Like the word itself, Slut! is playful, dirty, risqué, and only barely insulting. The songs are hilarious, the characters colorful, and watching it is like drinking a Cosmopolitan—sweet with a hint of sophistication, leaving you giddy; silly and soon forgotten.

As you may have guessed, Slut!, the new musical at the American Theatre of Actors, is about sex (and drinking). How wonderful, confusing, harmful, and casual it can be (sex, drinking, or both). Of course this is sex in the twenty-something WB kind of way, meaning no AIDS, no nudity, and perfect morning hair. Even the costumes could be from the latest episode of One Tree Hill. Think women’s J. Crew shirts and skirts the color of flavored martinis, and men’s business casual Dockers and urban casual Diesel. Even the number of main characters, three men and three women, carries the sort of odd symmetry you only find in sitcoms like Friends.

But this is where the comparison between sitcoms and Slut! ends. Slut! is more South Park movie than Dawson’s Creek and although the story may sound familiar (boys meet girls, misunderstandings, and happy resolve), you aren’t likely to find a rendition quite like this.

The lead character is Adam and befitting the role he is handsome, confident, and charming. His two best friends are Dan, the sweet innocent one, and J-Dogg, the emotionally underdeveloped “hip-hop head” who postures sexual promiscuity when-all-he-really-wants-is-love one (a la Seth Green in Can’t Hardly Wait). Unlike the stereotypes they purport to represent, these characters defy expectation. Unlike other leading men—the type of characters George Clooney or Brad Pitt might play—Adam doesn’t pretend to be a gentleman. He is a self-proclaimed, full-blown, honest-to-goodness slut. Dan may be the innocent one, but he is also the clingy, self-absorbed, sexually repressed one. And J-Dogg, despite his affinity for FUBU jumpsuits, doesn’t even try to rap. Instead, he sings about the trials and travails of Herpes in the sweetest falsetto voice you’ve ever heard.

The female equivalents to these three men are no less amusing or unexpected, and as you might imagine bringing these two groups of people together results in a story with more nasty twists then a dirty curly straw. By the end of the first act, Adam the Slut realizes he has slept with every attractive woman in New York and decides to leave on his newly sequestered sailboat, the HMS Donkey Balls, to find women in new countries to conquer. Dan, the sweet one, gives up his innocence and trades in his true love for the life of a “monster” slut. One of the women, Janey, who gets married at the beginning of the show, realizes she doesn’t really know her husband as well as she thought. And one of Janey’s best friends, a struggling musician named Delia, finally gets the record contract she has always wanted but has to contend with a record executive who likes to stick contracts in his posterior.

As with any comedy this removed from reality, the humor in Slut! would not work without actors with timing and conviction. This cast is not only as talented and skilled as their list of Broadway and Off-Broadway credits belie, but they're an ensemble that possesses a rare mix of playfulness and professionalism. Jenn Colella, who plays the independent but vulnerable musician Delia, is as delicate and thorny as a rose, and although she only has one chance to really belt it out, has a powerful voice to boot. Mary Faber adds flavor to the play as a collection of minor characters, including one of Delia’s friends, a charming if clichéd dumb blonde named Veronica. Andy Karl, who plays Adam the Slut, is the momentum behind the show, delivering each of his numbers with moxie and graciously giving up the spotlight when needed. Kevin Pariseau plays the equivalent to all of the slightly random and askew characters in The Simpsons like the old sea-dog and the perpetually drunk bar regular, appearing out of nowhere like a magician and never missing a beat in transition. Harriett D. Foy, who plays a bartender and a variety of supporting roles shows off her Broadway experience by pulling out one of the best received songs in the show, “Lower the Bar,” a silky jazz number about sexual standards, despite being left on stage with little in the way of staging or choreography. Finally, Jim Stanek, David Josefberg, and Amanda Watkins round out the cast nicely, each contributing strong performances, the latter two in multiple supporting roles.

In addition to the great acting, what makes this play better then a shot of tequila and some dirty jokes, are the lyrics, written by Ben H. Winters, which are both intelligent and pee-in-your-pants funny, and the music, written by Stephen Sislen, which merge musical genres seamlessly to fit the mood of the various scenes throughout the play, and an incredibly tight band that brings them all together. In fact the only aspect of the show I didn’t think was up to par is the set design by Beowolf Boritt, whose choice of colors constantly compete with the actors for the audience’s attention, and whose central set piece—an impressively large two-story book case lined with bottles—breaks up the stage into awkward pockets of space. The awkwardness of the set could also have been handled with greater finesse by director Gordon Greenberg who has done an amiable if underwhelming job, at times doing little more then placing the actors on stage. To be fair, whether by design or accident, Greenberg should be given credit for the outstanding chemistry of the cast. Last, but certainly not least, Warren Carlyle’s choreography keeps the show moving at a good pace, and at times is so brilliantly in tune with the humor of the show that the actors' movements just seem to flow naturally from the story.

The minor flaws in the production aside, going to see Slut! is a lot like a drunken one night-stand: it isn’t a good idea for a first date, no kids should be allowed, and I don’t recommend it for recovering alcoholics. In fact, at $55 a ticket, much like drunken sex with a stranger, you may find it a little bit expensive for something that is only fun while it lasts.

Take your kids to see Snoopy!!! at Brooklyn Family Theatre!!! It’s a simple, straightforward production of a simple, straightforward show, and with strong musical values, it’s a delightful way to spend an hour and a half.

Brooklyn Family Theatre, located in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is dedicated to presenting family-appropriate plays and musicals, and their production of Snoopy!!! follows their winter 2004 production of the original Peanuts musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. These shows are ideally suited to their style and space. The simple, Charles Schulz-styled set pieces and props by director Phil Greenland and actor Hector Coris are exactly what’s called for, and the brightly-colored costumes by Orlando Haynes and Greenland bring the famous comic strip characters to life.

This 1975 musical was conceived as a sequel to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Snoopy!!! shares more than just the comic strip source material with its better-known predecessor. For starters, it uses the same “song-vignette-song” format, and there are more than a couple of musical numbers which are variations on songs and situations from the first Charlie Brown musical. A school room number with the children fretting over an Edgar Allan Poe reading assignment has much the same feel as the “Book Report” number in You’re a Good Man, and “The Big Bow-Wow”, a second-act showstopper for Snoopy, is very similar to YAGMCB’s “Supper Time.” Some adults may get antsy when a couple of the songs stretch one joke out almost to the breaking point, but, hey, it worked the first time, and the fact is kids love watching Snoopy pull out all the schtick-y vaudeville stops.

Not everything in Snoopy!!! is directly reminiscent of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, however. There’s a layer of complexity, albeit thin, in this show that isn’t as evident in YAGMCB. Although the earlier musical has more of the authentic Charles Schulz humor and heart, the music for Snoopy!!!, by Larry Grossman, is unexpectedly sophisticated harmonically, rhythmically, and structurally. This adds a good bit of interest for adults, and when Charlie Brown reminisces about Snoopy’s days as a puppy in “Where Did That Little Dog Go?”, parents in the audience may get a little misty and pull their little ones a little closer. The two “pawpet shows” with Woodstock and the gang watching a hilarious stuffed animal performance really gets the kids laughing, and adults will find an enjoyable camp element in seeing stuffed animals enact War and Peace or Woodstock falling in love with a worm puppet. (Rachel Martsolf, in the silent role of Woodstock, is wonderfully expressive with her face and body.)

The most impressive aspect of Brooklyn Family Theatre’s production is the very strong musical values. The voices here are terrific—the seven actors manage to get the lyrics across to the audience in spite of the difficult acoustics of BFT’s church sanctuary venue, and the ensemble is musically crisp and well-rehearsed. The women’s trio “I Know Now” is a vocal highlight of Act I, and Hector Coris as Snoopy lets it rip with a belty version of “The Big Bow-Wow” in Act II.

Brooklyn Family Theatre uses recorded synthesized accompaniment for the show, which gives the music a fully-orchestrated sound and allows the sound operator to easily control volume, but it diminishes any feeling of spontaneity or freedom for the actors. On a couple of occasions, the timing of actors’ delivery of lines and audience laughs didn’t line up with the pre-recorded underscoring.

Andrew Bevans is appropriately awkward and sympathetic as Charlie Brown and Isaac Arrieta is appealing and sincere as the smarty-pants Linus. Suzanne Adams exhibits fine comic timing as the tomboy Peppermint Patty, and she’s got a strong voice, whether belting or using her soprano in the very pretty song “Poor Sweet Baby.” Erin King is talented but doesn’t really get much stage time in the small role of Sally. Most of the time, Hector Coris’s dry takes and well-timed deadpans as Snoopy are hilarious, but sometimes his gaze out above the audience's heads seemed unspecific or just blank. However, his energy as Snoopy and understanding of famous pooch’s absurdly moody temperament is spot-on. As Lucy, Dawn Trautman is bossy and has a powerful voice, but, like Coris, she often falls back on a blank stare out above the audience when not delivering lines.

There is much to enjoy in Snoopy!!! for children and adults, and Brooklyn Family Theatre’s production is well worth the trip to 8th Avenue and 10th Street in Park Slope, especially if you’ve got kids. Snoopy!!! only runs for three weeks; don’t miss it.

Imagine you were walking down a street in New York and you stumbled upon an actor dressed up as the Cowardly Lion and wearing a George W. Bush mask while jumping through circus hoops held by an actress pretending to be Condoleezza Rice dressed up as a showgirl. You would have had the good fortune of stumbling upon the Theater for the New City's Street Theater Company, performing their newest opera, Social Insecurity.

Social Insecurity is the story of three friends from New York City who are seduced, persuaded, and/or coerced into joining the National Guard out of high school and then sent to fight in Iraq. While in Iraq, they are shocked by the amount of senseless death they witness and as a result are unsure as to why they are fighting in the war. Ultimately, one of the friends is killed by a landmine but is unable to ascend to heaven until the injustices that they witnessed in the war are reconciled. The remaining two soldiers return to the U.S. with the intent of putting their friend’s soul to rest, only to find the chaos and dismay they had left in Iraq has spread here at home.

The story, told through puppetry, dance, and song is a real visual treat on a hot summer day, a harkening back to the Vietnam era when public expression of your political beliefs was more the norm. Aside from the colorful costumes and movable sets the actors and stagehands are the real heart and soul of the piece. With 25 actors, 12 crewmembers, 2 assistant directors, and 5 musicians, this production is a huge undertaking. Actors stream on and off the stage while backdrops are brought on by hand. Add to that the heat from a summer in New York and the technical difficulties of mounting a musical outside and it becomes apparent that it takes a very special kind of person to pull this kind of show off.

If there is any weakness to Social Insecurity it is the writing. As a story, Social Insecurity reads like anti-war agitprop, rarely moving beneath the surface of the issues the play raises. It is a spectacle about a spectacle that left me feeling as frustrated about the war going out as I did coming in. Even as a means for information about the various injustices directly or indirectly resulting from the war in Iraq, this play jumps from one topic to another with such abandon that at times it feels overbearing and intimidating. Although it is hard to discern any deep meaning from the cacophony of political rhetoric that is thrown at you, the show does serve as a rallying cry of sorts, reminding us that the war continues, as do its effects at home and abroad.

If the writing is Social Insecurity’s weakness, then its greatest strength is the number of people the TNC Street Theater Company will reach. By performing in all five boroughs, TNC will provide an opportunity for hundreds of people in New York, some who may never have seen a theatre performance before, to see a free show. Not only will TNC bring theatre to all corners of the city, but they will also attract an audience. They do a great job of positioning themselves in areas with a high volume of foot traffic and keeping their story moving at a fast clip so as to keep the audience’s attention. Accommodations are hard to come by at street theater performances but here milk crates are provided as seats and actors and stagehands run around with water bottles squirting over-heated audience members.

At the performance I saw, most of passersby stood behind the seats that were provided to them, unwilling to commit to staying but unable to pull their gaze from the stage. Every few minutes someone would remember they were going somewhere before they had stopped to see who this person was who was wearing a lion costume and a George W. Bush mask or why there was a father singing to his son in Iraq. Eventually, that person would leave, only to be replaced by someone else who had also been on their way somewhere before they noticed the stage that hadn’t been there the day before.

Rose Franken's play Soldier's Wife is a pristine time capsule from another era, offering a glimpse onto a world that feels very different from our own. In Eleanor Reissa's thoughtful staging at the Mint Theater Company, it's at once an engaging entertainment and a fasincating and unique opportunity to look back at our not-so-distant shared past with a little bit of hindsight and a little bit of wonder.

It's late summer, 1944, in a (not so fashionable) West Side apartment in Manhattan. Kate Rogers is putting the finishing touches on a barely plausible repaint job on a stepladder; her nine-month old baby boy is asleep in the other room. War news is all that seems to be on the radio.

