As an adult, it’s a delight to see the all-female acrobatic dance troupe LAVA perform their latest work (w)Hole:The (whole) History Of Life On Earth. Their work is dynamic and sensual, but also absolutely appropriate for all ages. If you can, bring a young person along. It will be like "Take Your Daughters to Art" day.

Conceived and directed by LAVA founder Sarah East Johnson, the show includes performers Natalie Agee, Molly Chanoff, Eugenia Chiappe, Diana Y Greiner, and Rebecca Stronger. Each woman is an incredible athlete who displays a great physical strength and endurance that challenge gender stereotypes of feminine movement and beauty. They are seemingly fearless as they soar and tumble over each other and through the air. In addition to that energy and showmanship are a wonderful rapport and interconnectedness between them, the work and the audience.

(w)Hole is inspired by the ever-shifting phenomena of geologic change. Volcano formation, magnetic polarity reversal, and tectonic plate movements are all explored through movement and shifts of balance. This includes getting the audience to move as well. At one point, people are asked to stand up if they have started something new in the past six months. They then join people who have stood up because they have ended something in the same amount of time, and together they are asked to walk into the playing space and move in two circles going in opposite directions. I can't say it was the most amazing event of the evening in terms of death-defying tricks, but I think that was the point; that what Johnson is trying to do is make her experiments connecting movement and the effects of environmental and personal change accessible and relevant to all.

This inclusiveness starts from the very beginning. There is no opening music or announcement as in a traditional circus show. The audience sits in the round and the performers enter the space, defined by a tape drawing on the floor of a large spiral, one at a time and at their own pace. They greet people they know in the audience, stretch, put out mats and place their equipment and props to the side. None of this seems faux-casual. It just is a great starting place that helps us in the audience to be not only spectators, but part of the event. The only aspect of this that goes a bit too far for me personally is the unexpected "bathroom video diaries" directed by Sini Anderson and Bob Alotta. In the ladies' room, (I don't know about the men's) there is a TV over the stalls that plays a video of individual performers discussing their feelings about their preparation and work.

In accordance with the theme of change, each show will use a different combination of theatrical elements that are picked by chance throughout the run. When you enter the lobby, there is a poster on an easel that shows differently colored dots under the categories of music, lights, video, and choreography. The colors of the dots represent texture, seasons, geologic movement, and rock formations. So, on a given night, the music may be "white" for "hard," the light may be "green" representing "Spring," the video in "red" for "flow," and the choreography "blue" for "metamorphic." On the night I attended, the music by Steve Hamilton and video by Heather Delaney seemed black/soft and gray/explosion, respectively. The light was "winter" white and, if I had to guess, I would pick "blue/metamorphic" for the choreography. There is also a log where you can see the combinations that made up previous shows. Once you get the hang of it, its fun to consider all the possibilities. As soon as the show ended, a young girl next to me said to her mom, "So, we're coming back tomorrow?" The work is that smart, interesting, and joyful to watch. I definitely agree with her about wanting to see it more than once.

Anyone who caught [title of show] during its initial run at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival will not be surprised to read that it could also be called Hit Musical. Because that’s what this little show-that-could, now playing at the Vineyard Theatre, looks, feels, and sounds like. It is so hilarious, inventive, and full of heart that it will make even the most battle-hardened theatergoer wonder, “How come they don’t write 'em like that more often?!”

[title of show] takes meta-theatre to delightful new heights. Librettist Hunter Bell and composer-lyricist Jeff Bowen—who also play themselves in the show—decide to write a musical from scratch to submit to the then-inaugural New York Musical Theatre Festival. With the help of two actress pals, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff (also playing themselves), the enterprising duo set out to write as much as they can before the looming three-week deadline. But, what is their show going to be about? Hunter and Jeff quickly decide to write a show about writing their show, which leads to exchanges like this:

JEFF: So, that means that what I’m saying right now could end up in the show.
HUNTER: That’s right.
(Pause.)
JEFF: And this, too!
HUNTER: That’s right.

And that’s just the beginning of [title of show]’s self-referential cleverness. Bowen and Bell smartly keep everyone’s sarcastic, irreverent real-life personas (at least, I’m guessing they are) intact. As the guys daydream about which famous people they could cast in the show, Jeff mentions Betty Buckley. Hunter winces. “Isn’t she a hot box of crazy?” he asks. Later, when asked why she isn’t auditioning more, Susan bluntly replies, “I’m a handsome lady, which makes me a tough sell.” [title of show] even gets musical director Larry Pressgrove in on the act—but only after he receives permission. When faced with answering one of the actor’s questions, he remains silent until Jeff says, “Larry, we worked it out with the union so you can talk.”

There are also effective moments of touching sincerity. After toiling away for years as an understudy, Heidi finally relishes her first opportunity to originate a role: “For once I don’t have to fit the mold. I am the mold.” Later, in the closing musical number, as the creators confront the mounting pressures of revising the show in hopes of garnering a career-boosting off-Broadway run, they decide that they’d rather be “nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.”

Bell’s book is a both a classic tale of can-do optimism and a feast for musical theatre fans. The story imparts the feverish love of theatre that consumes people in the throes of creation. One will find themselves rooting for this show’s intrepid foursome because their passion is so irrepressible. [title of show] is also littered with musical and pop culture references, both famous and obscure. Where else will one find a show that gives equal weight to Wonder Woman, Into the Woods, Henry, Sweet Henry, Hurry, Harry, and Shields & Yarnell? Such moments define the characters more specifically, and make their enthusiasm (and knowledge) all the more believable.

Bowen’s score is loaded with tuneful melodies and wonderful lyrics. In “Monkeys and Playbills,” a hilarious song made up almost exclusively of show titles, Hunter and Jeff search for inspiration while sifting through old Playbills. “Die Vampire, Die!” is a rousing and funny call-to-arms by Susan to ignore one’s inner critic. And the stirring 11 o’clock number, “A Way Back to Then,” in which Heidi yearns to return to a simpler time, is sure to become a new standard in no time.

One of [title of show]’s biggest assets is its cast. Bell, Blackwell, Blickenstaff, and Bowen are all sublime as…well, themselves, showing off fine acting skills, great singing voices, and excellent comic timing. Director-choreographer Michael Berresse wisely keeps things simple, giving [title of show] an informal feel that suits it perfectly. Neil Patel’s rehearsal room set, Chase Tyler’s everyday costumes, and Ken Billington and Jason Kantrowitz’s casual lighting add to the show’s easygoing demeanor. The audience knows instinctively that everything here has been polished to professional standards, but the charming looseness that [title of show] successfully achieves makes it feel as if one is watching it all unfold in someone’s apartment. Quite an impressive feat.

[title of show] is sure to become more than nine people’s favorite thing. Head on down to the Vineyard and see if it could become one of yours.

Before you ever meet the performers in Troika Ranch’s 16 [R]evolutions, you meet Isadora. That’s the name of what is essentially the fifth dancer in the cast, the one that isn’t human. Isadora does not have arms, legs, and poise like the others, but rather sensors that create a 12-point skeleton of each dancer onstage, using a single camera pointed toward the action from downstage center in front of the house. I am not a technophile, so I am not sure if I can use the word “lasers” here, but the six-year-old in me who grew up with Tron wants to ever so much.

Isadora is a bit of real-time motion-tracking software designed by co-artistic director/visual designer Mark Coniglio. As “she” and her 12-points follow each dancer about, the computer animation on the back wall surface and the sonic score are manipulated by the movement of the bodies onstage. The high-tech environment “dances” with them, and with the audience as well, as they enter the lobby of the Eyebeam Art & Technology Center. There, stationed above the entrance to the performance space, is a mini-version of the sensor-camera used in the piece. As you face the camera and twitch your arm, animation lighting up the opposite wall twitches with you. Though I couldn’t glide it about as beautifully as the dancers did, the entrancing effect of making light tremble with the slightest body shift did cause me to actually utter the words “Far out!” The woman standing next to me said, “Try it with a glass of wine, you’ll enjoy it even more.”

This dance piece is a subversive cocktail all by itself, viscerally choreographed by Dawn Stoppiello and blending eerie elements of natural human grace with the cold, intangible, threat of technology to overpower it. Dark, innate senses are played on, and a dread is produced that is universal, yet impossible to rationally describe—an uncertainty that mankind is still at the wheel of an increasingly programmed world. The four dancers—Robert Clark, Johanna Levy, Daniel Suominen, and Lucia Tong—embody walking consequences of a permanent status shift between man and machine. Each is a representational character who has lost all instinct and impulse, and replaced them with set reactions to electronic stimuli. At the beginning, needs that we take for granted are simply non-existent. The need to wear clothes is gone, for these characters no longer send or receive messages through dress or nudity. Likewise, the need for the body to align itself and stand up straight has been removed from its fundamental know-how, along with its ability to run, attack, or protect itself from corporeal elements.

What hasn’t been deleted becomes clear as the performance progresses: Loneliness, empathy, curiosity about others, and sensation to their touch. The dancers all move with yearning, passionate force, connecting with each through means of both status and vulnerability. A memorable sequence shifts status amongst the humans themselves—with two acting as snooty servers of a cereal breakfast to the remaining two, who sit dead-eyed and listlessly chew in time to loud, crunching sound effects. As each cereal-eater breaks from the table to dance, a server returns, sits, and folds napkins into the shape of a boat before leaping upon the table itself, a defiant captain amongst his linen armada.

The interplay of the four dancers and the virtual environs they manipulate on the back wall is fascinatingly ambiguous, much like society’s attitude itself toward technology. In one sense, the lights and dancers swirling in tandem are quite beautiful—an evolution toward an environment of harmony and equilibrium that guides us as we guide it, exacting a new, precise definition of peace. In a sense of considerably more menace, 16 [R]evolutions fashions a Orwellian universe in which Man is never hidden from the glassy, omnipresent gaze of movement sensors; a world where technology is an impenetrable skin over all things, suffocating and inescapable. Breath seemingly cannot be drawn anywhere in such a world without a computer converting it into recorded data of 1’s and 0’s, and all animal senses are turned gullible or inoperative. The cast of dancers, along with Dawn Stoppiello’s powerful choreography and Mark Coniglio’s astounding effects, plumb the depths of this paradox with artful consideration. Though bold advances in computer capability are in fact what fuels their work, making it possible, relevant, and cutting-edge all at the same time, it is their use of that capability to examine itself that makes them artists worth keeping an eye on.

Multimedia theatre of this nature, in which artists are controlling the media in real-time onstage, will soon be a trend, I imagine. It removes the clunky and awkward barrier between live performers who are creating shared and impermanent moments with an audience and inadaptable, prefabricated media that is identical to itself from night to night, such as an actor onstage having a “dialogue” with a pre-recorded voice-over. Companies like Troika Ranch that use technology not for mere spectacle, but as a means of allowing theatre to explore man’s relationship with gadgetry provide shows like 16 [R]evolutions that are fiercely engaging—audiences are spellbound by a live, shared moment of man and machine relating onstage. This relationship, long the exclusive province of sci-fi book and screen, has been too long out-of-reach of theatre’s unique and powerful ability to examine and sear into consciousness. 16 [R]evolutions is an exciting, innovative breed of performance with all-too-short a run—give your eyes and mind a treat and catch it before its animated lights go dark on January 28th.

In Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza’s recent dirty joke documentary The Aristocrats, Judy Gold and Sarah Silverman are among the limited number of female comedians (who, as a whole, are far funnier than their male counterparts) to appear on-screen. Creating humor from truth and self-mockery, Gold and Silverman stand out not only as women in comedy, but also as Jewish women who speak openly (albeit from vastly different vantage points) about being women and about being Jews. Silverman opens her film Jesus is Magic with a running joke professing that she has created a stage production of a comic musical dealing with September 11th, AIDS, and the Holocaust. Over the course of the film, Silverman manages to integrate these three topics—among others of equal seriousness—in amusing if not entirely logical ways.

In the new show 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, however, Judy Gold has more than outdone her counterpart, crafting an endlessly amusing and truly heartfelt production that includes all three of the aforementioned taboo topics (among many others) in ways that are both hilarious and, ultimately, profoundly moving.

25 Questions (written by Kate Moira Ryan with Gold) intertwines elements of Gold’s stand-up comedy (old and new) with a project that grew out of an autobiographical journey. Gold moves from the Judy Blume-obsessed, fish-out-of-water, New Jersey-resident, lesbian daughter of a loving and dominating Jewish mother to becoming her own version of a loving and dominating Jewish mother to two sons with Wendy, her partner of 20-plus years. Along the way, she and collaborator Ryan take others along for the ride, conducting 25-question interviews with Jewish mothers of all ages, careers, races, degrees of observance, and movements within Judaism.

The results are presented as interstitials to Gold’s larger story, about her journey to and through motherhood, and her fear of turning into her own mother, a well-meaning woman who calls the police if she doesn’t hear from her daughter on a daily basis. Gold impersonates each of her interviewees, crafting a body language and speech pattern that clearly demonstrates that, although they live under the shared rubric of “Jewish mother,” these women are incredibly different. From the Orthodox mother who insists that she would sit shiva (a death ritual) for her daughter were she to marry a non-Jew to the Chinese Jew-by-choice who doesn’t regret converting but deeply regrets moving to New Jersey, Gold gives voice to a broad range of women whose similarities are often caricatured, but whose individual experiences are often ignored.

Most poetic and deeply moving is the tale of a woman who, as a young girl, recalls being left with the girls and women in the balcony at shul (synagogue) while her beloved grandfather went to pray with the men and boys in the main sanctuary—only to find herself by his side, wrapped in his tallis (prayer shawl) before the service’s end. Similarly, stories from women who survived concentration camps (and their mothers who, in some cases, did not), a mother who outlived her eldest son, and even Gold’s own story of sharing a painful life change with her young children elicit an exquisite—almost reverent—silence from her riveted audience. Indeed, it is a testament to Gold’s gifts as a performer that she is able to move so skillfully from guffaw-inducing comedy to moments of such rare poignancy.

The piece still has a few rough edges: several of 25 Questions’ opening scenes feel over-rehearsed, and a section about Gold performing at a benefit for Howard Dean is incongruous and falls painfully flat. Karen Kolhaas’s simple and clean staging relegates the collection of Jewish mothers to the side, placing Gold squarely at the center of the stage and of the story. And although Gold is more than up to the task of carrying the piece, the audience is left wanting more from the mothers. Only one mother’s response to each question is shared; with multiple interviews and so many questions, we must assume that there is a trove of material that remains left out of this work. (Indeed, Gold jokes that she and Ryan were hopelessly naive to assume that any Jewish mother could respond to 25 questions in the 30 minutes that they had initially allotted for their meetings.) Perhaps the authors plan to release the material as a book; we can only hope. Still, none of these minor shortcomings undermine the overall experience of 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother as an entertaining and powerful work.

A soundproofed and grubby rehearsal room, complete with empty beer cans and bottles. The hum of an amp. The sound of ice clinking in a glass of vodka and someone tuning a guitar. Argo Theater Co.'s new outing 33 to Nothing is a slice of life in a bar band that hasn’t made it big. Everyone in the band is getting older, and decisions need to be made. It’s an impressive study of a band’s deconstruction.

Written by Grant James Varjas, Gray (played by Varjas) has a tense relationship with the entire band. One guitarist is his former lover Bri and the other is his former best friend Tyler; the bassist is Alex, who “stole” Tyler away when she married him. Some in the band want to “grow up” and buy a house or have children, and others simply want to move on to safer and healthy relationships. The only one who does not seem influenced by all this tension is the slightly obtuse drummer Barry, hilariously and wonderfully played by Ken Forman. His comic timing gives the show much needed levity and lightness and his cell phone ring tone (and his short defense of it) are a laugh out-loud experience.

Preston Clarke (Bri) and Varjas do a splendid job showing the complexity of their relationship and the tensions that remain even when a relationship is over. The chemistry, regret, and anger that exist between them are unambiguous and moving. Unfortunately, other relationships in this play go unrealized. It’s hard to see that Tyler (played by John Good, who also directed the play) and Gray were ever friends, or even that Tyler misses their closeness. The marriage between Alex (Amanda Gruss) and Tyler lacks spark and at times it’s not very clear how or why they ended up together. Indeed Alex shows more life with drummer Barry than with Tyler.

Most of Gray’s songs seem to be post-mortems of his failed association with Bri, and his propensity for self-destruction tears the band apart. If he cannot be happy, Gray is determined to make the lives of his bandmates miserable as well. Gray “thrives on emotional violence,” and Bri finally tells him “there’s too much you,” as his reason for leaving both the band and the relationship. The play gives many reasons as to why Grant is so self-destructive, but it becomes almost impossible to excuse his behavior and as a result his character becomes entirely unsympathetic. The songs only seem to highlight Gray’s utter self-absorption, instead of letting us feel compassion and understanding. Varjas does, however, have a amazing bit of behavior, when he’s left all alone with his guitar. It seems, finally, that he’s through with destruction. For the moment, at least.

At times, the songs detract from the pacing and compelling interplay between the characters, but the songs themselves are soulful and quite catchy. The actors all play their own instruments, and they truly work together like a band. Some of them, Clarke especially, are clearly terrific musicians in their own right.

First time director Good does a likable job with the piece. 33 to Nothing sometimes bites off more than it can chew; it poses so many questions and conflicts that many get left by the wayside and go unresolved. Nevertheless, Varjas and his cast give a striking study of band, with all the frustration and love that keeps them together, even when it’s clear that it’s time to move on.

Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis is receiving its second production in New York in less than a year. Last October, London’s Royal Court Theatre brought James Macdonald’s original 2000 production to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Now, BAM’s Next Wave Festival is hosting French director Claude Régy’s 2002 production featuring renowned film star Isabelle Huppert. While Huppert is a mesmerizing performer, the production lacks the spark that makes Kane’s work so compelling, transforming the play into a statement about the author’s suicide. Régy negates the play’s possibilities on stage, opting instead for a static exercise in angst.

4.48 charts the thoughts of a depressive who is in the throes of a hopeless search for a nonexistent lover. The play’s main figure—the text does not designate characters, or even indicate the number of actors required—is psychotic, the lines between reality and imaginary erased.

Kane cited Artaud and his “theatre of cruelty” as a major influence on the play. (She admitted that while at school, a professor who she didn’t like kept recommending Artaud to her and that she avoided Artaud for a number of years because of his suggestion.)

4.48 shares formal qualities with Artaud’s radio drama To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947). In a series of monologues from various speakers, Artaud’s play gives voice to the pain that comes from that split between mind and body. While the suffering of Judgment is relentless—Artaud’s tortured scream in the original broadcast is a sound without reason, uncontained by even the play’s loose narrative threads—Kane’s play grounds suffering in a recognizable story.

4.48’s most touching and humorous moments occur between the patient and a doctor who is trying to help. When the doctor suggests drugs to help with the depression, the speaker worries that it will interfere with work, to which the doctor replies, “Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide.” That kind of black-as-coal humor is a Kane trademark and while 4.48 ranks as her bleakest play, Kane’s humor, her sparse and poetic language, make 4.48 not just a chronicle of personal despair, but a play about humanity’s isolation, our inability to know ourselves and those who love us.

Unlike Macdonald’s production that divided the text among three speakers, Régy’s 4.48 Psychose is primarily a monologue to showcase Huppert’s amazing stage presence. Huppert stands in the center of the auditorium in front of a scrim and she does not move for the production’s 100 minutes. It is physically grueling and the tension of her performance comes from her desire to break free: to move, to use her hands, to communicate to us. Yet, she is unable to do so; pain has frozen her in place.

Huppert delivers Kane’s text in French, in a slow, almost monotonous voice. The moments when the rhythm shifts sparkle, lifting the production out of its narcoleptic haze. The repetition of “flash flicker slash burn” near the play’s conclusion demonstrates how rhythm can forcefully convey the content of the speaker’s addled brain. It is a moment that is incredibly powerful in performance, working to great effect in both Macdonald’s and Régy’s productions. Yet, in this incarnation, that theatrical energy is rare. One of the great benefits of seeing the play in French is how it allows an audience member to focus on sound. But reading 4.48 conveys a variety of tones and tempos. Huppert’s delivery tends toward only the slow and stilted. Huppert commands our attention at first, but the show grows tiresome.

Occasionally, subtitles are projected above the stage, but their purpose is unclear, more distracting than enlightening. They are not frequent enough to help non-French speakers understand the play, nor are they integrated enough into the production to feel like a clear directorial choice. You have to crane your neck upwards just to read them, taking your focus off of the stage, never a good thing.

Huppert is joined on stage by Gérard Watkins, who appears behind the scrim as the doctor figure. Huppert never turns her gaze away from the audience. In this production, the play’s principal speaker is unable to reach outside of herself to anyone. While the play is ambiguous about the outcome—the final line is “please open the curtains”—Régy’s production makes suicide the only solution. And that is its major flaw.

What draws me to Kane’s work is her humor and how love is possible even in the most horrifying of circumstances; that’s what makes her a genuine political writer. What makes her so admired by playwrights and directors of my generation is her work’s inventive theatricality; she wrote plays that beg to be staged. The very things that make Kane a great playwright are missing in this production. This is 4.48 Psychosis as Kane’s suicide letter. But to reduce a play as finely crafted as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to biography is criminal, for this play is not about a young writer who killed herself at twenty-eight.

Kane’s life is destined to loom large over her plays, just as Artaud’s does over his theatrical writings. But the intensely personal material of 4.48 Psychosis does not preclude a production that engages the world beyond the stage.

Christmastime in New York is always one of my favorite times of year. Along with the elaborate decorations, window displays, and multiple ice skating rinks, we’re always presented with a cornucopia of holiday shows, from the traditional Nutcracker and Radio City Christmas Spectacular to every type of Christmas Carol imaginable. Joining the throng this year is A Broadway Diva Christmas, a holiday revue featuring a quintet of high-profile Broadway actresses, including Jane Eyre’s Marla Schaffel, One Life to Live and Hairspray’s Kathy Brier, and the original Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, Ellen Greene.

Greene serves as the informal host of the proceedings, taking us through 18 Christmas songs, from the traditional (“Joy to the World,” “O Holy Night”) to the ultra-contemporary (U2’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and “Lonely Jew on Christmas” from the television show South Park). The collection of songs, though diverse, works quite well under Brian J. Nash’s musical direction, who effortlessly blends the comedic pieces into more touching ones, with the help of a great band that supports the divas without overpowering them. The “Jingle Babes,” a power vocal trio, serve as choral backup for the proceedings and repeatedly sing “Silver Bells” (reprised a bit too much for my taste), creating a musical framework for the evening.

