling is not as successful, tending to play all of her emotions on one note and pausing far too long between lines.

Director John Capo uses the entire playing area well. He is also credited with the simple and functional set. The lighting design by Philip Watson has some very nice mood-setting moments, with the exception of one inexcusable choice to have Shilling’s character in light so dim that you could not clearly see her expressions for a very pivotal speech while sitting center stage. (Director’s choice?) The 1940s flavor costume design was not credited.

I saw The Suffrajets during a RedLab evening at One Arm Red, the relatively new performance venue in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. (Also on the bill that evening: an excerpt from a movement piece called Heliantha and a short, very strange video entitled Mortal Coil by Dana Salisbury.) RedLab is billed as an "incubator of experimental performance"—and lest those words scare you away, know that from this initial encounter, I am full of enthusiasm and praise for what's going on here. Artists need nurturing places to try, to learn, and to fail; I will certainly be making more trips to this unexpectedly comfy theatre as my schedule permits.

Of course, sometimes artists in a lab setting triumph, and that's really exciting. That's exactly what happened with The Suffrajets, whose obviously still forming musical about a pair of extraordinary American sisters has all the markings of exciting, innovative, entertaining theatre. I can't wait to see what this evolves into.

The Suffrajets are Tess Gill, Laurie Norton, and Dia Marie Shepardson, who are the writers of this "Musical Seance," and Tom Bartos, who composed the music. Shepardson also serves as director, while Gill and Norton portray, respectively, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie C. Claflin. (Gill also plays the cello and Norton the ukulele). Woodhull and Claflin are actual historical personages, who lived remarkable lives in New York during the second half of the 19th century; Woodhull ran for president in 1872—the first woman ever to do so—with Frederick Douglas as her running mate. (Grant won.) She and her sister also set up their own brokerage firm on Wall Street—another first for women. But their dabblings in spiritualism and belief in free love cost them their credibility, and they have sunk into obscurity. The Suffrajets are going to remedy that.

Their show utilizes a panoply of styles to tell the sisters' fascinating stories in songs and scenes of great variety and charm. A sequence in which Tennie acts as spiritual advisor to a succession of very different clients is one of the most ingenious of the show's segments, deftly and economically illustrating both the sisters' rise in influence and the social and cultural tenor of the times in which they lived. Some sections of the show are entirely abstract, such as a felicitous early musical number in which the performers, at cello and uke, set the stage for what's to come by naming the women whose careers were made possible by the work of pioneers like Woodhull and Claflin. There's a similar interlude later in the show in which Woodhull's downslide in the popular press is charted with evocative music and movement.

Other parts of the story are told more traditionally, including a rousing interactive campaign rally that constitutes the climax of the evening.

Some more work is needed: the ending of the piece comes too quick and too abruptly; we've come to care for these two women and we want a less peremptory dismissal of their final years and legacy. And there may be too many different styles in this show—although I suspect that the connected notions of collage and collision are both at the root of what The Suffrajets are after in this piece. In any event, I am eager to see how they finish it. There's potentially a work of great power and intelligence being created here, one that promises to be a good deal of fun for thoughtful audiences.

Gill and Norton are fine musicians and performers, by the way, with Norton particularly affecting as Tennie.

The Swan, by Elizabeth Egloff, is quite a remarkable work. It’s half allegory, half dream sequence. It’s dangerous theatre because it requires that the dramaturg be competent enough to see past the words on the page, which on first read might seem like gibberish. And, once mounted, it assumes that its audience members are all capable of independent thought and imagination. In short, it’s my understanding of what theatre is supposed to be all about.

A fairy tale for adults, The Swan, set in Nebraska, tells the story of thrice-married Dora Hand, whose last husband shot his brains out a day after their wedding. Spirit beaten by relentless male abandonment, Dora endures a long-term, tediously boring affair with married milkman Kevin. Kevin openly keeps her with his wife’s full knowledge, pays her bills, and worships her despite (or possibly because of) her emotional unavailability.

Then, inexplicably, a swan crashes quite literally into their lives through her picture window. The passion Dora denies Kevin suddenly manifests itself in her efforts to nurse the swan, whom she names Bill, back to health. But Bill doesn’t merely recover. He transforms into a young handsome human man who knows nothing of human emotional fickleness. He loves Dora with the fervor of a jealous pet. To the equally jealous Kevin’s fury, Dora begins to respond in kind, and Kevin’s maniacal intervention comes too late as Dora begins her own spiritual—and physical—transformation into a swan.

The set, for the most part, is like Dora’s world: sparse, cold, almost sterile—except for the beautiful translucent gauze scrim, designed by Nikolaus Webern, which serves as both picture window and dance floor where the swan finally makes his benefactress’s soul one with his own. Eva Burgess’s direction keeps the action always flowing.

