In Harvest, Manjula Padmanabhan's fine play that is currently receiving its NYC premiere at La MaMa, a young man in India takes a job as a professional organ donor. The time is the near future, and a company called Interplanta is recruiting healthy Third World humans to become, essentially, health repositories for wealthy Westerners. Om's client is a woman named Ginni, who pays him and his family top dollar—at least in terms of India's per capita income—to stay fit and ready for the possible day when she will need something from him, say, a kidney, or his skin, or his eyes.

Om's wife, Jaya, is understandably distressed by this new job, not least because of the strain it puts on an already very dysfunctional relationship. For Jaya is in love with, and having an on-again / off-again affair with, Om's younger brother, Jeetu, who supports himself by working as a prostitute. The other member of the household is Ma, Om and Jeetu's mother, a meddlesome lady who thinks that her elder boy (Om) can do no wrong and that the others can do no right (Jaya, for example, is repeatedly referred to as a "slut").

As for the work itself—such as it is—well, that's a round-the-clock regimen controlled 100% by Interplanta, who deliver boxes of food and other necessities as dictated by Ginni (she orders, for example, that a working toilet and shower be installed in Om's one-room, fourth-floor apartment, because she doesn't want her employee mixing with the "disgusting" others who dwell in his building). Om and his family do get to enjoy the spoils of his new high-paying position—in one of the play's most effective scenes, their rise to consumerist luxury is depicted wittily in a series of sight gags—but their lack of freedom eventually gnaws away at them, as does Om's fear that the day is drawing near when some part of his body will be needed by his faraway benefactress—quite possibly a part that he can't do without.

I won't reveal the rest of Padmanabhan's intricately plotted tale, but I will say that Harvest compels from beginning to end, creating a not-so-fanciful futuristic world that's pretty darned scary. Om's occupation starts off as a stark and brilliant symbol of the most invasive kind of First World Colonialism, but the play shifts gears along the way and turns its attention to an even more insidious form of colonization, that of our very humanity by a cultural ethos besotted with technology and comfort. While Om's family's crisis spirals horrifyingly out of control, commercials for Interplanta's latest and greatest products and services are projected on a screen that coincides with the rear wall of their apartment, lulling us (and them, perhaps) into a sense of security that's as malignant as it is false. (These exceedingly well-crafted videos are directed by Matt Bockelman.) Padmanabhan essentially picks up where Orwell left off, crafting a 21st century cautionary tale of enormous resonance.

Benjamin Mosse's production at La MaMa's First Floor Theater is mostly terrific, anchored by a quartet of splendid performances (Debargo Sanyal as Om, Naheed Khan as Ma, Christianna Nelson as Ginni, and Rupak Ginn as Jeetu) and smartly paced and designed (the endlessly escalating "conveniences" delivered to the family by Interplanta take the form here of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes, and as they stack up toward the ceiling they provide a visual allusion to Ionesco's The Chairs, a neat and relevant absurdist reference point). Diksha Basu is less effective as Jaya, unfortunately, failing to hold our attention or sympathy in Act One, which proves problematic as the play's focus shifts toward her in its second half.

But Harvest is by any measure a significant success, and La MaMa and East Coast Artists are to be congratulated for bringing it to the New York stage. Audiences in search of lively and challenging theatre that looks deeply and candidly at the relations between the world's "haves" and "have-nots" will be well stimulated by this thought-provoking, valuable work.

A program note tells us that Haunted takes place in the future: in June 2006, one month from right now. It's a facetious touch, one of many tongue-in-cheek elements included in this production intended, I think, to throw the audience off the scent of what its creators really have in mind. I'm not sure that all of this disarming is strictly necessary, for Haunted is mostly a deft, involving drama about a family coming to terms with itself, staged and acted with care and acuity at one of my favorite downtown theatres by a company brimming with talent and skill.

The story begins on a very dark summer night at a cabin in the town of Holderness, New Hampshire, a mountain/lake community about 75 miles north of Boston (it's where On Golden Pond was filmed). Katherine Keene, a divorced New Yorker of 40, has come up to this, her family's "camp," for a quiet weekend with her boyfriend, Marc, who is 28. It's clear that their relationship is still young, but also that it's serious, or at least potentially so; this trip feels like a test for both of them—him as a fish out of water in this remote and unworldly setting, and her as a woman recovering from a damaging relationship that went on too long, tentatively easing into another that might prove more suitable.

Complications arise fairly soon with the arrival of Katherine's mother, Genie, and her brother, Richard. The two have been staying in the family farmhouse across the lake from this cabin; with them comes Andy LeFresne, a local who looks in on Genie (and, until he died, Genie's late husband Peter) during the long stretches when Richard is in Boston with his life partner. Richard is visiting Genie because he's become worried about her health: it appears that she has started talking to Peter (which we witness more than one time during the play; is his ghost really present?). Is she eccentric? Dotty? Senile? (To playwright Alex Roe's credit, we're never quite sure.)

Richard unearths some family history that might better be left alone; he also has authentic concerns about the economics and practicality of Genie's living out here in the country on her own, without modern conveniences and with most of the neighbors having departed the area. This is a way of life that's disappearing—Genie and the Keene household are becoming ghosts themselves.

Marc befriends a little girl named Heather as he wanders around the lake; nobody in the family seems to know who she is (and while some are able to see her, others, apparently, cannot). Is she yet another spectral presence in this isolated spot where past and present are colliding?

And what's the thing that's gnawing at Katherine, preventing her from breaking away from her old damaged existence with her ex-husband and fully committing to her new life with Marc?

Haunted eventually answers all of these questions satisfyingly, and the journey—if a bit leisurely at times—is always compelling because Roe and his cast have crafted believable, compelling, articulate characters that we are eager to meet and know better. The script could probably use some tightening, though, and perhaps some of the red herrings that pepper it might be better eliminated.

Roe's staging—on a marvelously evocative set that he also designed—is terrific, creating a clear and distinct sense of place and of history. The cast is excellent, with Teresa Kelsey a warm, yearning presence at the center of the story as Katherine (I love how each of the other characters has a different nickname for her), and Tod Mason (Richard) and Charlotte Hampden (Genie) very effective as the other members of her immediate family. Greg LoProto is splendid as Marc, finding his way on alien turf both literally (the city boy trying to cope with country life, a la Green Acres) and metaphorically (discovering the secrets and his place within Katherine's heart). Andrew Firda provides his usual expert acting as caretaker Andy, offering some charming moments of quiet humor throughout.

Metropolitan Playhouse doesn't often produce brand-new plays such as this one; I'm happy to say that they've worked their usual magic on the piece, and more significantly they've found in this new play what they almost always find in the neglected classics that are their more usual fare: the keys to the American soul, locked deep inside our common history and heritage. Haunted ultimately is about ghosts shared by all of us, in our families and in our pasts.

Carlos LaCamara’s Havana Bourgeois takes us back to eve of Castro’s coup and Batista’s flight, to a time when “la Revolucion” still seemed to stand for something, or at least a time when Cubans of many kinds believed it did. LaCamara attempts to peek through several P.O.V.’s on the Revolution but boils the argument down to taking sides, a ready trap and the ultimate subversiveness of its ideology: “Within the revolution, everything; without the revolution, nothing.”

November 1958. Havana. An ambitious young graphic artist, Alberto (James Martinez), working in a cosmopolitan advertising agency, Soria and Associates, yearns with youthful naivete for the Gilded Life. With accounts for Standard Oil, Matusalem Rum, and such, Soria and Assoc. provides Alberto the opportunity to be on the fast road there. Except Cuba in November 1958 boils with the passion of revolution, and in spite of Alberto’s enlightened view of the ideals of social reform, the middle-class capitalist lifestyle that he practices is the fuel that powers that passion.

The teams are assembled, and the players are introduced. The Capitalists are Alberto, Soria, Juan, and Panchito. Soria (Jaime Sanchez), the owner and figurehead of the company, bulges literally and figuratively with pomposity, courting clients, employees, and lovers alike with duplicity. Juan (Alexander Alioto), the opportunistic art director, sucks at the heals of Soria like a usurping prince ready to fill any vacancy in the Chair, stepping over his more talented peers in the process. Panchito (George Bass), the washed-up but still capable sketch artist, keeps tipping his flask in consigned defeat, a never-has-been already counting down his days.

The Comrades are Margot, Manuel, and the inchoate voice of Fidel. Margot (Selena Nelson), the curvaceous copywriter and mistress to Soria, not only sees the impenetrable glass ceiling but feels its weight crushing her, the dual nature of being female and mulatta. Manuel (Rashaad Ernesto Green), the guajiro (hillbilly) copy boy who can’t read but can draw, escaped the fighting in his town at his mother’s behest to go find a future where one is possible.

As the fighting in the Sierra Maestras and at Soria & Assoc. amps up, the sides start to clearly define themselves, eventually forcefully so. Alberto sits at the nexus of this divide, a social climber whose talents facilitate the move and whose personal history endears him to the cause of agrarian reform and the social contract. He introduces Manuel to the philosophical ideals of the Revolution, dubbing him a protégé and thereby providing the foot in the proverbial door for the eager yet humble subservient. New Year’s Eve, 1958, Batista flees directly from his formal gala with family and fortune in tow; Castro gladly rides into Havana to hordes of cheering comrades. Overnight, the home team is no longer the home team, with the Capitalists driven out by the rush of conversion of Comrades to the revolutionary movement. But the transition naturally involves some growing pains, and Soria’s agency is reluctantly annexed by the new regime, nationalized into a committee to serve pro bono its propaganda needs. Manuel accepts Juan’s duplicitous suggestion that he replace Soria as the agency’s head, and the group becomes a microcosm of Cuban politics and social order, mercenary justice based on fear, control, and retribution. Eventually the only decision of importance for Cubans is whether to stay or go, a question that eats at the identity of a person.

In spite of his attempt to give humanistic depth to his characters, LaCamara creates symbolic personifications of the us/them paradigm: the reluctant exile, middle-class idealist driven by reason, vs. the revolutionary simpleton, brainwashed peasant driven by vengeance. LaCamara’s narrative favors the view that the Revolution as an opportunity to fulfill true sovereignty for the Cuban people was squandered by fools who succumbed to Castro’s manipulation, tyranny, egotism, and greed, the consensus in the exile community but not a universal opinion.

The cast is solid all around except for the inconsistency of Spanish pronunciations and accents. Inevitably, a translation (which this clearly is in one way or another) must overcome the discrepancy of rhythms between the languages, and those of us who are bilingual become acutely aware of this. Particularly compelling to watch are James Martinez as Alberto, whose commitment to Alberto’s principled ideals never wavers; George Bass as Panchito who provides some witty zingers and a look at a lost generation too old to see the hope of the revolution; Ursula Cataan as Sandra, Alberto’s opera-singer wife, whose heartfelt torment over leaving her parents behind to save themselves in exile provides the truest glimpse of organic human perspective; and Rashaad Ernesto Green as Manuel, who, despite the simplicity of the guajiro’s character, succeeds in exploring complexities and authentic passion in the cause of socialism and revolution.

