Just about every time I go to the Brick, that hotbed of theatrical energy on the fringe of Williamsburg, I get blasted out of my seat by the impressive talent in the house. Adventures of Caveman Robot, an almost preposterously ambitious new musical by Jeffrey Lewonczyk and Debby Schwartz, based on the comic book character created by Jason Robert Bell and Shoshanna Weinberger, is no exception. Here, for example, you will see Ian W. Hill, one of indie theatre's most versatile performers, rap something called "The Gorillasburg Address" while dressed in a gorilla suit and a big top hat (he plays, among other characters, a villainous primate named Ape Lincoln); you'll also enjoy Hill teaming up with terrific clown Devon Hawks Ludlow as a pair of bizarre mad scientists who happen to be brothers—they rip through their hilarious material as if they'd been working together as a comedy duo for decades. And Kevin Draine, Jorge Cordova, and Robin Reed parade around in costume designer Julianne Kroboth's wildly imaginative creations as a sextet of wacky, off-kilter super-villains: a former teen idol-turned-pyromaniac called Burn-Out, a strange effete French master hypnotist named Simon Says, an S&M-ish sexpot with freakish bionic arms known as Mistress Svetlana, and others just as kooky.

Not everything in Caveman Robot works, but you have to admire the immensity of its vision and the sincerity of its exuberant desire to entertain. Lewonczyk, who not only has written the book and collaborated on the lyrics but is also the director, co-producer, and an unbilled actor (on video) for this extravaganza (full disclosure: he's also a sometime contributor to nytheatre.com), has taken on the colossal job of writing and staging an original multimedia musical about a comic book character that very few people have ever heard of. That last bit is important: one of the most impressive things about Lewonczyk's well-crafted libretto is the deft way it doles out a great deal of exposition, easily bringing the uninitiated in the audience (such as myself) completely up to speed about the back story of Caveman Robot, the paradoxical union of primitive homo sapiens and futuristic high-tech who is the lovable hero of the show.

I'll try to lay the thing out for you briefly: Caveman Robot is the resident super-hero of the city of Monumenta, a place not unlike our own home town though in a seemingly alternate universe (the plot references, for example, a super-genius named John Zarathustra, D.D.S. as being president in the 1980s; Zarathustra will turn out to be Caveman Robot's arch nemesis). Caveman Robot is indeed a caveman who somehow (I confess I didn't quite get all the intricacies of how this was accomplished; don't try it at home) has been kept alive for millennia thanks to a life-giving dodecahedron, some kind of futuristic scientific whatsit that is maintained by Tuttlewell Laboratories. Professor Tuttlewell and his niece Megan (she reminded me of Velma from Scooby Doo, but much brainier) are Cavey's caretakers and best friends; Megan, it appears, would like to be even more than that.

Okay, so everything is hunky-dory in Monumenta except that all the various arch-villains in town hate that they are constantly being foiled by the super-powerful, super-sincere Cavey. Someone else hates Cavey, too: Loser Pete, a sad-sack little guy whose every step forward in life seems to be impeded by Caveman Robot; as he confides in "Loser's Pete's Song," a clever music-video parody that is the most effective musical number in the show, he's lost his apartment, his girlfriends, and his job to (inadvertent) incidents brought on by Cavey's crime-fighting.

Enter Edison and Franklin Park, two ultra-brilliant scientists who are brothers; Franklin is, also, quite insane. The two are working for an as-yet undisclosed third party and are recruiting all of Monumenta's bad guys to form a team that is originally supposed to be called the Terrible Ten but eventually has to be scaled back to the Nefarious Nine when Ape Lincoln refuses to join. This assemblage of bizarro baddies rivals anything the folks at the Batman or Marvel Comics franchises ever dreamed up: I've told you about Burn-Out, Simon Says, and Mistress Svetlana, and now I'll add to the list a Nazi whose brain has been transplanted into the body of a penguin, a man whose voice is so loud that even if he whispers he can knock down entire buildings with the impact, and a fellow called Mr. Tense who can deflect bullets from his body because he's so, well, tense.

So the Park brothers bring all these nasties together and devise a can't-miss plan to defeat and destroy Caveman Robot once and for all. Will they succeed? Will Megan be able to save her beloved Cavey? Will Loser Pete side with the bad guys, or will he see the light? These and other questions are, indeed, answered as Adventures of Caveman Robot wends its way through 19 scenes and two acts of hokey but heartfelt dialogue, songs, dances, and pow-bam-zonk fight sequences.

Much of the play is quite funny, especially as realized by Kroboth's zany costumes and the skillful cast; for example, a recurring joke in which Edison Park consistently forgets Loser Pete's name is put over masterfully by Hill and Chris Harcum (as the hapless Pete). The songs are uneven; I wondered how necessary they finally were to the piece, which is more of a "fightsical" (to borrow the name of a budding genre being developed by folks like Tim Haskell and the Vampire Cowboys) than a musical: the signature "numbers" of the show are elaborate live-action fight sequences rather than traditional song-and-dance turns. To that end, Caveman Robot would undeniably benefit from the talents of a fight director like Haskell or Qui Nguyen—someone who could really provide the stylish, polished choreography that these pivotal climactic segments require and deserve.

Multimedia consists of video projected on three different screens, including some really lovely abstract bits that represent Mater Vox, the sophisticated computer operating system controlling Cavey's wiring at Tuttlewell Labs; this is all impressively well-executed, which sometimes jars with the delightfully imaginative but decidedely low-tech aesthetic of the costumes and other staging elements. There are in fact three different attitudes seemingly at play in Caveman Robot: a neatly realized high-tech approach; a wacky, downtown-y "let's put on a show" energy; and the sweetly parodic but never campy sincerity of the story itself, which presumably comes from Caveman Robot's creator, Jason Robert Bell. These three concepts don't always mesh smoothly.

Bell, by the way, takes the title role as the super-hero he created originally for the comics; he's a charmer as the towering, aluminum-coated lug, offering a bona fide star turn in a show brimming with indie theatre stars. The only other cast member I haven't mentioned thus far is Hope Cartelli, who plays Megan with the requisite pluck and repressed sexiness; she only has one big number in the show ("His Robot Queen") and she gives it her all.

Adventures of Caveman Robot is fun and ingratiating. Lewonczyk tells us in his director's note in the program that the company has had a "heck of a time doing it," and so all we need to do is we relax and have a heck of a time enjoying it.

Manhattan Theatre Club's press release for Elaine May's new show After the Night and the Music says that it's about "life in the new millennium." This claim might have been accurate a thousand years ago or so, but I'm afraid it amounts to false advertising for a program of short plays trading in such cutting-edge topics as wife-swapping and middle-aged divorced women overeating while waiting for a man to call them. May, once thought to be a pretty bright star in some quarters, has managed here to create a script even more humorless and uninteresting than her previous Broadway outing, the catastrophic Taller Than a Dwarf; she's also somehow figured out a way to be more offensive than she was in her 2002 porn star comedy Adult Entertainment, inserting homophobic and misogynistic (!) jokes gratuitously throughout the evening. I for one will not be racing to her next play, should there be one.

The evening starts with a curtain-raiser called, wittily, "Curtain Raiser." In it, Eddie Korbich—the only actor who survives the evening with dignity intact—plays a former chorus boy and dance teacher who longs to dance with someone tonight here at the "dance hall." Alas, he's a very homely guy and no woman will go near him (and he remarks that if he were gay, the situation would be worse, because men are even pickier—ha ha!). J. Smith-Cameron, badly miscast as the presumably/stereotypically butch half of a lesbian couple (e.g., she's wearing a pants suit and sits with her legs spread apart), is the only person in sight, so Korbich's character, Keith, asks her to dance. She refuses; then demurs, saying she only knows how to lead; then finally agrees. What follows is a lovely display of virtuosic following AND leading by Korbich, who, as a teacher, is comfortable taking either role. He executes the steps gracefully and with great showmanship and earns the only heartfelt hand of the evening when he's done. If May had intended some kind of lesson here, however—say, about not judging people by their appearance or not pegging them into categories based on their sexual orientation or other predilections—she undermines it by indulging in precisely these behaviors throughout this very short little play.

And she's just winding up: The second piece, "Giving Up Smoking," is a four-person mostly-monologue play featuring a middle-aged harpy named Joanne who divorced her husband and now waits foolishly by her phone for a man she hardly knows to call her and ask her out, all the while indulging in a variety of progressively dangerous addictive behaviors and prattling on to herself like a madwoman. She's played by Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter, a very talented comic actress who gets the rhythms exactly right but still can't wring any laughs out of the material because the character is such a zero. Brian Kerwin plays Mel, the man Joanne is hoping will call her; he's also recently divorced and just as self-centered and deluded as Berlin's character. May has actually supplied Mel with a characteristic that makes him vaguely human: he misses his children. Otherwise, he's no one to root for, either.

Jere Burns plays a very over-the-hill-looking gay man named Sherman, who is Joanne's best friend. He, rather improbably, is waiting for a "stud" named Gavin to call him (why Gavin would want to is never explained; and p.s., he never does). So Sherman, after having a hissy fit because Joanne won't talk to him on the phone when he calls her every five minutes, does what any self-respecting middle-aged gay man would do, i.e., he makes a big bowl of popcorn and sits down to watch a DVD of The Wizard of Oz. When last seen, he's weeping openly over Dorothy's imminent departure with the Wizard in the balloon.

The fourth character, played by Smith-Cameron, is Sherman's mother, a little old lady who lives alone in Florida where she is having experimental treatments for cancer of the everything. May, wishing to make a point about serenity or something, has of course characterized this woman as the only truly content, peaceful person in the play—as if we were going to start emulating the behavior of losers like Joanne, Mel, and Sherman. "Giving Up Smoking," which does contain the occasional funny line, is finally pretty much a waste of time.

But after intermission, things really fall apart. "Swing Time" features Burns and Smith-Cameron as Darryl and Mitzi, a middle-aged couple who have inexplicably agreed to have sex with their best friends Ron and Gail (Kerwin and Berlin). Things progress as far as having these four actors, all of whom have done respectable work elsewhere, strip down to their underwear (happily, they are silhouetted in dim light by this time), and pretend to grope and make out with one another. May's obsessions (see Adult Entertainment) have apparently gotten the better of her. Coitus is interrupted by a phone call that sets off a ridiculous argument that, thankfully, ends this foolish play.

When I Love My Wife came out in 1977, critics carped that "swinging" was already out-of-date; what are May and MTC thinking?

The show curtain, which I guess should be credited to set designer John Lee Beatty, depicts an elegant Manhattan skyline at night. It's the only glimmer of sophistication in an evening of theatre that may well represent a new low for the Broadway stage.

There are places where one can go and see classical theatre untouched and performed in a manner as close to what was originally intended as is possible. But for me, especially if I’ve seen a show in its "original" state, I prefer to see what a new production will do with it. I want to see what might be wrought from the text that I may not have seen or thought about. If you feel the same way, then the Vortex Theater Company’s production of Agamemnon is not to be missed.

Aeschylus’s classic tale of revenge is boiled down like a chicken stock which is then used to create a tasty stew by tossing in a little Shakespeare, a dash of Dante, a splash of video game lingo, and a whole lot of cooking recipes. There’s also a healthy hunk of a speech on the six steps for ritual slaughter of animals stirred in. This added some strong flavor. And for dessert, well there’s lots of eye candy throughout. It’s all very postmodern and oh so experimental.