All three actors handle Egloff’s text seamlessly even as it grows increasingly bizarre and surreal. Both Stephanie Barton-Farcas as Dora and T.J. Mannix as bewildered Kevin ably capture the unromantic, lived-in look of people who have been up and down the dark highway a few times over. Exotically handsome Karam Puri, as Bill the Swan, is superb, especially in his physicalizations. Even as he transmogrifies from wounded bird to curious human, Puri’s Swan has no agenda but to heal and to claim his mate.

Nicu’s Spoon Productions has done a fine job with this challenging play. Extra kudos for having the courage to mount it in the first place. I hope they can restage it again soon and pull in the audience and sponsorship that they deserve.

The wit and cynicism of Dorothy Parker and the "Vicious Circle"—the select group of mostly theatre writers and critics who met regularly for lunch throughout the 1920s at a large round table at the Algonquin Hotel—are once again brought to life in Peccadillo Theatre Company’s production of the new musical—yes, musical—The Talk of the Town. I am both happy and relieved to report that the show is delightfully entertaining, capturing the quips, critiques, and putdowns of this legendary group, and lovingly touching on the many relationships, romantic and otherwise, that grew out of it.

I mention being relieved. I’ll admit up front that I was skeptical going into the show. It is, after all, about a group of writers known for their dry and witty one-liners. I personally couldn’t imagine this subject as a musical; I worried that the wit might be drained away in order to make room for the songs. The surprise here is that the music in The Talk of the Town captures the spirit of the Round Table as deftly as do the spoken words. The songs are sarcastic and bawdy, full of gentle jabs and stinging slaps. There is no change of tone when the cast begins to sing. And Mercedes Ellington’s choreography is whimsical, naughty, and even a little arrogant.

The group that gathered around the infamous round table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin included novelists, critics, and playwrights, such as Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber, and the team of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It also included the young Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker magazine during this time, and Neysa McMein, who did the illustrations for its cover, and threw famous cocktail parties in her studio while she painted. The "Talk of the Town" column that occupied the first page of The New Yorker was often filled with the lively gossip that originated at this table. The members of the group, each famous in his or her own right, became more famous for simply being a part of this group. At a certain point the table actually had a velvet rope in front of it. People would sit at tables nearby to watch and, if they were lucky, be the first to hear the snappy morsels of social commentary that the group was expected to produce regularly. Eventually their lives took them to other places—several of them to Hollywood—and the group that had no formal purpose for existing to begin with slowly dissipated.

The Talk of the Town is successful at showing us how these very different personalities came together to create a common experience. It also takes us beneath the surface to touch on many of the details of the relationships within the group. Parker and Benchley, for instance, had strong feelings for each other that never quite had a space to grow, and Ferber was a close confidante and mentor to Sherwood, inspiring him to write his first play based on his experience in World War I. There are dark moments as well, such as Kaufman and Connelly’s decision to no longer work together, and Parker’s many depressions and unsuccessful suicide attempts. The pressure of these real life events made it difficult to uphold the illusion of the constant party that was supposed to be going on. The writing—book, lyrics, and music are all by Ginny Redington and Tom Dawes—never gives too much or too little detail. It never gets bogged down in the things that went wrong, but neither does it ignore them and settle for a glossier version of the story.

Crisply and seamlessly directed by Dan Wackerman, the play flows cleanly from scene to scene and song to song at a gently invigorating pace. Caroline McMahon as Dorothy Parker and Chris Weikel as Robert Benchley are captivating in the roles of consummate party people with deep and troubling personal lives beneath the surface. Rob Seitelman is delicious as Alexander Woollcott, the ringmaster of the group. Donna Coney Island is striking as Edna Ferber, a commanding woman at a time when women were not generally thought of as leaders. The scenic design by Chris Jones and lighting by Dana Sterling and Renee Molina are simple and elegant, giving a playfully artificial backdrop to the lives of the people on stage.

The mission of the Peccadillo Theatre Company is “to restore buried gems to their rightful owners: the American theatergoers.” The company has, in fact, already produced several works by some of the people portrayed in this musical. With The Talk of the Town, they have restored the artists themselves in a loving tribute. They are certainly the right people to undertake this task. This playfully glowing gem deserves a long and healthy life of its own after this run.

Wings Theatre Company’s production of Clint Jefferies and Paul L. Johnson’s new musical The Three Musketeers has passed a very severe test. I strongly dislike most musicals, and most modern musicals even more. Yet I find that I can’t say enough good things about The Three Musketeers.

