Thank God for the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, a dynamic, incisive collective of directors, composers, performers, and designers exploring Japanese theater techniques in the Western drama. In the past, they’ve explored work by the Polish experimentalist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and the notorious pataphysician Alfred Jarry. Taking on a more traditional playwright like Bernard Shaw, they have their work cut out for them. Director Brooke O’Harra and composer Brendan Connelly have painstakingly integrated Kabuki design, physical and vocal techniques, and a percussive underscore into Shaw’s 1905 work Major Barbara in this exciting new production. Though the marriage is not as tense and bumpy as that of Andrew Undershaft and wife Lady Britomart, the domestic principals of the play, the melding of theatrical approaches is unable to entirely eradicate the problems of Shaw’s pedestrian stagecraft—largely the fault, as this fully-engaging production demonstrates, of the playwright.

It’s decision time at the Undershaft household: munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft needs to determine which of his children should carry on the family business, and the options are grim. Son Stephen is a mewling mother’s boy, without a shred of personality; daughter Sarah is about to marry a blinkered doofus; and, worst, daughter Barbara has become a major in the Salvation Army and aims to save the world from itself. Connoisseurs of Shavian paradoxical wit will quickly recognize Major Barbara as one of the most characteristic works of the canon: long stagebound arguments lit up by rhetorical fireworks, delivered with mellifluous British accents in attractive drawing rooms. Major Barbara is also, sad to say, one of the least visually-imaginative of Shaw’s plays, lacking the physical farce of Arms and the Man and even the thoughtful, evocative stage pictures of Saint Joan.

And this is where the mastery of the Two-Headed Calf’s production comes in. For two-thirds of this production, the performances and staging are exciting, even electric. Not long into the first act, staged in the upstairs space at La MaMa’s Annex Theater, the cast begins to break the predictable cadences of the Shavian sentences by exploring asyncopated rhythms in them, unexpectedly emphasizing portions of some words over others, accompanied by a percussion player at the side of the stage; the Kabuki technique of stylizing social gestures is especially relevant to Shaw’s social satire, as members of the family, waiting for the father’s arrival, busy themselves in repetitive domestic movements like lighting a pipe.

The second act, staged in the downstairs lobby of the Annex (“please keep your belongings with you,” the program suggests), is the gem of the evening, though: Undershaft visits Barbara’s Salvation Army storefront and mingles with a stereotyped cast of society’s misfits, attractively costumed in Kabuki tradition by Tara Webb (whose costumes for the rest of the production are similarly evocative, from Undershaft’s red cravat to Barbara’s militaristic buttoned top and long brown skirt). O’Harra’s direction is especially daring here; the audience is never more than mere inches from the action, and the broad, violent stylized movements of the scene (especially those of Nadia Mahdi as Bill Walker, a sociopathic pugilist) mean that the audience is drawn in at some physical risk. But all this is most precisely choreographed, the silences and stillnesses all the more affecting for the underlying sadness they suggest.

The third act returns to the upstairs space, and as the characters visit Undershaft’s munitions factory, the stylized backdrop rises to reveal the deepest cavernous recesses of La MaMa’s space, the grandeur of which encourages the characters to play in the space like children; because this is a munitions factory, they play war games. And here, unfortunately, director Brooke O’Harra runs right in the face of Shaw’s ironic speechifying, in this play at its most turgid, and the final 15 minutes or so of the play are delivered by Undershaft, Barbara, and Barbara’s fiancé Cusins straight out to the audience: Shaw’s defeated directors before, and in the concluding moments of the evening Shaw defeats O’Harra too.

But let it be said that this is merely the last quarter-hour of the play; the preceding two-and-a-half hours are among the most entertaining, imaginative, and dynamic productions of Shaw I’ve ever seen. Apart from O’Harra’s direction, not a gesture of which is superfluous or carelessly conceived, the music of Brendan Connelly and the four-member ensemble threads effortlessly through the production, from the underscore to the original songs in the second act, written by the band LOW. Standing out among the large and precise cast are Bob Jaffe’s Andrew Undershaft (who here resembles a satanic Steven Keaton from the old comedy Family Ties) and the aforementioned Nadia Mahdi, but the evening is especially a triumph for Heidi Schreck, who as Barbara careens through the difficult role’s character changes—from vulnerability to fear to dismay to strength and happiness, then back to vulnerability again—with utter conviction, her face and body exhibiting stony strength and trembling uncertainty at the same time. In smaller roles, Johnny Klein delivers an amusingly hangdog performance as indigent Snobby Price and Slaney Chadwick Ross as Barbara’s hopelessly overwhelmed and diminutive assistant Jenny Hill is funny and charming, even when her arm is ripped off in the middle of act two. (You really have to see it.)

Some of it doesn’t work: the use of video, though sometimes cute and jokey (there are cameras hidden in coffee mugs and on the tips of pens), isn’t fully integrated into the overall directorial conception and doesn’t add appreciably to the experience of the show, which would get on just as well without it. But on the whole, if Shaw’s plays are to enter the 21st century with all the relevance and comic intensity with which they energized the English stage of the early 20th century, O’Harra and the Two-Headed Calf company can lead the way, suggesting new perspectives and approaches. The Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf’s Major Barbara is a sparkling, innovative, wholly entertaining evening in the theater, and at $15, perhaps the best stage bargain in New York this month.

I once purchased a book called Mondo Marilyn, a collection of short stories, essays, poems, and other writings inspired by Marilyn Monroe. Flipping through the book now, I can see that it focuses on four classic Marilyn themes: her sexuality, her fame, her addiction, and her death. Our fascination with these themes has created a strong, enduring Marilyn mythology. She’s often a symbol of “ideal woman.” Ken Cameron’s play Making Marilyn, which explores Marilyn Monroe as a symbol of motherhood, love, and sex is an interesting and weird addition to the Marilyn conversation.

Making Marilyn’s main character is a very troubled young man named Scout (Patrick Costello) who is growing up in western Canada in a small town near the Rocky Mountains. His mother is called a whore by many people in the town, and his father has left town for good. Marilyn Monroe (Ashlie Atkinson) comes to Banff to shoot the film The River of No Return in 1953 and meets Scout. As they become close, Marilyn ruins Scout for all other women. Paying the preacher’s daughter a nickel to see her boobs will no longer do, as Miss Monroe becomes his “one and only.”

The play takes place in three time periods: 1962, immediately after Monroe’s death; 1953, during the filming; and 1945, when the U.S. drops the atomic bomb and the earth moves. Scout shifts between these periods several times during the play, with transitions emphasized by music and lighting. The latter of these elements, which seems to be designed by the director, Robin A. Paterson, ranges from a shadowy, dim light when Marilyn is at her most mysterious and when Scout’s mom is at her lowest, to a watery, sunshiny light when Marilyn is flirty and wearing a cotton dress, to strange and severe when Scout is traveling through time, exploring different moments in his life. Designer and composer Michael Picton’s three repeating musical themes add to the effect. Sometimes, there is weird organ music like a tape being played and rewound simultaneously; sometimes, there is a clanging, sad piano; and sometimes, the music is all Hollywood—glamorous and orchestrated. At the top of the show, Costello also sings and plays guitar.

Like Marilyn Monroe, Scout’s mother’s body is her business. Since the two parts are played by the same actress, the brave Ashlie Atkinson, the parallels are all intentional. Both women are heartbreakingly lonely ladies who love to drink whiskey and know what their curves are worth in the world of men. Atkinson, though she is no Monroe (who is?), has huge, gorgeous eyes and plenty of curves. Under Paterson’s direction, she makes definite choices with the two characters and makes them distinct. As the play progresses, Marilyn seems more like the deep-voiced, openly emotional Mom than like the flirty girl who giggles when she mounts a bicycle and plays with a little boy’s emotions while pretending she doesn’t know what she’s doing. This is the second play I have seen with Atkinson, and I will gladly see her any time she appears on stage.

As performed by Costello, Scout’s younger and older selves are less distinguishable, a choice that might also be intentional since the show involves a character’s journeys through time. It must be a confusing role for an actor to travel from age to age so rapidly and to stay specific for each part. Costello’s vulnerability and lust are both very believable. He seems both naïve and completely aware of his emotions.

The story’s time travel aspect is interesting, structurally. In 1963 in Hollywood, California, a cop (Robin Mervin) pulls Scout over and wants to search his car to look for stolen items. At the beginning of the show, the scenes between the cop and Scout are long, but they become shorter as the story progresses. Stopping scenes at key points, Cameron adds an interesting suspense to the story line. As the play reveals that Scout is reliving different times in his life over and over, as we do with important memories, one scene between Monroe and Scout is partially repeated and altered. I think Cameron could have even made more use of this device of replaying scenes, adding to Scout’s confusion about time.

Over all, the play is an interesting exploration of a boy’s longing for more of his mother’s love and his obsession with Monroe, which is personal, not the universal “love” we feel for a cultural icon. Though the time traveling is bizarre, the play may be worth seeing to see Atkinson’s Monroe.

Patrick Combs’s Man 1, Bank 0–perhaps against the odds—is a hoot.. Cleverly walking the line between one-man show and stand-up comedy (sprinkled with a little bit of sweet old storytelling), Combs tells a fantastic story about being young and broke (and $45K in debt). On a total goof, he deposits a junk mail check for $95,000 ($95,093.35 to be exact) into his ATM. So convinced of the fact that there is absolutely no way this is anything more than a gag, especially since the words “NON NEGOTIABLE” are boldly written across the top of the check, he signs the back with a smiley face and watches as the money machine eats up his joke.

Thus begins an adventure so unbelievable that Combs constantly reminds the audience that he is telling only the absolute truth. The check cashed! In one of my favorite lines, he says “the ATM took Monopoly money!” And it did. The next time Combs hit the ATM, his receipt told him that his bank balance was over $100K. He finds himself totally consumed by this, so much so that he calls the lovely disembodied lady voice at the bank just to hear his balance regularly.

Convinced that this can’t be real, that a simple letter in the mail can’t resolve all financial woes, he asks for advice from his mom. She tells him he’d better give the money back or “they” will come for him. At night. He calls his brother in Boston who tells him to “get it in cash.” We later learn that his brother was a millionaire during the dot-com bubble, “but only on paper.” Young Patrick then turns to the only place he can think of to learn for sure if this is for real: the Law Library. He finds a book, a GIANT book that is so entrenched in legal-ese that it might as well be written in Chinese. Flipping through this tome, he can’t even find a table of contents, let alone any answers to the legality of his situation. But clever Mr. Combs finds the authors of the book, both law professors, and sets to tracking them down.

After a very funny chain of events, he finally reaches one of the incredibly verbose authors. At home. This cantankerous old lawyer finally gets to the bottom of the issue: “Non-negotiable” means actually not negotiable. Except when written on a check! So the money is his!

Combs is so cute and charming and bursting with life and good intentions, that after the initial thoughts of “how many of these checks could be sitting in my mailbox right now?!” stopped running through my mind, I found myself on the edge of my seat and so on his side. This act, this goof, has made him a champion for anyone who has ever missed a payment on a bank-owned student loan, anyone who is constantly bombarded by credit card applications, anyone with a checking account, for that matter. Combs's story shows that the little guy can put the big guy in a compromising position!

Cashing the junk mail check gave Combs a piece of his fifteen minutes. He became a minor celebrity, appearing on the Montel Williams Show, Hard Copy, and in countless news headlines back in 1995. Most flashy top news stories fizzle out after a few months at best. But Combs has been going for over ten years now. And it seems to me that it his show is as fresh and funny now as ever, most likely due to the boundless energy behind the performer, and a few additions (new for the New York run: a short film of “Where Are They Now” clips, including the recent whereabouts of Mom, the brother and the crazy lawyer, among others). Kudos, Mr. Combs!

