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

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

Twenty years ago, nobody knew what a Whoopi Goldberg was. Today, she's one of the few genuinely iconic entertainers of her generation. No "Goldberg" required anymore: she's just Whoopi now, and as soon as her familiar warm growl comes up on the loudspeaker (to passive-aggressively warn us to shut off our cell phones), the audience coos with anticipation, ready to welcome her back to the place where it literally all began. Whoopi is back on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in an updated version of the solo show that rocketed her to fame. Whether you're a fan, or just curious what all the fuss was about, see it. There's actually very little else that needs to be said.

Okay, I will say a little more. Whoopi is a 100 (or so) minutes of Whoopi doing what she does best: playing five very different, very smart characters that you know she loves, commenting on the state of the world as she sees it, and connecting with a live audience. That last part is in some ways the most challenging: what she clearly craves is the give-and-take of the comedy club, which is unfamiliar terrain to folks used to the "rules" of Broadway theatre—viz., sit quietly and clap when it's over. Whoopi wants us to break the rules. When people come in late, she wants to know why, and she means it. (When a couple informed her that they had missed the first half of her show because of an emergency, she grew concerned and then, assured everything was now alright, promised them free tickets to another date so they could see what they had missed. I think she meant that too.)

She is, first and foremost, a supremely talented actor, and so the various characters that she creates for us—with the meagerest of props and accessories; it's almost all done with voice and body language—are the show's essential core. She opens with one of her signature personas, Fontaine, the streetwise drug addict. He tells a gorgeous story about his visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (a repeat from the 1984 show), and he also delivers what amounts to the evening news, riffing on the current administration's foibles and channeling the frustration of 55 million Kerry voters in a jokey and occasionally profane monologue about George, Condi, and the rest of the gang that culminates in a prudent reminder to be vigilant and a warning to the President, only half meant in jest, borrowing from The Police: "Every breath you take/Every move you make/I'll be watching you."

The show's second segment involves Lurlene, who ruminates on the trials of menopause, and the unfair way that male menopause seems to be celebrated in the media but female menopause is treated as a tragic secret. There's lots of what used to be called blue material here, crowd-pleasing though certainly not so ground-breaking as it must have been two decades ago; there actually was a time, not so long ago, when people didn't talk so unabashedly about male urination habits and the hazards of a bikini wax, but none of this is taboo anymore.

My favorite piece follows, one about a disabled woman who surprises herself by discovering love in the non-judgmental eyes of a matter-of-fact young man. This is not only the most emotionally affecting of the evening's monologues, but also the most demanding: Whoopi reminds us why she's an Academy Award-winning actress in this effortless, self-effacing tour de force.

Two more characters round out the show, one old, one new. The former is the famous Valley Girl character—another fine and surprising bit of writing and performing that is absolutely worth repeating. The latter is a giddy throwaway about an "Orderie" (i.e., Law & Order addict) that's very funny, especially if you've been a devotee of the long-running series.

The show is so much fun that we're loath for it to end; but when it does, we feel like we've gotten our money's worth and then some. Whoopi delivers what her fans want and expect, yet she still manages to surprise and startle us. She's a pro, no doubt about it; better than that, she's smart and passionate, and not at all interested in complacently resting on any laurels. My companion, who knew the original 1984 show, estimated that about a quarter of the material here is brand new.

Kathleen Turner has said that she knew even when she was in college that she was born to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The good news is: she's right. From the moment she arrives on stage in the exquisite new production of Edward Albee's masterpiece, she embodies all the contradictions of this extraordinary character—the self assurance, the vulgarity, the intelligence, the sophistication, the wretchedness, and the pain. Her work here is revelatory. See this play.

See it because, too, you don't often have the opportunity to do so. Virginia Woolf? was last on Broadway in 1976, which means that more than one generation of theatregoers, mine included, has not been around for a first-class New York mounting of this play. Sure, you can see the famous movie version, but after you see it live—alive!—I don't think you'll go back to the celluloid anytime soon. This is authentically epic theatre of the sort that only happens once a season or so, if we're lucky. I was surprised to realize that the plays it feels most like are the O'Neill masterworks Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh—like them, Virginia Woolf? is grueling, complicated, feverishly emotional, naked, and perilous. Coming back into the light after three fraught hours in darkness with a family so archetypal yet so individual felt nothing short of cathartic.

The play is about George and Martha, a couple who have been married 23 years. He's a history professor at a small New England college, and she's the daughter of the college's president. She married him, she explains at one point, because she thought he was ripe for grooming to become her father's successor; she was wrong about that. They exist together now in a symbiotic relationship that's evolved into either death grip or mortal combat or both: the fire that each one spews is oxygen to the other.

We watch George and Martha on a particularly bitter night, very late, after a reception for new professors at Martha's father's house; it's early fall. Martha has invited a good-looking young biology professor, Nick, and his wife, Honey, to visit them. It's after 2:00 a.m.

The guests arrive, much to George's displeasure. Drinking, conversation, and more drinking ensues. In Act One—and George and Martha are as conscious as we are that there's a performance going on; Nick and Honey take much longer to understand this—the older couple shock, disarm, and eventually neutralize into submission the younger one. Martha takes the lead, volleying insults at and around the husband she regards as ineffectual and invisible—a flop, she calls him; a bog. He mostly takes it, though sometimes he returns the serve, usually with biting sarcasm ("Martha? Rubbing alcohol for you?"). It's mean and it's funny: they've played this game before; it's always about them (by which I mean to say that it doesn't matter who's in the room with them, as long as there's someone); there's perverse pleasure being had in the torturous discomfort that they're arousing in their visitors.