Above all, Jefferies’s book and lyrics show a thorough respect for Dumas’s original, crediting the audience with sufficient intelligence to follow its arcane intrigues and centuries-old mores. Familiarity with the book and its many stage and screen adaptations will enhance your appreciation but aren’t necessary. Young D’Artagnan (Ryan Boda) comes to Paris seeking his fame and fortune and befriends the eponymous musketeers (who curiously always fight with swords and never muskets): Athos (Stephen Cabral), Porthos (David Weitzer), and Aramis (David Velarde). The King they serve, Charles XIII, is a weak-willed fop (hilariously portrayed by Josh Grisetti in a Veronica Lake wig, lipstick, and women’s shoes). The real power behind the throne is the hissable villain Cardinal Richelieu (David Macaluso), who, in an effort to consolidate his power, schemes to entrap the sensible queen Anne (Kim Reed) in her affair with the English Duke of Buckingham (David Garry). (In this very French story, we are on the side of all the adulterers: D’Artagnan has his own thing going with the married Constance Bonacieux, played by Nalina Mann.)

Richelieu’s prime agent of evil is the duplicitous Milady de Winter (Pamela Brumley), a black widow spider who’d sell out her grandmother if she thought it was to her advantage. As in all tellings of the tale we see far too little of our musketeers, who are primarily the comic relief and D’Artagnon’s allies in his many contretemps. This particular version focuses heavily on the wrongs of Milady, and her rather brutal comeuppance, justice of a rather Medieval sort, which this production very boldly does not shy away from.

The score matches the book in intelligence, and a good deal of the action is carried by the songs, making the show at times feel close to operetta. At close to three hours though, some trimming seems to be called for. Unlike Les Miserables, for example, the source material doesn’t seem to bear the gravity usually afforded such an epic treatment. A simple melodrama, it would make more sense at two hours, though I wouldn’t envy the task of removing any of the uniformly excellent material. The youthful cast go at it hammer and tongs and seem to be having a great deal of fun. The intimacy of the house makes their vocal performances even more of a treat. The show-stopping number at the end of the first act involving the whole cast will blow you away.

If Jefferies and Johnson create more musicals like this, it may make a convert out of this inveterate musical-hater.

So Einstein, Copernicus, Galileo, and Karl Marx are in a room together...

If that sounds to you like the setup for a terrible joke, well, you're half right. Alec Duffy's extraordinary play The Top People of the Millennium Sing Their Favorite Schubert Lieder takes off from this goofy premise and elicits a great many laughs, mostly at Karl Marx's expense. But there's a great deal more going on here: Duffy has transcended the obvious comic potential of his premise to create a thoughtful, graceful, timely, and inspiring work of theatre. As dense and difficult as it is startling—Copernicus conjures an ephemeral spirit and spins out poetry, dance, and complicated mathematical formulas; and all four of our "heroes" spend a good of time singing Schubert songs in untranslated German—The Top Ten People is evocative and provocative; it gave my companion and me several hours of post-theatre discussion (and I'm still processing, and mulling over, bits of it a couple of days later). It's as rich, full, and intoxicating an experience as a theatre-lover could hope for.

So as I was saying, Einstein, Copernicus, Galileo, and Karl Marx are in a room together. What room?—I don't know: some sort of anteroom in the eternal, I imagine; a place where these four pillars of Western Civilization have gathered to find out their relative standings on Biography's Top Ten People of the Millennium List. As we first meet them, Galileo is composing a tune on a piano; Copernicus is scribbling in chalk on the floor, working out what looks like a complicated scientific theorem; Einstein is knitting; and Marx is, well, bored. He eats a pickle. He draws a smiley face on the floor in chalk. Finally, as the show proper begins, he moves to the piano and begins to sing one of his favorite Schubert lieder (Duffy is nothing if not literal about his title)—but he mispronounces some of the German words. Over and over again. Galileo, accompanying him, corrects him and then gets annoyed.

What's going on here, you're asking? Well, soon the silliness starts to coalesce into very meaningful chatter. Einstein wonders (a) what number he'll be on the top ten list, (b) whether Gandhi is also on the list, and (c) where is the wine that was promised. Galileo, a bit of a brooder, takes issue with the whole notion of the list, especially the very strong probability that all of its members will be White European Men (and he bets Einstein a thousand dollars that Gandhi won't be on it).

Copernicus continues his work, as if in a reverie, until he pauses to sing his own favorite Schubert lieder. Einstein and Marx indulge in some small talk; Marx seems to have a sort of crush on the scientist, and in between nervous helpings of a variety of snacks tries to work out a strategy for connecting with him. (Arthur Aulisi, who plays Marx, is hilarious executing a potpourri of physical comedy shtick to literalize his character's dilemma and apparent ineptitude—everything from losing his chair to smashing a jelly donut onto his chest.)