The name Lalon Phokir is not one immediately recognizable to an American audience, but ostensibly Sudipto Chatterjee aims to change that with his biographical production of Lalon entitled Man of the Heart. The show, which follows the life of the 19th century Bengali sage, integrates much of what Lalon himself wrote, alongside bits of information about the life, and myth, of Lalon.

Playwright/performer Chatterjee admits to a lifelong obsession with Lalon, which, given the details of the mystic’s life, is not that surprising. Lalon lived to be 116, and came of age in India during the beginnings of British colonization. Though biographies of him conflict, Lalon apparently was born a Hindu and became a Muslim after a near-death experience with smallpox and his adoption by a Muslim father. In spite of his being a poor farmer, he attracted thousands of followers in his lifetime, becoming well known for his popular but arcane songs. He also was well known for his reluctance to define himself as either Muslim or Hindu, saying that it was the heart that matters in worship. He embraced both Hindu and Muslim religious beliefs in his highly spiritual compositions.

Chatterjee puts tremendous faith in Lalon’s successful merging of the religious messages of Islam and Hinduism, which so often violently oppose each other. He sees hope and urgency in exposing Lalon to a larger, modern audience. However, while the message may be urgent, it is not coming through clearly in this piece. Man of the Heart suffers from a muddled text, which leads to an often unclear meaning.

Lalon sings in riddles, whose intended esotericism has both a covert and a religious value. His koan-like verses hide his message from those who are not intended or prepared to receive their true meaning—especially authority figures in the new Imperial government occupying India. But the riddles of this play are less effective. The piece works best when Lalon’s songs (performed beautifully in Bengali by Chatterjee, with supertitles) speak for themselves. He was a master of making anchored irreconcilable differences seem weightless, and his works stand as a testament to that. But Man of the Heart lacks Lalon’s own strength and subtlety. It carries itself heavily, lumbering from a dense scholarly analysis of the mystic’s meaning and relevance to strange inexplicable tangents on colonialism or tantric sex. There is a huge amount of seemingly unrelated information, with few satisfying transitions to help explain them.

Part of the problem with Man of the Heart is that it seems to want to do too much with Lalon. It wants both to explain him and to leave him inexplicable. It takes on not only his biography, but his place in history. It tackles his conflicting mythologies and his most opaque religious texts. An hour of Chatterjee performing his songs would be enormously gratifying. However, after two hours of jumping from biography to enactments of Lalon’s poems to piecemeal video footage in projection, it becomes confusing and tedious to try to make sense of it all. In a play that has no clear beginning, middle, or end, it is enormously difficult to feel compelled forward through the entire piece. It seems the same thing could have been compacted into half the time, and to greater effect.

Chatterjee, and director Suman Mukherjee, are not wrong in supposing that the inspiring life and works of Lalon are stageworthy, nor are they wrong in expecting how much modern audiences could benefit from Lalon’s message. But this high-aiming production somehow misses the mark, leaving much of what might be gained from Lalon’s insights to remain in the dark for a while longer. Perhaps it takes too much on, and focusing on a smaller chunk of Lalon Phokir could make this production as luminescent as its promise? Or perhaps something was just lost in translation.

Filled with profoundly cynical statements about the state of American politics, college education, the entertainment industry, and 21st century America in general, Sarah Schulman’s Manic Flight Reaction still wants to have faith in human nature. The play never resolves this central contradiction, which makes it unsatisfying; there’s a heated argument going on throughout the play, but in the end no one has changed at all.

The case for optimism about humankind lies in the hands of Marge, a bisexual performance artist who has finally finished her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and landed a teaching job in Illinois that comes, for the first time in her life, with health insurance and a steady paycheck. Still carrying a torch for the slightly psychotic actress who’s recently dumped her, Marge has taken up with Albert, a puppyish graduate student. Despite the challenges of her life to date—the death of her mother, abandonment by her father, single parenthood, financial struggle, and a never-fulfilled quest for love—Marge still truly believes in open communication, trust, and the essential goodness of human connections.

The case for cynicism lies with most of the other characters in the play. Marge’s daughter, Grace, a junior at Hampshire College, is majoring in Alienation Studies and trying to figure out how to be both nice and ruthless—though if she had to choose, ruthless would win. Grace’s boyfriend, Luke, the son of the CEO of Union Carbide in Bhopal, has fame as his only career goal. Luke’s looking for a senior project that will put him on the map—and decides, with Grace’s help, to make a documentary about Marge, whom he sees as a sad throwback to a pre-ruthless age. When Luke and Grace discover that Marge’s first love, Cookie, is now the platitude-spouting wife of a Republican presidential candidate, they stage a meeting between them that has enormous marketing possibilities.

On top of all this, throw into the mix a tabloid journalist, who arrives to interview Marge about an upcoming Todd Haynes movie based on the life and suicide of Marge’s mother. Not only is the media-averse Marge unaware of the film, but she’s been lying to Grace for her whole life about the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death.

One eruption of Marge’s past into the present with hugely public repercussions might have been made plausible; two are both convoluted and a strain on credibility. And the convolution factor is not helped by the tendency of the characters to engage in blatant psychological exposition, explaining every thought, mental state, and intention. It feels as if Schulman doesn’t trust her audience to get any subtext—which is a shame, because she’s at her most incisive and witty when she resists the temptation to over-explain. (My favorite moment is an exchange between Marge and Cookie: COOKIE: There is a cure for homosexuality. MARGE: What is it? COOKIE: Fame.)

Much is revealed, explained, and discussed in the course of the play—but in the end, Luke and Grace go off to seek fame and fortune, the journalist goes away with her scoop, we never find out what happens to Cookie after the scandal breaks, and Marge remains alone with her ideals. The only one who seems truly affected by the events of the play is Albert, who finally learns to do his own laundry.

The actors do their best to rise above the wordiness and the psychological exposition, with varying degrees of success. Deirdre O’Connell is stunningly good as Marge. Her grounded, subtle portrayal turns a character who could easily become Pollyanna into a strong woman who has consciously chosen—and continues to choose—to live according to her ideals, even if she’s made a lot of mistakes along the way. Yes, Marge, too, tends to wax philosophical at the slightest provocation, but O’Connell makes her sound genuine and passionate even when quoting Walter Benjamin.

Jessica Collins as Grace and Michael Esper as Luke both find the humor and the charm in their hopelessly self-centered adolescent characters, but both struggle with the more heavy-handed pronouncements. Molly Price’s Cookie is both written and performed as a caricature; Price fares slightly better when playing Marge’s mother in a flashback, but still seems over the top.

Director Trip Cullman, too, seems a little stifled by the speechifying; much of the physical production feels rather static—except for a perhaps unnecessary but physically beautiful flashback near the end. The richly detailed set, by Louisa Thompson, hits just the right note, but so much of the play takes place in stillness, with one character talking and the others listening intently, that the set feels underused.

Schulman is also a novelist, and I think perhaps this story might fare better as a novel. I can easily see how pronouncements that feel overblown when stated baldly by a character would seem wryly ironic in the voice of an omniscient narrator. As a play, though, Manic Flight Reaction has both too much and too little to say.

It would, I think, be difficult for anyone not to get emotionally invested in a play about Fairness. Thus, an audience is willing to accept a great deal of artifice. In the case of Paul Grellong’s play, Manuscript, the injustice is plagiarism, and the plot requires a significant suspension of disbelief.

Chris and David are two freshman at two Ivy League schools (Yale and Harvard, respectively) who have been best friends since childhood. One night during winter break, Elizabeth, Chris’s new girlfriend (also a Yale freshman and a published novelist) joins them to meet for the first time David (a fledgling novelist) and to smoke a little opium before a night on the town. Unbeknownst to Chris, the two writers have actually met before: at a journalism workshop, where Elizabeth slept with David and then stole an essay of his, reworked and published it under her name— in The New York Times.

As David vacillates between reconciliation and revenge, the pivotal plot element arrives, via a set of bizarre circumstances: a new manuscript by a very recently-deceased Salinger-esque author comes into their possession and the three must decide what to do with it. (I’ve tried to keep my synopsis vague, so as not to give away the finite number and variety of secret allegiances that are exposed.) But what follows is a battle royale between Ethics and Opportunism. Guess which one wins?

The play is as black-and-white as it sounds, some of the plot points are hard to swallow, and there is a strange five-minute stretch at the end in which virtually nothing dramatic happens (no reversal; no new information, in fact). But the main event is still engaging. Credit for this is definitely due to Bob Balaban, who directs this New York premiere. He keeps this loquacious comedy crackling and coaxes a terrific performance out of Marin Ireland. Her embodiment of the villainous Elizabeth transcends the whiny, ingratiating dialogue available to her. She is gregarious, bright, and attractive—her Liz seems by far the most intelligent of the three characters and, denouement aside, the most likely to succeed.

Ireland’s stage-mates, Jeffrey Carlson and Pablo Schreiber (as Chris and David, respectively) are less sympathetic—less believable, in fact. Both men’s performances are actorly: Carlson’s elocution (his full-voiced and excessive articulation) sheds a harsh light on Grellong’s less-than-lush dialogue, which is made to be used more than admired. Schreiber affects a fiercely nebbishy wielding of words that is distracting and, from what I could tell, not necessitated by the text (David makes a couple of stock references to anti-Semitism, but that particular phenomenon is so far removed from the plot that I am surprised the lines have not been eliminated).

One other performance dynamic I found confusing is this: there is a strong homoeroticism between the two characters that is unaddressed in this fairly outspoken play. Both men have had sex with Elizabeth, but both seem strangely sexually stand-offish, and when it’s just the guys, there is a tension that is not satisfyingly resolved (or unresolved). It was unclear to me if this was an intentional directorial decision, or a more nebulous occurrence. Nonetheless, I found it distracting.

Still, the unacknowledged appropriation of another’s words, voice, or identity is such a violation that we all can relate to in some way, no matter how naïve or jaded we might be. It is very satisfying to watch a plagiarist get what s/he deserves, and that is—along with Marin Ireland— ultimately what makes Manuscript a play worth seeing. For, as with any drama that deals with an ethical dilemma, you may be surprised at the solution for which you find yourself rooting.

Marion Bridge should be—if the there's any justice in TheatreLand—the play that makes stars out of Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor and rising actress Susan Louise O'Connor. Beautifully directed by Susan Fenichell and splendidly mounted by Urban Stages, it's a terrifically entertaining and engaging work. I highly recommend it.

It's about three sisters who have reunited at their family home, after a long time apart, to care for their dying mother. The eldest, Agnes, is a struggling actress who lives in Toronto and is unhappy to have to return to her roots here on remote Cape Breton Island. Theresa, the middle sister, is a Catholic nun in a farming order; a natural peacemaker, she's determined to see the clan through this crisis. The youngest sister is Louise; she still lives at home, though without a job (at least lately): she is, as her sisters forthrightly put it, "strange."

As their time together passes, all manner of family secrets and recriminations emerge (or re-emerge). Agnes is angry at her mother because when she was a teenager, she became pregnant and was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Theresa is exasperated by Agnes's drinking and by her constant swearing. Louise has become, apparently, addicted to TV soap operas; she also has found religion, and her sisters are a little concerned about her close relationship with a "butch" (Agnes's term) member of her prayer group who drives a truck. All three deal with their conflicted feelings about their father, who abandoned the family long ago and now lives in a mansion with a sexy young woman whom Agnes and Theresa both call "Lolita." And there's a lot of lingering resentment about a family trip, decades ago, to a town called Marion Bridge. Agnes was disappointed because this place, a favorite of their mother's, proved so lackluster. Louise—though the other two have forgotten this—is still nursing a grudge because she wasn't allowed to go, on account of having the chicken pox.

