A curious thing happened after World War II: women who had entered the workforce during wartime were suddenly expected to return home, forget their own ambitions and careers, and devote their lives to their husbands and the children they were expected to have. River Heights Productions' New York premiere of Doris Baizley’s phenomenal comedy, Mrs. California, shows the frustrations of these women, and how society forced a lifestyle upon them that many of them didn’t want. Instead of being rewarded for their individual achievements, they’re praised for their ability to procreate and iron shirts. Without their femininity, they are considered less than worthless.

Dot (played by Heather Cunningham) has entered a televised “Best Homemaker” Contest, where she will compete in such “womanly” competitions as table setting, cooking dinner, and sewing aprons. These kinds of contests actually occurred in 1950s America, and the comedy and satire of Mrs. California is biting, witty, and certainly shows the feminist backlash that occurred during this time with both sympathy and ridicule.

Dot, who was an ensign in the WAVES and saved a naval convoy during the war, has entered the Mrs. California Homemaker Contest at the behest of her best friend Babs (Elizabeth Burke), a women who was laid off from being a master electrician wiring bombers. Babs is separated from her husband and is clearly dissatisfied with the role of “homemaker” that has been thrust upon her; whereas Dot is the compliant, sweet, and perfect mother with the perfect marriage, Babs is fiery, rebellious, and furious, setting up a tragically funny character conflict. As the contest progresses, Dot finds herself questioning her own values, and how important it is for her to win.

Cunningham and Burke do a nice job showing the close friendship and banter between the two women. Kristen Vaughan, Matilda Downey, and India Myone McDonald, are terrific as the other contestants, as they manage to portray both their doll-like exteriors as well as their own private struggles. It’s distressing when Vaughan’s character reaches out to Dot, only to be rebuffed. Dave DiLoreto is stiff in his role as Dudley, Dot’s corporate sponsor and resident Stuffed Shirt. Director Megan R. Wills has some interesting ideas and a great concept for the piece, but at times she appears more concerned with playing up the tragedy of these women, rather than trusting that the comedic satire will deliver the message with a far more effective punch.

The set design by Viviane Galloway is inspired—these three-dimensional, vibrant women are forced to live in a two-dimensional world. The paper-doll house set is both chilling and cute, and both sound designer Di Drago and lighting designer Robert Eberle do a fine job adding to this suffocating, but still pointedly funny, world.

Mrs. California is a valiant effort with a lot of heart, and River Heights Productions should be praised for being the first company to bring this marvelous play to New York City. The play is remarkably adept at showing how women have been fighting to be treated as individuals for generations, and how “femininity” (and perhaps “feminism”) is an ever-changing concept. It also highlights a very important message—that behind every great woman is another great woman who is her friend.

George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession is about a young woman named Vivie who has been raised in relative affluence, even receiving a college education at a time (1894) when few young ladies did; she wants to be an actuary, but even more than that, she wants to be financially independent. At the moment, though, she is quite dependent—on her mother, the Mrs. Warren of the title, a woman she barely knows, having grown up in boarding schools and the like while her mother tended to mysterious "business" in places like Brussels and Vienna.

As the play begins, a mother-daughter reunion is about to occur. Mrs. Warren is back home and ready to meet her grown-up girl, and perhaps also to let her know a little about where the money that has allowed her to be brought up so nicely came from. In a discussion where authentic bonding takes place, Mrs. Warren reveals to Vivie that she made her living as a prostitute, because no other alternatives available to her at that time were as viable: "Do you think we were such fools," she asks her economically rational daughter, "as to let other people trade in our good looks by employing us as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when we could trade in them ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages?"

(Let me insert here that the exact nature of Mrs. Warren's work is stated with admirable delicacy—you've really got to be listening carefully to understand precisely what she's alluding to.)

Vivie of course is completely sympathetic to her mother's plight and is ready to become her staunchest champion. And then, the other shoe drops in Act Three: a business partner of Mrs. Warren's, a slimy gentleman by the name of Sir George Crofts, informs Vivie that Mrs. Warren has never left her original trade, that with his invested capital she manages a string of brothels across Europe that are enormously profitable. (Again, the language is oblique as can be.)

This time, Vivie is shocked. It's one thing to sell yourself when that's the best you can do to survive, but another to sell others and realize a handsome return in the process—that's essentially her line of thought. She escapes to London. Will a reconciliation between mother and daughter be possible now?

As that's the one surprise in Mrs. Warren's Profession, I won't give it away here. Shaw raises interesting issues in this play, the most compelling of which deal with economic necessity and social hypocrisy—in other words, much the same territory as his most famous work Pygmalion. Morality almost doesn't enter into it at all—it is entirely possible to view Vivie's objection to her mother's profession as being rooted solely in its exploitation of workers (though perhaps that stretches the playwright's intention just a bit).

It is the subject of intention that most interested me after seeing Irish Repertory Theatre's production of this piece. What does Shaw want to persuade us of here—are we supposed to be on Vivie's side or Mrs. Warren's? Under Charlotte Moore's indifferent direction, I was hard-pressed to decide. On the one hand, we have the splendid Dana Ivey, doing justice and more to Shaw's words as the pragmatic matriarch/businesswoman (but never entirely convincing as a woman whose beauty and charm apparently dazzled England and the continent). On the other hand, we have Laura Odeh's priggish and remote Vivie, a woman who seems incapable of connecting with any other human being (or is that just Moore's blocking, which oddly has characters talking out to the audience instead of to one another). In the end, I didn't really believe in either one; indeed the truest words I heard on stage were these (spoken by the villain of the piece, Sir George, played with overwrought bombast by Sam Tsoutsouvas, except that he toned himself down perfectly to get this message out):

Why the devil shouldn't I invest my money that way? I take the interest on my capital like other people: I hope you dont think I dirty my own hands with the work. Come! you wouldn't refuse the acquaintance of my mother's cousin the Duke of Belgravia because some of the rents he gets are earned in queer ways. You wouldnt cut the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suppose, because the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have a few publicans and sinners among their tenants. Do you remember your Crofts scholarship at Newnham? Well, that was founded by my brother the M.P. He gets his 22 per cent out of a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on. How d'ye suppose they manage when they have no family to fall back on. Ask your mother. And do you expect me to turn my back on 35 per cent, when all the rest are pocketing what they can, like sensible men? No such fool! If youre going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of decent society.

Now that last bit, especially, feels awfully darned timely and resonant to me. Shaw understood the human race, no doubt about it.

I wish the present production did better by the play. There are a couple of performances that did impress me—Kevin Collins makes quite a lot of Frank Gardner, the young man who is besotted with Vivie (or at least her fortune), and Kenneth Garner nicely conveys the bottled-up hypocrisy of Frank's father, a country reverend who was once involved with Mrs. Warren himself. Dan Kochar's set ingeniously depicts several different locales on the tiny Irish Rep stage, but David Toser's costumes are unflattering to both Ivey and Odeh. All that said, I'm glad to have seen the play, mainly because it's one that doesn't get done so often. It's worth taking in.

Hanoch Levin (1943-1999) is one of those international playwrights whose work is of paramount importance in his home country, while remaining virtually unknown in the United States. In a sense this is surprising, since Levin hails from the fraught nation of Israel, with which America is so closely associated throughout the world. A Google search reveals that he was incredibly prolific, and his work spanned a multitude of genres and styles. His discovery by a wider audience in this country seems overdue, but unfortunately, the Personal Space Theatrics production of his play Murder is probably not the best place to start.

Maybe it’s not entirely negative to say that Murder is alternately repulsive and boring—since that’s just what actual life on the civilian frontlines of a seemingly endless war must be like. As written, the play takes place in an unnamed country enmeshed in a struggle not at all dissimilar from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and consists of three violent scenes—each of which contains, yes, a murder—plus a coda. In the first scene, soldiers kill a teenager they’ve been interrogating, and are then confronted by the youth’s bereaved father. In the second scene, the father appears at a wedding on the seashore, where he seeks revenge for his son’s death. The third scene finds a drunk laborer attacked by prostitutes and suburban homeowners who believe him responsible for the carnage at the beach. Are all of these situations as open-and-shut as they seem?

That the laborer is played by the same actor (Jerry Zellers) who played the father only raises more questions. There’s an interesting—and, I believe, intentional—bit of theatricality here involving the time-honored stage practice of double-casting: the circumstances of each scene force you to question whether the actor is playing the same character he or she was playing in the previous scene.

Unfortunately, this is where the allure ends. Almost everything compelling about the production begins and ends with the tricky structure of Levin’s script, which has been adapted by director Michael Weiselberg (from a translation by Kurt Beals and Liel Golan). By contrast, the dialogue as it appears here is almost a blunt weapon in itself, studded with such chestnuts as “He was just like you! He had dreams!” and other habiliments of stage grief. There is a maudlin use of child actors, and a denouement which should be shattering, at least in melodramatic terms, but which feels tacked-on and artificial instead. Whether this hokum is part of Levin’s intention—an exposure of the banality that accompanies death—or a clumsiness in translation is not made readily apparent by the production surrounding it.

The actors all approach their roles with an unremitting seriousness of purpose, which, rather than energizing the action, has the perverse effect of draining away its humanity. This overall sense of high moral principle paradoxically causes the performance to feel both toothless and distasteful at the same time. If the motive for presenting onstage simulated murders and rapes is to shake a potentially complacent audience into challenging realizations, they need to be fiercely committed. Instead, the director and cast approach the material with such constrained, self-satisfied respect that we’re not shocked, just made skeptically queasy as we wonder what it’s all about.