Myopia has characterized much of our country’s public discourse on terrorism since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of 2001. The media initially focused on the immediate facts of the events, and now we argue about the United States’ military response elsewhere, or the ethics of local security measures like random bag searches. The empathy required to understand the motives behind the violence is lost to stereotyping and judgment. Rarely do we allow the history of political violence—political protests, assassinations, race riots, corruption by police and judicial systems—to speak to the causes and conditions that move individuals to breech the bonds of civility into violence. In his play Haymarket, Zayd Dohrn has identified one such incident from our country’s past—the 1886 bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square of a labor protest—and bravely imagines the trauma of the event, as well as the unheard conversations of those who advocate violence in the struggle for reform. The production may not do the themes justice; nonetheless, the play makes its strengths known.

Haymarket tells the story of Albert and Lucy Parsons, two anarchists who were accused of involvement with the bombing. The rally where the incident occurred was organized around a goal that Mr. & Mrs. Parsons believed in and fought for: the eight-hour workday. When the police came to disperse the crowd, an unknown assailant threw a dynamite bomb into the square, killing or wounding eight policemen and several civilians. In response, several prominent anarchists were indicted and executed in one of the earliest “red scares” in this country.

The script’s real strength is its focus on the individuals involved. By probing the raw trauma of and the individual motives behind the historical event, Dohrn’s play raises plenty of essential and timeless questions. Should we temper our judgment if violence is intended to open the door for substantive reform? We now take for granted the eight-hour workday these men died for; can we say that their martyrdom did not bear fruit? We arm our police in the name of public and economic order—does this make their violence different from the terrorists? Albert Parsons is written as a man torn between love for his family, his own frailty in the face of horrific events, and a real belief that fighting the violence of capitalist industrialism against its workers may require violence as an effective response. By the end of the play, we may question the rightness of his choices, but not the integrity of the man who struggles to engage the difficult issues of his time.

Dohrn frames this story as visions or recollections of the Parsons' daughter. Some years after the trials, Lucy Parsons admits her daughter, also named Lucy, to a mental asylum. While efficiently giving shape to the play, this frame adds little to the story. It promises some insight into the elder Lucy Parsons as the driving force of her husband’s martyrdom but she never emerges as a decisive player in the story. By having the same actress play mother and daughter, both Lucys are sapped of their fullness as characters.

Beyond the Parsons’ story, though, the more thoroughly developed story within the play concerns a policeman who has survived the attack. His proximity to the bomb has caused him to lose his hearing. When he goes to the hospital to seek treatment, he befriends a nurse whose brother was killed in the attack. A romance sprouts. But the nurse and her family have been so emotionally traumatized by the attack that, whatever her feelings for the officer, she cannot bring herself to embrace this man who so reminds her of her dead brother. Officer Spierling departs, crushed.

Finally, in the climactic scene of the play, Lucy Parsons must ask a police guard for the favor of seeing her husband before he is executed. In a savvy and effective piece of play design, that guard turns out to be Spierling. We know him to be an ordinary man, no less a cog than the laborers for whom the Parsons have so passionately advocated, and one who has suffered in this struggle as much as the Parsons. As Lucy cries to see her husband, the deaf cop just stands there and tells her, “He can’t hear you.” The din of the violence has deafened not only his hearing, but also his capacity for empathy. In fighting for a social good, both policeman and anarchist are unable to express their capacity for love.

I am moved and encouraged that Dohrn’s compassion brings the play to a scene that dramatizes what feels like a genuine divide between social order and the chaos that is part of its change. Unfortunately, the production fails to fulfill it. The actors play the scenes at such a slow pace that it borders on the absurd. Robert Saxner’s staging is clear and sometimes clever, but the actors rarely speak with any urgency. It is quite jarring when Haddon Givens Kime’s energetic, evocative scene-change music interrupts the flatness of the scene it follows. Judson Jones is excellent as Officer Spierling and his scenes with Birgit Huppuch as Nurse Barrett are by far the most effective. Jones’s silences and stammers are full and tender, and genuinely moving, and Huppuch displays an openness and willingness to engage that makes her appealing. But their scenes are the exception. I ached for the cast to show the passion that led Lucy Parsons to call her husband home to die, and he to respond. Perhaps it is a sign of our own anesthetized time that the cast, for all its hard work and intelligence, fails to tap into the incendiary quality that inspired the events of the play.

Michael Mack’s Hearing Voices is making its New York debut, after touring in dozens of locations around the United States. Perhaps what is most unusual about this production at the Michael Corzine Studio (at Times Square Arts Center) is that it also marks one of the play's few showings in a theatrical venue. Mack’s one-man show, which deals with his mother’s lifelong battle with schizophrenia, has been seen in variety of locations: he has performed for boards of mental health professionals at hospitals, on National Public Radio, for universities and conferences, even in a few churches.

The first thing that is likely to strike an audience member is the authenticity of this piece. It is hard not to be moved by the artist’s generosity and candor in performing some of the darkest moments of his and his mother’s lives. He approaches his past with a writer’s skill, with a strange attentiveness and analytical interest even in the midst of emotional trauma. He trudges through the earliest memories he has of his mother, in her first psychotic episodes, all the way to the end of her life.

Michael Mack describes this piece, which he has been working on for over ten years, as a continual work in progress. One gets the sense that as a piece of writing, the piece may very well be done. It is full of rich images and difficult memories. It is sometimes excruciating in its excavations. We get flashes of his mother cutting off her hair; his mother bare-breasted; his mother wondering aloud if she’s the Virgin Mary; his mother serving his sister a bowl of excrement. As he gets around to comparing schizophrenics to saints, he conjures the image of his devout Catholic mom in her later years, filthy, homeless and toothless. He calls her a martyr. He begins to preach, as if he were a priest, the Gospel according to his mother, “Saint Annie.” It gets especially profound when he asks the audience pointedly, “If you can’t imagine St. Annie, imagine your mother.”

As a piece of theatre, however, the work seems as though it may still be in its early stages. What Hearing Voices seems to lack most is direction. Director Daniel Gidron has a few exceptionally good stage moments here, especially those that take place in total darkness. On the whole, though, the piece drags. It has little momentum and feels spread thin by the end of the 90 minutes; not because the material isn’t compelling, but because not enough changes onstage.

The piece is highly literary and, at times it tends to feel more like a reading than a play. To its own detriment, it doesn’t make use of many basic theatrical devices. There is almost no sound design, no lights, a static set, and minimal attention to costumes. The piece seems especially to be lacking in character development. A wide and potentially rich range of characters make fleeting appearances, including Mack’s mother Annie, his father, a priest, a doctor/expert, Frank Sinatra, and various siblings. But the only really convincing character, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Mack himself. The rest seem only suggestions which are all too briefly embodied, and too commented upon, by Mack.

With the great variety of Mack’s menagerie of personalities, it is sometimes glaring where character potential goes untapped. For instance, Mack’s hair is unusually long and he possesses a quite slight physique. However, no attempt is made to use these natural assets to better differentiate between his characters, especially between those of his mother and himself. Since when he portrays himself his hair is pulled back, why not change or loosen it when embodying his mother? In addition, all the costume adjustments seem incidental and haphazard, evoking sentiments and style more than distinct characters. A doctor’s coat and a Sinatra-style fedora are both used at various points, but the text tends to interrupt itself before a character fully materializes. And the voices of the individual characters are not distinct enough from the author's. The play ends up suffering from too much of the material seeming too much the same.

It is not surprising that Mack has garnered interest and praise from groups as wide-ranging and prestigious as National Public Radio and the Harvard Medical School. The subject he works with is profound and arouses curiosity and empathy. The language and style range from poetic and stylized, to quick and brutal. As a piece of writing, one can imagine this work would be a gratifying read. But Mack seems to have the impetus to also perform the piece, and, considering the subject matter, the possibilities for it onstage are really quite strong. However, for the play to be fully realized, it would most likely benefit from a reconsideration of the material from a more theatrical, and less literary, point of view.

Any production of a classic play which is promoted as “eerily relevant” (or words to that effect) to contemporary audiences makes me a little wary. One rarely hears this expression associated with Medea, Hamlet, or Death of a Salesman—all three of which have always seemed to pack a political punch at any historical moment. But this may be due to the fact that they are also fascinating stories filled with vivid characters, and the ways in which they are politically active might not be their primary draw.

Hecuba is an anti-war play, to be sure. Written during the Peloponnesian War, Euripides's subject is the eponymous queen of Troy who, after her land is defeated in the Trojan War, is enslaved and suffers the atrocities of war a mother most fears—the loss (or rather, killing) of her children. The Royal Shakespeare Company in fact bills their production, starring Vanessa Redgrave (and now running at Brooklyn Academy of Music), as “eerily relevant” in advertisements and programs. The phrase connotes a sense of inevitability to this play being produced at this time. But has there been a time when a production of this play would not somehow be relevant?

As the conquered Troy still burns, Hecuba, once-queen-now-slave, begs for her daughter Polyxena’s life as the girl is carted off by Greek soldiers to be sacrificed to the spirit of Achilles. Before the grieving Hecuba can organize a proper burial, her servant hobbles on with a cumbersome bit of bad news in the form of Polydorus’s water-logged corpse that just washed ashore. (Polydorus, her son, had been left in the care of their family friend Polymestor, who betrayed the formerly royal family, drowning the young man for his sack of gold.) So Hecuba plots her revenge—she invites Polymestor and his sons over, so they may pay respects to her freshly-sacrificed daughter. Polymestor lies extravagantly about her (actually dead) son’s current health and happiness before he and his children are lured into a tent by Hecuba, who has instructed a hoard of Trojan women to slay the boys and then pluck out their father’s eyes.

This courageous and ultimately vindicated woman seems like a stellar role for a great actress—and Redgrave is certainly that. But RSC’s production, which alarmingly credits no director, indicates in the program that the U.S. production has been “developed by” its adaptor, the British poet Tony Harrison. Harrison’s script is indeed poetic, but the language is distinctly undramatic, even idle. Combine this with a play that seems (at least to me) more rhetorical than most other Greek tragedies (so many meditations by the Chorus; so little interaction between conflicting parties), and you have a theatrical event that even the immense talents of Vanessa Redgrave cannot save.

Redgrave, in fact, seems pretty lost: committed, but unguided by what feels like the production’s utter lack of distinct purpose. She speaks with agitated anger rather than rage, with cool satisfaction at her revenge as opposed to blood-toothed vengeance, and my interest was not consistently sustained. Though she wailed and bemoaned her fate, and the Chorus of Trojan Women watched on with their permanently wan expressions, I could not understand the importance of watching this play at this time. So I found myself stuck on the Eerie Relevance.