Here’s a quick run down of the plot of Agamemnon just so we're all on the same page. After ten years of laying siege to Troy, Agamemnon is finally returning home victorious to his angry and unfaithful wife Clytemnestra. Before launching this expedition, Agamemnon sacrificed their oldest child, Iphigenia, in order to bring favorable winds to the Greeks' sails. Clytemnestra is still a little peeved about that and has been planning her revenge along with her lover (and Agamemnon’s greatest enemy) Aegistus. Their plan: serve Agamemnon to his guests at a banquet honoring his return. Sounds yummy! Unknown to Clytemnestra, Agamemnon has brought back a slave girl for himself named Cassandra. Cassandra is cursed with the gift of prophecy only to have no one ever believe her. So as it turns out that there will be an extra main course. The more the merrier.

Not only does this stew have lot of different text ingredients tossed together, it's also somewhat of a stylistic compote. The furies are mostly represented by wiry dog puppets (designed by Andrea Gastelum), though their operators eventually emerge as the furies themselves. There are a couple of short slide shows and a chorus of chefs with some wild choreography. The acting, for the most part, is on a higher plane of hyper-reality, with possibly the exception of the Head Chef/Herald (played brilliantly by David Arkema) who could easily be mistaken for a real chef.

The ensemble is rather large due to the ever-present chorus, but it is as tight as can be thanks to the sharp direction of Gisela Cardenas. Cardenas brings a clear vision to the show. She certainly achieves her goal to link the process of cooking with human lust for power. Cardenas puts her actors through a solid physical workout and the effect is visually stunning. There is moment, for example, when the entire chorus piles on top of the King’s Messenger, only to be tossed aside like pillows when he bursts forth.

The Messenger segment was one of my favorite courses of the delicious meal. Played with intensity and turbulence by Seth Powers (who also plays Aegistus with sarcastic arrogance), this segment featuring the soldier returning home from the front is especially poignant in these days of the lingering war in Iraq. Linda Clark, who some may know from the most recently defunct Star Trek franchise, is phenomenal as Clytemnestra. She holds a knife behind every line. Jonathan Co Green plays Agamemnon commendably. His rigid and broken body from a decade of war tells all. Catherine Friesen fully embodies the pain and confusion of Cassandra. She also appears briefly as Iphigenia and Elektra. I wasn’t quite sure why Elektra comes on in the very beginning wearing thigh-highs and a mini skirt but I can’t say that I objected.

Hats off to Oana Botez-Ban for the excellent costume design. Clytemnestra changes several times, each time matching the occasion perfectly. When her husband returns she wears a lovely wrappy-sarongy-thing that she lays down before him as a sort of red carpet, while she's still wearing it. After he’s dead she wears pants and a tie. The soldier’s uniforms are grungy and muddy while the chef’s uniforms are pristine white with bright orange aprons. Lucrecia Briceno designs a dazzling light motif. Everything is low-lit with colored cross lights and each chorus member has his or her own pole lamp which they use to throw emphasis here and there.

There is so much more I could say about this show. It’s a great production and/or a tasty dish. One note: eat before you go. They've come up with the tantalizing idea to have onions, garlic, and basil slowly cooking the whole time just to put the smell of the show’s concept in the air.

If a male singer in the 1920s and '30s recorded a popular song called “The Man I Love” for a shellac 78 record, he could not change the lyric to “The Girl I Love” due to the strict rules of song publishers. As a result, many recordings from this time by the likes of Bing Crosby and various popular dance bands shockingly celebrate what sound like “gay” sentiments to our contemporary ears. Listeners of the time don’t seem to have batted an eye, even when a male crooners sang their hearts out on songs with titles like “He’s My Secret Passion.”

These wonderful historical recordings provided the inspiration for Michael McFaden’s delightful musical Ain’t We Got Fun, which plays in a workshop production as part of the 3rd Annual Fresh Fruit Festival. McFaden has built a book around songs from the '20s and '30s and come up with a traditionally-structured musical comedy about the ups and downs in the lives of two boys in love.

The plot of Ain’t We Got Fun is appropriately old-fashioned, but with a “boy meets boy” twist. The story centers on Benny (Daniel Vincent) and Oscar (Bryan Lelek), two young men from the resort town of South Haven, Michigan, who venture to nearby Chicago and get caught up in the big city’s racy scene. The show mostly is an upbeat song and dance affair, but in the second act McFaden works in darker themes, including the Stock Market crash of 1929, the Mob, and prostitution. By beginning and ending each act with older versions of the characters in 2002, McFaden has come up with a framing device that puts the story in contemporary perspective and also adds some comic relief as characters comment on just how much, and in some respects how little, things have changed.

The production is cleverly conceived, with some particularly nice touches. The use of a barbershop quartet “chorus” called The Bearcats (Robert M. Bowden, Shawn Carnes, L.T. Kirk, and McFaden) is very effective, reminding us that acceptable all-male activities at that time were not limited to sports (the great vocal arrangements are by Douglas Coates). And a flickering “old-time” film sequence depicting men scantily costumed as iconic “masculine” types (cowboy, gladiator, Zorro, American Indian, etc.) is a hilariously clunky Busby Berkeley tribute.

The physical production makes the most of very little. The costumes by Stephen Randolph are period-perfect; Michael Lenzo’s lighting design is simple if perhaps a bit too shadowy. The recorded musical accompaniment by Mark Beall and John Todd is fine, but sometimes is too loud for the singers to be heard, and sometimes begins a beat or two too late. In fact, the slow pacing of the piece is its most serious problem.

The highlight of the evening is the scene-stealing performance of Mark Middleton as Miss Amanda Luze, the drag queen proprietress of “Amanda Land,” a gay Chicago speakeasy where much of the action takes place. Middleton’s campy croaking, fabulous gams, and hilarious deadpan have to be seen to be believed. His performance alone is worth the price of admission. As Benny, Daniel Vincent is a polished performer with a fine voice, and he particularly captures the naïve yet naughty spirit of the piece. Bryan Lelek as Oscar is not as accomplished a performer, but shows comic flair in some of the slapstick sequences. Melissa Landry is sweet as the younger Chloe, who is literally hopelessly in love with the boy-crazy Oscar, and her second-act romance with “Meathook,” the speakeasy’s hulking doorman (Steve Mogck), is in a great musical comedy tradition of secondary love interests.

The primary charm of the piece is that it captures in its characters the combination of naiveté and wild pleasure-seeking that made the Roaring '20s so notorious and so fascinating. Ain't We Got Fun is corny and nostalgic in the best way but still manages to be fresh and original—who could ask for anything more?

Those of you who haven’t ventured down the rabbit hole lately should take this opportunity to see this unique and wildly imaginative adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic story. This production is a part of the Dream Music Puppetry Program, whose goal is to produce new works of puppetry combined with live music. This is the perfect structure for this story, and creators Lake Simons and John Dyer make the most of it by giving us an explosion of surrealistic sight and sound. I do have to admit that much of the actual story is a little lost in this production, but that is more than made up for by their show’s visceral appeal.

Most people know the story, but what version do we know? I feel fairly safe in saying that the majority of us know the Disney version, but like most books turned into movies there are gaps and scenes that are left out for length and continuity reasons. This production skips from scene to scene without much connection; had I not been familiar with the story I would have been quite lost.

Like a surrealist painting, this production highlights the dreamlike mindscape, the absurdities, and the odd juxtapositions that Carroll uses in his story, but what’s left out is much of the quirky dialogue and character interactions. The dialogue that exists is spoken by either Simons or Dyer. Simons only voices Alice from her position on stage as puppeteer while Dyer voices all the other characters from his position just offstage as bandleader. This works as a funny gag for awhile but eventually I felt that more time may have been spent creating unique character voices. Many things about Carroll’s parody of Victorian life are quite funny but most of these things are lost due to the missing dialogue.

Despite these issues I had a great time at this show. Simons is without a doubt one of New York’s most talented puppet engineers (by engineer I mean she designs, choreographs, and operates her puppets). Whatever she touches springs to life with a seeming desire to live forever. She mixes puppet design styles such as bunraku and shadow and she creates a very subjective world that one feels compelled to enter and share with her. There are several scenes, such as the one in which Alice is chasing the mouse that is swimming in the flood created by her tears, that absolutely swept me away. I felt as if I was genuinely living in a dream and I think that would have pleased Mr. Carroll.

The driving force throughout the show are the brilliant compositions of John Dyer. His five-piece band rocks, underscores and opens doors to this strange world. Dyer uses sound like text, creating a story all its own. For example, he uses a bell as if to say “look over here” whenever a certain object comes on stage. He also uses theme songs for certain characters (the rabbit has one of the coolest of these) that are heard whenever that character enters. Apart from the sound effects and theme songs, Dyer also creates some beautifully written and alluringly melodic tunes out of Carroll’s text. There are some moments when the pace of these tunes seems to drag a little but I saw that as all a part of this roller coaster ride of a show.

Another unique aspect of this truly exceptional show is the way Simons uses her team of co-puppeteers as a sort of Greek chorus. They of course animate puppets (and they all do so with great skill and precision) but they also enter the story as support characters here and there.

This production should not be missed. But who should not miss it: children, adults, or both? I’d have to say adults— children will certainly be stimulated by the visual and aural aspects, but the lack of a discernable story may leave them a little disinterested by the end of the program. Still, all of the creative elements are extremely cohesive, from the gorgeous lighting (courtesy of James Latzel) to the intricate choreography of the bunraku puppeteers to the inspired music. Simons and Dyer are a formidable creative team and I hope to see more of their collaborations reach New York stages.

Theatre for a New Audience’s current All’s Well That Ends Well is a competent production performed by a company of capable actors that is worth seeing. Apparently set some time in the late 19th or early 20th century (the program is not specific on this point, but the costumes suggest this time frame), this interpretation by director Darko Tresnjak is entertaining though not particularly illuminating and occasionally confusing. In New York City competent Shakespeare is certainly worth a view, though I hardly think it is cause for celebration.

When first seated at the Duke Theater, we are confronted with a Greco-Roman edifice, in grays and black, with many columns and somber curtains. It is an elegant formal setting, designed by David P. Gordon. This sets the tone for Tresnjak’s interpretation of this comedy, a tone that pervades this production all too darkly. The lighting, designed by Rui Rita, is generally moody throughout the performance and sometimes harsh, primarily using side lighting that at times creates sinister shadows on the actors’ facial planes. This, too, seems to serve Tresnjak’s dark vision.

But is this vision the play? I think this darkness only serves the post-funereal ambience of the first scene. Only at the end of the first part, when we “travel” to Italy, do the design elements open up a bit and does Tresnjak give us a cheeky, fun event. Yet this is really a fleeting moment. Yes, while we are in Italy the somber curtains are gone, revealing some architectural archetypes in two dimensions upstage, but there remain the formal columns, the black and gray tones. I really think a simpler setting would have been better. And I keep coming back to the fact that it is a comedy. Where is the color? Where are the front lights? This tension between setting and text is what I find confusing—not intellectually, of course, but thematically. Julius Caesar would love this set!