More—much more—surfaces as the play progresses. MacIvor has created three vivid, strikingly contrasting women in this family, and in the hands of the very capable actresses Henny Russell (Agnes), Christa Scott-Reed (Theresa), and Susan Louise O'Connor (Louise), they become loving, appealing, hugely sympathetic presences. Russell nicely balances Agnes's hardened veneer (the sometime drunk who mourns all the lost opportunities of her life) with the warm, caring woman that she generally keeps hidden underneath—there's a gorgeous moment, for example, in which Agnes and the childlike Louise are playing cards, and Russell lets us see the precise instant when Agnes decides to let her baby sister win. Scott-Reed deftly navigates Theresa's transition from almost-annoying goody-two-shoes to a more complicated, accepting, growing woman trying to negotiate her dwindling faith and her conflicting desires. Good as both of these two are, O'Connor nevertheless threatens to steal the show out from under them, time and again, in the admittedly showier role of Louise. O'Connor brings massive warmth, naiveté, determination, and precocious wisdom to this character—one she was born to play, as fans of her work in previous MacIvor shows such as Never Swim Alone and See Bob Run will surely attest. O'Connor gets some of the play's choicest material in her direct-address monologue (all three sisters are assigned one), advising us to live life the way she likes to drive her truck—completely out in the open and in the moment, ready to embrace whatever she happens upon without thinking about what's behind or ahead of her.

The story of these three women is easy to enjoy and easy to get lost it; but MacIvor is no conventional storyteller, and as I watched Marion Bridge I became aware early on that for those theatregoers interested in digging beneath the surface of this homey drama, there's some buried treasure waiting to be discovered. What MacIvor does here—shrewdly, subtly—is to create a soap opera (a cannily engaging one) and at the same time, explore why such a story, for all its excess and strained plausibility, is so appealing and so necessary to us. Agnes says, exploding the mythology of her glamorous life in the theatre:

I'm just trying to make some kind of story. I've spent so long trying to tell other people's stories. Telling stories in dirty basements with people who think crazy means brilliant and brilliant means poor. Telling stories I don't even understand. I want my own story.

And Louise, disarmingly, states the playwright's purpose very directly at the end of her monologue, when she says to us:

I suppose some people would say it's strange for me to be standing here talking to you.
(Long pause.)
And I suppose some people'd say it's strange for you to be sitting there listening.

We have to listen; we can't help it. MacIvor knows this. And in this deceptively simple, brilliant play, he shows us why theatre—all stories, in fact—are so essential to our survival.

A hundred years from now, when "Ann Coulter Tonight!" (or "Al Franken Tonight!"; choose your poison, as it were) turns up on Broadway, is anybody going to be impressed?

My point being, where America once produced humorists, all we seem now to have are pundits. Mark Twain Tonight!, Hal Holbrook's gift to 21st century New Yorkers for—alas!—18 performances only, proves the point in ways you may not be expecting. What do we know about Mark Twain today? The obvious stuff: that he wrote Huckleberry Finn, and other books; that he was a wit. But I certainly didn't appreciate how presciently profound Twain was. Holbrook brings to life a side of this man that is almost breathtakingly edifying to witness at this particular moment. This Mark Twain Tonight! is about a great humanist whose disillusionment was turning him into a great pessimist. The searingly honest observations he makes about the human race feel so contemporary that they constantly stop us in our tracks. Who is so willing, so able, to tell us the truth about ourselves in 2005?

Boy, do we need Mark Twain right now. We need Holbrook too: this actor who pretty much popularized the idea of a one-man show in the first place (in the earliest incarnation of this piece,  about 50 (!) years ago) is still just about matchless in executing same. There's no set to speak of; the simplest of costumes; the meager props of a good storyteller (a cigar, an ashtray, a water pitcher, and a glass). No set-up either: Holbrook as Twain ambles out casually, introduces himself with alacrity and good-humor, and starts to talk. We know that everything he says is something that Twain wrote (and the sources are helpfully listed in the program). But it feels like a conversation—a one-sided one, with a brilliant, articulate, provocative old friend. It's a pleasure and a privilege to listen. Trappings, context, gimmickry would just get in the way.

Holbrook's Twain delivers what's expected by enacting a selection from Huckleberry Finn (about Huck's pangs of conscience when he fails to turn in the runaway slave, Jim, who has become his friend), and also by cagily jesting about a variety of commonplaces, from the gullibility of  his peers (a throwaway joke about a tour guide in Genoa, Italy who showed visitors two "authentic" skulls of Christopher Columbus) to his own professed proclivities for bad habits (a reminiscence about a time when he was sick and two different friends told him to drink a quart of whiskey as a cure—that's half a gallon, he concludes with a devilish hint of a grin).

But what's on Holbrook's mind is more serious than any of that. The actor has made a very conscious choice to bring his perennial show back to New York this summer, and the material he's included is very deliberately selected. There are two important themes. First, Twain is compelled to warn us against demagoguery in its two most insidious forms, the religious zealot and the politician. (A close third, he contends, is the journalist.) In vignettes that are only half-humorous, he disarmingly chats about how all Republicans are insane, but only Democrats seem to know it—and how all Democrats are insane, but only Republicans know that. In a moment that's eerie (and was met by almost stunned silence), he opines that a man who is convinced that his religion is the only true one will do anything to convince his neighbors of this—he might even blow them up.

But the real heart of what Holbrook-as-Twain wants to tell us is not cautionary. What he wants—what is true of his life story, and what we must take from it—is for us to think for ourselves. "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform," he tells us. The passage from Huckleberry Finn has not been chosen randomly: Twain is determined to make us confront conventional wisdom and decide on our own if it makes any sense.

Holbrook makes it feel not like a lecture, despite the less-than-lighthearted timbre of his particular message; and anyway, to be in the presence of such well-thought-out and elegantly articulated darned good sense is a treat.

Holbrook turns 80 this year (he's delightfully spry, I'm glad to report). This may be the last time Mark Twain Tonight! plays on Broadway; it's legendary, and deservedly so, and for that reason alone worth attending. But the urgent message of this great humane actor and his great humane subject is downright essential.

It’s easy to see why Scott McPherson’s now-classic play, Marvin’s Room, has remained so enduringly popular: it’s a tearjerker. This comically black tale of a dysfunctional family that reunites in the face of looming tragedy mixes twisted humor and melancholy drama in a skillful way, resulting in a frequently funny and unexpectedly touching script that offers some juicy roles and runs the emotional gamut. A play like this is catnip for an outfit like the T. Schreiber Studio, a professional acting school that produces an annual season of shows for its current students. If only their current revival of Marvin’s Room were up to the task of delivering everything this play has to offer. Unfortunately, the cast lacks the necessary blend of craft, talent, and experience needed to pull it off.

Spinster-ish Bessie has spent the last twenty-or-so years caring for her elderly father, Marvin (she half-jokingly claims he’s been taking that long to die), and watching after her doddering aunt, Ruth, in their Florida home. Ruth, a devoted fan of the soaps, has a bad back and shouldn’t fall asleep while sitting down, but often does anyway. (At one point she implores Bessie to tell her when she’s sleeping because she doesn’t always know.) When Bessie is diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, her long-estranged sister, Lee, arrives from Ohio to help her out. Lee, a single mom and a goodtime gal, has problems of her own: her oldest son, Hank, has been institutionalized for burning down their house, and his erratic, unpredictable behavior keeps driving her potential suitors off. (Their relationship could, at best, be called fractured.) Nevertheless, she whisks Hank and her younger son, Charlie (a bookish nerd), off to Florida in the hopes that one of them will be a bone marrow match for Bessie.

With this much emotional tumult going on, Marvin’s Room could easily turn into one of Aunt Ruth’s cheesy soap operas. But McPherson avoids the melodramatic reversals those programs rely on, opting instead for more plausible and well-earned manipulations (think Terms of Endearment). The weepy parts are easier to take because of the play’s somewhat absurdist humor, exemplified best in a story Aunt Ruth tells about a nurse who’s been hired to take care of Marvin during Bessie’s brief hospital stay. When asked how she explained the nurse’s presence to him (apparently, Marvin is confused by the disruption of his normal routine), Aunt Ruth simply says, “I pretend not to notice her.” Her rationale is that if she ignores the nurse, then Marvin will hopefully think he’s hallucinating (which, to her mind, is better than telling him the truth). Whenever the nurse lifts him out of bed and carries him to the bathroom, Aunt Ruth tells him, “Look, Marvin—you’re flying!”

Lee is also a conveyor of McPherson’s warped drollness. She doesn’t like to tell people that Hank is in a mental institution, preferring the terms “loony bin” or “nuthouse” instead (she thinks they’re both better for Hank because they lessen the gravity of the situation). Later, while visiting a potential assisted living facility for Marvin, Lee empties an entire complimentary candy dish into her purse. The visit has been a total waste of their time, she tells Bessie (it turns out the place is too expensive), so they might as well get something out of it. (McPherson even extends his off-kilter perspective to self-righteous Bessie. Mortified by Lee’s blatant theft, she immediately dumps her spare change into the dish to pay for the candy. A brief, but funny, battle of wills ensues.)

With such a wide palette of emotional colors to play with, it’s a shame that the cast of Marvin’s Room doesn’t have more fun with them. With only one or two exceptions, almost all of the performances are deadly earnest, but lack urgency. The actors tentatively commit to their choices, and speed through entire scenes mechanically without landing their key moments. Simply put, there is very little nuance to the acting here. The main exception is Jill Bianchini, who hits all the right notes as Lee. Adair Jameson nails Aunt Ruth’s funniness, but fails to mine the role for more richness or dimension. As Bessie, Noelle Holly is only as good as the person she’s acting opposite. When paired with some of the less accomplished cast members, this produces some mixed results. But once Bessie and Lee are reunited, and the play starts to focus on them, this Marvin’s Room hits its stride. Holly holds her own with Bianchini nicely, and she achieves real impact during a powerful Act II speech in which Bessie tells the story of her one true love.

Even though he’s unable to elicit a uniformly high level of performance from the cast, director Peter Jensen demonstrates understanding of the play through physical staging and spatial relations among the characters. Lighting designer Peter Hoerburger and costume designer Astrid Brucker make fine contributions, but the real behind-the-scenes triumph belongs to set designer Ryan Scott, whose multi-purpose set makes the intimate Gloria Maddox Theatre look and feel bigger than it is.

Having seen previous work of theirs, I know that the T. Schreiber Studio, a consistently reliable producing organization, is capable of much better work than this. I’m sure they will rise to the occasion more successfully the next time around.

In response to vague and unsubstantiated threats of aggression, the government has hastily enacted some laws to help them prosecute the parties they believe to be responsible. One of the parties—an overthrown monarch of a smaller nation—has been imprisoned and now awaits a certain death sentence, despite protestations that the tribunal was illegal and in violation of international law."Suspect a justice / That seems to work so to the state's advantage," says the prisoner. "O, poor victim, when the men who wrote the law / Are prosecutors, judge, and jury too!"

No, it's not a play about Saddam Hussein and post-9/11 America; it's Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller's 1801 tragedy about Mary, Queen of Scots. In Michael Feingold's clear translation and Eleanor Holdridge's equally accessible staging, the parallels between then and now are illuminated in riveting fashion, though: the scenes of behind-the-scenes intrigue and manipulations remind us that long before there was Watergate or Plamegate there was plenty to be suspicious of in the halls of power. Kudos to the Pearl Theatre Company for showing us this fine and neglected classic, and giving us a chance to appreciate how timely and useful it is.

