Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, a self-termed “comedy”, lends itself to many disparate and interesting descriptions. It is, in some ways, a “play of ideas” in which former serfs and members of aristocratic society (and their somewhat more well-adjusted descendants) struggle to find their social and ideological footing on a more even playing field in the years following the fall of feudalism. But the playwright is not making any apparent argument, not glorifying the past or the future, not wanting us to go away preferring one of the two. He is documenting a certain cultural transition.

The Cherry Orchard might also be usefully interpreted as a light-hearted tragedy. The tragic heroine being Madame Ranevskaya; her tragic flaw: compulsive generosity (allowing lovers to leach off her, encouraging her entourage to live above her/their means, giving alms at the expense of her children and brother); her fate: losing her family estate, which includes the eponymous orchard. It is light-hearted because Chekhov is not seriously imploring us to feel too sorry for this formerly-wealthy bunch who must now, gulp, actually find work.

Another description of this play might be a farce of the heart: an ensemble of lost souls, enacting the emotional equivalent of pratfalls, slamming doors, and mistaken identities. The (actually not) funny thing is that the real people they are clumsily trying to elude or deceive are themselves. Rare and brief are the moments when two individuals are able to truly see eye-to-eye (even Anya, Madame Ranevskaya’s daughter, and Trofimov, the family tutor, who seem to be among the most self-aware of the bunch, have strenuously convinced themselves that they have transcended romantic love and share a much more enlightened bond). Yet rarer and briefer are the times when one individual is able to take a clear-eyed look at him or her self (who comes the closest? Perhaps Yepikhodov, the bookkeeper—a squeaky-shoed, grinning and guitar-strumming geek, who, accepting his irrefutable status as a weirdo, seems content to perpetually court Dunyasha, the young maid who is politely unfazed by his affections).

Gayev, Madame Ranevskaya’s brother, makes an aphorism along the lines of “If there are many cures for a disease, then it is incurable.” Putting a more optimistic spin on it, I would say “If there are many interpretations of a play, then it is universal.” A perfect illustration of this is Atlantic Theatre Company’s production of The Cherry Orchard in a new—and terrific—adaptation by Tom Donaghy, masterfully conducted by director Scott Zigler, and performed by a uniformly superb ensemble of actors.

I urge you to see it. Donaghy’s colloquial and lulling language belies the growing panic as August 21st approaches: the day the estate will be auctioned. Similarly, the characters go from restless to restive as they watch Madame Ranevskaya, in an earthy yet oblivious turn by Brooke Adams, seem confused by their gloom, as though her purse were incontinent and emptying itself. Worthy of special mention are the alternately garrulous and exasperated Larry Bryggman as Gayev, Todd Weeks’s charming buffoonery in the role of Yepikhodov, and, in a small but crucial part, Mary McCann’s witty portrayal of Charlotta, Anya’s governess, a magician and independent woman who is looking out for herself first.

And then there are the last few moments of the play after Ranevskaya and her entourage have bid farewell to her house and beloved orchard, accidentally leaving behind the aging butler, Firs (the ensorcelling Alvin Epstein). Disoriented, he wanders about for a bit, before stopping to witness the cherry trees being cut down to make way for a number of villas. (Fitz Patton’s sound design—which seems to put us in the middle of the fated orchard—is extraordinary). Epstein, whose performance is the very soul of this hilarious and heart-rending production, watches this razing with a near-vacant expression that is something quite beyond woe.

Referencing Chekhov’s dissatisfaction with the play’s premiere under Stanislavsky’s strictly naturalistic direction, the dramaturg’s note states the Atlantic’s intention to present us with a production of The Cherry Orchard that is more in keeping with the author’s comic intention and existential vision. I do believe they have done that. I really felt like I saw the play—with no obfuscation, no distracting directorial “choices” or interfering actorly egos. It was as though the play was the wind and Zigler and his agents were the trees at its mercy.

The Color Purple, the exquisite new musical adapted from Alice Walker's novel and Steven Spielberg's film, is glorious. It's joyous and heartbreaking, funny and sad, exhilarating and serious, epic and scarringly intimate. It's a triumphant celebration of how one woman finds her voice by finding faith and power within herself. And it's a show that exults in letting its audience feel, be moved, and become part of its uplifting emotional spirit.

The story, which will be familiar to fans of the book and movie, concerns Celie, an African American woman living in Georgia during the first half of the last century. When we first meet her, Celie is 14, and she's just given birth to her second child—a little boy named Adam who, like his older sister Olivia, has been taken away by Celie's Pa so that Celie won't be distracted from her labors in the household and in the family's store. Within minutes, the awful conditions of this young woman's life are revealed to us: Olivia and Adam's father is Celie's Pa; Celie is told she is ugly and stupid; while her sister Nettie is allowed to go to school (she's studying to be a schoolteacher), Celie's only thought to be useful as a workhorse. When a rough-hewn neighbor known only as Mister comes by, asking Pa for Nettie's hand in marriage, Pa offers him Celie instead; reluctantly, Mister agrees to take her (as long as he also gets one of Pa's cows).