Unfortunately there are no murders here, just unrequited love that is eventually requited, to a degree. The story revolves around Helena, the daughter of a recently deceased and renowned healer, who is obsessively in love with Bertram, the young Count Rossillion, who is the son of the late Count, the latter having been the patron of Helena’s father. When Bertram runs off to the French court, Helena follows, ostensibly to heal the King’s “severe” disease (he suffers from a fistula). When Helena cures the King, her reward is her choice of young men in the court for her betrothed. Naturally she chooses Bertram, who has no intention of getting hitched to anyone. Bertram flees to the wars in Florence, leaving behind an oath to never be Helena’s unless she gets from him his ring and by him his child. A chase, a bed-switch, and some hilarity with the secondary plot (Parolles, a braggart-soldier, is given his comeuppance) follow. Finally, Helena gets her man, though the text leaves it ambiguous as to how they will fare.

The cast is comprised of excellent actors, every one. The younger characters are without exception believable and enjoyable to watch. Adam Stein’s Parolles is perfect. Equally effective are both Dumaine brothers, played by Thomas Michael Hammond and Paul Niebanck. Space limits my naming the rest but they do all make it fun. On the older side, Tom Bloom, as Lefew, the wise lord with a heart of gold and a twinkle in his eye, shows us the best of what an American Shakespearean can be—true to character, emotionally connected, with a facile ability to speak the verse.

I do quibble with three performances, though. Laurie Kennedy is absolutely believable as the Countess of Rossillion, which ought to come as no surprise since she is an accomplished Shakespearean. However, she delivers her lines too slowly and carefully, with the result that we get ahead of her thoughts. Likewise, John Christopher Jones presents a wry, measured clown, Lavatch, which is incipiently delightful, but he seizes upon this one note of internal rhythm and the comedy wanes. As the ill King of France, George Morfogen leaves no doubt he is on Death’s door. What he lacks in the beginning is at least a glimmer of the marvelous King we see once he is cured. I have no doubt these veterans understand that Shakespeare’s characters are complex creations demanding attention to nuance. I have a feeling more will come with the playing of it.

Some call All’s Well That Ends Well a problem play. This does not mean that it is a play that is difficult to deal with, but one whose subject matter concerns a problem of conduct or social relationship. But this sounds like Shaw, not Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays are often problem plays in one context or another, but they are complex creations, which can sometimes be a problem to present.

The main problem with All’s Well That Ends Well for a modern audience is the relationship between the main characters Helena and Bertram. Why does Helena choose Bertram? Why does Bertram reject Helena? Tresnjak explains the latter by giving us an adolescent Bertram who is at the age for oat-sowing, not marriage-vowing. Though Lucas Hall ably portrays this teenage protagonist, his Bertram makes it very difficult for us to understand the other problem: why would Helena choose such a whiny boy-man? So, in Tresnjak’s world, the first question really goes unanswered: Helena loves Bertram because she loves him. Period. Luckily, in Kate Forbes we have a marvelously engaging Helena who has a riveting presence. In fact, with this attractive Helena, we must wonder why in heck Bertram doesn’t want her.

My problem with this production is that I did not come away with a reason as to why Tresnjak set the play in the period he did. Yes, Helena is like a suffragette in her take-charge stick-to-itiveness. She is like a Shavian heroine, so it does make some sense to use Shaw’s time period. Yet does it illuminate the text? There is also some dangerous unintended imagery. Regardless of how correct Linda Cho’s costumes are (and some of them are stunning, particularly Helena’s final gown), the resonances we see can jolt us out of the play: when Helena appears at Court with her carpetbag she looks like Mary Poppins, or, add some dirt on her face and she could be Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Also, I don’t see the significance of the period with respect to the War element: the uniforms may be accurate, but they remind me of Arms and the Man (Shaw again!). Does this give insight into Shakespeare’s comedy?

Adding to my problem, director Tresnjak and designer Gordon give us signifiers that are either never explained or come out of nowhere. Why, for example, is there a classical statuette on the table downstage right? Why also, are we subjected to a post-script coda featuring a toy we’ve never seen? How much more significant would that toy have been if it had been invested with some emotional weight as an object of importance in prior scenes?

All in all, you will not feel like you wasted your money if you see this production. Perhaps my quibbles are minor in an age when we are lucky to get a Shakespeare play acted with uniform clarity that is on the whole entertaining. I just feel we shouldn’t be settling for competence. Tresnjak is a gifted director who, in this All’s Well That Ends Well, shows us signs of brilliance. He ought to be able to give us more. No problem.

The legacy of the great singer/songwriters of the folk and rock era is their music and their words, and we have them on records and tapes and CDs that we can play and replay whenever we hanker for a memory of our collective past. Pop Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in the walkman or iPod and you can relive the way it felt to hear that for the first time in the late '60s, when you were, well, however old you were back then.

So what's the point of a show like Almost Heaven: Songs of John Denver? It's basically 28 Denver songs—almost all of the most famous ones, plus perhaps a dozen less well-known pieces—sung by six singer/actors (Jennifer Allen, Terry Burrell, Valisia Lekae Little, Lee Morgan, Jim Newman, and Nicholas Rodriguez), at least a third of whom probably hadn't even been born in 1969. Well, apart from the obvious value as entertainment and nostalgia—both of which are pretty high; this is a very well-mounted show—what if we learned something new about music that's so familiar that we really do just take it for granted? What if some connections could be made between a man's music and the times he lived in, helping us appreciate how different and how the same we are, three and four decades after that music first got made?

The first act of Almost Heaven, and a good bit of the second as well, accomplish just that. Director Randal Mylar, working from a conception by Harold Thau, has found a way to present Denver's songs and let them speak directly to us, for themselves. No fancy footwork; no idiotic storyline; no big overblown arrangements (musical or otherwise). Just "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and "Rocky Mountain High" and "Sunshine on My Shoulders" and all the rest, considered and performed, not as if new but as if worth our time and attention and rapture. And they are—worth it, I mean.

Jim Newman, whose stringy blond hair makes him a reasonable stand-in for Denver physically (though his voice, which is terrific, is more like James Taylor's than Denver's) is our narrator for this journey backwards in time, but happily he says very little, and pretty much everything he does say is from Denver's own pen (his autobiography, Take Me Home, is the source for most of the spoken words in this show; a lot of Denver's own photos are also incorporated here, as projected backdrops for many of the songs). Interspersed with Newman's folksy chronology are a few letters from fans and the occasional interjection from an irate critic or industry insider.

But happily almost all of Almost Heaven is songs. The first act is a panorama of Denver's work during his formative years as an artist, the '60s and early '70s. We get a glimpse of his folk period, singing with the Chad Mitchell Trio ("For Bobbie," rendered in glorious harmony by Newman, Morgan, and Rodriguez). We get a fun and gently ironic paean to the world of rock & roll that Denver was never a part of—"I Wish I Could've Been There (Woodstock)," sung by the company against a backdrop of evocative images from that legendary festival.

And then we get a look inside the soul of the man and his art: "Country Roads" as an anti-war song (a resonance that never occurred to me when, as a ten-year-old, I learned the words in elementary school: "I hear her voice / In the mornin' hours she calls me / Radio reminds me of my home far away")."Rocky Mountain High" (much more obviously) as an anthem of the wonders of nature, framed by spectacular views of the Rockies themselves:

Now he walks in quiet solitude the forests and the streams
Seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake

And, later, as a cautionary poem for those who forget how majesty stays majestic:

Now his life is full of wonder, but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land

"Calypso," with the obligatory (but glorious) images of Cousteau and that soaring, celebratory melody. Most striking to me, "Fly Away," here presented as the dreams of the city's working women, longing to break away from jobs and lives that trap them in concrete and buses and subways. Mylar puts a huge close-up of drowsy African American woman leaning against a window on her way home from work while Terry Burrell sings the chorus. Beautiful.

When I was a kid, Denver was resolutely square in my neighborhood. Today we divide people into blue states and red states. Listen to these songs and understand how wrongheaded that is.

Almost Heaven's second act is less successful in letting Denver's art communicate his spirit to us; there's a longish section in its center celebrating his love ballads in a series of solos and combinations that feel outsized and overly contemporary, forcing material like "Annie's Song" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" into a pseudo-American Idol mode that has little to do with their creator. But the show finds itself before its end, with an aching rendition of "Poems, Prayers and Promises," and a lovely coda—Denver (on film; the last ever made of him) performing snippets of a never-finished song called "Yellowstone."

The onstage band—music director Charlie Alterman plus Chris Biesterfeldt (guitar), Steve Count (bass), Bob Green (fiddle, mandolin, acoustic guitar), and Frank Pagano (percussion)—is outstanding. The six performers each have their moments to shine; one of the brightest is Valisia Lekae Little, at her best leading the company in a rousing "Grandma's Feather Bed." But it's Jim Newman and Lee Morgan who are absolutely indispensable here, Newman affirming exuberantly "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," and Morgan finding every drop of soul in "Rocky Mountain High" and accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica in "This Old Guitar."

It's easy to drop Almost Heaven into a "jukebox musical" box and dismiss it, but that's to deny its special magic—a genuine appreciation for a man who really meant it when he said "I know he'd be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly." Such open-hearted troubadours are rare these days; I'm grateful for a chance to remember, and reconsider, this one's work: what it meant then, and what it means now.

“Bittersweet” is the adjective one might use to describe the guitar-strummed chords which open John Cariani’s new play Almost, Maine, and which bring to mind the hours I have waited on hold to speak to a customer service representative at my bank, or any other corporation where “the right relationship is everything.” In fact, watching this series of vignettes about love I had to put on hold my emotional intelligence, my artistic integrity, and any desire I might have for personal growth and self-knowledge, as I was relentlessly reassured that the right relationship IS, INDEED, everything.

I don’t expect everyone will regard this new romantic comedy’s oversimplification of the human heart as an act of violence—a frantic beating down of the fears and anxieties that Theatre was created to help us manage and understand. While the auditorium was not quaking with laughter, it was quivering with the resonance of “awwww’s” and “ohhhh’s” when the broken heart that a girl carries around in a paper bag was fixed by a mysterious but loveable “repairman,” or when the boy with no nerve endings learned to feel pain after being kissed by (read: instantly falling in love with) the emotionally-turbulent woman in the laundromat.

I confess I only witnessed the first five of the eleven play-ettes that make up the evening, but aside from my conclusion that all in all, Almost, Maine is nearly as emotionally-probing as a porn flick and just about as cute as Shirley Temple on ecstasy, I did find some redeemable qualities. Among said redeeming qualities is Miriam Shor, who forgoes the “heartwarming” for a sort of quizzical factualness, an air of not-taking-everything-at-face-value. By resisting the sentimental undertow, her characterizations are genuinely funny and moving in subtle ways the playwright did not seem to intend. Also quite watchable are Justin Hagan and Finnerty Steeves who both have moments of genuine emotional ambiguity in spite of the play’s desperate attempt to ward off such complexities. Todd Cerveris, unfortunately, bear-hugs the glib tone of Cariani’s writing and can be sometimes too “likeable” to watch.