The play condenses actual incidents from English history surrounding the rivalry between Mary Stuart, one-time Queen of Scotland, and Elizabeth Tudor, her cousin, now Queen Elizabeth I. (There's a nice summary of the historical events here.) As the play opens, Mary has been tried by an English kangaroo court for her alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth (which she denies), and she has, as expected, been sentenced to death. But Queen Elizabeth is reluctant to carry out the sentence, and not only because she feels some sort of tenuous familial bond for Mary; she worries that the people will turn against her if she is seen to be the murderer of her cousin-queen. At the same time, as long as the Catholic Mary lives, she remains an authentic threat to Elizabeth's grip on the throne (in the eyes of the Catholic Church, Henry's marriage to Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn was illegitimate, making Elizabeth a bastard and Mary of Scotland the rightful heir to Henry's kingdom).

Half of Mary Stuart details, with appropriate suspense and machination, the endless plotting among Elizabeth and her closest advisors to try to deal with the problem of the imprisoned Scottish queen. It's fascinating stuff, offering a portrait of Elizabeth as a vain, preening woman and a shrewd manipulator of the men around her—the quintessential politician in a court filled with them. The other half of the play tracks Mary's journey toward a sort of martyrdom, as efforts by friends old and new fail to win her the reprieve she dearly covets. In the end, Schiller (or at least Schiller by way of Feingold) seems to marvel at Elizabeth's scheming pragmatism but to genuinely admire Mary's idealistic nobility as she courageously marches to the block with a clear conscience and a piously pure soul.

Along the way, Schiller famously invents an episode that never actually happened: a meeting between the two rival queens. It's a great scene, positively the dramatic highpoint of the play, and demonstrates definitively the thing that heretofore only Mary and Elizabeth themselves seem to have realized—that they, and only they, are authentic matches for one another. The sparks really do fly when they have their confrontation.

Inhabiting the two regal roles are the reigning queens of the Pearl Theatre Company's resident acting company. Joanne Camp is alternately restrained and passionate as Mary, while Carol Schultz emphasizes Elizabeth's vanity and deviousness. Their scene together is splendid, while separately they firmly anchor the rest of the proceedings effortlessly.

Mary's supporters include her lifelong nurse Hannah (played with understated sincerity by Beth Dixon), and the rash and romantic young Mortimer, an Englishman who turns his back on his country to rescue the wronged Scottish queen from her prison (portrayed by Sean McNall with requisite fervor and immaturity). By Elizabeth's side stand the stalwart anti-Catholic Lord Burleigh (Dominic Cuskern, in a stern, committed performance) and the wiser Earl of Shrewsberry (solidly played by Richard Bourg). Caught in between are a variety of underlings, well represented by the hapless William Davison (Noel Velez), whose lack of authority is ruthlessly exploited by his monarch; along with the treacherous Earl of Leicester (Bryan Hicks), onetime lover of Mary and now favorite of Elizabeth.

Other noteworthy players include Edward Seamon as Mary's reluctant and merciful jailer Sir Amyas Paulet and T.J. Edwards as Mary's steward, Melvil.

As they so often do, the Pearl gives us here a straightforward and unencumbered look at a classic but lesser-known play; Mary Stuart is not a work that gets produced very often, and I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to see it in this commendable production. If we can find in it some echoes of our own current political circumstance, well, that just confirms that history repeats itself—seemingly over and over again.

The Pearl Theatre brings us a solid production of one of Shakespeare’s less frequently produced plays, Measure for Measure. Director Beatrice Terry doesn’t give us any particular spin on the piece, the setting is the Pearl’s seasonal festival stage, and Frank Champa’s costumes are roughly “period.” Without any conceptual accoutrements, it is left to Shakespeare to shine, and he does so admirably.

The plot centers on Duke Vincentio, a leader who feels out of touch with his subjects. So, he decides to take a sabbatical from authority. He leaves his lieutenant Angelo in command, telling him he is going away, and then stays behind disguised as a friar. A number of the Duke’s decrees, what we would call today “Blue Laws,” have been left on the books, though no one has been paying any attention to them. Chief among these is a ban on out-of-wedlock fornication. This is highly problematic: despite the fact that the penalty for transgression is death, bordellos are flourishing, bawds are thriving, and maidens' bellies are growing.

Now, the Duke has not enforced this statute for over 16 years, but as soon as Angelo is in charge he decides the law is the law and sentences to death the latest perpetrator, one Claudio. However, Claudio is no mere lothario; he actually loves his love Juliet and intends to marry her. Claudio’s sister, a novitiate named Isabella, is persuaded to intercede with Angelo on her brother’s behalf. Angelo, a heretofore puritanical governmental cog, becomes infatuated with Isabella ( “What, do I love her, that I desire to hear her speak again and feast upon her eyes?”). In a remarkably rapid move of hypocritical gumption, Angelo declares he will free Claudio if Isabella sleeps with him. This creates a moral dilemma for Isabella, who is not inclined to give up her virginity for her brother’s life. Luckily, the Duke is around to observe, pull strings, and finally set all aright after instigating a typical Elizabethan bed-switching scheme.

The Pearl’s production highlights the fact that this is a comedy, without interpolating jokes or shtick. The play really is a primer for playwrights on the use of dramatic irony to comic effect. Terry lets the Bard do the work and the inherent humor comes through. The chief comics are Dominic Cuskern as Lucio and Edward Seamon as Pompy. These Pearl stalwarts don’t try too hard, they don’t push for laughs—they simply are the characters, and to great effect. Cuskern in particular is marvelous in his portrayal—he is a gifted Shakespearean who clearly knows what he is doing and is great fun to watch.

The production seems a fairly uncut version, coming in at two hours and forty minutes, including intermission. For my taste, I wish Terry had found another fifteen minutes to cut, but the performance does move along and the plot moves and twists enough to keep us engaged. On the whole, I am not sure what Terry wanted us to come away with—I would not say she has put her own stamp on the play. But perhaps it is just enough to let old Bill Shakespeare do his thing. After all, an examination (and ultimate rejection) of the Biblical tenet of answering an eye for an eye and measure for measure is certainly relevant. Further, it is nice to be reminded that, like Angelo, we should not judge lest we be judged.

I didn't get the point of David Grimm's new play Measure for Pleasure. Its title reminds me (and, I'll bet, many people) of one of Shakespeare's plays, but there's nothing in the script alluding to that particular work, although the entire piece is pastiche: why send the audience off on the wrong course before the show even begins, I wonder?

Grimm's target, or inspiration, is Restoration Comedy; the idea of Measure for Pleasure seems to be to create a brand new 18th century sex farce/comedy of manners in the style of The Country Wife or The Rivals. Sir Peter Lustforth, oh so bored with his plain but oversexed middle-aged wife Lady Vanity, is lusting after pretty young Hermione Goode. Hermione lives with a puritanical aunt, Dame Stickle, who disapproves of her romance with handsome Captain Dick Dashwood. With Sir Peter's help, Dashwood disguises himself as a music master and moves into the Lustforth household: the former is hoping that Dashwood will woo Lady Vanity, thus freeing Sir Peter to pursue Hermione; but Dashwood, unbeknownst to his friend, is planning to court Hermione in this new persona.

Meanwhile, Will Blunt, Sir Peter's valet, has romantic difficulties of his own: he is in love with Molly Tawdry, a transvestite prostitute. Will helps Molly get a position as Lady Vanity's maid, with the unforeseen result that Molly meets and falls in love with Dick Dashwood.

There's also a secret society (that actually existed, according to the program), where Sir Peter and his lascivious middle-aged associates hold orgies.

Grimm doesn't rock the boat structurally, so the final outcome isn't particularly in doubt. Grimm does rock the boat sociopolitically, or at least he could, by having as his main pair of lovers two gay proletarian men. But the novelty of their match-up isn't particularly acknowledged in the script; everyone on stage seems entirely comfortable with Will and Molly living happily ever after, which is lovely but not especially pointed, except perhaps in the subtlest of ways.

Grimm's script is sprightly but overlong: the poetry isn't arresting enough to be of more than passing interest, and frankly by the end of each act, I was getting fidgety in my chair. The thing is filled with dirty jokes—too many for its own good, I fear. When the big second act laugh comes from having a repressed old maiden lady wander on stage holding a dildo, well, that suggests something along the lines of desperation, doesn't it.

Director Peter DuBois offers a serviceable staging, but only that. The actors are generally fine, with Euan Morton's Molly and Michael Stuhlbarg's Will a genuinely appealing romantic couple to root for, and Emily Swallow's Hermione a beautiful and forceful ingenue. The scene-stealer is the accomplished Suzanne Bertish as the unlovely Lady Vanity; she's not sufficiently matched by Wayne Knight as Sir Peter. Saxon Palmer is handsome but ultimately a cipher as Dashwood.

Measure for Pleasure evidences a solid writing talent, but its apparent lack of purpose—as satire, let's say—makes me wonder what Grimm was hoping to accomplish in writing it. The notion of putting a gay relationship inside a classical framework seems to suggest all manner of interesting possibilities in this year of gay marriage and Brokeback Mountain backlash. But none come to fruition here: a pity.

If you’re looking for a powerful, viscerally exciting theatre experience, head to the Classical Theatre of Harlem for their production of Medea. Euripides’s harrowing drama of a woman’s bloody revenge on her husband is not for the faint-of-heart in any production, but this version, adapted and directed by CTH artistic director Alfred Preisser, raises more goosebumps and back-of-neck hairs than usual.

The spookiness begins when huge sliding doors rumble open to allow the audience to enter the theatre, an abandoned-feeling open industrial space bordered by menacing chain-link fence and scaffolding. Members of the female chorus, with eerily painted faces, stare at each person entering. The intensity of the mood continues for the next hour, with ritualistic dancing, chanting, and singing, and blood-curdling screams. The sound of daggers scraping against each other punctuates the invective, and Death, portrayed as a graceful, slinky dancer, watches from a high platform. An agitated old nurse with a trembling voice predicts that something terrible is going to happen, and this theatrical pot is ready to boil. Medea makes a dramatic entrance and the ride begins.

Preisser’s thrilling production allows the audience to connect directly to the characters’ emotions and predicaments by setting the events in a world that incorporates elements of the ancient, contemporary, and futuristic. We don’t know exactly where or when this Medea is taking place, but the personal dynamics and the patriarchal hierarchy are all too recognizable. The audience also feels immersed in the drama because the action literally happens around them. The nurse may sit next to your chair to listen to an argument taking place in the center arena, King Kreon’s robes may brush past you as he enters, and you may have to turn around to witness Medea’s terrible final act right behind you.

The basic story is familiar to most: Medea’s husband, Jason, for whom she has made many sacrifices including betraying her father and the people of her homeland, intends to abandon Medea and marry Princess Glauke, daughter of King Kreon. Kreon attempts to banish Medea, but she persuades him to grant her an extra day in Corinth, during which she confronts Jason. He assures her that their two children will be raised as royalty under his care, but this only fans the flames of Medea’s jealousy. She takes her revenge on Jason by poisoning Princess Glauke and murdering their two sons. She escapes by magic to Athens, where she has been granted safety.

The conciseness of Preisser’s adaptation of Euripides makes the impact of the drama all the more powerful. The published running time is 70 minutes, but the performance I saw was a quick hour. The “timeless” setting allows Preisser to get away with some pretty contemporary-sounding phrases that truly get the point across. It’s hard for one to imagine doing what Medea does in the end, but when Jason barks “I don’t need you, bitch,” the utter disrespect and naked hatred in those words makes you understand a little of what drives this woman to murder.