I will admit that many of these shortcomings arise from the necessity of working with an off-off-Broadway budget. The first-floor space at P.S. 122 is small, and at such close quarters—with the stage bisecting an audience that sits right next to the action at either side—the fight choreography appears ginger and reticent. The upshot is that the murders never feel like murder, just acting. This is something that might have been overcome by a professional, well-conceived use of blood or a few more weeks of rehearsal—both luxuries that small companies rarely have the resources to indulge.

Personal Space Theatrics is trying something ambitious with Murder, and for that I salute them. But in the end, they’ve distilled what might have been a more complex statement on the part of Levin to the simple platitude that “violence is bad”—and even then they merely underline this blunt statement without deeply imagining what it means onstage. Murder may be a fascinating play, but the fact that I’m saying “may” rather than “is” doesn’t speak well for the production.

Following in the footsteps of the likes of Robert Wilson, the Builders’ Association, Mabou Mines, and Les Freres Corbusier by joining the ranks of “avant-garde theatres interpreting Ibsen” is Mitchell Polin’s Ordinary Theater, whose play Mustard describes itself as a renegade reinterpretation of Ibsen’s A Doll House. Double cast in the role of Nora are Kimberly Brandt and Jessie Richardson, who engage in a series of sometimes arresting but often cryptic performance art-style vignettes by themselves, with each other, and with fellow performers Ben Horner and Kristopher Kling—both of whom are oppositely double cast as Nora’s husband, Torvald. Interspersed throughout is performance artist Michael Burke, whose brash demeanor pops up from time to time to act as a sort of sightseeing guide through the world that Mustard creates.

But what that world implies and what one is supposed to take away from it, let alone where A Doll’s House fits in to all this, is not altogether clear. And it’s not as though Polin—who is the author and director of the piece—isn’t talking. Profound-sounding utterances, didactic exhortations, and self-reflective musings are sprinkled throughout Mustard like, well, condiments, but few provocative points manage to stand out among all of the philosophical clutter.

Still, I’m not sure how much that really matters, or even how seriously Polin expects one to consider all of his seemingly off-the-cuff musings. Mustard comes off primarily as an examination of theatrical form. Here the piece seems to draw more inspiration from Warhol than from Ibsen, for Mustard seems consciously evocative of a '60s art “happening” such as one might have encountered during the heyday of the Warhol Factory era. Polin accomplishes this through a collection of theatrical styles and technical elements, all of which are gamely undertaken by the performers alongside video projections and a live rock band.

Although Mustard is by no means cohesive—and doesn’t seem intended to be so—there are plenty of individual moments that are striking enough to keep one engaged for the duration. The performers all do a fine job working off each other, and Polin has keen eye for assembling an ensemble of performers who each possess a distinctive energy and style. Particularly compelling are Brandt—whose purposefully off-key singing and laid-back demeanor is reminiscent of a strung out art house diva—and Richardson as her more biting alter ego, who in trading off as Nora manage to shift from opposition to sameness smoothly from moment to moment. Also of note is the spacey and droning sound of the members of Tungsten74, who perform live throughout the show, and form an integral part in the evening’s proceedings.

Mutant Sex Party is about a high-powered American politician who is involved with a male prostitute. In the first scene, we watch the former command the latter to humiliate him verbally—S&M without the whips and chains. "You know what I've done," John (the john) tells Clay (the hustler), and then he begs Clay to batter him with words.

There's an interesting and very complicated relationship to explore here; I was immediately curious about the power dynamic—John wants Clay to beat him up, at least figuratively, but he's still calling all the shots and paying the bill—and also about the element of hypocrisy, for John is presented as a powerful figure in the current administration, and what we see him do here—hire a prostitute (a male prostitute at that), ingest cocaine, drink a great deal, swear incessantly—presumably contradicts what his constituents think he stands for. There's also the tantalizing question of what Clay knows that we thus far do not: what has John done to make him feel so guilty?

But the direction that playwright Edward Manning takes his play reveals very little about any of these provocative subjects. Instead, we learn that John is being investigated for an insider trading scheme (apparently similar to the recent Martha Stewart debacle), and, later, that he is the target of a gargantuan left-wing conspiracy to eliminate "dinosaurs" like him from the government. This latter plot development, Ludlamesque in ambition and audacity, feels both unwarranted and implausible. More detrimentally, it reduces what could have been a fascinating study of power, sex, hypocrisy, and the intricate linkages among them, to a by-the-numbers thriller. Character is sacrificed for plot; and the plot isn't exciting or believable enough to make us forgive the exchange.

Tom Demenkoff (John) and Eric Van Wyck (Clay) work hard to make the two men they portray vivid and fully-formed, but Manning leaves out too many details and supplies too many other arbitrary ones for them to succeed. For example, John gets a long monologue about how much he liked having sex with young women when he was in college and another one about how he made some troublesome relatives disappear. None of this information jives with the man we see, who is on some level at the mercy of a less well-educated man to whom he is, apparently, sexually attracted.

Indeed, the treatment of sex and sexuality in Mutant Sex Party is murky and disturbing. Why has Manning chosen a gay relationship at the center of his play? There is no evidence that either John or Clay actually is gay; no evidence (except a fleeting reference to one blow job, long ago) that they ever have sex. John could hire a dominatrix to humiliate him, if that's what he gets off on; but it's ultimately not even clear that he does get off on it. In the end, the Sex in Mutant Sex Party feels like a red herring, designed to lure us in, but having no bearing on the outcome of the story. (The Mutant designation is even more troubling: are John and/or Clay mutants because they (might) like having sex with men? Because they pay/get paid for it?)

An epilogue, in which the two men meet up years later and admit that they love one another suggests the play that Mutant Sex Party might have been. Alas, it's an ending that feels tacked on to this one; love would seem to have very little to do with what happens in this disappointing work.

With My Heart Split in Two, Lucid Theatre takes a retro tradition and gives it a new twist. Once upon a time, radio plays were an era’s TV and main form of entertainment. Now our generation has iPod and computermania to replace the days of radio. Lucid Theatre, per their press materials, is the first company to incorporate podcasts into a theatrical performance. Each week a new ten-minute segment will be available for audience and fans to download onto their iPods and computers. Viewers and listeners can also subscribe to the Lucid Theatre podcast on iTunes and automatically download the new installments as they become available.

The show/recording begins with a stoic announcer (Joe Thompson) who gives the exposition of “the demented insanity of My Heart Split in Two,” an audio play based on true events and “too ludicrous for any stage to support.” His promise of what's to come is in no way undelivered.

The play begins with four adventurers, Albert, David, Marcia, and Suzanne, landing on a remote mountain in Alaska. They arrive separately and go to their cabins. After Albert and David have warmed themselves by the fire, Albert realizes that David’s abandoned cabin has been occupied by another. Soon we are introduced to Claude the Crazy Mountain Man, who is David’s caretaker, and also madly in love with David. David then distracts Albert by informing him that within the nearby cabin reside two foxy ladies (Suzanne and Marcia) and that Alaska is a land for lovers. Albert rethinks the trip because “no woman has ever taken his little fry seriously.” After a series of random conversations between the two “almost friends,” a strange series of hot tub catastrophes, broken hearts, bizarre phone accidents, love affairs with snowmen, stolen hats, gooey injuries, stalkings, cold winds, and love affairs ensues.

Somehow amidst this downright insane plot, a story does evolve in one hilarious pratfall after another. Putting aside the wonderment of how playwright Terry Withers could actually think this stuff up, there is the masterful sound effects worked by the actors. Ben Arons's sound design is truly ingenious. The actors use everything from popsicle sticks and doorknobs to cellophane and cabbages to make the frequent noises and sound effects. The audience is separated from the actors by a Plexiglas window, behind which they perform at microphones, in the manner of an oldtime radio broadcast. Much like a group of children at a zoo, we sre riveted by what's happening on the other side of the glass.

The Announcer, played by Joe Thompson provides the requisite dry delivery and ironic smiles, with the right combination of 1950s telecaster and witty downtown edge to make the role complete. Cliff Campbell’s Albert is delightfully charming—a clueless half wit led to extreme measures to woo his almost lady love. Campbell has smart comedic timing and knows just when to pull back and when to push forward with the absurdist material in this production. Jason Linder, as Claude the Crazy Mountain Man, tackles his ridiculous lines and bizarre character with a hilarious gusto and charm. I am eager to see more of this quirky actor in future roles. Paul Murillo’s David supplies the perfect foil to Campbell’s Albert, with dead-on delivery of his many one-line zingers. Brenda Withers, plays Marcia with coy charm and skillful humor. Adrianne Dunbar (Suzanne) has striking stage presence and sly comedic wit.

Director Brendan Hughes has skillfully woven together a brilliant cast, edgy material and an innovative idea, culminating in a mind-boggling theatrical and listening adventure.

“Hope is what’s left after everything else is lost,” says the lover to his mistress in My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon, a new play by Don Nigro now being presented by Hypothetical Theatre Company. In this case, hope vanishes long before—before the second act and certainly before the last words are uttered two hours and fifteen minutes after the story begins. To be fair, there is some good writing in this juicy story, and the actors are visually right for their parts, but Nigro’s repetition drains the story of its glamorous and intriguing aspects, exhausts his characters, and tries the patience of his audience.