At Mister's house, life for Celie is even worse. Mister has four wild and spoiled children from a previous wife that she must care for, he's a tyrant to everyone who lives in his house or works in his fields, and he's also a mean-tempered drunk who beats Celie regularly and abuses her emotionally. When Nettie comes over one day, hoping to move in with Celie because life with Pa has become hard to bear, Mister tries to rape her. She gets away, but she disappears from Celie's life—completely, because Mister hides the letters she subsequently writes to her sister.

Just when it appears that there can be no hope for Celie, two remarkable women enter her life. The first is Sophia, a confident, brash, expansive woman who has fallen in love with Mister's eldest son Harpo and isn't afraid to tell him (or Mister, for that matter) what's what. The second is Shug Avery, a successful entertainer with notoriously loose morals who was once Mister's lover and is the daughter of the local preacher. Shug is immediately struck by Celie's open-hearted innocence and kindness, and becomes the first person (apart from the long-gone Nettie) to love her unconditionally and for herself. Celie reciprocates Shug's love, as feelings heretofore unknown—not just of romance, but also of self-awareness and self-actualization—crystallize within her.

Decades full of incident—much of it hard and sad, but a lot of it inspiring and joyful—follow until the story reaches its conclusion, some 40 years after its beginning. See the show and live it all: book writer Marsha Norman has found a near-miraculous way to narrate the epic tale with economy and intelligence, and the drama, guided by director Gary Griffin's sure and steady hand, passes speedily and compellingly. Propelling the story are the musical elements, both of which are exemplary and thrilling—Donald Byrd's choreography is dazzlingly raw and authentic and exciting; and the superb score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray alternately soothes and soars as it gives heart-rending voice to the myriad emotions experienced by the show's characters.

Two devices are particularly noteworthy. A trio of Church Ladies (played by Kimberly Ann Harris, Maia Nkenge Wilson, and Virginia Ann Woodruff—all three wonderfully individual and yet a superlative force as a team) offer narration and commentary throughout the piece, which proves both a deft way to deliver exposition and a brilliant means to convey one of the show's significant themes, the notion that no matter what happens to you or whatever anybody says about you, the capacity to grow and change lies only within yourself. A second convention observed by the show's creators is that, in general, only the men dance and only the women sing. (There are some exceptions, but that's the broad nature of the thing). This concept roots the show in its place and time. I love that The Color Purple, though about a singular heroine and the extraordinary women who help her realize her potential for love and accomplishment, is also about everybody and anybody. Celie's hardships aren't presented as unique because they weren't; Mister's awful temperament isn't attributed to evil so much as to rotten circumstance. Fact is, it was tough to be black in Georgia in 1909, and The Color Purple is entirely uncompromising on that point without making too much of it. The show's humanity—its recognition that human nature is both flawed and redeemable—is its most important asset. The sentiment of the title song—that God lives within all of us; so simple yet so profound—is one that we seldom hear sung on a Broadway stage. Maybe we need to hear it more; we certainly need it now.

The show is beautifully produced and designed, with particular kudos to Brian MacDevitt's warm and lovely lighting design and Paul Tazewell's smart, appropriate, and very pretty costumes. The music runs the gamut from gospel-infused spirituals (the opening number, "Mysterious Ways," is put over with soul-stirring power by Carol Dennis) to giddy jazz (Shug leads the company in a first-act show-stopper called "Push DaButton") to the timeless harmonies of swing ("Miss Celie's Pants," my favorite number, features virtuoso improvising by the three Church Ladies that I never wanted to end).

The performances are magnificent: this is as accomplished and committed an ensemble as has ever been assembled in a Broadway musical. Felicia P. Fields is perfect as the spitfire Sophia, while Elisabeth Withers-Mendes is tender and appealing and sexy as Shug. Kingsley Leggs gives a magisterial performance as Mister, capping his portrayal with a searing second-act number called "Mister's Song" in which he vows to change his ways. The supporting cast members, highlighted by Brandon Victor Dixon (Harpo) and Renee Elise Goldsberry (Nettie), are excellent.

Anchoring the show and turning in the bravura star turn I always knew she had in her is La Chanze, who is radiant as Celie. This woman only finds her voice late in her difficult life, but when she does she uses it to make—in the words of one of The Color Purple's recurring songs—a joyful noise.

Which is, in the final analysis, precisely what this show is all about. The Color Purple, effusive and sprawling and full-hearted, is a welcome addition to Broadway. I hope it will stay there for a long, long time.

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s latest production, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (running in repertory with Glyn Maxwell’s Wolfpit) is a charming way to spend an evening. With tongues planted firmly in cheeks, three plucky performers attempt to tackle all of William Shakespeare’s works—his comedies, dramas, histories and sonnets—to varying degrees of success. Everyone onstage is clearly having a wonderful time.