Perhaps I should have started off by asking why this play is being produced in New York in 2006? Why, when there are plenty of Hollywood film-products that espouse the redemptive myth of relationships (soulmates, wedding rings, Mr. and Mrs. Right), do we pay sometimes ten-times the price of a movie to see such pageants performed live? How in need are we of reassurances, escapes—how intolerable for us is the uncertainty of human relationships?

The Times reported this week that more than one in every eight New Yorkers has diabetes: is this Luden’s cough drop of a play the kind of medicine we should be taking?

Like most of Oscar Wilde’s plays, An Ideal Husband is a “social” comedy that, while very specific to Victorian era issues, still has political and moral parallels to our own media headlines of 2005.

An otherwise fine, upstanding, and progressive London statesman finds himself being blackmailed for a serious financial transgression that occurred 20 years prior, at the start of his career. If his role is exposed, his dilemma is whether to meet the inevitable shame and public ruin with categorical denial, or with the honest fortitude that befits a man of his station. His only alternative, it seems, is to give in to his blackmailer’s demands and commit a crime ironically similar to the first, with no one else—especially his beloved, ultra-virtuous wife—being any the wiser. But can he live with himself?

The production values for Jumbalaya’s revival of An Ideal Husband are generally excellent. Robert Francis Perillo’s direction is fluid, no-nonsense, and faithful to a very specific theatrical style. Stephanie Voyer’s period costumes are lush and beautiful, and there are quite a number of them. The set by Mark Delancey is spare, but the few parlor pieces he uses are immediately evocative of the period; hovering in the background is a giant Union Jack to let us never forget where and when we are. I especially liked Michelangelo Sosnowitz’s snappy, irreverent music between scene and set changes.

Perhaps it was just an off night, but the general level of performance I saw seemed somewhat cold and subdued, almost as if they were going through the motions. There were several occasions of characters speaking so quickly I didn’t understand what they were saying—although I was impressed with the across-the-board facility with dialect. (Robert Blumenfeld is credited as the production’s dialect coach.)

The play worked best for me in the more weighty, dramatic scenes between Christian Kohn, a respectable presence as troubled Sir Robert Chiltern, the “ideal husband” of the title, and his best friend and confidante Lord Arthur Goring, played to aristocratically bored, elegant perfection by Trevor St. John. Carolyn DeMerice as the despicable yet sultry Mrs. Cheveley also has a nice seductive thrust-and-parry scene with St. John, although I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to believe that they had actually ever once been in love.

Of course, none of the characters—especially the women—in An Ideal Husband is very deep or sympathetic, and all of them are mix-and-match recyclables from Wilde’s other plays. Alas, to the detriment of what might otherwise be a strong, likable cast, this production seems to choose being sincere, very relevant fluff over being charming, funny, occasionally relevant fluff. Fortunately, however, plenty of moments filled with the playwright’s trademark timeless wit still come shining through.

Tim Ellis is an amusing guy. His new solo comedy show, An Inquiry into Human Understanding: The Meditations, Confessions, Ethics, Metaphysics, and Poetics of Tim Ellis—his first attempt at the form, by the way—is smart, humorous, and engaging, full of wry commentary on a variety of significant subjects such as: Wendy's new Homestyle Chicken Fillet sandwich.

Ellis riffs on reading on the subway (he got hooked on Moby Dick by reading it over another passenger's shoulder). He recounts a dream he had in which he was shopping for a suitcase at T.J. Maxx. He shares some of his earliest writings (from 1979, when he was probably about ten years old), including a brief but exciting story about time travel and another about meeting a famous baseball player.

It's all very much the musings of an intelligent and vaguely disenfranchised Everyman; a guy with enough time on his hands to not only wonder if the reason that the waiter at his local diner can't get his breakfast order correct is because there's some inherent flaw in the English language preventing accurate communication, but also to write about it in a comedy sketch.

Ellis tells us in his press materials that his models include great monologists like Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby (and we can see their influence), but I'd say that in finding the surreal in the extremely ordinary Inquiry more brings to mind the sensibility of Stephen Wright, and in its (only half-put-on) philosophical ambitions it reminds me of the work of Spalding Gray. Where Gray rambled on a theme and jutted off on various tangents, though, Ellis's show is more or less all tangents. It's incisive, humorous stuff. Some of it—like his asides as he proposes to circulate a petition against the aforementioned Wendy's entree—is downright hilarious satire.

Ellis's style is homey and low-key; the entire show plays out with minimal props and effects, with Ellis meandering and rotating around a stool that he occasionally comes to rest upon. His conversational style should work as well on TV or CD as it does in a theatre; either or both of those media would be suitable directions for Ellis to take his work as he hones it in front of a welcoming audience at the PIT.

Anathemaville is a good idea gone wildly out of control. Playwright Scott Venters has taken as his theme the splendidly pertinent notion that behemoth retailers like Wal-Mart are sucking the life blood out of American towns and cities, which certainly strikes me as a valid and useful area of inquiry: my own experience is that in this age of customization, there seem to be fewer rather than more choices, and the ones that exist are generally for the convenience of the seller, not the buyer.

Venters uses the classic play Our Town as point of departure and framing device. Venters co-opts the structure of Thornton Wilder's play, most of its famous scenes and images (i.e., he gets two characters up on ladders talking about life near the end of Act I; shows us his young couple on a date in a 21st century shopping-center version of a drug store; etc.), and even makes use of a narrator (Uber-Mart greeter/security guard Leo stands in for the earlier play's Stage Manager). Venters's notion, I presume, is to juxtapose the idyllic American way of life supposedly depicted in Our Town with the crass present-day plastic life epitomized by mass-marketing goliaths like his Uber-Mart.

Alas, here's where Venters starts to go badly astray, for he makes the wrong assumption about Our Town (i.e., that it's sentimental claptrap) and indulges in parody—of the Wilder play, not of life in Wal-Mart-Land.

Worse, he also indulges himself, to the point of presenting an unwieldy three-act script that runs some 200 tightly-typed pages in hard copy, and lasts something like four hours in production. I must admit to leaving the theatre at the end of Act Two, which at the performance attended concluded at 10:15pm (the show began at 7:30). I've read through the final act for purposes of this review.

The basic story involves David, an inert and apathetic Uber-Mart employee, and his awakening by Carol, the renegade daughter of Uber-Mart's chairman, who with David plots a demonstration against the company. Venters surrounds David with a host of unattractive and weirdly afflicted characters: Bernard, the automaton-like aspiring manager, who has a deformed finger that apparently frightens everyone who sees it; Verda, an unassuming young woman whom everyone labels a "dyke" for reasons never quite made clear, who has a gas-mask-like device over her face because of a rare disorder involving the relative sizes of her tongue and head; BJ, a waif who was abandoned in Uber-Mart as a child and now fancies himself  Sir Galahad, knight of the round table (inexplicably speaking in a Medieval dialect filled with archaic words and phrasings that he could not possibly have learned in an American department store that he has supposedly never ventured out of); Warren, a gay man in severe denial with a penchant for hurting himself; and Kathleen, David's cousin and fiancée, who is addicted to heroin and crack, was sexually abused by her father, and now pays for her drug habit by having sex with the grotesquely fat store manager.

I never understood why Venters wants to make the denizens of Anathemaville (the Southern American town where his play takes place) so extravagantly dysfunctional and unlikable; seems to me that his points about big business killing individualism and initiative would register more successfully if he tried to make his play about US instead of about a demonized THEM that most audience members will not only not identify with, but not wish to spend any time with at all.

Meanwhile the play's quotient of vulgarity, offensiveness, and just mean grossness escalates as it runs on (I verified this with my perusal of Act Three in the script).

The production, directed by Jess McLeod, is prisoner to the play's excesses. It's hard for me to believe that none of the folks involved with this project is aware that the play is at least two hours too long.

It might be interesting to see what might be left of Anathamaville should Venters rigorously edit and focus the work. For now, it can only be charitably described as an interesting idea gone disastrously awry.

The novelist Rick Moody once remarked that he didn’t think about genre whenever he wrote something, citing it instead as “a bookstore problem.” Apartment 3A, the new play by journeyman stage and film actor Jeff Daniels, similarly defies easy categorization. It is part love story, part romantic comedy, part religious and philosophical treatise, and part anti-conservative tirade—with a supernatural tinge to it. It is, by turns, both funny and serious, but cannot be called either a comedy or a drama. It’s refusal to be pigeonholed makes it a little messy—much like life. Which I’m guessing is the point. Making his New York debut as a playwright, Daniels has written a play with a healthy dose of heart, humor, sincerity, and optimism, and a glaring lack of pretension and self-consciousness. Despite a number of places where it could go terribly wrong, Apartment 3A stays dutifully on its own singular course and provides a surprisingly fun and edifying night at the theatre.

Annie Wilson is pessimistic about life and love (she remarks at one such moment that her favorite color is “a lovely shade of abyss”). She’s losing faith in the effectiveness of her job as director of fundraising at the local public television station (“We’re like asparagus: we’re good for you, but would anyone in their right mind have us?”), and when she catches her longtime boyfriend cheating on her rather, um, athletically (with “Mary Lou Retton,” as she jokingly calls the other woman)—well, that’s just the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She moves into a shabby new apartment, and is immediately set upon by her overly-ingratiating and happily married neighbor, Donald. She also has to contend with a co-worker, Elliott, who is madly in love with her at a time when she couldn’t be less interested. What she doesn’t know yet, though, is that both men are going to put her faith—in everything—to the test.

Daniels, already established as a fine film and stage actor, proves that he’s as fine a writer. He’s handy with a one-liner, and gives Apartment 3A a dry and slightly misanthropic sense of humor: Annie’s on-camera meltdowns during her station fund drives are perfect examples—as is the recurring motif of polar bear mating habits strategically placed throughout the play (don’t ask, just see the show). He also keeps the action moving forward and stays one step ahead of the audience: several times during Apartment 3A, I could have sworn I knew exactly where it was going, only to have Daniels steer the proceedings in an unexpected (and completely justified) direction—always a mark of good writing. Best, and most surprising of all, is his taste for romantic optimism. I’m not going to blow the ending here (which has some twists and turns in it), but suffice to say that Daniels is rooting for Annie to end up with…well, somebody.

Director Valentina Fratti directs the show with comfort and ease, allowing the actors lots of room to play while keeping the staging both simple and authentic. She and set designer Lauren Helpern make the most of some split-screen type scenes that might keep other directors hamstrung. Traci Klainer’s excellent lighting design helps in this regard, making it clear what’s happening when, and where the audience’s focus should be. And David Newell’s fine costumes subtly reveal character without drawing attention to themselves.

Apartment 3A is anchored by a splendid performance from Amy Landecker. As Annie, she hits all the right notes in a role that showcases her aptitude for both comedy and drama. The same can also be said about Joseph Collins and Arian Moayed, as Donald and Elliott respectively, both of whom give Landecker ample and excellent support. Jonathan Teague Cook, as Annie’s salty landlord, and J. Austin Eyer, as another one of her put-upon co-workers, round out this excellent cast. (One of the main reasons Apartment 3A works so well is because of their efforts. These actors look like they are having so much fun on stage that the audience finds itself willing to follow them anywhere. They are a joy to watch.)

Apartment 3A marks both the arrival of an intriguing new writer and the return of one of the New York theatre’s favorite sons. That they are both the same person is—to use one of the play’s oft-repeated phrases—a miracle. Let’s hope we get to see more of Jeff Daniels, the writer, here in the Big Apple very soon.