The play takes place between 1901 and 1908 and is based on the historic relationship between the colorful and brilliant architect, Stanford White, and Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful showgirl who becomes his mistress. The eccentric millionaire Harry K. Thaw also pursues Nesbit, but she loves White, who is married and preoccupied with his work. Thaw, unappealing as he is, is attentive and always available. Ultimately, Nesbit marries Thaw, who physically abuses her, and, in one of his jealous rages, shoots White. At the end, Thaw divorces Nesbit, leaving her penniless.

This is a story filled with possibilities. But important events, such as Mrs. Thaw’s opposition to the marriage and Mrs. Nesbit’s responsibility for her daughter’s downfall, are buried among chatter, missing the opportunity for prickly tension. This is a shame, because Annette Hunt, in the best performance of the evening, does a marvelous job portraying the over-protective, domineering Mrs. Thaw, who dismisses her son’s eccentricities with a flick of a wealthy wrist. Catherine Lynn Dowling is less secure as Mrs. Nesbit. Moments are thrown away: the effect that White has on her, her greed, her indifference to her daughter are not as clear as they could be. Kit Paquin is a beauty and physically fits the role of Evelyn Nesbit nicely. She has a memorable moment when, seated on a suspended moon, she sings the title song in a lovely, crystal voice. Paquin takes us on a bumpy ride, but shows little emotion as she meets her obstacles. She shows more fire when her character pleads for attention from White than after she is thrashed with a whip, left vulnerable by her mother, succumbs to drugs, and is discarded without a cent. At the end, the character does not seem to have learned anything from her journey. Mark Pinter’s confident dignity lends credibility to Stanford White. More fervor in the beginning and more passion when he has Nesbit alone would lend meaningful contrast to a somewhat bland White at the end. Tim Altmeyer is very good. He gives Harry K. enough tics to drive a dog mad. This is both funny and tragic, and during the course of the evening his peculiarities need to be managed more effectively by director Amy Feinberg in order to maintain some semblance of sympathy from the audience. Overall, Feinberg has the cast over-indulging in their roles where they should be natural, and holding back where they ought to be fervent.

The performance, of course, is tied to the script and many of the faults could be eliminated with a red pencil. There are too many scenes in too many different places, some of which could be combined or eliminated. Each time tension builds, the script calls for Thaw and White to proclaim Nesbit’s beauty and their love. This not only diminishes the tension, but eliminates the climax. Watching the characters as they discover what we already know can be very effective theater. However, here, White’s murder is simply one more pace among many. Nigro gives us a lot of very good information, often too much. There is a hint of homosexuality just before the shooting, but that piece of information quickly passes and then the biggest surprise is—the play is not over. There is still the trial.

It’s not that the play is confusing. It’s that it is not sharply defined. This also can be said of the plush, red set by Mark Symczak. Red velvet curtains swathe the walls; red brocade chairs serve as a parlor; a large, red circular settee sits in front of a largely unused red-blanketed bed. There is an elevated drawing table upstage for the architect and two round tables downstage. It is visually attractive, but it doesn’t work. It serves too many functions, and I, for one, stopped caring where the characters were suppose to be. Chris Lione’s costumes work. He has Nesbit in a stunning suit that looked like light weight suede. Nesbit puts the jacket on when she leaves a scene and removes it when she arrives—a nice visual hint. Another aid is the use of video. Each scene is introduced with a video tag line projected above the stage. Credit for this goes to Tim Cramer.

Pianist Tom Berger plays James Thornton’s title song and his own compositions off and on throughout. It adds intimacy and overall ambiance.

There are so many good elements in this play. The story is terrific, the visuals appeal, the talent is available. There is very good dialog, too. It is simply obscured by too many words. This is easily fixed, especially by someone like Nigro who has a number of plays to his credit. Slash mercilessly, and save the play.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a porn star, then My Year of Porn, Cole Kazdin’s charming new one-person show, ought to be right up your alley. Kazdin’s observations about the porn industry are funny, poignant, and eye-opening—so much so that you may never think about ex-Marines or French non-dairy creamer the same way again.

My Year of Porn chronicles Kazdin’s twelve-month tour of duty on a film crew making a documentary about the porn industry. Among the cast of misfits they encounter are porn starlet Sinammon Summers (who enthusiastically confesses that she is a Green Bay Packers fan); porn director Gordon “Monty” Monty, who relentlessly teases Cole about joining the on-screen action; and a set production assistant who looks notoriously like Jeffrey Dahmer. Then there’s the porn crew, none of whom is eager to appear in the documentary lest their “day-job” employers—Disney, Vogue, The West Wing—find out what they do on the side. But, for all the stigma still attached to it, there are glaring indications that the adult movie industry has gone mainstream: at an annual porn convention in Las Vegas, Cole notices that hundreds of people are lined up to get in six hours before the event starts. “Even the Mormons have a booth at the convention,” she dryly points out.

But, what starts out as a potentially titillating adventure soon becomes routine, then grueling, for Kazdin and her crew. Daily exposure to hardcore sex makes her feel numb. She begins avoiding words like “dirty” and “hard” in her everyday life. In a particularly funny moment, Cole is shocked to discover that she has become so deeply involved in her subject that every sentence out of her yoga teacher’s mouth sounds suggestive. Add to that the number of porn stars who long to get out of the business but can’t seem to (they constantly point out the differences between their small, insulated world and “the real world”), and before long Cole comes to the conclusion that, without love and intimacy, raunchy sex is not all its cracked up to be.

Kazdin is a likable performer who doesn’t take herself, or her material, too seriously. She has an easygoing, endearing demeanor, and realizes the ridiculousness of her subject—which is the point of My Year of Porn: how silly the adult movie business is. What may be arousing on-screen is downright hilarious when seen in person (as when Cole witnesses an actress, in the middle of a sex scene, improvise, “Oh yeah! I can feel it in my cervix!” Cut!). Kazdin plays all the characters, and does a good job of portraying them in a broad, humorous manner without making them stereotypes. Her character transitions are occasionally confusing (she’s playing who now?), and director Ivanna Cullinan sometimes lets her down with clumsy scene transitions, but, overall, My Year of Porn is entertaining and well done.

I like the idea of NEUROshorts: a collection of plays that explore the human mind through stories of its malfunction. Even the names of the conditions intrigue me: synesthesia, dementia, Aspberger’s syndrome, Meniere’s Disease. The jumbles of Greek and mysterious names suggest some epic tradition of heroic patients and scientists practicing their dark magic, questing to unlock divine mysteries. The evening starts strongly, as the writers of the first two plays find the legs to carry me into the worlds evoked by their initial concept.

Beneath the surface simplicity of its fairy tale structure, Edward Einhorn’s The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Robot proves surprisingly complex in its implications. Its “once upon a time” storytelling is enlivened by puppets, created and performed by they show’s performer, director, and designer, Barry Weil. Painted in brash, electric colors, Weil’s puppets express a surprisingly great variety of reactions with cleverly inventive minimalism. What makes the piece so effective is that Einhorn never boxes its hero in by pathologizing his Aspberger’s syndrome. The writer never relegates the boy’s obsession with robots, typical of those with Aspberger’s, to some ghetto for curiosities or freaks. It simply drives our hero’s quest. The boy’s inability to grasp normal humor is sensitively handled as well. He is effectively estranged from us, yet the jokes never come at his expense. Ultimately the piece pays off with a rich ambiguity. As unsettling as I found it to see a boy strip himself of human emotion, I did feel happy that he got his wish.

Kelly R. Haydon’s Vestibular wrings poetry out of a rather sensational bunch of circumstances. Hugo, a legendary danseur, has developed Meniere’s Disease, a condition that destroys his sense of balance. Moreover, Hugo has also ended up on death row; the mystery of his crime drives the plot of the play. A young male nurse and fan cares for the dancer as he prepares for the execution. Haydon develops this gothic melodrama into a satisfying exploration of art and the performing artist’s craving for an audience. Hugo mourns his situation with a verbal excess that recalls Tennesee Williams or Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story without being derivative. John Grady fails to display the verbal gusto that would make the most of his character’s eloquence, but he is an experienced dancer whose carriage brings dignity to the end of the play. As the nurse, Jason Liebman comes closer to the style of the dialogue. I only wish director Jolie Tong had infused the the imminent execution with a little more urgency.

Unfortunately, the quality of the second pair of plays drops off drastically. In her one-woman script A Taste of Blue, writer Alexandra Edwards describes the experience of a woman (played by Amy Montminy) whose senses become jumbled: color is tasted; sound is smelled, and so forth. The impressionistic text lists observations from this point of view, which director Julia Martin has staged as oddly intoned, disjointed declarations in the dark, to a backdrop of vague music and video projections. In a couple of brief scenes, the lights come up and Montminy addresses us simply and directly; in those moments she is charming. Mostly, however, I found the piece numbing.

Doctors Jane and Alexander, also written by the Edward Einhorn, the festival’s artistic director, presents a variety of facts from his family history. “Edward” (Jorge Cordoba) appears in the play, interviewing his mother (Alyssa Simon) who is wheelchair bound and suffers from mild dementia. As he asks her about her psychological research, he also discusses his grandfather, Alexander Weiner (David Palmer Brown), who discovered the Rh factor in blood. There is a suggestion that Weiner’s stellar career somehow stunted that of the mother, like a large tree that chokes a sapling beneath it. But a relationship is never established; father and daughter do not even have a scene together. Simon brings some weight to her performance as the mother; her physicalization of the woman’s debility has real poignancy. Director Ian Hill and the cast also have fun staging a series of living comic book panels about Dr. Weiner’s hematology research. But the piece amounts to little more than a pageant of disconnected scenes, and any thread or resonance that might have held the entire evening together is diminished by this weak finish.