Comedic divas Greene and Christine Pedi (of Forbidden Broadway fame) succeed the most throughout the evening, Greene providing adorable renditions of “Silent Night” and “Santa Baby” and Pedi providing first a show-stopping rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as Roxie in Chicago, then pulling another star turn with “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Pedi turns the most boring Christmas song ever into a hysterically funny display of her talent for impressions—the audience chooses 12 names from a hat, and Pedi sings each verse in the style of the actress named; selections at the performance I attended included Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Davis, Julie Andrews, and Fran Drescher. This song alone makes A Broadway Diva Christmas worth attending. Diva Brier belts out Joni Mitchell’s “River” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” as the vocal powerhouse of the night, and divas Schaffel and Maya Days round out the quintet with more serious, traditional fare, including “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.”

It’s always exciting to see celebrities up close and personal, and for anyone who follows the Broadway scene, A Broadway Diva Christmas will be a great Christmas treat. Hearing this group of talented ladies share their favorite holiday songs certainly put me in the Christmas spirit. I hope that A Broadway Diva Christmas joins the many performance pieces that help New Yorkers welcome the Christmas season each year.

Jacob Issac Ehrenreich, named for his grandfathers killed in the Holocaust and also called Yankel by his immigrant parents, wanted nothing more as a teenager than to be an all-American guy named Jake. A Jew Grows In Brooklyn is his one-man story of how he's come to accept who he is, transforming his adolescent embarrassment to pride while taking the audience on a musical nostalgia trip through the Brooklyn and Catskills of the '50s. My experience throughout the show paralleled young Jacob's journey. At first I was uncomfortable, cringing at all the schmaltz. By the end, I was tearing up and happily clapping along to the old Yiddish songs most of the audience knew by heart.

Ehrenreich grew up in East Flatbush with his two sisters in a home where every piece of furniture had a plastic slipcover and children played stickball till their mothers called them in for dinner. His loving and overprotective family encouraged his musical talents, and as a young man he performed on Broadway, played drums, and toured with Greg Allman's band. In video clips, we see family vacation pictures around the swimming pool of women wearing beehive hairdos and tired-looking men in bathing trunks and black socks, and stiffly-posed bar mitzvah photos in front of silver curtains that match everyone's outfits. We are told the people had Old World names that made Yankel Ehrenreich sound like Mike Smith.

A meditation on existential dread, this is not. However, Ehrenreich's good-natured optimism and celebration of family, tradition, and corny jokes are not thoughtless. The people were not blood relatives, we are told, though Ehrenreich and his sisters called them Aunt and Uncle. They were fellow survivors who came out of DP camps like his mother and father and who had lost entire families. These people became family for one another, sharing simple joys like summers in the Catskills with their children. If they could pick up their lives and laugh at a tummler's jokes, who are we, Ehrenreich seems to be saying, not to be upbeat?

A tummler was an activities director, comedian, musician, and singer who worked in the Catskills resorts back in their heyday. In the strongest part of the show, Ehrenreich—backed by his band, Elysa Sunshine (guitar and musical director), Ted Kooshian (keyboard), Ray Josephs (drums), and David Solomon (guitar)—goes through a typical day and evening in the life of a tummler. Starting at the top of Act II, he comes out in camp director shorts (pulled up almost to his armpits with the shirt tucked in for authenticity, a great comic touch) and a visor. Then, after working the crowd—"Where are you from?" "Mill Basin! Brownsville! Flatbush!" people in the audience shouted out—we are led in a round of "Simon Says." Like I said, there are elements of the show that could be called corny. But, they are shamelessly so, which like a tummler's jokes ("My bris went horribly wrong. I couldn't walk for a year!") makes it enjoyable.

After the games, Ehrenreich becomes the emcee in the "Starlight Lounge" ("Every resort in the Catskills had a place called the Starlight Lounge," he says). He tells jokes, sings songs, plays the trumpet, trombone, and drums, and finishes off with a rousing almost punk version of the Yiddish chestnut "Romania." His voice and energy are very strong, admirably carrying him through. The director, Jon Huberth, keeps the action and pace moving throughout and makes good use of Joseph Egan's set, designed to look like a family's home in 1950s Brooklyn. Ehrenreich ends the show by bringing us up-to-date on his present life. We see pictures of his marriage, wife, and son. I didn't enjoy watching someone else's wedding video and baby pictures as much as other parts of the show, but I did understand the reason. During his wedding reception, Ehrenreich's father, Jonah, said the wedding tents should have held ten times the amount of family in attendance.

That poignancy, along with the name Ehrenreich gave his own son, Joseph Dov-Behr, named after great-uncles who were also killed, instead of the American name he always wanted for himself, brings a deeper meaning to A Jew Grows in Brooklyn. According to articles in the press kit, the show had been ending with a video of Ehrenreich's little boy singing "God Bless America." That didn't happen and I think it was a wise move to cut it. But, really, by the end of this very sweet journey, I probably would have choked up about that too.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a screwball comedy, a wacky cloud of fairy dust. Director Tina Landau and musicians GrooveLily understand this very well.

For anyone who doesn’t know the intricate story, Theseus, king of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. At the same time Demetrius, a young man at court, wants to marry Hermia, the daughter of the king’s right-hand man. Hermia’s best friend Helena is in love with Demetrius, who won’t give her the time of day. Hermia, however, is in love with Lysander, who loves her back but can’t get her father’s permission to marry her. Theseus orders Hermia to marry Demetrius, so Hermia and Lysander run away to the fairy wood.

But the fairies are also in a fray. Titania, queen of the fairies, has a page boy who is the son of her best friend who died in childbirth. Oberon wants him, Titania won’t give him up. Meanwhile, some crude working men (known as the Rude Mechanicals) are planning a play for the wedding festivities. One of the Mechanicals, Bottom, stumbles away from rehearsal. Oberon gives him a donkey head and enchants Titania, who falls in love with the donkey-headed Bottom while Oberon gets the page boy. Concurrently, Helena and Demetrius have followed Hermia and Lysander into the forest. Oberon happens to see that Helena is sick with unrequited love and so sends his top fairy, Puck, to enchant Demetrius. Puck gets confused, enchants Lysander instead, and madness ensues that is ultimately all set right in the end.

It’s a long, complicated story, and the first two hours of this particular production are a little slow. However, the stagecraft and acting keep the magic alive.

Let’s start with the design team, as there’s no way to talk about this production without talking about Michael Krass’s costumes, Scott Zielinski’s lights, and especially Louisa Thompson’s set. The set is so wonderful I just wanted to run up there and play on everything myself. At the very top of the show the band is sleeping on a black stage. As they begin to dream the play, their chairs lift, flowers grow, and a white wall filled with candles descends—and there we are in Theseus and Hippolyta’s palace. At the end of that scene, the Mechanicals shove aside the gorgeous white flat and make their own crude little area with a sheet and work lights. In the fairy wood, slender silver poles with little climbing steps glimmer as trees, and the acrobatic fairies use them to curl up in podlike hammocks, bungee jump on them, hang sideways off of them. Maybe once this production is over, this team would consider collaborating on a playground for grownups.

But, oh yes, back to the play! A credit to both director and costume designer, there is no doubt that the small, bohemian Hermia belongs with scruffy Lysander, and that leggy, elegant Helena belongs with aristocratic Demetrius. Another choice piece of casting is Lea DeLaria as Bottom. Her Bottom is a crude show-off but he is also actually talented, and the Mechanicals put up with all of his excesses because he’s the best performer of the bunch. Did I say “he”? Bottom is a woman who’s trying to pass as a man, a choice that enlivens DeLaria’s performance. Since she knows she might be discovered at any moment, she has added incentive to make as much of every opportunity as she can. Ellen McLaughlin’s haughty strangeness is put to good use as Titania, and Jay Goede is an unusually kindhearted Oberon. In general, the actors are having such a good time with their parts that the old woods have new energy. Special note has also to be taken of Brenda Withers as Helena and James Martinez as Lysander.

GrooveLily turns the more poetic passages into songs that have a folk-rock-modern-adult-fairytale-rave feel. The music holds the production together, creates the mood, and keeps the energy high even when the story gets long. And Landau’s choice to give the fairy woods a nightclub feel justifies having all the band equipment on stage.

There is a moment at the very end that sums up the whole experience. After a final blowout musical number, Puck had to stop the audience’s applause—in order to ask for it again in the final speech. The timing is a little off all around, but it’s an enthusiastic experience nonetheless.

A Month in the Country, about 150 years old, was nevertheless new to me; I found it utterly delightful. It's at Theater Ten Ten right now, mounted with that company's usual loving attention to detail and respect, under the superbly unobtrusive guiding hand of director David Scott. Ten Ten alumni Annalisa Loeffler, David Tillistrand, and Elizabeth Fountain are better than ever in three of the play's main roles, while Greg Oliver Bodine and Timothy McDonough prove particularly impressive in their Ten Ten debuts. A great time is promised for all, I think.

The play, by Ivan Turgenev (I can't find a translator credited in my program), takes place at the estate of Arkady Sergeyitch Islayev, a wealthy middle-aged landowner who devotes most of his time (offstage) to his extensive business affairs, leaving his lovely, intelligent, bored wife Natalya in the hands of Rakitin, a longtime family friend. One look at Rakitin's worshipful gaze at Natalya tells us—though evidently not Arkady—that Rakitin is madly in love with Natalya. And, alas, one look at Natalya's beautiful but distracted face tells us that she is not, and never will be, interested in Rakitin, not in that way. Instead, her attention is focused this summer on Alexey Baliayev, a 20-year-old student from Moscow who has come to the Islayev estate for (so far) the eponymous month in the country. The length of his stay will be determined by what Natalya chooses to do or not do about pursuing her infatuation for this attractive young man.

She launches her strategy by feeling out her ward Vera, who, Natalya quite rightly fears, has fallen in love with Alexey herself. The fact that Vera, at 17, is significantly closer to Alexey's age doesn't much faze Natalya as she wavers back and forth about whether to implement this or that wicked scheme to have her way.

Also involved in aspects of the plot are Dr. Shpigelsky, who is courting, in his remarkably blunt way, Lizaveta, the woman who serves as companion to Arkady's widowed mother. The doctor also is speaking for his friend Bolshintsov, a splendidly dull, plain, elderly (but rich!) chap who would like to marry Vera.  There's also a German tutor hovering about, teaching Natalya's young (never seen) son Kolya. And lurking seemingly everywhere—possessing as much knowledge as us in the audience but far more than anyone else in the play—is the maid Katya.

The mood, at least in Scott's gossamer production, is lighthearted and lightheaded; we aren't intended to take any of the foolishness too seriously, even though some of it will likely have serious consequences for some of the characters. A Month in the Country has almost a boulevard comedy feel, tempered with the melancholy and fatalism we associate with Russian theatre; we can see where Chekhov, Strindberg, and Gorky all found comic and tragic inspiration here.

Jennifer Colombo's simple but evocative set morphs artfully from drawing room to garden to an intriguing alcove described only as "an unfinished room" in the program. Jeanette Aultz Look's costumes—really lush by off-off-Broadway standards—define the characters perfectly and fill the stage with color and period style.