Galileo points out that apart from the lack of representation of non-white, non-male, non-European people on the list, there's also a preponderance of scientists. Where are the artists? Why are we so fixated on individuals—what about the many important achievements of groups over the past thousand years? And then he rises, to be interviewed by a public radio program that is about to premiere his musical compositions, all of which are written for non-traditional instruments (e.g., one is scored for four helicopters).

If it still seems a bit confusing, a bit surreal, a bit strange and silly—well, it is. But the diffuseness is purposeful (i.e., there's a method to Duffy's madness). Galileo's musings inspire us to consider... lots of things. Why does music have to be written for traditional instruments, to mention one obvious example. Why do we value science over art? Why do we value politics and economics at all? What does a list like this one tell us about our society and ourselves?

Why do we make lists?

Galileo and Einstein hash out quantum theory. When we make a list like this, are we somehow altering the thousand years of civilization we're aiming to measure with it?

Why are Schubert lieder the one and only thing that all four of our cultural heroes seem able to appreciate and enjoy together?

The Top Ten People is awesomely generous with its wit and its insight, and although I know I didn't understand everything in it, I can't remember when I've gotten so much intellectual nourishment from a 90-minute play. Plus, it's funny—Aulisi, as I've mentioned, is terrific as the clumsy Karl Marx; Amy Laird Webb is just as entertaining as an understated Einstein and Eugene Rohrer is superb as a bemused but curmudgeonly Galileo. It's beautiful, too: Barnarby Carpenter (Copernicus) and David Schreiner (The Shadow; Copernicus's doppelganger from the spirit world) execute stunning singing and movement in several sequences that serve to remind us of the glory of music and ballet and the power of abstract image and sound.

The real-life top ten list is slipped in slyly, validating Duffy's thesis. I remember when A&E announced it five years ago, it seemed to make sense. Now I'm not so sure. Which is exactly why The Top Ten People is so valuable and so compelling. It's a show to test your assumptions about everything, including off-the-wall fringe-y theatre with deliberately silly, long titles. Go see it.

Serving as backdrop for the new play The Trading Floor is a collage of posters and handbills from ACT-UP from the late 1980s; occupying a fairly central position on this wall is a photo of then-President Ronald Reagan, with the caption "He Kills Me."

The sight of that, in the middle of the week of National Mourning for the just-deceased Reagan, caught me by surprise. And then I started to think about the event depicted and celebrated in The Trading Floor—a small but very public demonstration, on September 14, 1989, in which seven ACT-UP members made their way into the New York Stock Exchange, where they handcuffed themselves to a guard rail and threw fake dollar bills onto the trading room floor, all to call attention to the shamefully high profits being realized by the pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome, manufacturer of the seemingly miraculous AIDS medication known as AZT. Think about what these men accomplished: they got past security and onto the floor of the NYSE, they delivered their message before being arrested, and—most significantly—they achieved their goal, helping to drive the price of AZT down by 20%.

Now think about whether anything like this could happen in the America of 2004. The Trading Floor, far from being merely a docudrama about an interesting if relatively little-known event in the annals of gay rights, emerges resonantly as an examination of a dying brand of grass roots activism. The half-dozen individuals who comprise Collaboration Town, the theatre collective responsible for this production—all recent graduates of Boston University—were in grade school when the events of this play happened; for them, this tale is remote history. What's exciting is that they've been inspired enough by it to place the story on stage, with dynamic results.

Using texts by several of the people who participated in the demonstration, as well as material by contemporary observers like Tim Miller and David Wojnarowicz,  the members of Collaboration Town have created a "biography" of the event—part docudrama in the style of Anna Deavere Smith or Moises Kaufman, part artistic meditation in the manner of Charles L. Mee. The product is very much their own, exhibiting a sensibility that exults in both the youthfulness of its creators and the deadly serious sense-of-purpose of its subjects. The Trading Floor contains lots of back story about the demonstrators (and I would have liked to know how much is fact and how much is fancy) that explores the realities of being a gay man in the 1980s: Gregg is a promiscuous, ambisexual, post-disco proto-club kid, as likely infected by a needle as via intercourse; Richard is a performance artist who has lost a lover to AIDS; and James is a closet case working out his feelings of repression and guilt in the surprisingly public forum of ACT-UP.

Their stories converge as the demonstration takes shape, under the leadership of a charismatic stockbroker-turned-activist named Peter. We watch the planning and strategizing unfold, and discover the personal costs to each of the participants. Even though we know how the story is going to come out, the suspense is well-built and palpable here; like the musical 1776, The Trading Floor's great success is in holding its audience's interest even though the ending is never in doubt.