Act Two is all about destroying Nick. Here's where Albee gets political—this part of the play has more in common with The Zoo Story or The Goat than anything by O'Neill. Nick—ambitious, craven, hypocritical—epitomizes all that's rotten at the core of the American Dream. He doesn't deserve to get out of this place intact, and he doesn't. But Act Three is where the real explosion—implosion?—happens. Martha has gone too far, even for her; and George has to act. Realize that for George, being authentically roused to action is significant. If you know the play, I think you will be surprised—startled—jolted—by the potency of the climax; perhaps, even, by its nature. (If you don't know the play—and I'm not giving it away here—then all I can say is watch out.)

The moment that it all came together for me—when, conversely, I completely fell apart—arrived like a fast ball that I didn't see coming. Turner and her co-star, Bill Irwin, have a chemistry that's palpable and overwhelming; in their hands the final moments of Virginia Woolf? are so tender and raw and private that they're difficult to watch—painful and terrifying.

David Harbour and Mireille Enos, who portray Nick and Honey, begin by annoying us and end up showing us how essential they are to the fabric of the play and to George and Martha's relationship. Turner and Irwin dominate the proceedings throughout, though, as they're intended to; and when one of them is absent, he or she is missed. Turner's gruff deadpan, throwing away barb after barb, is delicious; her unguarded honesty is devastating (does Martha ever actually tell a lie during the play?). Irwin is great underplaying opposite her, getting as much mileage from the slyest hint of a smile as she gets from her (Albee's word) "braying." Big clownish moments—for here, George is revealed to be a kind of clown (Martha would concur)—work brilliantly: after you've seen Irwin stealthily aim a hunting rifle at Turner's Martha, you'll never need to see it again.

Anthony Page's staging is quick, strenuous, and exacting. The set, by John Lee Beatty, is a miracle of naturalism, with the occasional off-kilter touch that we don't notice until our attention is called to it, like an oversized set of windchimes by the front door or an almost mannerist chair to which George retreats with a book at one point when he's more or less—though only temporarily—down for the count. Jane Greenwood's costumes tell us all that they should about the characters. Peter Kaczorwoski's lighting and Mark Bennett's sound design are unobtrusive and effective, as they ought to be.

I'll say one more thing before leaving you to head to the Longacre Theatre (or to click on the "Order Tickets" button in the sidebar). I was struck by how prescient Albee is in this 43-year-old play. Martha is a kind of sacred monster—a woman of privilege and power who knows she can do whatever she wants and say whatever she wants. A deliberately coarse reminiscence about a gardener who "entered" her when she was 16, for example, can't be challenged in a  room full of people who are all beholden to her father. Did Albee know that his creation would become emblematic of a whole class at the top rung of the American power structure?

That's all I have right now. See this play.

Pearl Theatre's newest production, Widowers' Houses by Bernard Shaw, brings us back to a time when ruthless self-made capitalists were persona non grata in proper society: sure, it's a study in hypocrisy, but there's something somehow refreshing about the rigid politeness of the snobbish upper classes of Victorian England. Mr. Sartorious, a slum landlord of vast wealth but no social position, actually demands affidavits from the titled relatives of his prospective son-in-law, assuring that they will receive his daughter Blanche into their homes. Imagine such worries plaguing the likes of Donald Trump or Martha Stewart.

For his part, the young man, Harry Trench, is completely ready to ignore Sartorious's humble background—until, that is, he discovers the source of Sartorious's income. Then he is appalled: how can a man make his living on the backs on the poorest of the poor, charging them inflated (if meager) rents for horrific tenements that are mostly unfit for human occupation? But Sartorious is able to turn the tables on him:

SARTORIOUS: And now, Dr. Trench, may I ask what your income is derived from?
TRENCH (defiantly): From interest: not from houses. My hands are clean as far as that goes. Interest on a mortgage.
SARTORIOUS (forcibly): Yes: a mortgage on my property. When I, to use your own words, screw, and bully, and drive these people to pay what they have freely undertaken to pay me, I cannot touch one penny of the money they give me until I have first paid you your seven hundred a year out of it.

Leave it to Shaw to insert such a succinct criticism of the capitalist system inside what has heretofore felt like an almost Wildean comedy of manners. In Widowers' Houses' third act he'll propose a rather cynical resolution; until then, though, he'll keep us rapt in a torrent of theoretical discussion regarding how to improve the lot of the poor and, more pointedly, precisely who is ultimately responsible for said improvement, and how, and why.

This is Shaw's first play and far from his best, but it's absolutely worth hearing; as they so often do, the folks at Pearl are doing their audiences a great service in mounting with enormous precision and care a play that no commercial company would likely ever touch. Widowers' Houses offers some sterling opportunities to several of the Pearl's formidable resident actors: Dan Daily is at his commanding best as the pragmatic and sometimes tyrannical Sartorious; Sean McNall balances youthful decency with acute intelligence as Harry Trench; Dominic Cuskern is wondrously petty as Harry's friend Mr. William de Burgh Cokane, a gentleman obsessed with appearances and tact (at the expense of actuality and truth); and Edward Seamon is fine as a fellow with the improbable name of Lickcheese, who is one of Sartorious's rent collectors (he feels a bit like a prototype for Alfred P. Doolittle). Rachel Botchan, generally the ingénue, plays a leading lady of a very different sort here—Blanche, Sartorious's daughter and Harry's intended, is a sharp-tongued, selfish, avaricious little thing, not at all admirable and barely likable; Botchan goes at her full-force, pleased, it would seem, if we hate her down to her spoiled insides.