Certainly there are women suffering this way in Iraq at the moment, as there are mothers in the Sudan and other places where there are genocides occurring that are under-(or simply un)reported in United States newspapers. But I found myself trying to recall a period in history when there were NOT women facing these wartime atrocities. So does that make this play so important that it must be seen now? Harrison’s production of Hecuba, at least, does not make a very convincing argument for itself.

If you’re a die-hard Redgrave fan, then you should subway down and see it. If you want to stare at a terrific set (Es Devlin’s design is a seemingly endless mountain of tents, holding the prisoners of war), buy a ticket. But otherwise, I’d click on the “now playing” tab at the top of this page to find the nearest production of Mother Courage and Her Children.

2,400 intervening years of history have not made Hecuba any less necessary than it was when Euripides first wrote it: its message, decrying the seemingly endless cycles of attack and revenge that we call war, remains as unheeded today as it was then. The Pearl Theatre Company's production, using a new translation by Janet Lembke and Kenneth J. Reckford, takes us right to the core of the matter: that men (and women too, sometimes) seem incapable of resisting the call to arms; that no matter how much poets and pacifists rail against it, there remains something fundamental inside us humans—call it honor or call it folly—that gets tugged inexorably toward battle. In Hecuba we see, over and over, scenes where people lament and wail about warfare's cruelty and destruction; and then we see the same people fail to prevent more of the same from happening. Such is the terrible reality of the situation, illuminated in Shepard Sobel's bleak, stark staging, and pointing toward a single unanswerable question that stares back at us from the stage like a brutal, silent scream: will humanity ever learn this lesson?

Hecuba takes place at the end of the Trojan War. The victorious Greeks, led by their king, Agamemnon, and the great soldier Odysseus, have destroyed the city of Troy and are returning home with the women of Troy enslaved as their spoils. The chief prize is Hecuba, once queen of Troy, now reduced to wearing rags and living among her former subjects in the army's tents. All are stranded, for the moment, on the shores of Thrace, waiting for the winds to return and allow the Greeks to set sail. Here, Hecuba's tragedies pile up and a horrible revenge is wrought.

First comes news that the Greeks have determined to sacrifice Hecuba's daughter, Polyxena, to the gods. Though she begs both Odysseus and Agamemnon to halt this act that she sees as murderous, the execution takes place; Talthybius, a messenger, relates the event to the horrified mother, in extreme graphic detail.

Right on the heels of this comes word that Polydorus, the youngest son of Hecuba and her husband Priam—who was sent away before the Trojan War to live with their ally King Polymestor of Trace—has also been murdered: his body has washed up on the shore, found there by one of Hecuba's attendants, killed for the substantial quantities of gold that his parents sent with him to his (supposed) refuge.

And now Hecuba can take no more. She begs Agamemnon to let her have revenge, which she calls justice and which he conveniently refutes any knowledge of. What she does to Polymestor makes for one of the more horrific climaxes to a Greek tragedy—right up there with Medea, in fact. Knowing that on some level Polymestor "deserves" what he gets here, and also that Agamemnon is about to come in for punishment of his own at the hands of his vengeful wife Clytemnestra—knowing all of this somehow nevertheless doesn't make it feel particularly "right." I longed, instead, for the rule of order and law that comes at the end of the story of the House of Atreus (at the uplifting conclusion of Aeschylus's Oresteia, for example). But at the end of Hecuba such a mark of authentic civilization seems very far off indeed. Where does our own so-called civilized society fall on such a spectrum?

Sobel's production is riveting. Joanne Camp's Hecuba is its powerful center, an avenging angel, to be sure, but one possessed of a rather scary nobility: her conviction in her own absolute authority and entitlement is unwavering and relentless. Surrounding her are three mostly silent attendents (Rocelyn Halili, Kelli Holsopple, and Susan Hunt) and a chorus of Trojan captive women (Rachel Botchan, Vinie Burrows, and Carol Schultz) who bear witness but never challenge Hecuba or anyone else who's willing to assume command. Carolyn Ratteray, as both Polyxena and the ghost of Polydorus, offers the contrast of pure innocence, as startling here as the white robes that she wears.

The men opposing them are all masked in this production, suggesting the duplicity that all of them demonstrate in their self-serving actions. Agamemnon and Odysseus are both portrayed by John Livingstone Rolle, the soldier as slave to the "will" of his people and the king as manipulator non-pareil. The messenger and the Thracian king are both played by Dominic Cuskern, who delivers a truly great performance whose highlights are two remarkable monologues about the catastrophic results of taking an eye for an eye.

The masks, which are most effective, are designed by James Seffens (with mask consultant Jim Calder). Evocative costumes are by Devon Painter, sound and music by Jane Shaw, lighting by Stephen Petrilli, and a spare, classically-styled set by Susan Zeeman Rogers provide an appropriate look and feel to this production that matches Sobel's ritualized direction. This is a place where catharsis can happen. Will we listen to what our souls tell us when it does?

Watching Cate Blanchett’s Hedda Gabler is like watching a caged panther—an elegant, beautiful animal clearly out of sync with her environment, but whose inner fire and enormous energy are still mesmerizing, equally so when she’s being charming and when she’s being cruel. The difference, of course, is that rather than being grabbed by hunters in some far-off country, Hedda is in a trap of her own making; she consciously made the choices that have caged her—judging them the best of the alternatives available to her—but only over the course of the play realizes how badly she has misjudged. Blanchett’s riveting performance illuminates every tiny twist and turn along the path to Hedda’s doom.

Hedda Gabler is the maiden name of the newlywed Hedda Tesman, just returned from an extended honeymoon with her scholarly husband, Jurgen Tesman. Tesman brings the bride home into what he thinks is her dream house, into the familial embrace of his doting aunts Julle and Rina, and into a complicated friendship with Judge Brack, a local man-about-town who, among other things, arranged the mortgage on the Tesmans’ lavish new home. But all of Tesman’s plans to cocoon himself in the study of medieval craft guilds, and all of Hedda’s ambitions to turn her husband into at least a distinguished professor and at most a political figure, are complicated by the return of two figures from Hedda and Jurgen’s past. Eilert Lovborg was once both a suitor of Hedda’s and an academic rival of Jurgen’s, but alcoholism and Hedda’s rejection nipped his promising career in the bud—until the recent publication of a well-received book. Thea Elvsted, a former schoolmate of Hedda’s, has become Lovborg’s “comrade” and secretary—and has left her husband to be with him. The sudden appearance of first Thea and then Eilert on the Tesmans’ doorstep proves the ruin of the tenuous peace Hedda has made with herself, with Tesman, and with Brack, and tragedy ensues.

What really stood out for me here was Blanchett’s delineation of the evolution of Hedda over the course of the play. Her Hedda is painfully, exquisitely conscious of the potential consequences of each of her actions, even the impulsively cruel ones. She’s bold within the limits of her sphere but ultimately trapped by a conventionality that she both accepts and despises in herself; she would never dare, for example, as Thea has dared, to leave her husband publicly, and she knows full well her own cowardice. Blanchett’s performance is so precise, and so specific that you can watch the consciousness that she has fatally miscalculated—that she will forever be the pawn of Judge Brack’s emotional blackmail—dawn, moment by moment and line by line, across her face.

And because Blanchett so fully inhabits each moment, I learned things about the character of Hedda I’d never known before. I’d never seen the fun in Hedda before, the fact that she’s constantly testing the limits of her world and finding to her satisfaction that she can control her environment as much as she had planned to. As the “general’s daughter” she’d enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, and finagled a certain amount more; she chose to marry Tesman specifically to ensure that she could continue to do pretty much as she wants, and takes genuine pleasure in proving that to be true. I’d never noticed the affection in her relationship with Tesman, or that part of Hedda’s annoyance with Aunt Julle is for the way she infantilizes Tesman.

The other performances in general are solid, but not revelatory. Anthony Weigh’s Tesman is charmingly obsessed with his Brabantian craft guilds. Aden Young’s Eilert Lovborg stands out, but that’s partially because the character has a fire and a passion that none of the other characters have.

I found Robyn Nevin’s directing unexpectedly clumsy. Some of the blocking is murky and some of it heavy-handed. I was confused by the way both the staging and Fiona Crombie’s elegant set delineate—or fail to delineate—the different rooms and areas of the Tesman House. Nevyn’s tendency to locate actors downstage center, either staring thoughtfully toward the audience or lecturing while facing directly upstage, seems a little melodramatic. I also found the very somber music to add unnecessary foreshadowing.

But in the end, any production of Hedda Gabler is really going to rise and fall on its Hedda, and Cate Blanchett’s Hedda rises triumphantly.

Where have you heard this word before? Heddatron. Read the science section of the Times? Wired.com? Hold on. Since when did science journals start posting theatre reviews?

Well, the union of these uncommon bedfellows is indeed fitting, at least through next weekend. Yes, in Heddatron, the latest offering from Yaleies-turned-downtown-darlings Les Freres Corbusier, Ibsen’s classic Hedda Gabler is cast half with a troupe of remote-controlled robots and half with regular old human actors (who are actually all quite good). Great media candy, of course, but the robot actors have very brief stage time. They are pretty cool—ranging from the Robo-Aunt Julie, who looks like an aluminum silhouette of Grandma’s cameo brooch, to Judge Brack, who is more of a Tonka Truck in a wig and a robe, to a couple that are more like Rosie, the Jetsons’ robot maid. Voiced in voiceovers by members of the cast and controlled by their makers from the wings, their glorious scene was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before on stage. The show, though, does not rely solely on mere spectacle to entertain.

LFC’s mission statement makes note of the fact that one of their tenets is “rigorous academic research”. This play, written by the irreverently funny Elizabeth Meriwether, makes this quite clear. She melds the world of Ibsen’s play with a very interesting take on what Ibsen’s real world might have been like, a fifth-grade research report, a desperate and lost husband and his wacky obsessive brother, and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, a book about what might happen when technology advances so far that humans are no longer necessary.

So what is the play about?

The basic premise is that Jane, a pregnant Midwestern Mom, is kidnapped by robots and holed up somewhere in the Ecuadorian jungle. Her husband Rick, a kind of Joe Regular who works at Staples, tries to keep it business-as-usual-even-though-mom-is-pregnant-suicidal-and-kidnapped, for the sake of their daughter Nugget, whose class report serves as our exposition of Ibsen and Hedda Gabler. Rick enlists the aid of his screwball brother, Cubby, to hatch a plan to find and rescue Jane. Cubby sees this as a window to not only his 15 minutes but to tons of loot, so he hires a film student to document the whole thing, which they plan to sell to the networks, book publishers, or whoever else might buy it.