Scott's cast is first-rate, from Beth Ann Leone's mischievous parlor maid Katya to David Tillistrand's mostly clueless but genuinely sympathetic master of the estate. Annalisa Loeffler is transcendent as Natalya; we're always a little aware of her sadness and at the same time of her bemusement at her own uncontrollable follies. Elizabeth Fountain and Timothy McDonough are enormously appealing as the youthful Vera and Alexey, with Fountain particularly adept at showing us a sudden transition from girlishness to righteous womanhood (a la Gigi, let's say) and McDonough delightful in his proud but wary befuddlement as he discovers that not one but two beautiful women have fallen in love with him. Ron Sanborn and Lisa Riegel are especially charming in the scene in which the Doctor courts Lizaveta in as clumsy a fashion as possible. Paula Hoza is appropriately imperious as Arkady's meddlesome mother, and Tim McMurray is fine in two very different smaller roles, the tutor and the blustery neighbor Bolshintsov. Greg Oliver Bodine is excellent as the perpetually put-upon Rakitin, who finally finds nerve and voice in the final scenes of the play, to our immense joy.

This is a supremely good-natured piece, basking in the uncommon Russian summer sun and the frivolity it seems to inspire in the denizens of this privileged household. If, like me, you've somehow missed this classic Turgenev work thus far in your theatre-going career, here's a grand opportunity to make its acquaintance, under the most favorable of circumstances.

I believe it was Chekhov who said something like if you show them a gun in the first act it better go off in the last. Well, in A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun, the very first thing we see is the daughter following the instructions on how to load her brand new gun. So, does it go off in the last act? Oh it goes off alright, I’d say about every ten minutes. She actually has to reload just after intermission. The gun is also frivolously pointed at just about everyone. If there were a baby in this play the gun would certainly have spent some time pointed at its cute little head. It’s all in good fun. It’s like a sitcom, but with a gun and some cussing, which is just fine, but I was wondering when things would turn serious or real in some way. But I wondered in vain because they never do.

The daughter, Jess, bought this new gun because she has discovered that her husband is cheating on her and she’s determined to shoot him. Her overbearing and self-centered mother, Beatrice, enters her apartment using her “emergency” key and almost gets shot in the process. (That’s only the first shot. Get used to being startled out of your seat.) Jess is an intelligent but mousy and pessimistic young woman who has always sought her mother’s approval but has never been able to get it. She recently won a ham in a grocery store contest and since she’d never won anything in her life she tells everyone she meets that day that she’s having a party to celebrate. Beatrice is there to help with the party, but Jess has become too depressed about her husband screwing around to care about it anymore.

The majority of the play takes place during the party. Jess spends most of her time holed up in her room while her mother butterflies around from guest to guest telling them personal things about Jess such as that fact that she’s pregnant. Various party-goers parade through her room and talk to her. There’s the lesbian couple that wants to adopt the baby, there’s the guy that Jess sees at her therapist’s office because his appointment is right before hers, and then there's the man that took her virginity but can’t seem to remember her. Eventually her Dad shows up and makes a fond confession of having an affair himself. An admission for which Beatrice shoots him. (Not dead; she just grazes him arm.)

It’s very silly. The mother character is ridiculously self-absorbed. The daughter is whiny to the point of annoyance. The rest of the characters are blatant stereotypes. With the possible exception of the guy who took her virginity. Their scene actually approached something tender and real. I was fooled into thinking that the daughter would in some way make a connection with her mother, maybe even gain her approval, but they never really come close. She takes Beatrice’s emergency key away and that’s about as close as the playwright comes to a resolution.

Playwright Barra Grant has a talent for writing some great jokes but even comedy has moments where characters face a real situation with real emotions and/or genuine reactions. If every line in life were a joke then what would be funny? What would it be contrasted with? I laughed with these characters for a while but after some time I lost the urge to laugh because it just got old. I wanted something real. At one point, for example, Beatrice thinks that Jess has shot herself in the bathroom, but her reactions are nothing even close to how a real person would react. I guess that's why they call this one dark comedy, but at the same time it’s all oh so light. So I figure Grant is inventing a genre that she might call gray comedy. It’s interesting and much of the audience was laughing throughout so it works for some.

Veanne Cox is equally endearing and annoying as Jess. And those are hard things to balance. She manages to pull some honesty out of a character that admits to very little. George S. Irving is absolutely hilarious in his role as the father. His monologue about his affair is brilliant. Olympia Dukakis is at her quirky, comic best in this role. There were some moments when I felt she was pushing it just little bit, but I wasn’t sure if it was due to the writing or to the directing.

Director Jonathan Lynn lends the play a quick pace and stages some funny physical bits. There are a few places where he goes a bit over-the-top, such as the Puerto Rican party-goer who is almost constantly salsa dancing. Jesse Poleshuck’s rotating set design is most impressive.

I had some fun at A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun but it didn’t last the entire show. I could not help but think that if I wanted to watch a sitcom I could have just stayed at home.

The plush red velvet curtain rises to reveal a gorgeous John Lee Beatty set: a fabulous airy kitchen / dining room / living room / staircase-to-the-second-floor, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and with a glimpse of lush greenery outside ("a beautiful house somewhere in the Hamptons," the program says). We get a moment to take it all in, and then enter our leading lady, Jill Clayburgh, looking mighty fine in upper-middle-class casual (courtesy of costumer Catherine Zuber); can it really be almost 30 years since she got famous as An Unmarried Woman? Shortly thereafter, our leading man, Richard Thomas appears: yes, John-Boy Walton, all grown up but just as amiable and eternally youthful (and don't get me wrong, both of these movie/TV stars can hold the stage and deserve to be on it). A few minutes more, and here comes Ann Guilbert, once Millie Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show, the high-pitched slightly whiny voice and kooky stooped walk intact.

I was delighted to be in this lovely room among such old friends. How is it possible for A Naked Girl on the Appian Way to squander all of that goodwill so quickly and completely?

Leave it to Richard Greenberg to pump in the highfalutin' upper-crust mean-spiritedness and pump out anything resembling charm or reality. The Tony-winning playwright who hypothesized a baseball star coming out of the closet for no reason whatsoever (Take Me Out) and a prominent black entertainer involved in a public interracial romance in pre-World War I America (The Velvet Hour) here trumps his own facility for devising spectacularly implausible scenarios with a story of a Martha Stewart-ish cookbook author/TV celebrity, her wildly successful and rich businessman husband (now semi-retired and writing a book of his own), and how two of their multi-ethnic adopted children fall in love during a European trip and decide to get married.

Now, there's certainly a provocative social issue worthy of exploration in all of this (just as there was in Take Me Out), but Greenberg, true to form, eschews that opportunity and devotes himself instead to exploiting stereotypes in as broad and nasty a fashion as possible, and to piling up sensational detail upon sensational detail without regard for what life is actually, or even sort-of, like.

So the old lady played by Guilbert is a discontented ex-Bohemian who carries on endlessly about how much she hated her (dead) son and still hates his wife (whom she calls, not so endearingly, a "dumb bitch," over and over again); she uses even fouler language to talk about sex and other body functions, like an uncensored Sophia from The Golden Girls. The three adopted children—who are of Japanese, German, and Dominican descent—spew racial epithets at one another (Bill, the Japanese kid, compares his brother Thad to the Nazis and makes vulgar sexual jokes about his sister Juliet). Bill is revealed to be bisexual; Thad fooled around with a boy in high school; their mother is revealed to have had a lesbian affair. The next-door neighbor (the old lady's daughter-in-law) is a has-been pretentious author who is writing a two-volume study of menstruation.

Greenberg gives them all inflated vocabularies as if that will make these people seem somehow smarter or more dear to us. (They use a number of words that I didn't recognize; even Thad, who is otherwise presented as pretty much the Village Idiot, has prodigious word power.)

I didn't believe a word of it and I didn't find it funny. To be fair, the audience around me mostly did seem to be having a pretty good time: I wouldn't want to spend $86.25 to watch what amounts to three episodes of a coarse and dirty-minded sitcom on stage—but having spent it, I guess you may as well relax and enjoy yourself.

Director Doug Hughes has done nothing particularly wrong in staging the play, but he hasn't done anything especially right either. Clayburgh, Thomas, and the rest of the show's very attractive cast do pretty much what they need to in order to put over the thing, which is to say that they play in the broadest possible manner. Thomas nevertheless manages to be centered and immensely likeable, while Clayburgh's pizzazz and chic elegance remind us (when we stop to think about it) that she deserves something SO much better for her return to Broadway than this. The kids are played by Matthew Morrison, James Yaegashi, and Susan Kelechi Watson, and they're really terrific in thankless roles (especially Yaegashi, who proves himself—after his all-Japanese and occasionally naked stint in Take Me Out—a really fine comic actor; he deserves something better too).

This kind of frivolous comedy of manners is of course a staple of theatre; in the '50s and '60s, writers like Harry Kurnitz, Samuel Taylor, and Norman Krasna built entire careers on this sort of thing. But those guys tended to ground themselves in reality and when in doubt they usually went for good taste rather than bad. Times have changed, I guess.

And oh yes, a naked girl on the Appian Way is mentioned in the script (twice), but I have no idea why this particular phrase has been chosen as the title of this play. Unless the folks in charge are hoping that we'll suppose an actual naked girl will turn up on stage (none does). Could they be that crass?

A Night Near the Sun, an ambitious new play by Don Zolidis, is about a young man named Eric, his best friend Andy, Andy's 16-year-old girlfriend Kristi, and a married couple in their 40s who are their neighbors, Troy and Louise. Eric lives on a farm on the outskirts of the small Wisconsin town that is these folks' home; he spent the first 16 years of his life more or less imprisoned in a barn (for reasons that are revealed at the end of the play). Eric has a deep, dangerous crush on Kristi; so does Troy, although in his case it's a more generalized lust for all pretty young girls—Troy, the local drug dealer, spends his leisure time in Internet chat rooms, pretending to be a 13-year-old named Sally. Louise, meanwhile, has the hots for most of the young men who turn up at their house, including Eric, who arrives there—in the scene that sets the story in motion—to buy some acid from Troy.

Kristi's mother is dying of liver cancer, and her father, who has always been physically abusive to her mother, is making her home life pretty unbearable. But when Kristi asks Andy to let her stay at his house (he lives in his parents' basement), he balks, concerned at least in part by the possibility that her father will charge him with statutory rape. Andy similarly rejects her suggestion that they run away together. And so, Kristi suddenly disappears, on the very afternoon that Troy is supposed to deliver the LSD to Eric...and Troy disappears, too.

This leads to a string of events that turn tragically violent. I don't want to give away the play's surprises, so suffice to say that before the (metaphorical) curtain falls, someone has been murdered and every one of the surviving characters' lives is irrevocably altered.

This is, as the foregoing synopsis should alert you, a very busy play. Indeed, it's almost too fraught with incident for its own good. Zolidis is terrific at delineating characters, and particularly when he's blessed with an accomplished actor—as he is here by Brian Linden as Troy and Zachary Fletcher as Andy—he's able to create honest, complicated, touching individuals. The details are insightfully fleshed out: Andy's romantic attempts at poetry; Troy's manic cover for his middle-aged desperation in bars, drugs, and chat rooms. Linden and Fletcher deliver well-rounded and finely-tuned performances; it's unfortunate that their characters (especially Fletcher's, who is almost completely absent from the play's second act) don't have more to do.