J.R. Sullivan is at the helm of this production, and provides the necessary pacing and motion for the thing. Design—sets by Takeshi Kata, costumes by Liz Covey, and lighting by Stephen Petrilli—are all apt and appropriate.

Shaw would learn how better to balance entertainment and edification in his later plays, but Widowers' Houses is by no means a disappointment. Pearl's production reveals it to contain plenty of food for thought—the problems of inequitable distribution in our economy not, alas, having been much solved over the last century.

I saw two of the three components of Wilde, New and Sizzling, Woman Seeking...'s summer program of new plays. The ones I caught were New and Sizzling, both compendia of short original plays; the writing is consistently sharp and the production is consistently professional, so I'm putting Woman Seeking..., a company whose work I have not seen before, on my "A list"—I'll definitely be checking them out again in the future. If your schedule permits, take in some or all of these mix-and-match evenings of theatre.

New and Sizzling are composed of five plays apiece. My favorite among the ten was The Dinner Date, by Stephen O'Rourke, which depicts a disastrous first date between two neurotically self-conscious people. She hasn't had a date in two years (compared to five years for him), and their lack of recent experience tells on them as they make faux-pas after hilarious faux-pas while trying to engage in some pre-chicken small talk. She compares the bouquet he brought her to the smell of decaying animals; he seems to get fixated on monkeys and Lucille Ball. O'Rourke spices things up by letting us hear not just what this awkward pair says to each other but also what they say to themselves—and they are their own harshest critics. It makes for a very funny and neatly incisive comedy, that is deftly performed here by Jase Draper and Ellen Mareneck.

The Dinner Date is one of the Sizzling pieces, all of which deal with relationships/sex in a more humorous, grown-up, and non-sensationalized manner than the umbrella title might suggest. The other Sizzling plays include Sweet Jane, by Ross Stoner, about a man who is still obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, even though he's about the propose to his current flame; and Anna Li's Compatible, which probes the thoughts and feelings of a couple on the brink of serious commitment. The Bodice Rippers, by Arlitia Jones, introduces us to a pair of underemployed sisters who fantasize about improving their lives by writing a women's romance novel; nicely acted by Christine Mosere and Laurie Marvald, it also features Fabio Taliercio as the fictional hunky pirate hero of their story. Finally, John Donahoe's Bundy's Follies tackles the darker side of sexual fantasy in an unsettling though not completely successful manner. It's interesting material, however, and performed with conviction by Jon Seymour and Amy McKenna. Donahoe, by the way, is the skillful director of all five Sizzling plays.

The five New plays all deal with family relationships and are, as a group, even more satisfying than the Sizzling series. The backbone of this set is Judy Carlson Hulbert's Driving Daughter, which shows, in five scenes that are sandwiched around the other four New works, the life and times of a mother and daughter, as seen from the front seat of their car. It begins with the mother trying to comfort her crying infant by taking her out for a 2am spin; from there, we follow the girl through childhood, adolescence (learning how to drive), young (and rebellious) adulthood, and finally to maturity. Hulbert manages to take in an enormous amount of living in this wise, economical play—her observations about coping with a relative with Alzheimer's, for example (in the second scene), are both profound and touching. This is a play and a playwright that we should hear from again. Ana Jacome and Mary Anna Principe are commendable as mother and daughter, respectively.

Redemption Song, which is written by Carol Schlanger and performed by Helene Galek, is a monologue about a woman who goes to Jamaica to visit her college-age daughter and experiences renewal, personally as well as in terms of her relationship with her offspring. Nice. The rest of New is broadly comic, from Donna Spector's warm-hearted look at a fortune teller and her deceased mother in Crystal Ball, to Susan Goodell's humorous yarn about a family whose members are none of them what they seem (Well Really), to the charmingly off-kilter August Jinx, by Linda Escalera Baggs, about a bride whose aunt is convinced that her wedding is doomed. The five New plays are well-staged by Andy Davis and Kathy Gail MacGowan.

New and Sizzling move quickly and pleasantly along, and the entire evening feels of a piece, rather than haphazardly stitched together as so many 10-minute-play programs often do. All in all, a most enjoyable night at the theatre.

In Woman Before A Glass, Lanie Robertson presents a semi-satisfying mixture of biography, celebrity and banality. His subject is Peggy Guggenheim, the rich patron of modern art, a woman who can be given a heaping dose of credit for the careers of painters like Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst. Guggenheim’s life is rife with enviable relationships, and an inspirational love of living artists. It’s a rarity to find someone of her economic class who not only gives to the arts, but does so because of a deep passion that artists are important, and should be fostered for their own sake.

Robertson’s play, a one-woman show, presents her near the end of her life, living in Venice in the mid-1960s, trying to decide what to do with her paintings (which she refers to, aptly, as her “children.”) The play has a promising start, as she goes through a series of dresses, connecting them to her life stories, commenting smartly on their history and their designers. She wails: “You realize there’s a history of 20th century designer gowns right here and I’ve nothing to wear!” From there, it moves freely throughout Guggenheim’s life in four parts, a bit rudderless, even as it is supported by Guggenheim’s compelling character.

Lending no small dose of gravitas to this evening is Mercedes Ruehl, who is simply astonishing to watch. She captures Guggenheim’s flare in her own singular way, effortlessly making business like mixing a drink watchable, and working her way through the text with an honesty and power some could only hope to achieve.

Costumes by Willa Kim also have beautiful authenticity, especially given their prominence in the early narrative. The scenic design by Thomas Lynch is as well-dressed as the star it supports; with colorful textures and hanging designs that allude smartly to the very style of art that was Guggenheim’s passion.