It’s a lot, but in Heddatron, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. We also go back in time for a glimpse of Ibsen’s world around the time he was writing Hedda Gabler. You don’t have to be a Theatre Lit Scholar to enjoy it. The fifth-grader really breaks it down. From Nugget’s report:

Most people don’t know about theater history because it’s not as interesting as regular history. There aren’t any wars. Theater history is made up of people trying to make theater in different ways than the other ways of making theater. Lame. But not as lame as war. Now I will talk about Henrik Ibsen.

Enter, a henpecked Ibsen and his comically shrewish wife, who take us into another world of the play. She snipes at him to eat his dinner rather than play with it and calls him “freak” and when she leaves the room, he consoles himself by playing with dolls, which seems to be how he makes his plays. Daniel Larlham and Nina Hellman each shine in their roles as the Ibsens. Larlham can sport a mean set of sideburns and Hellman, well… I’ve never been more tickled to hear someone call her husband “Freak.”

In Ibsen’s world, we also meet the maid Mrs. Ibsen hires, a lisping, self-proclaimed “kitchen slut” (played by the delightfully dippy Julie Lake), as well as August “Miss Julie” Strindberg (brought to vivid life, and in a Swedish Speedo no less, by Ryan Karels). The rivalry displayed by Ibsen and Strindberg is, I assume, meant to mirror that of Lovborg and Tesman in Hedda. Meriwether’s imagined Ibsen is much funnier than I would ever think the real playwright was.

These worlds then explode apart and that’s where the robots come in. Little bits of Hedda are played out with these remote-controlled thespians, with Carolyn Baeumler’s Jane trapped in the middle. Script in hand, she seems excited and freaked out at the possibility of another world of opportunity. Unfortunately, in the world of the robots, it seems like only Hedda Gabler goes, and any time Jane tries to stray from the script she is immediately forced in by an audio-only “big brother” whose alarm screams “SAY YOUR LINE! SAY YOUR LINE!”

If it all sounds a little chaotic, well, it is. But director Alex Timbers keeps the whole circus under great control and moving at a great clip. Just as soon as you catch your breath from one bit, the next is there for you to savor. A very fashionable-yet-functional set by Cameron Anderson allows for the explosions from one world to the next and back again. The robots were designed by Meredith Finkelstein and Cindy Jeffers. They may not have had the same training and study time as their human counterparts, but they were very exciting to watch just the same.

Although, in this time where it seems like so much is becoming automated, can’t we just keep some things for the people only?

As a frequent theatre-goer, unfortunately I don't see shows that inspire or excite me as often as I'd wish. But when a show succeeds, and uses the unique advantages of live theatre to do so, there’s nothing like it. Hell is one of those shows.

Hell, a "new (necessary) opera" by poet Eileen Myles and composer Michael Webster, loosely retells Dante’s Inferno. A Poet has been summoned into a Hell called “Constant” to write a poem for the Devil. As she questions her purpose there, she’s taken on a tour of Constant, coming across an assortment of characters, including a do-nothing leader called Father Tree, a dissenting gnome, and representatives from Iceland. Myles’s amazing libretto touches on politics, pop culture, and the media, ultimately taking the stand that live performance (poetry, opera, theatre, what-have-you) is critically important—and being suppressed by the powers-that-be.

This message is expertly enhanced by director David Chambers and video designer Peter Flaherty. Live video is woven into the piece, as each of the singers is caught on tiny surveillance cameras and the images projected onto a large video screen center stage. Wesbter has skillfully set Myles’s libretto to music, evoking a baroque operatic style using recitative to let Myles’s words stand out.

The cast is uniformly excellent. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting great singers for a $20 ticket price, but the performances are first rate—as good as anything at the New York City Opera or the Met. Of course, Matthew Chellis as the Devil and Juliana Snapper as the Poet stand out, but each cast member has their chance to shine, and shine they do, especially Danielle Freeman as the frog, Daniel Gundlach as Thomas, David Adam Moore as Lewis, and Amelia Watkins as Dorothy.

Opera, frequently considered to be a dying art form, is the perfect vehicle to make Myles’s point—and Myles and Webster have made their opera short (90 minutes) and accessible. Shows like Hell are necessary and important to see—run out and catch this one before it’s too late!

If you've ever wondered why they have those divider-things between the front and back seats of New York City taxi cabs, see Hell Cab. You'll discover about two dozen reasons—as many, pretty much, as there are scenes in this moody dramedy by Will Kern.

Kern spent time as a cabbie in Chicago, where Hell Cab takes place (and where, apparently, the innovation of divider-things has not yet taken hold). For diehard New Yorkers, the play's reality is a little jarring: Why are these passengers touching the cabbie all the time? Why are these passengers talking to the cabbie all the time? Why are the passengers always calling the driver "Driver" (as opposed to "Hey, You" or, more likely, nothing at all)?

Ok, let me backtrack a bit. Hell Cab depicts a VERY eventful day in the life of our hero, a nameless cabbie who has been on the job just a few months. He's a loner and he's a little sad, but he's never a pathetic wastrel like the Harry Chapin cabbie; neither is he, as far as we can tell, a biding-my-time-until-I-get-a-break cabbie a la the TV series Taxi. He's just a compassionate, striving guy in a job that he probably both feels and thinks too much to be really good at; it'll either drive him crazy or turn him cold and hard. Nic Mevoli, onstage for virtually the entire play, is superb as the cabbie, creating a very human, very sympathetic character whose travails authentically engage us.

Said travails are a bit over-the-top, however; I wasn't finally sure whether Kern intended to crack us up with an America's Kookiest Cab Rides show, or to tear us up with America's Most Harrowing Cab Rides. Hell Cab offers some of both, which means that its reality—even getting past the New York/Chicago thing—is hard to pin down. Is this really one hellacious day on the job? Are we really supposed to believe that passengers behave this weird all the time? Does a cabbie really deal with a passenger coming on sexually to him, a close shave in a scary neighborhood, and a rape victim, all in the course of a single day? The play starts intense and out-there, and just never lets up.

The silly vignettes—for Hell Cab is all vignettes, maybe two dozen of them, strung one after the other, each depicting a particular "fare"—are fun for the actors: Adam Purvis, for example, is funny as a man who communicates using a sock puppet, and Reagan Wilson is on-target as a Mother-to-Be whose baby looks like it might just pop out in the taxi.

The more serious stories, most notably one involving a receptionist who is the unwitting victim of a very callous would-be boyfriend, are often compelling. Kern is interested in racism, and he deals more than once with the difficulty in getting cab drivers (white and black) to pick up African Americans and to journey to predominantly African American neighborhoods. This gives Hell Cab some weight. I was concerned, though, by what felt to me like a misogynistic streak in the play: the women are all presented here as either victims or manipulators. I was also somewhat troubled by Kern's tendency to dwell on the worst aspects of human nature in his play; except for a final scene (which feels contrived and tacked-on to provide a suitably uplifting ending), all of the vignettes depict men and women at their basest—drunk, stoned, on-the-make, deceiving, betraying, fighting.

Rising Sun Performance Company, nevertheless, does well by the piece, with a nifty set that really looks and feels like a taxi cab (designed by Larua Jellinek) and appropriate costumes, sound, and lighting design. Director Akia keeps the pace brisk and navigates fourteen actors through at least twice that many roles seamlessly and effectively. All in all, it's a rowdy, generally diverting evening. And it will remind you to be extra-special nice and considerate the next time you venture into a cab.

Spalding Gray is Josh Lefkowitz's Last Great Hero.

Now, the reason I capitalized "Last Great Hero" is because Lefkowitz has a very particular definition of this term, one whose derivation is described in a very funny anecdote in his terrific one-man show Help Wanted; one whose specificity ties Lefkowitz to Gray, the late great monologist whose work and legacy has, in part, inspired this singular, smart tribute-cum-confessional. Indeed, the three items on stage at Dixon Place when the audience arrives for Help Wanted—a chair, a table, and a bottle of Poland Springs water—provide an immediate visual cue to what Lefkowitz is up to in this show. That he succeeds so admirably in this, his performance and playwriting debut, indicates how intelligent and talented and loaded with chutzpah this 24-year-old actor/writer is.

I should pause now to make sure you know that Help Wanted is, above all, terrifically funny, brimming with humor and authentic wit; and that it's performed with warmth and delightful and sometimes insouciant brio by young Mr. Lefkowitz. He's an appealing performer and he never wears out his welcome. His writing is colorful and vivid: I saw, in my mind's eye, just about every detail of every story that he engagingly recounted in the course of this 90-minute play.

I should add, too, that the full title of this piece is Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century. In it, we can detect echoes of Lefkowitz's hero—unabashed ego; a collision of the personal and the Zeitgeist. Lefkowitz's subject is his journey from naive college student to slightly-less-naive struggling young actor. The story should be a cliche: he gets his BFA degree from the University of Michigan; is unable to find a suitable job and becomes a parking lot attendant; suddenly gets a "big break" in the shape of an acting job in Washington, D.C.; learns the hard way that "big breaks" don't grow on trees; becomes a waiter. Along the way, he does a great deal of thinking and observing. He fancies himself a writer (he tells one story about lying about being an actor, pretending instead to be a poet, apparently thinking that this would make him seem more stable), and he eventually realizes that this very play was inside him, waiting to be put on paper and then on stage.

He also gets to meet his Last Great Hero, the pilgrimage to New York City from DC forming the moving and melancholy climax of Help Wanted.

Lefkowitz's stories depict a coming-of-age/awakening in brave and unfettered detail: his musings on his latent racism and his momentarily confused sexuality, for example, are at once hilarious and blistering for their honesty. He can evoke a moment of real tenderness, such as his father's farewell to him as he boards the plane for his new "career" in D.C., and in passing he can nearly floor us with a subtle reference, as when he tells us about his 20th birthday, September 11, 2001.

His digressions are perhaps less convoluted than Gray's, while his acting style is more naturalistically overt, reminiscent of another hero (though not a Great Hero—his definition is very clear on this point), Eric Bogosian, bringing the numerous other characters in his tales to very vivid life with distinctive voices and mannerisms; spare and effective. Already, Lefkowitz is on his way to a style of his own, as writer and performer, and if the solo show seems as natural a fit for him as for his idols, he's got room and years ahead of him to grow. His personal searches for meaningful employment are just beginning. I look forward to seeing the results.

La MaMa is reviving Ellen Stewart's epic Herakles via Phaedra, and it is as you might expect an extraordinary work of collaborative theatre. Even its scope is audaciously grand: the telling of not one but two classic Greek myths, intertwined—those of Herakles, the great legendary hero, and Phaedra, who became a queen and then, tragically, a slave to her passion.

Herakles is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman and consequently despised by Zeus's jealous spouse Hera. She takes her revenge by casting a spell on Herakles, turning him temporarily insane; he kills his wife and two sons. He turns to the Oracle Pythia for aid, and she in turn sends him to his cousin King Eurystheus, who bids him to do the twelve famous labors as penance. While performing these mammoth tasks—which include slaying a variety of super-human beasts and cleaning the Augean Stables—Herakles encounters the Amazons, whose queen Hippolyta leaves behind a baby son, Hippolytus, who is adopted by Herakles's friend Theseus.