Brian A Costello, Matt Neely, and Scott D. Phillips share the task of playing and narrating Shakespeare’s works, have plenty of comic panic attacks, and whirl the audience through a crash course in Shakespeare and his plays. Their love of the play is evident, their enthusiasm is infectious, and they hurl themselves into the comic fray with fearlessness and abandon. The audience was with them from the outset.

The set, sound, and lights are kept simple, but the costume design by Nicole Frachiseur is marvelously over-the-top and inept, in keeping with the (intentional) struggling and haphazard style of the production. Dominating Robert Klingelhoefer's set is a picture of William Shakespeare himself that has almost a Mona Lisa-like quality; the Bard seems sometimes to be laughing with the performers, and at other times to be comically appalled at what his plays are being reduced to.

Most impressive is when Costello, Neely, and Phillips engage the audience in an interpretative character analysis of Ophelia. Also strong is Titus Andronicus as a Julia Child-inspired cooking show. Othello, as performed by a third-rate Eminem, and Macbeth, sporting one of the worst Scottish accents in history, are both laugh out-loud experiences.

Director Michael Surabian has assembled a fine ensemble cast, and for the most part, they handle the language and challenges deftly. I was sorry that the actors didn’t have more room onstage to play on, but I guess the technical demands of Wolfpit took precedence (the Wolfpit set is very much in evidence, with only a relatively constricted section of the stage available for Complete Works). Some of the performers’ physical comedy bits and pratfalls might have been funnier had they more room to move about. The pace lags when the actors are covering Shakespeare’s comedies; it was obvious that everyone onstage enjoyed mocking the tragedies, as they cheerfully admitted.

Audiences familiar with Shakespeare will probably enjoy the evening more than someone who is new to the Bard, but even “Shakespeare Beginners” will find much to laugh at, enjoy, and even learn.

Constance Middleton is smart, sophisticated, kind, rich, and yet all her friends are feeling terribly sorry for her. Her husband, John Middleton, F.R.C.S. (which stands for Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons; he's a high-class doctor), is having an affair with her dear friend Marie-Louise Durham. She knows, though: and when Marie-Louise's enormously wealthy but still uncouth husband Mortimer calls the question by accusing John and Marie-Louise of their infidelity in front of them, Constance, and (conveniently) all of the other characters in this play, she devises a quick-witted and entirely unexpected response that shields all involved from scandal while giving her the upper hand vis-a-vis John and Marie-Louise. She then executes a year-long plot to get her own back, more or less, striking what playwright W. Somerset Maugham must have thought was a splendid blow for the feminist cause in 1926 in the process.

Constance's machinations are possible because she doesn't care about her husband's adultery (or so she says). Years ago, she realized that she had fallen out of love with him (though she professes to still like him very much). She also, more recently, has begun to question her place in his life. She feels, she tells us, like a prostitute, but a fraudulent one: she lives off her husband's money, but, since the advent of Marie-Louise, she hasn't performed any services whatsoever in return. She craves an honest living, and so after the affair is exposed and abruptly ended, she takes a job working as an interior decorator for her friend Barbara Fawcett, and earns £1,400 during her first year (that's about $68,000 in 2005 money, not bad for a neophyte with no training). With this money, she executes a plan that deals a wounding insult to her proud, pompous husband and will, perhaps, bring her temporary (possible sexual) satisfaction.

Maugham was presumably being Terribly Modern dealing so forthrightly with the nature of the marriage contract among rich people in upper-class '20s London. But his portrait of the Middletons, or at least Constance's perception of their relationship, feels incomplete: surely there's more to married life than copulation—John reminds his wife that they have in fact brought a daughter into the world, but even this fairly fundamental sacramental duty fails to stir our Enlightened Heroine. No, according to Constance's warped logic, a wife's only job is to put out; and if for any reason the sex subsides, she's not living up to her part of the bargain. For contrast, Maugham provides the grasping and spoiled Marie-Louise, who has taken another lover before the play's end, again under her doting husband's nose, and has also (at Constance's suggestion) accepted a $600,000 pearl necklace from Mortimer. I guess Constance knows an actual whore when she sees one.

All of which leads me to just one question: Why on earth is anyone reviving a play this archaic and idiotic? Maugham has filled his script, Wilde-like, with epigrammatic pronouncements about the relative natures of men (piggish) and women (faithful but manipulative). Lacking wit, humor, or profundity, they hang in the air stupidly; do we really want to perpetuate age-old stereotypes that our modern age has, or should have, rejected soundly? (Of course the trouble is that the audience—and many of my fellow theatre reviewers—are in fact laughing at, enjoying, and even honoring the resonance of these mostly offensive sentiments; Houston: we have a problem.)