This is an enjoyable evening of theatre, but I endorse it with a bit of trepidation. Robertson’s script lends the most weight to Guggenheim’s personal life, her relationship with her daughter, her reflections on Nazi Germany. While all of this is fair game for a biography, given 90 intermissionless minutes, what makes Guggenheim a stand-out human being of the 20th century is given short shrift. While there are lists of the last names of artists all over the script (“Braque, de Chirico, Rothko, Calder, Bacon, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, Miro, DeKoonig, Delvaux,” she intones) and the occasional tidbit of anecdote (attributing her love of these paintings to Samuel Beckett), it’s weighed down with overwrought pop psychology. Perhaps Robertson wants to reveal the tragedies in Guggenheim’s life. All lives have their share of tragedy and all people have some blinders about their family. Few have the premonition, resources, and dedication that Guggenheim displayed for life, the arts, and patronage. There’s an opportunity here to get her unique perspectives on these giants of modern art; but instead we are given mostly light comedy and a heavy dose of psychoanalysis.

The question becomes, what is Robertson trying to do beyond present a place for Ruehl to shine? The slapdash narrative and lack of focus (is Guggenheim responding to her wealth, is she a bad mother, is she simply eccentric, is she responding as a prominent Jew on the heels of World War II?) makes it hard to discern. Which, in the end, pulls the punch from what are clearly intended to be emotionally cathartic moments near the end of the play.

And so Woman Before A Glass provides a fantastic opportunity to see two powerful women in the spotlight: Mercedes Ruehl and Peggy Guggenheim. Ruehl steals the show from underneath Guggenheim, unfortunately, because Robertson fails to give the uninitiated a clear picture of what was special about his subject. Coming into this performance cold (I attended with a friend who was a Peggy Guggenheim enthusiast), I would expect one would glean only the surface of Guggenheim’s importance to our lives today, and the importance of her “children.”

I’m the first one to forgive glitches in the theatre. today's high-tech, expensive world, I am grateful to see people still chomping away at the bit, bare bones, doing the work that they are called to do.

So I applaud the folks over at the American Theatre of Actors. Just blocks away from the bright lights of Broadway, they plug away in their small, downtown-esque space, doing the work that means something to them.

But Wonder Comes on the 7th Day,  which just ended a short run at ATA, seems worlds away from both Broadway and edgy downtown theater. In this world of not-quite-in-between but not-quite-on-either-team, I was left in an uncomfortable limbo. And I just couldn’t connect with the play.

The story itself centers on preparing for Grandma’s 80th birthday party. Preparations involve Father taking his arthritis meds, Mother doing the grocery shopping, and Son coming home after a long time away. Fairly straightforward, save for the fact that nobody particularly cares for one another. And when nobody on stage cares for each other, a wall gets built between actor and audience, leaving the audience hard-pressed to care about what’s going on on stage.

Writer/director Barry Primus’s play rambles on but doesn’t back itself up. The script goes into great detail about the furniture and that it is expensive and rare. The pieces they chose to use for the set were clearly from IKEA. Fine, nobody is going to lend their Eames chair to a play, but at least dress the cheap stuff up in a fancy outfit!

This lack of concern seems to carry over to the acting as well. Although the players are physically on the same stage, they never seem to be in the same world with one another. Primus has written in monologues filled with Mamet-like utterances that I assume are meant to be character- and actor-driven, but come across as the work of the heavy hand of the playwright. I felt like I was watching Method Acting students do classroom exercises. There are little things, like why does Mom enter from the market barefoot? Then she goes to the table upstage and comes downstage with shoes on. Mom emotes in a monologue. Father and son emote at each other. When Grandma finally enters at the end of Act I, her one line is delivered in a burst of emoting too.

In the end, as much as I applaud their effort, I don’t see what they’re really going for over in Wonder Comes on the 7th Day. But I do appreciate the fact that they’re doing it because, even though I didn’t, they obviously love it.

The performance begins where the renowned Bread and Puppet Theatre itself began, on the street. A group of clowns plays various band instruments as their notorious artistic director Peter Schumann dances a jelly-legged dance while waving a flag and occasionally hitting passers-by on the head. It was infinitely entertaining to watch the reactions of East Villagers as they tried to either move through the growing crowd or comprehend this bizarre happening. In some ways, I wish the performance would have stayed on the street because, as always with Bread and Puppet, the political themes of this performance should be witnessed and absorbed by as much of the general population as possible.

The annual visit by Bread and Puppet Theatre is an event that is highly anticipated by many New Yorkers. They used to be a New York-based troupe, founded by Schumann in the '60s, but they eventually moved to the greener pastures of Vermont. Bread and Puppet has intentionally remained on the fringes, refusing to succumb to commercialization or even to accept any endowments. Over the passed 40 years they have developed a reputation for producing politically charged performance art that is always as relevant as it is surreal. This year’s offering is no exception.

It’s a double bill, each a little over 45 minutes. The first, titled World On Fire, is a wild cabaret of Dadaist episodes. The piece is layered with repeated actions, strange interludes, and metaphoric scenes that evoke the state of emergency in which we currently live. My favorite repeated action is the hoisting of a pile of scrap metal high into the air and then letting it drop with a splendid crash. The Asymmetrical Prisoner-of-War Orchestra provides the show with outstanding musical interludes. The orchestra’s conductor arbitrarily points at a musician who might be playing anything from a plastic bag to a Jew’s-harp to a clarinet, creating an incredible cacophony that reminded me of a John Cage composition. I loved the mixture of real instruments and everyday items transformed into instruments. The metaphoric scenes, all performed by the National Emergency Clowns, are hilarious and poignant though I admit that I didn’t always catch Schumann’s intention. Still, the meaning is made abundantly clear. The world is on fire but we don’t smell the smoke like the rest of the world. Our politicians and corporations have to tell us about the fire and then they persuade us to buy individualized fire extinguishers. Schumann is showing us with this chaotic satire how far we have separated ourselves from the rest of the world.