If you're a ukulele fan—and from the looks of things at Theater for the New City right now, there are plenty of you out there—then you don't need me to tell you about the New York City Uke Festival. But if, like me, you're not (I count myself as indifferent and unaware; I'm not against them), then what I will say to you is this: pass an hour or more at this singular confabulation of slightly eccentric musicians. You might be very surprised. I know I was: count me as one who, if not necessarily a fanatic, is certainly very much for ukuleles now.

The event that I got to partake of is an hour-long musical comedy called American Novelty, performed by an Austin, Texas band known as Shorty Long. Now American Novelty isn't exactly your traditional book musical, but it's enormously entertaining, often quite funny, and contains a delightfully infectious score. It's basically a series of anecdotes about made-up forgotten ukulele artists of America's past, each of which ends with the band recreating one of the supposed musician's signature songs (all of which are actually written by Pops Bayless, the leader of Shorty Long).

The songs are treasures, every one. They've got titles like "Hey, Mr. Hitler" (an American tough-guy's warning to the Fuhrer and the other Axis leaders as well), "You Gotta Go Down to Go Up" (a wry indictment of corporate culture; think about it), and "Coffee and Sinkers" (supposedly written in the Ajax Diner). My favorite was probably "First Hand Witness," a genuinely affecting blues about loneliness sung beautifully by "Just Plain Bob" Guz—a really sweet, sophisticated composition. They all are that, though, and by the time the band got to "Flaming Ukulele in the Sky" (which is hilarious and a toe-tapper), most of the audience members—fans, you see—were singing along, making glorious carefree music together with the folks onstage. A lovely experience, this.

You can read about Shorty Long on their website and hear some sample clips of their songs here. The band consists of Bayless, who leads, sings some vocals in a gnarled yet clear voice, and plays a couple of different ukuleles along with a banjo-uke; "Just Plain Bob," who strums ukes like nobody's business; Mysterious John, the narrator, who also sings and plays the kazoo; Mark Rubin on upright bass; and George Carver, who plays an instrument I've never seen before called a lap steel with rapt concentration. From these unusual components comes a most accomplished sound—I came in expecting Tiny Tim and left understanding that these very serious musicians can make seriously wonderful music.

This is indeed the best part of my job: the chance to have an experience I would never dream of having, and in the process opening my eyes to something new and unexpected. (It's also one of the best parts of being in New York: offbeat fare like the New York City Uke Festival can be uncovered in this metropolis every day of the year, more or less.) I highly recommend this particular outing if you have some time available during the next few days. You may find yourself singing along with "Flaming Ukulele" yourself before it's over with.

The star of the current New York Minutes, subtitled "A revue of the songs of John Wallowitch," is in fact the lyrics of the songs themselves. For one hour at the Duplex, TOSOS II presents them, sung by three engaging performers under the direction of Mark Finley (who also conceived the evening), with piano accompaniment by Ray Fellman (who also served as music director). These performers, Robert Locke, Jolie Meshbesher and Chris Weikel, are a likeable trio, but with varied vocal talents. The conceit of the show, three strangers meeting at a New York bar, relating to each other through song, and departing, seems cute but almost forced. I got it but I wonder whether we really needed it. Still, it is a way to bring some of the over one thousand songs of the prolific Wallowich to light.

Though I had heard of Mr. Wallowitch, I could not recall any songs. But then, I rarely get to the cabaret circuit, where evidently he has been championed by such luminaries as Tony Bennett and Dixie Carter. The composer certainly writes in a wide range, as evidenced by the program, which runs from searching ballad to comic up-tempo. In general, I think the trio at the Duplex fares best when tackling Wallowitch’s lighter material. This may be because, for me, Wallowitch is better at the light stuff. His ballad melodies tend towards the generic and the lyrics predictable. But when he lets his rhyming genius shine in such numbers as “Cosmetic Surgery,” it is quite fun:

They have altered their beaks
And they've lifted their cheeks
And now everyone speaks
In society's cliques

I thought instantly of Noel Coward and then in the program I learned that Wallowitch has indeed been compared to Coward. This is apt, as certainly the lyrics are the thing with both composers.

Fellman plays a terrific piano, Weikel has an engaging baritone and kind of steals the show, Locke is a real charmer with a John Davidson demeanor, and Meshbesher knows how to sell a song, though she has the weakest voice. I would have liked to have heard more close harmony, but regardless, Wallowitch’s words shine through. For that, it is well worth the two drink minimum.

Nightmare, directed by Timothy Haskell, could well be New York's best answer for something to get you in the spirit of the Halloween season.

And, like any good haunted house, it transforms an otherwise relatively familiar space. The oft-used CSV Cultural Center, on the Lower East Side, is turned into an unrecognizable maze, and a veritable hive of gruesome and unhappy circumstance.

The spooks of this haunted house are, as promised, "more David Lynch than John Carpenter." There are no spirits or ghouls, but there are more than a few plausible horrors. A nurse performs a very un-nurturing act. A man trimming a tree finds truth to maxim "better safe than sorry," just a little too late. A sugar addict takes extreme measures, in front of a bathroom mirror, with regard to his problems with junk food.

It's hard to say too much about Nightmare without spoiling its surprises, so this review is necessarily brief. The event promises a good spook for those in the mood, but isn't as terrifying as their subway ads, which feature a stomach-turning image of a young girl whose eyes stare in total whiteness.

Costumes and sets are particularly precise and, the lights are satisfyingly dim, offering a fair amount of blackness to stumble through. Some performances are better than others, but the host of grim figures are, on the whole, well cast. There are more than a few surprises, and fun-seekers are unlikely to be disappointed, but don't expect to be scared out of your wits. A great scare is truly hard to find, and Nightmare doesn't quite reach the kind of fright that you will remember for weeks on end. But it is a well thought-out, well produced, scare-fest. It is also the creepiest thing you are likely to do in the next few weeks, unless you plan on watching The Exorcist alone, and in an empty apartment, any time soon.

Victoria Stewart's new play Nightwatches, impeccably presented by Overlap Productions, is a fascinating and compelling story of fanatacism, repression, and self-discovery. Set in rural New England in the early 1900s (I'm guessing New Hampshire from the reference to Mount Washington being nearby), the play tells the story of Mary, a woman past 30 (and therefore past her "prime" according to that era's standards) who marries a younger man and comes to live and work with him on his farm. Initially a marriage of convenience, their pairing acquires a passionate component that's a surprise to both. But the husband, Stephen, refuses to allow himself the pleasure of a sexual relationship with his wife, jeopardizing their happiness and their future together.

The circumstances surrounding this couple are singular. Mary is the eldest of many children, and her mother, a widow, at some point stopped believing that Mary would ever marry, instead relying on her more and more to help her run the household and farm. But one day, Stephen—a widower himself, his wife having died young in a tragic accident—comes calling, explaining to Mary's mother that he needs someone to help him run his farm; he's just too exhausted from trying to do it alone. In exchange for Mary, Stephen is willing to give his prospective mother-in-law a tract of land she's been hankering for. And so the deal is done.

Mary, who we quickly discover is a smart, strong-willed woman, has ideas of her own. Yes, she'll marry Stephen, and yes, she'll hold up her end of a bargain that she knows is rooted in economics. But she means to have all that a marriage entitles her to: a home to care for, a business to operate as a full partner, and, most important, a husband who will love and cherish her. Though her mother has led her to believe that a wife's filial duty is just that, an obligation to be endured, Mary thinks she wants children. And after she has her first sexual experience with Stephen, she discovers that she wants love—lots of it, in all of its physical manifestations.

Nightwatches is about Mary's journey toward a fulfillment that's not just sexual but wholly human; through her physical and emotional love for Stephen, Mary learns to be a better person. But there's a parallel journey here that really gives the play its weight, and that's Stephen's. He is a passionate, accomplished lover; but he's also loaded down with guilt and anxiety. We even catch him, in one brief, dark scene, flagellating himself. The secret behind Stephen's repression is a key element of Nightwatches' story, and it won't be disclosed here. Suffice to say that playwright Stewart has something essential to say about the wicked ways that people delude themselves, or allow themselves to be deluded, in the name of good and evil.

She's also a splendid storyteller, and the craft with which she and her collaborators at Overlap Productions lay out Mary and Stephen's saga is formidable. They've done a particularly fine job conveying place and period, with the spare designs by Evan O'Brient (set), Carla Bellisio (costumes), Aaron Sporer (lighting), and Elizabeth Coleman (sound) working togethere seemlessly to give us a sense of spartan, Puritanical New England of a hundred years ago. Under Susanna L. Harris's expert direction, the actors show us clearly how hard this life was—that these people have, simply, a great deal of work to do in these pre-automation days, and this helps us appreciate how necessarily fleeting and special the moments of passion really are in their laborous existences.