The six young writer/performers responsible for The Trading Floor are Jesica Avellone, Geoffrey Decas, Terri Gabriel, Matthew Hopkins, Boo Killebrew, and Jordan Seavey. They prove themselves adept theatre artists, shaping the material with a skill that belies their relative inexperience. There are a few places where their artistic immaturity catches them—the insertion of a "what happened afterward" scene in front of the climactic depiction of the demonstration is a misstep; and there are sections that feel too close to Angels in America and The Normal Heart for comfort. But make no mistake: Collaboration Town is a theatre company to reckon with. I will look forward eagerly to their next project.

All six are commendable performers, too (they're joined in the cast by John Wernke, who makes a strong impression as the sadly conflicted James). Avellone, Gabriel, and Killebrew play men much of the time—a conceit that doesn't work as well as it might; my companion at the theatre remarked (and I agreed) that it might have been more interesting to have these actresses play some of the women, gay or straight, who were involved in ACT-UP instead. That said, both Avellone and Killebrew bring real power and passion to their performances here; they're matched by Seavey and, particularly, Hopkins, whose performance as Peter is enormously compelling and layered.

It's just great to see these young artists so eagerly tackle a difficult, complicated, and controversial subject such as this one, and to succeed so admirably. The Trading Floor is an excellent and valuable lesson in theatre, in contemporary social history, and in the rights and duties of every American. I urge you to see it.

The Trial is the premiere production of Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, and so it's worth saying something about this brand new company before I talk about the play itself. Phoenix is an actor-driven troupe, founded and managed by five players who were mainstays of Jean Cocteau Repertory's acting ensemble for many years; they've collaborated here with a number of other very experienced actors and designers and the distinguished director Eve Adamson (the Cocteau's founder). The point is that, unlike most new theatre groups that arrive on the off-off-Broadway scene, the Phoenix has a lot of expert talent behind it, whose work theatregoers are very familiar with. In just four short months—Phoenix was initiated in August—they have mounted a full-fledged revival of a difficult and complicated play; no easy proposition even for the most experienced hands.

They have, in very large measure, succeeded impressively: know-how goes a long way. The physical production—Robert Klingelhoefer's stark, moveable set composed of dark doorframes and uncomfortable-looking prison cots; Margaret A. McKowen's varied and often fanciful costumes; Tony Mulanix's moody, angular lighting; and Ellen Mandel's arresting and sometimes unnerving score—is top-notch. Adamson's staging is clear and focused and frequently riveting. The performances of the fourteen actors are consistently fine (and some of them—notably Craig Smith's elegant tour de force as an amoral lawyer, Elise Stone's turn as a grimy and grasping landlady, and Angela Madden's nearly Dietrich-esque take on a bored prostitute—are better than that). If future work from the Phoenix is of the caliber of what's on view here, then it's probably already fair to say that New York has a worthy new theatre company in its midst—and we can't have too many of those, can we?

If you're sensing that I have some reservations about The Trial, though—well, I do. But they're almost all about the play itself. This is a dramatization of Kafka's novel about Joseph K, a bank manager who is awakened one morning by loud knocking that turns out to be coming from a pair of guards who are there to arrest him. They don't, or won't, or can't tell him what he's being arrested for; K never finds out, in fact, what his "crime" actually is. But he's subjected to a series of escalating and intensifying personal intrusions. As his trial nears, he's bounced around from Inspector to Bailiff to Law Clerk to Advocate to Judge without recourse or satisfaction; the only thing that comes clear as events transpire is that there's no way out. It's the kind of grotesquely absurd situation that would feel hilarious if it weren't so obviously serious.

Throughout, K grapples with the notion of "freedom." Kafka and his interpreters (dramatists Andre Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault, translators Joseph & Leon Katz) intend, I think, an existential question here: near the end, K turns on all the other characters in the play—interrogators, lawyers, so-called friends and family—and declares "Each of you belongs to all, and even though none of you is under arrest, I feel, I know, you're less free than I am."

The play The Trial was written in 1947, and it may well have jolted audiences then. Here's my trouble with it: after 1984, after Godot, after Ionesco, heck, after Monty Python—how can The Trial jolt us in 2004? The ground covered here—bureaucracy carried to absurd degrees, conspiracy lurking behind every corner, antic sex as a kind of life-preserver; first and foremost, whether anything actually means anything anymore—is familiar terrain in our post-post-modern world.

So I didn't find much that was new or resonant in The Trial; in fact, I was mostly aware that I wanted to laugh, but somehow felt constrained from doing so (which means something, but I'm not quite sure what).