Phaedra, handmaiden to the goddess Aphrodite, falls in love with Theseus and then later, due to the interfering magic of the jealous Aphrodite, with Hippolytus. Neither of our eponymous characters' tales ends happily, with Herakles falling prey to the centaur Nessos, and Phaedra's forbidden love bringing tragedy to herself and her family. (In the play's finale, however, Hippolytus is restored to favor and receives the "god gift," a familiar ending to Stewart's mythological works.)

The particularly wonderful thing about Herakles via Phaedra is that all of this story-telling is accomplished with ingenuity and wit by a committed company of two dozen actors, a small band of musicians, and lots of low-tech wizardry. In Stewart's show, actors don masks to transform themselves into terrifying creatures like the nine-headed Hydra or the Bull of Crete; and elegant movement and simple set pieces are utilized to create beautiful and astonishing effects such as the death of Ariadne, who is washed away by the Mighty Wind Aelous, or the immolation of Herakles within his enchanted cloak.

Music is the most significant theatrical element of Herakles via Phaedra, propelling virtually every moment of the large and complicated plot and often conveying all the information that's required at any particular juncture. The score is based on the late Genji Ito's original, contrived for the premiere of this piece in 1988, and has been augmented by David Sawyer and Michael Sirotta. It incorporates all kinds of electronic effects and is played live by Sirotta, Heather Paauwe, Benjamin Sher, and Yukio Tsuji. Much of it is unadorned by text, serving as evocative backdrop for movement choreographed by Stewart and several movement coaches (Renouard Gee, Shigeko Suga, Barbara Martinez, Kamala Cesar); both the dance moves and the music itself are eclectic and wide-ranging, drawing upon numerous influences and cultures to render the story interestingly and accessibly.

There's also a fair amount of singing—if I had to pick a genre in which to classify this work, I'd call it an opera—the best of which is performed by striking countertenor Benjamin Marcantoni, who plays King Eurystheus, commanding Herakles at his dozen labors in stirring song; and by Cary Gant, who narrates the tale and also appears in the final moments as a gangster-ish Poseidon.

Standouts among the large ensemble also include Peter Case as Herakles, Gian Marco Lo Forte as Herakles's lover Iolaus, Renouard Gee as King Aegeus and the god of medicine Aesclepius, Chris Wild as Hippolytus, JT Netterville as Theseus, Shelia Dabney as Pythia, Meredith Wright as Hera and Herakles's second wife Deianeira, and La MaMa stalwarts Brian Glover and Eugene the Poogene in numerous supporting (often quite funny) roles.

Stewart tells us at the beginning of the show that everyone in La MaMa participated in putting this massive show together, and there are two full pages of detailed credits in the program (along with an excellent plot synopsis and an essay by Michael Sirotta about the score). When you see the show, take note of all of these important contributions.

Though it ends with a rousing dance celebrating the restoration of Hippolytus, the overall mood of Herakles via Phaedra is surprisingly dark and fatalistic. In this piece (in contrast with last year's Greek play at La MaMa, Perseus), the gods are cruel and spiteful and all-controlling, manipulating the mortals who anger them, capriciously and wickedly. This is the world of early Greek myth, before mankind started to believe in free will, when fate was decreed and unmoveable. The only relief comes at the end of the piece, with the appearance of a deus ex machina who is ostensibly the Greek diety Aesclepius but whose looks and behavior are more Eastern in their nature: is he the Buddha? It's fascinating to contemplate the messages, subliminal and otherwise, that Stewart wants to convey in her work.

But mainly, it's exilharating to see all of the elements of theatre—including, foremost, the audience's engaged imagination—getting such a grand workout. Herakles via Phaedra reminds us why the stage is, as it has been for millennia, the place where citizens gather to tell epic tales of good and evil, of love and hate, of life and death.

Hi! is a one-woman show, written and performed by Amber Martin. It is an unusual, quirky, and highly musical adventure, in which Martin embodies a series of unconventional characters.

Hi! is a bit of an oddity. It’s not exactly a play since the usual elements of a play are not present here—story, dramatic tension, or a sense of beginning, middle, and end. So what is it? It seems to be a series of vignettes and scene-lettes, strung together by the fact that all characters are all played by the same performer, and that each one incorporates music and a fairly wild costume change. It's a free-associative cabaret enacted by a highly talented performer.

The first character is a televangelist-type, whose wardrobe (all white with a dove perched on her shoulder) makes her look like a cross between Tammy Faye Baker and Snow White. Her extra wide lips only seem to grow larger as they spontaneously burst into Christian anthems. This lady shows a great deal of promise—all of Martin's characters do—but nfortunately, she's not really on stage long enough for the audience to create a strong bond with her. This is true of all the other characters, and as a result it's difficult to derive much meaning from their quick appearances and equally speedy disappearances.

The transitions for this show are a bit problematic. It takes a more than a little while to transform from person to person, as each of them looks pretty radically different from the one before, and usually requires a rinse and a re-application of make-up. Considering what has to be done, it is quite impressive that Martin can accomplish it in the time she does. But, nonetheless, at least ten minutes of this one-hour show are devoted to these changeovers. The ones where she is singing to herself seem to go on the longest. But, there are a couple of highly effective ones; there is a particularly good one where we listen to the character (in voiceover) as Martin changes behind a screen, looking a bit like a James Bond title credits scene, with a light behind her silhouetting her nude body.

Trained as a dancer, Martin has a compelling stage presence. She works her way from a beehive-adorned, country-music-loving small town girl to an Alice Cooper-like rock-scream queen in a leather micro-miniskirt to, still later, a sequined aging lounge singer—to name a few. And, she seems equally invested in the entire menagerie. She is quixotic, committed, and absolutely precise, in every one of her characters. So, getting interested in her isn’t difficult—but that interest might be more sustainable if the piece had a stronger sense of story, or even continuity. Unfortunately, for an audience member with a drive to derive meaning from a variety show, the task is a bit out of reach with the fast paced and spastic Hi!

The design of this show suits Martin’s world well. The set looks a bit like a dressing room, with a screen center stage and a vanity off to the side. It effectively gives the sense of this as an ever-transitioning space. The lighting is especially good at helping to create a new place every time there is a new character. The show also has a highly involved soundtrack, with voiceovers sometimes playing even while she is speaking; it is occasionally distracting, but generally helps to texture the show. The costumes are the real tour de force. They go from wacky and irreverent, to genuinely surreal. They are completely thrilling and very funny; when one comes off, the next one is eagerly anticipated.

Martin says in her program that this show is to “get it out of her system.” Extremely talented as a performer, singer, designer and general character-maker, Martin is someone you have to see to believe. There is a lot going on in the one-woman extravaganza that is Hi! that would be hard to find anywhere else. And, though lacking in much dramatic structure, it is a true adventure into the performer’s psyche, and that is anything but ordinary.

In Hilda, an extraordinary play in the Act French Festival, French novelist Marie Ndiaye demonstrates the many ways in which power destroys. Ndiaye accomplishes this in both blatant and nuanced ways, and she is incredibly artful as she does so.

In the story, Mrs. Lemarchand, a liberal, moneyed woman, wants to hire Hilda as her maid and nanny. She has never met Hilda, but she has heard that she is beautiful and caring, and she loves her name. She wants to extend her largesse by offering Hilda social and financial opportunities. Mrs. Lemarchand negotiates with Hilda’s husband, Frank, a carpenter; indeed, she browbeats him into accepting the position for Hilda—a first step toward his indebtedness to her and the one step that propels him into a life which he neither wants nor from which he can extricate himself.

For hiring Hilda is not enough for lonely, desperate Mrs. Lemarchand. She trails Hilda as she cares for the children, dresses her in expensive hand-me-downs, parades her for her friends to see, and eventually possesses and destroys her—all in an effort to make Hilda love her. This happens incrementally, without violence, and in the name of liberal generosity. It is appalling to hear the lengths to which Mrs. Lemarchand goes on behalf of Hilda. In her eagerness to give Hilda one of her dresses, Mrs. Lemarchand decides that Hilda is not quite clean enough to wear it. She insists that Hilda shower immediately and then try it on. Taking it further into the absurd, Ndiaye eventually has Mrs. Lemarchand bathing Hilda regularly. She discovers lovely beauty marks on the backs of Hilda’s knees and during a dinner party Mrs. Lemarchand invites her guests to examine them. I wanted to rescue Hilda. But Hilda, so ever-present, never actually appears. It is her sister, Corinne, played by Brandy Burre, who arrives late in the play to ostensibly save the day.

Ellen Karas plays the demanding role of Mrs. Lemarchand with inner determination. In a 90-minute production with no intermission, she is required to press her case for Hilda roughly 90% of the time. She begins with an open, chatty, and cheerful disposition that clearly defines her as a woman of position talking to someone without rank. Subtly, she moves into desperate longing for something she craves and will have. Finally, she gives her character a desperate destructive force as she calculates how to keep Hilda for her very own. Dressed in a bold royal blue sheath (designed by costumer David F. Draper) and a single strand of pearls, against Donald Eastman’s monochromatic set, Karas commands the attention of the audience and of the antihero, Frank.

Frank, ably played by Michael Earle, is an equally demanding role as he reacts to Mrs. Lemarchand’s diatribe with a full range of facial expressions, only occasionally getting a word in edgewise. He enters with his carpentry box, expecting to make repairs, but instead receives a pathologically fixated tirade from Mrs. Lemarchand on his wife, Hilda, and the Pygmalion-like aspirations she has for her. Frank stands up to Mrs. Lemarchand. But in the world that Ndiaye has created, this is not enough to spar with Mrs. Lemarchand’s psychological manipulations.

In this tightly-wound play, small gestures such as trading dollars for work or bringing a cup of coffee, become events of great magnitude, power shifting ever so slightly from one character to the other. Credit goes to Erika Rundle for a translation that is nimble and nuanced. Indeed, it does not seem like a translation at all. Each of the seven or so scenes has at least one powerful reversal, and the audience can only watch with a sinking heart as Frank, a respectful man who values what he has, loses ground. Earle gives Frank solidity and common sense, making him someone with whom the audience can identify. But, power has nothing to do with common sense, and in this case it consumes both the powerful and powerless.

Eastman has created a set as strong as the protagonist. It is so prominent it is nearly a fourth character. The profile of a bare staircase stands centerstage in stark relief. There is no banister to soften the geometric lines. Rather, it rises to the ceiling and appears to be a staircase to nowhere. The stage, gorgeous in its stark simplicity, nearly shimmers. With Nancy Schertler’s sumptuous lighting, the stage draws attention even before Mrs. Lemarchand makes her startling entrance. The set is so pristine that, at one point, even the audience sympathizes with Mrs. Lemarchand—if only for a second—when she refuses to let Frank in the door, because his wounded hand is dripping with blood. Blood in this room, on this carpet?