Kate's older sister Florence arrives, with some news of her own: Kate's husband John is back from his tour of duty overseas. And indeed, moments later John arrives, having been wounded on a mission in the South Pacific and requiring at least several weeks recuperation time stateside.

John has news, too. His best buddy, a fellow named Steve Martin, wound up in the next bed at the military hospital where both were treated. Steve was a lot worse off than John (and in fact died in the hospital); one of the things that gave him some pleasure, though, was reading the letters that Kate wrote to John. He thought so much of them that he mentioned them to his father, a prominent publisher. And so now it looks like Kate's letters are about to be in print.

Act Two begins with Kate celebrating the impending publication of her book, "Soldier's Wife," by blowing a good deal of her $500 advance on a shopping spree: a new dress (reduced from $79 to $22.50); a slightly damaged used humidor for John; bold floral slipcovers for, well, every bit of furniture in sight. But life looks like it's about to change: a gentleman named Alexander Craig is expected at 4:30 this afternoon, to interview Kate for the ladies' section of the newspaper. On his heels, surprisingly, is Peter Gray, who turns out to be a woman and is Craig's editor. She's found out that Kate's book is about to be a sensation, and she smells a story that she wants to be sure Craig sniffs out; she also wastes no time suggesting herself as literary agent to Kate, who is about to be offered a five-figure deal by a major movie studio.

This being 1944, the issue is not whether Kate will sell out and change her lifestyle to match her new-found celebrity (she won't), but whether John will be able to deal with the fact that his wife is earning so much more money than him. A thing that surprised me about Soldier's Wife was that the deep contrasts between the super-sophisticates Craig and Gray on the one hand and the folksy Rogerses on the other, which seem to be the main thrust of the play's second act, are virtually forgotten in the third: Peter is dismissed, more or less, as a self-evidently unfulfilled woman, while Craig is given a chance to prove his muster when a "real" crisis comes along.

I don't mean in that last sentence to sound superior or cynical, mind you: the other thing that surprised me about this play (though perhaps it shouldn't have) was how simple the world it portrays seems to be. Men and women know their "places" and, though the war has temporarily disturbed the balance, they're eager to set things right. More to the point, moral clarity is everywhere. No one wonders whether the war is just or necessary—everyone understands its importance even if they're weary of it. (Craig even calls himself a "yellow bastard" for not having enlisted.)

Is there value in spending quality time in a period and place where life was so different from our own? Absolutely—the reason we need theatres like the Mint to teach us about our past is so that we can see where we've been, to better understand how we got to where we are. Reflecting such divergent attitudes toward gender roles, sacrifice, and public service, Soldier's Wife is a valuable bit of social history, beautifully preserved.

It's also beautifully presented, with a first-rate cast bringing Franken's characters to life vividly and humanely. Michael Polak is wonderfully measured and instantly likable as John, while Angela Pierce is a lively, delightful Kate. Kate Levy strikes the right notes as worldly Peter Gray. Jordan Lage is terrific as Alexander Craig, telegraphing his type to us as soon as we see him hand his hat and coat to Judith Hawking's pitch-perfect Florence. And Hawking is splendid, evoking the period with each detail of her well-crafted performance.

Burns Mantle, writing about the original production of Soldier's Wife in 1945, noted that Franken was among the first to consider what would become a significant social issue of her day—the ways that families would cope with men being away for a long time and women taking their places as wage-earners. If the play's resolution of this dilemma feels a bit pat, it's nevertheless surprisingly satisfying. We can't get back to the time depicted here (and probably wouldn't want to, even if we could). But there's something ineffably comforting about the values, outmoded and otherwise, that pervade this piece and the simpler, more innocent era it represents.

There is a lot to say about Someone in the Ghost Box Told Me it Was You, currently playing at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. Performed by the relatively new company TEMPORARY distortion under the direction of Kenneth Collins, the piece distinguishes itself from the majority of plays one is likely to see from moment the audience arrives in the performance space.

The stage consists mainly of two elaborately wired transparent boxes, about the size of a refrigerator. In each box there are two actors nearly on top of each other. At least ten small screens pepper the stage and, when the lights are out, they shine like electronic stars in an otherwise pitch night sky. Except for the boxes, the televisions, and the wires, the set is completely bare.

The claustrophobic box is a highly effective dramatic tool, as it becomes a symbol that changes in the mind of the audience based on whatever text is being uttered by the performers. At times, it appears to be a phone booth, in other moments, a loft bed, and more than a few times, in its shape and dimensions, it is likely to remind the audience of a coffin. This technique of staging almost the entirely play within these extremely limited spaces, a technique that this company has worked with before, is reason enough to check out one of TEMPORARY distortion’s works. You are not likely to have seen anything quite like it.

That said, there is a good deal about TEMPORARY distortion that you are likely to recognize, material that is familiar from other sources. The minimalist deadpan style of acting is impossible not to associate with Richard Maxwell; the lights and sound, with their levels and distortion, are similarly reminiscent of Richard Foreman. The technologies and the screens containing archived and live images might immediately be associated with the Wooster Group, and the direct delivery of non-linear text makes it hard not to think of Sarah Kane. As long as one is borrowing techniques (as any artist generally does), this is a rather prestigious group to borrow from. But the piece feels a little too borrowed and creates some of the feeling of walking around in someone else’s shoes.

The stylization of this piece wears a bit thin, and the second half of the piece feels like it drags. Ghost Box is built to have an inherent self-awareness and distance. The motive of the piece seems to be, at least partially, to keep the audience at arm’s length, aware of where they are, never fully able to engage or lose themselves in the onstage world. In doing this however, the creators somewhat stunt the energy and momentum of the piece, which never have a chance to build.

The text hints at an over-arching relationship within the piece, but narrowly misses making that work. The script is full of proclamations, self-references to the play, to the actors, to a number of “plot” points. But it proves slightly difficult to fully create a functional, non-linear text that doesn’t just seem eclectic. There is no clear narrative. The techniques used in the text at best serve to create a kind of mood. There a number of one-line, non-sequiturs, some of which later recur, and which help to provide more insight to this mood. Two of the most memorable are, “I forget who I am on most mornings,” and “Does life seem somehow intolerable to you?”—the latter a quote the company chose to put on their postcards. The highly effective set provokes a deep sense of alienation, disorientation, and estrangement—all of which creates a kind of theme, but not much of a story. The non-linear tack is truly suited to the piece, but makes it difficult to string many of the elements together, even symbolically.

The script and the play are at their strongest when the piece deals not in estranged sentence structures but with a highly specific story revolving around a character named Victor. The details are purposefully vague, but there are hints at some seedy undercover dealings, involving subterfuge and a possible murder. Here the group is able to achieve both a haunting clarity and an unexpected humor.

Like much of the piece, the performances feel a little too forced. The deadpan, one-level style is surprisingly hard to master. It definitely feels like the right direction for these box-structure pieces, but it doesn’t always come out right. It seems like the women try too hard to master a Godard-like vacancy and sensuality, while the men seem to be reaching for a muted danger. Sometimes the techniques work incredibly well but mostly they ring a bit false.

This group is not far from creating an exciting and signature style, but they are still just shy of doing so. The box is a near flawless creation. It is the most moving and effective part of the work. For what is fundamentally a static structure, changes to it are made beautifully by small, but significant, additions of lights and props. The colored fluorescent lights within the box make huge changes to the onstage world and the sound design is almost equally sophisticated, which augurs well for this company’s future. As soon as the performances and the text mature to match the high conceptual level of these boxes, this group could very well begin producing staggering original work. In the meantime, it is worthwhile to see them leaning towards it.

With Somewhere In Between, now featured at the Fresh Fruit Festival, playwright Ronny Almog attempts to address elusive questions about human sexual identity. An ensemble of actors enacts different situations evoked by questions such as: What sex is god? What is a man? A woman? And do I have to choose? Through a collage of different vignettes—scenes, movement sequences, and monologues addressed to the audience, some set to original music provided by Doron Shalom on the piano and Udi Berner on the viola, the ensemble embarks on a philosophical inquiry into the pain of ambivalence in gender identification.

It is a difficult feat. Most of the text is an absurdist play on the meanings of words used to describe gender. While at moments successful, the mere vastness of the theme often seems to take over. It is difficult for us to relate to it. Perhaps rooting the action in character and location would make it more accessible. It is as if we don’t know where the ground is. I suspect that this effect is not far from the intentions of director Issi Mamanov and his team. We are to understand that gender labels affixed to people are meaningless in the face of individual internal chaos. But unfortunately that chaos is not fully realized for us on stage in ordered theatricality. We are left gazing a bit confused at the wistful (and well-executed) backdrop of blue sky mottled with white clouds, designed by Michaela Lika.

What is clearer, however, is the generosity of the actors. Despite a language barrier—they are all Israelis—they are able to transmit to us, viscerally somehow, their enthusiasm about the theme. In fact, after the bows they volunteer to perform a segment in the original Hebrew. The writing in Hebrew is funny and witty and the actors are free to bring it to life. I imagine that the general vagueness described above is due, in part, to a poor translation. We get a glimpse of the life of the piece in another moment. Unexpectedly, Almog steps onto the stage from the audience, sits in a pool of light, and almost seized with emotion speaks the words of a poem. The air in the theatre thickens—suddenly specific and haunting. We watch as a person dares to speak to us about questions that, whether we know it or not, we all share about what it means to be engendered.

Sore Throats is not an easy play to watch. Playwright Howard Brenton scathingly dissects middle-class domestic life, through characters who are verbally cruel and physically violent toward one another. The play’s view of human relationships is cynical, casting a merciless light on the way money and power warp emotional ties. You wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with any of these people. And yet, the play can also be oddly exhilarating, because in their violence and brutality and sordidness, all the characters are striving to break free of conventionality, striving to live a life different from the one that’s making them miserable now. They’re bound to fail; as Brenton writes: “it’s very very dodgy, the search for ecstasy. No wonder millions settle for a nice cup of tea.” And these particular people are perhaps more bound to fail than most—they don’t really have the courage or the strength of character to succeed, and they’re hurting themselves and one another in the struggle—but there’s something noble about their attempts.

The first act takes place in a completely empty flat. The year is 1979. Jack and Judy are recently divorced and have just sold their house. Although the divorce settlement stipulated that Judy, who’s never had a job and went straight from schoolgirl to housewife, would keep the sale proceeds of the house, Jack is having second thoughts. He wants to move to Canada with his young mistress, start over, and he wants Judy to sign a document granting him half the money. When she refuses, he turns violent, and it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t the first time. Jack tortures a signature out of Judy, but before he can escape with his prize, a young woman—a potential subtenant—arrives to view the flat. Against her better judgment, Sally gets drawn into battle, and together the two women are able to bully Jack off.

Fast forward a year. Sally and Judy have been attempting to live a completely hedonistic and domesticity-free life. The flat has descended into chaos and squalor, which they purposefully resist cleaning. They take turns picking up strange men and boys, they’ve traveled a bit, Sally’s quit her receptionist job. But the money is running low, and although Sally is aware that when it runs out, it’s back to answering phones, Judy—who really has nowhere to go once this money’s gone—is tempted to burn or destroy what remains in a final act of defiance. Then Jack shows up, baby carrier in hand, telling the pathos-filled tale of the birth of his child beside a highway in Canada and begging once more for a share of the house-sale money—and it all only gets more vicious after that.

Director Evan Yionoulis and three very fine actors (Laila Robins as Judy, Bill Camp as Jack, and Meredith Zinner as Sally) have given the play a strong, stark production that does not flinch from or attempt to soften the harshness of the writing. Adam Stockhausen’s shallow set forces the actors and audience into close proximity, and Donald Holder’s lighting design features flares of brightness to mark each outburst of violence. The set and Katherine Roth’s costumes visually underscore the thematic contrast between the acts—from the stark emptiness of the flat in Act One to the squalid chaos of Act Two; from Judy’s pristine white skirt set to a tawdry black negligee; from Jack’s policeman’s uniform to washed-out casual clothes.

In a preface to the play, Brenton writes “It is glaringly obvious to your author that the western world is in thrall to a system that respects nothing but money and power… It may not, I am very aware, be glaringly obvious to you, dear reader.” Sore Throats does indeed illustrate human interaction at its most desperately compromised by money and power. Although I tend to agree with Brenton’s point in a general sense, I think the play might actually be more effective if it were somewhat more nuanced; just because the western world at large is wholly motivated by money and power doesn’t mean that more complicated emotions have been evacuated from every exchange between individuals. But the force of Brenton’s writing, and the power of the acting, makes it impossible to look away.

Soul Searching, the new musical by Matt Okin and Avi Kunstler, is about one woman's quest for the perfect man. Now, it isn't as shallow as that little description might make it sound. In fact, Okin and Kunstler have a reasonably profound moral to impart in this sweet-natured and earnest show, which is that it may take you a long time to find what you think you really want, and so you may as well enjoy and appreciate the journey on the way to whatever that is. (The two penultimate songs in the show, "The Journey" and "When the Right Time Comes," bring home this point; they're the strongest items in the score.)