But as good as Zolidis is at painting these portraits of melancholy small-town men, he's less accomplished in managing the very complicated plot and back story that he's hatched in A Night Near the Sun. The explanation for Eric's isolation feels far-fetched, and the overall ambience of the piece—drenched in forlorn sex and drug-taking—seems to lack the depth that would really allow us to properly understand the lives he's depicting here. I was also disturbed by the lack of balance in his portrayals of women: the four female characters (two of them strong offstage presences) are a nymphomaniac, a victim who is literally on her deathbed, a troubled teen with dangerously self-destructive impulses, and a delusional psychotic. Lacking positive contrasts of any kind, the play borders on misogyny.

It has been given a competent production by the bold young company Impetuous Theater Group, with a versatile and spare set designed by Joe Powell and effective lighting and sound design by George Gountas and Ryan Dowd, respectively. James David Jackson's staging feels a bit slow-moving in the first act, but is satisfactory overall. In addition to Linden and Fletcher, the cast consists of Cidele Curo, who does her best with the underwritten role of Louise, and Reyna DeCourcy (Kristi) and Michael Rudez (Eric), neither of whom seems to have quite the acting chops to fully put over their complex characters. (The fact that both look and play considerably older than their respective characters' ages of 16 and 22 is problematic as well.)

A Night Near the Sun offers an often interesting look at contemporary American small town life; at its best—in its compassionate explorations of Andy and Troy—it feels like the kind of thing William Inge might write were he alive today.

After I left John Jahnke's arresting production of Susan Sontag's playlet A Parisifal, and I let its evocative imagery waft through my subconscious for a while, it occurred to me that lines from two poems were popping into my mind. One is Auden's, from "September 1, 1939": "We must love one another or die." The other is Donne's: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

And so, whether or not Jahnke or the late Miss Sontag intended me to, where I found myself after this extraordinary work of theatre was pondering mortality and our relationship to it. In A Parsifal—Sontag's oblique paean to the myth and the opera—a young man kills a beautiful swan by accident and then witnesses the ravaged decline of an ailing King (on a gurney, getting hooked up to an IV drip); later, he sees his sometime lover Kundry die in much the same undignified way (both scenes, in their jarring hospital-white coldness, bring to mind the modern-day plagues, especially AIDS, which may be how, via Larry Kramer, I got to Auden).

The question is not whether the hero Parisfal is responsible for the deaths, but rather whether he is or should be moved by them. In the end I thought he was, or maybe it was just that I was. We can hope for a timeless hero, here armed with an Uzi instead of a bow and arrow or mace, to be humbled and touched by death, even when death is his business.

Sontag wrote A Parsifal in 1990, and yet the script feels particularly resonant at this particular moment. Parsifal says, "I'm not good at talking" and later "I read as little as possible. I trust what I feel," which made me spontaneously start mapping his character to that of our current President; it's not a perfect fit (couldn't be), but I think there's some validity to the notion that this mythic finder of the Holy Grail is supposed to be learning lessons here possibly lost on some of our own current political leaders.

The play is very short—the script runs to just six pages—and Jahnke's production, about an hour all told, makes it not just longer but larger. Each movement seems magnified, the better for us to look at it. The brief tale plays out in a stark white space, defined mostly by levels that ascend from front to back of the stage, with holding areas to each side, some enclosed by translucent netting. Jahnke's design team—set designer Michael Casselli, lighting designer Shaun Fillion, costume designers Ramona Ponce, Pilar Limosner, and Hilary Moore, and sound designer Kristin Worrall—do stunning work in synch with the director's pristine and precise vision.

The staging is filled with memorably striking effects: Black-Eyed Susan as the Ostrich, mother-figure to Parsifal, wears downy feathers and furry slippers and occasionally sits on a broad white swing. Okwui Okpokwasili as Kundry, Parsifal's temptress and (perhaps) beloved, progresses from savage sprite to inner-city AIDS ward patient, climaxing her deeply-felt performance with a gorgeous mournful rendition of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." Gardiner Comfort enters as the newborn Parisfal completely naked except for his machine gun, disarmingly innocent and not a whit erotic or prurient. The chorus of knights are young men toting Uzis, and in a particularly moving sequence they pass the "word" down from their hero, which turns out to be a shockingly tender touch or kiss—Auden's message, again.

It's theatre that makes us think about what we're seeing—Jahnke's work provokes contemplation and analysis despite the often opaque and/or perversely indistinct text. It is also singularly beautiful, not a bad end at all for a piece as abstract as this.

In the one-character play A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, Brazilian playwright Marta Goes tells the story of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s sojourn in Brazil, and her long and tumultuous relationship with Lota Macedo de Soares, a Brazilian intellectual and sometime politician. There is certainly a story to be told there, a great romance: American poet on fellowship travels to South America by freighter, intending to disembark in Rio, spend a few days with acquaintances there, and then see the whole of South America. Instead, she has a massive allergic reaction to cashew fruit, winds up in the hospital, and during her recuperation falls in love and stays in Brazil, and with her lover, for 15 years.

But Goes has not found a successful way to tell that story, nor a compelling way to bring the character of Elizabeth Bishop to life. The style of the play veers between oddly unemotional descriptive monologues and extremely awkward one-sided conversations where Bishop is either on the telephone or in theory addressing someone in another room whose responses we never hear. But, as often with such contrivances, Goes takes such pains to make sure everything we don’t hear is explicitly contained in what we do hear, that the dialogue becomes strained and never convincingly conversational. And because of this unconvincing faux dialogue, the invisible/absent Lota, often the “other side” of these conversations, sometimes seems a more interesting character than Bishop herself.

And neither in the conversations nor the monologues do we get a real sense of the emotional or intellectual life of the character. One large problem with the play is that Goes’s Bishop seems to bear little resemblance to the Elizabeth Bishop one might imagine from reading Bishop. Now, there’s an interesting challenge there for both writer and audience—what if the private person were, in fact, a woman who differs greatly from the persona a reader might imagine?—but in order for the fictional private construction to be believable, it must be possible to imagine her coexisting with the evidence we have of the public person, and I did not feel that to be the case here.

The play includes citations from Bishop’s own poetry, prose, and letters, which deepen the contrast between the real Bishop’s vivid writing and the fictional Bishop’s awkward descriptions of her life. Where the Bishop of her own writing is warm, sharply observant, nature- and animal-loving, wry, deeply devoted to her friends, self-deprecating, relentlessly critical of her own (and others’) work, and boldly—sometimes painfully—honest about her own shortcomings, Goes’s Bishop seems merely whiny, depressed, and completely emotionally dependent on Lota.

There are also moments that seem both out of character and deeply anachronistic—I cannot imagine that anyone in the late 1950s, let alone Bishop, who only ever referred to Lota even in correspondence as “her friend,” would have described Lota’s appointment to a government position as an important victory for “homosexual women.”

An overly fussy production does not help. Amy Irving gives the best performance she can under the circumstances, striving to locate the wit and the charm in the writing. But rather than trying to find a physical throughline for the piece, director Richard Jay-Alexander has emphasized the choppiness of the scene breaks by moving each scene to a different, fairly elaborately realized physical location—which means that Irving spends a great deal of time walking from “place to place” on the stage’s turntable. Jeff Cowie’s set, with elaborate new furniture swiveling onstage every few minutes, and Zachary Borovay’s beautiful but over-the-top projections, are lovely to look at but distract from rather than enhance the play.

Second Stage Theatre’s current revival of A Soldier’s Play is well done: there is a high level of proficiency in craft and technique on display from everyone involved. The production moves at a steady gallop, never lagging, and holds the audience’s attention throughout. But, while these are good attributes and make for a diverting evening of theatre, they are not enough to make for a riveting one. The key ingredients missing from this revival—passion, urgency, and inspiration—are the ones that prevent it from tapping into the full explosiveness of Charles Fuller’s powerful drama.

The setting of A Soldier’s Play is an Army base in the Jim Crow south—Fort Neal, Louisiana—during World War II. A black soldier, Sergeant Waters, is brutally murdered one night as he stumbles drunkenly back to his barracks. At first, the killing is attributed to the local Ku Klux Klan. The Army brass is not keen on spending a lot of time or resources investigating what they think is obviously a hate crime. (Remember: the play is set in a time when racism was still very prevalent in the U.S. and a "colored" man’s life was held in low esteem.) A military officer from Washington D.C., Captain Davenport, is sent to head the investigation. Davenport is a rarity for that era: a black officer. When Waters’s commanding officer, Captain Taylor (a white man) meets Davenport, he knows that the powers-that-be don’t take the investigation seriously. How do they expect the local authorities (also white) to cooperate with a colored officer? Nevertheless, spurred on by both pride and duty, Davenport moves ahead undeterred. Before long, he eliminates the Klan (and all other white men) as suspects, and begins to focus his efforts on Waters’s own men: an all-black company. The deeper Davenport digs, the more skeletons he finds hanging in their barracks, as it turns out that Waters was not as well-liked or respected as he’s initially made out to be.

The stakes are understandably high for everyone in A Soldier’s Play. The black soldiers are fighting for equality and respectability in a world that doesn’t want to give them either. But they don’t expect to receive such prejudicial treatment from one of their own. Waters—who appears in flashbacks throughout the play—is all about the military advancement of his race. But, he secretly covets the white man’s way of life—one of comfort, privilege, and power—and has trained himself to “play by their rules” in order to get ahead. Waters, in turn, forcibly tries to make his men adopt the same way of thinking (for their own good, of course), instead of allowing them to rise or fall on the strength of their own personalities. One soldier in particular, the Mississippi-born Private C.J. Memphis, becomes the preferred target of Waters’s ire (“The Sarge didn’t like Southern negroes,” one of the privates tells Davenport). Of C.J.’s good-natured, guitar-picking, happy-go-lucky homespun disposition Waters says, “We got to turn our backs on the chitlin’, collard greens, cornbread style.”

Fuller has a lot on his mind here—namely, the uplift of an entire race and how that must start from within. He argues that, as a people, blacks will never be able to defeat white racism towards them until they first eradicate the racism they direct at each other (and sometimes themselves). It’s a provocative idea that Fuller expresses beautifully, with well-written characters, sharp dialogue, and a solidly designed structure. By making A Soldier’s Play look ostensibly like a whodunit, he takes the polemic out of his message and makes it more palatable and dramatically interesting.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could go wrong with such strong material to work with, but the creative team behind this production somehow manages to do it. That’s not to say that this production is bad, because it isn’t—it’s actually very good, by which I mean “good” in the “professional” sense. Director Jo Bonney stages A Soldier’s Play with her usual fluidity, and set designer Neil Patel, costume designer David Zinn, and lighting designer David Weiner all turn in reliably first-rate efforts. The pacing starts out nicely, and builds appropriately as tension increases and dramatic turning points are reached. Scene transitions flow smoothly to keep the show moving at a brisk clip.

But, this Soldier’s Play turns out to be nothing more than a hollow exercise in technique. Everyone does what’s expected of them as far as putting a polished veneer on the proceedings, but the nebulous, elusive spark of inspiration is glaringly absent. There is no passion or urgency to anything that happens on stage—strange, considering the script itself contains plenty of both qualities. No one is guiltier of perpetrating this than the actors, almost none of whom seems to have a fire in his belly. As Davenport, Taye Diggs is too nonchalant—he brings a casual detachment to his role that does not suit it. And as Waters, James McDaniel is not scary or tyrannical at all, just rude and insensitive (hardly a good enough reason to inspire as much vitriol as his character does). When he utters A Soldier’s Play’s most famous line to C.J.—“The black race can’t afford you no more.”—it hardly rises to the bone-chilling heights Fuller intended. The rest of the cast more or less falls in line behind their two leading men—they go through the motions without making us feel the heat. Only Anthony Mackie, who plays one of the more erudite soldiers, and Steven Pasquale, as Waters’s white commanding officer, rise to the play’s level of fervency.