Carey Perloff directs with the eye of a perfectionist. The pace moves steadily, the pauses are just right, and the important reversals pack a punch. Make no mistake. This is not a 90-minute monologue. All three characters play a critical role in trying to gain control of their lives. But, there is no stopping this giant snowball. It will stop only when it flattens everything in its path. Thank God for the Fourth Wall.

The Hip-Hop Theatre Festival is now celebrating its fifth annual presentation with an incredible international lineup. If you are unfamiliar with Hip-Hop theatre then this is your chance to become acquainted with this relatively new fusion of theatre, music and perspective. The beats and poetics of Hip-Hop and the fresh voices of this generation are what drive this new form. It’s definitely worth a look. This festival offers a lot—music, poetry, theatre, and dance—but there is very little time to catch it. So check it out before it’s gone.

All performances are one-night-only affairs so I can tell you about the amazing performance I witnessed but you won’t have the pleasure of catching this particular show. Titled Solo Series 1: Witness to War, the program was comprised of two seasoned solo performers: Jerry Quickley doing an excerpt from Live for the Frontlines: Petrol & Protein and Yuri Lane also doing an excerpt from his show From Tel Aviv to Ramallah.

Quickley begins the night with a story about his trip to Iraq to cover the war for Pacifica Radio. His goal was to let the unfiltered voices of the Iraqi people be heard. He went in as an un-embedded journalist and was able to speak with ordinary people on the street. He was staying at the Palestine Hotel when the “Shock and Awe” campaign began. Part of his story is about the first time he saw death as a child and this proves the perfect setup for what is to come. His performance is a brilliant mixture of poetry and prose and he also mixes in a little video from his trip along with some great music.

Jerry Quickley is blessed with many things. Among them—a golden voice, mad storytelling skills, and the uncanny ability to sculpt language into ribbons of social relevance wrapped around pillars of lyrical beauty. I’ve seen many shows this past year but I cannot remember being moved so profoundly to laughter and tears as I was by this too-short one-man performance. At the end of the show the lights blackout and Quickley walks offstage with no bow, leaving us all wanting more. This just proves that Quickley is all about the truth in his content and not the glory of his talents.

Yuri Lane bills himself as a human beatbox. He tells the story of his travels in Israel using a smattering of words but mostly through his extraordinary ability to produce beats and various other sounds using nothing but a mic and his mouth. Lane’s story is about two young men, one from Tel Aviv and the other from Ramallah, whose fates are destined to intertwine. He establishes certain sounds and/or beats for every location and makes other distinctions using movement or voices. I found his story and performance very engaging but once I figured out where the story was going I wanted it to get there a little quicker. The ending is very powerful but Lane’s writer/director Rachel Havrelock needs to tighten up the middle just a bit.

Computer VJ Sharif Ezzat provides Lane with a great video collage that Lane uses as a backdrop. Lane also choreographs much of his movement to the collage, making the program as stimulating visually as it is audibly.

You still have this weekend to see the final performances of the 2005 Hip-Hop Theatre Festival. I truly wish I could tell you that you have plenty of time to take in this remarkable form of theatre but you don’t. Maybe next year the producers of this festival will extend the run to two weeks instead of just one (hint, hint).

Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Caesar out,
Not to hip you to him.

This, lords and ladies, is the essence of Lord Buckley: a cool and sassy transplantation of something famous and familiar (in this case, a poetic oration by Marc Antony written by a guy he'd call "Willie the Shake"): square morphed into hip. Lord Buckley, who lived from 1906 until 1960, apparently did this first—before MAD Magazine, before Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, way before Robin Williams and George Carlin and a whole host of other great comic minds/institutions who all profess to have been influenced by him.

I was eager to learn something about this guy; I confess that I'd never heard of him until the press release for Jake Broder's new show His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley in the Zam Zam Room hit my desk several weeks ago. I checked out this website to get some background; by all accounts, Buckley had a pretty interesting life, as artistic innovator and self-invented proto-beat celebrity. So how is it that Broder's show falls so flat?

The smallest of the three spaces at 59E59 has been transformed into, I guess, the Zam Zam Room: it looks like a vintage jazz club, with tables crammed close together and a three-man combo on stage just a few feet away—it's a perfectly authentic set (designed by Phillip Breen with scenic consultant Sabrina Braswell) except for the obvious stuff that's missing, i.e, smoke and booze. (If ever a show cried out to be performed in a jazz saloon, this is it.)

The conceit of the show is that we've traveled back some 50 years in time to one of Buckley's performances. The lights go down, Broder-as-Buckley does a short routine from offstage, he gets introduced by David Tughan (who plays the club's Emcee and Buckley's occasional co-performer), and then Lord Buckley makes his entrance. For the next 90 minutes or so, we get a sampling of classic Lord Buckley—in addition to the already-mentioned "Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin' Daddies," Broder performs "The Swinging Pied Piper," "Jonah and the Whale," "The Hip Ghan" (about Mahatma Gandhi), "The Nazz" (the story of Jesus Christ), and several other pieces. All share the jive-talk that was obviously Buckley's trademark. And that's pretty much the whole scene, baby.

The thing is, as presented here, Lord Buckley feels like a one-hit wonder. The joke of turning Shakespeare into hip lingo is the exact same joke as turning the Bible into hip lingo; if Lord Buckley did anything else, we don't really find out about it here. We do get a hint, in a song called "Georgia Sweet and Kind," which juxtaposes Ray Charles's "Georgia on My Mind" with the sounds of a black man being lynched. I would have loved to have seen more of this kind of material, if there is more.

What's here amounts to too much of a good thing, and it's a little creepy and off-putting besides. Broder re-creates Buckley's use of African American dialect in delivering his pieces, which was probably a blatantly subversive political act when Buckley did it but feels just this side of offensive when a strapping young blond guy does it in 2005. And, I don't know, maybe I'm being too touchy, but isn't this (from "The Hip Ghan") sorta racist?:

So Mr. Ribadee, the Indian Patrillo,
he sent out the notes to all the Indian musicians,
to the ribadee players, the dong-dong players,
the dang-dang players, the ming-long players,
and all the reed-heads, the lute heads, and the blute heads,
and all the blowin' heads there was to come on in,
that they was gonna gas a big jam session for the Ghan.

It made me feel uneasy, and not in a consciousness-raising way, but in a times-have-changed-thank-God kind of way.

Now, all of this said, let me note that Broder works hard at creating and maintaining his persona, Tughan is terrific when he performs (whether as Abraham Lincoln or as a cool radio newscaster of the sort that George Carlin would later make his own personal property), and the band (Paul Oden on piano, Brad Russell on bass, and Jimmy Young on drums) sounds fine. This is an interesting show, and entertaining (if perhaps too repetitive). But all it did was make me want to know more about Lord Buckley, as opposed to satisfying my curiosity on its own.  I hate to second guess creative people, but it seems like Broder, who wrote the show with Tughan and David Chidlow, would have better served his subject with a more expansive one-man play format: rather than trying to simulate the experience of one of Buckley's performances, maybe he could have created a new play around a performance. Buckley's work certainly speaks for itself; but as presented here, it doesn't finally say very much.

Most of us remember our high school years for their life-changing discoveries and their debilitating awkwardness. We were extremely vulnerable, walking around with our hearts exposed, wearing our desires on our sleeves and our idealism like a groovy pair of shades. In the four-year odyssey, our bodies and minds go through a drastic change as we slowly (and sometimes painfully) begin to define who we are. Rob Nash’s Holy Cross Sucks! is a truly inspired look at this pinnacle time in our lives.

Told through the eyes of three boys who have united under a banner of nonconformity, Holy Cross Sucks! begins freshman year 1981 and goes straight through graduation. It is set in an all-boys Catholic high school in a middle class suburban neighborhood in West Houston. The boys, Johnny, George, and Ben, are “The Punk,” “The Fat Kid,” and “The Homo,” respectively. Johnny’s journey is that of an angst-driven teen trying to become a writer. George is struggling to emerge from the shadow of his domineering military father. Ben is trying to come to terms with his sexuality. All three are determined to be themselves but first they must discover what that is. Along the way we meet other high school stereotypes, including “The Slut," “The Virgin,” “The Nerd,” and “The Cool Teacher.”

Nash, who is the play's one-man ensemble, juxtaposes their tales in a fast and furious format. He switches back and forth from one character's voice and posture to another with the ease and skill of a carnival juggler. It is an absolutely stunning feat of focus and precision to behold. It is also apparent that Nash knows his main characters; that each one is a part of him and in some way influenced his own coming of age.

If you read the description of this show you may ask yourself what’s in this '80s high school story that I haven’t already seen in a John Hughes flick. Not much, for the most part—except Nash’s story is brutally honest and raw at times. This makes for some moments that are so real that I felt as if I was reliving episodes of my own adolescence. Some of his depictions of teenage sex are particularly biting.

Still, I think Nash could take his characters a little farther beyond their labels and offer a few more surprises when it comes to their actions and reactions. Also, while I found Nash’s fast pace impressive, he never lingered long enough on a single character or scene for me to make a connection. I was consistently left wanting more. Perhaps this is his intention, but I sometimes felt as if I were watching a music video of people’s lives.

The music for the show is a killer collage of '80s pop tunes. Sound designer Jorge Muelle does a great job with effects and Jeff Croiter’s lights provide some very attractive movement between scenes and between inner thoughts and conversation. Wilson Chin’s 3-D backdrop design of a classroom is also very striking. Finally, Jeff Calhoun’s direction is a firm and steady tug to the play’s conclusion.

Ultimately, Holy Cross Sucks! is about three teens who have made the “…passionate choice to fearlessly be themselves.” Being ourselves is a goal we should all be reminded of whether we are teenagers or grown-ups. Nash not only deserves the highest praise for his flawless performance but also for offering us this important universal theme.

There’s some seriously well-funded weirdness going down at the Axis Theatre. Highly produced high art drenches the bare, semi-circular stage with multimedia, genre-bending abandon. If you’re feeling gripped by a whimsical mood for a short and funny eyeful of surrealism and don’t mind having to come back three times to get the whole story then Hospital 2005 is the answer to your whim.

Hospital is an annual series that explores the far reaches of the mind through the mind’s eye of a man in a terminal coma. The trigger for his coma is different each year. This year he has contracted Virus H5N1, a.k.a. Avian Flu, and has fallen into his coma/state-of-being after coughing all over his Super who was fixing his sink at the time of his collapse, sending them both to the CDC’s quarantined facility. This opening exposition is delivered via short film, the first of two excellent shorts created by Dan Hersey.