Part Two of the show, Daughter Courage, has a completely different feel to it than its predecessor. It is about a young woman named Rachel Corrie who was killed while trying to prevent a Palestinian home from being bulldozed. The piece opens with the reading of a haunting and provocative letter that Corrie wrote to her mother before her death. Schumann accompanies the reading with some eerie scratching on his violin. This piece is very somber and allegorical. For example, Schumann uses a group of drummers to represent the bulldozer and a single person with hand cymbals to embody Corrie. Daughter Courage conjures the dismal atmosphere of oppression and violence using disturbingly expressive masks and shocking sounds contrasted with very significant silence. I was moved by the juxtaposition of the distorted, snobby men in bow ties with the sad parade of refugees. The masks created for this piece are extraordinary. And the Bread and Puppet signature giant puppet that appears at the end is, of course, awe-inspiring. Schumann makes Corrie’s sacrifice into a stark wake-up call to the cycle of violence that grips that area of the world.

The show provides no program so I can’t really give specific credit. I assume this is a conscious choice, and it fits their anarchic style. The large ensemble of volunteers is fantastic. They all perform with precision in a show that does not preoccupy itself with form. The National Emergency Clowns are exceptionally funny; I especially liked the one in the big, pointy hat. I really liked all the painted backdrops and banners as well. Schumann creates high production value on a low budget. The combination of found-object and high-art theatre lends the show a remarkably rich texture and seems to be an underlying metaphor for Schumann’s goal of bringing the raw and refined in the world together in harmony.

The show is a circus of symbolism and simplicity. It demands that its audience perk up and listen. Bread and Puppet Theatre has seeded an entire generation with the idea that puppet theatre can be a powerful voice of change that is accessible to anyone who wishes to listen. So get over to Theatre for the New City and get an earful and an eyeful as well. (And of course a tummyful of free bread at the end of the show.)

Claustrophobic and rather sensationally vivid, Andrew Frank's new production of Buchner's Woyzeck is every bit the angst-ridden young man's fever dream that it is billed as. It begins with a brutal murder: Woyzeck, the alienated young soldier at the center of this play who is widely regarded as drama's first "modern" protagonist, slits the throat of his pretty young wife Marie. Twice. The rest of the play, in flashback, tells us why, or at least tells us as much as it's possible to tell about why anybody does anything, which is indeed the crux of the play. It won't spoil a thing to say that it ends with a more detailed and bloodier rendering of the same murder, followed by Woyzeck's own death. It feels inevitable in the context of the drama; the question to toy with is whether it or anything is inevitable in life.

Timeless and essential issues are considered here, as you can see, from a very young man's perspective (Buchner was 24 when he wrote Woyzeck and died before he finished it). The ideas in this play—in terms of both theme and form—have gone on to inform the work of many 20th century dramatists, so if you've seen Beckett and Brecht and the rest of the usual suspects, you will perhaps be most interested in discovering how Woyzeck functions as startling and revolutionary antecedent to their work; I was. Episodic, bleak, profane (scatological, even), and reckless in its disregard of both practical and political theatre convention, it feels at once modern and remote, like a creepy German expressionist painting. At least that's how Frank has framed it, putting it right in our faces, with the audience seated on two sides of the very constricted MTS playing area (it looks more like a runway than a stage—spectators literally have to pull their legs in to make room for the actors). Maruti Evans's set is spare but still feels too big for this space, contributing to the illusion of distortion; Chris Dallos has bathed the whole thing in eerie blue light, interrupted for crowd scenes by a bright artificial illumination, that reminds us that all of what we're seeing is filtered through the disintegrating consciousness of the very troubled title character. It is, all in all, an effective and totally cool staging.

What happens in the play is that Woyzeck is assaulted by—and then finally surrenders to—the growing meaninglessness of the world around him. We see him at work, shaving his Captain's beard or on guard duty, guarding—what? We see him at play, at a carnival or getting drunk in a bar. And we see him with his wife, Marie; and we see her accepting jewelry from a handsome Drum Major and giving him what you'd expect in return. The dynamic of the play suggests that Marie's infidelity is as important as the indifference of everyone else—the Captain tells Woyzeck that he's dumb and has no virtue; a Doctor has made Woyzeck a human guinea pig, feeding him nothing but peas for a month—to Woyzeck's eventual breakdown. Which suggests questions about free will (not to mention compassion and human feeling) that are obvious and unanswerable.

Jason Howard inhabits Woyzeck so organically that he holds our sympathy throughout, no mean feat. His is a very physical, very meticulous performance, and in the confined space we see it as if under a microscope. The rest of the actors are equally impressive: Nancy Sirianni, hard-edged and opaque as Marie; Edward Sears, stern but sensual as the Drum Major; Jeffrey Plunkett, dripping puzzlement and noblesse oblige as the imperious, enigmatic Captain; and, in smaller roles, Daryl Boling, Maximillian Davis, Fiona Jones, Mac Rogers, Benjamin Thomas, Jennifer Gordon Thomas, Kim Vasilakis, and Lex Woutas (who gets to deliver my favorite line in the play, as a drunk at a tavern: "I wish our noses were two of those flowers that clowns have, and we could spray each other in the neck").

Having never seen a production of Woyzeck before this, I am glad to have had a look at it. Frank and his colleagues satisfy our curiosity about this famous but not-so-frequently-done work of theatre. And they pique our interest in whatever they have in mind to do next.