The protagonist of Soul Searching is Brenda, who is Jewish, an Upper West Sider, a teacher, and tired of being alone. In the first act, her three friends Rachel, Becky, and Sara set her up with men who, as it turns out, have some of the worst qualities of their respective husbands: Alan is an Orthodox Jew who thinks a woman's place is in the home; Peter is a mystic enamored of cults and celebrities; and Mo is a high-powered businessman who assumes money can buy him love. Not only are these three men quickly rejected by Brenda, they help focus her friends on the problems they're facing in their marriages. As the first act concludes, all four women are questioning their life situations.

In the play's second act, things work themselves out for all concerned, with the help of a wise rabbi and an unattached single man who assures Brenda and the others that, with faith and patience, one's objectives can always be achieved. Though all of the characters in Soul Searching are Jewish, the faith professed at the show's end is strongly secular: faith in oneself as well as faith in one's God are what Brenda and her friends are shown to require. It is admittedly a kind of generalized feel-good message, but it makes for an upbeat ending that (it seems to me) feels intuitively true.

The best thing about Soul Searching is Kunstler's varied, pop-rock-styled score (additional music and lyrics are by Okin). The songs are catchy, tuneful, and pleasing, ranging from the driving "On the Upper West Side" to the plaintive "Don't Hold On To Promises" to the doo-wop-inflected "Pretty Girl" to the very lovely "100 Days." This last song is performed beautifully by Max Roll, by the way, who plays another of Brenda's would-be beaux, a fellow named Michael who, thanks in part to Roll's charming performance, we find ourselves rooting for.

Unfortunately, Roll proves to be the only cast member who's able to do justice to the material. Aaron Grant, double-cast as Mo and Sara's husband, does credible work but his singing voice is on the weak side. Everyone else in the 10-person ensemble fares poorly both with acting and singing.

So we're not really seeing Soul Searching at its best in this production. Okin's staging is fine—it was always clear to me where he wanted the show to go, and the higher-production-value image that he seems to have in his head, guiding his vision in this necessarily stripped-down off-off-Broadway staging, was always evident. One poor decision was the use of headsets in a very intimate venue, the effect of which is to make a lot of the lyrics muddy and hard to understand.

But the material feels strong to me; Soul Searching, in the right venue and with the right cast, has the potential, I think, to be a real crowd-pleaser—a feel-good date show on the order of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. I know that Okin and Kunstler have been developing this show for a long time. I hope it can have another life after this staging.

Souvenir, a play with music by Stephen Temperley, is subtitled "A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins." Now Florence Foster Jenkins was a real person (read this) who became famous for having no talent while apparently believing that she did. Specifically, though she was tone deaf and had no discernible sense of rhythm, she was convinced—or caused others to understand that she was convinced—that she was a brilliant coloratura soprano. In her middle and old age, she gave annual recitals and eventually made some records that were apparently quite the rage in some quarters for a while. In 1944, she appeared at Carnegie Hall, just a few months before she died at age 76.

Now what about this life—one that was completely unknown to me until Souvenir came along, and I'm pretty well-versed in the trivial far reaches of American entertainment history—made Temperley want to write a play? I think he's attracted to the quixotic gallantry of Mrs. Jenkins, at least as he's imagined her: though everybody else can see that she's a foolish and deluded old woman, she, like some Lady of La Mancha, dreams her impossible dream and reaches for her unreachable star. There is, to be sure, nobility in that; but I think for us to understand it requires some context: who is this woman? why is music so important to her? what, if anything does she do when she's not singing? Alas, Temperley tells us none of this; all we know of his heroine is that she tries to sing and can't and then tries to sing some more and can't some more. We can admire her stick-to-it-iveness but we don't really understand her; we don't get under her skin and into her heart.

So, intentions aside, what Temperley has actually created here is a monument to this sadly laughable lady that takes the shape, exactly, of a sadly laughable lady performing for us. Souvenir's structure goes like this: Cosme Mc Moon, the play's narrator and Mrs. Jenkins's accompanist and closest (only) collaborator for a dozen years, tells us some anecdotes about how badly she sang; and then Mrs. Jenkins turns up in a new costume and sings badly. In Act One, we're usually in the music room of her apartment at the Ritz-Carlton and so she wears tasteful suits and dresses. In Act Two, we're mostly at the 1944 Carnegie Hall concert, for which Mrs. Jenkins supposedly wore a different costume for every song, and so we're treated to a parade of outlandish creations that threaten, for better or worse, to upstage the caterwauling.

Which takes me to the main, and pretty much only, thing that I finally have to say about Souvenir, which is that rather than elevating Mrs. Jenkins to a kind of heroic eccentricity, it reduces her to a joke, and a mean-spirited one at that. I don't think I would have found the original Mrs. Jenkins funny for more than 30 seconds or so as she repeatedly hammered nails into the coffin of her talent, and I didn't find Judy Kaye, pretending to be Mrs. Jenkins, funny for much longer. When Lucille Ball pretended she couldn't sing on I Love Lucy, and screeched off-key in this or that outrageous get-up, she always wisely kept the joke fresh by keeping it brief. Two hours of bad singing isn't, or at least shouldn't be, anybody's idea of an entertaining evening.

If Kaye had an authentic character to create in Souvenir, well, then things might well be different. But, as I've already explained, she doesn't. And so she's stuck, straining her naturally fine voice to create awful sounds with it, and forced to play it reasonably straight (as opposed to the grand clowning that Lucy got to do) because we're supposed to somehow be empathizing with Mrs. Jenkins, even though she is, as depicted here, resolutely uninteresting and consequently impossible to care about.

Donald Corren, who plays Cosme, has a part equal in size to Kaye's, but also equally un-fleshed out. There are fleeting moments of conscience in some of his narration: should he have told her the truth? was he prostituting his talent by taking her money for a dozen years? But again, there's so little in the way of background that it's hard to form an opinion on these matters, or even to care very much.

The show does feature a nifty set by R. Michael Miller that alternates between the Greenwich Village lounge where the elder version of Cosme supposedly works (the main story is a flashback) and Mrs. Jenkins's ritzy digs. But the Lyceum, one of the smallest Broadway houses, is obviously too large for Souvenir, especially for the pixilated tribute that I think it wants in its heart of hearts to be. The heroism Mrs. Jenkins exhibited, if any, was of the very smallest kind: hers is a story of humanity not exalted but brought down right to lifesize. A more intimate venue might be more welcoming; a more full-hearted perspective might be, too.

Their three heads arise sequentially from square holes in the hollow wooden triangle that constitutes their set and they look at each other until one decides to speak. The wandering conversation is about the music that can be heard from the theatre next door, the fly that just landed on the set, the degree to which they feel “in the moment” as actors. After their thoughtful discussion winds down, they look at each other again, and slowly duck back into the triangle, gingerly replacing the wooden lids.

This description—the first few minutes of Spirit, a play by the London-based theatre company Improbable (currently in performances at New York Theatre Workshop) — may seem Beckettian: a scientific precision-based approach to making art. And it is. But the science practiced by Improbable is not one of repetition, theories and facts; rather it is the science of ephemerality.

The narrative of Spirit is the story of three storytellers—played by Guy Dartnell, Phelim McDermott, and Lee Simpson— who are telling the tale of three brothers who have a bakery in the city of a war-torn country. The oldest brother (Dartnell) awaits a letter, drafting him into the army; the youngest brother (McDermott) intercepts it and decides to go to war instead, leading to his tragic demise. However, given the title, it is no coincidence that what I am compelled to convey about this piece is the nature of the events, rather than the events themselves.

Directors Julian Crouch and Arlene Audergon have created in collaboration with the cast a cautionary tale about war that is among the most thoughtful and pacific experiences I’ve had in the theatre. Dartnell, McDermott, and Simpson share a fraternal rapport so genuine that the dissimilarity of their physical likenesses is immediately moot. Though the sibling-narrators indeed generate a great deal of conflict—a war enacted with puppets whose heads are loaves of bread; a shouting match among the storytellers about who is more present and emotionally-invested as an actor—Spirit brilliantly eschews contentiousness (and pretentiousness, for that matter), moving through those all-too-human limitations like a ghost.

I am impressed by Improbable’s striking theatricality—from their ingenious set (realized by Crouch, Graeme Gilmour, Rob Thirtle, and Helen Maguire) to the sequence where the pair of living brothers ventriloquize the body of the dead one to illustrate the psychic damage he might have suffered had he survived— but I am more impressed by the manner in which all of their theatricality is executed: a gentle, bold simplicity.

Spirit is a play (in both senses of the word) that uses facts (that is to say detail) to uncover truths (that which is universally human). Inherent in their literal and figurative depictions of war, is the suggestion of a kind of solution, but Improbable is not so direct or didactic. Perhaps this solution is most vividly shown in the way these men perform: they listen, they receive, they use, and they let go. Their performances are generous—with each other, but especially with their audience; you will leave with, if nothing else, a stronger understanding of human resilience, even in the most frighteningly uncertain of historical moments.

Stage Kiss, the new "trifle" from the Stolen Chair Theatre Company, is a delight from start to finish: it truly puts the "play" back in play.

The fun begins the moment we take our seats and peruse the set, which literally covers every available inch of the tiny Red Room stage. A great set, I think, not only provides an ambient environment for the play but gives the audience information about what's to come as well; that's precisely what David Bengali's masterful design for Stage Kiss does, brilliantly letting us know right up front what we're in for. There's festive greenery everywhere; the walls are festooned with flowers and an occasional classical-looking portrait of some ancient hero or god. It looks like a playground for A Midsummer Night's Dream, which as we will see is entirely appropriate; and the goofy kitschy elements—cuddly Gund-ish forest animals, plastic blow-up palm trees—suggest the Ridiculous Theatrical sensibility, which we'll also see is entirely suitable. Mostly Begali's design promises a great time ahead. Happily, his collaborators do not let him—or us—down.

As soon as the lights start to dim—or perhaps even a little bit before—the goddess Venus comes bounding in, looking slightly frazzled in a pink fairy costume; Layna Fisher plays her as a vaguely inebriated ditz, a cross between, I don't know, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow. Venus sets things up for us: we're in a town in ancient Greece, where once a year the god Neptune (portrayed lustily by Jon Campbell, clad in leopard-print bathing suit, see-thru plastic cape, and giant scuba-diver flippers) demands the sacrifice of a virgin in return for his protection of the city. (Yes, apparently these gods are not above extortion; they are also aware that they are Roman gods—it's that kind of show.)

Puritanus (also played by Fisher) is the blustery father of a fair young maid named Gallathea; Veneria (Campbell) is the dithery mother of another fair young maid, Phyllida. (The fair young maids are played, respectively, by Cameron J. Oro and Alexia Vernon.) Both parents are distraught by the possibility that Neptune may choose their daughters for this year's sacrifice, and so each contrives to hide his/her prize from the randy god by disguising her as a boy and sending her into the woods. And so Gallathea becomes Queerius and Phyllida becomes Gynophilus, the two girls-dressed-as-boys discover each other, instantly fall in love, and then have to work out the sexual politics of the resultant confusing situation.

Neptune, of course, catches wind of this hoax being perpetrated against him and introduces some additional complications to the plot. So does Venus, who is both Titania and Puck in this particular Midsummer Night's Dream; as do the two interfering parents. By the end of a very fleet 80 minutes or so, all is worked out satisfactorily, with Phyllida and Gallathea affirming their own love even as Veneria and Puritanus and Venus and Neptune pursue theirs.

Romp that it is, Stage Kiss is no trifle at all, but in fact a canny and clever parody/paean/satire/tribute of/to, oh, several of Shakespeare's comedies (Midsummer and As You Like It come instantly to mind), classical mythology, Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre, and other stuff that I will think of later. Playwright Kiran Rikhye demonstrates her remarkable versatility (as she has done in her previous works The Man Who Laughs and Commedia dell'Artemesia), here penning what sounds like authentic Elizabethan verse that is often hilariously funny without ever feeling forced or lame. In the midst of these literary and poetical pyrotechnics, she introduces the very contemporary question of hetero- vs. homosexual couplings, arriving at a conclusion that is at once playful and authentically liberal (here I use that word in the most classical and traditional sense).

