I'm sorry to have to report that Freak Winds, a thriller from Australia written by Marshall Napier, contains almost no thrills at all. There are a few moments offering something mildly unexpected, but nothing made this theatre-goer gasp or shrink back into his seat—not even the promised "sudden loud noise" (per a sign on the door to the theatre) proved particularly unsettling.

The premise certainly seems promising. An arrogant insurance salesman comes knocking on the door in the middle of a raging storm. No sooner has the apparently mild-mannered and possibly dotty old man Ernest opened the door and let in the salesman (whose name is Henry Crumb) then the freak winds of the play's title blow a massive old oak right onto Henry's new car. (Okay, that does seem a bit improbable, but let it go.) Henry tries to call for help but, naturally, the phone lines are down. And although at first it is Henry who is insufferably rude and annoying, it becomes clear that Ernest is more than his match and, well, strange.

For one thing, he's got scrapbooks full of clippings of lurid crimes involving teenage girls and the like. For another, when he goes off into the kitchen (to get Henry some coffee and cookies), we hear an ominous sound of knife-sharpening and, on at least one occasion, horrid noises of Ernest presumably retching somewhere else in the house.

Reasonable explanations are offered for the above, but Henry has seen enough horror movies not to rely on them, and so have we. Eventually, a pretty young woman named Myra turns up; wheelchair-bound, she at first seems to be both kinder and saner than Ernest, but it's not long before she's moving in on Henry, ordering him to allow her to give him a massage and, a little later, upping the ante with kisses, demands for sex, and a marriage proposal.

The thing is, though most of what happens in Freak Winds feels designed to manipulate the audience quite shamelessly, we play along, assuming that the payoff will be worth it. Henry will turn out to be the long lost something or other, seeking revenge; or Ernest and Myra will be revealed to be the famous mad so-and-so serial killers, relentlessly planning something-or-other: we'll accept anything, pretty much, provided it makes for a psychologically satisfying reason for the bizarre events that we've witnessed.

Unfortunately, the payoff doesn't come. I'll ruin what little suspense Freak Winds has to offer if I tell you any more; suffice to say that the play works hard to scare the pants off the audience but fails to because its events finally only feel random and haphazard. No greater force (e.g., Evil) is at work here.

Napier directs and stars as Ernest and so presumably the show we're seeing is the one he intends us to see. His work as an actor is more assured than as a writer, and indeed his two co-stars—Tamara Lovatt-Smith as Myra and Damian de Montemas as Henry—do everything they can with the spotty script. But in the end, with nothing motivating the weird mindgames and manipulations that Ernest and Myra go to such great pains to undertake, Freak Winds falls sadly flat.

Fully PACT represents the culmination of six months of development of seven new short plays from Playwrights/Actors Contemporary Theater (PACT). They're being presented in two separate programs; I caught "Destination B," which includes four pieces by Craig Pospisil, Stuart D'Ver, P. Seth Bauer, and Lisa Ferber and Robert Firpo-Cappiello.

Before I talk about the individual shows, let me note that the company's ambition here seems to be outstripping its capabilities, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for less than optimal viewing of new work. Specifically: the production values in each show proved to be pretty impressive, but performance elements felt problematic, as if directors and cast members simply hadn't had enough time to pull their work together. This situation was exacerbated by the choice of material (and I'm speaking here only about the four plays I got to see), which is exciting in terms of audacity and diversity of theme, genre, and style, but therefore necessarily more challenging to put up than the run-of-the-mill ten-minute play evening we see so often off-off-Broadway. So while we're seeing here work that's genuinely sophisticated and interesting, I'm not sure we're seeing it at its best. (I was at a very early performance, and that needs to be taken into account as well.)

The one completely successful piece, in my estimation, was the first, Pospisil's Train of Thought. Staged on a New York City subway car, this clever contemporary urban comedy takes us inside the heads of four late-night travelers headed downtown. There're two couples: Marcy and Wade, and Nina and Frank. Wade has spied a pretty girl at the other end of the car and has decided he's fallen in love with her at first sight. Nina—said pretty girl—is a little creeped out by Wade's attention, and instead looks forward to a cozy romantic evening with her boyfriend Frank. Marcy, Wade's girlfriend, wonders about her relationship with Wade: does her really love her?; he's always so willing to go along with whatever she wants to do that she's starting to worry that he doesn't really care. And as for Frank—he's focused on the newspaper he's trying to read, bemoaning the state of current politics.

Pospisil draws out neat surprises from his characters as they move toward their destinations (metaphorical as well as literal); the writing is crisp and witty and has the ring of truth. All four actors do excellent work here: Michael Rhodes is very funny as the arch, put-upon Frank; Nancy Wu is a charmer as the perky but not cloying Nina; Missy Hall is similarly likable wavering between romance and pragmatism as Marcy; and Scott Katzman is utterly convincing as the hapless dreamer Wade. Christopher Maring's staging is satisfactory though perhaps more inert than it might be; Haruka Ashida's illogical (indeed, mostly unrecognizable) subway car set represents the sole misstep in an otherwise excellent collection of deft, workable designs for the evening.

The next two items, D'Ver's Tragedy ( A Comedy) and Bauer's Vermouth & Chicken, feel like high-concept comedies that haven't quite gelled yet. The former is about a fresh-faced guy from Kansas City who comes up against his new girlfriend Masha's eccentrically dour family and loses. On one level, it's like an Adams Family episode: "normal" stranger encounters the all-black-clad, excessively gloomy clan and the culture shock fuels a succession of jokes. I sensed something deeper was intended though: there's a New-Yorkers-versus-the-rest-the-world ethos implied here (though not fully explored), and there's also more than one allusion to Chekhov (Josh, the Kansas City dude, asks why his girlfriend Masha always dresses in black at the top of the play) that I was hoping would go somewhere. Jody O'Neil's staging fails to clarify the overall thrust, and as a result an able cast mostly flounders.

Vermouth & Chicken is far and away the most ambitious item on the program. A (presumably middle- or upper-middle-class nuclear) family suddenly finds itself with all of its possessions missing—taken away, the punk-attired daughter Angie explains, by "them." All that's left is a TV set that only displays white "snow" and a seemingly unlimited supply of vermouth and chicken. Eventually father, mother, and daughter are joined by son Brad and his new girlfriend, and later all five lose all of their clothes save their underwear. There's an absurdist parable lurking in here somewhere; Bauer is conjuring Albee's A Delicate Balance here, along with Beckett and Ionesco, to make some points about complacency and materialism. But again, it doesn't quite work, and I think that's mostly because the piece isn't there yet. (One thing I couldn't quite make out was why the two titular items were the particular ones chosen.)

After intermission comes Oh, Mister Cadhole!, an hour-long musical by Lisa Ferber (book and lyrics) and Robert Firpo-Cappiello (music and lyrics). (Actually, there are only a handful of songs: I'd be inclined to characterize this as a comedy with music, and even then I'd question whether the songs are really necessary.) The conceit of Cadhole—a very clever one—is to impose classic noir style on the most commonplace of events, in this case, daily life in an office. The "caper" involves the diversion of miscellaneous office products (staples, paper clips, etc.) by VERY small-time hoods Horace Page and Molly Hadafew to a new profit-making office supply company of their own; I love how silly and unsubstantial this is, a molehill turned into a very funny mountain by Ferber's exaggerated appropriation of the taut, sexy, metaphor-laden style of Double Indemnity and Sam Spade pictures. There's also a murder (of the title character), which is less funny because it's what we actually expect from a pulpy suspense tale; and there are also two detectives and a lot of other appropriately improbable plot developments. The piece is probably longer than it needs to be, but the jokes land more often than not and the ambience of the thing is delightful.

A play like this needs a very consistent style in order to work, and here's where this production of Cadhole falters. Christopher Windom's staging—and again, this may be improving with subsequent showings—is sluggish and imprecise. There are a host of spectacularly good comic turns on view here: Alyssa Simon is dead-on as tough-as-nails Molly Hadafew (and her hairpiece—at least I assume it's a hairpiece—seems to have a life of its own: a great touch). Ivanna Cullinan is similarly supremely assured as boss lady Hermione Trufflehead; like Simon's, all her line deliveries and comic business hit their targets. Tom Paitson Kelly is hilarious as nerdy Horace Page, especially when he momentarily transforms into an only slightly more debonair version of himself. And Devon Hawkes Ludlow, a supremely talented clown, is terrific in the silent role of Jeffries Servalot, Mrs. Trufflehead's valet; when he bursts into song (without uttering a sound, of course), he's brilliantly funny. Ludlow is an actor we need to see more of on NYC stages.

But for all the hits in Cadhole there are an equal number of misses: Marci Occhino is entirely at sea as the ingénue Marilyn Mushroomburger; Kevin Draine and Peter Handy seem, at best, inadequately prepared as detective and murder victim, respectively; Lisa Barnes, as the other detective (one Gloria Gauzefilter), gives a game performance but she never seems comfortable in the role, particularly when she's called upon to sing and dance; and Eric C. Bailey is resolutely unfunny in what could be the silliest role of the show, a gay man's man called Lex Blockawood.

I see real potential in all of the work in "Destination B" of Fully PACT, and I hope that these initial stagings help the creators move closer to their ambitious visions for them. I'll be eager to check in on all of these pieces, if and when they achieve new form in the future.

Rarely have I felt the complexities of racial identity so compellingly articulated as by Funnyhouse of a Negro. The play is under an hour, yet manages to compress a huge number of perspectives into its short running time. In it, Adrienne Kennedy explores the psyche of Susan, an educated young black woman—the daughter of a light-skinned mother and a dark-skinned father—who commits suicide. Anchored in the early 1960s, when it was written, this story of a girl's desperate escape from racial self-hatred serves as a benchmark against which to measure the current variety of African American identities and role models, ranging from Oprah Winfrey to Condaleeza Rice to 50 Cent, that have evolved since that time. As directed by Billie Allen, who played Sarah in the original 1963 production, Funnyhouse of a Negro also invites its audience into the mind of an individual struggling with mental illness. Sarah is not simply a stand-in for every black woman, but a very smart, sensitive woman whose damaged psyche includes a deep understanding of her history and cultural dislocation.

Kennedy dramatizes the suicide as a fugue. Written in a tight, poetic form, her characters—presented as different personae within Sarah's mind—cycle through its story many times, with each repetition adding layers of meaning. Sarah (Suzette Azariah Gunn) has isolated herself in her rented room, which contains her bed, a desk, piles of books, and a life-size, utterly white plaster statue of Queen Victoria. She is haunted by her light-skinned mother (Kellie E. McCants), who may have been raped or killed by her “black beast” of a father (Willie E. Teacher). When the father's ghost comes banging on the door, Sarah tries to block it out, speaking to Queen Victoria (Trish McCall) and her alternate persona of the Duchess of Hapsburg (Monica Stith), who constantly insists, “my father was the darkest, and my mother was the lightest, but I am yellow. I am in between.” Sarah has tried to erase her African heritage by immersing herself in the world of European culture, amongst white friends whom she describes as “like myself...shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death.” However she tries to leave it behind, the banging always intrudes, until finally Sarah's father enters, begging her to forgive him for his blackness. Sarah refuses.

Rejected by Sarah, the father removes his hat and, as in a dream, becomes Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister in the Congo, who was assassinated by competing tribes with the collaboration of the Belgian government for his African nationalist position. Her father becomes a multi-faceted figure, far more than the initial crude, racist stereotype of him as an animal/rapist. Apparently his mother, Sarah's grandmother, asked him to “be Jesus,” and to travel to Africa to carry the gospel and education to Africans. Like her missionary father, Patrice Lumumba sought “revelation on the golden savannah, amongst the white francopenny trees”: some way to transform the tragedy of Africa into a source for hope. But he has been murdered for his ideals, by fellow Africans who wish to remain allied with Europe for personal gain. This father/Lumumba figure, who is joined by Jesus (Lincoln Brown), accuses Sarah of betraying them. They are icons of beliefs that might refute the white racism that eats at her. To escape all this, she hangs herself, in the same way that she claims her father killed himself after she rejected him.