It might be possible to empathize with Constance if she were shown to be taking some kind of emotional journey in the play. But, to cadge from Dorothy Parker, Kate Burton barely makes it even from A to B in the role of Constance, starting out as jaunty and confident and coarse and ending up, well, jaunty and confident and coarse. Her exuberance and utter lack of subtlety put me in mind of Debbie Reynolds as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. An unintended side-effect of Burton's overacting is concomitant overcompensation on the part of everyone else on stage: genuinely fine actors like Lynn Redgrave (who plays Constance's mother), Enid Graham (Constance's sister), and Michael Cumpsty (John) mug and wink and race around the stage just to keep up with their braying co-star. Director Mark Brokaw has apparently not tried very hard to rein any of them in.

The Roundabout Theatre Company's lack of judgment in putting on this play is equaled by the tastelessness of the decor. Allen Moyer has provided one of the singly ugliest sets I've ever seen on a stage—a tatty Oriental motif in bright jade green and mauve that would certainly not inspire me to hire Constance to decorate even a doghouse. The costumes, by Michael Krass, are similarly awful: Burton is dressed in shades of peach for two of the three acts, which is perhaps the one color that her fair complexion can't accommodate; Graham is made up in mannish suits a la Gertrude Stein; Kathryn Meisle (as Marie-Louise) and Kathleen McNenny (as Barbara) are gotten up in clownishly garish parodies of '20s flapper clothes; and poor Redgrave can barely even move in the hobble skirt that she's stuck with for her two-second appearance in Act Three.

All in all, I had the worst kind of evening at The Constant Wife: an irredeemably wasted one.

What makes a play American? There’s any number of obvious answers: it was written in America, it was written by a writer from America, it’s about America and Americans—but is there something more to it? Is there some inherently American subject matter, something stylistic that marks a text by its origins? The Contrast, by Royall Tyler, is the first play ever to lay claim to that description, and if I were to use it as a test case, I would have to say yes.

First performed in 1787, The Contrast was the first play written by a native-born American writer that was ever performed in public by a company of professional actors. In rough outline of the plot it’s a comedy of manners much like what you might have seen on British stages of the period. But the particular combination of characters, the focus on relative social positions and national origins of those characters (the “contrasts” of the play’s title), and the moral of this particular story do seem to display an American sensibility that is still recognizable to a modern viewer, or at least this modern viewer. Tyler’s writing is a little rough around the edges and a few plot strands get tied up with unseemly haste, but the joys of The Contrast are in watching that American sensibility, and those American characters, be born.

The piece is set in post-Revolutionary War New York. Miss Charlotte Manly, a fashionable young thing, and her uncle’s wealthy ward, Letitia, have nothing better to do all day than to flirt and to gossip. The most particular target of their gossip is their friend Maria Van Rough, who has recently become engaged to Dimple, a fop and man-about-town who has also been paying attentions to both Charlotte and Letitia—Charlotte for her beauty and Letitia for her dowry. Maria is no more interested in Dimple than Dimple is in Maria, but he is the son of an old family friend, and Maria’s father insists on the marriage, thinking it to be a solid financial alliance. As a dutiful daughter, Maria determines to go through with wedding a man she despises; Dimple, meanwhile, is doing his best to try to force Maria to break things off so he doesn’t have to do it himself. When Charlotte’s brother Henry, a Revolutionary War veteran who is as stolid and serious as Charlotte is flirtatious and gossipy, arrives in town on business and falls in love with Maria, the stage is set for the usual round of romantic intrigues, complications, and resolutions (at least for Maria and Henry; unusually for these sorts of comedies, there aren’t enough men to go around, and not everyone ends up ready to be wed).

There’s also a very funny subplot involving Dimple’s well-groomed manservant, Jessamy; Manly’s rustic farmboy of a valet, Jonathan; and an Irish maid named Jenny. Trying to woo Jenny himself, Jessamy thinks that if he can trick the plain-spoken and socially graceless Jonathan into courting Jenny clumsily, his own more polished attentions will be sure to win her favor. And in the end, honesty, sincerity, and marriage-for-love win out over old-world manners, ancestral familial ties, and marriage-for-wealth—and what could be more American than that?

All very familiar up to this point—but what makes it different is the precision and specificity with which Tyler lays out the relative class positions, national origins, and places in the social framework of his characters. Although Manly, Charlotte, Dimple, Maria, and Van Rough are all of the upper crust, there are clear distinctions of attitude, opinion, habit, dialect, and costume among them, so that the Revolutionary soldier is strikingly different from the more European-styled gentleman, and equally different from the Dutch burgher (or at least, that’s what I think Van Rough is meant to be). For example, Manly, the simply-dressed and passionate veteran who embraces the character of his new country, stands in striking contrast to Dimple, the garishly dressed fop with disdain for anyone who has not been to Europe.