The sexual shenanigans are of course complicated by director Jon Stancato's decision to cast a man as Gallathea and a woman as a (much more butch) Phyllida: so we have a boy portraying a girl dressed as a boy falling in love with someone she thinks is a boy but who in fact is a girl dressed as a boy (played by a girl—phew!). Stancato somehow manages to make all of this gender-bending as naturally naive as it might have been in Shakespeare's time and, simultaneously, as provocatively subversive as it was is Ludlum's. Case in point: the most passionate kiss in the piece is one that Neptune plants on the cross-dressed Gallathea as he's about to make her this year's sacrifice: our very visceral reaction is informed by the circumstance in the play (this sweet young thing is about to be raped) and by the homoerotic context (we know that these are two men kissing). Stancato keeps us on our toes in this fashion, all the while keeping us wildly diverted and amused: good stuff.

Four splendid young actors bring Stancato and Rikhye's inspirations to life. Oro and Vernon are appealing and witty as Gallathea and Phyllida, creating a couple to root for regardless of what sex each appears to be or actually is at any given moment. But the acting honors truly belong to Campbell and Fisher, who master the quick-change aspect of their roles with spectacular felicity and create a pair of dazzling comic creations apiece. Fisher, in particular, is so deft at characterization that (thanks to Merav Elbaz's great costumes), I forgot she was playing both Venus and Puritanus and assumed that someone else had slipped into the show at the last minute.

Pay attention to all of the names I've mentioned here: Stolen Chair is one of NYC's most impressive new companies, and it will be exciting to see whatever they choose to tackle next. Meantime, treat yourself to one of this season's charmingest "trifles" and let these talented young artists plant their Stage Kiss on you.

On stage are two runners. One of them is on a treadmill, running but of course never arriving anywhere. He will run for the entire length of the play—about 50 minutes or so. We'll always see him; he will always be present, aware of the events playing out elsewhere on the stage and in the play, but never in them. Is he running toward something, or away from something?

The other, on the stage itself, runs only fitfully; most of the time, he darts around his own thoughts and memories. We understand instantly that he's the mind, or subconscious, of the physical runner (i.e., the guy on the treadmill). We understand, too, that he IS heading somewhere; sifting through images and flashes and moments stored up in his brain in an effort to gain mastery over the thing he is running from.

They're in a race, these two halves of a single man. Literally and figuratively. The race in objective reality is one he organized himself, in honor of his paraplegic brother. It's a five-mile marathon, and it's not clear that he's up to it. Will he get the second and then third winds that he needs to keep pushing on?

The other race, the one in the runner's head, is even trickier, because it's on an obstacle course that's littered with phantom images of his smothering, hyper-religious mother; his remote, emotionally empty father; his younger, wheelchair-bound brother; his annoying sister—all of them crashing into and colliding with him as he tries to negotiate through and past them. In his vision, the mother is a Moth, flitting about rather cloyingly; the father is just Farther, a soulless bureaucrat who carries a toilet seat behind him. The sister is a Cyst, emblemized by a door in a doorframe that she takes with her everywhere, ready to slam it whenever she doesn't get her way, which is most of the time.

Playwright/co-director Steven Gridley and his collaborator Jacob Titus have created a remarkable theatrical world for Still-life with runner, filled with lots of wondrous, unexpected touches and plenty of aural and visual symbolism. It's all in the service of getting deep into the mind of their troubled protagonist, that poor, mostly silent guy who runs and runs and runs on that treadmill. I've never seen a mind so vividly or viscerally laid bare on stage: the fruits of this particular collaboration (Gridley and Titus did the design as well, and work the sound and light boards live; costumes are by Rabiah Troncelliti) are breathtaking in the brilliance of their achievement. All—or almost all; can we ever know everything about what's going on inside our brains?—is revealed by play's end. (Don't think I'm going to spoil it by telling you.)

Seven actors perform Still-life with runner, but none is asked to do more than Jeffrey Horne, Spring Theatreworks' artistic director, who is the lost soul on the treadmill. What's extraordinary about Horne's work here is not that he runs in place for more than three-quarters of an hour without stopping, but that his acting never lets up—his reactions and movements are always specific, always in the moment, always in touch with everyone else in the room, actors and audience, even though none of them can interact with him in any way, according to the play's rules of engagement. It's a spectacularly controlled performance, not to mention an obviously physically draining one.

Jesse Erbel is Horne's alter ego in the piece, and he's excellent; the others in the company, all splendid, are David Wylie (as the brother), Douglas Simpson (father), Erin Treadway (mother), Sharon Floyd (sister), and Eric McGregor as a Monster who physically embodies that which Horne's character is running away from. This is sensational, jolting, involving theatre—exactly what I've come to expect from the adventurous folks at Spring Theatreworks.

After a brief intermission, a second short play, Titus's Waking Up, rounds out the evening. This is more physical/movement piece than traditional drama; it's much more abstract and much less specific than Still-life with runner. A man in an orange jumpsuit (a prisoner?) narrates most of it, which appears to be memories of a childhood whose troubles are eventually revealed to be rooted in abuse. The effect of the play is that of a disturbing anxiety dream (as opposed to a nightmare): there are funny surreal moments intertwined with scary and/or jolting ones. Characters include a snake and a rooster (smartly realized by actors Erin Treadway and Trisha Henson, respectively). I can't say that I fully understood Waking Up, but it's certainly an arresting work of theatre, and an intriguing counterpoint to Still-life with runner.

The components of this double bill of one-act plays share the same author and director (Edward Einhorn) and the same overriding concern (loss of brain function), but in terms of tone and outlook they couldn't be more different. They make for an interesting combination.

Strangers is about a man named Richard and a woman named Sylvia who meet in some kind of waiting room iin a series of vignettes over a period of days or perhaps even weeks or months. Richard's perky speech habits ("Hiya!"; "I'm in the pink!") belie something serious just under the surface; it's apparent fairly quickly that he's suffering from some kind of neurological disorder that has affected his memory rather severely. To say much more about what happens in this play will ruin it, I fear: delicately, stealthily, and insidiously, Einhorn's script mimics Richard's disease to deliver a potent reflection on how such a condition might feel to the victim and to those closest to him.

Peter Bean gives one of his trademark excellent performances as Richard, capturing all of the anxiety, fear, frustration, and hopelessness of a complicated man who, stripped of much of his own essence, is struggling not to become a tragic figure. Nancy Nagrant does excellent work as Sylvia, serving as both our guide into Richard's muddied consciousness as well as our surrogate, coping with the natural conflicted human reaction (anger and pity) to dealing with such a man. Touching, stark, and entirely unsentimental, Strangers is a smart, mature, highly effective one-act drama.

Linguish splits its focus among four people who have been brought together under quarantine, all having been exposed to (and expected to develop symptoms of) some insidious plague that strikes at the human memory. It turns out that this disease can take varying forms, and so we watch John lose his ability to remember the names and meanings of things, his one-time girlfriend Sandy succumb to a Tourette-like condition which causes her to chatter ceaselessly and to spew unintentional profanities, housemate Michael develop laughing fits and become unable to form complete words, and fourth housemate Beth turn into a kind of human parrot who can only repeat words and phrases she's just heard.

Linguish differs from Strangers (and the other entries in NEUROfest) by hypothesizing a fictional, even fantastical disease; consequently it feels a bit like science fiction and more than a bit like a fairy tale (are our protagonists suffering from the mental condition they most fear?). It's also more lighthearted than Strangers, even concluding with an unexpectedly upbeat ending that suggests that Einhorn's main theme here is that connection in whatever kind of "language" is more important to our survival than sophisticated, orderly communication.

The cast of Linguish includes Bean (John), again offering a splendid performance; Josephine Cashman (Beth), luminous and warm as a psychologist who spends most of her time in the play trying to keep her housemates "sane"; Uma Incrocci (Sandy), finding the kindness and frustration in this character, a schoolteacher; and Ken Simon (Michael), blustery and curmudgeonly as a lawyer who loses the ability to speak. Maxwell Zener completes the ensemble in a variety of roles, of which the silent "outsider" who makes periodic deliveries of provisions to the quarantined household is perhaps the most memorable.

Both plays are neatly staged by Einhorn and feature effective production values (sets and lighting are by Alex Senchak, costumes by Carla Gant). William Niederkorn's original music, especially his discordant, staccato rhythms and tones for Strangers, is especially effective.

Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist, a new play by Thomas Bradshaw, depicts scenes from the long and interesting life of the South Carolina politician who was a force in American politics for half of the 20th century. Among the incidents included are: Thurmond as Governor in 1948 labeling President Truman a socialist for proposing civil rights legislation and then bolting the Democratic Party to run for President himself; Thurmond, now a Senator, furious with President Kennedy for allowing Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead his historic march on Washington; Thurmond bemoaning the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 (and saying that the only good thing that's happened in the country lately was the assassination of JFK); and Thurmond at his 100th birthday party, virtually immobile and apparently senile in a wheelchair, being toasted by Trent Lott.

And oh yes, I nearly forgot: we also see young Strom at 22, lusting after a smart and pretty young black servant named Carrie. And then we see her pregnant, with Strom's daddy chiding her and other "Negresses" for being so promiscuous and fertile. And then we see, over the years, Essie, daughter of Carrie and Strom, apparently much beloved by her father despite his very public image as a segregationist.

Bradshaw makes the contradictions clear, and in places hints at what made Thurmond tick—what made him a man who proudly and repeatedly opposed equal rights for African Americans, while at the same time someone about whom his daughter Essie could make the assertion that is this play's title.

But Strom is very short—just 45 minutes long—and Bradshaw leaves us wanting much more when the piece is done. There's a deeply disturbing and fascinating paradox at the root of Thurmond's pscyhe, at least as Bradshaw speculates about it here. But the play doesn't go as far as it could to make a case for this speculation, and as a result it feels superficial and inconclusive.

It is, though, very funny, in a scary, discomfiting, politically incorrect way. The presentation of the ancient Thurmond in the final scene is wicked parody (if perhaps richly deserved); the rampant racism of Strom's father is bizarrely comical in the ironic way that offensive old movies of the Stepin Fechit school are. (Both Thurmonds use the "N" world profusely in this play, by the way.)

The play's irony hinges on its authenticity, which to my ear felt pretty strong. A program note (or something similar) indicating how much of what's attributed to Thurmond here is stuff he actually said would be useful.

The production is terrific. Eliza Hittman's staging is sharp and fast-paced and neatly simple. (The clever trick that she employs to switch locales from interiors to exteriors is too good for me to spoil here.) The actors are excellent. Jerry Zellers plays the title character as something of the village idiot, which is how he's written, but he's nevertheless likable in spite of everything, which serves the piece perfectly. Monica Stith projects intelligence and dignity as Carrie and Essie. And James Stanley is stolidly despicable as the senior Thurmond, Trent Lott, and a variety of political aides.

Some of the passages mark Bradshaw as a significant up-and-coming talent, in particular the scene in which Thurmond meanly belittles Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech with a bigoted response that uses the same rhetorical devices as the famous original. But Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist ultimately feels too slight to be entirely successful as the "political fantasia" that it's intended to be.

Whatever else you may think about David Hare's Stuff Happens, the fact that he's written a play that takes a serious, challenging look at the Iraqi War and other recent events—that he's put the subject on the table; that he's trying to stir up a conversation among theatre-goers about something authentically important—is cause for considerable admiration and acclaim. The first thought that went through my head when I read that the Public Theater was presenting this piece—and indeed, at intermission, after seeing its first half—was this: where's the celebrated American playwright writing a serious play about the War in Iraq?

Stuff Happens chronicles the history of this controversial war, from its roots in the terror attacks of 9/11 and before, right up to the present day. (I mean that literally: there's a line in the play that refers to something President Bush said on March 29, 2006, just two weeks ago.) The characters in this play are almost all real, famous people—Bush, Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, along with their British counterparts, Tony Blair, foreign secretary Jack Straw, MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, etc. The story tracks how these men and women made decisions that led to the bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, and not at all incidentally how those decisions served to isolate Bush and Blair's governments from much of the rest of the world and, increasingly, from their electorates. (I should add that Hare does not shield the public from blame; at the very end of the play, an Iraqi man says, "A country's leader is the country's own fault." He's talking about Saddam Hussein, but the implication is explicit and worth considering.)

The play trades in political pow-wows and scripted media events that feel very familiar, the latter particularly so—we've all seen a lot of Stuff Happens already, on the news, over the past five years. Hare tells us in a program note that all of the public statements made by politicians within his play are verbatim, but most of the dialogue, whether his creation or not, feels authentic because all of the players have been given characterizations that jive with common public perceptions of them. (One might quibble that both Tony Blair and Colin Powell are presented with a touch more sympathy than the others, but ultimately they're depicted here as principled men who compromise/sell out in order to maintain their positions of power, which I think is how the liberal intelligentsia in the US and UK probably view them these days.)