But, as the story is told through the eyes of a mentally disturbed woman, we can never be sure what actually happened. The play further complicates the situation by giving us two white performers—Elena McGee as Sarah's landlady and Danny Camiel who appears in one scene as her Jewish boyfriend—who sit just outside of the proscenium, commenting and laughing at the action. According to the landlady, Sarah's father did actually visit and ask Sarah to let him back into her life. But at the end of the play, after Sarah has killed herself, the landlady announces that Sarah's father is alive, a doctor married to a white woman, in an apartment surrounded by books and artifacts of European culture. This information, combined with her education, her clothing, and the décor of her room, suggests that Sarah is financially comfortable and her isolation arises primarily from her mental condition and cultural dislocation. Other than clues, we are not given a clear picture of her life outside her own perception; we have no idea where her mother is, and cannot truly know where her father is.

Kennedy's play does make clear that, whatever the opportunities of Sarah's life, her internalization of white values carries with it a toxic self-hatred. Sarah cannot silence this primal force with logic, or replace it with other images, and her inability to reconcile it leads to her suicide. The designers go a long way towards conveying the hurricane power of this hatred, especially Michael Messer, whose music and sound effects create a haunted house of startling tangibility, and Aaron Black, whose lights shift like dreams with each change of mood. Above all, for all the layers of global and historical context, Allen makes sure her fine ensemble stays close to Sarah in the story. As the ghost figures of Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, Trish McCall and Monica Stith find an exaggerated, entertaining style that never overpowers Suzette Gunn's sensitive and painful performance as Sarah. Willie Teacher channels both the mournful pleading of a father with his daughter and the hot judgment of Lumumba's quest for justice.

The audience at the performance I saw consisted of a mix of about half African American families and couples and half white theatre aficionados like myself—perhaps not so different a mix from the audiences that saw the original production in 1963. As we left, some faces showed befuddlement at the demands the play placed on us, but clearly the accomplished and heartfelt ensemble performance carried us closely through its storm. Years after its original production, the play has become a time capsule of a certain desperation; while its particular urgency may belong to the past, Sarah's ghosts accompanied more than a few of us out of the theatre that night. I saw them in one group's particularly focused conversation, and heard them in a knowing laugh from an older man. Whether for sale in the record store, or playing on cable TV, this revival makes it clear: Sarah's ghosts are among us still.

Marc Morales's Galaxy Video 2 is everything that a successful sequel should be. It brings back all the eccentric characters from  its source—Galaxy Video—and gives them all the quirks and foibles that we loved about them in the first place. But it's stocked with all-new situations and conflicts (okay, some of the conflicts are replays of, or reactions to, events in the original); and it's got a potent new villain ominously called "The Man." Most importantly, it stands on its own, so that if you don't know Galaxy Video, you'll still totally follow the show, and enjoy it.

It is, in short, as smart and hilarious as the first installment, yet fresh and original.

Okay, so here's the set-up, just in case you missed Galaxy Video (shame on you!) during its two New York runs (or, in published form, in NYTE's Plays and Playwrights 2003). Galaxy Video is the largest video store in the universe; so big that people often claim they can't find their way out; so big that the number of movies and aisles containing them appears to approach infinity. In the first play, we met a ragtag group of misfit employees and customers trying to cope with a typical day in the shop. Jerry was the earnest new employee, striving to do his best. Russell, his revered co-worker, was the jaded senior employee, brooding about the end of his relationship with his girlfriend Shelby, and his betrayal at the hands of former co-worker Barnaby Franklin, who stole one of Russell's story ideas and sold it to the movies. Three other employees included Shelly, who suffers from narcolepsy; A.E. (or Angry Employee), who quit "to herself" after just a few hours and went back to her restful pastimes of yoga and drawing stick-figure people; and Simon, who was (and is) just plain odd. The customers included Manny, who always wears a winter coat and thinks that Fred Berry (Rerun from TV's What's Happening) is the greatest star of them all; Marissa, a knockout from the Bronx with attitude, a cell phone, and a penchant for forgetting the names of movies and actors in the movies that she wants to rent; Erick, her boyfriend; and Jason, Jamie Lee, and Michael, three kids who love horror flicks.

They're all back for Galaxy Video 2.  The store is now part of a huge chain of Galaxy Videos, a la Blockbuster, all owned by a mysterious personage known as "The Man." Jerry is now the senior employee (Russell quit); he's struggling, rather comically, with his sexual identity. Simon's still his oblivious self, and Shelly is still collapsing on the floor without notice due to her condition. She's also now Erick's girlfriend, his relationship with Marissa having ended in Galaxy Video; they seem to make a nice couple. But Marissa is back, for the store's grand re-opening, and she wants Erick back—and she doesn't care what she has to do to get him.

Manny, who worshipped the store employees in the first play, now has his wish—he works in the store himself. (Talk about hog heaven!)  He's acquired a love interest, too: a sweet nerdy girl named Sandy who works at the nearby Starbucks, who sets off a crisis of the heart for Manny when she invites him to have "bagels for breakfast."

Jason, Jamie Lee, and Michael are back, now shooting their own film in the cavernous depths of the store. So are Barnaby Franklin, Russell (now a civilian, just looking for a copy of Fame), and Beth, a harassed customer whom Simon loves to torment by sending her to the wrong aisle.

And oh yes—A.E. is back. In a prologue, we hear her lash out at and then shoot her therapist. Soon she arrives at Galaxy Video holding a DVD box that she says contains a bomb. She's also got a gun. She says that God has instructed her to blow the place up.

Possibly even more nefariously, Simon has been put on special assignment by "The Man"—to remove certain titles from the shelves and bring them to the "secret aisle."

Oh, and one more thing: it appears that Barnaby Franklin has sold his soul to the devil.

Playwright-director Morales deftly shakes and stirs up these various ingredients and concocts a sharp, hilarious stew of a comedy. Some of the jokes and gags are brilliantly laugh-out-loud funny (like the moment when Jason, filming—Michael Moore-style—A.E.'s planned terrorist act, orders a dolly shot). And the themes addressed, though always with humor, are smart and important: stuff like institutionalized racism and the heavy pall of censorship now hanging over our country's culture.

As he did in Galaxy Video, Morales employs a pair of masked ninja characters who serve as stagehands and supernumeraries, shifting Bradd Baskin's ingenious setting this way and that to create new nooks and crannies in which the play's numerous scenes play out. Transitions are all choreographed to a slew of apropos pop/rock/rap selections; the show passes lightning-fast. The cast is engagingly committed and over-the-top: standouts include Johanna H. Clay, back on hand as Manny; Lucas Wotkowski as Michael, who quits Jason's film early in the play and winds up planning a Vegas act of film and TV impressions with Jerry; Melanie Angelina Maras, on-target as tough-but-sexy Marissa; Clay Drinko, hilarious as the whiny but egotistical budding auteur Jason; Alexandra Lemosle, adorable as the geeky Sandy; and Deondra Lyonne, who is daffily fearless as Jamie Lee.

Morales hasn't quite figured out how to end this play: after an elegantly choreographed climactic chase scene, it wasn't clear to me whether the store was supposed to have blown to smithereens or the whole story was just Jerry's bad dream. But apart from this—which will presumably be clarified—Galaxy Video 2 is a delightful and terrific successor to Morales's worthy original. There might even be more Galaxy Video tales to tell—who knows: maybe there's a TV series here, just waiting to be coaxed out.

George M. Cohan Tonight! is a biographical fairy tale. A success story of a Broadway legend, it shines with the exuberant can-do optimism that made its subject famous. “Everything I do is just a series of well executed tricks,” a fellow vaudevillian explained to the young George M. Cohan. Determined to learn every trick in the business, Cohan was making up his own songs at age four, starring in his own act at 12, and taking over the family business at age 15. These very same tricks would eventually earn him a Congressional Medal of Honor (interesting piece of trivia: he refused to take a night off from performing to go and pick it up.)

The conceit of the play is that the ghost of George M. Cohan is haunting a Broadway theatre when he happens upon an audience. He then tells the story of his life in chronological order, mixing in appropriate songs from his repertoire. Jon Peterson, as Cohan, sings, dances, and charms his way through an hour and 45 minutes that pass in a flash. The only problem is a technical one: because he sings unamplified with a band in the background, it costs his voice some power and means the most effective moments are when the songs are broken up with dialogue. Despite this, Peterson is a consummate showman and our attention is riveted from beginning to end.

James Morgan’s wonderful sets put us backstage at a vaudeville theatre, David Toser’s beautiful costume gives us an instant sense of this man, and Mary Jo Dondlinger’s lights takes us out of the modern black box and into a world of footlights and greasepaint. Chip Deffaa’s tight, smart, and simple script manages to convey Cohan’s patriotic high spirits without ignoring the fact that attitudes about war have changed considerably. Deffaa refrains from commentary, simply laying out events for us to experience and observe. Easily the most chilling and moving moment of the show is the rendition of “Over There.” Deffaa sets it up in a simple, understated way. Peterson as Cohan remarks casually that he was paid more than any songwriter in history to write a little tune that would make young men around the country line up to enlist. He then launches into the pro-war anthem in a way that sends chills down your spine and yet brought the audience to thunderous applause.

The play makes clear that the most important relationship in Cohan’s life is to the theatre, despite numerous personal and business attachments. Cohan remains close to his father, mother, and sister his entire life. His business partner and best friend is Sam Harris, his music an inspiration to the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Irving Berlin. He has a wife, children, and numerous lovers. But no one ever surpasses his love of the stage. He never questions his priorities until the end of his life when his business partner dies and his children grow up strangers. As he begins to reflect on his choices, Cohan’s trademark optimism becomes mixed with sadness and complexity. This only enhances his power as a performer, inspiring Eugene O’Neill to write Ah, Wilderness for him. And when Cohan finds out he is dying, he finally allows a movie to be made of his life story. Starring protégés Jimmy Cagney and Walter Huston, Yankee Doodle Dandy is, of course, a hit.

As Peterson closes the show with a zippy rendition of “Give My Regards to Broadway”, the subtle and perhaps troubled aspects of Cohan’s life fade. Whatever the reality may be, an exuberant, optimistic, fairy tale version of this man’s life is probably the most truthful. As Cohan’s daughter Georgette remarked after seeing Yankee Doodle Dandy, “That showed Daddy’s life the way he would have wanted to have lived it.”

When a piece of theatre says “adapted from a story by George Saunders,” my advice to theatergoers is simple: Go.

Audiences can count on George Saunders’s stories to tell America about itself in a bizarre and interesting way and to delve into a universal aspect of human existence. With a company like P.S. 122, notoriously the home of talented designers and actors, and with the very competent director Yehuda Duenyas, who also adapted the story for the stage, Saunders’s work is in very good hands.

Pastoralia is about a man and a woman who play prehistoric cave dwellers in an historically themed park (you know the kind, where actors “live” the lifestyle of people in the past in supposedly authentic settings). The man and woman live in a perfect “zoo” replica of a cave (designed by Michael Casselli) with fake looking stones and brown painted walls made of that ubiquitous “zoo environment” material. They eat, try to start fires, fight, fake hunt, grunt, and do cave paintings. Their environment is complete with a viewing window through which tourists can peek and observe their behavior. The tourists then have to fill out forms evaluating the educational value of their experience.

The cave dwellers, Ed and Janet, played by Ryan Bronz and Amy McCormick, are dressed in fur costumes (designed by Kirstin Tobiasson). They also each wear a matted hair wig with a protruding “caveman” forehead and bushy eyebrows. Since dentists were not widely available in the Stone Age, they wear mouthpieces with rotting teeth.

Like all zoo creatures, Ed and Janet receive their meat from a scheduled feeding; specifically, it comes through a bin in the wall that opens much like a foldaway bed. After Ed pretends to hunt and kill an invisible animal in the air with a stick, they then cook the meat over an open flame.