I think watching Apparition is supposed to feel like a nightmare: a sequence of things you can’t really explain, each one more unsettling—though for no good reason—than the next: strange creatures in shadows, weird noises in the corners, and definitely beasties under the bed. And there were moments when a genuine shudder did run down my spine. Unfortunately, there were far more moments when confusion was simply confusion, frustration, and impatience.

There’s not a single story here, but rather a series of vignettes—some choral recitations, some monologues, some more traditionally constructed scenes—performed by an ensemble of five actors in vaguely Victorian clothes. (Christal Weatherby’s elegantly tattered, gray-and-black costumes make the ensemble look like Edward Gorey drawings.) Sometimes the actors sit at music stands and read; sometimes they seem to be collectively telling a campfire story. Much of the time, they are in complete darkness, or a vague, grey light that presents only silhouettes. Sections of the play involve the retelling of the plot of Macbeth, in evocative detail but without any names. Some of the stories involve weird occurrences in daily life that disturb more than they should—a drink that disappears from an otherwise empty room; hearing pounding on your door in a new place in the middle of the night.

As you may be able to tell from the above paragraph, I didn’t really understand what was going on, a lot of the time. Or, more precisely—I understood what was happening internally within each section, but I never really got a sense of how the sections fit together, why they were presented to me, or how I was supposed to engage with them. I felt like I was supposed to be having a genuinely terrifying nightmare, but instead I was having one of those puzzling but not exactly scary dreams where suddenly everyone is speaking in a language you don’t understand. This was an extremely frustrating experience, perhaps more so because so many of the involved artists are people whose work has impressed me in the past.

There seem to me to be two problems here—one of conception, one of execution. The first is that it’s really hard to construct a nightmare-scape that scares everyone, without resorting to horror-film blood and gore—the most truly unsettling dreams are the ones that arise within the individual psyche and don’t contain elements that would necessarily be scary to anyone but the dreamer. I think it’s that kind of imagery and feeling that playwright Anne Washburn and director Les Waters are trying to tap into—but I think it’s almost impossible to hit the night terrors of a whole audience at once.

So how do you execute this challenging task? Waters, Washburn, and their team of designers seem to be trying to tell a story about feeling scared, or perhaps showing an audience how to feel scared, instead of actually scaring us. Washburn’s script feels overly wordy; it narrates every twist and turn in the consciousness of the person having the unsettling experience. Darron L. West’s clever soundscape does create tension, but feels almost like a movie score in the way it telegraphs the emotions a scene is meant to evoke. Andromache Chalfant’s blasted-apart set creates a decaying no-man’s land inside the Connelly Theatre’s elegant proscenium. Jane Cox uses deliberately ugly—or completely absent—lighting to harshen and obscure the action. Waters’s staging is deliberately static and flat, so that none of the performers really interact.

The performances are mannered and stylized, too—the ensemble (Maria Dizzia, Emily Donahoe, David Andrew McMahon, Garrett Neergaard, T. Ryder Smith) seems to relish the complexity of the language but often the actors seem bemused by, rather than involved in, the stories they tell.

I can’t help thinking that Apparition might be much more effective if it were much less elaborate—if more were left to the power of suggestion. Told in a small dark room with a few candles and the occasional unexplained footstep in the background, some of these stories might be genuinely unsettling, and the overall randomness might take on the quality of a dream. But the piece as it was presented never worked for me, especially in a proscenium theater, with elaborate production values.

In Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Septimus Hodge tutors a young pupil named Thomasina Coverly at Sidley Park, an English manor that in 1809 stands athwart the fading positivism of the Enlightenment and the burgeoning subjectivism of the Romantic Movement. Hodge discovers he has awakened the latent genius of Thomasina, a 13-year-old prodigy who is on the verge of apprehending the second law of thermodynamics and modern chaos theory. Like the Romanticism that was coming into style, Thomasina’s discovery threatens to sweep away the optimistic belief in order and progress that Hodge has based his life and teachings on.

In a parallel tale set in the present on the same English manor, three scholars unaware of Thomasina’s existence sift through the history of the Coverly estate. Bernard Nightingale is investigating the goings-on of Lord Byron, who he suspects to have been a guest of the Coverlys in 1809. Hannah Jarvis is trying to discover the identity of the mysterious hermit of Sidley Park, while Valentine Coverly (a descendent of the 19th century Coverlys, who still lives at Sidley Park) is using the family game book to create a mathematical calculation that will enable him to determine the behavior of grouse. Meanwhile, in both 1809 and the present, the pageant of life continues behind the scenes and around the protagonists as every step towards understanding leads to greater and more puzzling enigmas. What emerges is a celebration of the human existence from the point of view of the skeptic: meaning and fulfillment are found in the hopeless but essential quest for understanding amidst the individual triumphs and tragedies inside of a doomed universe.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is both glorious in its scope and beautiful in its construction, and it is easy to see why it seems to have continually grown in popularity and esteem over the past decade. Conceptions of philosophy, psychology, cosmology, physics, biology, poetry, history, art, botany, landscaping, engineering, theology, and morality are weaved together into an elegant tapestry that is made compelling, both intellectually and emotionally, through the brilliance of Stoppard’s prose and ideas. Still, Arcadia is a delicate instrument that one can easily see come crashing down from the weight of its philosophical preoccupations if it were not handled with adequate talent and skill.

Happily, both are in ample supply in QED’s flagship production of Arcadia at the Greenwich Street Theatre. First-time director Zander Teller has delivered a simple and elegant version of the play that both puts forth its intellectual concepts in a clear and compelling manner, and captures the emotional core of the relationships and personalities of its characters. The result is a perfectly paced evening that earns every minute of its three-hour running time. Dov Lebowitz-Nowak’s lighting and set and Melissa Daghini’s costumes support the show admirably. Lebowitz-Nowak’s thematic interpretation of the play on the set’s floor—parquet with panels blackened in a random but increasing pattern—is a particularly striking touch.

Much of the success of the evening can be attributed to the many fine performances in this production, but among the most memorable is Rachel Jablin as the irrepressible Thomasina. Cheerfully defying the doomsday implications of her mathematical predictions, Jablin’s Thomasina is engrossing and completely convincing in her displays of exuberant youthfulness and mathematical gifts. In contrast, there is an element of world-weariness to Andrew Rein’s inhabitation of the role of Septimus that jars with the descriptions of his lustful antics behind the scenes, but which still makes for an unexpectedly compelling interpretation. Septimus here seems almost to foresee the demise of his world order, which perhaps lessens the irony of his eventual fate but heightens its sense of tragedy. Also impressive is Micah Freedman in the difficult and not-so-flashy role of Valentine, bringing clarity to his scientific explanations and compelling warmth to his personality.

Is there room in New York for another off-off-Broadway theatre company doing the works of established and acclaimed English-language playwrights? If the result is work of this quality, then the answer is yes. Judging by its first endeavor, QED has all the makings to be a welcome and successful addition to the New York theatre landscape.

Artist Descending a Staircase begins with the mysterious death of an artist. But this play is less a mystery and more a commentary on modern art. Beginning with the title’s riff on Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the last word in Cubist painting, playwright Tom Stoppard follows through by combining the names of famous artists to come up with his own: Beauchamp, Martello, and Donner. Throughout, he pushes and prods, manipulates and massages the world of modern art to very funny effect. And no one can poke more articulate holes in the puffed up theories of art than a nimble wordsmith like Stoppard.

The story begins in 1972 with the death of Donner, a hyperventilating painter in his 80s who, before his death, lived in a cramped garret with Martello, a sculptor, and Beauchamp, who records noises and silences. Their living conditions reveal that none has seen sustained success—after all, what successful artist would choose to share living quarters and studio space with two others? Martello and Beauchamp are listening to a revealing tape recorded by Beauchamp. On the tape, someone snores, there are footsteps, and a voice says "Ah, there you are," followed by a brief commotion. Martello and Beauchamp believe the tape contains the key to Donner’s death. They suspect each other of the evil deed. As they banter, we see flashbacks of the three artists in 1922, 1920, and 1914. They are confident, brash, and avant-garde, "artists by mutual agreement," although they do not appear to have interest in or respect for each others’ art. What is more important is that they are what they say they are, artists of a new order, where no comparisons to the excellent draftsmanship of the old guard can be made. Gone are the long apprenticeships.

In one flashback, Donner brings out a small statue made of sugar. He says, "Imagine my next exhibition thrown open to the hungry. Edible art is what we’ve all been looking for." Is this a dig at Claes Oldenburg’s soft food sculptures or Wayne Thiebaud’s Pop paintings of pies and cakes?

During a pivotal flashback, Young Martello, played by Aaron Michael Zook, brings an attractive blind woman to their studio/flat for tea. As it happens, she knows of the three artists. She attended a gallery opening where they exhibited together before she completely lost her sight. She fancied one of them and now wants to figure out which is the one. As Sophie recalls, each artist was photographed with one of his paintings. She describes the painting, and they all remember it. The artist is chosen. Yet, did they see the painting she, their public, saw? This is a deciding moment of the play and its most memorable scene. Mary Murphy brings layers of psychology to her role as Sophie, and the play is at its most engaging when she is on stage. She is an eager, sociable guest, who displays her vulnerability with charm. Murphy is so convincing in her blindness that the audience collectively holds its breath when Sophie responds to Martello’s insistence that she pour the tea. It is a selfish little game that he inflicts on her and Zook pulls it off with a sly smile. Sophie is the outsider. Yet, she embraces them, entertains them, and adores them. They, in turn, toy with her. It is she who sees clearly what they fail to see. In her own way, she abandons them. They are left to age in their loveless, failed lives with their hostilities toward one another.

The young artists and the octogenarians are played by separate cast members. Joe Whelski as Young Donner delivers a quiet susceptibility, as if he knows or wants something that he cannot talk about. But it is the Elder Donner, played by Ronald Cohen, who comments on modern art:  "Imagination without skill gives us modern art."  In another excellent flashback, Michael Poignand delivers a spirited Young Beauchamp. He gallops around the stage clicking coconut halves together replicating the sound of horse hooves, an omen of his obsession with sounds and the recording of them. It is a funny bit, and a not-so-subtle hint as to how some artists find inspiration. The other two barely tolerate his antics.

Tom Knutson plays the Elder Martello. He delivers the necessary arrogance, but occasionally strikes awkward poses that don’t make sense, such as sprawling languidly over the kitchen table which is not long enough to make it an elegant pose. Ed Schultz gives Old Beauchamp facial tics that look real. The dialog in this play is very smart, so sharp that it is a shame to miss any of it. Unfortunately, I did. Director John Hurley would do well to turn up the volume during the banter between Martello and Beauchamp. Otherwise, the play moves briskly under Hurley’s direction. The pace is especially impressive since the stage is small.

You don’t need to know anything about art to enjoy Artist Descending a Staircase. There is a mystery that is neatly solved. There is a love story. And, there is lots of word play that is entertaining.

The set, by Scott Orlesky, is very much a garret: grim curtains shield the artists’ studios, and a simple table and three chairs accommodate the eleven scenes. Cheryl McCarron designed costumes. Sophie’s green dress helps guarantee that all eyes will be on her. Carrie Wood designed lighting.