Indeed, one of the reasons that Stuff Happens doesn't work satisfactorily as drama is the lack of a single heroic figure at its center. For a while it looks like either Blair or Powell will emerge as the protagonist of the play, but the facts let Hare down; neither man manages even to rise to tragic-hero status. It's only at the very end of his play that the author decides to intrude on his drama by inserting some much-needed perspective; Stuff Happens is never more effective than in this tiny scene, when Blair is chatting with a dinner guest at some unnamed public function:

DINNER GUEST: How do you feel about the 100,000 innocent Iraqis who have died as a result of the invasion?
BLAIR: I don't accept that figure. I've seen that figure and it's wrong. I couldn't sleep at night if 100,000 people had died.
DINNER GUEST: But you can sleep if 50,000 have died?

But as I said, the real value of a work like this is simply to place the problem before the theatre audience, to try to get a rise out of a war-weary public, to get us back to the energy level of a not-so-long-ago when millions of protesters took to the streets to try to prevent Bush's attack on Iraq. Hare expects the audience to laugh on cue at the George Bush jokes sprinkled throughout the play, but I think he's also hoping to stimulate a little engaged discourse as well.

Hare has set a difficult task for himself here, trying to make a story we know very, very well into compelling theatre, and I'm not sure he succeeds. A few soliloquies by unidentified characters form the heart of the play: a journalist wonders whether the ends justify the means in the toppling of Hussein's regime in Iraq; a Palestinian explains the conflict in terms of her nation's enmity with Israel. It's interesting stuff, but it lacks context, hovering around the main story without connecting to it—that is, until the final powerful speech by a man identified in the character list as an "Iraqi Exile," the man who talks about a country getting the leader it deserves.

Daniel Sullivan's staging isn't particularly interesting either: the Newman theatre has been transformed into a kind of arena with seats on either side of a bare stage on which the only furniture is a dozen plush red office chairs on wheels; side walls are used to project a few images that identify the locale. I guess the sparse set (designed by Riccardo Hernandez) helps focus us on the play's content, but it also emphasizes the paucity of bona fide action. 16 actors play dozens of roles (and narrate the play in Moises Kaufman-style call-outs that identify the speaker and the date; why not just project that information on the screens?).

Puzzlingly, some of the key characters are portrayed by actors who don't resemble the actual people they're playing at all (e.g., Jeffrey DeMunn, who plays Donald Rumsfeld as a scrappy overgrown Dead End Kid), while others are more or less impersonated by dead ringers (Gloria Reuben's smooth Condoleezza Rice). Byron Jennings and Peter Francis James do well by Blair and Powell; George Bartenieff is invaluable as Hans Blix, the closest thing to a hero on stage; and Brenda Wehle and Waleed F. Zuaiter stand out among the ensemble players. Robert Sella overdoes his French accent as UN negotiator Dominique De Villepin, however.

Is Stuff Happens worth seeing? I think so; even with its imperfections, it casts a necessary eye on events that are still affecting our lives, even as they seem to be receding. It's important not to let the spin doctors set the agenda everywhere in the culture; the Public Theater deserves our gratitude for giving this piece a place on our itinerary this spring. Let's hope some other playwrights and production companies follow this worthy example.

Between Mark Medoff’s Stumps and the mission of its current producer Nicu’s Spoon, there are some overt parallels. Both offer diversity in droves, both seek to challenge conventional views about how to have a discussion about diversity, and both Medoff and Nicu’s Spoon have a vested interest in the use of American Sign Language.

These parallels diverge in a large way during the production, though. Nicu’s Spoon is a new and idealistic enterprise, rough around the edges but sparkling with earnestness and energy. Medoff, who wrote Children of a Lesser God and the recent Broadway mess Prymate, seems disingenuous in this play. Stumps is unfocused and mean-spirited, standing in stark contrast to the idealism that is currently propping it up.

In Stumps, two Vietnam veterans, living in the Southwest United States, decide to turn a script one has written into a pornographic film. In doing so, they invite a porn actress who goes by Fawn Sierra into their home; and more importantly her handler of sorts, the Reverend Calvin Rhodes. As if they were in a play, these two characters waste little time in exposing and attacking the values of their hosts. I would call them bulls in a china shop, if the play were more delicate. There is nary a moment in this play where someone isn’t degrading themselves or the people around them. There is rape, there is blood, there is emotional violence of the most uncomfortable sort, there is drug abuse but there is never a sense of much at stake. Despite the fact that Medoff invokes Vietnam, impairment, and the Reagan era, he does little to raise the discourse above the level of "coarse."

The actors far outperform the script. Playing the “stumps” themselves are Alvaro Sena and T.J. Mannix. Sena is saddled with the script's toughest role, Jerry Marcus. This character is at once acerbic, sympathetic, artistic, and boorish, all while confined to a wheelchair. Sena proves up to the challenge when the play needs him most, in quiet conversation, although he tends to overplay his Jerry’s rage. Mannix’s Stephen Ryder is so essentially decent that the juxtaposition of his dreams and business (he runs an adult theatre) work to heartbreaking effect. As Stephen’s Vietnamese wife, Lin, Jovinna Chan is utterly believable and powerful, even in circumstances where her character's actions defy logic. I look forward to seeing her work elsewhere.

Karam K. Puri plays the endlessly venomous Reverend Calvin Rhodes. It’s an odd role for Puri, who is an Indian actor. As a character, Rhodes expresses racist views rather insistently, and goes so far as to indicate sympathy for the American Nazi Party. While I’m sure there’s an argument for this sort of casting against type, it took me out of the play. It made me say “oh, this role was written for a Caucasian actor” a few too many times. I would feel the same way, I’m sure, if a white actor were cast as a Black Panther.

That being said, Puri is also in the role that is almost unwatchable. The actor has charm and energy, but Calvin Rhodes is a loud, unappealing, unattractive villain who shouts over or talks around almost every character on the stage, with little motivation that was apparent. He just seems to hate the other characters in the play, and that makes for little drama except “Will anyone finally shoot this guy and shut him up?”

As Fawn Sierra or “Emily,” Thea McCartan takes some extremely difficult turns, playing the best moments carefully. Her progression as she rehearses a scene with Jerry from porn performer to honest actress is one of the show's highlights. It’s a shame she finds herself wading through so many clichés. Her character is a drug-addicted porn star who is hopelessly insecure, smarter than she appears, very, very nice and in an abusive relationship. Short version: Hooker with a heart of gold just waiting to be saved.

Despite my misgivings about the play, the company itself is worth exploring. I didn’t see their production of To Kill A Mockingbird, but after seeing Stumps, I wish I had. The staging of director Stephanie Barton-Farcas doubles speaking roles with on-stage performing doubles who speak in sign language. It’s a sparkling idea, and in moments, you can see its true potential. The signing performers (Darren Frazier, Tyson Jenette, Paul Savas, Pamela O. Mitchell, and Kate Breen) are intricately worked into the main action. The doubles are extensions of the actors, and in many cases, are cast as gender opposites, creating some intriguing stage pictures. In fact, Nicu’s Spoon is to be commended for the sheer amount of diversity in this small cast.

There is still work for Barton-Farcas to do, in places, with this evolving technique. The stage can become crowded with characters rather quickly, and it was difficult for me to know where to focus at times. With four actors standing close together performing a two-character scene, Barton-Farcas can either dazzle you with invention, or leave you a little overwhelmed with the flurry.

It’s hard to recommend Stumps, as the play is such an unpleasant experience by itself, but easy to recommend this company. Nicu’s Spoon's staging, mission for diversity and ASL techniques are powerful and will undoubtedly bring them fantastic success. I’ll be happily coming to their next performance, and hoping for a play that does them more credit.

The Sackett Group is currently staging Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer at the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse. The play embraces Williams's eternal themes of conflicts in human nature, desperation in family matters, sexual scandals, and the poet’s search for meaning. Slightly more realistic than his later work, but still heavily reliant on poetic images and language, it is a beautiful but difficult script. The Sackett Group, a relatively new company, takes it on with freshness and earnestness.

The play centers around Violet Venable, an aged woman with all the money and charm of the Old South and all the life experience of a bohemian vagabond (at least, she thinks so of herself). Her son, Sebastian, has died abroad, on the first trip in 25 years that she hasn’t accompanied him on. She blames the death on her niece Catherine, who traveled with her son. She claims Catherine is both slanderous to her son’s reputation and completely insane, and, sweet-as-sugar, suggests to Dr. Cukrowitz (whom she has invited for the afternoon to observe Catherine) that the best solution is probably be to lobotomize her. When Catherine does arrive, the play is complicated by the arrival of her mother and brother, who are dependant on the charity of Mrs. Venable (their relative by marriage) and who attempt to make Catherine say whatever is most amenable to Violet. Catherine is given a dose of truth serum and the play’s mysteries begin to untangle themselves as Catherine describes what happened, very suddenly, last summer.

Director Robert J. Weinstein attempts to balance the real and surreal aspects of the play, which is immediately visible when viewing the set. Mainly realistic in the furnishings, it wildly showcases gigantic painted foliage, some looking as if it came directly out of a rainforest. The leaves that dangle from the ceiling are also vaguely the shape of birds, which nod to a piece of the text that describes a sky thick with birds of prey from one of Sebastian’s and Violet’s trips. The lights also change drastically from moment to moment, which contributes to a dreamlike atmosphere.

Weinstein does not seem as able to incorporate this surrealism with his actors, who give convincingly naturalistic performances. The poetry of Williams's writing seems therefore a bit of an impediment to the actors, and the blocking is often staid and little stiff. Characters speak of a conflict of desires, but the actors rarely manifest much conflict. The performances seem a bit too straightforward, which ignores contradictions and insinuations suggested in Williams’s text.

A ready-made example is Williams’s treatment of Sebastian’s mother, Violet. This character never ceases to amaze me, especially in the delicate and insidious control she exerted over her son. She is especially concerned with being the one woman in his life, insisting vehemently to Dr. Sugar (as she calls Cukrowitz, whose name is Polish for "sugar") that her son was “chaste.” One would think a mother would not be so protective and proud of the characteristic of chastity in her 40-ish son. She also revels in the fact that she was not thought of by others in their travels as Sebastian’s mother. “It was never Sebastian and his mother, but always Sebastian and Violet,” she gushes, exuberant and proud. She seems to enjoy the fact that people thought of the two of them more as a couple than as mother and son. Whether or not she actually had relations with her son is past the point. Williams just drops enough insinuation to make one uncomfortable. It is clear that Violet prefers being treated more like a lover than a mother, and keeps anyone away who might usurp that place. However, Violet has been undone, as Sebastian became physically disgusted by his mother after she suffered a small (but disfiguring) stroke. Violet cannot admit that she was replaced, nor that she had anything as unattractive as a stroke. But the fact remains that she was left behind, and replaced by the younger, fitter Catherine.

Dorothy Stasney, who portrays Violet in this production, is almost too good at playing the matriarch. We never see the jilted lover side of Mrs. Venable, not even an inkling, as she appears straightforwardly maternal throughout.

Similarly, other actors seem to miss out on some complexities of their characters, which lessens the tension a bit. Ellen Lindsay's Catherine does not seem particularly disturbed, making her a little too obvious as a victim of her aunt’s revenge. And Matthew Healy's Dr. Sugar is a bit too sweet and well-intentioned, considering that, in lobotomizing Catherine, he stands to receive a major grant from Mrs. Venable.

The Sackett Group has a good deal of exuberance and ambition in tackling so difficult a work. And they prove they have both a sense of humor and a feel for Southern hospitality. Perhaps nowhere better than New York (outside the South itself) can the heat and humidity of Williams’ setting of summer in New Orleans be so easily sympathized with. There is a knowingly quaint nod to this by the producers as they hand out fans and bottled water to be taken into the theater before the show. These cheeky gifts prove effective tools in becoming involved in world of the play, and to ease the discomfort of a non air-conditioned theater.

Though this is not a perfect production of Suddenly, Last Summer, The Sackett Group makes some smart choices here and shows real promise as a new company. Those who are not familiar with this play would be well advised to take this opportunity to be exposed to this rich work by Williams, and to this nonprofit theatre troupe.

All of the shows at this year’s Summer Series were inspired to a greater or lesser degree by the work of the Ontological’s guiding light and monstre sacré, Richard Foreman, whose often abrasive art of wildly unexpected juxtapositions and id-aimed kinetic and scenic imagery bypasses the traditional routes of narrative comprehension to stake out a completely unique territory right smack in the middle of the viewer’s mental craw. To follow in these footsteps is an admirable path, but most of the artists I’ve reviewed these past five weeks have tread a bit too lightly, perhaps. It’s interesting to see so much striving for subtlety in the House of Foreman, where outsized, often grotesque, gestures would seem to be the order of the day.

In the sense of using the stage as a platform for perception-altering experience, it was a show that maddened me above all else—Last Year, the Universe—that seems in retrospect to have been the most effective; I may not have liked it, but it certainly made an impression on me. Two other shows succeeded in creating immersive theatrical worlds: That’s Not How Mahler Died and Tea With the Twins. Though the latter presented the most physically impressive landscape, the former’s canny manipulation of time succeeded in making it an unforgettably engrossing event. The two shows that bookended the Series—Is This a Gentleman? and Veils/Vestiges—both employed found text collaged in a new context, and, despite a handful of surprising or delightful moments, the material didn’t yet seem fully digested enough to truly alter my perceptions.