The talented members of the cast make a tight ensemble. April Yvette Thompson is small of stature, but as Medea her reserve of emotional power and her expressive voice make a big impression. Lawrence Winslow’s Jason, with his powerful physique having gone slightly to seed, is a self-centered man facing midlife crisis. As Kreon, Earle Hyman’s magnetic presence and sonorous voice are indeed kingly. Husky-voiced Zainab Jah is a lithe, slinky, disturbing embodiment of Death, and her erotically-charged dance with Medea is an eloquent depiction of the fateful moment when Medea decides to kill her two small boys. The boys are played by Brian Gilbert and Laron Griffin, two young actors whose concentration and commitment show promise; they also get to exercise their powerful lungs in the murder scene. Juanita Howard’s nurse is the embodiment of worry. The ensemble, which includes three haunting Fates and a female chorus who observe and comment on the tragic events, provides much of the tense atmosphere with movement, chanting, and singing. The only weakness in any of the performances is that occasionally a word or two is lost due to volume or articulation.

Preisser has assembled a creative team whose contributions all are totally in line with his vision of Medea. Christopher A. Thomas’s setting is appropriately cold and bleak, and his rolling scaffold unit that becomes Medea’s “chariot” at the end is an inspired solution. Kimberly Glennon’s costumes, like the adaptation of the play itself, effectively combine the ancient and the modern. K.J. Hardy’s lighting design is alternately stark and moody, plunging us into the mood of each sequence. Much of the suspense of the piece is created by Kelvyn Bell’s music and Tracy Jack’s earthy choreography.

Language can hold so much power. The English language, the one I know best, can be wrought into lyrical punches in the face. At the same time, much of our language has become far removed from what it was originally meant to symbolize. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy. This is especially true when it comes to an archaic language. Much of the bite has been lost over time because we simply don’t get idioms of the period. Joseph Goodrich, in his new translation of Euripedes’s Medea, attempts to bridge this gap between ancient and modern idioms in order to recreate the “bite” of the original text. In many ways he is very successful, while in others he takes the idea of the idiom just a bit too far.

If you know anything about the plot of Medea then you know that Medea, jilted wife of Jason, in an act of horrific domestic violence, kills their two young boys. But of course there’s a lot more to it than that. The play picks up at the point where Medea is in a pit of despair that quickly turns into rage. Her husband Jason has decided he needs to make a grab for more power and leaves Medea for the daughter of Creon, the King of Corinth. Creon has ordered her to leave the country because of the wild threats she has been making against himself, his daughter and of course Jason. She convinces Creon to let her stay one more day. As it turns out, that is all the time she needs to set her plan in motion. She wants Jason to feel her pain and she accomplishes that and then some. By analogy, Jason slaps her and she in turn eviscerates him. In this case what they say about a woman scorned is so true it’s kind of scary!

It’s a powerful story and I’m sure ancient Greek audiences were catharting all over the place but to a modern audience this sort of domestic violence can be seen on the news on any given night. So Goodrich’s idea to update the language in an attempt to pack it with punch is a good one. He certainly succeeds in bringing out a little more ironic and dark humor in his text. I giggled in a few places where I never had before. There are also some exchanges, particularly between Medea and Jason, that struck me as more real due to Goodrich’s crisp modern dialogue. However, his use of idiom at times goes a little over the top. At one point, for example, Medea calls Jason a “lying, cheating, gash-hound” and I just had to laugh (and not in the good way). He also uses the words "fuck" and "cunt" a bit excessively. These words don’t shock me and don’t offer the text “bite”—they merely make me think that there must be a better way to say what he’s trying to say. A few well-placed “fucks” would have been more powerful. To me, modernization doesn’t mean you have to debase the language.

Ernest Johns’s direction is tight and his vision of highlighting the horrific tragedy with blood and passion is clear. However, the overall acting style seems a bit presentational; that is it lacks connections to true emotion. Goodrich’s dialogue is realistic and modern but Johns’s direction doesn’t complement it with realistic acting. So I never really felt anything for any of the main characters. I also never really got a sense that Medea and Jason were ever really in love. This could be due to lack of chemistry between the two actors.

Ramona Floyd is certainly a talented actor. She has moments as Medea that are striking, but I just didn’t make a connection. I was continually pulled out of the moment by her recurring use of rage in her voice to present her passion instead of just being passionate. Pascal Beauboeuf plays Jason with a little more connection to real emotions that fall in line with the dialogue a little better. Angus Hepburn plays a strong Creon and Mickey Ryan is solid as Medea’s only ally Aegeus. Lynn Marie Macy plays a rather breathy one-woman chorus while Elsie James steals some laughs as the Nanny. Taylor Wilcox’s speech as the Messenger with all the bad news is singularly terrific.

Nicole Frachiseur creates an outstanding themed costume design and the set and lighting design courtesy of David Kniep is practical and aesthetic.

Perhaps it is Goodrich’s and Johns’s intention to juxtapose realistic dialogue with presentational acting, but it just didn’t work for me. It’s an interesting concept and I think it may be worth a look if only to see how it works for you.

Memoirs of a Manic Depressive lets audiences walk a mile in Gary Mizel's shoes. Mizel lives with bipolar disorder—what used to be called manic depression—and so the journey is, for most of us, both unfamiliar and insightful.

He's written a one-man play about himself and his experiences. The first half is mainly exposition about the nature of his condition and some of the facts of his life. So we learn that bipolars experience euphoric highs during which their egos go unchecked; Mizel says he thinks he's God, or nearly so, at these times. Episodes that we might characterize as paranoia are a side effect: Mizel tells us that real voices on television, movie screens, etc. seem to be directed only at him, and that illusory voices emanate from the walls and ceilings (he insists to a woman staying overnight, for example, that the FBI is keeping tabs on him).

Contrasting with the highs are terrible lows, and Mizel explicates these to us as well. Their principal manifestations are inertia and suicidal tendencies, and in the show's most harrowing segment, Mizel narrates the sad story of his mother, also bipolar but not so effectively medicated given the technology of the time. She begged her son to help her kill herself and, because he understood the deep pain she was experiencing, he allowed her to do so.

A clear but intangible shift occurs about midway through Memoirs, as the structure loses linearity and the relatively plain talk about bipolar disorder gives way to a stream-of-consciousness ramble that illustrates Mizel's life from the inside out. A lengthy account of an affair with a woman who turns out to be schizophrenic gives way to an even looser reminiscence about an abortive scheme to create a film company serving minority artists and audiences. Both stories are unsettling for their lack of traditional dramaturgical robustness and even more so because it's difficult to know what's "real" in them. Is the girlfriend actually schizophrenic, or is this one of Mizel's delusions? Is the film venture a noble effort gone awry, or the hallucinatory ravings of a mentally unstable man? We can't finally tell, which may well be Mizel's intent: we get a feel for the utterly off-balance world of the bipolar by being jarred and jolted and assailed with a reality that may or not coincide with an "objective" one.

The result is that Memoirs of a Manic Depressive is a fascinating, even unique experience, but also a very disturbing one; this is quite a difficult play to sit through. I think that's good. I left with this question: If a playwright who is not bipolar writes a convincing one-man play about a bipolar character, we'd probably call that art. If a bipolar playwright writes the same play about his own experiences, while taking meds that "control" his symptoms, is it art or a documentary? And if the same bipolar playwright writes the play when he's not medicated—and Mizel tantalizes us with this possibility at the very end of his play—then what is it? That's a rhetorical question, of course, but it illustrates the potency of this piece, which definitely makes us confront our own perceptions of reality and sanity and place them in a context we probably never even think about.

Mizel's script takes us interesting places. The production itself is not quite so successful, unfortunately. It's directed by Lorca Peress, who also designed the sound for the show, much of which is arresting and useful in conveying Mizel's state of mind at various points in the narration. But often the sound feels overdone (as does the lighting, which is by James Mojica); I think more restraint in some of the staging choices might help make the piece feel overall less taxing to the audience. Actor Dexter Brown plays Mizel and he delivers an uneven performance, capturing the highs and lows viscerally but faltering during the more difficult stream-of-consciousness sections that fill most of the second half of the play.

Note, though, that I saw the first performance, and so it's likely that some of the problems I observed will iron themselves out with time. In any event, Memoirs of a Manic Depressive certainly qualifies as vigorous, challenging theatre. I applaud all of the artists involved, especially Mizel, for tackling such a raw and personal subject with so much candor and courage.

Okay, this one's the real deal, folks: Michael Gardner's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness is the most exhilarating, engaging piece of theatre that I've seen in quite some time. More involving and interactive than any Halloween haunted house is likely to be this month—but in its way just as scary—Memoirs bombards the senses and the intellect with a precision that's absolutely uncanny; it's a wallop of theatrical daring and invention that jolts and startles and reminds you why the heck you even go to theatre in the first place. Anything but playful in its serious consideration of what it might be like to be insane—that's what it's about—the show nevertheless restores the idea of "play" to the play. The audience, on its feet throughout the 90-minute performance, follows the actors around the intimate playing space at the Brick Theater, who spin out, in all kinds of unexpected ways, the contents of a madman's tormented mind and soul.

The particular madman in question is Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge whose delusions (that he was the center of the universe, that he was being turned into woman, and others) led him to be institutionalized in an asylum in the late 1800s. Schreber wrote a journal while incarcerated (the memoir of the title), which writer-director Gardner has adapted into the script for this remarkable play.

Now I imagine that if Schreber were alive today he'd be diagnosed as bipolar and would probably be treatable with medication. In a way, we're fortunate that he instead lived a century ago, because he left such a compellingly vivid account of what the world was like to him, and Gardner and his collaborators have captured it with astonishing success here. There's a narrative, sort of: The play begins with Schreber's arrival at the asylum and his decision to write the memoir. It then proceeds through imagistic depictions of inner thoughts, things witnessed and observed, and visitations from family and friends, all splayed out in stream-of-consciousness fashion that's nonlinear (though generally chronological, I think), repetitive, and disjointed. It has the quality, somehow, of being both abstract and very specifically concrete at the same time—there's a sequence, for example, where Schreber collects memories of all the unfinished sentences that he has heard/accumulated during some unspecified time period and records them in his journal. Gardner stages this vignette with Schreber seated in a bath tub while spectral figures intoning the unfinished phrases drift by him at accelerating pace. Talk about discombobulation!—it's hilarious on one level, but so potently alienating and disaffecting that we share, at least for a moment, in the unnerving sense of disconnectedness that must have characterized practically every second of Schreber's terrible delusional life.

Gardner and company sustain this for the full  hour-and-a-half of the piece. The five actors—let me pause to name them now, and to say that their work here is astoundingly good: Hope Cartelli, Jessi Gotta, Ian W. Hill, Robert Honeywell, and Jeffrey Lewonczyk—pop up in different locations around the room, often dragging set pieces before or behind them, creating miniature installations that define, sometimes with breathtaking brevity, the environment of this or that particular observation or random thought of Schreber's. The items comprising the set—a tub, a desk, a couple of chairs—morph into different identities in ingenious ways, perhaps none more intoxicatingly surprising than the wooden bench that turns into a piano with the addition of some strings attached to Honeywell's white-gloved hands.

Joe Levasseur's lighting—hands-down, the most effective design I've ever seen in an indie theatre production—defines the space spectacularly and guides us, through darkness, to wherever the next mirage is about to materialize. The actors, simultaneously playing Schreber plus all of the ghosts and spirits that he conjures from the depths of his dysfunctional brain, often seem to materialize as well, and then to drift away into the dark unlit recesses of the space. They're clothed in surreal period costumes created by Iracel Rivero that match the mood set by Gardner's text and choreography and Lavasseur's lights to perfection.

The audience is encouraged to move around in the dim space and get as close to the actors as they dare. This makes the experience of Memoirs ultimately about us—about how it feels to be disoriented and suffering from sensory overload from who-knows-what direction or source and to who-can-guess-what purpose. Contributing to the random unexpectedness of it all is the fact that the actors don't know themselves exactly where the audience will be at any given time during the performance, making each show unique and also upping the energy in the room: everybody's a participant in Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, molecules bouncing through space trying to avoid collision and creating palpable electricity in the process.