The Artists of Tomorrow Festival, now in its fifth year, really is a laboratory for new work: for two or three nights, playwrights, directors, and other theatre artists get a chance to put a new show on its feet—see it, hear it, listen to the audience—and then go back home and do whatever work they feel needs to be done to bring their artistic "baby" along to its next level. It's a grand idea, nicely executed from what I can see—a supportive, informal atmosphere to provide much needed nurturing to deserving works-in-progress.

I am planning on seeing two of these developmental productions this year. My first was If You Take One Elf Off the Shelf, a captivating new play by Francesca Sanders that is about 92% done, I'd say. It's about a young woman named Danika, whose life has come undone—to the point of obsession and immobility—by her father's second marriage to Elsa. Elsa—presented to us by Danika, probably unfairly, as a slutty, coarse nymphomaniac—is only a little bit older than Danika; her usurpation (as Danika sees it) of Daddy's affections feels unfair and coerced in Danika's eyes.

To cope with the turmoil, Danika has conjured Samson, a giant and very obedient elf who was her constant (presumably imaginary) companion when she was a little girl. She has also written all of her frustrations with her situation into a novel, which sits tantalizingly upon her desk. And she's also breathed to life somehow this very play we're watching; Pirandelloically, the actors in it, who play Elsa and her boss, Errol, are messing with their own destinies and Danika's, by not following instructions and not sticking to the script. They quarrel and quibble over whether the stuff they're doing is in the play, the novel, or "real life."

Sanders does a splendid job navigating through the complexity she's created: somehow, we're always clear as to which of the meta-levels of the play we're in at any given moment, and we trust the playwright to guide us to an interesting conclusion that will tie up the confusion and whimsy and show us what really caused Danika to self-destruct. Alas, this is the 8% of Elf that needs work (and Sanders probably knows this, requesting feedback about her ending right up-front, in the show's program). As currently written, Danika turns out to have killed her father, jealous over his preference for Elsa, and is now in a mental institution. This feels too drastic: the juggling that Sanders does with realities and illusions is too deft and skillful and focused for such a pat conclusion—I'd like to see something that feels more organic and less surprising emerge at the end, something that addresses more directly the very clear sense of inadequacy that Danika feels based on her (perceived) fatness, homeliness, and undesirability.

But given the excellent rest of Elf, I am confident that Sanders will find the right finish for her play. I can't wait to see it when she does. This is a terrific piece of theatrical writing.

This workshop staging is remarkably fine. Director Jocelyn Sawyer is clearly simpatico with Sanders's quirky vision, as are the four expert actors who perform the piece. Caroline Price, though physically not the ugly duckling that Danika says she is, conveys her character's angst admirably, without ever feeling grating or whiny or superficial: the pain of this young woman is well-disguised but very real. Mario X. Soto is great fun as Samson—warm and gentle and reassuring. As Errol and Elsa and the actors who play them, Geoffrey Molloy and Amelia Zirin-Brown are terrific, managing the shifting levels of presence beautifully and incorporating all sorts of comic business seamlessly into their performances. Sets and, especially, costumes (both uncredited) are excellent.

 There is precious little professional dignity in picking up a reviewer’s press packet on the way into a show, and leaving with a summer night’s crush on the main character. It’s even more humiliating, frankly, to admit in writing and I suppose prouder reviewers might leave that detail out, or mask it with heavy praise for the writer. Well, it’s easy enough to grant that William Shakespeare, though too dead to probably care, does indeed have a hit with As You Like It, now at the Delacorte as this year’s first installment of Shakespeare in the Park by the Public Theatre. But when Shakespeare’s premier heroine, Rosalind, is let loose to hit all the giddy, dashing notes that are nailed in Lynn Collins’s performance, it is impossible not to muse, perhaps with a hint of envy, that our hero Orlando gets himself quite a catch in his happy marriage to her in the end.

As You Like It is unique amongst the Bard’s work in that the smartest, funniest, most powerful, most important character driving the main action throughout, achieving 100% success through pure strategy, is female. Rosalind, daughter of the banished Duke Senior, remains in the court of his treacherous usurper brother, Duke Frederick. Rather than banish his niece as well, Duke Frederick keeps Rosalind as company for her soulmate, his daughter Celia. But Rosalind’s beauty and charm bring out sympathy for her plight from the masses, and Duke Frederick finally does send her away. Celia and the court jester Touchstone pledge to follow Rosalind, who, disguised as a man, escapes into the Forest Arden, where Duke Senior is also encamped with nobles loyal to him. One more party enters the forest, Orlando and his servant Adam. Earlier, Orlando (delivered here with gusto by fresh-faced James Waterston) wrestles Duke Frederick’s champion at court, and wins his match and the heart of Rosalind. He also has to run for the woods, as Duke Frederick finds out he is the son of one of his most bitter enemies. Still in her male disguise, Rosalind vows to confront Orlando in the woods, and teach him the ways of love.

The youthful Lynn Collins shoots off sparks of clever energy as she flirts with Orlando, shifting moods with hilarious recklessness to keep him on his toes. Her Rosalind is endlessly engaging because she joyously authenticates a romantic notion that humanity never tires of: Love brings out the best in us. When we find our true love, the floodgates open and instantly we become smarter, sexier, wittier, younger, more generous, and better at problem-solving. Rosalind is inspiring. Shakespeare gives her the Epilogue for a reason—she knows the most, and she wins. Who else would we want to have the final word? Collins does so, and it has the exuberance of a victory lap as she completes her mastery of “the female Hamlet.”

Rosalind’s quick-witted match in the woods of Arden is Duke Senior’s dour advisor, Jacques, played by the great veteran actor Brian Bedford. The dexterity of his crotchety timing gives Collins's performance a run for its money as highlight of the evening. Bedford revels in the marvelous paradox of Jacques: he is a misanthrope who believes his baleful perception of the world is truly one-of-a-kind, yet cannot hide his delight in discovering new perspectives, borne of feisty minds. Bedford gracefully steps through a problem Shakespearean actors must often navigate: speaking a speech that is so famous everyone practically knows it by heart, even Shakespearean novices. For Hamlet, it’s the “To be or not to be” speech; Jacques actors get “All the world’s a stage.” Bedford gives it a unique spin, turning it about in his mind as a raw but promising idea that occurs to him when Duke Senior remarks “This wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants than the scene / Wherein we play in.” As he happily expounds on this theme with the famous “seven ages of man” speech, he enjoys the intellectual one-upmanship of it, and the opportunity to prove that his is the king brain of the exiled court, and he the keenest philosopher in Arden.

But for poor Jacques, finding a quiet, meditative spot in that woods is the devil’s chore, as couples frolic through the brush like squirrels. In addition to Rosalind and her wrestling hunk, we watch the courtly smugness of Touchstone (Richard Thomas) winning over the easily dazzled shepherdess Audrey (Vanessa Aspillaga), and the hapless country lad Silvius (Michael Esper) trying to pluck even a kind word out of the explosive fury of another shepherdess, Phoebe (Jennifer Dundas). Phoebe is by turns delighted and agog at the cheek of Rosalind’s male persona, and sets up a strategy to allure what she doesn’t know to be a woman. Lastly, Celia (Jennifer Ikeda) finds herself drawn to Orlando’s previously domineering guardian and brother, Oliver (Al Espinosa), now redeemed in Arden by the strange forces of the woods, and the power of Orlando’s forgiveness. The lovers are all expertly taken through the games of couplehood by these nimble actors, and it is with warm regard that we watch the Arden hormones settle down just long enough to smooth all romantic entanglements and hitch these lovers to their mates in the strong bind of marriage.

Director Mark Lamos delivers the story in a simple, straightforward manner, allowing the rich performances to blossom naturally from the text. The set and costume designs, by Riccardo Hernández and Candice Donnelly respectively, are unobtrusive and lovely. Dreamy music composed by William Finn and Vadim Feichtner complements the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story, and includes songs sung beautifully by Bob Stillman as Duke Senior’s crooner, Amiens.

As You Like It is a sublime, romantic night of theatre, and is made all the cheerier by the summer air of Central Park. It is the perfect atmosphere to listen and think on love, loyalty, nature, and redemption. I must admit to being relieved at the cast’s lack of mega-stars of the silver and television screen. All of the actors are of the finest caliber, to be sure, and have many prominent credits in all areas of acting. But the production’s earnestness is thankfully not undermined by a star-struck audience’s proximity to celebrities. Joseph Papp’s original vision for Shakespeare in the Park, now in its fiftieth season, seems more authentically fulfilled when the freely-admitted public is exposed not only to the most beautiful language ever written, but to ferociously talented actors that are not such household names that they uproot the sense of community that makes this institution a jewel of New York.

The first thing that one is introduced to in the Gallery Players’ production of As You Like It is Ann Bartek’s simple and elegant set. A series of grey platforms arranged at various heights are joined to the ceiling by thin white ropes pulled taut. This stylish design ingeniously suggests the Forest of Arden where most of the play will take place—the rope trees giving depth without obstructing view—and it also gives the set the feel of a giant stringed instrument that fits nicely with the production’s emphasis on music. For me it also symbolized the main problem I had with the production. This version of As You Like It, like the trees of its forest, seems like an exercise in form with not enough life attached to it.

And As You Like It, if anything, is about life. Shakespeare’s comedy follows the loves-sick youths Orlando and Rosalind who, banished by members of their respective families, abandon the corruption of courtly life and reconnect in the idyllic Forest of Arden. Here they find Rosalind’s father—the also banished Duke Senior—who has created a happy court of exiles in the woods. Rosalind, in disguise as the youth Ganymede, agrees to help Orlando woo his Rosalind, and also takes on the role of matchmaker between three other couples frolicking in Arden: the rustics Silvius and Phoebe, her cousin Celia and Orlando’s rehabilitated brother Oliver, and the clever court fool Touchstone with the simple Audrey.

Unfortunately, I found it hard to be swept away by this production. Director Neal Freeman has created a clean and efficient show that is nicely paced and skillfully staged, but it is also colored so safely within the lines that there is little to get excited about. While the cast delivers the language with clarity and commands the stage with a strong physical presence, this version of As You Like It is almost completely devoid of interesting character or thematic choices. Many of the performances—particularly the lovers—seem like they could easily be interchangeable, and what explorations the director is trying to make with this piece is hard to ascertain.

What Freeman does achieve is a theatrical construction of great aesthetic precision. David B. Thompson’s costumes, like Bartek’s set, is clear and coherent, with the drab grey uniforms of the court replaced by the multi-colored patterned vests sported by the residents of Arden. Freeman has sprinkled his production with live musical numbers, written by composer Alden Phelps and performed by Angela Hamilton on guitar and Heather Rogers on flute, that both provide melodies for the songs and serve as interludes between the actions. Freeman himself possesses a keen eye for tableau, and has meticulously choreographed the movement of the actors into a series of well-balanced and visually-pleasing pictures for the stage.

But while I admire the skill and the professional execution of this offering, this incarnation of As You Like It seems to present Shakespeare’s prose rather than inhabit it. At best I found this production blandly competent, more like a display copy of a play than an actual working model.

It’s ironic that later this month people will be waiting in line for hours to get tickets to the Public Theatre’s production of As You Like It. For a whole lot less hassle, you can see another production of As You Like It, in the very same park (Central) and for the same price (free), performed in a unique manner and served up in an easily digested portion.