I salute each of the artists involved for their willingness to take these risks, and to place works in various states of completion before the critical eyes of outsiders. However, in a festival like this, there’s little to be lost by risking even more, and it was a sense of danger that I missed most. I wanted to be offended, disgusted, seduced, to receive the full brunt of the experimental impulse that such a program can give vent to, but, with a few exceptions here and there, such sweeping defiance of expectation didn’t seem to be what interested many of these artists. Tea was made, the audience was offered gifts, we were all treated as co-conspirators, people worth politely winning over to the shows’ inner merit. Perhaps in this divisive age the tactics of confrontation are beginning to be frowned upon; fueled by trepidation about the havoc such attitudes are wreaking on the world at large, we’ve appropriated communion as a subversive recourse.

Despite my caveats about shows in particular and the Series in general, I walked up the steps to the Ontological each week with excitement and anticipation. I experienced five distinct yet complementary visions, and Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, the Series’ curator, deserves special mention for creating a context in which, together, they could resonate with a fascinating harmony. Though occasionally disappointed, I was never discouraged, and more often than not I was disarmed. I look forward to coming back next year and seeing how the project grows.

Veils/Vestiges (August 24, 2005)

Created by its primary artists, Temple Crocker and Annie Kunjappy, while living in separate cities, Veils/Vestiges reflects this dissociation in its very fabric. It’s a dialogue of words and images that connects, when it does, over a distance. Little feels immediate; the disembodied voice that emanates at one point from within a small tent, answering personal questions addressed by an interlocutor, feels like an apt metaphor for the experience as a whole.

The show’s subtitle is "the aesthetics of hidden things," and sure enough, emotions are discussed throughout but rarely if ever conveyed. Readings from the text of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy express no such affliction on the part of any of the players but simply float through the events of the production, leaving you to guess when they’ll come home to roost. That they never seem to do so is either a component of this hermetic aesthetic, or a reflection of the piece’s fragmented, almost nebulous state.

The primary theatrical image is that of a group of nice young people speaking directly to us in pleasant tones, offering us small gifts of printed cards or spools of threads between the requisite semi-silly dances. As the pleasant cast guides us through their loose system of intellectual connections, the experience comes to resemble sitting in class at a kindergarten of higher learning. In fact, as soon as I made that connection, various aspects of the show that seemed incomprehensibly arbitrary to me finally started to make a kind of sense: cards with colored pictures being placed in a circle on the floor; a show-and-tell featuring an actor’s collection of bells; a rolling set piece meant to be a house which resembled nothing more than a five-year-old’s lopsided drawing of the same. Combined with the erudite found-text script, it all felt like a lesson plan for incredibly precocious schoolchildren.

Unfortunately, though viewing the piece this way averted a certain degree of frustration, it still fell short of being elevated to a transfixing state. As often in pieces of this nature, there were a handful of images that proved temporarily transcendent, in this case moments involving mechanical toy birds and the drawing of bodily organs onto an actor’s bare torso But despite the kind attention given to the audience throughout, I felt addressed without necessarily being engaged, as if we were in a tent, or talking on a fuzzy phone line to a friend in a distant town.

Last Year, the Universe... It Came to Me in a Dream (August 17, 2005)

If you’ve seen enough experimental theatre you know that paradox is possible, maybe even probable. In the case of Last Year the Universe… It Came to Me in a Dream, the new show by Temporary distortion, we have it in spades: a piece that is simultaneously intimate and alienating, aggressively subdued.

The vast majority of the action consists of two performers standing or sitting in a constrained box-like structure, speaking text softly into microphones. Lights turn on and off, a gently churning soundscape comes and goes, and you feel yourself being hypnotized, forced into a state of mind you weren’t prepared for. It is an incredibly reserved attempt to muck around with the building blocks of your consciousness—let’s call it passive-intrusive.

Let me be on record as saying that I really respect what Temporary distortion and director Kenneth Sean Collins are doing—it is serious, deeply felt, intellectually rigorous work; but man, did it ever drive me crazy. That this is probably part of the point drives me crazier still. Admittedly the piece requires immense amounts of concentration to follow, a challenge I wasn’t completely up to. Left to my own devices, I found my mind turning to thoughts of all the various busy activities in my life—the very bustle that Collins, in a director’s note, claims to be working against with his strategy of silence, stillness, and minimalism.

For about the first 20 minutes, I actually loved it. The “box” is a miracle of aesthetic engineering: a metal frame structure just big enough for the two performers to coexist closely but still feel miles apart, rigged to the nines with wires, cords, colored fluorescent bulbs, microphones, and small TV consoles that often show close-ups of the actors’ faces. And I was impressed by Lorraine Mattox and Brian Greer’s intense commitment to their blank performance style, whether speaking slowly, in a muddled burst of words, or through song. But after a while the piece’s droning quality left me behind. The affectless, disjointed text didn’t help: to say that it is about the heartaches of interpersonal isolation is like saying that stereo instructions are “about” globalism—not so much an explication of the phenomenon as a dry, utilitarian example thereof.

If this had been a gallery installation I could have wandered in, studied it for twenty minutes, and left feeling I’d understood something fundamental about it. But clocking in at over an hour, it’s telling that one of the script’s mantras is “There is no way of escaping.” Surely the impression of endlessness was one of Collins’s goals, and it succeeded in making me feel like a restless victim of hypnosis—a paradox if ever there was one.

Tea with the Twins (August 10, 2005)

“Tonight we will bring about the end of the world,” is the first line uttered by one of the creepy girls at the top of the show; though they don’t manage anything quite so precipitous, they cut some interesting capers while trying. Written by and starring Normandy Sherwood and Jenny Seastone Stern, Tea with the Twins is a case study in amiable avant-garde tomfoolery that’s still trying to figure out where it wants to go. Of course that’s what the Summer Series seems to be for, so let’s focus first on what the girls are offering before we touch on what they’re holding back.

Ostensibly, the Twins (who go by the same names as their creators) are entertaining us in what would seem to be their parlor. The Ontological space has been completely transformed, skewed sideways and festooned with wild brambles, garland upon garland of fake flowers, strung-up stuffed animals, and Styrofoam walls. We are guests in their reality, and they make gracious if eerie hostesses as they play out charmingly jerky dances, deliver hand-drawn presentations about feral children (children that did not attend cotillion parties like the Twins), jockey for audience favor, and spew cockeyed monologues about birds and dreams reminiscent of the literary absurdities found in early issues of the now-seminal lit mag McSweeney’s.

Stern is the more expressive actress of the two, investing her follies with increasing verve and conviction; Sherwood, who takes a more laid-back approach, seems to be anchoring the pair in its self-created context. They both have a good time playing off each other, as well as a character foil, covered with hair, in the person of the Interloper (Andrew Dinwiddie, in outrageous hillbilly drag). His attempts to bollocks their nebulous apocalyptic scheme provide whatever drama the show has to offer.

And this is where Tea with the Twins offers room for improvement. It’s largely without structure, held together by a frame flimsier than the foam fireplace from which they declaim melodramatic protestations against the Interloper. Stern and Sherwood have worked together as actresses in the shows of others, but this is their maiden voyage as an outright performing duo. There’s something mildly enjoyable about the looseness of their script and the randomness of their images, but I might not have felt as kindly if the cast’s work hadn’t been buttressed by my pleasant memories of their performances in other productions. If in future incarnations they manage to give their Tea a tighter trajectory, I’ll wait with anxious approval for that promised Armageddon.

That's Not How Mahler Died (August 4, 2005)

The company’s name may be 31 Down radio theater, but despite an exquisite and indispensable soundtrack, That’s Not How Mahler Died is not a radio play. Far from it: though stillness and silence play a crucial role in the richly ambient proceedings, it’s the moments of intimate physicality that stay with you longest: a mouth sucking the last drop of medicine from a tiny spoon; the absentminded swinging of a woman’s leg; the heartbroken folding of a letter.

The primary wonder of radio as a medium is that, by withholding visual information, it makes the listener’s imagination an accomplice in the creative act. Though its events unfold in three physical dimensions before us, That’s Not How Mahler Died reflects radio in that it too withholds vital information and allows the viewer’s imagination to fill in the vast crevasses that remain.

The show has something of a story, but it requires your subconscious knowledge of film noir and detective potboiler in order to germinate. Taking place in the late 1950s, and very loosely inspired by the life of Gustav Mahler (whose music plays a key part in the show’s conclusion), the piece takes potential genre clichés—dim light, portentous chords, hardboiled text, smoke—and somehow uses them to create an atmosphere so clear and pure that your focus attaches to the tiniest details. At the center of it all is a classic love triangle: slow-burning neglected wife; dopey, desperate husband; sleazy, smitten lover. They each speak brief fragmented monologues or dialogues (some pre-recorded) that convey relevant plot information, but the actors provide far more silence than speech.

The refractive technology that’s become conventional in much avant-garde theatre is here used to wonderfully period-appropriate effect. An old rotary phone rings and rings, each ring comically growing longer than the last. An old 16mm projector displays images of the married couple filming themselves. An old black-and-white TV speaks to the husband in the character of Doc Freud (pronounced “Frood”), exhorting the husband, in a nasal Paul Lynde whine, to pull himself together. The piece is a technical triumph, but in a completely organic way. And the cast is superb: Lian Sifuentes as the wife, Ryan Holsopple as the husband (who also directed and designed the sound), Frank Boudreaux as the lover, and DJ Mendel in a video appearance as Doc Freud. Not a finger feels out of place, yet the performances breathe with a poignant sense of heartache. This is radio for all the senses, creating an alluring complicity with the viewer; don’t miss the chance to be a part of it.

Is this a gentleman? (July 27, 2005)

That the script for writer/director Kara Feely’s experimental duet Is this a gentleman? is developed from an English language textbook becomes clear as soon as events begin to unfold. Two men share the stage, trading a stylishly stilted form dialogue, mostly in the form of questions and answers. Mr. A (Ross Beschler) cuts the figure of a distinguished chap, replete with trench coat, fedora, and umbrella, but it’s Mr. B (Avi Glickstein), who’s obviously calling the shots. With a stopwatch in his hand and a whistle around his neck, Mr. B resembles nothing so much as an affable gym teacher, patiently drilling a promising but none-too-bright young athlete.

However, the sport in question is not merely physical; it consists in no less than the acquisition and understanding of civilized human behavior. Like a test-tube clone or a Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. A is a fully-formed man who is only beginning to grasp the particulars of the world around him. The exchanges between the two men, which primarily take the form of a friendly interrogation, are a parade of amusing banalities, ranging from observations about the weather to lists of which animals are considered beautiful—part The Bald Soprano and part The Lesson. Occasionally Mr. A shows off his newly-acquired knowledge by, say, ordering dinner with the impatience of a prig. Mr. B’s teaching style grows more insistent as the play continues, though the reason for this, like many other things, is never made explicit.

It is, in fact, this overall lack of narrative context that allows the performances to float freely in a logical world of their own, a space which is both the simple stage in front of us and a timeless netherworld. This uncertain frame, as it contrasts with the simplistic certainties of the language, gives the piece its mildly disorienting quality. However, although certain moments achieve a dreamlike immediacy—the two men eating bowls of strawberries and cream into distorted microphones; a dollhouse over an actor’s head, with a megaphone coming out of the front door—the randomness often feels contrived, making Is this a gentleman? an overwhelmingly intellectual experience. Conversations about whether animals behave rationally or instinctively hit a bit too squarely, and without a goal beyond its own exegesis the show—despite fine performances and killer sound design (by Travis Just)—threatens to become an education in the obvious, not just for Mr. A but for the audience. As Feely continues to develop her theatrical experiment further from its Ionesco-inspired roots, perhaps she can take the opportunity to further imbue her artful simplicity with more examples of the rich imagery that serves its current incarnation so well.

Having been to Japan once but not really knowing a lot about it, I went to Sundown, Yara Arts Group’s new performance piece about Japan’s first photographer, Hikoma Ueno, hoping I would learn something more about its history and people. Yara Arts Group’s skillful method of theatrical presentation, which integrates dance, puppetry, multimedia elements, and spoken word, makes for a very interesting experience. While I don’t think I "got" every last cultural reference, it didn’t matter; the main interest of the piece is to dramatize Hikoma Ueno’s evolution from chemist to artist to philosopher, and this journey is shared by the audience regardless of any details which might slip through the cracks of translation.