After the film, the Traveler, as the man in the coma is known, takes the stage with his Super (or “Sickmate,” as he is listed in the program), and they take turns denying that they are sick to the point of exhaustion (for the audience not the actors). The next scene is like an absurd vaudeville comedy duo between a doctor, who intentionally comes across like an actor playing a doctor, and a weird nurse with a bright orange cast on one hand, who randomly writes things down on a notepad pressed against her belly with her good hand.

The second short film is a somewhat funny non-sequitur about a nurse who wins the lottery. Afterwards, the Traveler returns, this time entering the highly stylized world of Kabuki theatre. This segment is the most interesting of the bunch. It mixes a parody of the world of Kabuki along with the already surreal world of the play to create a very effective (and rather hilarious) dream-state.

The producers state that each of Hospital's four 30-minute episodes can stand on its own, implying that if you’d like to drop in and catch only one or two you can still get a feeling of completion. I'm not sure I agree. I got the feeling of something that is just beginning, and considering that I saw the first episode that’s what I should feel. I think it takes seeing all the episodes to get the meaning of this show. For the most part, I walked away scratching my head not thinking about the dark corners of the mind but rather about the rad-red Dickies jumpers with the Axis logo on the back that the crew wears or how awesome the Kabuki costumes were. I’m sure there’s meaning embedded in the story but I couldn’t glean any from the 30 minutes I saw. However, I think for the price it’s worth it to check out the whole story. (At half price for students it’s a sweet deal).

Director Randy Sharp conducts her cast and design team with great skill. Her vision is clear and her style is equal parts experimentation and fun. Production designer Kate Aronson-Brown effectively mixes high technology with a starkly bare stage. David Zeffren’s lights are right on and Steve Fontaine’s sound design is lighthearted at times and at others kind of creepy, with the occasional twitter of a (potentially infected) bird in the background.

The cast is an excellent group of seasoned actors. There is not a weak link in the chain. Among my favorite performers are Laurie Kilmartin as the weird nurse with the cast on her arm, and her doctor partner Joe Fuer. But Margo Passalaqua as the Beautiful Wife Kaksiku made me laugh the most and I walked away doing my own impression of her character.

In the end, I believe that this year’s installment of Axis Company’s Hospital series is well worth a look. They are a very innovative troupe and their blending of high technology with high art makes a fascinating cocktail.

Sometimes a show cannot be defined or judged by any terms other than its own. Hot Feet, the new dance extravaganza set to the music of Earth Wind and Fire, is such a show. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly good or well done, but it is fun. I smiled all the way home after seeing it, and that’s the point. The art of showmanship is on full display, something that director-choreographer Maurice Hines knows a thing or two about. There are no deep meanings here, nor are the show’s creators trying to cure cancer. They just want to please the crowd, and make sure everyone has a good time. In that regard, Hot Feet delivers.

The story is a modern updating of "The Red Shoes." Kalimba is a high schooler with dreams of making it big as a dancer. Soon enough her ambition lands her a spot in the ensemble of the most prestigious dance company in town, much to the chagrin of her mother, who is suspicious of the company’s founder, Victor Serpertine. Rightfully so, it turns out. Victor owes the success of his company to his business partner, Louie (also known as Lucifer). Meanwhile, Kalimba faces the first adult challenges of her life: professional jealousy from the company’s resident diva, Naomi (also Victor’s girlfriend), and a budding romance with the choreographer, Anthony. It’s not long before Kalimba is starring in the company’s newest work, "Hot Feet." Little does she (or anyone else) know that there’s more to those red shoes she dances in than meets the eye…

Not that the story really matters. Hot Feet just uses it as a loose structure to justify what it’s truly about: the jubilation of dancing. Equal parts Broadway musical, dance recital, and Vegas floorshow, Hot Feet is armed with a battalion of talented theatre gypsies who know how to talk with their bodies. Hines puts them through their paces to form one of the hardest-working ensembles in town right now: they run through dozens of costume changes, entrances, and exits with a speed and facility that is amazing. The choreography is not particularly inventive, but it is rousing (again, crowd-pleasing by design), and the company knows how to execute it so as to elicit the desired response. (The production, as a whole, would benefit greatly if the ensemble would dance together—and in time with the music—more often. Their sloppiness in this regard may prove distracting to some, but the exuberance emanating from the stage helped me ignore it, for the most part.)

Then there’s the music, which is sublime. The Earth Wind and Fire catalogue is one of the premiere pop music songbooks of the 1970s, comparable to other R & B and funk giants of that era, like Stevie Wonder and Parliament / Funkadelic. Music director Jeffrey Klitz and orchestrator Bill Meyers do the right thing by staying true to the songs and not trying to "Broadway" them up in any way. Three offstage vocalists—Brent Carter, Keith Anthony Fluitt, and Theresa Thomason—handle the majority of the singing (a choice that thankfully frees the dancers from having to do so while performing some breath-defying moves), and they couldn’t be better. At several times during the evening, I could’ve sworn it was actually Earth Wind and Fire themselves in the pit, playing like there was no tomorrow. The singers and the orchestra are that good. They are the show’s true stars.

There’s still plenty happening on stage, however. Broadway veteran Ann Duquesnay, cutting an imposing figure as Kalimba’s mother, belts her heart out convincingly. Wynonna Smith gets the crowd charged up as the scene-stealing comic relief, Naomi. It’s always a pleasure to see the terrific Keith David on stage, and there may be no funnier (or more charming) moment in Hot Feet than when he puts on the Barry White love moves and croons his way through "Can’t Hide Love." And, making her Broadway debut as Kalimba, the loose-limbed Vivian Nixon proves to be a beautiful and fiery dancer, and a likable actress.

Whatever shortcomings Hot Feet may have, by the time the show reaches its sing-along curtain call finale—the classic funk workout "Shining Star"—it’s not hard to feel as if the evening has been well-spent. You can’t quibble with a show like that, can you?

Have you ever seen a show at Dixon Place? What?! You’ve never been to Dixon Place? Well, maybe HOT! The 14th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture can be your excuse to finally discover one of New York theatre’s little treasures. A non-profit organization founded in 1986 to provide a space for literary and performing artists to create and develop new works in front of a live audience, Dixon Place is dedicated to supporting the creative process by presenting original works of theatre, dance, and literature at various stages of development. It’s an artistic laboratory with an audience; a venue for experimenting and testing ideas without the pressures of production costs and premature press exposure. The space provides free rehearsal space, bulk mailing of their calendars to artists' mailing lists, technical assistance, and video documentation.

Never afraid to push the limits of artistic expression, Dixon Place has always placed special emphasis on the needs of women, people of color, youth, seniors, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender artists and audiences. Over the past 14 years, the HOT! Festival, the most successful program in Dixon Place's jam-packed year-round schedule, has featured new work by David Cale, John Fleck, David Drake, Lois Weaver, Shelly Mars, Taylor Mac, Peggy Shaw, and Marga Gomez. This year’s HOT! runs two whole months, until August 29, with 108 artists in all, and features two new commissioned works: Susana Cook's The Values Horror Show, and Brandon Olson and Rami Ramirez's Party and Prey. With a sliding scale admission of $10 to $15, there’s no excuse not to check it out.

Some of this year’s shows take place at The Marquee on the Bowery between Great Jones and East 4th. The shows I attended were both at Dixon Place, also on the Bowery, between Houston and Prince. A large room with two rows of unmatching couches and chairs on three sides of the stage, the space feels like an East Village living room (the old, pre-overpriced-real-estate-development East Village). Beer, soft drinks, and some munchies are available. Often (possibly always?) there is no “fourth wall,” and the artists and tech people move about and mingle with the audience before the show. Sometimes even during. It is certainly the most relaxed atmosphere I’ve experienced in a theatre, and the environment couldn’t be more supportive and nurturing for the type of experimentation they encourage and nurture.

The first evening I attended was entitled The Beach Bum Beefacke Bonanza & the Swingin’ Surfer Sex Sissies. The two shows that evening featured different sets of segments showcasing various performance artists. All the pieces had a decidedly queer sensibility, though the mission of HOT! is to present queer artists, not necessarily queer works. The pieces touched on issues such as misogyny, gender stereotyping, super-hero worship, sexual fantasizing, and attention deficit disorder. The quality and level of development varied, though no more so than at festivals I’ve attended presenting supposedly finished works, and the two friends who accompanied me that evening had different opinions than I about which were the strongest pieces. Most used sound effects and music, and one featured both a video monitor and projected visuals. Two of the pieces contained partial or full nudity, not uncommon at Dixon Place.

My second evening was all music, featuring performances by PNP, Xavier J., and a third duo that was not credited in the program. All were quite strong, with well-composed electronic sounds, excellent singing, and edgy lyrics about relationships, porn legends, urban life, and other aspects of queer culture.

Upcoming shows in the festival feature poetry, dance, comedy, multimedia, and many combinations of all of the above. Check out the festival website (there's a link in the sidebar) for more details. I’m sure you’ll find something there for you.

House of Desires, the latest theatrical treasure to be uncovered for New Yorkers by Storm Theatre, was written in 1685 by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Mexican nun. It's a pure delight, pretty much from start to finish; though I can't say exactly what I was expecting Sor Juana to have come up with, this intoxicating blend of romantic comedy, farce, and class satire certainly wasn't it. In the hands of director Peter Dobbins and his skilled ensemble, it's the surprise comedy hit of the season.

The story is very complicated. Don Pedro, a rich nobleman, is in love with Dona Leonor, a brilliant, beautiful, but poor noblewoman. Dona Leonor doesn't love Don Pedro, though; she loves Don Carlos, another rich nobleman, who ardently loves her right back. On the night that Carlos and Leonor elope, Pedro contrives to have Carlos detained by a pair of official-looking fellows who arrest him; one of them brings Leonor to Pedro's home (though she doesn't know that that's where she is), Pedro's plan being to woo Leonor on his own turf.

Meanwhile, Pedro's sister, the beautiful and spoiled Donna Ana, has set her sights on Don Carlos; however, as we have seen, Carlos is in love with Leonor. Don Juan, a friend of Don Pedro, is in love with Ana, and believes that she is in love with him. When Don Carlos turns up unexpectedly at the house, just a few minutes after Leonor's arrival, Ana begins to hatch her own scheme to win the man of her choice. Don Juan, of course, is also on hand.

I told you it was complicated: this all happens in approximately the first fifteen minutes of the play. The remainder follows the machinations of Ana and Pedro, along with others engineered by Don Rodrigo, Leonor's greedy father, and the inevitable servants—Ana's maid Celia and Carlos's valet Castano.

The plot spins out over a three day period during which identities are constantly being mistaken; arrangements, compromises, and feuds are continually being undertaken in the name of this or that person's honor; and a number of swordfights and chases (often in the dark) transpire. At one point, Carlos and Leonor actually exit Don Pedro's house together, which has clearly been their objective all along (made difficult due to the fact that the doors almost always seem to be locked), except Carlos thinks he's got Ana with him rather than Leonor and never actually bothers to check out this incorrect supposition.