Correction: there is one participant here who always knows exactly what she is about to do, and that's valiant Board Op Berit Johnson, situated godlike above the proceedings and manipulating the light and sound with eerie precision, imposing order on the apparent chaos and reminding us, rather palpably, that even from the depths of madness there's a desire for reason, for rigor, for righteousness.

Memoirs of my Nervous Illness is a total immersion in the pure power of theatre. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into the spirit of the thing and you will have an unforgettable—and fun!—sensory experience that is revitalizing and profound at the same time.

Two aspects of Jeff Cohen's appealing new play Men of Clay are particularly noteworthy. First, instead of cloaking autobiography in made-up names, places, etc., Cohen has elected to go the unexpurgated route: the names of the characters in the story are their real names, and the events depicted here, in broad outline at least, actually happened. Yet Men of Clay is not docudrama—far from it. It's a memory play, a look back at the playwright's adolescence 30 years ago, entirely subjective and, moment to moment, completely fictionalized.

Which brings me to the second singular element of Men of Clay: though the teenage Jeff is never seen on stage, his spirit is omnipresent throughout the piece. Men of Clay is about Cohen's father, Stan, and his closest friends, but we see them entirely through his son's young eyes. The result is a portrait that's blurry and out-of-focus, with a good deal of potentially valuable information missing or withheld. It's a son's attempt to understand the one man in the world he probably never can (i.e., his father), and on its own terms it wholly succeeds.

Stan "Squeaky" Cohen is a special but ordinary guy: likable, earnest, constitutionally irresponsible, cheap, naive. We never know whether he has a steady job or, if so, what it is; we do know that he loves jazz, women, tennis, and his sons (not necessarily in that order); that he lives with his aged mother in a lousy neighborhood in Inner City Baltimore; that he, in the central episode propelling this play, gets himself into foolish trouble by buying a brand-new car from a buddy for $1,500—a car he should have known (and, at least sub-consciously, probably did know) was stolen goods.

But more important, perhaps, Stan is presented here as an exemplar of a kind of guy, a generation of working-class Jewish men who grew up in what amounted to a ghetto in downtown Baltimore; scrappy, feisty, grasping men who worked hard to pull themselves away from their roots but never felt equal to the "country club Jews" in the suburbs. These are the men of the play's title—Stan and his lifelong friends, Ira Farber, Nate Askin, and Danny Dickler; the "clay" refers to the tennis courts at Druid Hill Park, where these four played their favorite sport for years. These guys regard Druid Hill as their personal clubhouse: nicer than the blacktop courts where the "schwartzes" (Yiddish for blacks) play, and—unlike the suburban clubs—free.

In five scenes that span about two years in the early 1970s, Cohen deftly reveals these men who had such an important impact on his youth, and it's as a character study that Men of Clay really shines. Ira talks too much, is just this side of blowhard in fact, except it's clear that he's sincerely good-hearted underneath his bluster. Nate is the quiet one, the pontificator; Danny is a bit younger, tagging along, agreeable and eager to please. Cohen has captured their unique voices in his sparkling dialogue and the interplay among these overgrown boys feels completely natural. The ending of the play is oddly touching, with these four middle-aged men aware, for once, that the world around them is about to overtake them; it feels like the finish of a coming-of-age high school flick, except the protagonists are all 45 instead of 18.

Cohen has directed the play himself, on a simple and effective set (design uncredited) that easily morphs from Druid Hill Park to a "bachelor pad" shared by Stan, Ira, Danny, and Danny's shady cousin Arnie (he's the fellow who sells Stan the hot car) to Federal Hill, near Baltimore Harbor. Script, staging, and ensemble contribute mightily to Men of Clay's sense of atmosphere; indeed the strongest performances come from the supporting players—Dan Ahearn as mild but phlegmatic Nate, Victor Barbella as even-tempered but not-so-bright Danny, and Gabrielle Maisels as Rocky Gorelick, Stan's pragmatic and appealing girlfriend.

Steven Rattazzi is funny as Ira, but it didn't seem to me that he quite captured the singular charm of this fellow. Matthew Arkin does a nice job as Arnie, presented here more or less as the villain of the piece, and Danton Stone is enormously sympathetic as Stan; but both actors are working within necessarily sketchy outlines here: the play's impressionistic approach doesn't allow us to get too deeply inside either of these guys and so both remain fuzzy figures by intention. (A special shout-out to all six actors is in order because, at the performance reviewed, just about all of the people depicted in the play—the real Stan, Ira, Danny, Arnie, and Nate—were in the audience. I can't imagine anything more nerve-wracking for an actor than knowing that the person he's playing is watching him; these folks are consummate pros.)

Men of Clay is obviously enormously personal, but any child who ever tried to make sense of their father and his friends (and why those people are his friends) is going to feel the resonance of this smart and deeply felt play. Especially with the real-life models in the room, I felt like I'd been let into a private and intimate corner of Cohen's heart. There are some rich emotional secrets there to be revealed.

Few shows come with more baggage than George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along. Critically lambasted during its Broadway run, the show only lasted 16 performances, and ended Sondheim’s collaboration with producer-director Harold Prince for more than twenty years. Furth’s book—a caustic, jaded tale of youthful optimism corrupted by fame and fortune—was blamed for the show’s failure, and has been periodically rewritten by the author over the years, generating a number of high profile revivals. Sondheim’s score, on the other hand, is a blast of tuneful, toe-tapping Broadway pizzazz, anchored by a pair of ballads—“Not a Day Goes By” and “Good Thing Going”—that have become standards on the cabaret and classroom circuits. Still, critics harp on Merrily’s shortcomings, viewing them as obstacles that cannot be surmounted. But, these same shortcomings are also enticing challenges for anyone bold enough to produce the show: they want to see if they can be the ones who finally put on a successful production of it.

Purgason Productions, no doubt, have this goal in mind with their current revival of Merrily. Theirs is a production full of fresh-faced performers who are eager to make a good impression. And, their ambition in tackling this difficult show is commendable. But, their eagerness betrays a lack of both skill and experience that makes success elusive.

Merrily tells the story of three friends—Franklin Shepard, Charlie Kringas, and Mary Flynn—fresh out of college, who are looking to conquer the world: Franklin and Charlie are an up-and-coming composer-lyricist team, and Mary is a budding novelist. We follow their almost 20-year friendship, from 1957 to 1976, through a host of trials and tribulations including early success, divorce, betrayal, alcoholism, and artistic corruption before the trio winds up estranged from one another. Franklin has morphed from rising Broadway composer to powerful Hollywood producer; Charlie, crushed and revolted by Franklin’s sellout, returns to Broadway and pens a Pulitzer Prize-winning play; and Mary, devastated by their falling out—and by her hidden, unrequited love for Franklin—spirals downward from best-selling novelist to bitter, alcoholic drama critic.

The conceit of Furth’s book is that he tells the entire story in reverse. Merrily begins in 1976, at the end of the threesome’s friendship, and journeys backwards in time, retracing the steps that led them to that point. This is a thrillingly ambitious idea that backfires. By introducing the main characters at their very worst, Furth makes it hard for us to care about them later. We’ve already seen what they’re going to become, so why should we give a damn?

Furth’s character development also seems a little lopsided. Mary and Charlie are written well enough to come off as three-dimensional human beings (albeit, not very pleasant ones), but Franklin never seems like anything more than a cipher. Sure, he’s talented and adored, but we never get a sense of who he is or what he believes in. He just goes wherever life takes him. Perhaps Franklin’s moral flexibility is the point, but having such a nebulous character at the heart of the show is not helpful for clarity’s sake. Despite these shortcomings Furth’s book still has enough substance—in the form of colorful supporting characters and acid one-liners—for any and all takers to grab on to.

Sondheim’s score—one of his very best—is full of the composer’s trademark wit and humor, as well as some of his most gorgeous, soaring melodies. Aside from the show’s signature ballads, Merrily features two of Sondheim’s classic patter songs: “Opening Doors,” a dizzying musical montage chronicling Franklin, Charlie, and Mary’s early beginnings; and “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” Charlie’s scathing attack on the businessman his collaborator has become. The wistful ballad “Our Time,” in which the protagonists’ younger selves declare the world as theirs for the taking, ends the show on a poignant and bittersweet note.

Unfortunately, this current production of Merrily is not up-to-snuff enough for the creative team to take advantage of it as a showcase vehicle. Director Steve Velardi has unwisely cast the show with a large contingent of current college students and recent college grads, which is a plus, in terms of energy and enthusiasm. But, in terms of confidence and seasoning, it is a huge minus: Velardi’s young cast has neither, in a show that cries out for both stage and life experience from its performers. (More than a few of them have that deer-in-the-headlights look of rookie performers who have minimal experience walking and talking on stage at the same time.) They have trouble projecting vocally, in both their speaking and singing voices, and often thrive only as a group (there is safety in numbers, after all). And, they fail to hit the emotional peaks necessary to make the story moving or compelling. Overall, there is a general sense of tentativeness that pervades everything in this Merrily.

As I said earlier, the entire company should be commended for trying to take this show on. Their courage is admirable, and their ambition cannot be ignored. In time, I’m sure that most of them will blossom into more-than-capable performers. But, for now, they would all be better served by material that is a little easier for them to handle. Until then, Furth and Sondheim’s enigmatic Merrily We Roll Along remains a puzzle in search of a solution.

You should definitely take a break and go enjoy Invisible Theatre Company’s revival of David Epstein’s Midnight, presented at the wonderfully well-air conditioned (not something to be taken for granted in the off-off scene) Manhattan Theatre Source. This charming light farce, filled with movie makers, method actors, and bumbling gangsters, is a trip to a 1954 New York City as it could only exist on a Silver Screen—a glamorous world of hotels and fame: a place where a dreamer with enough moxie can make his own breaks and make it to the big time. It is perfect for a summer night’s entertainment—the theatrical equivalent of a great beach read.

Epstein’s play is set in the grand suite in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Jimmy Halloway, a movie director in the midst of a creative slump, has come to New York for a make-or-break meeting with legendary producer Harvey Gouldenburg. Jimmy has begun to flounder creatively—he has made a series of commercially successful but artistically vapid war pictures—and has made many enemies in the business, including a scorned actor who broke into his home and attacked him with a knife (a knife whose size, it is pointed out to him, gets bigger each time he recounts the story). This mid-career crisis has left him with a phobia of out-of-work actors (making a trip to New York City something of a minefield) and the need to redeem himself by making a truly great movie, which he hopes to do with the help of Gouldenburg’s big name and deep pockets. Attending to Jimmy’s neuroses are Evelyn, his long-suffering assistant and lover, and Dennis, his lawyer and old friend, who puts up with Jimmy and secretly pines for Evelyn. And seeing to this group is Theo Stintz, the very model of the perfect British Butler, who comes with the suite.

To add obstacles to Jimmy’s plan for the perfect meeting (and to get the many doors in this farce opening and slamming), Epstein adds the character of Tony Simpolini to the mix. He makes a memorable entrance—sneaking into the suite holding a dog-eared script, hiding in a bar cabinet and staying there until we have almost forgotten about him. When Simpolini reveals himself to Evelyn, we find out he is a self-taught writer from the Bronx, who has come with a single, food-stained copy of his greatest work. He owes money to some Hassidic gangsters from his neighborhood and is desperate to show his play to Jimmy, hoping that he can sell the play, break into a career in the movies and—more immediately—get himself out of the mortal debt which comes due at midnight. Could Simpolini’s play have the kind of authentic, original idea that Jimmy has been looking for? Could he be the rugged and passionate man of Evelyn’s dreams? Have these gangsters followed Simpolini to the hotel? And could there be an out-of-work actor, mentioned in the characters I have already listed, who has succeeded in getting closer to Jimmy than the actor-phobic director would like? As they say in the world of farce, wackiness ensues.