The actors' work here is outstanding. As Mary, Ivanna Cullinan paints a portrait of inner strength and resilience that's utterly admirable; as she discovers her nascent sexuality and capacity for love, she acquires a maturity and outward beauty that grows and grows as the play progresses. It's a subtle, smart performance. Matthew Jared, as her younger husband Stephen, is in every way her match, capturing all of the blazing contradictions of this conflicted man. He projects an innocent unworldliness that's perfect for this role: there's a charming scene early in the play, when Mary is cooking Stephen their first breakfast together and asks him how he wants his eggs. Jared's blank response to this query—the purely ingenuous look of a man who has never had a notion that eggs can be prepared more than one way—gives rare and honest insight into this simple yet complicated man.

Rounding out the cast is Lenni Benicaso, who as Mary's mother, stalwart and toughened by years raising a family on her own, provides sharp contrast to Cullinan's warmer and more humane characterization.

Nightwatches is in every way a pleasure, full of rich and unexpected details in the writing and the acting that bring you up short. What's not unexpected is the high quality of the work; Overlap Productions has produced only five productions before this in its short history, but their track record ranks among the very best in the indie theater world. Catch this one if you can.

I think my all-time favorite stage direction is the one that Oscar Hammerstein wrote for the very end of the first act of The King and I. English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens has come to Siam to bring Western science and culture to the supposedly "barbarian" court; but as Act One concludes, she is lying prone on the floor, head-to-head with King, who has decreed that no one's head may be higher than his own. Hammerstein writes: "Anna and the King regard each other warily. Who is taming whom?"

I thought of that line more than once during Warren Leight's fascinating and very entertaining play, No Foreigners Beyond this Point, which is currently being performed by Ma-Yi Theater Company. It takes place in China in 1980, and concerns a pair of naive do-gooder-type young Americans who have signed on as teachers in the remote southern province of Guangdong. Their purpose is to teach English and to bring aspects of Western culture to the just-opened China of the immediate post-Mao period. But the inscrutable Chinese national character—a reflection, as one of the teachers notes, of Confucianism more than of Communism—gets under their skin every which way. It's almost immediately evident that learning is going to happen in both directions here, with the balance very likely shifted in favor of the Chinese hosts, who are indeed spectacularly adept at "taming" their foreign visitors. The tension inherent in this remarkable challenge/opportunity for cross-cultural sharing is terrific, and makes a strong backbone for this intriguing play.

(There's another King and I reference, which I can't help thinking Leight put into his play on purpose. You may recall that Anna spends a good deal of her time complaining to just about anybody she can find about the house she was promised but never gets. In No Foreigners, Andrew and Paula, the two American teachers, continually rail about the bicycles that they've been promised. It's a great device, and a smart allusion, intended or not.)

No Foreigners Beyond this Point takes its title from a sign that the bureaucrats in charge of the school where Paula and Andrew will teach have just moved a few miles further inland. The China that these two brave kids venture to is a very alien place (the Chinese keep apologizing for how "backward" they are), still just getting over the horrible backsliding of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's decade-long experiment in large-scale social engineering, during which China's intellectuals and teachers were banished to "re-education" camps while schools and businesses lay fallow.

So Paula and Andrew have to quickly get used to a world where everybody spies on everybody: students on each other; teachers on students and other teachers; teachers and students (and the maid, Xiao Da) on Paula and Andrew. Elaborate apologies and excuses substitute for actual action, much of the time, and also serve as "cover" for unauthorized or dangerous behavior. A local petty bureaucrat, Widow Wan, wields inordinate power over the community; virtually everyone bears scars, literally or figuratively, from the oppressive years just passed.

At the same time as they're acclimating themselves to their very alien surroundings, Paula and Andrew are also dealing with their changing feelings  for one another and about their futures. Andrew has come here pretty much only to be with Paula, but his indirection morphs into righteous anger as he starts to "get" the Chinese culture. Paula is clearly on a mission to find herself. Leight has unfortunately underwritten his leading lady's character—Andrew is the compelling center of No Foreigners for most of its running time, until suddenly Paula discovers reserves of inner strength and pulls the play's center of gravity toward herself at the very last minute.

The Chinese characters are wonderfully fleshed out, from the four students at Paula and Andrew's makeshift classroom (who are unfortunately mostly absent from Act Two), to the other teachers and administrators at Guangdong.

Loy Arcenas is the play's director and also the set designer; his staging is fine and his set is splendid, making great use of the sometimes problematic 45 Below space. The rest of the design team—Carol Bailey (costumes), Japhy Wiedeman (lighting), and Fabian Obispo (sound)—do expert work as well, with Obispo's contribution perhaps the most invaluable. The cast is uniformly strong. Abby Royle is sympathetic as Paula, while Ean Sheehy is enormously likable as Andrew. Laura Kai Chen, Ron Domingo, Wai Ching Ho, Francis Jue, Karen Tsen Lee, and Henry Yuk are all double cast as teachers, students, and others, with Jue making the strongest impression as Vice Principal Huang, the lone outsider on the school's staff.

If you'll forgive one more King and I allusion, No Foreigners Beyond this Point succeeds principally because it savors the idea of "getting to know you"—really immersing us in a world with which most of us have no direct experience, without judgment and without cynicism. It makes for a fascinating journey.

No More Waiting is an hour-long, three-part musical revue that showcases the talents of a host of young musical theatre artists who deserve to be really well-known and, let's hope, soon will be. The writers are Chris Widney (book and lyrics) and David Christian Azarow (music), who have crafted a pair of charming and clever one-act musicals, each containing some remarkably sophisticated material (the third piece, a comic sketch, is not as impressive). The behind-the-scenes people include director Daniel Neiden and choreographer Margherita Ryan, who work miracles in what may be the smallest stage in town at the Duplex Cabaret Theatre. The performers are versatile, energetic, ingratiating, and terrific: actors Shane Bland, Lisa Clayton, Lianne Marie Dobbs, Kevin Duda, and Larry Raiken can sing, dance, and clown with the best of them, and musical director Charles Czarnecki provides splendid accompaniment. Kudos to all of these folks; producers, casting agents, and directors should be pleasantly surprised if they catch one of No More Waiting's remaining performances and acquaint themselves with them.

The evening is held together by an admittedly transparent premise. The scheduled show "Lisa With An 'S'!" has been derailed, and the wait staff—all of whom are musical comedy performers—decide to take over and put on their own show instead. (And luckily, the bus boy is a virtuoso pianist and is ready, willing, and able to serve as their accompanist.) So with a minimum of props and costumes, the makeshift troupe stage a mini-revue, designed to show their talents off to best advantage. And whaddaya know—it works!

Scene One is called "Love.com" and tells the story of an Internet romance between Marge, who works at a bookstore in Arizona, and Leonard, a 30-year-old nerd who lives with his mom in New York City. Though they've suggested online that they look like J-Lo and Fabio, they are in fact shall we say somewhat more insecure about their bodies: she is apparently nicknamed "Large Marge" and he has acne so bad that pimply teenagers pity him. (This is disclosed in a very funny duet whose refrain starts with phrases like "I'm repulsive" and "I'm repugnant.") The would-be lovers decide to meet in person in New Orleans, and despite the entreaties of her best friend Pat and his domineering mother, they prepare for the face-to-face. The ending is sweet even easily predicted. "Love.com" gives Duda and Clayton great opportunities to demonstrate both comic and vocal technique; it also displays Azarow and Widney's gift for Sondheim-esque multi-part harmonies and counterpoint—their compositions for this little musical are surprisingly (and winningly) complex.

The next piece is a sketch called "Don't Ask" in which a platoon of apparently gay and lesbian soldiers save the day when they implement a kind of "Queer Eye" makeover of their tough-minded sergeant. Some of the jokes are funny (and they're all nicely delivered by the cast), but the material feels a bit thin and even a tad dated.

But "Elevator Face" is a triumph: an elegant, clever musical dramedy that takes place in a New York elevator that has stalled between floors. On it are Harold (Duda), a businessman in crisis trying to impress some higher-up honchos in order to save his job; Jim (Raiken), one such honcho, who only seems able to concentrate on the pretty young girl in front of him; Cindy (Dobbs), said pretty girl, a recent arrival from Texas who is going to be late for a job interview; and Lonnie (Bland), a nice, ordinary young man. In a witty choral number (also called "Elevator Face") and in thoughtful solos (mostly comic but one, Lonnie's plaintive "Take a Chance," refreshingly straightforward and sincere) we meet these people and learn what's on their minds. The performances are socko and the writing is smart and economical. This piece, even more than its two predecessors on the bill, promises really excellent things from this team of artists.

So No More Waiting, a topflight cabaret evening on its own, is also a glimpse at some of musical theatre's rising young stars. I look forward to seeing and/or hearing all of these talented individuals in theatres all over town soon.

When Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879 it was so controversial that he was compelled to write an alternate, more morally “correct,” ending. After all, the main character, Nora, rejects her marriage and her children at the play’s conclusion, so that she may go off and discover herself. Through the course of the play she comes to understand that she cannot truly participate in a marriage until she stops defining her life in terms of her husband and her children, and understands what it means to be her own person. Ibsen brilliantly captures this human frailty, this fear of knowing oneself, a fear so strong that the tendency is to downplay the self, to lose oneself in the world of those we think we love. On its surface, it is a story about the emancipation of Woman, but it is really a parable about the freeing of the human spirit.