To call Wrong Way Up very wise would be accurate, but it would also probably give a very wrong impression. This show—the most fun I've had at a new musical in months, maybe years—is all about the jubilation that comes from figuring out and then following your path. The actors, musicians, and audience share in the sheer joy of the thing and when it's over, just about everybody is in a great mood. What Mamma Mia! and Brooklyn hope to do, Wrong Way Up actually does, in spades. It's a swell way to spend an evening having a blast with a roomful of strangers.

It begins with some stylized imitation-Fosse choreography against a Chicago-ish vamp from the piano. We know intuitively that this is not what we came to the quirky little two-level Belt Theater to see, and we're quickly proved right when a middle-aged man huffs onto the stage and orders everyone to stop. "This show is about me," he says, "and I'm not Pippin!" The music shifts to rock & roll, the lighting gets more natural, and we relax, knowing we're on track.

Not that the false start is just some gimmick: our hero, whose name is Arthur, headed off in the wrong direction a number of times himself, as we discover as his life story unfolds on stage. Arthur is played by Robert Whaley, the co-author of Wrong Way Up, and the info in his brief bio suggests that some of what we're seeing may well be autobiographical, at least in broad outline. Whaley's writing partner Tony Grimaldi plays guitar and also a character who self-identifies as the Greek Chorus, helping Arthur narrate his tale. Playing everyone else are two remarkable actor/singers, Jeffrey Dean Wells and Rachel S. Stern (more about them later).

The story begins in Syracuse, New York, where Arthur is the only child of a disheartened, hard-working mother and a frequently drunk, eventually absent father, whose main occupation seems to be to gamble away whatever extra money this lower-middle-class family has. Arthur reacts to his unhappy home life by becoming a petty thief, which eventually escalates into stealing a car (this is documented in one of the show's most effective musical numbers, the very funny "Diary of a Thief"; Whaley and Grimaldi describe the allure of an unoccupied auto with the key in the ignition in the most poetic of terms). School is just as unsatisfying to young Arthur, who is self-conscious about his acne and mortified when a teacher reads his pathetic love poetry (to a popular girl named Diane) aloud in class. Escape seems the best idea, and when he turns 18, Arthur decides to head to New York City.

Here, though, are more false starts. "His First Days in New York Were Sexy" goes the title of the long song that illustrates Arthur's various adventures and misadventures upon arrival in the Big Apple in the '80s; this is the best number in Whaley and Grimaldi's score, capturing the sweep of the City in a sort of collision of Midnight Cowboy and Big. It ends with a big silly finish in which each member of the cast tries to outdo the others with a flashy finale.

Arthur eventually finds love, and after that he starts to find himself. A performance of Peter Pan (hilariously condensed into a 30-second tour de force by Wells, channeling Mary Martin to perfection) sparks an interest in theatre; this leads, circuitously, to music. Arthur has always loved playing the trumpet, and has always loved to dance. Why not put together a rock band? The rest, as they say, is history: in real life Whaley and Grimaldi formed The Niagaras; here, with Grimaldi now taking the role of eccentric-but-nerdy guitarist Mitch, they create a group called Wrong Way Up. The mission is to make music and really enjoy it; Arthur, as one song has it, is sure he's "One Cool SOB" and whether or not you agree at first, by the time he's gyrated across the stage like some latter-day Elvis you can't help but agree. Something close to catharsis happens when our hero finally finds his place on stage. What's beautiful about it is that fame and money aren't important—what he's after is happiness, fulfillment, and proximity to an audience.

Whaley is quite a performer. In the small Belt space, he's able to make eye contact with just about everyone in the room, and as soon as he ooks at you, he's got you: the magnetism really is palpable, and the joy really is infectious. His performing is all about energy and is genuinely exciting to watch; his dancing, especially, is thrilling. Grimaldi is lower-key but just as effective; his dryly ironic, laid-back style is perfect counterpoint to Whaley's more manic and intense persona. The show's other two musicians, Frank Spitznagel on piano and Paul Capuzzo on drums, are terrific; they sound great throughout, and the music is never too loud for the intimate surroundings. Wells and Stern do outstanding work; they both have fine singing voices, are able to juggle a dozen or more characters among them with seamless ease, and their energy matches Whaley's beat for beat. Wells has that grand Peter Pan turn that I told you about, as well as a number of other show-stopping moments as, for example, Arthur's insufferable acting teacher or Mitch's dull-witted fast-food-restaurant boss. Stern shines in the show's quieter moments, in particular as Arthur's mom; her renditions of "Hearts Beyond Broken," about Arthur's parents' failed marriage, and "So, I'm On My Own," when Arthur moves out, are powerfully moving.

The entire show is staged with zing and simplicity by Andrew Grosso; Thomas Mills has provided the snappy choreography. Simple props and accessories help Wells and Stern establish the characters they're playing at any given moment; Grimaldi and Whaley denote the passage of time and place using only their coats and hats. The script could probably use some pruning; there are places in both the Syracuse and New York sections that are repetitive and overlong. On the other hand, excess is certainly part of what Whaley/Arthur is all about, and in any case, Wrong Way Up never feels like it's overstaying its welcome. Quite the contrary: when it reaches its giddy, exalting climax, nobody seems to want it to end, on or offstage. What a kick.

Wuthering High, the latest offering from Cagey Productions and Four Panel Productions, is an homage to '80s teen comedies. At least, I think it is. Sometimes it’s a parody of such movies—particularly the landmark films of John Hughes—and other times it’s a dark gothic romance. Both are understandable, considering that the play is adapted from Emily Bronte’s 19th century novel Wuthering Heights and inspired by teen film comedies of the 1980s. However, with this many different elements at work it’s often difficult to know what Wuthering High is, and what it’s trying to accomplish.