Director Adamson suggests, in a program note, that The Trial is about totalitarianism and thus may be viewed as a cautionary tale (you can read her note here). I disagree: I think the play is about philosophical abstracts more than political realities; but more important, I didn't find anything in this production to convince me otherwise. I wonder if some of the choices made here—in particular, the casting in the lead role of John Lenartz, a very capable actor but, at least in this performance, not an endearing or heroic one—ultimately work against the production. (Another example is the suit of clothes that McKowen has given to Joseph K, which is almost too reminiscent of Stanley Simmons' costumes for the original Broadway Waiting for Godot.)

But even if the play finally didn't affect me in a significant way, I have nothing but respect and admiration for what the folks behind it are up to. Our theatre needs more serious-minded work—work that's done for it's own sake, not just to showcase budding artists looking for TV or film work. Phoenix Theatre Ensemble promises to be the real deal. I await their next effort with eagerness.

Upon seeing Stone Soup Theatre Arts’ production of The Trial of God, my first inclination was to race home to my laptop and Google Elie Wiesel, the play's author. I wanted to know the details of his life to further understand the impetus for this political drama that places God on trial in the midst of religious war. My Google search taught me that Wiesel was born in Romania in 1928. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, liberated in 1945, and appointed Chair of the U.S. Presidential Commission on the Holocaust in 1978. I discovered that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. And I found the following quote (was it stated in 1943 or 2003—or on a day before, during or after?): “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensibilities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.” (http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org)

As part of the UnConvention Theatre Festival, The Trial of God is Stone Soup's contribution to an examination of the ongoing plight of war, freedom, and human rights. Wiesel originally set his play in 1649 Poland following an organized massacre of the Jews. In the play, three wondering minstrels travel to a devastated city with the hope of entertaining for the dead. They aim to judge the wicked and reward the victims through their songs and rhymes. The spectacle they ultimately perform is a trial with God as its defendant. The trial's debate is twofold: who owns God and whom did God disown. At the center of the trial (and the play) is a Jewish father named Berish, whose entire family has been murdered, save his daughter Hanna. It is Berish who feels disowned by a negligent God. His argument in the trial is that God must be on the side of the Christian killers, for why else would God allow Berish’s loving family to be unjustly murdered. The trial illuminates religious conflicts, political agendas, and multiple persecutions against humanity. It is Berish’s daughter Hanna who ultimately sees God in every man, every action, every devastation, and every hope.

The ensemble of actors give cohesive and well-intentioned performances. The multi-racial cast includes: Dondrie Burnham, Nat Cauldwell, Jason DeMarchi, Eric Eisenbrey, Teresa Jusino, Marsha Martinez, Shawn Shafner, and Ben Trawick-Smith.

Nadine Friedman’s direction finds it strength in the subtle telling of a provocative story. She strives to activate real people in an unbearable world. And she inspires interesting and truthful performances from her company of actors. However, I question the choice of updating the story, setting it in present-day upstate New York (as noted in an article included in the press packet, not the program). How this is more evocative than Wiesel’s original lost city in Poland is unclear to me, particularly given that the formal dialogue in the script is reflective of another time. I don’t believe in this case it was necessary to update the story to highlight its contemporary relevance. There are obvious parallels between Wiesel’s Trial of God and Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (trial and all). I missed the Brechtian stamp that potentially could have enhanced the political agenda of Friedman’s direction.

Dana Schloss’s set design is a minimal composition of wood tables and chairs that, oddly enough, seem to cramp the small studio space at the Abingdon Theatre. Costume designer Coleen Scott has benefited most readily from the updating of the production, which enables a design of jeans, black shirts, and baseball caps. But the effect is too similar to a Gap ad, and not the reality and complexity of Wiesel’s play. Sean Linehan’s lighting is most reflective of the integrity of the play's themes. His design evokes the diffused and amber tones of twilight, capturing those early morning or early evening moments when the sun has escaped our view, hiding behind the horizon—that period between light and darkness—that state of ambiguity and obscurity.

What I appreciate most about this production of The Trial of God (and previous Stone Soup productions) is that they do provoke thought. They have an agenda that champions the disenfranchised, the misused, and the misunderstood. They seek out issues and stories that need to be told. They see the human journey through the eyes of many races, homelands, and periods in time. And they use the theatre as a means to educate. They certainly educated me, and I am thankful to know more about Wiesel and his work.

     Someone might be watching.
     Someone always is.

This simple exchange is the spine of The Trial of K., Synaesthetic Theatre’s complex and provocative adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1914 novel The Trial.