A Doll’s House has proven to be an enduring masterpiece. The story is of a woman, Nora, who has committed a crime to save the life of her husband, Torvald. When events converge to reveal the crime to Torvald, he rejects the exigencies which compelled the crime. He sees the crime, not the love behind it, and can only focus on the fact it was committed and how it will hurt his reputation. It matters little that a neat reversal in the plot sets things aright. Nora has seen the man her husband really is, and she sees the role she has been playing, that of a doll in his house. Nora’s new-found courage to face her fears and leave the doll’s house remains inspiring and Ibsen’s themes continue to resonate today.

In 1981, Ingmar Bergman distilled Ibsen’s three acts into 90 minutes, focusing on the relationship between Nora and Torvald and using the secondary characters only to move the plot forward. Nora is a tight script, cinematic in its scene dissolves (no surprise!), and extremely compelling from the opening moment. I have always liked this script and was anxious to see it in performance.

Set designer Joseph J. Egan has given us a lovely set for Test Pilot Productions’ current presentation. A semicircle of birch trees hems in the playing area, evoking a natural jailhouse feeling to Nora’s world. Just beyond the trees and in full view of the audience, sit the actors, watching the action when they are not “performing.” This adds a lovely layer of meta-theatricality, as the stage house itself becomes part of Nora’s “prison.” The expressionistic setting subtly reminds us that we are seeing a timeless parable. David Pentz lights the set beautifully and skillfully focuses our attention without calling attention to the lights.

Pamela Moller Kareman, the director, keeps the show moving when it needs to move and yet allows it the breath it needs. Matt Stine’s original music helps in this regard and like good cinema scoring, he effectively evokes and underscores moods without beating us over the head. And these moods are not all dark. The play is surprisingly funny at times, in a balance that keeps us from wallowing in pathos. Kareman wisely allows these moments to shine.

Kareman also wisely directs her company in a realistic style (since Ibsen is the father of modern realism). This forms a nice contrast to the almost Brechtian setting. In the lead, Carey Macaleer makes a physically striking Nora. She hits all her emotional marks and we do root for her. But rooting for her is relatively easy, since she is the heroine. It is more difficult to root for Torvald, who is written as a narrow-minded man of principal. Today, I think we tend to believe “he gets what he deserves” when Nora leaves. But there ought to be a sympathetic element to him, something that endears us to him and that we can understand makes Nora love him (or, at least think she loves him). Troy Myers’s Torvald needs to grow more dimensions. I hope he finds more passion in the early scenes so that his tour de force outburst at the end doesn’t seem so jarring. Tyne Firmin, though probably too young for the role, is an effective Dr. Rank, the family friend who, with his withering body dying of venereal disease passed down from his father, provides the ironic metaphor for Nora’s marriage. John Tyrrell is a perfect Krogstad, the somewhat evil engine driving the plot. Sarah Bennett brings an honesty and nuanced believability to her role as Mrs. Linde, Krogstad’s foil.

All in all, Test Pilot’s Nora is worth a view. It is a rare look at a master auteur’s interpretation of a theatrical master’s work.

We are all going to be faced with getting old. Brilliant comment, right? Well, it is a fact of Life. As we get old, we are also going to have a good chance that we will suffer some sort of memory loss. Let’s hope that if this does happen we find ourselves in the kind of loving relationship that playwright Barbara Hammond presents to us in her moving portrait Norman & Beatrice.

The setting is the kitchen of a home in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The conceit is that the first act depicts the couple of the title in the year 2001 and the second act takes us back to their first year as husband and wife in 1947. Upon first viewing the set, my reaction was to expect a “kitchen sink” drama. Now, I happen to like that genre, so I wasn’t concerned. Well, this play is that and more: a love poem written in the prose that exists between soulmates. The first act is at times heart rending, as we watch Norman, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, struggle within a world that keeps shrinking into the absolute and immediate present, while Beatrice, his wife of 54 years, keeps up with his shifting realities while steering him towards the necessities of living. Beatrice could come off as just a noble suffering soul, but Hammond avoids this by writing a loving partner whose own frailties can surface occasionally. Of course, Norman’s frailties are all too obvious, which is the point. They must be dealt with, as we as a nation must “deal with” our elderly. And how best to do this? Clearly, Hammond’s point is to do it with Love.

Director David Travis gives us an elegant naturalism, though at times I think he could tighten up the pauses. But that is simply a matter of my own taste and probably stems from my own prejudices to keep the pace moving. Never for a moment do we not believe these actors, and surely Travis gets credit for guiding them into the creation of this reality. However, I do suspect that both Graeme Malcolm as Norman and Jane Nichols as Beatrice needed subtle guiding only. These theatre veterans have crafted wonderfully realized characters. If I found it a little harder to see them as the younger second act incarnations of Norman and Beatrice, this is a minor quibble and has probably more to do with how amazingly they portray the septuagenarians in the first act.

When presented with well-done realism, the tendency is often to forget how difficult it is to pull it off from a technical and design standpoint. After all, it looks like they are in a real kitchen. So, let me commend Luke Hegel-Canteralla for a set that gets the details just right in both disparate decades. Marcus Doshi’s lighting is so good that you never notice that it is “lighting.” Camille Assaf’s costumes seem perfect for the characters.

Hammond’s second act is a clever echo of her first act. The resonances across the 50-plus years are fun to watch. Yes, this is a fun play: there are moments that are quite funny. And yes, it is a sad play: there are moments of poignancy that will stop your breath. I guess it’s like Life, a life from which the playwright has skillfully drawn. Hammond clearly knows her subject matter—the play is based on experiences she had with her own parents. She has distilled these experiences into two hours of riveting theater.

If the accompanying press material is correct, and the year 2030 finds us all in a Baby Boomer nation where upwards of 50 million have Alzheimer’s disease, we can only hope that we are blessed with a relationship such as depicted here. Kudos to Synapse Productions for bringing Norman & Beatrice to life. I have a feeling this play will not be forgotten.

One-man shows have a difficult barrier to overcome before they even begin. Coming in, the audience knows the voice they will be hearing. Sure, the actor can assume many roles and work his backside off trying to make them all convincing. Conversely, he can narrate with his own voice, sort of like books on tape. Yet, neither description captures Not a Genuine Black Man, the one-man show written and performed by Brian Copeland. In this show, the author calmly takes us on a conversational walk through his family album. Some stories are familiar, some are new. What they all share is a point of view—that it takes courage to live the life that you really want.

He starts, typically enough, when he and his sister are very young, but moves back and forth between his adult life and his childhood. The format is effective in showing the way he uses the early lessons in raising his own family. As a child, he lives in Oakland, California with his sister; his mother, a proud woman whose greatest ambition is to be respected simply because she is a human being; and his grandmother, a no-nonsense, straight-talking, hard-working spitfire from Birmingham, Alabama. There are two more sisters, whom Copeland dismisses from his act because he can’t handle that many characters—good information and a wise choice. Other than his absent father who makes occasional and frightening appearances, he depicts his family with humor and affection.

It is easy to admire a woman who defies convention. Copeland’s mother, although born in Alabama, insists on telling people she was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the epitome of white entitlement territory. It is one of his mother’s funny idiosyncrasies. Yet, it becomes less fanciful fairy dust as we get to know her. It is a piece of history she apparently needs in order to live the life she wants for herself and her family. Copeland has her speaking decorously, correctly, as she instructs her squabbling children that double negatives make a positive.

When Copeland is eight, his mother relocates the family to San Leandro, California, where the neighborhood is 99.99% white. Almost immediately, he is stopped by the police and frisked, taunted by six teens, and falsely accused of throwing a cat in a swimming pool. The stories, unfortunately almost a right of passage for the black male, are told less for their content than for the warmth and dignity Copeland bestows on his mother when she responds to them.

Copeland took the poor example of his father and modeled his own life by doing everything exactly opposite, caring for his children and spending time with them. Yet, for all his exemplary behavior, Copeland still encounters discrimination—not that he is black, but that he is not "genuinely" black. He ponders what this means, and adds that no one ever told his absent, abusive, inarticulate father that he wasn’t a "genuine" black man. What does it mean to be genuinely black? It is a question for which he does not have an answer.

Subsequently, Copeland describes an attempted suicide, followed by a malaise that borders paralysis. He desperately wants to go into the yard and play with his children, but he can’t get up. His grandmother calls and he moans into the phone, "I can’t get up. I can’t get up." She replies, "Whatchoomeanyoucan’t get up? Whatchoomeanyoucan’t get up?" and he has her off and running in her no-nonsense way until he is up and out, and playing with his children. It is a terrific moment—one in which self indulgence is swept out the door in exchange for living life in the moment.

Bob Balaban directs at a leisurely pace, keeping the performance at two hours without an intermission. It didn’t seem that long, but ten minutes less or so wouldn’t hurt either. David Hines’s elegant lighting adds dramatic effect to a sound performance.

One of the main rules of comedy is that no one gets hurt. Let the audience beware: there are plenty of laughs in Not Clown, but Not Clown is Not Comedy.

It’s difficult to explain the conceit of the show without giving their game away. In brief: the clown troupe performing the show is from an unnamed country that has persecuted clowns. Any clowns that weren’t abducted and tortured by the government fled to nearby Latvia. But there has been a recent election, and with the change in policy clowns are free come home.

Linda Johns is the daughter of the clowns’ worst enemy, the chief interrogator under the old regime. When she saw clowns tortured, she became sympathetic to their plight and tried to join them. Now that it’s safe for her friends to come home, she uses her family’s dirty money to pay for their return. She also asks them to perform "Not Clown," a show about their mutual adventures that she has written, directed, produced, and stars in.