Which is not to say that Sundown is a consistently gripping experience. The tone could be described as contemplative, which clearly is the intent of its creators, but at the performance I attended, the deliberately meditative mood and pace bordered on sleepy. Much more a performance art piece than a traditional play, I suppose one should accept it purely on its own terms, especially since it is so well done. Nevertheless, I can’t help wishing it were a little more concerned with keeping its audience engaged throughout.

The most remarkable thing about Sundown is the way it looks: this clearly is the work of accomplished designers. The piece contains some exquisitely beautiful images. The composition in the staging, which takes place mostly on a bare stage with a scrim at the rear, is flawless, and Watoku Ueno (no relation to Hikoma Ueno), who is both lighting designer and director, has created some intensely lyrical moments involving shadow puppets and light. One particular image of Hikoma Ueno, in a dream, jumping from a huge seaship, was the highlight of the experience for me. Only highly skilled artists can create a moment so simple yet so eloquent.

Hikoma Ueno’s family was known for portrait-painting, and, as a chemist who developed his own method of photography—wet-plate—he continued the family tradition in another, more modern, medium. The first part of Sundown is background information imparted by the company of six actors on the difference between daguerreotype photography and the wet-plate technique which Hikoma Ueno introduced. (The former process produced a single image on a metal plate and required the subject to remain completely still for minutes; the latter was a messy process, but it instantly captured a visual moment and the images could be reproduced.) While this may not seem like fodder for dramatic treatment, it places Hikoma Ueno in his important position in the history of Japanese photography. It also introduces two elegant ideas: Ueno’s notion that photography is painting without a brush and more truthful than painting, and that hashin, the Japanese word for photography, means "reflecting the truth."

The second section depicts Ueno’s interactions with his subjects, some of whom are skeptical of the process, some of whom are delighted to have their spirit preserved forever in an image. A few "stories behind the photos" are enacted, including a lovely vignette with two young women; the moment at the end of their scene when the wonderful authentic photo of the two women they portray appears projected above the stage is striking. The photo projections are by Makoto Takeuchi.

Ueno’s philosophical journey as an artist—in which he considers photography in relation to art, time, spiritual beliefs, and history—is the abstract final section of Sundown, and it contains some of the most beautiful imagery in the show. Powerful video projection effects and the aforementioned lighting and shadow puppet work made a deep impression on me.

There is a good bit of stylized movement and dance created by Asami Morita, which is graceful and effective. The costumes by Luba Kierkosz, most of them traditional kimonos, are beautiful. Composer/violinist Storm Garner’s thoughtful live accompaniment to the entire performance makes this distinctive production even more special.

The performers are strong, particularly Nick Bosco as Ueno and Kazue Tani as a beautiful “bird woman” based on the traditional Japanese symbolic figure of the white crane. The entire ensemble commits fully to this atmospheric piece, allowing the vision of Sundown’s creators—and Hikoma Ueno’s photography—to transport and enlighten the audience.

When you're talking to a real person, and then a virtual person calls you on your cell phone, who gets your attention? When you're attending live theatre, and you can watch an actor performing "live" at his/her computer keyboard, or the same actor rendered "virtual" via video on a big screen, which will you focus on?

These questions—which are actually variations of  the same, very important, very timely question—are at the heart of what Super Vision is about. A collaboration of the Builders Association, a performance company that likes to explore how to use technology to extend the boundaries of theatre, and dbox, a studio of artists, "interactive designers, and visual thinkers," the show is a living laboratory of cutting-edge multimedia. Actors perform with prerecorded video in digital environments of a kind that we used to call "virtual reality," and they perform in real time with other actors via electronic connections and interfaces so that an audience member can choose from more than one viewing plane, in any one of which one character or another will be "live" while the other will be "virtual" (on screen). The juxtapositions and subsequent decisions that they prompt constitute a good deal of what's intriguing about Super Vision. The design of the digital environments is dazzling and the most exciting and innovative element: live video feeds and recorded video segments are seamlessly blended with each other in transparent layers between us and the actors and between the actors and the rear stage wall, placing the performers (and us, because we are likeliest to subconsciously identify with the live human beings) inside the virtual world: it really is like being inside a video game. Theatre designers should all take note: this methodology is very cool and very effective. And I never was conscious of the "smoke and mirrors," by which I mean that even though I could see actors operating the computers on the stage in front of me, I never questioned the authenticity of the created "worlds" where Super Vision takes place.

The folks behind this technology are James Gibbs, Matthew Bannister, and Charles d'Autremont, who collectively as dbox provided "virtual design" for the show. Let's keep our eyes on them. The show's other creators—director Marianne Weems and sound designer Dan Dobson—are figuring out neat and fascinating things about how human actors and digital elements can collaborate to tell compelling stories in the theatre, and, more bracingly, what audiences can understand about an entity, live or digital, in real-time performance. We'll keep our eyes on these folks as well.

Now, I haven't yet told you what happens in Super Vision; I will now. There are three stories, linked by the high-tech way they're told and also by their high-tech subject matter, but nevertheless very distinct thematically. The first is about a man who creates a virtual identity for his young son, getting him credit cards and brokerage accounts and the like and, eventually and tragically, overextending until he drives the child into financial ruin. This piece plays like a cautionary tale and seems to me to be just as much about obsession and disconnection as it is about the perils of identity theft.

The second piece is a string of vignettes in which the same man—a Ugandan citizen with Indian parents who is in the electronics business and travels a lot in the U.S.—is interviewed by a succession of border agents at American airports. The presentation layer, so to speak, is enormously effective: the same actor (Joseph Silovsky) dons different accents, attitudes, and facial hair to embody the customs agents; we see him on stage working at a laptop but we mostly experience him larger than life on a screen towering over the hapless traveler—from the traveler's P.O.V. Meanwhile, we also see the traveler's real-time reactions to the accelerating indignities heaped upon him (for the agents, thanks to the ability of data bases to link up and cross-reference with one another in our ever-shrinking, ever-less-private world, seem to know more and more about him—stuff, eventually, that he doesn't even know himself). And, we also see digital representations of all of those ubiquitous data base connections. It's heady stuff, though it's ultimately overused here; by the time our traveler makes his final stops near the end of the show, all of the points have been made and the segments just feel repetitious. I wasn't ultimately convinced that a specific point had been made by the text of this part of the play, but the style of the thing is just dazzling.

The third, and best, tale deals with a young American woman in New York and her grandmother in Sri Lanka. They communicate over the Internet; the granddaughter has, apparently, outfitted Grandma with a state-of-the-art computer, webcam, microphone, and necessary software so that they can video conference with one another seamlessly. At first, the girl is trying to catalogue old photos and other memorabilia that was her grandmother's, and so she shows her scanned images which the old lady identifies as best she can. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that the grandmother's memory is deteriorating, which makes the recorded memories all the more special and miraculous. This piece juxtaposes the old-fashioned kind of communication (two people having a conversation in real-time, but never successfully here because the granddaughter is constantly distracted by her cell phone and other stuff on her computers) with the potent new-fashioned kind (in cyberspace, in virtual time, where voices and images that were once ephemeral can be digitized and made seemingly permanent). Profound stuff. Moe Angelos is terrifically affecting as the grandmother; Tanya Selvaratnam turns in a good performance as the granddaughter.

Though the content layer of Super Vision is ultimately only fitfully effective (text is by Constance De Jong);  the form and design of the thing are knockouts Explorations like this are rare and thrilling. Audiences and artists in search of where theatre art can go in the near future will want to experience this show, where indeed some of that future is happening right now.

If you’ve got a show that can keep the audience laughing through the scene changes, you’ve got a very special thing indeed. SUV: The Musical, with songs by Marc Dinkin and a book by Newsweek Online columnist Gersh Kuntzman, is a perfect show for the hot and humid summertime blues: a breezy, sloppy, all-over-the-place crowd pleaser with a few mordant observations on the American love affair with All Things Large just to keep things sharp.

The plot, so far as it can be summarized, has something to do with the size-obsessed Dick Johnson (Christian Maurice), who is anxiously looking forward to his Behemoth Motor Corporation’s unveiling of a new, gigantic, gas-guzzling, environmentally-hostile SUV, the Destroyer. This raises the pained ire of career environmental activist Max Blank, who seems to have transported in from the 1970s (Adam Wolfsdorf). An automobile accident involving Blank and Johnson’s wife Sarah (Dina Plotch), however, leads to romance and unforeseen consequences. Add to this mix a lovelorn crash test dummy (Jerry Miller) and a chador-chasing Saudi Arabian bureaucrat (the striking Derek Roland), and … well, you get the picture. That it all ends up in a kooky courtroom presided over (in this production) by the playwright is predictable, but not excessively so.

Unfortunately, in juggling all these disparate plots, Kuntzman sometimes reveals his virgin status in the musical-comedy world by dropping one or two of them now and again. The story complications sometimes threaten to overwhelm the general careless cheer of the enterprise (and also add up to more than two intermissionless hours of playing time, which stretches the patience of audiences these days). Still, his light touches here and there—including a delightful reference to Watergate’s Deep Throat and All the President’s Men that I won’t ruin—keep cast and audience on their toes.

Dinkin’s ‘70s-pop-influenced score is well-performed by a four-piece band that he leads himself, and his lyrics are as clever as Kuntzman’s book. Those of them I could hear, anyway; the opening performance was plagued by some Satanically-possessed body-miking system that, sadly, robbed Jen Kersey (as Johnson’s preternaturally irritable daughter) of her entire solo number. At the end of the show, Kersey wisely returned to the stage with a hand-held wireless mike. (The program lists no credit for sound design, and believe me, that’s just as wise.) Fortunately, this audio problem didn’t hinder the appreciation of Eric Oleson’s energetic staging, Katie Workum’s choreography, or Gian Marco Lo Forte’s minimalist and often imaginative sets.

To fill things out, a tip of the hat to the rest of the cast, too, particularly the three-strong chorus, who play multiple roles. Stephanie Roy and Chris Griggs brightly contribute to the general festivities, but a special shout-out must go to Kenny Wade Marshall as Spiros. I haven’t heard songs belted out like that since Ethel Merman bodyslammed “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in the '50s; no problem with a non-functioning body-mike there.

The new revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd has garnered a lot of attention and understandably so. British director John Doyle’s production re-imagines Sweeney as if Marat/Sade had been turned into a musical and made to resemble a Nine Inch Nails video—more than enough to strike fear into the heart of purists who remember Harold Prince’s original Broadway production (now legendary in Broadway lore) and its subsequent televised version. Where Prince’s version was epic and operatic, employing a cast of nearly 30 and an orchestra almost as large, Doyle’s heavily deconstructed version turns Sweeney into a claustrophobic potboiler and pares down the cast to ten actors, all of whom double as the orchestra. The good news is that purists have nothing to fear: this new Sweeney is a triumph from start to finish. In a town that is sometimes top heavy with high concept deconstructions it’s refreshing to see one that actually serves the story instead of itself. The true measure of Doyle’s achievement here is that, despite its drastically re-imagined look, his is a legitimate take on Sweeney that stays true to the power and intensity inherent in Sondheim and Wheeler’s masterpiece.

Taken from a 19th century British legend, Sweeney Todd tells the story of a barber who returns to London after a long (and false) imprisonment to seek revenge on the cruel judge who sentenced him to jail, and who stole his wife and daughter in the process. Sweeney quickly sets himself up in new digs above a failing meat pie shop run by the long-widowed (and morally flexible) Mrs. Lovett. When Sweeney’s bloodlust gets the better of him, and he begins “practicing on less honorable throats” in anticipation of murdering the judge, Mrs. Lovett hatches an idea for disposing of the corpses that also benefits the pie shop. Get it?

If this doesn’t exactly sound like typical Broadway musical fare…well, you’d be right. Except that Sondheim can successfully turn most things into palatable Broadway musical fare. For a man who, by the time Sweeney first debuted, had already converted Roman comedy, Western imperialism, an Ingmar Berman film, and the malaise of modern urban couplehood into some of the most challenging and beloved musicals of his generation, this tale of a murderous barber did not pose many problems. On the contrary, it brought out many of his best qualities. Sondheim’s score is, for my money, the crown jewel in his extraordinary canon. His music has never been richer than it is here, his lyrics never more insightful or soulful, and his finely-honed sense of rhyme is sharpened like the finest of razor blades. Sondheim’s cleverness and wit come to full flower in a story where you would expect to find neither, and he finds places inside even the blackest of hearts for the audience to sympathize with.

Wheeler’s book—one of Broadway’s finest—also deserves mention for effortlessly juggling several complicated subplots (which include the potential rescue of Sweeney’s daughter by a lovestruck sailor, the nagging presence of a ubiquitous beggar woman, and the appearance of a rival Italian barber and his simpleton sidekick), and striking the perfect balance of dialogue and song. Wheeler constructs excellent book scenes that know how much information to convey through speech before handing the rest off to Sondheim.