I hope I’m not giving too much away, but one of the many interesting and funny parts of the play is watching how the artifice of their environment mixes with the aspects that pretend to be realistic. It’s funny to see Ed open up a fake stone and reveal that it’s a storage space for some Ritz crackers.

It’s funny to see the cave dwellers peek at the viewing window to make sure nobody’s looking before they push the button on the wall which starts the fire and then dance joyfully, even though nobody’s watching, as they pretend they started the fire by rubbing sticks together.

For the first few scenes of the play, in which Ed and Janet establish their cave person routines for the audience, neither actor says anything. In between each scene, the lights (designed by Ben Kato) fade up from morning to night to show the passage of time, or they blink off. The first time a character says anything in English, the modernity of the line gets a nice laugh.

Indeed, one of the best things about this play is how, in Duenyas’s adaptation, so much happens on stage through movement, as the play establishes the environment in which the characters live and as the company tells the story.

The play’s conflict comes from questions of loyalty and following rules. One of the cave dwellers has a drug addict son (played by Jesse Hawley) and one has a sick child. Also, the park gets very little attendance (only two guests in three months) and they are threatening to make employee cuts.

The two leads are superb in their parts as the cave dwellers. Bronz is perfect as Ed, who has a reputation for staying in character even when he takes out the trash. He is sensitive—so excruciatingly sensitive. He wants to do right by his partner and keep his job, two wishes that are becoming increasingly at odds with one another. McCormick is also perfect and heartbreaking as Janet, whose tarnished reputation has made her a target for the park owners’ possible cutbacks. She is cynically funny and dysfunctionally sad.

James Stanley plays a bureaucrat who is looking for evidence to fire someone and does a fantastic job seeming both insincere about caring for his employees and also really sincere about pressuring the two to follow the rules. Richard Ferrone and Alissa Ford, as the couple who run the employees-only snack shop, blend satire and reality to tell their story. Dmitri Friedenberg, the youngest cast member, is great in his two roles, as the shop owners' son and also as a tourist brat. Peter Lettre is very funny as his father, who really wants every experience to be educational, and who tries hard not to lose his temper when cave people become ornery.

Overall, George Saunders's Pastoralia is a treat to watch. I really felt an emotional connection with the characters’ conflicts. As bizarre a set-up as Saunders gives the audience, this play, with its story that is so human, so funny, and so sad, is a perfect example of how a false world can contain reality—and of how good storytelling works.

Giant and Variation, the two title characters of this new play by Francis Kuzler, are twin Hereford bulls. That's fairly remarkable all by itself; but the fact that these two bulls can talk makes their genuinely unique. What Kuzler decides to have them talk about marks him as a particularly inspired playwright, and makes Giant-n-Variation distinctively sharp, smart, and insightful.

Imagine that you were the only cattle in the herd who had mastered human language: how would you feel? Kuzler gives us two preternaturally articulate animals who understand their separateness. As they graze and stare, as bulls are wont to do, they exhibit a surprising sense of wonder about their place in the cosmos and an all-too-familiar awareness of their uncontrolled mortality. In a nutshell, Giant and Variation are Waiting for Godot's Vladimir and Estragon on four legs apiece, marking time by playing games (the Moo Length game was my special favorite), debating rules of engagement (for their games and for life in general), and alternately fretting and philosophizing about a destiny that, they are certain, consists of being cut into steaks and chops and sold for so many dollars a pound.

Giant in particular is very precise about his speech, never dangling a single preposition, and taking care to be very clear and accurate about whatever it is that's on his mind. He's portrayed by Carsey Walker, Jr., while his brother Variation is played by Zack Calhoon; dressed by costume designer Cheryl McCarron in tan leather boots and vests, and earth-colored shirts and slacks, they evoke bull-itude without stooping to anything so pedestrian as masks or giant Disneyfied fake heads; indeed, their entire manner somehow resists the anthropomorphization that Kuzler's concept might breed in less assured hands. Their performances as these two ruminating Herefords are endlessly engaging, and make for the most entertaining and thought-provoking segments of the play.

The rest of Giant-n-Variation is an ambitious blend of psychological mystery, linguistics, and sociology. Dr. Evelyn Kingfisher-Carson is a maverick academic studying communication in the animal world; she believes, apparently, that animals are capable of something similar to human speech, and so when she stumbles upon the Little Delta ranch in Texas, which is home to our title cattle, her interest is definitely aroused. Traveling with her is the vagabond Tom Noise, a hitchhiker she picks up on the highway who signs on as her assistant. The ranch is run by a young woman named May Smith, who lives their alone with her father, studying advanced genetics to learn more about how to protect her diminishing herd, and caring for her cattle, including Giant and Variation, whose special prowess she appears to know all about.

Kuzler tells his story in flashback, introducing us to Evelyn and Tom after the events at Little Delta. They're obviously shattered by them, but it's never quite clear why: he's structured his play something like Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, blending very difficult, technical passages (about genetics and various theories of language and communication) with a tantalizing mystery that unfolds in pieces before our eyes.

He's also built May's story on a foundation that feels a lot like David Auburn's Proof, probably too much so for its own good. (In particular, Kuzler uses puzzling notebook entries in an exactly analogous way to Auburn.) Some of May's incongruities are neatly accounted for, but the main one—the one that links her to Evelyn and Tom and, less directly, to the musings of Giant and Variation—feels fuzzy even at play's end.

Jen Larkin (May), Dante Giammarco (May's Father), and Barbara Drum Sullivan (Evelyn) all do great work, but they don't succeed in answering all of our questions about their characters. Christopher Yeatts, as Tom, doesn't either, but his characterization is so vivid and detailed that we still feel that we know this drifter stuck in the middle of a complex web of mis- and missed communications. Eric Amburg's staging is quick-paced and energetic. As usual for Boomerang Theatre Company, the production values are terrific, from the aforementioned costumes and Scott Orlesky's spare, very serviceable set to Carrie Wood's moody lighting and Ann Warren's exquisite sound design.

Kuzler's writing, especially for his two cow characters, is far-ranging, smart, and often beautiful. It's rare to see a two-hour play that you wish were longer, but I actually think that Giant-n-Variation needs another scene or two, to help clarify some of its tantalizing mysteries and tie together the cosmic concerns of its extraordinary title characters with the more down-to-earth human problems of the rest of this play's inhabitants.

Nelson Avidon’s new play, Girl in Heat, lives up to its title—there is definitely a girl in it who is in heat. But that’s the only thing it has going for it. This frustrating and confusing play will likely provoke feelings of indifference in the audience, causing them to ask the questions that the creators apparently failed to ask: “What’s the point of this?” “Why are we watching this?” When a 75-minute play feels long and tedious, these are questions that need answering.

It’s the end of the work day on a hot summer evening here in New York. Joseph, a lawyer, is lollygagging around the office. Enter Marilyn, the sweet, young office temp. It’s her last day on the job, and she stops in to say thanks and goodbye. Or does she? Before long, these two are playing cat-and-mouse games of verbal and physical seduction. It’s just a matter of who will blink (or break) first.

With a set-up like that, you’d think that Girl in Heat would be primed and ready to tackle sexual harassment in the workplace. But, it doesn’t. Avidon opts instead to make Girl in Heat nothing more than a showcase vehicle—presumably for himself, as both a writer and actor (he plays Joseph). Unfortunately, the play’s lack of theme, relevancy, and urgency make it nothing more than predictable and implausible. Avidon’s will-they-or-won’t-they plot generates no suspense, because it’s never in doubt which direction the characters are going. His idea of clever banter is to make the characters answer questions with other questions. Ugh. And the most seductive dialogue Avidon can think of? It’s a tie between Marilyn saying to Joseph early on, “I’m like a limp strand of pasta. Throw me against the wall and I’ll stick,” and then later telling him flat-out that she has no gag reflex. What?!

Not to mention that such events strain the credibility of the situation. If this entire workplace foreplay/seduction scenario were played out in real life, hopefully one of these people would be smart enough to either get a hotel room or walk away completely. But here neither character is that smart. Granted, Joseph has a legit reason for not taking Marilyn back to his place: he’s married. But, Marilyn doesn’t have a good one for not bringing Joseph back to hers: she has “rules” about who she takes home. (What the hell does that mean?) So they stay in the office, within earshot of Joseph’s assistant, and possibly some of the higher-ups. Is the audience really supposed to believe this?

As for the characters themselves: Joseph is a creep. He’s a married man entertaining a young woman with booze and drugs in an inappropriate place. And, the only reason he’s still at the office is because he got stood up by some other woman he was going to cheat on his wife with! (And this is a guy who, by his own admission, is angling to make partner, and doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize his chances. Good luck!) As for Marilyn, she’s a cuckoo. Obviously immature, and emotionally damaged by a troubled past (which, under these circumstances, elicits no more reaction than a yawn), her violent mood swings volley back and forth between brazen flirtations and childish over-reactions. What either of these people see in each other is incomprehensible.

So, what does all of this mean? I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that Girl in Heat’s absence of a discernible theme—something that might pull all of these disparate and random elements together to form a larger, cohesive picture—and the author’s inability to provide enlightening insight into his characters casts this production to a doom-like fate: anyone in the audience who has ever read a book, or seen a play (or who even has a layman’s knowledge of basic psychology) will be able to guess within the first 15 minutes how the whole thing will end.

The performances are equally frustrating. Avidon has a natural, easygoing demeanor that brings some level of believability to the proceedings. But, he’s more focused on being “in the moment” than providing clarity, and, on the whole, his performance is unable to fill in the blanks left by the script. It feels as if he doesn’t want to understand Joseph. As Marilyn, Cheryl Leibert looks completely lost. She seems to lack the emotional range necessary to bring any depth to her role, or the skill to convincingly navigate the mood swings. (I should also mention that there is a third actor mentioned in the program, Theresa Musto, who is listed as playing a character that Joseph and Marilyn talk about, but who never appears on stage. Musto is not, however, listed on any of the press materials. Very confusing.)

Unfortunately, there’s not much here for director Robert Walden to work with. He does his best to keep things interesting and moving at a brisk clip, but the script eventually tells on him. Maya Kaplun’s realistic office set is a high point, as are Hillery Makatura’s lights, which provide the only thematic illumination (no pun intended) in an otherwise lackluster production.

Of the many, many indelible images conjured in Alan Berks's lovely solo play, my favorite is definitely the one of our narrator, perched on a mountaintop high above the old city of Jerusalem, reading Konstantin Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares to a group of goats.

Now, if that hasn't made you curious enough to buy a ticket to this play, whose title is indeed Goats, then allow me to further tantalize you with the news that this is one of the smartest, warmest, funniest, and wisest new works I've seen in some time; that the bare-bones but very careful production from The Production Company, staged by artistic director Mark Armstrong, is spectacularly effective; and that the hard-working actor on stage, Michael Szeles ("Say-lesh"), is giving a superb, touching, and quite remarkable performance. Goats is a find, for all of these reasons, but perhaps especially because playwright Berks opens his formidable soul in this piece and takes his audience to so many extraordinary places they've never been before.

Places like a rabbi's office in a building near Mount Olive, where our young protagonist is "recruited" to become a more devout Jew (he starts to balk when he notices a photo of the rabbi embracing Steven Spielberg). Or a remote village somewhere in France, where an experiment in local color turns disastrous when our hero gets terribly drunk on whiskey. Or a Greek island, a few weeks after tourist season, in the middle of a torrential downpour, where this young man, trying to play backgammon with his girlfriend, realizes that their relationship may be nearing its end.

We never learn the name of the character at the center of Goats (we do find out his Hebrew name is Avraham), but the playwright tells us in his program bio that this story is true, so let's assume that he's a version of Berks himself. The story begins with his first trip to Jerusalem, when he was 22 years old, during which he had the aforementioned encounter with the rabbi who was Spielberg's pal. Detours to Europe span the next year or so, until the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, which draws this young man back to Israel, ostensibly just to earn money for a few months working at a kibbutz, with the eventual goal of bumming around Southeast Asia for a while.