When I walked into the space one of the first things I noticed were the three cameras set up all around the playing area. At first I thought they were going to be filming the performance but as it turns out, the cameras are there for surveillance. The images of the live performance are projected onto the back wall for all to see. I was reminded how voyeuristic it is to be an audience member sitting in the dark watching other people’s lives being played out before me. However, in this production it is not just a life that is being presented for our gaze—it is the mind and more specifically the fantasies of the main character that are on display. This is what I really liked about The Trial of K. It takes the Expressionistic idea of exploring the inner workings of the mind and equates it with surveillance. The production’s comments on surveillance in society are at times a bit unsettling. I felt as though I was peering into the mind of the main character—as if I was one of those people (the They) who watch us on all these hidden (or not-so-hidden) cameras.

Our title character, K., has been accused of a crime. What the charges are he is never told, but that is not important. What is important is that he’s been accused and he must defend himself. At first K. doesn’t take the charges very seriously and sees them as more of a nuisance than anything else, but as time passes word of his case gets out and he is compelled to put an end to it. The courts are located in a multi-leveled house in a middle-class neighborhood and every room he goes into contains a bleak and frequently erotic adventure. In his quest for acquittal he discovers that “Innocence never helps but influences do.” So he seeks out those who have influence on the court, only to find himself on a twisting trail of endless bureaucracy. The whole time, K. is shadowed by a Kafka character who seems to be writing the story as it plays out.

The first half of this hour-and-forty-minute jaunt is so visually stimulating. It is filled with K.’s erotic fantasies, played out with beautifully stylized movement and choreographed dance. All the acting is hyper-real and it seems that every gesture has been meticulously rehearsed. There are a handful of songs that have been adapted a little to fit the play’s needs. In the second half, the song and dance numbers drop off and the play becomes more serious. As K.’s case begins to go badly and he becomes stressed by the anxiety of it all the play transforms itself to fit his mood. However, I found that I sort of missed the excitement and over-stimulation of the ensemble driven first half.

Synaesthetic’s artist collective nature pours forth from its fantastic ensemble. Everyone works in equal parts on this show and that pays off in a very stylistically even presentation. Margaret O’Sullivan delivers an absolutely stunning performance. She plays K. with so much focus that I could see her making connections to the character before my very eyes. She made me forget that she is a woman playing a man. The women of the ensemble, Aubrey Hardwick, Ginger Legon, Tina West Chavous, and Joy Lynn Alegarbes, all play male roles at some point but when they are not playing men they throw feminine sexuality about the stage with playful roughness that is quite rousing. It is interesting to note that the three men in the show, Ted Hannan, M.A. Makowski, and Clinton Powell, at some point all have a feminine quality to their characters. I really enjoyed the bending of gender roles in this production. Two performances that stood out for me were Ted Hannan as the naughty, lap dancing judge and Aubrey Hardwick as the painter with connections.

The co-directors, Joy Leonard and Chris Nichols, create a unique world that is episodic, like a dream interrupted by the reality of bureaucracy. Their focus of the eroticism of K.’s thoughts makes the show into a sort of "Trial of K., S & M"…but that works for the film noir style they establish early on. But, as I mentioned before, the spirit of that style does not span the whole play and there were times when I felt far away from the action. Overall, I like that they don’t attempt to over-interpret the text and instead leave much of the meaning for their audience to interpret.

The technical aspects of the production are outstanding. There is a short film directed by John DesRoches that illustrates Kafka’s culminating parable of the door splendidly. David Crittenden’s costumes are fabulous. The lighting, provided by Paul Hudson, is attractive and evocative. The original music composed by Rench is a lulling trip-hop fantasy in and of itself. Finally, David Szlasa’s set is an innovatively practical design in which set pieces lift right out of the stage.

The production values for this remarkable piece of theatre are equal to its insights into our current society. You don’t have to know Kafka’s novel to enjoy the show, but you will want to bring your appreciation for high art.

The tale of Don Quixote is one of hope and idealism. The Man of la Mancha is the ultimate chaser of windmills, the confused and romantic wanderer who, with his squire Sancho Panza and their trusted steed Rozinante, encounters fantastic journeys in search of his true love, the lady Dulcinea, and fortune befitting his true status as a Knight Errant.

Now, granted, his title was self-imposed after voraciously reading an insane number of books about knight errantry. He nonetheless serves as terrific fodder for theatre-makers, who twist and morph and cut and paste this story into equally fantastic journeys. Right in line with this is the current fantastic journey created by the Double-Edge Theatre, The UnPOSSESSED. They’ve transformed the Annex Theatre at La MaMa into a sparse yet energetic playground on which they set the stage for a very exciting and daring production.

They’ve got a lot going on here. At times it’s like Don Quixote goes to the Circus, the Carnival, or the Renaissance Faire. These good folks from Massachusetts have created a found-object extravaganza, a burlesque vagabond minstrel show teeming with music, shadow puppets, and carnie side-show style characters that are all over the place, literally and figuratively. They are taking risks textually, visually, and physically and through these risks breathe fresh air into a story that is too often made staid or static by more traditional or commercial theatre troupes.