Writers Karen Grenke, Christina Nicosia, Jonathan Van Giesen, and David Vining plop Bronte’s tragic lovers down right in the middle of a John Hughes movie. Goth girl Catherine Earnshaw drops her best friend, the brooding, snarky Heathcliff (who longingly pines for her, of course), when she has a chance to join the in-crowd at school. The fallout is predictably tumultuous, with one character landing in jail, another one fleeing to Europe, a third one exiled to a military academy, and a fourth one going completely insane.

Sounds like fun, right? Actually, it could be. But, unfortunately, there are too many styles happening in tandem for Wuthering High to be much fun at all. The satirical aspects of the show are too casual and half-hearted to succeed; the dramatic segments are too heavy and out of sync with the rest of the show; and the attempts at homage fail because the company tries so hard to make Wuthering High entertaining and funny that it ends up being neither. If one stylistic approach could have been settled on and committed to, they might have had a show. As things stand right now, they do not.

Ginna Hoben, Meghan Love, and Rachel Speicher provide some bright spots as The-Coolest-Girl-in-School’s entourage, as does Dov Weinstein as the resident nerd. Stephen Blackwell does well as Edgar, the surprisingly humane BMOC. But Wuthering High ultimately suffers from two fatal casting choices. Co-author Grenke’s characterization of Catherine seems nearly as whiny and shallow as the “cool girls” Catherine is trying to impress. And, as Heathcliff, co-author Van Giesen is disastrously one-note. Emulating Judd Nelson’s performance in The Breakfast Club, Van Giesen’s portrayal is all attitude and flared nostrils, but without any depth. Grenke and Van Giesen both also look significantly older than the characters they're playing, not to mention everyone else on stage.

In the end, Wuthering High lacks a discernible theme. All of the acknowledged classics in the '80s teen genre make potent statements about high school class warfare and prejudice. Wuthering High has all the ingredients necessary to do so also, but is identity crisis keeps it from accomplishing that. Instead, Wuthering High focuses on surface features—i.e., the inclusion of stock character types and recognizable pop songs of the era—to ensure that it comes off as authentically “80s.”

Perhaps the creators are trying to create their own new '80s teen classic. If so, they sabotage themselves by skimping on point of view.

And where’s the fun?

Poor Yokasta. Not only does she give up her crippled infant son for dead, only to have him return as an adult, kill her husband, and marry her himself (the discovery of which causes him to gouge his eyes out)—to top it all off, the progenitress of the world's most famous Complex doesn't even have a tragedy to call her own. Even in the Oedipus cycle, Sophocles's famous group of plays about her lover/son, she's reduced to wandering on- and offstage, delivering portentous exposition that bears little regard for her monumental role in this timeless tragedy.

In YokastaS Redux, playwright Saviana Stanescu and seminal avant-garde director Richard Schechner have decided to redress this grievance on Yokasta's behalf, attempting to provide her with a work befitting her stature. Though it doesn't have the weight and power of actual Greek tragedy (nor, for the most part, does it wish to), it succeeds touchingly and entertainingly in bringing a hitherto neglected matriarch into a much-deserved spotlight.

The title is plural to reflect the fact that there are four Yokastas. In ascending chronological these are: Yoyo, her hyperactive, imaginative childhood self; Yoko, “the middle one,” a defiant young queen married to the limping, lecherous Laius (Oedipus's dad); Yono, the contented, perpetually pregnant bride of Oedipus; and Yokasta herself, the hardened survivor of the post-Oedipal years.

But wait, you culture-savvy classicists protest—what later years? Didn't Yokasta do herself in after the incestuous secret was revealed? It is exactly this kind of misinformation that Yokasta is appearing on this program to set straight. The first scene of the play, you see, and many others, are modeled on a talk-show format, in which Yokasta is questioned on her personal life by a well-groomed interlocutor who gently but firmly pries into the darker recesses of Yokasta's past.

When I first read in the press materials that several of the play's scenes would take place on talk shows, I feared that the script would overreach in its attempts to maintain contemporary relevance. To my relief, the scenes are played lightly and gracefully, less as a parody of TV culture than as a contemporary rhetorical vessel for the distilled conveyance of essential information. It helps that the performers in these scenes (and throughout the entire production) are top-notch: Christopher Logan Healy (who plays all the men in the show—TV hosts, the touchingly hopeless Laius, and Oedipus himself) is fatuous without resorting to broad satire, his polished performance style and expert timing putting the humor over with infectious ease; and Daphne Gaines, who anchors the whole show as Yokasta, has dignity, authority, and style to spare.

The interview scenes (including a hilarious one in which Medea and Phaedre attempt to embroil Yokasta in a smackdown for the title of World's Worst Mama) pepper a series of more straightforward, but often equally funny, scenes depicting the narrative of Yokasta's life. Young Yoyo (Jennifer Lim), playing with action figures, charts out her future as Queen of the Universe despite being told to respect the workings of fate. Laius and Yoko (the fiery Phyllis Johnson) attempt to reinvigorate their marriage with some sexual role-playing. An alarming monologue delivered by Yono (Rachel Bowditch) in the voice of the child-drowning Andrea Yates is provided with a wryly disturbing multimedia reflection later on in a comic slideshow of Yono sensuously bathing her new husband-to-be soon after the inadvertent murder of his father.