Not Clown is a play within a play within a play, and it is full of surprises. The clowns turn on Linda time and again. They tie her up and make fun of her. They abandon her and ruin the show. And this sparks a series of questions: Is this the nature of clowns, why they had to be outlawed in the first place? Or are they getting back at Linda for trying to control them in a different but equally sinister way? Are clowns real people who can be hurt? Or are they so adept at pretending to be real people that they are a menace to society? The play poses these questions with such relentless subtlety it’s enough to make your head burst into cartoon flames.

Carlos Trevino’s set is deliberately amateurish and all the props are visible. Actors can be seen preparing to enter or whispering in the background. Like everything else in the play, the set has several layers of meaning. Clowns are creatures of the theatre with no life offstage and this setting makes that clear. It is also a tradition in political theatre to show the “seams” (otherwise known as the backstage action) so the audience never gets so absorbed in the story they forget to think about the ideas being presented. The set also demonstrates that Linda is still an amateur, and doesn’t have control over the space or the people in it. The rest of the design elements back these ideas up nicely: Natalie George’s lights, Allison Stelly’s costumes, and Cole Wimpee’s props.

But while the production is full of symbolism, self-consciousness, and horror, the play also has a strong narrative and is great fun. The outsized squealing horror of the clowns in full makeup is truly alarming, but the cast trusts each other so much they are a joy to watch. Robert Deike, Josh Meyer, Robert Pierson, Mark Stewart, and Rommel Sulit are all excellent. Matt Hislope does amazing sound effects. But it is when the play shifts into naturalism that something really special begins to happen. Elizabeth Doss as Linda and Lee Eddy as Agnes become the heart of the play as the clown troupe prepares to run and Linda enters their lives. Because of this connection, the ending is truly grotesque and terrible.

Not Clown is harrowing to watch and offers no easy answers. It does not make a statement but paints a portrait, which (to extend the metaphor) then disconcertingly comes to life and starts asking questions. Do pain and humiliation matter when the other option is never being able to live the life you were born to live? Can the world really live without clowns even when they threaten the prevailing order? There are no easy answers in this play, and no moment the audience can let its guard down. But the reward is a complicated, nuanced piece of theatre that asks real questions, about what it means to be a citizen as well as about what it means to be a person.

Windblown tattered doors the height and width of the stage close upon the deep collective darkness of night then open on the deep individual darkness of memory at the beginning of Scena Plastyczna KUL’s Odchodzi (Passing Away), a play without words, based on the poetry of Poland’s celebrated poet Tadeusz Rozewicz and directed and designed by Leszek Madzik. The show is a gesture of spirit and mourning, a meditation on the fading of memory and love, a profoundly moving and haunting experience.

Madzik bases his series of tableaux on Mother Departs, a book of prose and poems by Rozewicz, but as a director who eliminated any sort of spoken language from his spectacles decades ago he translates Rozewicz’s work into a series of pictures, not a narrative or a drama: his is a theatre of images which humbly and quietly offers to the individual spectators, the actors (ten of them, all students), live, breathing objects of the spectator’s gaze. Here the collection of tableaux centers around the death of the poet’s mother and the fading of maternal love, but Madzik speaks to every experience of profound loss and the dissipation of the material world in fading memory.

The audience is plunged in darkness for the first several minutes of the show, then ghostly images begin to emerge from the cavernous dark: the dimly lit doors closing one world and opening onto another, revealing the body of an old woman in a coffin, dimly lit herself like a fading icon; the body slowly approaches and departs from the audience, the coffin teetering away from us as the old woman is resurrected in memory: suddenly, the dead body is no longer aged but young as she recedes through time and distance. The centerpiece (in the theatrical space as well as in time) is a giant picture box on a turntable, laboriously pushed round and round by the poet as he reconstructs memories in his mind: in one memory, his mother is the origin of a series of thin, dark approaches to the son, these approaches taking the form of delicate black dresses; in another, the poet posits his mother dead in front of him as he slumps over his writing desk. In the final sequence, hollow sheaths emerging from the floor, photographs of the poet’s mother, are filled with corporeal moving presences; after a short time, though, these empty too, leaving only a series of aged skin-like cloths, which glow yellow for a moment, then blue, then disappear into the darkness entirely.

This is a wordless show, but it is accompanied by a musical score by Marek Kuczynski and a live vocal performance by the renowned Polish jazz singer Urszula Dudziak, whose soprano voice (she is described in the program as a scat singer, but this spiritualized improvisation is a far cry from the dooby-doos of Mel Torme) suggests both bodied presence and the ephemerality of experience. On occasion the score (equal parts basso Gregorian chant, urban rhythm, and hints of swing) jars, drawing attention to itself at the expense of the tableaux, but these moments are few.

Madzik’s Odchodzi (Passing Away) is a profoundly theatrical experience, plunging to the roots of drama and spectacle as an elicitation of the sacred from love and the physical bond between a mother and a child.

After Madzik’s beautiful offering and last year’s production of Saint Oedipus in the same space, La MaMa and the Polish Cultural Institute must be commended for bringing to the New York stage a spirituality, grace and beauty all too often missing from our own theatres.

There is something enduringly mesmerizing about Oedipus. In spite of the fact that Seneca’s text is centuries old, the tragedy remains inexplicably relevant. Famous as a story of hubris, of literal and metaphoric blindness, this production by Theatre By The Blind is richly and thoroughly engaging. It is one-of-a-kind experience, and one posing many unexpected questions.

Director Ike Schambelan has transplanted the story from ancient Greece to the White House. Oedipus is a man who’s left his homeland in order to circumvent the gruesome prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. In self imposed exile, but ruler of another land, Oedipus (George Ashiotis), surrounded by presidential aides and his stately first lady (Melanie Boland), attempts to discover the origin of his country’s crisis. Oedipus is determined to end the turmoil by finding, and punishing, the man responsible for the late king’s death—thereby appeasing the wrath-filled gods. But tragedy seeks out Oedipus despite his good intentions, as he discovers that not only is he the man who killed the former king, but that the entirety of the prophecy he left his home to avoid, he has unintentionally fulfilled. Oedipus, in horror, then performs his infamous blinding retribution, pulling out his own eyes, and leaving his country. The dilemma of hubris and good intentions gone bad is poignant as it is linked by TBTB to the American Chief Executive.

A production this rich and this challenging is rare; and no small part of what makes this Oedipus a singular experience is that this famous script about blindness is being performed by this particular group. Theatre By The Blind is composed of individuals with varying degrees of sight, from the completely sighted to the totally blind; they are, in a sense, a panel of experts on the matter. This play deals with issues of blindness, and consequently strange corners of it are brought under examination. With actors who astonish audiences with their adeptness as performers, audiences invariably try to figure out who in the cast is actually blind. And as the actors navigate their space and inhabit their roles with equal aptitude (every member of this cast is exceptional), it is strangely uncomfortable to suddenly hear Oedipus search for the cruelest possible fate for himself, one worse than death, and settle on blindness.

But messages about blindness in the text itself are more complex. The play is littered with pejorative blindness references, but also includes the character of the blind prophet Tiresius (J.M McDonough), gifted with a second sight, a valorized blindness. Oedipus’s blindness is something more complicated: a punishment, a physical bleakness inflicted to properly reflect the bleakness of Oedipus’s soul. And the text’s unanswered questions posed about the nature of blindness feel viscerally relevant once asked by Theatre By The Blind.

There is another aspect about this Oedipus which cannot be replicated elsewhere. It is the subtle but undisputable existence of two plays at once, one for the sighted and one for the blind. Theatre By The Blind estimates that while only 0.2% of general theatre-going audiences are blind, some 10% of their audience are visually impaired. It is their mission to “integrate blind and sighted in a shared aesthetic experience.” So, TBTB is aware that some in the audience do not see the visual clues planted by the design—the American flag pin on the lapel of Oedipus’s jacket, how the room strangely resembles the Oval Office in Merope Vachlioti’s effective set. There is nothing within the text to suggest, thereby cluing a non-sighted person in, that the play has been relocated from Thebes, and that the actors, dressed smartly by Christine Field, look like they may have stepped off the set of The West Wing.

There are, however, significant markers specifically for the blind. For example, major lighting changes are often accompanied by an onstage sound, seemingly to give an auditory clue of a change to those who can’t watch for it. During the show, I couldn't help wondering how many cues I was missing out on as a sighted person; how much of this play I wouldn't pick up because I was watching it. And from time to time, I closed my eyes, knowing I wouldn't replicate the experience of those who cannot see the play, but trying to discover a small something about this other play occurring in this Oedipus, the play that is not meant to be seen.

In the end, the fictional tragedy of Oedipus and the non-fictional condition of the blindness of many of the cast become inextricably linked in meaning to the spectator. There is one unmistakably provocative moment, in the form of a song, saved for the last seconds of the play, where I found it impossible not to question what perspective Theatre By The Blind intends to share about the role of blindness in this production. It seems as if the company may be taking the view that Oedipus’s journey is not a tragedy at all, that his blindness is ultimately his blessing. Or is the surprising song they sing about sight a truly biting irony, simultaneously commenting on Oedipus’s tragedy and the performers’ own?