But he never gets to Southeast Asia; his request for solitary employment results in his assignment to a remote farm run by a mystical old man named Shy who says he's more than 2700 years old, and who raises goats from whose milk he makes what we're told is the best cheese in the world. (The cheese is so famous, the narrator tells us with some wonderment, that Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel have both been to the cave where Shy sells it.) And so this young intellectual Jewish American actor-wannabe takes a job as—a goatherd.

The stories are, by turns, hilarious, astonishing, and awe-inspiring. We meet two ex-soldiers from the Israeli army who like to hang around the farm and get stoned, from whom the narrator learns much about the seething hatreds that fuel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We meet stubborn goats who won't go where they're supposed to, who teach him still more about sheer wanton anger. We hear about Shy's mercurial and often enigmatic ways—that he only sells his cheese on Saturdays to spite the Orthodox Jews; that he talks "like Yoda" in koans that advise his young helper to "cook with love" and "think like a goat."

One is bound to learn something from an experience as singular as this, especially someone as eager and open-hearted as Berks seems to be. He puts some of the life lessons he acquired into gentle yet profound perspective as Goats reaches its conclusion. These truths—about acceptance, about self-knowledge, about authentic faith (in nature and in yourself more than in a supreme being)—feel especially resonant. Maybe we all need to spend some time herding goats, at least metaphorical ones.

Szeles, who embodies Berks's alter ego with what feels like eerie precision, gives a magnificent performance in this marathon role. He speaks Berks's vivid text beautifully, and together the two men evoke scene after scene in our mind's eye, even though Armstrong's spare production uses the meagerest of sets (a couple of strategically placed, well-designed rocks, courtesy of Erica Hemminger) and perhaps a dozen lighting instruments (meticulously arranged by Stacey Boggs). Jessica Gaffney's costume design and Emily Wright's evocative sound complete the environment, along with a few well-chosen props (such as a copy of the Stanislavsky book). This is indie theatre at its very best.

Goats is enlightening, uplifting, and very entertaining. For me, it's an introduction to the work of playwright Berks, whose next plays I will eagerly look forward to, and that of the just two-year-old Production Company, about whom ditto. I've already seen Szeles a few times on stage, and he's always impressed me; if the right people see him here, he could be headed for the breakthrough he richly deserves.

Acrobatic training has been part of Chinese culture for two thousand years, and the Golden Dragon Acrobats epitomize this tradition. The show is an exploration of the physical world at every level. Not only people, but also objects are pushed to their limits: ladders, balls, cloth, hats, plates, umbrellas, fabric, and chairs are all skillfully exploited. And there is no limit to the dexterousness of every part of these acrobats' bodies. They are as deft with their feet as most jugglers are with their hands, using them to toss umbrellas, juggle balls, and balance full trays of glasses. In fact, juggling, balancing, or spinning something while doing contortion, flips, or leaps is a staple of this production.

Alternating men's and women’s routines point up the exuberant power in the men’s acts and the lithe lightness of the women. Qui Yu Chen’s shimmering contortion while balancing a tray of glasses on her foot is sheer beauty. A group of women do a full acrobatic routine while spinning plates so delicately they look like gently waving flowers. One man literally carries the show on his shoulders at he stands on a straight ladder, balancing it, while two men do a headstand routine on top of him. The boys’ hat juggling act has powerful glee, and the Greco-Roman wrestling match erotic stateliness.

Unfortunately, the show’s climax act is a little less amazing. One acrobat steadily stacks chairs one on top of the other until they almost reach the ceiling. It is daring, especially as the chairs waver, but it doesn’t match the awesomeness of the previous acts. Also, this is the only time the performer speaks to the audience, egging them on to applaud. Although this interaction is part of the act, and it is fun to support him, it is the only act that required this encouragement.

All of the performers are consummate. Present, masterful, joyous, they communicate these ancient tricks as something brand new. And the powerful music, simple themes, and explosive choreography are about something that transcends culture—absolute joy in exploring the full potential of the human body.

Golgotha, a new play by Shmuel Refael, is currently at La MaMa in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust. It is a monodrama in which the main character, Alberto Salavado, reflects on his experiences as a Sephardic Jew (raised in Spain, and Ladino-speaking) during the Holocaust. Now living in Israel, he is spurred to consider his life and situation more closely as he prepares to be part of a torch-lighting ceremony at Yad-Vashem on Holocaust Memorial Day.

I am absolutely certain that there are those who benefit from this play in a way that I cannot ever comprehend, including Holocaust survivors, survivor's families, and members of the Sephardic community; many such people seemed to be in the audience the night that I was there. I respect the ongoing mission of works of art helping to ease the pain by sharing the experience, and passing on information with the hopes that the events will not be repeated.

But I must also say that I think it is dangerous when works about the Holocaust feel overly familiar or repetitive, because the essence of the message then slowly degrades. If a play, or any piece of art, about atrocity seems easy to deal with, then the opposite mission of the piece is accomplished. At the moment when horror no longer horrifies, the danger of disassociation becomes readily apparent. Unfortunately, my experience of Golgotha was more in this vein, and I found myself neither fully involved nor profoundly moved by this piece.

Victor Attar provides a strong portrayal of Salavado, especially in the moments when the character becomes most emotional. But Refael's text is somewhat problematic as a vehicle for him: it seems too straightforward, so that there are no surprises or revelations. We know, from the beginning of the play, almost all there is to know. We know that Salavado was made to be a crematorium operator by the Nazi officers, and to push other Jews into the gas chambers and furnaces. Gruesome as this information is, when the play finally gets around to going further in depth about this subject, the effect is surprisingly unemotional because we know most of it already.

Neither does the play really accomplish the experience of making the Sephardim, as forgotten victims of the Holocaust, come to life. There is one really striking moment when Salavado arrives in the concentration camp and is greeted by a Polish Jew who, in disbelief, asks, “What, do they also bring Sephardic Jews to the ovens?” (To which he responds: “No—we Sephardim came here as volunteers.”) But the play doesn’t really provide much more information as to what made their experience unique. The themes, the words, and the experiences related, all seem intensely reminiscent of other Holocaust literature.

It is also unclear, throughout the play, who exactly Salavado is talking to. He is usually directing his comments at the audience, but since it is established that he is alone in his house, it is a bit off-putting having him talk as if there were someone else there.

Obviously, Salavado carries with him a tremendous amount of guilt. He blames the Devil for pursuing him relentlessly. When his doctor suggests he take better care of his heart, Salavado answers, “I don’t have to worry about my heart, I have to worry about the Devil who keeps me alive as punishment.” But I found his guilt almost too straightforward. He looks at the experience lighting the torch Yad-Vashem with reverence, and he laments that he doesn’t think that he is worthy. I never felt any doubt as to his worth, though; he is so clearly a victim, deserving of any moment of respite he can get. Doug Wright's I am my own wife explores deeply the complicated web of guilt, especially as it relates to a struggle for survival in a time of daily horror. But Golgotha presents Salavado as so clearly victimized, and so unquestionably good at heart, that the tension of the script and the story is quickly dissipated.

The music, though lovely and apparently authentic to the Sephardic community, is more disruptive than enriching. It distracts from, rather than supports, Attar’s onstage experience. The video art is at first thrilling, but gradually becomes repetitive and is by no means used to its full potential.

There is a tremendous body of artistic work devoted to, or relating to, the Holocaust, especially when compared to other great historical atrocities such as the recent Rwandan genocide. This raises the bar to an extremely high artistic level for new works about the Holocaust, because they must add something to the material that hasn’t already been conveyed. Golgotha works nobly and with good intentions, but falls short of bringing an unheard artistic insight.

If the Marx Brothers were alive today, I think they might very well be Brian Parks.

Witness this exchange from his play Goner, between Dr. Warren Wyandotte, chief of surgery at Bruno Hauptmann General Hospital, and two FBI Agents:

HAZEL: I see here you attended the Erskine Medical School and Waffle House.
WARREN: Eight years.
HAZEL: Specializing in “postmodern medicine.”
WARREN: It’s a school of thought that says the patient doesn’t actually exist.
MELVIN: Do you still believe this?
WARREN: No—it totally undermines your ability to bill.

Goner—workshopped at The Present Company six years ago; a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002—makes its long-awaited official New York debut at the Kraine Theatre, helmed by John Clancy; it is an hour plus a few minutes of raucous, hilarious, lunatic subversion. It's as fast as a speeding bullet and approximately as subtle, spewing explosions of comic debris as it whirls past us, relentlessly and fearlessly, tearing down any edifice with even a remote pretense to authority or seriousness that might lay in its path. Indeed, if Goner has a flaw, it's that it never stops to catch its breath: it's the Marx Brothers minus Lillian Roth or Kitty Carlisle singing some inane tune or other to provide a break from the anarchic shenanigans: Groucho, Chico, and Harpo at full blast, with no Zeppo for leavening.

It is, though, very very funny. The reason that FBI agents are interviewing Dr. Wyandotte is because the President is in this hospital; he was sho at an event at the Smithsonian Institute, and Wyandotte and his team of crackerjack nutcases—er, surgeons—literally have their Chief Executive's life in their hands. Wyandotte's trusted team includes Ecorse Southgate, a doctor who is more interested in marketing his new toy idea ("Chemotherapy Barbie") than actually performing operations; and Hoyt Schermerhorn, the new guy, a heroic fellow who is in love with himself and Wyandotte's daughter, in that order (and whose name, for the non-New Yorkers reading this, is a bad in-joke, consisting of the names of two major thoroughfares in Brooklyn).

Wyandotte's daughter, meanwhile, is working downstairs in the hospital lab, examining stool samples and dreaming of a career as a filmmaker (her big idea is to make a documentary about black people who, she has just learned, were once enslaved in this country and are apparently in need of her help).

Once the President arrives, agents Hazel Park and Melvin Dale of the FBI arrive also, in search of clues to the vast conspiracy that they are certain exists and of which the President's assassin must surely be a part.

Parks's take-no-prisoners style makes fools out of everybody in this cockeyed universe. He's been careful to identify his President as one Waterford Novi, but some of the stuff that comes out of this character's mouth may sound eerily familiar, such as these soundbites on the environment ("Lots of it left") and on air pollution ("We all like breathing, but that’s no excuse for extremism"). Goner is not particularly a political play, but the times we live in sometimes make it seem like one: when we learn that Agent Dale can't tie his shoes, it's a joke on establishment ineptitude; but when he says "I love a good wiretap. You can almost smell the Constitution burning,"—well, that does feel a little bit specific, doesn't it?

Clancy's production still feels a little raw in places, with some of the actors not quite as simpatico with the breackneck rhythm of the piece as others; this likely will improve over time. But David Calvitto, as Dr. Wyandotte, gives a performance of sheer comic brilliance, completely in tune with Parks's wacked-out world and presented with letter-perfect, split-second timing. Jody Lambert is a hoot as Schermerhorn, and Bill Coelius anchors the show as much as appropriate as President Novi, who is also the play's narrator.

Almost vaudevillian in its loose, vignette-heavy form (there are dozens of scenes, some lasting just a few seconds), Goner is as much shameless paean to/filch of American show biz (HOYT: Suture / WARREN: Suture self) as it is a zonked-out postmodern deconstruction of same. Whatever it is, it's fun to have it at last on the boards in NYC. There's another Parks/Clancy collaboration promised for later this season (Americana Absurdum), and hopefully some new stuff after that: stuff, definitely, to look forward to.

Good by C.P. Taylor is about the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s, but its focal point is neither the upper echelons of the Nazi leadership nor the victims of Nazi atrocities. Instead, Taylor has concentrated on the Germans who took the path of least resistance. Good shows a portrait of the German people who ultimately victimized not only others but also themselves by joining a regime whose excesses they did not agree with, but which they did not have moral capacity to oppose.