Doyle’s version of Sweeney builds tension by confining the action to a very small section of the stage. All ten actors remain on stage for the entire show (even after several of them have died) surrounding the playing area on three sides, suggesting that there is no escape for these characters—from each other or themselves. And while Doyle keeps the cast in constant motion (actors who aren’t in a given scene frequently find themselves moving to strategic locations where their presence either enhances a scene or provides well-placed foreshadowing), the stage never feels cluttered or cramped.

The most potent way Doyle builds tension, though, is by eliminating all of Sondheim’s scene change music. There is no set to change, so—with just a quick re-arranging of chairs—the actors move from one scene to the next without interruption. While this sometimes causes confusion about where the characters are, it also robs the audience of the opportunity to applaud—an unexpected and unnerving advantage. By taking that away, the audience gets wrapped up in the story in much the same way that the characters do. There is no relief to be found in this Sweeney Todd. The only chances the audience gets to breathe are at intermission and curtain call. And, at both times on the night I attended, the audience unleashed their pent-up reaction to such a thunderous and rapturous degree that I could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that I was at a rock concert.

With this much going on, the actors have their work cut out for them. But they are all up to the task. Patti LuPone is superb as Mrs. Lovett, making her smart and crafty, instead of daffy. Dressed like a middle-aged Sally Bowles, she also adds a welcome dose of sex to Sweeney: her Mrs. Lovett has a libido and the will to use it. Her portrayal reaches its apex during the Act I finale “A Little Priest,” in which Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett scheme to stuff his victims into her meat pies. Despite its gruesome subject, LuPone turns this classic duet into a playful and lusty form of foreplay.

As Sweeney, Michael Cerveris is excellent, raging and brooding aplenty. But he also illustrates Sweeney’s descent into madness in a creepily convincing fashion. His is a Sweeney consumed by such a single-minded thirst for revenge that it can only lead to an unstoppable and irreversible insanity. (I should add that both he and LuPone are in fine voice, and sound wonderful both separately and together.)

In other roles, Manoel Felciano shines as Tobias, the simple-minded boy Mrs. Lovett takes under her wing, by taking ownership of Sweeney’s signature song, “Not While I’m Around,” and making it sound fresh and new again. Mark Jacoby turns in a solid performance as Judge Turpin, and Alexander Gemignani is terrific as his menacing enforcer, the Beadle. Donna Lynne Champlin is impressive as Pirelli, the Italian barber, and newcomer Diana DiMarzio makes the most of the thankless (but important) role of the Beggar Woman. As Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, and her maritime paramour, Anthony, Lauren Molina and Benjamin Magnuson make the perfect starstruck lovers. And John Arbo lends ample ensemble support, as well as some terrific bass playing. All the actors prove themselves to be highly skilled musicians. I dare say they could all sub in a Broadway pit band any night of the week.

Doyle and company have really created something special here. By eschewing epic sweep in favor of boiler room intensity, they have made Sweeney Todd new again for the next generation of theatergoers. Attend this tale and rejoice in its savage magic.

Adam Bock’s Swimming in the Shallows is a charming if slight new play. The themes of the piece stay in safe waters—friendship, self-exploration, the search for love and security. Barb, in the midst of a midlife crisis, decides that she is too weighed down by her possessions. She has been inspired by Buddhist Monks who only own eight things and decides that she must escape the weight of all the things that she and her husband Bob have accumulated. She explains this new feeling of heaviness to her friend Carla Carla:

BARB: ... my waffle iron my mixer Bob’s electric carving knife the cutting boards all my Tupperware I’ve got tons of Tupperware...
CARLA CARLA: Everybody has Tupperware Barb.
BARB: At Peggy’s Tupperware party I got forty-eight new pieces alone the other night forty eight that’s enough for six monks that’s six Buddhist monks worth of Tupperware at one shot in one night Carla Carla

Meanwhile, Carla Carla and her girlfriend, Donna are deciding whether or not to get married, and the final member of this eclectic group of friends, Nick, is trying to stop falling so quickly for—and chasing away—the men in his life.

Without any unifying conflict, the play alternates amongst this quirky group of characters as they chase the things they want—Barb continues to divest, Carla Carla and Donna have some harmless spats over the wedding details, Donna tries to set Nick up with the right man, Donna tries to quit smoking. Playwright Bock tips his hand rather heavily by dropping one fully absurd plot into the play: After striking out with more and more men, Nick visits the aquarium where Donna works and falls in love at first sight with a Mako shark. He and the shark, personified by an actor with a fin on his back, then go on a date to the beach. The inclusion of this device never really amounts to anything revelatory. Perhaps we are meant to see Nick’s budding relationship with the shark as a sign that he has fallen for the baddest of bad boys (the kind that can, well, eat you alive); or perhaps Nick’s love for this shark—which everyone around him accepts without questioning the reality or biology of the situation—is supposed to be proof that love need not be bound by what is rational. Whatever the reason, the story of Nick and the shark feels obtuse and underexplored.

Indeed, none of the issues that the characters explore in Swimming in the Shallows is ever pushed to the point of challenging or illuminating. There is always the feeling that the fictional Twig, Rhode Island, where the play is set, has a safety net beneath it. Bock is a talented and entertaining writer—these are witty, likeable characters and it is nice to spend time with them, but at the end of the play’s trim 90 minutes you feel as if there has been little risked and little gained.

Second Stage Theatre Uptown has served this play very well by providing a fantastic ensemble and production team. The cast is charismatic and deft in their characterizations. Mary Shultz infuses Barb’s quest to be free of her possessions with an openness and grace. As her husband Bob, Murphy Guyer takes the play's most underwritten and least flashy character and makes your heart go out to him. As a native New Englander, I have to give credit to Susan Pourfar for not only giving Carla Carla a strong presence, but also a flawless just-outside-of-Providence, Rhode Island accent.

Despite the scaled-down production budget of the Uptown series, scenic designer David Korins creates a great effect for the shark’s aquarium that truly makes it seem as if we are watching him swim sideways through the air. This trick of mirrors and a skateboard, in combination with Paul Whitaker’s lighting and Bart Fasbender’s sound design, is a memorable piece of stage magic.

In all, Swimming in the Shallows is an enjoyable light treat of a play, the theatregoers' equivalent of a good beach read.

Give me a good script and good actors any day and I won’t care that there are only eight lighting instruments. This is the case with Ailanthus Theatre Company’s revival of Sympathetic Magic by Lanford Wilson. Forget about the obvious low budget, this cast will enthrall you in the story—you will care about the characters and learn a thing or two along the way.

Wilson’s themes are monumental, no less than the significance of the Universe, known and unknown. Against that awesome background, are we, this quintessence of dust, really important, or are we insignificant? In the end I think Wilson is telling us that viewed macroscopically, we, the little things, do matter. It may be a paradox, but what we are and what we do does matter. The universe can’t get along without us: we matter in a world of infinite matter and energy.

Like the cosmos, revolving around itself in an infinity of revolving galaxies, the play revolves around astrophysicist Ian “Andy” Anderson, played by Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, and his live-in longtime girlfriend, Barbara, a successful sculptor, played by Stephanie Chavara. During a several-days' glimpse into their lives, she gets an unwanted pregnancy and he gets an astronomical discovery. Both events are huge and change lives, with the discovery of the latter and the confrontation with the former leading to major upheaval. It’s the juxtaposition of the two and the realization of the importance of the “little” human problem in the face of the “giant” physics discovery that leads to universal truth. (Pun intended.)

Helping admirably along the way: Barbara's half-brother, Don (Joby Earle), a gay Episcopal priest who is contemplating celibacy; Pauly (Bryan Rucker), Don's ex-lover who is the church's choirmaster and has AIDS; Mickey (Corey Pierno), Andy’s colleague who has just been dumped by his girlfriend and is on the make; Carl (Peter Levine), Ian's university department head who is a keen politician in the world of science; Sue (Mary Hershkowitz), an erstwhile law student who is also on the make and who is secretary to Liz;and Liz (Deborah Harris), Don and Barbara’s famous anthropologist mother, who is coping with dying, writing a book, and giving advice to her two children.

Like a universe of heavenly bodies, Wilson has crafted orbits of intertwining humanity. Though the scenes jump around, the settings are basically Andy’s college lecture hall, Andy and Barbara’s living space, Don’s church, and the observatory where Andy and Mickey make their discovery, with a bar, a restaurant and the beach thrown in. It is no small task to make this cinematic style work and the company does it marvelously. Despite the eight lights and the bare essentials for a set, it all works. Sound designer Jason Weiner provides excellent backgrounds to help with locales, set designer Mallory Larson cleverly maximizes the space, Shana Solomon makes effective use of the lights, and director Sean Dillon keeps it all flowing well. The actors are all well-cast and each does a great job of fleshing out his or her character. Dillon has elicited an honest natural style from the company that helps us really invest in the characters. Of course, Wilson deserves a great deal of credit. His ear for dialogue is just right.

In anthropology, Liz tells us, "sympathetic magic" is the name given to the rituals human beings enact in order to influence events, such as rain dances or fertility rites. In this play, sympathetic magic is a metaphor for the things we humans do on a daily basis to get by, get on, and affect Life. The energy of our lives matters to the universe.

After seeing this production I did some Internet research and found that the play won the 1997 Obie Award for best play in a production commissioned by Second Stage Theatre. I also saw that the initial reviews were mixed, with some outright pans. Typical to other famous playwrights who have written world-renowned plays, I think this play suffered from comparisons to other Wilson works. Having no preconceptions, I just sat in the theatre at St. Ann’s Parish in Brooklyn Heights and happily absorbed it all. You will not regret seeing this production. You will laugh, perhaps cry, and certainly learn a few things about the universe and about humanity, not necessarily in that order.

In the '30s there was a director/actor/producer/showman with a remarkable stock company of actors and an astonishing vision of what theatre could be like; his name was Orson Welles. If there were just one theatre community extant in New York nowadays (instead of the disparate dozen or so that actually exist), Ian W. Hill would, by now, be recognized as Welles's natural heir. In terms of audacity and energy, not to mention artistry, Hill has been proving himself a latter-day boy wonder for so long now that he doesn't really qualify for the epithet "boy" anymore. So when do the powers-that-be sit up and take notice?

The occasion for the foregoing hyperbole, which is sincere, I swear, despite its breathlessness, is my latest foray to a Hill opus. It's at the Brick, in Williamsburg, and it's a new production of Richard Foreman's Symphony of Rats, a text from 1988 about a President of the United States who goes crazy and thinks he is communicating with aliens. Hill directs, designs, and stars (as POTUS) in the show, abetted by his assistant/partner-in-crime Berit Johnson (working the sound/light board) and a cast of ten actors who have all been associated with him before, plus another (Art Wallace) doing recorded voiceovers.

I can't say that I followed everything in the show; Foreman and I don't ever seem to travel on the same wavelength, and so a lot of the pseudo-poetic absurd script failed to land in, or at least get parsed sensibly by, my brain.

But I certainly got the jist, which is that the president is wildly out of control; delusional, even: his chief of staff and his first lady can't get through to him, because he's both paranoid (convinced there are rats everywhere) and hallucinating (convinced he's seeing/talking to aliens).

There's some resonance to be had here: a Chief Executive who imagines enemies everywhere reminds us of Nixon; a President who thinks he's being directed to do things by some otherworldly being(s) could be interpreted as a stand-in for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Furthermore, this President indulges in a lot of sexual shenanigans, with a mistress and a prostitute, which could bring to mind Bill Clinton.

Hill wisely eschews anything more specific than this, letting the audience find whatever relevance it chooses in the spectacle of the most powerful man in the world undergoing severe and sudden meltdown.

As far as I'm concerned, though, Symphony of Rats in Hill's version is about itself—a surreal, nightmarish parade of outlandish, inventive, thoroughly original sights and sounds: a mad Alice-in-Wonderland-ish presidential soap opera on acid. I was constantly engaged, almost always entertained, and frequently surprised. And I laughed a lot. The stage pictures, images, juxtapositions, even (in one place) the smells of Symphony of Rats provide a feast for the senses and fuel for the mood and, often, the intellect.

Hill works like a dog in the central role, which keeps him on stage throughout and at one point has him frenetically dancing until he looks like he's ready to drop. He's matched moment for moment by his splendid, sympatico co-stars—Peter Bean, Gita Borovsky, Amy Caitlin Carr, Carrie Johnson, Alyssa Simon, Moira Stone, Adam Swiderski, and Bryan Enk and Roger Nasser, the former especially memorable as an alien on the attack and the latter hilariously disingenuous as, first, a messenger in an old-style Philip Morris telegram boy getup and, a few minutes later, a goofy-looking alien.

Kudos to all involved for taking a dense, enigmatic text and making it evocative and endlessly interesting. If you don't know Hill's work, now's the time to catch up with him. He's a significant force in New York's indie theatre scene; he mustn't be lost sight of.