It may sound like I’m splitting hairs, but the difference between what this production achieves and what it could achieve if it tried a little harder is the difference between an enjoyable evening of theatre and an edifying, life-altering artistic experience. While it’s good to know that technique and professionalism can carry plenty of weight, every show still needs the intangibles that can only be provided by an artist’s soul. They are the missing ingredients in this production, and the ones that keep this Soldier’s Play from being one for the ages.

My companion at Michael Brandt’s A Spalding Gray Matter, himself a Spalding Gray fanatic for many years, mentioned that he has a Google News Alert set up to send to his e-mail address any new content on the web mentioning the genre-defining solo performer who disappeared in New York in January 2004, and whose body was pulled from the East River the following March, his death believed to be a suicide. Ironically, almost every one of these websites, blogs, and news articles sent as a hit on the name"Spalding Gray" describes someone else’s work. "The performer’s very Spalding Gray-like monologue," a snippet might read, or "With personal candor reminiscent of Spalding Gray…" Brandt’s presentation deliberately offers an homage to the simplicity of Gray’s usual set-up: a table and chair, a notebook, a beverage, and a screen. Upon taking his seat, Brandt commences his journey through a near-terminal lung infection that he contracted and suffered in his hometown in Kansas, concurrent with Gray’s disappearance back home in New York.

Many intriguing touches to Brandt’s piece, overseen by director Ian Morgan, will be familiar to lovers of Gray’s monologues, and are testaments to Gray’s mastery of storytelling. The show uses lighting shifts, expertly designed by Jason Lyons, to change tones between sections describing his Alice in Wonderland-like journey through the outlandishness of the American health care system, and biographical musings about its parallels with Gray’s mental and physical health struggle. Above Brandt is a screen that he operates with a remote from time to time to display an illustration to his story, such as a lung x-ray, a dateline, or a drawing. Occasionally a sound effect by designer Matt Sherwin is woven in, such the whooshing of Brandt’s oxygen tank, effectively enveloping us in Brandt’s bizarre world of mysterious illness.

The appeal of Brandt’s story lies in the everyman helplessness that we all feel in the face of the human body’s frailties, and the ambiguities of care provided by this nation’s health system. Brandt’s story begins with a misdiagnosed cold that suddenly turns into pneumonia and a fluid-filled lung. It is still a mystery how this was caused. Once the lung condition is correctly diagnosed on his third visit to the local health clinic, he is forced to endure a morass of antibiotics and fluid-draining attempts, medical jargon, medical buffoonery (one doctor blames his lack of success at draining Brandt’s lung on fluid that was “hiding”), surgery, and any number of indignities, from being bathed by his father to carrying his draining lung fluid around with him at the hospital in a clear, briefcase-like container. He also discovers how lucky he is to have emerged from the misdiagnosis alive.

The awe of this inspires riveting, Gray-like scrutiny of the details of survival and recovery. Brandt uses sharp humor to expound on the ludicrousness of the hospital staff’s favorite question: On a scale of 1-10, how bad is your pain? On a more somber level, Brandt leaves a lasting impression when he demonstrates the vulnerable, hunched position he assumed for thoracocentesis—the insertion of a long needle through the back of the seated patient, to drain fluid from the lung.

Important details, though, seem to be missing about Brandt’s connection to Spalding Gray. After hearing an initial news report about Gray’s disappearance while healing at his home, Brandt becomes riveted to the news every day for an update, though there is little in Brandt’s story to suggest that he had a strong personal connection to Gray before his disappearance. His initial concern about the first news report is not even the event of Gray’s disappearance, but the absurdity of the label "monologist." "Are other actors 'dialogists'?", he wonders. Still, Brandt was clearly intrigued enough by Gray to begin research, as much of the show relates Gray’s tragic life story, including a debilitating, work-stopping car crash in Ireland in 2001, followed by depression and multiple suicide attempts. What was the inspiration for this research? What if it had been some other actor whom he was familiar with, but not passionately connected to? What was the eerie detail that hooked him hard onto Gray’s story, and made him more than just a headline to Brandt? If these connections are present in the evening with Brandt, they are subtle needles in the haystack of his own story, and they could use more attention to support the Spalding Gray angle of this piece.

This is not the first production of this show; Brandt previously performed it last year at breedingground production's Spring Fever Festival. Martin Denton’s review of that original production is linked above. Martin greatly appreciates Brandt’s caustic wit and harrowing story; I wholeheartedly concur. I loved a particularly witty remark Brandt makes about OxyContin, the highly addictive pain medication notorious for having had Rush Limbaugh amongst the many who weren’t able do without it. It is also notorious for causing constipation. Brandt dryly intones, "So if you always thought Rush Limbaugh was full of shit, well…"

Brandt’s own story, independent of Gray’s, is a fascinating one. Oddly enough, the Spalding Gray frame of the piece, though timely with his recent death, is perhaps its least compelling element. The story of Brandt’s illness has plenty on its own to make us think about mortality, medicine, and what we take for granted.

A Touch of the Poet was meant to be part of an eleven-play cycle, tracing the history of one American family over the course of 175 years. But Eugene O’Neill only completed one of the plays, which was never produced in his lifetime. So it’s difficult to know what to make of A Touch of the Poet on its own terms, without knowing how it might have fit into the larger cycle, or even whether O’Neill, seeing it on its feet, might have been inspired to go back and do some rewriting. And the Roundabout Theatre’s current production can’t quite overcome the flaws in the script, especially in the exposition-heavy first act—though there are plenty of pleasures to be found in even second-rate O’Neill, especially when beautifully acted.

Much of this exposition comes in the very first scene, where Mickey Maloy, a bartender in an early 19th century Boston tavern, quizzes Jamie Cregan, a down-on-his-luck Irish veteran, for information about Maloy’s boss, Cornelius ("Con") Melody, formerly Cregan’s commanding officer in Spain. Melody now owns this tavern, where his long-suffering wife, Nora, does all the cooking and cleaning and scrimping and saving; his daughter, Sara, serves bitterly as a waitress; and Melody himself, feeling too grand to tend bar, spends most of his time drinking, tending to his thoroughbred horse, and reminiscing about his glory days in the army. Resident in the hotel—but never seen on stage, which also generates much exposition—is Simon Harford, the ailing son of an upper-class Boston family, with whom Sara is in love, and much of the play—which takes place in a single day—revolves around this budding romance. Nora, still desperately in love with Con despite his constant mistreatment of her, wants to see Sara love someone the same way; Con vacillates between seeing the match as perfectly suited and scathingly criticizing Sara as a peasant who couldn’t possibly be worthy of a gentleman’s son. Simon’s mother, Deborah Harford, appears in the afternoon to see her sick son and appraise Sara, and the Harford family lawyer turns up in the evening to bribe the entire Melody clan to move away from the Boston area.

Since it’s a Eugene O’Neill play, you can probably predict that it doesn’t end well. Con, incensed by the attempted bribery, sets off for Boston to avenge the slight to his honor, and returns having received a crack on the head that leads to a rude awakening about his actual position in the world. His wife and daughter are left not quite sure whether to mourn Con’s broken spirit or to rejoice that he’s finally recognized how hard his illusions have made their life. The last scene of the play, taken on its own, is heartbreaking, but it’s too little too late to redeem Melody. One of the problems with the script is that, having watched this destructive drunk manipulate, insult, and bully these two women for two hours, I wanted his awakening to come from a more insightful place than a head injury.

But flawed O’Neill is still richer than the best work of many a playwright. Nora Melody, as played by the beautifully subtle Irish actress Dearbhla Molloy, is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman who knows all too well the sacrifices she’s made for love, and has chosen not to be bitter about it. The scene between Sara Melody and Deborah Harford is both a very civilized catfight between a young lover and her would-rather-not-be mother-in-law and an incisive commentary on class and gender in post-revolutionary America. And Kathryn Meisle is riveting as Deborah; she turns a one-scene character who is in some sense the villain of the piece into a poignant and sympathetic mother, who both wants her son to have a freedom she’s never been allowed and knows the cost of that freedom, for him and for her.

Gabriel Byrne has a challenging role—he’s playing a scenery-chewer, a bombastic drunk who prides himself on being larger than life, and it’s a difficult balance to play that kind of role without going over the top. Byrne cuts the scenery-chewing by giving Con’s sarcasm a truly vicious edge, and then turns it on himself to energize that aforementioned last-act conversion. Byrne even comes awfully close to making us understand Con’s good side—that spark of something that makes a good woman love him without stinting, that made men follow him into battle—and I think his ultimate failure at doing so is O’Neill’s more than Byrne’s. The story doesn’t make sense without that side to Con, but it’s not really written into the play.

Emily Bergl, as Sara, is less successful at finding the shadings that make sense of her character. She is touching as the young girl radiant with first love, but seems to play only one note—bitterness—in her dealings with her father, even when her lines call for her to grudgingly admit her affection for or even identification with him.

Doug Hughes’s direction feels competent but uninspired. The strongest actors shine, but those in the smaller roles seem a bit tentative. The staging is oddly two-dimensional, given the size and depth of the stage, and the blocking often seems stifled by an excess of tables and chairs on Santo Loquasto’s set.

A Touch of the Poet may ultimately be more of a historical artifact than a major addition to the O’Neill canon—which makes it interesting, if not always entirely satisfying.

Fasten your seatbelts….
It's going to be a bumpy Christmas….

Okay, groan yes, but you need to hear the delivery! Whether or not you are a Bette Davis fan and know every one of her famous lines by heart or not, seeing five time MAC award-winning Tommy Femia in the title role of A Very Bette Christmas is definitely a present you should give yourself this year.

The hour-long play with music takes place in a television studio in 1962. A Christmas television special starring Miss Davis is trying to be made but with little success. For one, there is a raging snowstorm outside and guest stars Liberace and Brenda Lee are unable to show up and perform. The other obstacle is Miss Davis herself, dominating the director (the offstage voice of Peter Morris) and her assistant Elf (Daniel John Kelly). When she finds out that her very special guest star is to be none other than Joan Crawford, she creates some wonderful songs in her honor. One forgets how many words rhyme with "souse" and "slut."

The playwright, Elizabeth Fuller, has written about Bette Davis before in the book and play Me & Jezebel about the true events of 1985 when Davis came to dinner at her family's house in Connecticut and stayed for a month. Although I don't think the premise for this play is as interesting or open to possibilities, it makes a perfect piece for the cabaret venue Don't Tell Mama. It's meant to be a laugh a minute and director Mark S. Graham delivers the goods with fast pacing and staging. Almost all of the jokes land, a few miss the mark, like the Elf having Tourette's, but that is more the script than the delivery or timing.

Speaking of timing, watching Femia is like going to a master class for performance. His comic timing and reactions are impeccable and though he does look, sound, and act like Bette Davis (thanks in part to the wonderful costumes and hair design of Jon Jordan and makeup design of Mark Manalansan), he makes the character his own. He is as much a great actor as he is an impersonator. Daniel John Kelly as the Elf who defected from the Pushpinski Circus is very funny when he has to impersonate all of the guest stars who didn't make it. His singing voice is not strong, but he has created a very sweet character who is instantly likeable and sympathetic.