More specifically, Good is about John Halder, a respected professor of German literature who has an ailing and infirm mother, and who has written a novel sympathetic to the idea of euthanasia. Halder’s book brings him to the attention of the Nazis, who see in Halder an opportunity to bring intellectual credibility to their program of genocide. Although he finds the Nazi Party’s ideology and methods distasteful, Halder is far too preoccupied with his own bourgeois concerns—foremost of which is an affair with a 20-year-old student of his—to do much more than register tepid complaints as he gradually becomes increasingly complicit in the Nazis’ growing catalogue of crimes against humanity. Good takes us through a theatricalization of Halder’s rational and imaginative mind, the leitmotif being an ever-shifting array of imaginary musicians and singers who mysteriously appear at critical moments along the way. Halder continues along his course to the sound of his imaginary musical accompaniments until he eventually rationalizes his way into an SS uniform and a position helping to oversee the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz.

Long before he reaches Auschwitz, however, Halder confides about his musical hallucinations to his friend Maurice, a Jewish psychoanalyst with little regard for other Jews, wondering if they are some manifestation of his inability to deal with reality. Here Halder is uncharacteristically perceptive. Halder’s inner soundtrack gives an absurd grandiloquence and pretentiousness to his life in his own mind, elevating his own petty struggles to the level of a grotesque epic, which of course makes him oblivious to the real tragedy going on around him that he is increasingly taking a direct hand in. Musical director Charles Geizhals and violinist Kate Cassella perform these numbers with vocal assistance from Good’s able cast, and Jennifer Gordon Thomas does a good job staging both these musical numbers as well as the piece as a whole. Setting up the intimate space almost in the round, Thomas has her cast constantly circling and haunting Good’s central character, and Stephen Arnold’s lighting design helps give this production the mood of a twisted cabaret. The overall effect points to a nationwide delusion of grandeur that is both grotesquely farcical but also very frightening.

Still, too often I found myself disengaged from the actual story being told in Good, and I think this is largely due to the composition and presentation of its main character. Halder himself, in contrast to the music of the piece, is purposefully given virtually no emotional range at all. Daryl Boling in the lead role maintains the same distracted unease whether proclaiming his love to his mistress or discussing the Final Solution with Eichmann, and the same distancing evasiveness in both his public conversations with others as well as in his private and inner musings. It’s a grounded and believable performance for a man as detached as the script presents him, but it is also one that I found completely impenetrable. Without seeing any real humanity underneath Halder’s urbane mannerisms, I found it all too easy to disassociate myself from him and his crimes.

But perhaps more important, Taylor’s script doesn’t really reveal much of a change in Halder, nor does it reveal any new insights into him as the play progresses. Had Halder started out “good”, even if just ostensibly, one could follow either his transformation from a true humanist to a Nazi stooge, or the eventual revelation that he was never as good as he seemed. Instead, I found Halder thoroughly unlikable from the start. Seemingly incapable of any real empathy for his family and friends, and devoid of all but the most academic and abstract ideas of morality, Halder uses his detached notions of objectivity to put his mind at rest while he burns books, betrays his friend, abandons his family, and oversees the persecution and then the extermination of the Jews. He proves a difficult character to emotionally invest in, both because he is repugnant in such mundane and petty ways, but also because he is essentially the same shallow, self-absorbed pedagogue at the beginning of the play as he is at the end. Rather than how a thoughtful person with a normal range of emotions finds himself seduced by the Nazi spell, Good seems to tell the story of how the Nazis recruited the perfect candidate for the job at hand, which to me fell short of being compelling or all that thought-provoking.

If you see only one revival of a dopey, corny, light-headed 1920s college musical—and hey, you really should: you've been stressed out lately—then see the best and brightest of them all, Good News. Mel Miller and Musicals Tonight! are putting on this breezy, giddy, supremely silly musical comedy and they're having a ball; so is the audience. This is the most delightfully entertaining enterprise from Miller's consistently fine company in quite a while; also as tuneful and enjoyable a show as many of the much more expensive ones playing in Broadway houses just a few blocks away. (Good News is at the 45th Street Theatre, just yards away from Sweet Charity.)

Good News, like the many featherweight musical comedies that it inspired, is nothing more or less than a happy two hours of exuberant singing and dancing and tired but jolly gags. This kind of musical was the Mamma Mia! of its time, only the songs were brand new. And what songs!: how many scores can boast no fewer than four authentic standards, by which I mean songs that will probably be at least somewhat familiar to you, even almost 80 years after they were written? This show has 'em: "Lucky in Love," "Good News," "Varsity Drag," and "The Best Things in Life Are Free," the last of which actually still has the capacity to authentically thrill when its warm-and-easy refrain commences:

The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life are free,
The stars belong to everyone
They gleam there for you and me.

The story revolves around Tom Marlow, the star of Tait College's football team. It's Thursday, and he's just flunked "Comical Charley" Kenyon's astronomy class! He can't play if he doesn't pass a makeup exam on Friday, and if he can't play, how can Tait beat dreaded rival Colton College in the big game on Saturday?

Tom's girlfriend Patricia, pretty but self-centered and snobbish, is acing Kenyon's class, but she's too busy organizing an affair for her sorority Pi Beta Phi to help him out, so she recommends her cousin Connie Lane for the job of Tom's tutor. Connie, like all the girls at Tait, worships Tom, and so she's only too glad for the chance to actually meet him. The two, of course, fall in love instantly ("And love can come to everyone / The best things in life are free"). Tom passes his test; he can play in the game. But what's this new complication? Oh no: Pat has decreed that if Tom wins the big game, she will allow him to marry her. What's he gonna do?

If you think that anything less satisfying than a Tait victory AND wedding bells for Connie and Tom are not somehow in the offing, well, you just aren't trying hard enough to get into the spirit of this show. It is, after all, entitled Good News: do not expect anything sour.

Do expect lots of other convoluted but temporary plot complications to ensue, involving such disparate characters as Tom's roommate Bobby Randall, who has been on the bench for two years of football games but is determined to get into the game once and for all; Babe, the seemingly dumb-but-cute co-ed who has set her cap for Bobby; Beef, the husky football player who used to date Babe; Pooch, the team's highly superstitious trainer; Coach Johnson; Professor Kenyon (who's revealed to not be such a hard-head after all); and a naive freshman named Sylvester who is willing to pay Bobby a quarter for the privilege of carrying coal for Tom (whom he calls Mr. Marlow).

It's a hoot and a howl. The jokes are frequent and often very lame, the songs come seemingly out of nowhere, the plot machinations are alternately random and absurd. But it all works remarkably well: this is a spectacularly entertaining show. It's also very much an ensemble piece, allowing lots of talented performers a chance to shine.  The one that really knocked my socks off was Sandie Ross, a diminutive young lady with a powerful voice and a luminous disposition; she leads the company in "Varsity Drag" and "Good News" and particularly in the former comes as close as possible to stopping a show where the actors are all still on book and production values and choreography are necessarily limited by a two-week rehearsal period and off-off-Broadway budget. Also superb are Leo Ash Evens, who plays Georgie, a very minor character in the scheme of things, except when he gets to sing or dance, both of which he does splendidly; and Adam Shonkwiler, who is funny and appealing as Bobby, particularly in his lively second-act duet with Babe called "In the Meantime." Jonathan Osborne (Kenyon), Roger Rifkin (Coach), and Tad Wilson (Pooch) are all terrific too, as the "oldsters" in the show. Adam MacDonald, who is very tall, is a charming, big-voiced leading man, perfect for the role of Tom.

There's also a mystery guest star who makes an appearance in the second act that's an enormously fun surprise. I'm not saying anything more about it.

Musicals Tonight!, so unprepossessing and good-naturedly modest in its aims, is the ideal venue for a show like Good News: it would be ridiculous to put something so dated and foolish as this on Broadway (though it wouldn't surprise me if somebody did it anyway), but in the concert format for $19 a head it makes for a delightful evening out. Its silly high spirits are absolutely infectious as it lets us see what kind of middle-brow entertainment our great-grandparents cheered in the theatre. And its songs are winners.

In closing, all I can say—echoing the cast while cheering on this or that footballer in the show—is: Rah! Rah! Rah!

It would take a lot of work to not enjoy Circus Contraption's Grand American Traveling Dime Museum, currently playing at Theatre For the New City. You could close your eyes, and avoid the dangerously impressive feats of aerial dynamism. You could plug up your ears, not taking in the tubas or banjos, or the satisfyingly gruff and tinny croons of its singers. You could crawl under your seat, cover yourself with a jacket and hum the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" until the show was over. Short of that, there isn't much chance of avoiding the contagious enjoyment to be had here. It's probably better just to give into the good time, since chances to see shows this fun come along rarely at best.

The aesthetic of the show is a bit of a dingy, Victorian era, traveling circus act—fully equipped with the sideshow's floating fetuses in jars and a trio of buxom beauties, known as the hoochie coochie girls, performing tricks in their underwear. The characters also include: Dr. Calamari, a keeper of curios (and a comatose woman he keeps in a case); Bunny LaMonte, a rabbit-eared bicycle racer; and Darty Kangoo, a scantily clad fortune teller who doubles as a trapeze artist—to name only  a few. Circus Contraption calls the show "a bracing curative for the afflictions of our times." And if the afflictions of our times include taking ourselves too seriously, steadily removing mysteries from our lives, and altogether taking the fun out of things—then the Dime Museum is a steady curative indeed—and easier to swallow than snake oil.

The performers are shockingly talented and versatile. There's juggling, acrobatic feats high and low, songs, puppets—all elements of a seamlessly executed spectacle, one "designed to stimulate all aspects of the Human Organism," as the Circus Contraption barker says. And, unlike the bigger big tops of Cirque du Soliel or Barnum and Bailey, the intimacy and believability of the Dime Museum is what makes it so special. The gymnasts here don't look like someone cut from the Ukrainian Olympic team at the last minute—they look a bit more like that friend of a friend of yours, the one with the piercing, who borrowed 15 bucks a few weeks back. The rag-tag team of performers all seem a bit degenerate, and that's no small part of their appeal.

The music is as much reason as any to see this show—it is almost all original, and is performed live by the highly talented Circus Contraption Orchestra. Their lyrics and arrangements are as quirky as they are endearing.

Something should also be said about the set, designed by Terry Podgorski and Elizabeth Luce, which looks like a carousel as imagined by Tim Burton, dripping with torn fabrics and flashing bulbs. It is dark and tattered, capturing nuances in color and form, bringing rushing memories to mind for anyone who's ever been to the bruised and decrepit carnivals that creep from small town to small town.

Though they tip their top hats to the legacy of the circus and the sideshow, Circus Contraption manages a work that goes beyond homage.Their unique humor and talent make them an essential addition to the theatre and carnival tradition. And—an added bonus—Wednesdays are "pay what you will," making the possible excuses for not seeing this show next to nil. So go, watch a girl tap dance in a handstand, in this, Circus Contraption's New York debut.

Wreckio Ensemble's new show Gravediggers is inspired by a commendable impulse, namely, a strong desire to "take action" against "the slow and painful disarming of our democracy" (their words, from a program note). But what they've created is both too dense and too oblique to really succeed as activist theatre; it's tough to rally an audience to action when they can't figure out what it is they're being asked to do. Filled with allusions to and reminders of a host of theatrical landmarks from the past sixty or seventy years—from Beckett and Brecht to Williams and Wilder, many of which are probably not intentional—Gravediggers finally feels mostly like a hodgepodge of influences congealing uncomfortably into an experimental plaything of a company still struggling to find its way. There may be some interesting work ahead for Wreckio, and there are certainly good intentions afoot now; but the product right now is very raw and unformed.

The play is sort-of in progress even as we are being seated. Against a surreal backdrop juxtaposing bleak terrain, piles of body parts, and a wondrous Godot-like tree sprouting a big red heart on one of its branches (there will be plenty more Beckett references to come), we see two gravediggers squabbling silently with one another. Their battle of wills sometimes takes the form of a shoving match, but most of the time is silent and immobile: a staring contest. When the lights go down and then back up again, and the play proper begins, the two are still at: it "'Tis" says one. "Not" says the other. Back and forth, for a long time.