With so much textual conflict regarding blindness, coupled with the rare circumstance of a cast of blind actors, it is difficult to not feel involved in a special kind of mystery in this production. Schambelan’s direction of Ted Hughes’s adaptation is strong, making the task of sorting symbols and decoding information thrilling, and not a bit laborious. Chances to be challenged so rigorously by a play are rare, and this production should not be missed by those interested in the challenge.

The Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs, now playing at New York Theatre Workshop:

My preconception: “Ah, plugging a bunch of modern-day middle-aged lesbians into the story of Oedipus. A sort-of Candid Camera, Greek-tragedy-style. Chock full of really bad jokes and lots of eye candy (depending on your diet). This should be a campy little post-modern special-interest treat!”

My actual experience: completely engaged, thoroughly entertained, a little sad, a little haunted.

The plot: It’s Terri’s 37th birthday, and her girlfriend Prin (in her early 50s) has arranged a weekend celebration at a Palm Springs lesbian resort with their friends Con and Fran. 40-somethings Con and Fran are recent mothers who, after many years together, are experiencing LBD (“Lesbian Bed Death”), which even the most “cutting-edge caring” (to borrow a phrase from Dame Edna) cannot cure. However, Prin and Terri, in their seventh year together, seem to have the perfect relationship: steamily sexy and deeply loving. In fact, at Sunday’s birthday dinner, Prin plans on popping the question, but Joni, the Tiresian caretaker, warns Terri (who recently lost her adoptive mother) that at that very dinner she will receive some rather earth-shattering news concerning the identity of her birth mother.

If you have been keeping the title in mind throughout, the much-alluded-to information will be no surprise. But though the Five Lesbian Brothers provide shock (of varying degrees), they do not rely on it. They don’t have to. They take their slightly absurd premise quite seriously and the result is transcendent. The dialogue is funny, but the pain is real and, as creators as well as performers, their balance of the two is masterful.

Our first sight is Joni, the blind seer and very-tanned naturalist who runs the imitation-Native-American resort, standing naked, folding towels. With an improper amount of care, an actress could let this figure be mere comic relief, but in the hands of Babs Davey—the only Brother not given writing credit—Joni has an air of pragmatic detachment that is ominous. Lisa Kron and Maureen Angelos are at once fresh faced and worn out as Con and Fran, the ladies who can’t seem to find the “on” button to each other’s libidos (they keep hitting the “panic” one instead). Peg Healy’s Terri is effortlessly emotional as a woman reaching out for a mother figure, while Dominique Dibbell is deeply effective as she shifts from a wisecracking dyke to a woman whose heart, on overload, is systematically shutting down.

Director Leigh Silverman maintains a lightness of weight especially as the material turns dark. She and the Brothers seem to have a singular vision, shared by their designers (most notably David Korins, whose set is both kitschy and classical). Oedipus at Palm Springs is a piece of theatre that marries the mundane and the mystical, disarming us with pithy camp, and then confronting us with a compendium of universal fears that are commonly called “the human condition.”

My conclusion: Don’t miss it.

As part of the Off-Off-Bowery Festival at Jean Cocteau Repertory, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble is presenting a new production of William Shakespeare's Othello. Directed by Rachel Macklin, with sumptuous period costumes by Sean Sullivan, the play—though barely, if at all, cut—feels squarely focused on its two leading characters. Seth Duerr, as Iago, and Kevin Kaine, as Othello, both provide intriguing and well-thought-out interpretations of these familiar roles, and it is as a showcase for the considerable talents of both of these actors that this revival achieves its main success.

We meet Duerr's Iago first, and although he's absent for much of the play's second half he is nevertheless indubitably its driving force and focal point. Duerr gives us an Iago of pure misanthropy: his early speech about how much he hates the Moor feels almost like Richard III's winter of discontent, so concentrated is his anger and malevolence at the General (and the world) that have so unjustly wronged him. Duerr maintains the evil, oily charm of his character throughout, giving us an Iago we can love to hate. His diction is flawless and his presence is unrivaled (except by Kaine's, appropriately). His decision to smoke cigarettes feels a little over-the-top (not to mention anachronistic); the knee-level boots that he sports, in a sea of other military men clad in regular shoes, also come across as a bit jolting. (Is that Sullivan's choice or his own? I'm not sure.) Duerr's take on Iago is vivid and valid, but it doesn't result in much of a journey for the character, which actually helps tilt our interest toward Othello (perhaps what Shakespeare intended; he didn't call the play "Iago," after all).

As Othello, Kaine delivers a fascinating but uneven performance. He's adopted a strange accent that, to my ear, sounded Southern African American; I'm not sure this a good idea. If Kaine, who tells us in the program that he is "Half Black," is self-conscious that he looks like a white man, well, he shouldn't be: I applaud Macklin for casting color-blindly, as it were: the race angle isn't particularly emphasized in her production, which gives attention all the more to the universal emotions that Othello trades in (love, passion, jealousy). Kaine conjures all of them spectacularly when he has to. The pacing of the final scenes, where his obsession leads to tragedy, feels a little slow; but in his scenes with Duerr, especially, Kaine captures the complexity of a man too-often portrayed as very simple.

The work of the remaining cast members is variably successful. Sara Mayer's very modern (almost feminist) Desdemona doesn't really jive with the part Shakespeare has written, while Abe Goldfarb's buffoonish Rodrigo feels like a forced attempt at lightening up a very dour script. Danaher Dempsey is fine as Cassio, though, and Garry Carbone, Joe Serpa, and Eric Michael Kochmer make strong impressions in smaller roles.

I didn't learn anything new about Othello in this production. But if Duerr and Kaine and their colleagues—all of them ambitious, up-and-coming theatre artists—can develop their craft while bringing a timeless and classic tale to the stage, what more can we really ask for?

Office Sonata, a hilarious and inventive new comedy by Andy Chmelko, deserves to be this season's sleeper hit. Alas, it only runs two more days; maybe it will come back. Boy, am I glad I got to see it!

Deliciously surreal yet rooted just enough in the world of corporate life that office workers know and love (to hate), Office Sonata is a funny, sharply-observed, shrewdly grounded satire of American nine-to-five culture. It revolves around Martin and Kyle, two underlings in the awesomely massive Empie Advertising Agency. Martin is a slacker with attitude: when he accidentally substitutes a porno tape about barnyard animals and she-males for a client presentation, he is punished—in Empie's unorthodox style—by being "fingered" (i.e., a silent, somewhat scary man in a raincoat and obviously false moustache hovers over his desk all day, middle finger extended right in front of his face). But when Martin 'fesses up to his next screw-up—a HUGE one, whereby he crashes all of the company's computers by visiting a porn site on the Internet—he is rewarded for his courage with a big promotion. Empie, with the lack of consistency, internal logic, or common sense that we know in our hearts pervades all monolithic money-making institutions these days, has its own unique way of managing, well, just about anything.

Kyle, on the other hand, is plodding and striving, starting at the bottom with a plan to do the jobs no one else wants to do so well that he will surely be noticed by upper management. Guess how fast he gets promoted?

He does wind up saddled with a hellacious boss named Marisa who, in one of the play's funniest sequences, locks horns with another executive, Les, because he won't move out of her way and she won't move out of his. (This, Chmelko tells us, is called "Zax Complex"—an affliction affecting the rich and powerful.) Eventually Kyle, along with Les's assistant Megan, declares a revolution against their arrogant fathead bosses, tossing lo mein noodles and Zima at them until a team of "Separation Specialists" turn up, armed with tranquilizer darts, to end the stalemate. It's belly-laugh funny; it also feels like only a slight exaggeration of what actually transpires in Corporate America (or, perhaps more accurately, of what Corporate America seems to do to its unwitting inhabitants), which means it's as outrageously tragic as it is outrageously silly. Director Jason Zimbler sums up the play's moral in a succinct program note: "If you work for an asshole, quit."

The writing is superb; the production matches Chmelko's invention and wit note for note. Zimbler's staging deftly combines a variety of subplots, juggling them before our eyes as nimbly as any Flying Karamazov Brother (and providing the same level of breathless but sophisticated anarchy as well). The production design is of the same broadly comic style as the writing and direction, featuring a sublimely witty visual joke (a set piece in the upstage left corner) that you won't get until Chmelko's script delivers its most delicious payoff, near the very end of the show. Qui Nguyen's fight choreography, notably for the bitch-slap confrontation between giant cowards Marissa and Les, is terrific.

Seven remarkably versatile actors portray all of the roles in Office Sonata—I was sure there had to be more of them, so quickly and completely do they morph from character to character. First among equals are Bryce T. Gill as Martin (who gets some particularly nifty audience interaction to play with) and Justin Swain, who is hangdog personified as sweet, naive Kyle and quite the opposite as a web porn site brought to life in one of the play's most imaginative sequences. DH Johnson plays the sadistic executive Les as well as a lowly mailroom clerk named Vance who gets some of the show's funniest business and perhaps its most hilarious line. Beth Jastroch and Brendan Bradley play, among other roles, a pair of prisoners in a mysterious cell who fall in love with each other. Rounding out the ensemble are Heidi Niedermeyer as Megan and Rose O'Hara as Type A Business Lady from Hell, Marisa.

Office Sonata is only the second full-scale production from Impetuous Theatre Group, a new troupe headed by James David Jackson, Josh Sherman, and Joe Powell (their debut was Venezuela, which nytheatre.com covered in last summer's FringeNYC festival). This is a company that we will definitely be keeping an eye on. Meanwhile, if you can get to one of the remaining performances of this really impressive show, do so—you'll have a ball.