I was trying to rack my brain for a suitable Bette Davis quote to end this review. But not knowing her films extremely well, I've come up blank. I guess that helps prove that you do not have to be a Davis fanatic to thoroughly enjoy this show and be a Femia fan.

A Woman of Will is part play, part cabaret, part theatre history. Amanda McBroom (who composed Bette Midler’s signature song “The Rose”) wrote the lyrics, Joel Silberman wrote the music, and together they collaborated on the book. The show, directed by Silberman, isn’t very long, only about an hour-fifteen minutes with no intermission. There are sixteen songs and only one on-stage performer in star McBroom, although we do get to know other characters through messages left on voicemail—most notably, one particular voice, from beyond the grave, which offers comfort and assistance in the heroine’s moment of personal crisis.

In A Woman of Will, lyricist Kate has locked herself away in a Cleveland Holiday Inn to write the lyrics to a musical version of The Merchant of Venice, which in this case is a star vehicle for Jennifer Lopez called "The Merchant of Havana." Kate is struggling not only because she hasn’t written a song in years and years and the director is pressuring her for the work, but also because she’s distracted by the guilt of being a 52-year-old married woman who is having an affair with a much younger man. Whenever she can’t figure out a lyric—or her life—she ponders what one of Shakespeare’s heroines would do and then sings a song from that character’s perspective.

A Woman of Will is indeed clever—perhaps too much so. There are a lot of great ideas and concepts—definitely too many plot details for an hour-fifteen show to fully explore, and so makes Kate’s story come off as merely superficial. Four or five songs would have been more than sufficient, but here there are sixteen. Unfortunately, with the exception of a couple of the novelty songs, they all sound alike. I thought Gertrude’s “In His Hands” was lovely, and it was hard to resist Goneril’s “The Bitch is Out,” but Ariel’s “Hard to Be a Fairy Blues” was just plain annoying.

The show abounds with menopause jokes and bitchy swipes at much-maligned Jennifer Lopez. While I had no use for those, I did appreciate the wonderful voicemail messages, particularly from Patrick Cassidy as the tenacious “Boyfriend” and George Ball as the confused, long-suffering “Husband”. What I didn’t get to hear nearly enough of was the voice of the ever-remarkable Jim Dale as the stern but compassionate “Playwright” who defies time and space to pass on advice to Kate. He comes much too late in the story, stays far too briefly, and his sudden departure left me feeling cheated.

The production values of A Woman of Will are terrific, especially in the moments when the handwritten text of Shakespeare’s folios are superimposed white on black against the walls of the far backdrop. It’s indeed refreshing to see a female main character who’s lived more than a little life as played by an actress with a normal, healthy, age-appropriate body. The beautiful 50-something McBroom isn't a skinny model-type. She can shake her booty and laugh at herself with the best of them, and her voice is just divine—although I felt that for someone who is supposed to be sequestered in a hotel room to get some writing done, she is awfully well dressed in silk and high heels. She looks more like a headliner about to appear at the Rainbow Room than a frustrated writer who’s about to put nose to the grindstone at the desk and find inspiration in vodka and Almond Joys.

A Woman of Will is, frankly, a bit too sincere and soap opera-ish for my taste, and has an old-fashioned Hollywood “girlie” style to it that belongs to an era I don’t really relate to. Nonetheless, I cannot deny that McBroom and Silberman deserve credit for showing some “once more unto the breach” spirit.

A dozen or so suited men sing: “If God says Nothing / Then Do Nothing.”

A lone man moves cardboard along the floor, as he is unable to touch it with his feet.

This man ties a shoe to his head, and carefully moves a trash bag full of empty Coke cans.

This man is a butler, an American hero, a homeless man.

He has a thing for Rabbit and is in love with a young woman whose face has too many freckles.

A.W.O.L., an adaptation of Oliver Cadiot’s Colonel Zoo, could very easily be called obtuse. It rambles like a lunatic. It throws in seemingly random and unrelated bits of text and imagery. It is whimsical and deadly serious. It embraces the sort of mess that few theatrical pieces do these days: it is a surrealist painting and a prose poem and it demands the attention of those who love language in theatre.

The play is covered from head to toe in resplendent words, which makes perfect sense considering its source. It is also centered and grounded by the masterful performance of Steven Rattazzi. Essentially a one-man show, Rattazzi is everyone he is supposed to be, switching from satire to sincerity, high status to low, within a few seconds, never feeling ethereal or unfocused. In moments he moves with the grace of a dancer, but never allows us to feel that we are watching an overly rehearsed performance. It’s a marathon performance, full of life, and Rattazzi never misses a touching beat or laugh line. He is supported by an all-male chorus, who sing the wonderful music by composer Adam Silverman. Between Rattazzi and this chorus, there is a conflict between uniformity and passion that is palpable.

What is this play about? That’s an open question. The book is about a butler, but director Marion Schoevaert and translator Cole Swensen have adapted this character into a schizophrenic everyman, moving throughout his identities fluidly. He is always, though, an outsider. Unable to touch or communicate with those around him, those with fixed and uniform identities. It becomes the journey of an explorer, who longs to be a part of his world, but has no place in it. Much like Beckett’s novels, A.W.O.L. places a lone voice in the void, and shows how human the void can be.

The very thing, this unspeakable void, that makes A.W.O.L. powerful could also be, to some audience members, a frustrating flaw. The specifics are wantonly vague, and the script whirls around in both circumstance and tone, never placing itself in time. (The production notes that this takes place in the streets of downtown New York, but I had to take their word for it. I’m sure New York isn’t the only place with cardboard boxes and Coca-Cola.) The lack of groundedness creates the plays dizzying highs, but makes for a difficult and dense evening, even at less than 90 minutes. I didn’t walk out with a firm sense of what exactly was happening, other than the struggle. Each character had his obsessions, and together they formed the whole of our narrator; but in a mad world it’s difficult to find a clean thread.

Somehow though, it all makes some sort of internal sense. Or doesn’t. Either way, A.W.O.L. is as spare, and complex, as a poem.

Mike Leigh’s 1977 dramedy, Abigail’s Party—now receiving its long overdue New York premiere, courtesy of The New Group—is an incisive look at British middle class unrest. It studies a group of tenuously connected adults at a cocktail party—where the dynamic runs the gamut from good-natured banter to outright scorn—with subtle precision, turning the proceedings into a sociological Petri dish. Masterfully directed by Scott Elliott and led by an excellent cast (which is anchored by a frighteningly good turn from Jennifer Jason Leigh as the party's hostess), Abigail’s Party cuts right to the heart of the hostility bubbling under the surface of drunken small talk.

Set in late 1970s London, the play focuses on a cocktail party being thrown by Beverly, a brash and domineering housewife, and her hen-pecked husband, Laurence. The guests are their neighbors: Angela, a giggly and cheerful nurse, and her strong-but-silent bruiser of a husband, Tony; and Susan, a quiet and polite divorcee. Susan has been exiled from her own flat for the night—by her teenage daughter, Abigail, who’s having some friends over for a party of her own. Beverly’s party goes well for a while: strained but cordial niceties flow smoothly enough. But soon the noise from Abigail’s party (which has turned out to be larger than Susan anticipated) starts coming through the living room wall. Then everyone at Bev’s has one gin and tonic too many, and the gloves come off. Pent-up resentments are unleashed, and lead to an unsettling conclusion.

Leigh’s writing process has been well-publicized over the years—casting a project first and then collectively creating it with the actors through extensive improvisations. The end result usually turns out looking and feeling truly authentic—as if you’re spying on someone’s everyday life. Abigail’s Party possesses this fly-on-the-wall quality. The play trades plot for character study and occurs in real time, so the main attraction for the viewer is in watching Leigh’s characters behave and interact with each other. And it shares some common ground with the work of Harold Pinter in that things that are left unsaid reveal as much as those that are spoken; what happens offstage colors the action as much as what happens on stage. At one point, Laurence and Tony leave to check up on Abigail and her friends. When they return, it is clear that something has transpired between them—something possibly confrontational—but we never learn what it is: they keep it to themselves. But their thinly-veiled contempt for each other, evident in their behavior, is all we need to know. Similarly, Angela aggravates Tony to no end—he’s embarrassed or possibly disgusted by her—but we don’t know why. It is left to us to figure that—and many other aspects of Abigail’s Party—out.

Leigh also has bigger things on his mind, namely the passing of the proverbial torch from one generation to the next. Abigail’s next-door party hovers oppressively over the onstage proceedings. When the Sex Pistols start blaring through the wall it’s the equivalent of a rallying cry from Britain’s punk rock youth. Beverly’s generation—the older of the two, exemplifying 1970s “Me” Generation narcissism—begins slipping into irrelevance in that moment, as the audience recognizes that the coming punk movement will be the next one to start a cultural revolution and change the world. By the time Abigail’s Party reaches its disturbing conclusion, the social dominance of Beverly’s generation is literally dead.

It also sounds like there’s a lot more fun being had at Abigail’s party than at Beverly’s, where subtle passive-aggressiveness builds into not-so-subtle humiliation. Beverly is the party host from Hell, the kind of person whose house you would never want to go to. She has a lot to prove and wants to be thought of as posh and sophisticated, but she’s too selfish and insensitive to ever be hostess-with-the-mostest. Her compulsion to refill everyone’s drink whenever she runs dry herself (whether they want one or not) smacks of trying to make her guests adhere to her idea of what a party should be like. Their constant refusal of hors d’oeuvres or a cigarette is viewed by her as a personal affront. And her advice to Angela about which shade of lipstick she should use is a prime example of slow burn degradation. When Beverly attempts to seduce Tony in Act II (by dancing alluringly to Jose Feliciano’s version of “Light My Fire," much to everyone’s discomfort), she throws out all sense of social decorum. “We’re not here to hold conversations,” she declares at one point, “we’re here to enjoy ourselves!” Obviously, her idea of what that constitutes is skewed.

Director Elliott builds tension through inertia: even as the party becomes more demoralizing, the characters do nothing. They simply put on their best faces and suck it up (politeness is the key for everyone except Beverly). By keeping the actors mostly anchored to their seats, much like a real party, Elliott creates a growing sense of claustrophobia (there’s nowhere to run except out the door, and the guests are much too nice for that) and unease, making the audience feel not only like they are at the party themselves, but also complicit in letting Beverly get away with her demeaning little jibes (more than once I found myself looking away in shock and disbelief at some action or words of hers—that’s how uncomfortable it gets). Much like slowing down on the highway to view the aftermath of a car crash, Elliott’s direction of Abigail’s Party makes us wish we could do something to help and simultaneously glad that it’s them instead of us.

Abigail’s Party also moves at the perfect tempo. The play occurs in real time, and sails along with all the familiar peaks and valleys of superficial party repartee. Much of the credit for this must go to the exceptional cast, all of whom operate with great fluidity and teamwork. Max Baker gives a wonderful, heartbreaking performance as the sensitive Laurence. The ever-reliable Lisa Emery gives the placating Susan a soulful undercurrent; her eyes and behavior reveal a full inner life even if her words do not. Darren Goldstein gives Tony the proper blend of stoic menace, and Elizabeth Jasicki is likeably daffy as Angela. And, Jennifer Jason Leigh nails Beverly’s uncouth brand of self-centeredness perfectly.

Abigail’s Party rewards theatergoers with a generous helping of great acting and great storytelling. And a telling look at a party you’ll be glad you weren’t invited to.