It's a very great while before we understand that they're arguing about whether the red heart-like object in the tree has grown since the last time they looked at it. What we understand sooner is that they are a pair of cowards, a pair of followers in search of a leader, a pair of lost souls without the self-awareness that makes that condition interesting or bearable. Think Tweedledee and Tweedledum as Estragon and Vladimir. Their patter, which goes on much too long, unrelievedly, is hard to take.

Eventually, other characters emerge and things start to happen. First we meet  the Corpse, the dead body of a soldier that the gravediggers were supposed to have buried but thus far have not. They use the Corpse as a kind of game piece, spinning it around so that it will point to one or the other of them, thus ending their quandary regarding which of them is "right." (The results are indecisive.) Next, much more interestingly, appear a Mother and her Son. Though he's full grown, he's in a baby carriage; it appears that she is going to shoot him. We infer that he's a draft dodger and they've agreed that it's better for him to die here than in the War.

The situation, and balance of power, then undergoes a number of shifts as the Mother decides to take the gravediggers hostage and take over their cave, which she plans to convert into a resort, even though there is no water anywhere around. The Son falls in love with the Corpse. Intergenerational conflict ensues. Finally, a Representative of the government turns up, at last providing fuel for the protest that we have been awaiting for about an hour. He prevaricates and doubletalks and manipulates all but the Son (and the Corpse, who is of course dead). A giant Phoenix turns up near the end.

The level of abstraction is always very high; there is barely a throughline to follow, what with the narrative threads shifting almost whimsically throughout; there's certainly not much in the way of cogent or persuasive discourse or argument proffered. Sure, we "get" that the Mother and then the Representative are stand-ins for red state Bushism, the Son is the questioning voice of reason, and the gravediggers are the silent majority; but we know that almost as soon as we see them. Alas, Gravediggers takes us nowhere deeper in the realm of political or social commentary; and worse, it takes about ninety minutes to not get there.

The visuals are striking, especially the set, which is designed by Dechelle Damien with art direction by Michael Mello. Costumes are strange and call attention to themselves. Karly Maurer's direction is as unfocused as her script (she's also the playwright); it was often difficult to tell where we were supposed to be looking, and the pacing is very slow indeed. Dimitra Bixby and Tara Grieco execute the rigorous physical movement required of them (as the Corpse and Phoenix, respectively) with skill, but the rest of the ensemble isn't assured enough to pull off the stylization that Maurer is going for. (I should note that Wreckio explains in the program that they've developed an acting technique called "Physical Realism" which I'm not sure I understand or even recognize from this performance; these folks aim high but they're still just nestlings.)

All in all, Gravediggers makes for a difficult sit. I will try to check in again with Wreckio Ensemble in a couple of years and see if and how they've progressed; as I've said they're ambitious and, I believe, sincere, and I wish them well in their efforts to develop an aesthetic that matters to them. They need to bear in mind that it should also matter—and be accessible—to audiences.

Not since Arsenic and Old Lace has there been a story about two more stageworthy old ladies. Now Playwrights Horizons brings to life “the Edies,” Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie” Beale, who were famous for being Easthampton’s “most notorious recluses,” related to Jackie O (aunt and cousin, respectively) and unknowing fashion icons.

You may remember the 1975 documentary-cum-cult-classic Grey Gardens, although if you’re like the friend who accompanied me, you’ve never heard of it. In the case of this show, I recommend watching the movie before seeing the show. I had a lot of explaining to do to get my pal up to speed, even after we left the theatre.

The Reader’s Digest version of the movie is as follows: The Maysles brothers (who also made the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter) were asked to do a film on Lee Radziwill (sister to Jackie O) and her family. When they got to Edith and Edie, holed up in one room of their 28-room mansion in total squalor, they realized that they had hit a goldmine and changed the film entirely.

What happens in the movie? Not much. It’s a deep character study, shot over six weeks. The Edies touch briefly on their history, their famed relative, and how life once was grand, but the focus of the film is the gnawing dynamic between mother and daughter. They bicker and berate yet they live together in one room, on twin beds, with a dormitory-style refrigerator and a hot plate (mother cooks soup in bed). The house is infested with cats (52), raccoons, and fleas. It’s a total train wreck, and I’ve seen it countless times.

The stage version is very clever. That book writer Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, and lyricist Michael Corie chose to make it a musical makes sense—it is chock full of camp, the music is fun, and the setup is quite clever.

Act I takes place in 1941, before World War II, when Little Edie was on top of everyone’s social calendar. She was courted by a Getty and two Rockefellers and, on the evening displayed here, is about to announce her engagement to Joseph Patrick Kennedy (older brother to JFK). Edith is getting ready for her moment in the spotlight at the engagement party, a lawn party at their gorgeous home Grey Gardens, in rehearsal for a concert she was going to give. Edith was known for her “parlor concerts” and had a close bond with her ascot-wearing, scotch-drinking pianist George Gould Strong. Little Jackie and Little Lee are running around the house, in awe of their older glamorous cousin. It seems like “Little Edie” is poised to live the life of a first lady, eventually realized by her cousin.

Act I mixes fact and fiction. Mother seems to want the best for daughter but can’t seems to step out of her own spotlight, real or imagined. Daughter’s life falls apart in one evening. Edith, in an effort to either not let go of her daughter or to not let her life surpass that of her dear mother, spills a little “dirt” on Edie. In the mind of a Kennedy with his eye on the White House, this has the potential for scandal and he hits the road. Little Edie, alone, does the same.

Act Two highlights the film, showing Grey Gardens in a total state of disrepair (it was going to be condemned by the Board of Health until Jackie made a small donation to ensure it would pass inspection and get out of the tabloids) in 1975. We see Little Edie, back at Grey Gardens and absolutely out of her mind. She is touting the virtues of what she calls her “revolutionary costumes,” wearing a skirt pulled up over her chest, and one on her head like a pseudo-turban, topped off with a brooch. Edith does a lot of sitting down and is always hungry, calling on Edie constantly to fix her supper or just generally be around, which further hits home the dysfunction in their relationship. Mother just couldn’t let go.

The music is kicky and campy. Edith’s parlor concerts alone are cause for applause: they go everywhere from arias to un-PC yet hilarious spirituals.

The entire company is on the mark: sharp, funny, and very well-cast. The divine Christine Ebersole is absolutely fantastic as Big Edie in Act I and Little Edie in Act II. She wears a skirt on her head like nobody’s business and has got a voice to beat the band. Mary Louise Wilson, as Edith in Act II, is all at once hilarious and cruel, delirious and calculated. Both ladies manage to walk the line I imagine was walked by mother and daughter—on the surface they don’t seem so crazy, but once you look around, it comes screaming out. Walking that same fine line is Sara Gettelfinger as Little Edie in Act I. The grace and poise with which she charges Edie belies Ms. Beale’s ultimate demise.

The only piece missing is what happened in those 30-odd years between Acts I and II? We can assume that Edith, whose husband left her and whose father disowned her, slowly lost her mind while raising three children alone with dashed dreams of stardom. But why did she stay in Easthampton? And why on earth did Edie come back? How did she go from the verge of living Jackie O’s life to being a crazy lady with a skirt on her head? She left Grey Gardens for Manhattan with dreams of becoming a dancer, only to return home in her early 30s. Couldn’t writer Doug Wright find something to stage in that story? He came up with a back-story to fill Act I, why not a little taste of something in the middle?

This double bill of new, short, autobiographical solo shows at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater is funny, smart, and very entertaining. It helps that Amy Rhodes and Brian Finkelstein are expert actors as well as writers; the time you'll spend with both of them as they spin witty and sometimes poignant tales about their pasts is genuinely rewarding.

Growing Up Amy is Rhodes's second one-woman play. Her first, I Enjoy Being a Girl, which debuted here a couple of years ago, dealt with her dating history in high school and college. This piece frames that one, spending some of its time on events in her childhood, as the youngest and least intellectually promising of three children in her typical-yet-not-so-typical Iowa family. Her older sister was smart and preternaturally socially conscious, while her older brother was a math and science wiz (today he is, she tells us, literally a rocket scientist). These two kids applied to Harvard for the fun of turning it down; so trying to be noticed in such company was clearly a challenge. Rhodes tells us about sessions with a child psychologist, games her siblings made her play (one was called "Pig," presumably at least in part because the young Amy was on the pudgy side), and rigorously planned summer vacations.

More engaging are the sections of Growing Up Amy that focus on her mother. The play begins and ends with Rhodes portraying this parent, whom she clearly understands and loves pretty dearly, at the ironing board in her Iowa home, on the phone with the (now grown-up) Amy. Rhodes's portrait of her mother—at once hopelessly provincial (for we're seeing her through the eyes of the slightly jaded urbanite that her daughter has become) and affectionately sympathetic—is full of humor and warmth. I was reminded of Julia Sweeney's take on her mom in God Said, "Ha!" The conversation with a hapless telemarketer is hilarious; worth the price of admission all by itself.

Directed with clarity and without sentiment by Eric Pliner, Growing Up Amy is a charmer. Rhodes—no slouch in the intellect department, her childhood feelings of inferiority notwithstanding—is growing as writer and performer. The best bits of this piece, her previous one, and the next several to come are going to meld into a terrific one-woman play one of these days.

Brian Finkelstein's First Day Off in a Long Time is a rambling monologue mostly about his experiences, about a dozen years ago, working as a volunteer at a suicide prevention hotline. He tells the story in an easy, good-humored manner, heading off on frequent tangents to explain how he happened to get this job and to introduce us to a host of eccentric characters whom he encountered along the way. The most vivid of these is Glen, the one-time hippie who is his boss at the hotline—Finkelstein relaxes his posture and slows down his speech to conjure this fellow, whose vocabulary and world view seem to be an amalgam of tired '60s-era clichés and Baby Boom self-help platitudes.

As the story unfolds, Finkelstein eventually introduces us to another character, a 20-year-old NYU student named Amy who calls the hotline one night and appears to be in danger of killing herself. Finkelstein and his director Adam Swartz manage the transitions from humor to authentic drama deftly, and indeed Finkelstein is at his best performing this unexpectedly moving story. His "narrator" persona is less assured, for the detachment that he's going for there seems to come less naturally to him than the emotional engagement he gives us at his show's high point.

As First Day Off progresses, we learn that it's inspired by the monologues of the late Spalding Gray. The setup should have tipped me off right from the start—Finkelstein sits alone on stage at a desk on which sit a microphone, a glass of water, and a notebook. I was nevertheless surprised when the Gray reference emerged—maybe there's something Finkelstein can do to strengthen that connection earlier on.

The writing, though, is strong throughout, and when the material allows Finkelstein the actor to take over from Finkelstein the standup comic, the show really soars.

Each of the two works on this double bill reveals exceptional talent. I've been a fan of Amy Rhodes for a while, and I will now count myself as one of Brian Finkelstein as well. These are both writer/performers to keep an eye on.

He is tall, tan, sexy, with a puckish gleam in his eye and a purr in his voice. She is small and slight, pasty-skinned and wary-eyed, and kicks the thoughts out from her mouth like a barnyard animal. He wears a sleek suit, takes pictures with his cellphone, and googles things on the Internet. Her outfit is bright orange and baggy, her matted hair is ponytailed, and her greatest luxury might be the ashed cigarette between her bony fingers. He is a British journalist who will fabricate the photos of a British soldier torturing a bound and hooded Iraqi prisoner. She is an American soldier from West Virginia who has been arrested and will be convicted for actually torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The English Boy and the American Girl, the two fascinating figures in Peter Morris’s compelling play, Guardians, never meet; it is doubtful that any dialogue between them would convey their similarities in the way that Morris ultimately does in two separate episodic monologues. But what makes this a theatrical event not to be missed is Jason Moore’s hauntingly spare production currently running at the Culture Project, starring Lee Pace and Katherine Moennig, who saturate these already vivid characters with brilliant humanity.

The unnamed young woman is, of course, Lynndie England, perhaps the most notorious (or at least camera-friendly) U.S. Army reservist involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (her commanding officers were cleared of any wrongdoing); the unnamed young man is, on the other hand, a plausible invention—just the kind of person who would have perpetrated the British prison-torture hoax which led to the resignation of The Daily Mirror’s editor (the real culprit is unknown). She speaks to us of the past, describing the events that led to her incarceration, whilst he speaks to us from the present, detailing the events that are leading to his dubious coup.