Director Peter Bloch has underscored these distinctions with dialect, giving the characters a range of accents. This takes a little getting used to, but I think it’s ultimately an effective way of emphasizing Tyler’s structure. Manly, Charlotte, Letitia, and Maria speak with a lightly British-inflected English (to a modern ear, anyway); Van Rough has a hint of what I think is a Dutch accent; Jenny is Irish; and Dimple has an affected lisp. The most striking—and contrasting—accents belong to Jonathan and Jessamy: Jonathan’s “Yankee” accent could perhaps still be heard in parts of rural Maine, while Jessamy slips between a Cockney English (when in private or addressing the audience) and an exaggerated imitation of Dimple’s tones. Gail Cooper-Hecht’s richly detailed costumes and wigs also emphasize the social positions visually.

The acting ensemble is uniformly solid. I was especially taken by Cate Campbell as Charlotte and Matthew Cowles as Van Rough, both of whom sparkle in roles that could easily come off as a bit shallow or selfish. Jesse May is also endearingly conniving as the smooth-tongued Jessamy.

The Contrast is an important piece of American theatrical history—but it also remains a charming and thoroughly enjoyable American play.

Wilson Chin's set for The Dear Boy arrested my attention as soon as I took my seat in the theatre. First of all, its walls are lined with books, hundreds of them, and I love books: I could make out several volumes of the Durants' world history series, Joan Peyser's Leonard Bernstein biography and something with the tantalizing title Moo. Second of all, as I studied it, I realized that it couldn't possibly represent only one room; and as Dan O'Brien's play progressed, I was proved correct: it's actually three rooms, shown to us simultaneously—a teacher's office (table and chairs at dead center), a bar or other sort of party room (open areas at the perimeter of the stage), and a sublet apartment belonging to two poets (hence all the books).

This set is ambitious and not a little confusing; so is the play itself. O'Brien's first scene suggests that The Dear Boy is about a teacher who is going to learn something crucial from one of his students (the press release tells us this as well). James Flanagan, the 60ish high school English teacher, has invited one of his 17-year-old students, James Doyle, to go over his assignment. Young James was to write a short paper in the style of James Joyce about one of his heroes, and Flanagan is disturbed about the story that his student has turned in. Specifically, Doyle's paper features a kid shooting his English teacher, which alarms Flanagan. Doyle tells Flanagan that he obviously hates all of his students, which alarms him even more. Though parts of the scene sometimes threaten to defy credibility, we are nevertheless hooked.

But gears switch radically in Scene Two, at a faculty holiday party where Flanagan is chatting with colleagues Richard Purdy and Elise Sanger. Richard is gay and is very concerned that he will be passed over for the department chairmanship after Flanagan retires because of his sexuality. Elise flirts with Flanagan, and eventually invites him home with her—but not before Richard almost spills the beans about Flanagan's Big Secret (which was not at all difficult to guess, but will nonetheless not be disclosed here). In Scene Three, Flanagan and Elise are in her apartment (the one she sublets from the poets) and more revelations come to the fore.

Does the sad old English teacher learn anything? Maybe, but whatever it is fights for attention among the myriad details and tangential plot ideas that O'Brien keeps throwing at us. Richard's storyline is all about institutionalized homophobia. Elise's storyline is about sexual repression and hero worship. Doyle's storyline veers into the area of abuse (or does it?—O'Brien is muddy on this point). Does Flanagan's own sexual nature stem from a childhood incident of abuse? Does Flanagan like his students? Is he a latent pedophile? O'Brien tantalizes us with all of these suppositions but never resolves them, or makes any of them central to his play's (absent) thesis.

Why does O'Brien work so diligently to be politically incorrect? The play features gratuitous offensive remarks about Jews, African Americans, women, gays, and other groups. Is O'Brien trying to make a point about classism in America? The play's setting is a public high school in the affluent community of Scarsdale, and the teachers bemoan the difference in economic status between themselves and their rich students. But the only student we actually meet—young Doyle—seems to hail from the wrong side of Scarsdale's tracks.

I found myself noticing technical problems with the script, Both Flanagan and Richard Purdy use the same trite phrase "Thank you very much" in the same sarcastic manner, leading me to wonder why the playwright failed to differentiate their voices. And Elise says "yadda yadda yadda" at one point, though the script informs us (for no apparent reason) that the year is 1990, well before this catchphrase came into common currency.

I point these bits of carelessness out because they're indicative of the larger problem with The Dear Boy, namely, its sloppy and unfocused writing. In the end, I was completely bewildered by what O'Brien was trying to accomplish. And Michael John Garces (the director); Daniel Gerroll, T. Scott Cunningham, Dan McCabe, and Susan Pourfar (the actors); and Chin and his fellow designers were never able to clarify things for me.

A 56 minute biography of the life of Henrik Ibsen told through puppetry? Sounds wacky? Sounds “Wakka Wakka” wacky? Well, it works. This is engaging, effective theatre created and performed by multi-talented artists David Arkema, Gabrielle Brechner, Kirjan Waage, and Gwendolyn Warnock, a/k/a Wakka Wakka Productions, Inc.