Throughout, Stanescu and Schechner's language (they're co-credited with the script) avoids the pitfalls of modern writers aspiring to the Greeks: it manages to be poetic without pretension, affecting but not affected. The multiple Yokastas combine, retreat, squabble, and bond over the course of the fractured narrative; Schechner's direction, admirably crisp at every turn, prevents the various viewpoints from ever threatening to muddle.

At the denouement, the traditional bloody catharsis of Greek tragedy is intentionally sidestepped to reflect something trickier and less satisfying to dramatize: continuance. By denying previous reports of her suicide, Yokasta has preempted our thirst for purging, finality, and the settling of scores; she refutes the terrors and inevitable destinies of the ancient world with the modern values of forgiveness, survival, and self-reliance. The result is a play about Greek tragedy that isn't completely depressing.Maybe Yokasta doesn't have it so bad after all.

The show’s title alone is enough to make a Gen-X audience giddy: there are few more recognizable movie quotes than its first eight words, taken from Anthony Michael Hall’s defiant, detention essay voice-over that closes out the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. This clichéd but quintessential teen drama can make the snobbiest of film connoisseurs melt with nostalgia, and delight in its Brat Pack star dazzle; its marvelously narcissistic, insular high-school world; and its juicy dialogue, delivered with heaping amounts of seriousness by the where-are-they-now ensemble cast. The film’s plot: Five high school stereotypes (“nerd,” “popular girl,” “jock,” “rebel,” “Goth-girl weirdo”) are collected together for their Saturday morning detention by a tyrannical principal, and assigned an essay spelling out who they think they are. As soon as the principal leaves, they fight, they swap life stories, they dance, they dump all the essay work on the poor “nerd” guy, they make puppy-eyes at each other while he writes, and they leave. A story ready and ripe for a loving but deserved parody? Yes, yes, yes. The audience could hardly wait on the opening night I attended, for they hooted and applauded as soon as the lights went down, and we heard the opening power chords of The Breakfast Club’s theme song “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”

Unfortunately, You See Us As You Want To See Us trips upon bursting out of the gate, and doesn’t recover to win the day. Director Dana Discordia and the cast (all credited additionally as writers) make the risky choice of pushing these characters past already indulgent stereotypes, and discarding the fearful adolescent innocence that endears them to anyone who remembers high school. The play’s characters instead seem like jaded, cynical adults in group therapy. The popular rich girl Claire is jaggedly carved into a snarling “bitch.” Other descriptions from the program: the straight-A geek Brian is turned into an Asian “foreigner,” wrestling team star Andy into a “faggot,” and Goth-weirdo Allison into a “fat girl.” Rebellious John Bender, The Breakfast Club’s foremost scenery-chewing character, remains an “asshole”—his new comic twist, evidently, is getting triple the beatings from his father back home. It is a joyless lot gathered on the stage to take us on down Memory Lane. They re-enact the various iconic scenes, spending much time directly quoting the movie, spoofing only with exaggerated facial expressions and costume elements such as Andy’s wrestling headgear. Parodic diversions of the predictable sort arise now and then. The characters are racially cruel to Brian and homophobic towards Andy. It is curious that Allison is spared many remarks about her weight, despite being labeled the “fat girl” in the program. It seems as if the show’s writers forgot that if you are going to personally slur the identity of your “faggot” and “foreigner” characters multiple times in the dialogue, you better have some cutting remarks prepared for the other negative stereotypes that trot out on stage.

The degree of distortion to each character is confusing and arbitrary enough at times to render the quintet of detention victims unrecognizable from their movie counterparts. Sometimes this is the fault of the performer, and other times of the concept. There is humorous potential in sending up the snootiness of rich girl Claire, but Kelli Rauch twists her face and condescends to such a hateful degree she seems more Cruella De Vil than high school prom queen. Conversely, though the Allison character’s “fat girl” angle never seems to fit, Amorika M. Amoroso’s performance retains the comic quirkiness originally given to the role by Ally Sheedy.

A slight variation of this phenomenon can be seen in the performances of Sean Doran as queeny wrestler Andy, and Rommel Quimson as the Asian intellectual Brian. They both clearly know what is funny about the stereotypes they are portraying, but they are parodically sabotaged by the puzzling choices to portray them that way. Andy in the film is aggressively macho, and in order to keep the world of the play recognizable, that has to be acknowledged more often. If he is hiding something about his sexuality, there is more humor to be found in staying true to the original Andy, but allowing occasional hints to come through. Making him flaming from the get-go is simply creating a brand new character. Quimson, as Brian, successfully portrays a smart, socially awkward Asian student. But adding to the original “nerd” character the woes and burden of being a stranger in a strange land forces the audience to leave the Brian-world they got to know in the movie—a pasty white kid who looks like everybody else and dutifully follows the rules set out for all, yet still finds himself isolated and scorned. Only Michael Van Steyn as John is consistent with the movie in performance and concept. His insolent hair-flip and wide-eyed intimidation stare are funny, recognizable aspects of Judd Nelson’s movie performance. I wish he would use more discretion in choosing the moments to use these bits—I enjoyed the hair-flip the first three times it occurred. The next seven made me tired of it.

For a few minutes after the performance ended, I found myself remembering bits from The Breakfast Club that I hadn’t thought about in years. Sadly, I laughed more in that brief span of time than I had just done watching this full-length lampoon of the movie. The world of The Breakfast Club is uniquely lovable, and comic mockery can be had at the expense of the movie, while still remaining true to that world. The tagline of this show’s title—"Reflections from The Breakfast Club"—indicates a desire to take us to that Saturday morning detention period, but we soon find ourselves looking at reflections that are funhouse-mirror-like—distorted and bizarre.