The press—which we once expected to be our watchdog alerting us to trouble that might happen (think of the names of newspapers alone: The Daily Mirror, The Times, The Herald, The Tribune, The Guardian, etc.)—and the prison guards—whom we once expected to be our protectors from the transgressors responsible for troublous events passed—have repeatedly violated our trust (the former behind the camera and the latter, now, in front). This, in and of itself, is not epiphanic, but Morris’s juxtaposition of these two “guardians” begets a slew of revelations that will fester in your mind for days after.

Moore’s excellent production makes corporeal those revelations. Bathed in, or deprived of, Garin Marschall’s nuanced lighting; lounging around or trapped within Richard Hoover’s chillingly austere set; sleekly sporting or simply surrendered to Michelle R. Phillips’ smartly detailed costumes, Pace and Moennig embody this couple with wit and compassion—two generous performances that illuminate each other. They take turns being the cosmopolitan and the crude, the innocent and the guilty, the haunter and the haunted. And both of them wondering, as we are (or should be): how did they get there, and is this what they really deserve?

Just 45 minutes in length, Gun Play, the new performance piece from Brian Rogers and his collaborators at the Chocolate Factory, is very short. It's also very uncomfortable, physically (the audience is seated on bleachers) and dramaturgically (the format is entirely non-linear, non-structured, not explained).

I think it's about the fetishization of guns by those who employ them, literally (rock star Ted Nugent is quoted extensively, describing the thrills of creating roadkill) and metaphorically (video game designer John Carmack is also quoted extensively, explaining the joys of crafting virtual destruction). For conceiver-director Rogers, form collides and congeals with content, for Gun Play is a work of theatre that's mainly about its toys: nearly a dozen computers, two projection screens, and live digital video cameras (not sure how many) are arrayed all around the tiny performing space—scads of technology in overdrive; way more than the $15 ticket price would seem to entitle us to; way more than seems to be needed to make whatever points Gun Play finally makes (except the pivotal one, that we are infatuated with our tools, be they guns or video equipment).

What happens in Gun Play? We watch the actors play video games for a little while; if you're close enough to the screens where the games loop, live, throughout the show, there's real danger in getting caught up in their hypnotic rhythms and patterns, in fact.

We witness re-enactments of Nugent, Carmack, and others (named in the program but not identified clearly in the show proper), talking about guns, physics, and video game design. It's repetitive and almost oppressively spare; Rogers has used this technique to great effect in earlier works like Fundamental, but here an apparent bent toward theatrical minimalism renders the found text less compelling.

We hear a constant soundscape of bangs, booms, explosions, etc.—designed by Chris Peck, the barrage of sound fx is perhaps the most potent element of the design.

And we see Gun Play's five creator-performers engage repeatedly in several ritualized vignettes. Sometimes they arrange themselves in a game of musical chairs that (I think) is meant to seem lethal. Sometimes they (very effectively) impersonate roadkill or dead bodies, prone in grotesque positions on a mat on the floor. Sometimes they careen through the space and bang themselves against mats attached to the rear wall, suggesting the paths of bullets. Actual bullets, or at least a very realistic-looking facsimile, literally rain down on the stage at one point. But interestingly, not one gun is ever fired during the play.

It's never uninteresting, but it does feel sometimes willfully obscure, which is why I left concluding that the apparently subtextual gears and gadgetry that separate the audience from the players might well be the real point. The "play" in Gun Play seems to signify not drama but sport: a fascination with machinery that can (actually or virtually) blow stuff up into a zillion pieces, without much regard for what that might mean to the hapless passerby.

Robert Moulthrop's new play Half Life is about a middle-aged man returning home from prison after serving a two-year sentence for fondling a teenage girl. How does a convicted pedophile, after paying his so-called debt to society, re-enter ordinary life? It's a smart, provocative question; the sad (and, I suspect, accurate) answer that Moulthrop provides in this thoughtful drama is: he doesn't.

Douglas's wife Eleanor, after enduring a variety of traumas both social (jeers and insults from neighbors, etc.) and psychological (alluded to but not much explored in Moulthrop's script), welcomes her husband back with as open a heart and as brave a face as she can manage. But she's the only one. Their daughter Denise, who has gotten married and had a child during the period of Douglas's incarceration, finds herself unable to forgive her father and refuses to see or communicate with him; he eventually forces the question, to very ambiguous result. Their best friends, Bob and Phyllis, put off seeing Douglas for more than six months, and when they finally do reunite in a very strained Halloween night dinner party, it's clear that neither couple can view the other in the same light as before.

As for getting a job, well, that's pretty much impossible. Bob tells Phyllis (though not Douglas) that no business in town will go near a convicted pedophile. Douglas is a teacher—indeed, the girl he molested was one of his students; obviously that profession is closed to him, despite his talent for it. So Eleanor gets him a job as a telemarketer. By play's end, there's little hope that he'll ever get a shot at anything more challenging.

The community, meanwhile, has closed in on Douglas relentlessly. He's terrorized by the prospect of leaving the house (and for good reason, as a couple of very vivid scenes confirm). His status as pariah is institutionalized, on the Internet and via signs at his home.

Half Life makes no judgments about any of this, to its great credit. Instead, it raises questions—very important ones: Is a man entitled to a second chance, even if he does something really terrible? Does the American justice system enable such a chance in this case? Are there crimes so heinous that the right to privacy must be superseded? Is it more important for society to be just or merciful?

Moulthrop's script is powerful, as much for what it withholds as for what it says. However, a recurring set of flashbacks—depicting Douglas teaching his science class, before he committed his crime (and attempting to link the play's title explicitly to the action)—is probably unnecessary and should be excised. Teresa K. Pond's staging is fine, particularly her use of three separate playing areas, which enables her to keep the action flowing continuously without having to break for scene changes. Mark Lynch does outstanding work as Douglas, really delineating the complexities of his situation and making this man--about whom the main thing we know is that he did this truly reprehensible crime--genuinely sympathetic. Lynch and Moulthrop are badly let down by the others in the cast however, particularly Cynthia Foster, in the difficult but really pivotal role of Eleanor; she gives us little indication of the mire of confused feelings that must be afflicting this courageous, battered woman.

Half Life deserves more life, though, after FringeNYC. For making us confront the complicated grey areas of a subject that we're used to processing only in black and white, it deserves nothing but our respect and support.

The American Theatre of Actors production of Hamlet goes for a barebones, straightforward approach to the play. It’s set in a timeless period, in modern dress, and makes no attempt to alter the fundamentals of the play. It’s a refreshing change to see a classic produced without the director trying to re-interpret or modernize it (all too frequent nowadays). Alas, while there’s no needless directorial tampering, there isn’t much of a guiding personality behind the ATA’s Hamlet, either.

In director James Jennings’s production, there’s almost no design present at all. Virtually no set, or sound, and very simple lighting too. Costumes are more or less present day (though Ophelia and Gertrude wear some fancy gowns that aren't quite 21st century). Props are only used when absolutely necessary needed as well. This creates a rather generic-looking interpretation of Elsinore and its denizens. It even seems that the only set pieces, a pair of curtains, are merely there because the script requires a curtain in Polonius’s death scene.

This approach gives the audience the chance to savor the text, without needless meddling from a director, and there certainly is enough going on in the text to hold the attention of a Shakespeare geek or drama scholar. Unfortunately this bare-bones production doesn't offer much of interest beyond the academics of hearing the script spoken aloud.

Take, for example the moment when the Ghost of Hamlet's Father appears and demands that Hamlet take revenge by killing the new king. Aside from the dialogue, there's nothing to indicate that the Ghost is supposed to be a terrifying specter; no light or sound change, no makeup. Some guy in a suit just walks onstage, rather nonchalantly, and demands vengeance for murder most foul.

Another problem with the lack of design is that voices are easily lost on the large, empty stage, and actors often have the choice of bellowing their lines or having their dialogue lost in this rather large off-off-Broadway theatre.

Although Josh Stamell is a capable Hamlet, most of the cast is lackluster, particularly the minor players. This often leads to one-sided scenes where the humor of say, the Gravedigger's speeches is lost, but the "Alas, poor Yorick" lines are well-delivered.

There’s nothing wrong with giving a by-the-numbers run of a classic, if it’s well-produced. Shakespeare knew what he was doing, and every production of a classic doesn’t have to have some visionary “Take” on the play. However, even the greatest play ever written needs more than an empty black box theatre and mediocre performances to captivate an audience for over three hours. While the ATA’s intentions are commendable, their show is not.

We see, in this Hamlet, a man just shy of midlife crisis territory: his crown, if worn, would cover no graying temples, but the lines on his face do not vanish so rapidly as his smiles anymore—if he smiled anymore. Michael Cumpsty’s Danish prince smolders with a deliberate, lethal intelligence, landing blows upon the hypocrisy of the Elsinorian court with the heavy finality of an ax stroke. His maturity and gravitas lend a sublime heartache to this character that has never reached me before in previous incarnations, stage or screen—no longer a youth, but still a student; no longer a son who can strive for his father’s approval, but a grown man long past those fresh-faced years when change is easy; no longer a prince who can expect the throne, but an aloof and aging noble stuck in a court that has literally whitewashed over all symbols of his god-like father’s legacy, and thus his purpose. The embarrassment of his mother’s ingenuous marriage to his usurping uncle, less than two months after burying his father, the former king, seems particularly acute in this production: Hamlet conveys little sympathy for those who trade the cares of life for the affectation of youth.

Cumpsty’s title performance at Classic Stage Company is compelling immediately, as he slow-burns his response to his newly crowned uncle, King Claudius (Robert Dorfman), clucking at another of his nephew’s cloudy-faced appearances at court. He gives the final word a venomous hiss: “Not so, my lord. Methinks I am too much in the sun.” Throughout the play, he allows his actions to erupt at pivotal moments, drawing from an inexhaustible supply of passion that the story builds in his gut. His defensiveness at the court’s disdain for his prior relationship with the considerably younger Ophelia (Kellie Overbey) is one such outburst that has marvelous elements of painful hindsight. It mixes a seasoned adult’s inner understanding of what kinds of relationships succeed versus what kinds fail, with a desperate lament that the heart ultimately disregards all such wisdom if love burns passionately enough.

I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum. What will thou do for her?

Cumpsty is a disciplined performer of experience and insight, and I heard more than once as the production’s opening approached that this also meant he was too old for the part. False. He has the chops, wisdom, and courage to plumb the very powerful adulthood of Hamlet, which many a youthful go at the part mishandles, mistaking the prince’s identity crisis as a desperate search for who he is, rather than a more mature despair at who, in the end, he is not. Cumpsty layers on a beautiful tragedy to Hamlet’s sense of failure as he comforts Horatio (Graham Winton) after accepting Laertes’s (Karl Kenzler) challenge to the final scene’s fencing duel. It is not just his inability to revenge his father’s murder that erases his fear of death; it is his realization that, though a grown, earnest man, he will never be his father. Lesser sons of great fathers aren’t granted that epiphany in its purest poetry until they have tasted the years past the age when their fathers became great.

The freshness of Cumpsty’s take on the role is in tandem with director Brian Kulick’s bold shaping of the oft-produced classic, making it visceral and engaging. From starting the audience onstage and the actors in the seating area, to turning the thrust stage into three-walled proscenium without compromising the view from house left and house right, Kulick’s concept of the world of Denmark is stark, jarring, and artfully symbolic, as realized in the work of his designers. Set designer Mark Wendland employs a color palette that is matched in Oana Botez-Ban’s elegant costumes. Claudius’s court is clad head to toe, ceiling to floor, in pristine whiteness, but the frailty of this hygienic attempt to symbolically clean away guilt from the past is cleverly realized in the walls of the court—they are made of thin white paper, cut away for entrances and the viewing windows through which house left and house right audiences see the action. The ingenuity of the paper walls is that they are so mutable and impermanent. Hamlet spray-paints accusatory graffiti on the back wall to rankle the king, and stabbed through the same wall is his sword that kills Polonius (Herb Foster) on the other side. Laertes literally tears open his own entrance in a thirst for Hamlet’s blood, and all the walls are torn completely down for the final duel, exposing a skeletal wooden framework lying beyond the delicate façade that once was. The whiteness of the set is further marred by the powerful shock of rest of the palette, the reds (such as blood and the costumes of Ophelia and the Player King and Queen, played by Jon Devries and Jason Ma, respectively) and the blacks (such as Hamlet and Ophelia’s mourning clothes).