Of all the rooms in a suburban household, the kitchen is where dignity faces its utmost peril. Puerile minds are already second-guessing me, thinking it is the bathroom that humbles us all greatly. But the kitchen has a sly combination of three elements that gives it reach over all other rooms jockeying for highest humiliation potential: intimacy (lacking the grand airs of the parlor), ease of entry (anybody can walk in on said intimacy. Who locks their kitchen?), and lots and lots of bits and bobs that are sharp, breakable, easily lost, easily fouled, or all of the above. So it is only natural that long-established playwright Alan Ayckbourn, master conjurer of the funniest sort of humiliation on Earth—British humiliation—should set Absurd Person Singular, Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest offering, in kitchens. Three different kitchens each take a turn as the setting for one of three acts, and each belongs to one of three suburban couples hosting successive Christmas gatherings, in a light evening of shtick at the Biltmore Theatre.

Alan Ruck and Clea Lewis are the first actors out, presenting the youthful Sidney and Jane, and their immaculate kitchen of domestic might. Like a page out of a Martha Stewart catalogue, this room is the hidden nerve center of two social climbers who don’t seem to have a lot of Christmas-party-hosting under their belt yet. Do they have the right drinks? Did they remember to buy x? Yes, here’s x, but where’s y? Sidney is a soldier of cheer who’s not afraid to go to his secret weapon if things get rocky in the parlor—games. Squeaky-voiced Jane is a daft housewife who parrots her husband’s asinine contributions to party conversation, and would just as soon that the cleaning had never stopped. The charm of the hosts must conquer two arriving couples, each of whom could help Sidney advance his career as a suburban real estate developer. Most stylish at the party are Geoffrey the philandering architect and his pill-popping wife Eva, played by Sam Robards and Mireille Enos, while the most distinguished mantle is carried by the banker and his wife, Ronald and Marion, the creations of seasoned stage veterans Paxton Whitehead and Deborah Rush.

As each of these couples takes their turn hosting the Christmas gathering in the following successive years and acts, we see the status of the couples shift between husband and wife and in relation to the other two pairings. Geoffrey and Eva (plus the off-stage character of George, their enormous dog, who is a series of hilariously timed sound effects designed by Bruce Ellman) have far darker circumstances looming over their Act II hosting preparations—or lack thereof, rather. Geoffrey has decided to go live with his mistress and Eva has silently decided to kill herself—these problems dwell in the room before it dawns on Geoffrey that company is coming. Though Eva never speaks in the second act, Enos is at the core of the non-stop physical mayhem that makes this the most fun part of the evening. Ayckbourn, truly on his game here, gives each character an absurd and utterly captivating task: Eva—to kill herself, cycling through a variety of increasingly drastic methods, each of them thwarted unwittingly by the rest of the oblivious guests. Geoffrey: to run for the doctor to treat his suicidal wife. Jane, the queen of clean, scrubs Geoffrey’s and Eva’s oven, thinking that Eva was struggling to clean it while actually struggling to gas herself; Jane’s husband, Sidney, joins in that spirit by fixing the sink as does Ronald, who fixes the light bulb, and gets rewarded with electrocution. Ronald’s wife Marion—well, she drinks. Enos’s drugged flailings through her suicide attempts after her first method of pills fails would make Lucille Ball proud.

The third act is oddly somber in tone—we are now in Ronald and Marion’s castle-like abode, which is seemingly all the more medieval because the heat has been broken for weeks. The cold has driven Marion to permanently encamp herself in bed with as much booze as possible within reach, which suits Ronald marvelously as now the rest of the house is quiet. Eva is in attendance, more stable if sharper-tongued than last year, and now keeps her spirit up by upbraiding Gerald for his ongoing unemployment and refusal to beg Sidney, now at the peak of his success and joviality, for a job. Not until the abrupt ending does the play regain its previous buoyancy, ending with Sidney getting his great wish—organizing a party game that is as egalitarian as it is inane: it mortifies everyone in the room generously and equally.

It is an upbeat ending to a play that seems like a fine pastry-crust—not meant to sit heavily in the gut, yet requiring skilled chefs in the kitchen. The actors are all up to the challenge, creating characters that are gracefully exaggerated. The women, in particular, enjoy themselves. Clea Lewis has a sing-song, nervous little laugh that she brings out just sparingly enough to keep from smothering the bit. Deborah Rush, as the boozy Marion, blows around the stage like a suburban empress, delivering some of the choicest lines of the night. Regarding Jane’s washer with separate dials for Whites and Colors: “its apartheid!” Moving on the color of Jane’s curtains: “most insistent.”

The pace of the action, under John Tillenger’s direction, stymies from time to time. While a dollop here and there of personal struggle is not out of place in a comedy, brooding adds drag to a scene, and there is quite a bit of it at the top of Act III, especially. Ayckbourn has written each act almost as its own compact little play, and that structure does not allow for much dwelling on an evening-long arc for each couple. The given circumstances are quickly established in each kitchen, and the action begins and never looks back. Act III gets out of the gate a bit slowly as the actors take time to reflect inwardly on their characters’ struggles, so that the final curtain drops on the party game just when the pace has returned to its old robust self. Nevertheless, there are quite a few exquisitely comic situations in this play that skewer the tight British clutch on dignified normalcy. Few playwrights these days can spin stoicism into mayhem with the zaniness of Alan Ayckbourn—see this play to witness comic writing that transcends the lazy sitcom habits of many contemporary playwrights aiming for laughs.

Got family coming to town that you just can't figure out how to entertain? Have I got a great way for you to fill at least three hours!

Accomplice: New York puts those red double-decker bus tours to shame. It is an entirely interactive and creative game/scavenger-hunt/wild goose chase through Lower Manhattan. When was the last time you hit the South Street Seaport, City Hall, Chinatown, Little Italy, and Soho all in the same day?

This clever little show teams you up with a bunch of strangers as clueless to the devious deeds at hand as you. My experience began like this: I had given my cell phone number and was expecting a call before the show on Saturday afternoon to tell me and my group where to show up. Around midday on Friday an incoming call rang from a Restricted Number. I don't answer calls from Restricted Numbers—I've fallen for that one before and swore them off for good. No message. A few minutes later the phone rang again. Restricted Number again. This time, a few minutes later the little 'you've got a message' envelope appeared. Curious, I listened. A gravelly Tony Soprano-accented voice addressed me by my full name. "Robin Reed" he said, "I’m callin’ ‘bout that thing you’re gonna be helpin’ me out with that you don’t know nothin’ about." I was instructed to take down the information and then “take the phone and smash it with a hammer and throw the pieces in the river. Or hit delete”—although the smashing and throwing is his preferred method of getting rid of any trace of evidence of our agreement.

I would entirely ruin all the fun if I told you much more than that. But I will, just a little bit. I will tell you that in the midst of this fortuitous and unseasonably nice weather we’ve been having, I can’t really think of a better way to spend the day. Brother-sister team Tom Salamon and Betsy Salamon-Sufott really went all out to put this thing together and keep it all on the down-low.

We got to the corner where we were told to go, and found a couple of other bunches of people just like us—looking around, wondering if this was where they were supposed to be. Suddenly out of nowhere (so suddenly that two of my friends totally missed it!) an incognito slickster whizzed by us with nothing more than a “Psst!” and we were off. From there we were given photo clues to find our next spot—with the eventual goal of helping this concocted bunch of criminals get out of the country—we were to deliver plane tickets. A motley group of strangers we were, and we had to work together.

For the next three hours we worked together in bars (yeah, a couple of drinks and a small bite to eat are included!) and on the streets to find our clues and help the crooks. The clues were mostly simple, and what one of us couldn’t figure out, someone of the other ten of us did. I’ll still never figure out just how that girl from Park Slope just happened to recognize the Wingdings font!

Throughout the day we met the funniest group of pranksters, all partners in the crime from which they were running. And we helped them. That’s right—we got to each of them in a perfectly planned three hours. We fed them an exit, they fed us a good time!

I would like to credit the brilliant actors, whose quick, off the cuff improvisations keep you on your toes. James Feuer, Joseph Tomasini, Wade Alan Steele, Joe Luongo, Brendan Irving, and Lauren Potter each came out of the woodwork on the streets and in the bars and park benches of Lower Manhattan to help make our afternoon so fun. And special kudos to John Cannetella, who, to this day, I can’t believe was acting—it’s not often that I think I can be fooled, but he got me!

But just wait until Accomplice II in the Spring. I’ll be watching out for you clowns this time!! And the Salamons are looking to bring it to some other big cities soon—so watch your back!

I did not particularly enjoy the 135 minutes I spent with Michael John Garces’s Acts of Mercy: passion play, but it was not a wasted evening at the (Rattlestick Playwrights) Theatre, to be sure.

I was struck immediately by the glowing cross of purple-neon lights that illuminated the black stage from above, suggesting a mournful and somewhat destitute (economically? morally?) feeling to the proceedings. The lights dimmed and rose again on an old man clearly on his deathbed singing a half-remembered song in a weakly delirious state, as a young woman with black hair covering her face gently cleansed his feet and legs. I was riveted. The lights dimmed again and rose on two young men hovering over the old man who seemed to be sleeping. Then they started arguing with machine-gun rapidity: a style of interaction that did not cease until the actors took their bows more than two hours later.

The premise is rather simple and rife with possibility: set in the present (presumably in Miami), a Cuban patriarch is dying in his bed at home and his sons and half-sons struggle with unresolved (and in some cases, deeply buried) feelings of guilt, resentment and (most interestingly) passionate paternal love. Their anxious interactions during this 24-hour period (?) belie a number of other inner conflicts—what is it to be a Cuban, an American, a Cuban American? What is it to be a man, a heterosexual, a lover, a friend, a son? And exactly what is to be done with women?

His questions are compelling, but Garces’s language here—and I do not know his many other plays, produced in and out of New York—is heavily influenced by Mamet and does not escape his idiomatic shadow. The content is simply too angry to be haunting, or to allow for other, more complex subtexts. Thus it was hard for me to feel something for these characters when they—and their creator—were feeling everything for me. Instead of toning down the harshness, or finding ambiguities in (between) the lines, director Gia Forakis seems to have heightened this already heightened text and has her actors flatly and relentlessly barking back and forth, pausing only rarely (and hardly pregnantly). This choice is isolating without being informative.

I can only assume that both Garces and Forakis wish for us to know that there are hidden aggressions behind the most banal interactions. Though each character is wounded and wary, the more successful performances here resist stating the obvious. Andrés Munar as Eladio, the “good” son—something of a pushover, yes, but the one who is most earnestly trying—every so often succumbs to said style, but is nonetheless sympathetic and more than watchable (which is fortunate since he has the most stage time). Ivan Quintanilla (as Ricky, a family friend, and potential closet case, who is trying desperately to be a good guy and a guy’s guy) and Jenny Maguire (as an inexperienced erotic dancer who is having trouble distinguishing between guys’ desires and her own) fare even better—perhaps their scenes are slightly less contentious. But the two actors imbue their characters with an irrepressible sense of playfulness and hope. Again, this may be complicit with how their roles are written.

Peter West’s lighting and Robin Vest’s sets are economical, imaginative, and may know more about what this play hopes to convey than the director or the writer themselves. Also, there’s a lengthy scene with nudity and some well-lit simulated sex so if, as you reach the end of this review, you were still thinking about bringing the kids, maybe don’t.