NY Classical Theatre doesn’t produce Shakespeare in a theatre in the park, but rather produces it in the park itself, using the natural terrain for its set. Each scene takes place in a different part of park, just a few feet away from the previous scene. The audience walks along with the show, from place to place, shepherded by a crew of flashlight-wielding ushers. Actors make their entrances from over hills, or along the park’s many hidden paths, while the audience sits in meadows or on the park’s benches. (Only a few scenes have benches nearby, so patrons should be prepared to be on their feet for the two hour running time of the show.)

This has a wonderful effect on the audience; as the first scene change took place, prompting the audience to run through a flower-strewn meadow to reach the next scene, I overheard one woman say to her friend “I’m frolicking!” The frolicking makes this a good way to introduce children to Shakespeare, by the way.

As You Like It has always been a crowd-pleaser, with its gender-bending shenanigans, strong female lead, and liberal clowning. It’s the story of young lovers caught in one of Shakespeare’s elaborate love triangles (which ends up as a love pentagon by the end). When the Duke is usurped, he and many of those loyal to him are banished to a nearby forest, Arden. His daughter, Rosalind, disguises herself as a man, and follows him to the forest, where her love, Orlando has also been banished. Here they encounter an increasingly elaborate chain of unrequited love, and general confusion, so it’s up to Rosalind to sort matters out in time for the epilogue.

The story is a perfect match for the outdoor venue, since much of the action takes place within a forest. Director Stephen Burdman has set the play in a period that feels strongly reminiscent of early 20th century, yet still timeless (women are in long skirts, and men are in boxy suits or waistcoats). It’s not an earthshakingly unique interpretation of the play, but certainly an entertaining one. The script has been whittled down to a bit under two hours, from a total of around three hours when unedited. The result hangs together pretty well, though the minor characters do seem more… minor.

The cast gives a nice performance, made remarkable due to the unusual conditions of the show. Leading lady Jenn Schulte’s portrayal of the cross-dressing Rosalind was manly enough to make a wandering park-goer loudly ask is she was a man or a woman. Torsten Hillhouse’s Touchstone proved to be a hit, getting plenty of laughs with his foolery (and a bit of help from Shakespeare’s wit). Some of the casting choices are non-traditional, like using the very-young-looking Hunter Gallagher in the role of an old man (eventually you don’t even notice Gallagher is a youngster, though).

Any outdoor performance open to the public will have to deal with certain distractions, whether it’s confused joggers stumbling upon the show, angry old ladies grumbling about the crowd, or even startled pot-smokers who find themselves surrounded by verse-spouting players. This season, NY Classical Theatre uses the area around a pond for their show, so mosquitoes become a minor annoyance in one scene.

NY Classical Theatre’s work has a high novelty factor, and should be seen at least once, just for that alone. But this company is more than a novelty, able to stand on the quality of its productions wherever they might be produced. So, by all means, go frolic with them.

Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos is described as “Almost a Play” by its author, Roger Rosenblatt. From my point of view, it’s not a play at all; rather it’s a series of (mostly) delightful satiric sketches about a variety of anxiety-inducing topics such as aging, fame, falling in-and-out-of-love, and splotchy cellular reception in Manhattan.

I don’t need for Ashley Montana to be a “play,” actually—with the help of Jim Simpson’s fluid and inspired direction, and a droll cast that includes Bebe Neuwirth, Jeffrey DeMunn, Jenn Harris, and James Waterston, Rosenblatt’s work attains a kind of theatricality that many traditional plays do not.

The central image (projected on the upstage wall) is a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition with the eponymous (and fictitious?) caption, “Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos,” prompting the four performers to inquire: “Who is Ashley Montana?” “Where are the Caicos?” “Is she escaping something?” “Why isn’t she wet?” etc. Near the end of the evening, they create a group story, round robin-style, to make sense of the more puzzling aspects of this cover story. That is my favorite part: watching the four of them, in constant, swirling motion, step in and out of characters as gracefully as they do the spotlight (in both senses of the phrase).

In between these two organizing events is a light, frisky meditation on grave themes. The more successful bits—a Good Morning, America-esque talk show with all the humanity of an amusement park ride; a bathroom commercial for the guilty capitalist; bootcamp-style soundbyte training for the press—are as thought-provoking as they are guffaw-inducing. Others are tame, cute, and sometimes a little passé, a good example being a torch song about trying to write a torch song about Ashcroft, but being unable to find a suitable rhyme for the name.

But said song, when sung by Bebe Neuwirth, inherits a wit that it might not otherwise possess. Like her voice, Neuwirth’s body language is as sharp as a straight razor; she and her fellow cast members command the stage in such a way that even the weaker sketches get some uproarious laughs. Jeffrey DeMunn is the mid-life-crisis man and whether he is diatribe-ing about death or being laid off due presumably to his age, there is a certain sweetness in his tone which, combined with his eagle-eyed watch over the audience, is oddly alluring. Deftly handling some staler bits—a Bush impersonation, among them—and triumphing with fresher ones—a Grim-Reaper-a-la-Caroline’s-Comedy-Club impression—James Waterston is a sexy goof. He and Jenn Harris (whose unrelentingly flat affect is somehow consistently engaging) hold their own in harmony with their more experienced counterparts.

Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos is smart, funny, and generous theatre. Neither aggressive with the jokes, nor heavy with the pathos, Rosenblatt, Simpson, and their stellar cast give us room to think and feel. And that’s more radical than you might suppose.

Gary Winter’s At Said is a play about writing. Perhaps. It’s hard to say—as hard as it is for the characters themselves to reflect upon their own lives. In fact, that actually may be the point.

Mother and daughter (Anita Hollander and Lia Aprile) live in a small tenement apartment. Neither one works—neither has any marketable skills, nor have they any way of getting to and from any job. Moreover, Darra, the daughter, is simply too afraid to leave the building, while Sybil, the mother, may be coping with scars from her childhood in a war-torn country. They have spent the last several years living off the “check” they get every month, killing time how they can and getting whatever small luxuries they can afford. In the first scene, Sybil reveals the latest—an old typewriter, salvaged from a junkyard. She tells Darra that she plans to finally put her stories about the past onto paper.

Everyone around Sybil is threatened by her plan. Darra is terrified of what could happen when everything in her mother’s head comes out. Her sometimes-boyfriend Will (Vedant Gokhale) is equally concerned for Darra, and is also strangely threatened by the very idea of writing about one’s self. The most urgent warnings come from the super, Mr. Carlos (Gilbert Cruz), who also used to write when he was in his own homeland—“but they found out.” After their threats, he is too afraid to write any more. Writing is dangerous, they tell Sybil. She could get hurt. But she persists, inspiring Darra and Will to each make their own cautious attempts at writing. Their attempts, though, are too scary to handle, and they do end up hurt at the end.

The language is very dense in places. Everyone speaks in generalities: you never learn the name of Sybil’s homeland, nor of Mr. Carlos’s. Sybil and Darra are not living on welfare, they get “the check.” Darra’s best friend Alex Marbles (Marisa Echeverria) attends “the community college,” but you never learn what community and what college. The characters also keep circling back to the same points and thoughts over and over: Darra insists that her mother is doing something dangerous, but every time Will offers to get rid of the typewriter, she stops him. Then five minutes later, she speaks about being in danger again. Even Sybil’s memoirs revisit the same fleeting details over and over—a waterfall, ringing the bell on her bicycle, a truck, a locked gate, burying people in the forest.

The opacity can be frustrating at times; for a long time I wondered of Darra, “who is this person? What does she want?” It gradually becomes clear, in its own way, that this is the point—these people not only don’t know who they were and what they want, they are too afraid to find out, but are eager to find out at the same time, so they keep circling themselves warily. Will in particular is so afraid that he moves to stop Darra from making some small brave steps towards the end.

The performances are all finely nuanced. Aprile has near-perfect chemistry with everyone on the stage, and she and Gokhale both avoid letting their characters slip into melodrama. Hollander and Cruz are also disarmingly matter-of-fact; you can see there was long-ago pain in them both, but it’s too long ago and buried too deep, and in the case of Cruz’s Mr. Carlos, you can see he thinks it’s not worth the bother of stirring it up. Except—sometimes you see he wishes he did. Director Tim Farrell wisely focuses on the nuances of the performance and on simplifying the set; the text is so dense that a complicated production would have obscured things even further.

At Said is dense and hard to follow at times—just as are any of our inner selves. Perhaps that finally is the point.

Avalon is inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. The 1982 book is a retelling of the King Arthur myths from a feminist point of view, re-imagining the familiar characters and putting the rise of Christianity in Great Britain at the center of the story. The narrative arc of the play is strong and the choices Glory Sims Bowen had to make in order to adapt this thousand-page book to two-and-a-half hours of stage time are clear and compelling. We follow these characters through their lives and we care about them. And although some members of this enormous cast are stronger than others, everyone is working together as a team and playing in the same world. Bowen uses Bradley’s slightly different spellings for the names of familiar characters, and a few notable performances include Yvonne Roen as a very commanding Morgause, Cameron Peteron as Gwyhwyfar, Jordana Oberman as a confident, powerful Morgaine, and Matthew Scholler and Matthieu Cornillon as Arthur and Lancelet, whose erotic tension is the most believable in the play. Also, Carolyn Mraz has designed a simple but effective set with four movable pillars that create an ever-moving maze for the characters to navigate through.

Unfortunately, the era the characters are living in and the society they inhabit are not fully realized. The novel is set in fifth century England and has a 1970s hippie-pagan agenda, but the costumes, accents, and manners of the characters in this play range from the time of Christ up through the present day. Because of that, there is no mooring for the religious and political themes that are dead center in this epic story. Also, how and why the mighty, magical kingdom of Avalon has lost its power is never clear. In the world of the play, the Christians showed up one day, asked the women of Britain to give up their power, and they did so cheerfully, no questions asked. This makes Avalon’s power look negligible in comparison. By setting the story in no time and every time, the universality of religious and gender struggle is diffused rather than strengthened.

The strongest element of this play is the relationship drama. The homosexuality, incest, tribal rights and power struggles do not just belong to long-ago royalty—they will be familiar to anyone who moved to a big city after college with a group of close friends. The story of Arthur is one of the world’s first soap operas, and certainly the themes of lifelong friendship and unrequited love cross the boundaries of culture and time.

Clifford Odets's 1935 play Awake and Sing! would seem to have a great deal to say to Americans in 2006. Set at the height of the Great Depression, the play tells the story of three generations of a lower-middle-class family, beaten down by their socioeconomic circumstances and in search of a way out, toward fulfillment and happiness. The youngest generation somehow is able to locate and grab on to hope. In this excerpt from Act III, the mother, Bessie, argues with her 22-year-old son Ralph:

BESSIE: ....here without a dollar you don't look the world in the eye. Talk from now till next year—this is life in America.
RALPH: Then it's wrong. It don't make sense. If life made you this way, then it's wrong!....No, I see every house lousy with lies and hate. He said it, Grandpa—Brooklyn hates the Bronx. Smacked on the nose twice a day. But boys and girls can get ahead like that, Mom. We don't want life printed on dollar bills, Mom!
BESSIE: So go out and change the world if you don't like it.
RALPH: I will!