At another point, Castano dresses up in Leonor's clothes, bringing to mind first Charley's Aunt and, later, Some Like It Hot (it actually seems as though Don Pedro and Castano might wind up together—this is very risque and forward-thinking stuff for 1685!).

Miraculously and hilariously, everything gets sorted out by the end, but not before we've been thoroughly diverted by a set of twisty, turny scenarios that are as improbable as they are breathless. Sor Juana's main idea here, apart from giving the audience a splendid time, is to give upper-class privilege a well-deserved come-uppance, and that mission is nicely accomplished in bravura high style.

In choosing House of Desires, Dobbins has given his actors a wonderful and rare opportunity to create roles in an excellent but hitherto unknown play. So men and women who usually ply their skills "reviving" Shakespeare and Moliere here get to sink their teeth into larger-than-life characters wrought by a playwright who was obviously familiar with both of those exemplars but cheerily went her own way, disregarding the standards of any existing theatrical form to make something very original and very much her own. Discovering this extraordinary talent is the first of the many pleasures available to audience members in this House of Desires.

The others come from Dobbins's expert staging, which blends the rigors of classical farce with broad slapstick; everyone on stage has a keen sense of fun and a well-developed sense of the foolish lengths to which lovers will go in the name of honor and to which scoundrels will go in the name of money. (There are plenty of both figuring in this story.)

The entire cast delivers fine performances, with Gabriel Vaughan and Caitlin Mulhern beautifully earnest and lovelorn as Carlos and Leonor and Jessica Myhr and Christopher Kale Jones expertly smug and manipulative as Ana and Pedro. Amanda Cronk does the soubrette thing as witty, devious Celia to a tee; Josh Vasquez has some terrific show-stopping moments as Castano, particularly once he dons Leonor's drag. Also threatening to steal scenes from time to time are Jamil Mena as a superbly klutzy Don Juan and Michael Daly as a supremely grasping Don Rodrigo. Daly serves triple duty here, by the way, providing some very exciting fight choreography that gets as close to the front rows of the audience as possible without risking dire injury, and also forming a chorus (with Jennifer Cannon, Mark Cajigao, and Natasha Harper) to sing the show's one song, a dirge of a love ballad that, in these hands, becomes a grand musical comedy turn. (The music is supplied by Skip Hennon.)

The Storm Theatre has outdone itself in terms of physical production, with Todd Edward Ivins providing a gorgeous and versatile unit set and Erin Murphy offering opulent and appropriate costumes, all well above expectations for a $19 ticket. Scott O'Brien's sound and Michael Abrams's lighting complete the environment expediently.

House of Desires has made me eager to sample more of the works of this apparently quite remarkable 17th century nun. Meantime, if light-hearted romantic comedy appeals, hasten to this production. I think you'll have a really lovely time.

Terry Schreiber's revival of Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, now playing at the Studio bearing his name, is compelling, important theatre. The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, is about a young woman and her complex relationship with her uncle—a man who, we come to understand, has been sexually abusing her since she was 11 years old.

When the play came out in the midst of the Clinton administration, its civilized effort to make both pedophile and victim understandable and accessible to audiences was in step with the times. Today, with tolerance strained rather systemically in this country, Vogel's incisive sensitivity feels at odds with societal attitudes; in addition, thanks in part to works like this one that helped formerly abused children deal openly with pasts generally left repressed, it's hard not to look at someone like Uncle Peck and not automatically judge him a monster. It's a tribute to Vogel's smart writing and Schreiber's finely-tuned direction that this production retains the uneasy ambiguity the playwright intends.

At the center of Schreiber's staging is Jess Draper's Uncle Peck, a multi-dimensional character of enormous depth who is at once a caring family man, a sorely troubled loner, and a slick, well-practiced predator. Draper takes us into the head of this man who genuinely loves his niece but at the same time can't figure out how to stop his damaging obsession with her.

Erika Shaffer plays the girl, known only as "L'il Bit," and she deftly navigates the journey backward from adult narrator (whose eye is never off the rear view mirror, as it were, looking sharply back at her life) to the progressively younger adult, then teenager, then little girl who became her uncle's confidante and plaything. Shaffer mines the complexity of her character as well, recalling Lolita in places where her attachment to her uncle stretches dangerously from playfulness to flirtatiousness.

A chorus of three—well-played by Trey Gibbons, Samantha J. Phillips, and Kira Sternbach—hovers in the background, observing and occasionally abetting the tale. Schreiber uses them explicitly as a Greek chorus (a point emphasized by Hal Tine's spare, classical setting) and so they're almost always present and entirely impotent. They stand in for us as complicit in the tragic thing that's playing out in front of us: from Peck's wife to the waiter in a fancy restaurant who lets Peck buy his underage niece liquor, the story is filled with people wearing blinders who allow the unthinkable to happen.

Vogel's play trades not in retribution but understanding; Schreiber frames this within an exploration not of tolerance but of a society and culture too prepared to tolerate and therefore look away. There's the finest of lines between caring enough to understand something and caring enough to try to change something: Schreiber, in this remarkable presentation, pushes us to examine where that line is, and on which side of it we have placed ourselves.

On the basis of his glib, shallow one-act play Huck & Holden, I'd say that Rajiv Joseph has a great future ahead of him writing TV sitcoms. For that's what this determinedly crowd-pleasing comedy feels like to me: whatever depth and intellectual explorations that Joseph may have originally had in mind for this piece when he christened it seem to have been squelched in favor of perky sex-comedy antics. Which is a shame.

The play begins with Navin, an Indian student newly arrived at an American college, inquiring at the library for the book "Huck & Holden." He's required to write a paper about it for English class, and he can't find the book. He does find, however, Michelle, an attractive African American sophomore who works in the library (not very hard, apparently) and has just discovered the Kama Sutra. When she finds out that Navin is from the same country as the sex manual, she's suddenly interested in him; and when he comes back to the library bearing the information that he in fact needs two books—The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—it's very clear where this play is going.

There follow a couple of cute scenes in which Navin is "visited" by "Holden Singh," an amalgam of the hero of Salinger's novel and an old friend from Calcutta. This fantasy figure is essentially Fonzie to Navin's Richie Cunningham, helping the shy and inexperienced Navin plot out his courtship of Michelle. Now, I was looking forward to a second version of the spectral "Singh," perhaps in overalls and a straw hat, once Navin started reading his Mark Twain—but such does not come to pass. The titular conceit of the play (a good one, that Navin will learn about his new country by seeing it through the eyes of two of its iconic rebels) is cast aside about 15 minutes in. "Holden Singh" suggests that Navin try to steal Michelle's necklace from her tough-guy boyfriend Torry, which leads to a silly scene in which Navin pretends to be a pizza delivery guy who just happened to pick up one of Torry's porn magazines, which leads to a rather crude sequence in which Torry teaches Navin about "ass-waxing."

Eventually, the Hindu goddess Kali shows up, and things really start to defy credibility.

There's no denying that Joseph has talent: he can craft a funny scene and write a humorous line with the best of them. The play is sharply directed by Giovanna Sardelli, and the five actors turn in polished performances (Nilaja Sun, as Kali, might perhaps be more effective if she toned down her attention-getting antics). It's not unentertaining, but it doesn't finally say anything terribly cogent or interesting; and I think it had a real opportunity to do just that. So Huck & Holden is a disappointment from where I sit. But Joseph may well be on his way to the career he's looking for.

Austin, a buttoned-up fellow who works as a greeting card writer, walks in on his girlfriend of five years, having sex with another man. So he goes with his older brother Jeff, a pedicab driver who always calls things by the wrong names, on a double date (arranged via J-Date, though no one in this play is Jewish). The women are Marcy, a photographer who has just broken up with her boyfriend after two years; and her friend Diana, an actuary (!) who is ready to sow some wild oats.

Naturally, Austin and Marcy are initially repelled by each other. But, if they can only get over (1) his refusal to accept the demise of his last relationship and (2) the fact that they are as unalike as it's possible to be, they will certainly make the perfect couple.

Diana and Jeff, meanwhile, having absolutely nothing in common, are instantly attracted to one another.

When the curtain falls (metaphorically) on I Love You Because, both pairs have paired, presumably for happily ever after. They sing the chipper title song, whose lyric says they love each other because of (as opposed to in spite of) their differences.

In fact, they love each other because the authors say they do. Do not look for logic—or emotional honesty, or the meagerest glimmer of intelligence—in this show, which is all about suspension of disbelief in the name of romance. I suppose it could well be the feel-good date show of the moment. I found it relentlessly, appallingly dumb.

Here's the arc sketched out by book/lyric writer Ryan Cunningham and composer Joshua Salzman: in Act One, they convince us how quirkily, goofily unsuited for one another are the idiotic Jeff and brainy Diana and the obsessive Austin and free-spirited Marcy; and then in Act Two, they barrage us with ballad after ballad telling us that both couples are hopelessly in love. Okey-dokey, if you say so: I was not convinced.

Part of the problem is that many of the attributes doled out to the characters are described but never shown: we're told that Austin has a "plan" and (horrors!) is a Republican, but we don't actually see any examples or indications of same. Equally troubling is the inconsistency of the authors' characterizations: Diana's opening number is all about how she can assign numeric formulas to emotional situations, but everything she does thereafter suggests that she has no faith in that particular ability.

Mainly, I Love You Because is tragically derivative, not only of Pride and Prejudice, to which it owes its characters' names and (perhaps) the general outline of its plot, but also of pretty much every successful sitcom of the late 20th century (the scene in which Marcy and Austin finally "do it," for example, is lifted more or less verbatim from a famous and much better executed scene from Cheers), not to mention countless date movies and, in the case of Jeff's propensity for malapropism, The Rivals.

And yet it still manages to make not a modicum of sense.

The score is an agreeable string of pop tunes: Salzman's music is pleasant but the melodies tend to run together, while Cunningham's lyrics are competent but without wit; there's evidence of talent here, but not of substance or, more importantly, heart. The same cannot be said for Christopher Gattelli's choreography, which is practically non-existent, or Daniel Kutner's direction, which is clumsy and awkward.

I don't know whose idea it was to turn the endlessly shape-shifting Village Theatre stage into what amounts to a runway down the middle of the auditorium, providing Kutner with at least two challenges—audience on both sides and a playing space lacking width and depth—that he fails to cope with.

Stephanie D'Abruzzo, lately of Avenue Q, and David A. Austin, in his NYC debut, make as much of Diana and Jeff as they can. The nasal Farah Alvin and the hopelessly wooden Colin Hanlon, as Marcy and Austin, do not. Jordan Leeds and Courtney Balan, billed as "NYC Man" and "NYC Woman," are more believable and likable than the other cast members in thankless roles, portraying various restaurant/bar personnel and moving the sparse furniture on and off stage between scenes. I felt very sorry for them. With any luck, they'll be able to find employment in much better shows very soon.