Upon entering the theater I was delightfully overwhelmed by the grand scale on which the company took up space. Immediately visible are Richard Newman and Hayley Brown as about twenty-foot-tall human metaphors for the windmill. I found my seat and as I began to settle in I was surprised to find Matthew Glassman as the adorably bumbling Sancho Panza caught up a rope (quite literally) like a skittish kitty in a tree. I knew right away that this piece was going to deliver big on spectacle. The performance continued on like that: a surprise around every corner, the audience unable to choose which way to look.

What I didn’t expect, however, was to actually feel The UnPOSSESSED. We, the unknowing daredevils in the front row, were quite surprised when Justin Handley Handley (who plays a number of utility roles throughout the evening) whizzed by on a fabric trapeze, thrilling us with an unexpected quick breeze. And Carlos Uriona’s Quixote kept us on our toes (and slightly back in our seats!) when he charged all over the place with his sword or on the very funny Rozinante (I won’t tell you why Rozinante is so funny—it’s a little secret that I thoroughly enjoyed). The element of danger present was exhilarating; especially the precarious physical situations Glassman, Handley and Newman got themselves into.

Double-Edge is not simply a physical theater company—they’re also very good actors. Richard Newman as Master Peter (among others) is infinitely engaging. I always find Sancho Panza to be the truly endearing character; the one that pulls on our heart strings with his fumbling good intentions. In the case of The UnPOSSESSED, however, Glassman’s charming Sancho shares these qualities with Uriona’s fascinating Don Quixote. Their relationship is dynamic; sometimes they seem like a couple of blushing teenagers awkwardly groping their way through their first date and other times it really seems like Quixote might actually knock Sancho out entirely.

Carlos Uriona simply is the Man of la Mancha. He is stoically delusional, bursting forth from one flight of fancy to the next. His Quixote charges full throttle towards his imaginary enemies and has the audience rapt—when he speaks there is no question that he is what you’re watching. His Quixote is the definitive “quixotic.” I will forever compare future embodiments of the famous knight errant to his.

Welcome to New York, Double Edge. I look forward to many happy returns.

Is it Christopher Durang? Edward Albee? A bird? A plane? No, it’s Harry Kondoleon—the Yale graduate who passed away from AIDS a decade ago and is the playwright of this surreal and darkly absurd play. The Double Helix Theatre Company offers this revival of The Vampires, granting an opportunity to once again see this irreverent and biting play that was originally produced in 1984.

It’s a complicated, yet strangely simple play about two brothers—Ian and Ed. Ian thinks he’s a vampire, but in reality is really a theatre critic (hum!—interesting parallel). He wrote a review of Ed’s play. The problem is that he didn’t review a produced performance but a development reading. So, to rectify an already heated and rivalrous relationship, Ian agrees to mount a backers’ audition of the play in his living room and even goes so far as to offer to rewrite Ed’s play. Ian’s wife CC makes the costumes. Ed’s wife Pat takes on one of the roles. And the rebellious Zivia, the 13-year-old spawn of Ed’s loins, travels through this play like a new age Renfield—she doesn’t eat flies, but would certainly fit right into any Bram Stoker novel. What ultimately comes into play is a farcical extemporization of family dysfunction—with all its jealousies, convoluted family values, and delusions of grandeur. Did I mention that Ian thinks he’s a vampire?

The company of actors includes Keith Anderson, Sean Breault, Amanda Fekety, Robyn Ganeles, Elissa Lash, and Jason Woodruff. They work at a sometimes ferocious and often shrill pace. Too frequently the size and melodrama of their performances overpowers Kondoleon’s already articulate play. Basically, they seem to be working too hard. Ganeles, though, is quite effective as the adolescent Zivia, certainly the most extreme character in the play. She plays her role with intriguing restraint.

Director Pat Diamond has the best of intentions, guiding his cast through the extremes of physical action and storytelling, but he is denied the possibility of actualizing the visual possibilities of the play due to the confines of the Phil Bosakowski Theatre, which feels cumbersome and claustrophobic as it is utilized by this production. Erik Flatmo’s set complicates matters by placing an overstuffed leather sofa in the center of usable space, causing Dana Sterling, the production's lighting designer, to struggle against self-conscious shadows. I wish the intimate simplicity of the theatre had been used to advantage instead of manipulated into something it is not.

Unfortunately, the experience is too large, too loud, and too uneven. There is a disconnection between the goals of the production and the outcomes, which left me unsatisfied. I acknowledge though the excitement of the company and their heedful efforts.