Directing his own play, David Epstein has mounted an excellent and entertaining revival with a great cast—an ensemble who make each character not only fit the story but also add to the Hollywood-fable style of the storytelling. Kathleen Wallace’s blend of poise and emotional commitment makes Evelyn the center of the play. Together with Nicholas Warren-Gray as Simpolini, there is a passion and energy that propels the play along and creates scenes with a great sense of heightened, rapid-fire banter, like a silver screen encounter between a young Hepburn and Brando. Gerry Lehane is excellent as Theo the butler, and the play allows him several comic transformations, which Lehane succeeds at making bigger and bigger, keeping pace with the play as it gets more outrageous act by act. When the chaos of the farce is in full pitch, Douglas Goodrich and Elizabeth Horn come crashing in as producer Harvey Gouldenburg and his floozie-for-now Florence and both provide a generous portion of energy and gusto. On the gentler side, Dan Patrick Brady’s skilled underplaying as Dennis creates a graceful and sweet character, perfect for hitting the play’s sentimental notes. Though Max—the “brawn” of the two Hassidic gangsters who antagonize Simpolini—has very few lines, Jesse Gavin’s deadpan timing and perfectly blank expression are a great example of how much can be made of a small role.

Invisible City is presenting Midnight for only a short run, and at a time when there is a lot of competition downtown. But I highly recommend you make a night for Midnight, a safe bet for a fun night at the theatre.

One of the pleasures of attending a play about a history and culture other than one's own is to not only learn new things but to leave identifying with the story as part of a universal human condition. There's a lot to learn in Kirsten Childs's musical Miracle Brothers. However, even if you don't read the explanations listed in the program of what a Capoeira or a quilombo is you can follow the heart of this story that examines race, freedom, family, and adventure.

The play takes place in the present and in 17th century Bahia, a center of sugarcane production in Brazil. In Brazilian myth, a boto, or river dolphin, can become a beautiful man or woman and walk on land to seduce humans. At the beginning of Miracle Brothers, an ensemble of botos gather at the Rio dos Milagros (River Of Miracles) on the Night of Transformation. They playfully argue about what other creature they will transform themselves into. Rejecting the idea of rabbits, they decide to play "the humanity game." But as one of the dolphins warns, to go through the Portal to the Mortals, unless done the right way, means perhaps never being able to return.

The dolphins nevertheless decide to become human and shape-shift while singing "We're going to the human side-yip!" They elect three dolphins—Jeca, Maroto, and Pato—to stay behind to open the portal for the others when they return from their game. But something goes wrong and these three end up on the riverbank, lost in another century—a time of human slavery, colonialism, and sugarcane plantations. There, they see GreenEyes, one of their dolphin brothers in human form, now a slave. GreenEyes sees the dolphins but doesn't recognize them. Then, Fernando, another dolphin in human form, appears. He has been transformed into the son of the plantation owner. Fernando and GreenEyes are brothers. The plantation owner Lascivio is father to them both; their mothers are respectively Lascivio's wife, Isabel, and  his slave mistress, Felicidade.

The two brothers have a secret friendship, despite their society's relegating them to unequal status. GreenEyes toils at backbreaking labor in the sugarcane fields under the eye of the evil overseer Rancor, and dreams of escape on the back of a dolphin. Fernando, a sickly youth, tries and fails to win his father's approval. He begs GreenEyes to teach him Capoeira, a martial-arts dance form and self-defense tool created by African slaves. In one of the strongest and funniest musical numbers of the show, "Tonight You Learn Capoeira," Fernando attempts GreenEyes's masterful moves, with only limited success. Mark Dendy's choreography, along with Jelon Viera's, who serves as Capoeira consultant, shines especially at this moment and helps to create the character and personality differences between the brothers.

Fernando, thinking he has mastered the form in one lesson, returns to his father's house to see Lascivio in a drunken rage threatening his mother Isabel. He attempts to fight his father with his newly learned moves and unwittingly kills him with the father's own sword. To save her son, Isabel tells Rancor that GreenEyes is the murderer. Abandoned by Fernando, who allows him to take the blame, GreenEyes escapes with the help of the dolphins in search of a quilombo, or a republic of escaped slaves, with Rancor in hot pursuit.

Fernando, overcome with guilt, runs away as well, to follow his brother and seek forgiveness. On their separate adventures, GreenEyes is saved from bandeirantes (mercenaries hired to bring back runaway slaves) by a pirate named Juan, who turns out to be a woman—the daughter of a wealthy Spanish nobleman. She has escaped her fate of a forced marriage and disguised herself as a man in order to have adventures. (As the dolphins sing, "Because she'd rather die in battle / Than be somebody's chattel.") Fernando encounters a runaway slave girl named Ginga who is trying to get to Palmeres, the most famous quilombo of all. She is poised to cut him down with her machete but is surprised that he knows Capoiera and assumes he is a black man, albeit an extremely light-skinned one.

Though the issues of the play trade in adult themes, Miracle Brothers will appeal to children as well. Director Tina Landau has swashbuckling pirates swing from ropes in the rafters towards the audience, and the trio of singing and dancing dolphins are Disneylike and seem to serve the same function as Cinderella's mice. The style almost seems too cute. Tyler Maynard as Fernando does a lot of "takes"  for the audience and sets up his jokes with great deliberation. Clifton Oliver as GreenEyes, while subtler in his portrayal of a young man trying to do the right thing in the face of terrible circumstances, still succumbs to making sure the audience gets a joke or a serious moment. The book—with jokes like "I don't have a clue" "You can say that again." "I don't have a clue!"—seems to make such acting choices inevitable. But then, the Captain of the pirate ship, Henrique, played by Devin Richards, makes his entrance. He does not comment on his actions but fully gives into the melodrama of being a heartsick pirate with his glorious baritone. Another standout is Nicole Leach as Ginga; a self-professed "black girl with a bad attitude and a big machete." Her portrayal appropriately fits the style but is also real and believable.

Although only three musicians are listed in the program, they create enough joyful Brazilian music on stage to make one think there is a full band behind the curtain. The music, combined with a luscious set by G.W. Mercier of rainforest greens and twinkling stars on the theatre's ceiling, completes the atmosphere and transports the audience into this adventure story of transformation.

There's no doubt in my mind that Christopher Durang's heart is in the right place: he intends Miss Witherspoon, I think, to be a comic-but-serious meditation on the sorry state of the world and the sad but pervasive disconnectedness of so-called sophisticates that has helped bring us to said sorry state. Veronica, the protagonist of this new play, is just such an urban creature of privilege: we meet her, at table at a sidewalk cafe or coffee shop, talking at (but not listening to or communicating with) some unseen person on her cell phone; basking in her wary entitlement to not be involved with anything going on around her.

Then Chicken Little appears shouting that the sky is falling, and then Veronica remembers how distressed she was when Skylab (back in the '70s) was put into orbit without anybody in authority seeming to care that it might very well fall down on the Earth. And then Veronica discovers that she is dead; or we discover it—at any rate, she's in the afterlife now, and she's confiding to us that she killed herself because she couldn't bear to live anymore, and that she's glad she wasn't around for 9/11 because that really would have torn her apart. All she wants now is peace. Oblivion, really: not to be bothered. By anyone. Ever again.

Alas, Veronica is not to have her way. The afterlife she's living in turns out to be Bardo (not exactly the one described here, but close), and, guided by a cheerful Indian woman named Maryamma who calls her "Miss Witherspoon" for reasons never entirely made clear, she's about to be reincarnated—more than once—until her aura clears up and until she learns enough to achieve enlightenment or nirvana. The bulk of the play follows Veronica through several reincarnations (one of which is "lived" twice, though whether both versions are "real" is also not clear).

For the first two-thirds of the play, Durang has his heroine actively resist the karmic lessons she's supposed to be learning. Then, in the final third, he makes a sharp turn and brings on both Jesus Christ (in the guise of a black woman in pearls and an ostentatious hat) and Gandolf (or Gandalf; I'm not sure of the spelling), who is NOT the character in Lord of the Rings but some pagan entity, who urge Veronica to go back to Earth one more time and try to effect significant social change before the planet self-destructs.

As I said, Durang's impulses here feel humane and beautiful. I just wish he'd written a play that's less muddled and more potently convincing. It's easy to nod empathetically when a character purporting to be Christ worries that her teachings aren't being followed nowadays, but it would be better if the play had actually seemed to be about that problem during the preceding hour. But it doesn't seem to be about that at all: for most of its running time, Miss Witherspoon seems to be a game, in which Veronica—who inexplicably remains Veronica even though she keeps getting reincarnated as different humans (and, according to Maryamma, is supposed to go through the Lake of Forgetfulness before she returns to Earth in each new incarnation)—engages in a battle of wills with representatives of various religions that she purports not to believe in. (Maybe I'm being too literal here, but I was confused by what I took to be a playwright hedging his bets, putting what appears to be a Hindu woman with Jesus inside a Buddhist construct.)

The play is fitfully funny, but the jokes feel scattershot; there's a running gag about Rex Harrison and My Fair Lady that I never really "got." Kristine Nielsen seems utterly at sea here, always indicating rather than inhabiting her character, gesturing and grimacing wildly, the way that Dame Edna does to stretch a laugh in her one-woman show. (I have seen Nielsen do fine work elsewhere: is this her decision, or has director Emily Mann asked for this?) In contrast, Mahira Kakkar is actually quite charming as Maryamma, who could be very annoying but somehow isn't. Lynda Gravatt provides warmth and gravity as a kindly teacher who befriends Veronica/Miss Witherspoon in one of her incarnations and also as the lady in the hat who is actually Jesus. Troupers Colleen Werthmann and Jeremy Shamos have much less to do that's interesting, portraying two different sets of parents and other miscellaneous personages who pop up in the various incarnations. The production values, as per usual with Playwrights Horizons, are superlative.

But ultimately, Miss Witherspoon, well-intended though it may be, is a bit of a mess; I kept wishing it would get its act together as I watched it, but it never did.

Moby Dick in one hour? Well, for the purposes of theatre and, especially, a one-man show, one hour is just about right. There’s just no way around the fact that Herman Melville’s timeless work of courage, loyalty and obsession is best-served as a novel, but not only do actor/playwright Christopher Moore and director Alex Roe recognize this, they embrace it. Roe is a gifted, resourceful director with a reputation for being able to successfully pull off theatre works (especially period plays) that others with less imagination would find unproducible. The equally talented Moore has culled the more “act-able” portions of Melville’s dense and sometimes daunting text and created a unique, theatrical sidebar which actually makes the audience want more—enough, possibly, even to forsake their daily dose of reality TV and actually READ the free copies of Moby Dick that are provided after the show.

With ocean waves pounding in the background throughout, Moore steps on to a stage erected to suggest dockyard planks and greets us with the inevitable “Call me Ishmael.” Bearded and dressed all in black right down to his pea coat, Moore very much looks—and sounds—the part of the good-natured young itinerant who arrives in New Bedford, Massachusetts in the late 1800s with dreams of working on a sailing ship and seeing the world. Soon we meet another classic character, Queequeg, with whom Ishmael must spend the night, since all the other rooms in the inn are taken.

ISHMAEL: “You gettee in,” he [Queequeg] added, motioning me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings, he was on the whole a clean, comely-looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

They quickly become inseparable friends, and loyal Queequeg joins Ishmael for the fateful voyage on the Pequod, commanded by the mysterious, maniacally embittered Captain Ahab and his long-suffering first mate Starbuck. The dialogue and text are entirely Melville’s, lifted right out of the novel.