Two boulders, a door/cabinet, a table, and a chair are all that occupy the Sanford Meisner Theater stage. But as designed by the company, these things comprise a magic box of fun and wonder. So creative! So inspired! Arkema, Waage, and Warnock are the puppeteers/performers. Brechner is in the booth (and also house manager). The four are an ensemble to be envied for their clarity of vision and the execution of that vision. Unbelievably, we see Ibsen from birth to death, with major points in his life highlighted. The company’s aim (from the press materials) is to explore Ibsen’s works through his life, to show the parallels to his life in his work, and to perhaps give insight into his work. They believe that Death is prevalent in his plays and seek to explore this theme. So, the three performers, who manipulate the puppets often in full view, are garbed as the undead, with Warnock, who voices and manipulates Little Ibsen, attired as a dead Ibsen (the old man we remember from photographs).

Through puppetry our imaginations can take flight—we stay with the narrative throughout in spite of it being a lightning-quick epic journey of Peer Gynt proportions. There is delicious irony, too, in how Wakka Wakka uses non-realism to explore the father of modern realism. This exploration is done with humor and pathos and with an original score by Lars Petter Hagen that includes a lovely funny recurring song, “Run Ibsen Run,” sung by a certain netherworld puppet duo. Using mostly hand and rod puppetry techniques, Arkema, Waage, and Warnock demonstrate a high level of skill. This is world-class stuff, folks. The puppets are numerous, inventive and surprising, such that I refuse to give anything more away. Waage designed and built the puppets with an eye toward the grotesque and absurd (trademarks of Wakka Wakka). Little Ibsen (who appears in press photos and thus I’m not giving it away), is a “Mini Me” of the playwright, right down to the mutton chops. The look is at once humorous and sad, a curious and effective juxtaposition.

The lighting design by Andrew Dickey, with a credited assist from Stephen Sakowski, works well. It is no small task to light puppets and puppeteers, keeping the focus on the puppets while allowing us to see the puppeteers. The designers accomplish this using a variety of small and tiny instruments. And the performers hit their marks admirably. Theirs must have been one painstaking technical rehearsal. It shows in that it doesn’t show. We never really think of the lighting—it is just seamlessly there when needed. Much of the credit for technical execution must go to the aforementioned fourth member of Wakka Wakka in the control booth, Brechner, who executes all the cues, including a fine sound design by Karl Schwarz. In testimony to her hard work, and clearly in the spirit of collaboration that is key to this ensemble, Arkema, Waage and Warnock take their bows with a gesture of inclusion towards the booth.

The Death of Little Ibsen is entertaining and thought-provoking. You will enjoy yourself even if you are not a fan of puppetry or know little about the works of Ibsen. If you love puppetry and know any of Ibsen’s plays, you will adore this show. Either way, it is an hour well spent in the company of four very talented artists.

You know how when you pass by a playground and you hear the screams and laughter of the kids you can’t help but smile or giggle yourself because the laughter—the fun that the kids are having—is so contagious. It’s irresistible. That’s how I’d describe my experience at Slant Theatre Project’s The Debate Plays. The actors appear to be having so much fun on stage that I’d challenge anyone to not have a good time at this show.

The Debate Plays are three playlets all that have a recurring love triangle. We start in the present and then flash back a hundred years or so and then we flash forward to the future. In the present, Courtney O’Connell has dumped her childhood boyfriend Scott Hooner (aka Scooner) for a decent fella named James. They are holding a debate over who is best for Courtney. The winner has the right to “claim” the girl, and the loser gets a restraining order. The catch is that the audience votes on who Courtney should be with because she can’t decide. The precedent for this debate was set way back in 1894 when a similar love triangle broke apart and one of the members went ballistic, shooting up the townspeople. So a law was passed that this tragedy should never happen again in Columbus, Nebraska (where all three playlets are set). The final flashforward finds us in a new debate with the same people and/or their offspring over the constitutionality of the law.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much at a show. What makes this production stand out in my mind is that it’s not just funny writing or acting, it’s all the production aspects of the show that are funny. Okay, maybe the lighting wasn’t so funny—but the direction, the costumes, the sound/music, and of course the writing and acting all pulled together to make a hilarious package. In the first play (by far the funniest), it’s the quirky reactions and subtle facial expressions of the actors coupled with some very natural yet unpredictable dialogue that really cracked me up. Also, director Wes Grantom is brilliant at finding the right moments to push the situation to unexpected and comically contentious places. For example, by simply placing the two men fighting for the girl ridiculously close together, he creates pure comedy. He pushes the action into the audience and gives little blocking moments like the taller man lowering the microphone laughably low for the shorter man.

The second play finds the same actors in hoop skirts and silly fake mustaches. The men play the women and the woman plays the man in this prequel to the first play. Director Evan Cabnet lends this one an over-the-top melodramatic style. It’s quite funny through most of it, but the dialogue here does not pack the punch of the first piece. This one, however, has one of the oddest endings to a play I’ve yet seen. For some bizarre reason, the entire cast breaks into an air band performance of a Weezer song.