Denmark is filled out with characters played fiercely and truthfully by an excellent cast. Graham Winton’s Horatio is especially touching as Hamlet’s only confidant, and his counsel is heartfelt. Jon Devries steals every scene he is in, whether he is on as the Ghost, Player King, Gravedigger, or Fortinbras. The biggest laughs belong to longtime stage genius Herb Foster and his nimble timing as Polonius, the King’s earnestly pompous advisor. Karl Kenzler is dynamic as Polonius’s son Laertes, and Caroline Lagerfelt plays Queen Gertrude with graceful, affecting vulnerability.

The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark is not undertaken lightly by any theatre company, and Classic Stage has risen to the challenge most impressively. I would rank it as the best Shakespeare I’ve seen this year, and to others I would say here is an opportunity to see how this play stays legendary. Everyone, in their life’s theatre-going, should have at least one memory of a Hamlet production that was as great as the play’s reputation, and opportunities to emblazon such a memory in your mind are precious. Take this one.

Hamlet is so familiar that if a director and actors can really get an audience to listen to the play, to make us hear it anew, then they've accomplished something to be proud of. Such is emphatically the case with Dreamscape Theatre's excellent revival of Shakespeare's most famous play, which boasts clear, smart direction by Ross Williams and a nine-person cast who bring even the most minor characters to vivid life. Indeed, intentionally or not, Williams and his crew seem to have spent the most time on the segments of the play that generally get overlooked (or cut) in other productions, showing us the world around the Melancholy Dane with illuminating texture and depth. At the same time, they remain focused on telling the story—a gripping, fascinating tale of ghosts and vendettas—with unencumbered forthrightness. Nothing feels imposed on Shakespeare here; this is a Hamlet that lets it audience draw conclusions about what this awesome tragedy might ultimately signify.

Here's what I learned about the play after experiencing Williams's staging. Hamlet is about a man, Claudius, who kills his brother, marries his brother's widow, and then usurps his crown. Hamlet, the new king's nephew (now stepson), is instructed by his father's ghost to avenge the murder. The king's chief advisor, Polonius, instructs his daughter Ophelia to repel Hamlet's honestly-felt advances; when this rejection melds with Hamlet's own disgust about his mother's apparent betrayal of his father, he cruelly mocks Ophelia (and leads her, indirectly, down a path of insanity and then suicide). Meanwhile, King Claudius's enemy, young Fortinbras of Norway, finds a way to avenge the death of his father at the hands of Hamlet's father. In every case, the children in this play are loyal to their parents and forthright in their emotions and deeds; while their elders prove treacherous and duplicitous, all-too-ready to dispatch any of the youngsters for personal or political gain. Williams doesn't punch up this idea, but it's omnipresent in his production: take from it what you will about, perhaps, the current state of our own country. ("Something is rotten in Denmark," someone famously says in the play; maybe the same is true about America in 2005.)

Williams uses the tiny Manhattan Theatre Source stage masterfully, arranging the audience around the main playing area, with pockets of playing space stuffed into corners here and there; this puts the drama literally inches from everyone's face, engaging and investing us into the story with real potency. (He solves the problem of how to stage the climactic duel between Hamlet and Polonius's son Laertes in such a small area with real ingenuity, too.)

He's cast the play extremely well. The ghost of Hamlet's father, the troupe of players who unknowingly assist Hamlet in trapping Claudius, and the ominous invader Fortinbras are all played by the entire company, which makes these presences both weightier and more ethereal than any of the others: an inspired touch.

Carmelle Arad and Rodney Lizcano comprise a sort of two-person chorus, taking well over a dozen roles between them, including a host of minor personalities who they wring rather largely (Osric, various messengers and guards); their main job, though, is to embody Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and I can't remember these two ever seeming more lively and interesting. I was particularly struck by the energy and warm good humor of their first scene with Hamlet, right after their arrival in Elsinore at the behest of Claudius and his queen, Gertrude: these two really do seem to be old friends of Hamlet, and as he pulls the truth of their purpose out of them, something actually seems to be at stake.

Todd Faulkner, Michael E. Lopez, and Jane Titus are suitably commanding and cold-hearted as Claudius, Polonius, and Gertrude, respectively. Titus shows us glimmers of residual affection for Hamlet, but makes it clear where her allegiance lies—until, at the very end, she understands what her new husband is capable of and she begins to recoil. (When she drinks the tainted brew that Claudius has intended for Hamlet in the final scene, for the first time ever I wondered if Gertrude might be deliberately taking her own life.) Lopez perhaps overdoes the Polonius-as-old-fool shtick in scenes with Hamlet and the King and Queen; but his gruff, alienating manner in scenes with Ophelia and Laertes feels perfect: the long, famous monologue in which he instructs his son on the ways of the world (ending, so ironically, with "To thine own self be true") has never seemed more glibly hypocritical.

Simon Kendall gives us a straight-as-an-arrow Laertes and Kevin Brewer is stalwart in the comparatively thankless role of Horatio, Hamlet's friend and confidant. As Ophelia, Bridget Crawford is terrifically compelling, showing us a very simple-hearted girl who is in love with a glamorous prince yet dutiful to a beloved (if difficult) father.

In the marathon title role, Zack Calhoon gives a fine, brave, intelligent performance. He's a young actor, about the age that Hamlet is supposed to be, which is by itself exciting; he's immensely likable and gets us to root for him to do a good job in this so-difficult role, and then pulls it off. He's best in the least familiar scenes, like the ones with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern or Horatio. This role has more impossibly famous speeches and lines than any other in the Western canon, I think; Calhoon negotiates skillfully through most of them, and if he doesn't always make them sound new or fresh, well, that would be a tall order indeed. (At the performance reviewed, he stumbled over his words only once—on the line "trippingly on the tongue" of all places. His recovery was delightfully assured and good-humored.) I felt admiration for Calhoon throughout—what a great opportunity for a young actor to get to tackle this Everest of roles! He will learn much from this experience.

This Hamlet is so good that its one serious misstep—the device of having Hamlet remove boards from the floor just before intermission, during his last scene with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern—stands out as a weird aberration: why has Williams included this distracting and mysterious bit of business?

But, this one problem aside, this is a commendably clear and accessible take on a complex and difficult play. Williams's staging showcases the play's immense greatness, and also reveals unabashedly some of its problems (e.g., the frequent wordplay, which apparently Elizabethan audiences thought was hilarious, but which seldom captivates today; the relentless over-the-top/melodramatic carnage of the final scenes). I love this production because it gives us the play, as is. Is it, as Williams suggests in his program note, the greatest English-language drama? Williams and his colleagues at Dreamscape Theatre give us everything we need in order to decide.

To be or not to be
That is the question

In fact, for theatregoers who can choose from half a dozen or more Hamlets every season, the question is: Why this one? Theater By The Blind's answer may surprise you: see their Hamlet—a well-acted marvel of economy and energy, directed by Ike Schambelan—because it's fun. Performed by six passionate, versatile, and committed actors, this production makes the so-familiar work seem brand new. Schambelan focuses on the story-telling in this very exciting, incident-filled play, and his breathless (but never rushed!) staging keeps us entertained and riveted from Francisco and Bernardo's first moments on guard duty until the famous, tragic, bloody end. (If you need a synopsis of the plot, there's a good detailed one at Shakespeare Online.)

In a fascinating program note, Schambelan tells us that the original Hamlet was probably performed by about six or seven players, doubling and tripling in the many roles. He gives us a Hamlet with a cast of six, with everybody including the one covering the title role serving double duty and more; he's broken down the characters into six archetypes, along the following lines: a Guardian figure (Marcellus, Polonius, Gravedigger, Osric); a King/Father figure (Claudius, the Ghost, the Player King); a Queen/Mother figure (Gertrude, Reynaldo, the Player Queen, the Second Gravedigger); a Lover figure (Horatio, Ophelia, Rosencrantz); a Friend figure (Laertes, Bernardo, Guildenstern, the Player); and the Prince himself, who also serves as Francisco and the Sailor.

What this does is (a) make the play move swiftly and tautly, with the myriad quick changes and potential overlaps challenging the artists delightfully in a kind of game/test of skill that's wondrously original and amusing; and (b) allow each of the players to deliver the kind of tour de force performance that's generally reserved only for the one portraying Hamlet. These six rise to the occasion magnificently. Melanie Boland is a splendid Gertrude, at once loving and duplicitous to her son, and she's also dead-on as the Second Gravedigger and the snivelly snitch Reynaldo. George Ashiotis, Theater By The Blind's stalwart co-artistic director, gives us a kingly Ghost and a much more ordinary Claudius, providing interesting contrast between the two. John Little has fun employing different accents, mannerisms, and eyeglasses as each of his characters, including a Polonius who is the perfect bureaucratic windbag and an Osric who is as unctuous and annoying as possible in just a tiny amount of stage time.

The younger trio of actors are just as accomplished. Pamela Sabaugh is probably the most convincing Ophelia I've ever seen; she makes her what Shakespeare seems to have written—a genuinely innocent, genuinely confused young woman; her scenes in the final acts as she moves toward her tragic destiny are authentically poignant and not in the least overplayed. Yet Sabaugh also creates two entirely different roles here, an earnest and dogged if not-too-swift Horatio, and, most memorably, a Keanu Reeves-like Rosencrantz who emerges, with Nick Cordileone's Guildenstern, as possesed of genuine personality and purpose (as opposed to the usual colorless in-jokes that these two are so often portrayed as in post-Stoppard productions). Here, R & G act like doofuses at times—they wander into the climactic playing of "The Murder of Gonzago" holding bowls of M&Ms and popcorn—but they also achieve real menace as the true nature of their visit to Hamlet is revealed. Cordileone is also excellent as Laertes, a carefree young guy who suddenly finds himself confronting a series of tragedies that make him grow up overnight.

At the center of it all is Nicholas Viselli as the Prince, in a performance that's surprisingly clear-eyed, straightforward and enormously appealing. Viselli's Hamlet begins angry and in pain, all the more so for not really understanding why. The appearance of his father's ghost sets him on a course of self-examination that culminates in the play's famous soliloquy, a speech that Viselli really claims as his own by emphasizing that Hamlet really is about to make a choice between life or death. "That is THE question," he slowly intones, and we understand that we're about to witness a fundamental and transforming decision. Viselli's Hamlet bursts into vivid focus once he's made up his mind, and the rest of the play's scenes breeze by as a result. It's a terrific and daring portrayal that enlivens a role that's so very familiar.

Schambelan's contemporizing touches, often humorous, also serve to make the piece fresh and accessible. The costumes (designed by Christine Field) are of the present-day, with the guards in flak jackets, Guildenstern in a baseball cap and bright green windbreaker, and Hamlet—shrewdly—in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms for the "What a rogue and peasant slave" and "To be or not to be" scenes. Merope Vachlioti's unit set provides compact multi-purpose playing areas that never need to be touched (except to clear the stage for the big fight scene); this helps ensure that the pace never slackens for a second.

It all makes for as involving and engaging production as I think it's possible to have of a play that at least this particular theatregoer has seen and studied so many times since high school that nearly every beat of it is second nature. It's not easy to make Hamlet look new and exciting, and so Theater By The Blind deserves our congratulations and our gratitude. If by some chance you've never seen this classic, here's a splendid opportunity; and if you have, then I think you'll find much here to delight and excite you that you may not have noticed before.