But this is not simply Cliff Notes Moby Dick performed live. Much of Melville’s dry humor, which might be lost on the page in a first reading, becomes much more evident when voiced by someone who knows what he’s doing. Moore plays all the characters, slipping seamlessly out of one skin into the next. Gracefully managing to make the poetic 19th century language accessible and natural—even conversational—Moore makes the most of his hour with hardly a lull, and the time flies by. When he finally launches into the more narrative passages of the story—the details of the voyage and the mad Ahab’s all-consuming quest to hunt and kill Moby-Dick, the sperm whale that chomped off his leg—the beauty of Melville’s colorful language and Moore’s artful storytelling skills made me forget that I was in a theater. Although there was only a single man on the stage, I saw the many.

Interestingly, though, even with all these wonderfully florid visions searing across my brain, it was when the play became more expository, rather than character-inhabited, that I began to lose focus and my mind started to wander. But as if somehow he knew what I was thinking just at that moment, Moore was suddenly making his final exit off the dock. And suddenly I found myself feeling a little cheated. I would have liked more details of the character of the whale Moby-Dick to be included in the night, but I suspect its teasing absence was part of Moore and Roe’s insidious plot to induce people to read. But I got the free book (which was very cool), and so I shall.

Cats can be any number of things—lap-warmers, exterminators, ancient Egyptian religious symbols, inscrutable enigmas, allergy fodder—but they’re not often accused of being circus animals. Unlike their more dependable canine counterparts, cats are far from tractable, which means that anyone trying to teach one to do tricks is either a masochist or someone with a lot of time on his hands.

So what can one surmise about Moscow Cats Theatre, a circus which has trained not one cat, but a legion of twenty, and then leaped over continents and oceans in order to share the fruits of their labor? It obviously takes a rare brand of pluck to undertake such a thing, and for that I offer a big tip of the hat. But since I’m not willing to advocate spending the exorbitant ticket fee to experience this yourself, I’ll let you in a sad secret: aside from the cats, the circus isn’t all that great.

Fans of camp will find throughout the evening some jewels to admire—such as the bizarre synthesized underscoring and the inexplicable aliens with green crocheted heads that run in and out from time to time, occasionally wearing giant rubber hands—and younger children could be heard trilling with delight throughout. But too often ringleader Yuri Kuklachev wanders off into extended spells of sub-Ringling buffoonery that take the breath out of the evening; he’s amiable enough, with a knobby face tailor-made for clowning, but his routines just aren’t inspired enough to carry the evening. The brief appearances of a handful of fellow humans (and even—gasp!—a couple of dogs) likewise can’t compete with the rare thrill of seeing nearly two dozen cats running back and forth across the full length of a stage, as they do at the show’s beginning. Before the show is over, you wish it was half as long.

But for lovers of kitties (like me), the half-hour or so of feline-focused material within the show’s 75-minute running time is almost enough to win you over. For the most part, they don’t do anything you can’t imagine a cat doing—they climb, they jump, they push things around—but they do it on a larger-than-usual scale, not to mention repeatedly and on cue. Whether scrambling to the top of and jumping off a pole that reaches almost to the Lamb’s Theater ceiling, balancing sturdily on two front paws, or walking a tightrope high above the stage, you find yourself consistently surprised that these creatures would submit to such activities.

The truth is, even with all the company’s collected experience, about a third of the time the cats would obviously still rather go their own way, and have to be nudged by Kuklachev into keeping on task. I actually found this recalcitrance nearly as delightful as their ability—it was certainly an honest response to the absurdity of the situation. Perhaps my favorite recurring joke involves one white-and-yellow kitty in particular who claws and meows contemptuously at Kuklachev whenever he tries to touch it after a trick. It is a cat being a cat, superlatively—in its stageworthiness a perfect presentation of the paradox of the evening.

If you leave Jean Cocteau Repertory's impassioned and incendiary revival of Mother Courage feeling like you've been pummeled—and that's just how I felt—be aware that (a) that means you're still alive, still human, and still able to respond viscerally to suffering and injustice; and (b) this is precisely how Bertolt Brecht and Marc Blitzstein meant for you to feel.

The Cocteau couldn't have managed a more timely work of theatre to open the weekend of the Hurricane Katrina disaster: most of us are responding viscerally to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen and -women and to the apparent injustices perpetrated on them by a neglectful government. This is precisely the subject of Brecht's play with music, only he set his tale in the early part of the 17th century, during the Thirty Years War, a marathon of carnage and destruction that, according to one book I consulted after the show, taught mankind only one lesson: that war breeds not peace but more war. It's a lesson we seem still not to have learned, along with so many others, such as compassion for our fellow creatures, thinking long-term rather than shortsightedly about our world and its resources, and actually being accountable for our actions—all of our actions.

Brecht's heroine (anti-heroine?) is a middle-aged woman with three grown children struggling to survive in an inhospitable world. She makes her living as a profiteer, selling goods that help keep the seemingly endless war going. As long as the war continues, she's able to eke out a living and often do much better than that; but when peace breaks out, her business goes to hell and though she says she's glad for the respite she's eager for the conflict's inevitable resumption. In Mother Courage, Brecht has created a consummate capitalist, which by his definition makes her irrefutably a hypocrite: it's not possible, he's arguing, for a person to make their living off the back of somebody else (or in this case, more graphically, over the dead body of somebody else) and still adhere to basic morality. By making his capitalist a mom, he's able to examine another quandary, namely, the tradeoff between looking out for your own best interest and looking out for your kids'. (Privileged people may think they don't have to make such a choice, but as Brecht understood and the folks who squandered so many of our country's resources are evidently just finding out, there's ALWAYS a tradeoff.)

Almost immediately after the play starts, Mother Courage pretends to tell her children's fortunes and predicts dire ends for all of them—her intent being to keep them close to her and therefore shielded from danger. But that's not what a parent can finally do, no matter how hard she tries; and so literally every time Mother Courage turns her back on her brood, something terrible happens to one of them, until in the end she is left alone but striving, though it's not particularly clear for what.

She also abandons (or is it that she's abandoned by) the one man whom she seems capable of sort-of loving, an army cook whose pragmatic relish for living matches her own.

The story plays out in three progressively more brutal and dire acts, filled with cynical talk about the inconvenience of dignity, the efficacy of taking (as opposed to giving or, what's more foolish, waiting for someone to give), and the worth and/or worthlessness of human life. There are no battle scenes, but the toll of the endless war is constantly, ruthlessly, and bitterly felt. Brecht punctuates the drama with songs that accost the audience with the play's main ideas. Act Two builds on Act One rather relentlessly; and then in Act Three, it almost feels like there's hope for the characters to at least breathe some un-foul air—there's even an act of unselfish nobility (don't worry: it will not go unpunished). Mother Courage and her Cook philosophize in a "Solomon Song" (similar to, but not exactly the same as, the one Brecht put into his Threepenny Opera) and conclude that any approach to life that's not self-serving is doomed to failure. Whatever faith you might still have in human nature is challenged at every turn for the full three hours of the show. We leave shaken and stirred: the world doesn't have to be like this, does it?

The production uses Marc Blitzstein's translation of the play, in its world premiere; it serves the piece beautifully. So does Paul Dessau's deliberately hard-on-the-ears score; and so does Giles Hogya's magnificent lighting design, which enables director David Fuller (whose work throughout is splendid) to create breathtakingly effective stage pictures with characters in silhouette or bas-relief that wordlessly highlight Mother Courage's themes and ideas. Roman Tatarowicz's spare set and Viviane Galloway's evocative costumes add immeasurably to the environment.

Jason Wynn, at the piano, and Lorinda Lisitza, in the title role, do astonishing work in marathon assignments. Eight other actors play the other several dozen characters who populate the play: Danaher Dempsey, Timothy McDonough, Sara Jeanne Asselin, Angus Hepburn, Seth Duerr, Lynn Marie Macy, Mickey Ryan, and Taylor Wilcox. Hepburn, one of the Cocteau's great treasures, has some remarkably affecting moments as an army chaplain who becomes Mother Courage's assistant for a time. And Duerr, in just his second season with the company, is nothing short of a revelation as the Cook, bringing the contradictions and complexities of a flawed and ordinary man into sharp focus.

Mother Courage is essential theatre, as far as I'm concerned. Bravo to the folks at the Cocteau for being brave enough to risk shaking up and even shattering the New York audience with a work that demands to be listened to.

Noah Haidle’s new comedy, Mr. Marmalade, has a lot going for it: good cast, good director, good production elements, and a good idea for a story. And Haidle himself is a fearless writer, full of energy, confidence, and invention, and a willingness to push the envelope. But, for all its good qualities, Mr. Marmalade suffers from an equally bad one: a glaring lack of logic. The result is a finished script that feels unpolished and not very well thought-out.

Four-year-old Lucy is a lonely child. Her father is out of the picture, her mother is always either working or out on a date, and her babysitter leaves Lucy to her own devices so she and her boyfriend can fool around in the upstairs bedroom. So Lucy invents an imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade, to keep her company. Unfortunately, real life seeps so much into her fantasy world that even Mr. Marmalade isn’t around much: he’s usually busy elsewhere, so he sends his assistant, Bradley, in his place. One day, Lucy meets a young boy from her suburban New Jersey neighborhood named Larry, and the two become fast friends. But when Mr. Marmalade learns of Lucy’s new friend, he becomes jealous and quickly re-appears to assert his presence.

There’s a lot of potential here, but Haidle overestimates his young protagonist’s mental capabilities, and fails to remember that all of Mr. Marmalade’s scenes take place inside her head. Thus, he expects the audience to believe that a four-year-old brain can create an imaginary friend who does all of the following (and there are some spoilers contained herewith, so if you don’t want to know too much about the show, skip over these bullets):

• snorts cocaine,
• pours beer on her in frustration,
• hits her,
• marries her, then takes her on a Mexican honeymoon,
• gets her pregnant, then leaves her,
• and, finally, commits suicide.

On top of all that, Haidle writes a scene late in the play where Lucy kills her own baby (offstage, thankfully) in order to ease Mr. Marmalade’s annoyance over the child’s wailing. Now, everyone knows that small children have active imaginations, but it’s hard to believe that any pre-schooler would be able to think up—or understand—a world this vivid, graphic, and dark.

Lucy also seems a bit too young to be interested in playing “Doctor.” Yet, in one scene, she convinces poor Larry to be “the patient,” making him strip to his underwear, and then puts her hand down his shorts and sticks it right on his privates. If Lucy were older—say, six or seven—this scene might seem plausible. But for the tender age of four, it rings false.

As for what Haidle seems to be saying with Mr. Marmalade…well, I couldn’t tell you. There is no discernible theme here, only a brash explosion of youthful brio on Haidle’s part.

The cast and the director give Mr. Marmalade their all. Michael Chernus, David Costabile, Mamie Gummer, Michael C. Hall, Pablo Schreiber, and Virginia Louise Smith all do good work here, and look like they’re having fun. (Gummer and Schreiber, both adult actors who play the young Lucy and Larry, seem to be having a particularly good time.) Director Michael Greif plays up Mr. Marmalade’s more distasteful and head-scratching elements for as many laughs as possible, without appearing to have any idea what Haidle’s message is either.

Because of its disregard for logic and plausibility, Mr. Marmalade is obviously the work of a novice playwright: one who might be very talented, whose development might’ve been helped immensely by working on this piece, and who we may yet see great things from. I hope so, because Mr. Marmalade feels to me like a script that would’ve been better left in Haidle’s desk drawer.