The final short is interesting in that it allows us to sort of see what happens to these characters, but it’s just not as entertaining as the two previous plays and that makes for an anti-climactic ending. I could have done without this one. In fact, the first play could easily stand alone.

Playwright Mat Smart is a gifted writer. He has an excellent ear for natural dialogue while at the same time he injects quirks and absurdities in just the right places. He also balances his comedy with just the right amount of drama. Just when I thought the play was going to be all laughs. he gave me something emotional. Not too emotional, mind you, but just enough. His pilot monologue is the encapsulation of almost every style in the play. It’s dramatic, funny, quirky and even a little absurd. It’s quite brilliant.

The actors all deserve a loud round of applause for their outstanding performances. They all take on several roles, creating distinct character traits for each. Jeff Galfer is just perfect in his role as Scooner. He balances sincerity and sloth in a character that you can’t help but like even though he’s kind of a jerk. Garrett Neergaard is a very versatile actor. His James was just endearing enough to make me vote for him. Chad Goodridge plays the mediator, among other roles, with natural grace and style. But it was Kathleen White who stole the night for me. She delivers the aforementioned pilot monologue with so much power and with so many idiosyncrasies that I have no doubt she is why it has stuck my head.

The Debate Plays is a fine example of what makes indie theatre a force that deserves more recognition. The members of Slant Theatre Project do it well and they have fun doing it. I hope this sort of theatre becomes more contagious.

At times it is our bodies that lead the charge towards something new, while at other times our minds will not let us linger on what we have established as routine. Still we tend to fight our bodies and minds tooth and nail because change can be so frightening. But there is one more element that stands apart from both body and mind and that is the soul. The soul most often wants something completely different. The Deluxe Illustrated Body attempts to look at change and the battle between body and soul using the metaphor of the human anatomy to illustrate this struggle. I think this metaphor would work very well if it were applied more consistently in the production.

The show opens at a funeral. Two sisters, Marti and Kate Anderson, have lost their father and, having lost their mother some time before, are now left alone with each other. Also in attendance are members of the Gerrard family, who have been close friends of the Andersons for many years. Father Matthew presides over the funeral.

Within the next couple of scenes, playwrights Lil Malinich and Jayson McDonald lay out several dramatic questions. First there’s Nathan Gerrard, a young professor of anatomy who lost his wife some time ago, and the question of why does he drink so much. Can he stop? Then there are Tom and Ann Gerrard, Nathan’s aging parents, and the question of what’s missing in their marriage. How can they reconnect? Father Matthew’s question has to do with a test of his faith and commitment to priesthood (read celibacy). Next question, will teenager Kate get over her crush on the much older Nathan? And finally, will Marti learn to forgive and move on with her life?

At this point you may be thinking, how can I follow all these dramatic questions? Is there a single question that unites them all? Indeed there is. It comes down to the purity of the soul versus the impurities of the flesh. There is a constant struggle within us (them) where the soul is pulling in one direction while the body wants other things. One will eventually win the day and change rides behind it. Marti’s soul wants to forgive but her body still feels hatred and betrayal. Nathan’s soul wants to get over the death of his wife but his body wants to keep drinking. Each character has a similar dilemma and happy resolution. This makes for a very sweet, if not somewhat neat ending.

Malinich and McDonald have written a very touching play. I cared about what happened to these characters. However, I couldn’t but feel that maybe one of them should fail to overcome his or her problems. This play is immersed real life circumstances and real life doesn’t always work out so neatly.

Also, their use of the human anatomy as a metaphor could be applied more consistently. There are only a couple of scenes where they directly address anatomy. In the program there is a list of “figures” (e.g., references to illustrations) that I didn’t realize I was supposed to follow until late in the second act when Father Matthew, addressing the audience, announces one of them. This is a singular event that could be used to more effectively demonstrate their metaphor. As it stands, their metaphor has little support in either the script or the staging.

Director Janis Powell leads our eyes all around the large stage there at Wings Theatre very well but she doesn’t lead us to see the human anatomy as a metaphor for struggle and change. There is a slide projector used to show the illustrated body but not nearly enough. There are 22 scenes, each requiring a tiresome set change that only worked to slow the pace. The set consists of large pieces of rolling furniture which begged to be left alone and have the actors simply create the illusion that they have moved to another location.

The entire cast is sincere and endearing in their own ways. There are, however, different levels of talent. Notably, Paul Rosoff creates a consistently smug and yet multi-layered Nathan. David Wesley Cooper as Father Matthew does an excellent job setting us up for a big change by establishing a character that is pushing his real feelings down. He is also very funny. But for me it is Sarah Lemp who delivers the most moving performance as Marti. She becomes realistically wrapped up in the emotion of every scene she’s in.

They say change comes from within. I’d say that a little change from within the structure of this play could make it a truly unforgettable experience.