And he will, too; or he'll try: the play is called Awake and Sing! and that's just what happens to Ralph before it's over. It's a tender, exhilarating message for a society afraid that it can't make a difference—a society not unlike, in some ways, our own today. I love Odets's idealism in this piece.

But that idealism is barely detectable in Bartlett Sher's slow-moving and overwrought revival, now being presented by Lincoln Center Theater at the Belasco. Sher seems to have mistaken Odets's play for another classic American family drama: Death of a Salesman. He's staged this earthy naturalistic melodrama as high tragedy, and he's allowed his set designer Michael Yeargan to destroy its center with an arty expressionistic set that literally disintegrates before our eye. Ralph's final triumphant declaration, which needs to be spoken from inside the living room he wants to escape, is instead presented as a kind of moribund epilogue declaimed in a snowstorm. It makes for a weak finish to a disappointing production.

Awake and Sing! centers on the Bergers, a Jewish family living in the Bronx. The de facto head of the clan is Bessie, a tough-minded, difficult woman who knows her husband Myron is a weakling and that she has to make all the big decisions that keep her household afloat. We never know exactly what Myron does for a living; just that he's a small man with big dreams—he's constantly looking for a main chance via lotteries, race horses, and so on. Bessie's 70-year-old father Jacob lives with them too; he's a retired barber and an inveterate Communist—though not one prone to actually put his incendiary words into action.

Their two grown children also share the apartment. Hennie works as a secretary, although Bessie would clearly love to marry her off, preferably to someone of the appropriate social and economic status. (Bessie, though poor, is a snob; that may be the most important fact you need to know about her.) Ralph, the younger of the two, works at a warehouse in a tedious but unspecified job; he knows he wants out, but at first he's only able to articulate his desires in terms of what he never got (skates, black and white shoes, his teeth fixed, etc.). It's only later, after some meaningful discussions with his grandfather, an upsetting and tentative foray into romance, and some truly life-altering events that happen to Hennie, that Ralph fully understands and is able to articulate the ideals he has come to cherish and long for.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Odets's script is how realistic it feels. Although some of the characters (notably Moe Axelrod, a neighbor and, later, a boarder of the Bergers') speak in jazzy slang that owes its origins as much to Odets's poetic imagination as to anything ever uttered on Prospect Avenue, most of the dialogue and every bit of the ambience of Awake and Sing! seems authentic. This must have been jolting in 1935: there's some raw talk and situations here, along with an unapologetic acknowledgement of the characters' ethnicity, that would have been unusual on the stage at that time and that sometimes sits uneasily on our ears now (Bessie's rich brother Morty, who makes a couple of appearances in the second half of the play, talks about the "wops" who work in his factory and the "Jap" who is his houseboy; Hennie says, about the man she eventually marries, "Twenty-one a week he brings in—a nigger don't have it so hard.") The point is, the play rings remarkably true, especially when the audience is allowed to believe in it.

But Sher doesn't give us much to hold on to here, which is what makes this revival so unsuccessful. The main thing that I missed was the desperation of the characters' circumstances. Yeargan's set and Catherine Zuber's costumes don't delineate the next thing to poverty; in fact in Act III, the Bergers all look quite smart in three-piece suits and stylish black dresses—surely they should be wearing clothes and sitting on furniture that look a bit more worn, a bit more lived-in, than what we see on stage here. There's no sense of cramped quarters on Yeargan's relatively spacious apartment set, and no sense of worn-out fight in any of the characters. Certainly Zoe Wanamaker's Bessie, a performance crafted of intricate and infinite detailed mannerisms, shows little sign of actually being tired, despite her constant announcements of same. But I'll bet Bessie is tired: life was hard in those days; it wouldn't hurt if we actually saw her doing something instead of just whining. (I was reminded, in contrast, of the recent revival of A Raisin in the Sun, with its subtle, silent depiction of Ruth Younger's endless daily chores.)

Sher has staged the piece, especially Acts II and III, at a snail's pace, punching up moments that don't need to be punched up, and in fact diluting their impact as a result. There's a sequence in Act II, for example, in which Bessie, in a rage, breaks her father's records. Instead of running into his room and smashing them on the ground the way a normal person would, Wanamaker goes into Medea mode, turning a tantrum into a rampage that makes almost no sense whatsoever. (The stage direction in the script reads: "She brushes past him [Jacob], breaks the records, comes out.")

Other distinguished cast members let us down. Ben Gazzara seemed to be walking through the role of Jacob at the performance reviewed, bringing virtually no passion or meaning to his important speeches. Jonathan Hadary seems to have little clue as to who Myron is. Ned Eisenberg is more effective as Uncle Morty, but he too, perhaps at Sher's bidding, is overly bombastic in his role.

The younger actors fare better. Mark Ruffalo gives the most accomplished performance of the evening as Moe Axelrod, the slightly cynical war veteran who is in love with Hennie. Lauren Ambrose, as Hennie, does an admirable job conveying how the passage of time and the assumption of responsibility can prematurely age a promising young woman. And Pablo Schreiber is just what's called for as Ralph, the naive, open-minded, and open-faced young hero of the play. Thanks to him the main ideas in Odets's script aren't entirely lost.

The press release for Babies with Rabies, the fun and ingenious new play by Jonathan Calindas, describes it as Noises Off meets Marat/Sade. That pretty much hits the nail on the head. This joyous, silly farce is an affectionate and knowing look at the trials and tribulations of making theatre in the off-off-Broadway world, where it sometimes seems like the inmates have started running the asylum.

Calindas's clever structure is complicated; stay with me here. Babies with Rabies is a play about a young playwright, Jonesy, who is trying to get his play produced off-off-Broadway. His director, Max, has cast an Equity actress named Tina in the play because she's sort of famous, and now Max is pushing Jonesy hard to beef up Tina's role. Jonesy doesn't want to do this because he's cast Miriam in the other female part, and Miriam's dad is a TV producer who just might want to hire Jonesy if he likes the play.

Tina is the worst kind of pushy, affected, limited-talent actor possible. She overplays all her scenes and upstages everyone in her path. She also misplaces emphasis on key words, so that "Sally" comes out "Sall-LEE" and "associate" turns into "ASS-o-see-ate." She calls Max "MOX." She is, to put it bluntly, very annoying.

The other actors involved are Quincy, who doubles as stage manager; Al, who swigs whiskey from a flask at every opportunity; and an inexperienced fellow with money named Winston who has inexplicably been cast in a double-role, as twins, in Jonesy's play.

Jonesy's play is about a group of patients in an insane asylum who are themselves putting on a play about a kingdom where a terrible plague has turned the babies into horrific monsters who prey upon the populace wontonly. In this play within the play (within the play), a Prince (played by inmate # 69; who is played by Quincy), offers a reward of 10,000 gold pieces to whomever can come up with a cure. A Doctor (played by inmate # 5/7/9, who has multiple personality disorder; played by Al) and a very weird scientist named Gary (played by # 54; played by Winston) are competing for the reward, and they're both entangled in a complex plot involving Terry (# 37; Tina), who is pretending to be a man; Larry (# 45 / Winston—both Larry and #45 are identical twin brothers of Winston's other characters); and Sally (# 24 / Miriam).

Meanwhile—still inside Jonesy's play but outside the inmates' play-within-it—numbers 37, 69, and at least one of 5/7/9's personalities are plotting to take over the asylum. And OUTSIDE Jonesy's play, Tina, Max, and Al are plotting to take over Jonesy's play.

Confused? Amazingly, you won't be when you watch Babies with Rabies. Calindas has done an admirable job of feeding the audience just the right amount of information at just the right moments to make sure that we never get caught in the mire of this bizarre and convoluted tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale. At the same time, he's able to get in plenty of digs at the off-off community that he (and we) know and love so well; and a good quantity of just plain funny gags as well.

Rodney E. Reyes directs with style; he's abetted greatly by Mario Corrales's excellent set design, which is simple but appropriate and transforms easily from the onstage to backstage worlds required by Calindas's script. Seven actors play all of the various characters in all the meta-levels of Babies with Rabies, with particularly fine work put forth by Kelly Rauch (Tina/37/Terry) and Dennis Lemoine (Winston/45 & 54/Gary & Larry), both of whom masterfully depict Very Bad Acting among other achievements. Tami Gebhardt is likable and spunky as the shy ingenue Miriam/24/Sally, and Tom McCartan is excellent as the moody Quincy/69/Narrator & Prince. Andrew Rothkin may be a bit over-the-top as Al/5,7,9/Doc. Rob Moretti and Erwin Falcon are fine as Max and Jonesy, respectively, grounding the piece in a reality that nevertheless seems to shift about halfway in.

That final point is one of Calindas's niftiest achievements here: somewhere in Act Two, it becomes clear that whether or not the inmates actually have taken over the asylum, our certainty about what's "real" and what's "pretend" has started to collapse. The inmates' play, and Jonesy's play, and Calindas's play all end simultaneously. Who takes the curtain calls? I'm not entirely sure...

Baby Girl is a new play by Edith Freni, directed by Padraic Lillis for Partial Comfort Productions. What a good show! And I don’t use “good” lightly. Now, “great” for me is Death of a Salesman great, or, True West great. Is Freni’s show great? No, but my use of that last Shepard metaphor is purposeful. I really think she has a voice that recalls Shepard. Is she the “next” Sam Shepard? Of course not, she is the next Freni! But her absurd naturalism certainly stakes a claim as a bona fide 21st century commentator on the human condition, as perpetrated by the American culture.

In the plot, Elise (Trisha LaFrache), a shall we say girl of “loose” morals, has had a baby out of wedlock by Richie (John Summerour), who happens to be the transgendered half brother of both Jason, a New York City policeman (Chris Kipiniak), and Patrick, a cook (chef?) in a successful restaurant (Curran Connor). In their Long Island community, Elise was the “easy lay” of these boys in days gone by. Now the “chick” has come home to roost—she had her baby girl to experience motherhood and now she really is determined to be a good mother. But who is going to be, or willing to be, the father?

I loved Baby Girl for its examination (and confrontation) of an all too common story of the struggle of children having children. And its darkly comedic take on the proceedings made me really think about the plight of the heroine. Moreover, we care about all the characters, which is why I think Freni could insert an intermission without fear of an audience exodus. We aren’t going to leave—we want to know what happens.

I will not comment further on the plot, for you must experience it yourself. Let’s just say the entire cast is wonderful. Now, such credit certainly goes to the actors (I have neglected to mention the marvelous supporting characters played by Sarah Hayon and Andrew Stewart-Jones), but credit is also due director Lillis. Paradoxically perhaps, Lillis was absent, which, in my mind, shows how much he was present: I think, the mark of a good director is often the ultimate apparent absence of a director.

Les Liang’s non-realistic set perfectly suits the play in the space, ably lit by Jason Jeunnette. Lex Liang’s costumes suit the characters well. The sound design by Zach Williamson is appropriately energetic and trendily loud—again, perfect for this production.

See this play. Some of my fellow audience members found it funnier than I did, but, of course, so what? If I didn’t laugh I was still always engaged. And you will find it funny, or sad, in places that neither I nor my then fellow audience members did. Such is the mark of a good play. Such is the legacy of maestro Shepard.