The Devil of Delancey Street is the latest musical from the quirky and singular theatre auteur Sharon Fogarty. A little rough around the edges and feeling not quite fully baked, it is nevertheless a charmer—a smart, sassy, wickedly subversive piece with lots on its mind and lots of unabashed heart.

It tells two interlocking stories. One is about Mrs. Mary Chaste, a woman in her 40s whose husband has died leaving his vast fortune to the church run by the corrupt Pastor Beagle. Now suddenly destitute, Mrs. Chaste and her 16-year-old daughter Grace find their way from their former Long Island home to the scrappy Lower East Side of Manhattan. Just as they are getting themselves established, Mrs. Chaste is abducted and brought to a brothel, where she is tied up in the cellar. Grace seeks assistance from Dr. Pang. Will they be able to find Mrs. Chaste? Will Mrs. Chaste escape from the whorehouse?

The second story concerns Damian, who is, quite forthrightly, the devil of the show's title. When we first meet him, he's doing his evil deeds right here in Delancey Street. But after he encounters Mrs. Chaste—and subsequently comes to her aid in her basement prison—her spunky spirituality leads him to question if he might not wish to be an angel instead. Two actual angels—Sarafina and Malachi—watch over and then abet his transformation, from heaven.

The ideas in Devil are familiar from previous Fogarty outings: organized religion is a haven for hypocrites, sexual repression is unhealthy, free expression is to be valued above all (Mrs. Chaste scandalized her husband by writing scary horror stories for little Grace, which the church censored and suppressed). Fogarty's idea of God is not exactly traditional; it reminds me of E.Y. Harburg's, the One who, in the song "Necessity" from Finian's Rainbow, says "go out and have fun." Fogarty's Lord is similarly loose and unconventional in His thinking: devils can become angels if they fall in love, evil pastors (Beagle is conveniently bisexual—and plenty horny—in his eager pursuit of the almighty dollar) can be defeated with a rousing anthem entitled "Now That's Fucking!"

The play is full of the offbeat humor and songs that are Fogarty's trademark. There are some really wonderful and original theatrical notions in it, notably the character of Delia, a telephone operator who is, apparently, everybody's secretary (Beagle's, Pang's, Damian's—even God's). Bradley True's hairdo as Pastor Beagle is a delicious visual joke. And there is at least one gloriously transcendent sequence, the one in which Mrs. Chaste and Grace earn money on Delancey Street by selling songs and poems to the passersby.

Fogarty is the show's director as well as its librettist-composer-lyricist, and also its star (as Mrs. Chaste). She's unwavering in her artistic vision here, as ever. Joining her on stage are some of her frequent collaborators, including the invaluable Karen Christie-Ward as Delia and Matthew Porter as the kindly Dr. Pang. New to Fogarty's world (and indeed to the New York stage, for he's emigrated here from England) is the formidable John Cunningham, who acts and sings Damian beautifully. Peter Dizozza plays accompaniment from stage left on a tiny keyboard, providing appropriate continuity and underscoring that's the glue holding together Fogarty's smart but fanciful tale.

I mentioned earlier that The Devil of Delancey Street still feels a bit unfinished—the tales of Damian and Mrs. Chaste weave together seamlessly, but neither, except in the "Songs and Poems" number, feels comfortably enmeshed with the lower-class street scene that Fogarty wants to frame her show within. A bit of revision—which may have already happened by now; that's one of the luxuries of doing live theatre—will likely smooth this out.

Still, it's an entertaining and provocative evening, and well worth checking out, especially if you've not yet had a chance to sample to gently subversive anti-musical theatre style that is uniquely Sharon Fogarty's.

Presented by Firebrand Theatre Company, The Dickens is an unusual Christmas tale about evil and redemption, swaggering gunslingers and pregnant prostitutes. Written by Michael Scott-Price and directed by Jaime Robert Carrillo, the play strives for comedy, but the result is an uneven but unsettling homage to the Old West with an unexpected holiday-spiritual twist.

Set in a lawless 1880s saloon in Nevada on Christmas Eve,  The Dickens puts six of the world's most criminal souls together, where they bicker, drink Dead Hombre, play poker, and find themselves in the presence of the sinister Lightbearer, the Devil in a not-so-subtle disguise. It seems that every Christmas the Devil gives a Christmas present to God. Sadly, it is never explained why Lightbearer is in such a Christmas State of Mind, which would have been an intriguing idea to explore.

Bill Pierce's set design is marvelous—he truly brings to life a rough and tumble saloon that's seen one too many brawls. The sound design by Matt O'Hare is also impressive, adding to the atmosphere of depravity. Kit Stolen's costumes and Chris Manning's lighting help complete the air of Old West authenticity—I almost expected Clint Eastwood to strut through the saloon doors and onto the stage.

The cast give solid and entertaining performances as the bad apples. Jorge Luis Casanova-Alvarez's portrayal of Father Island, a dissipated, suicidal priest who's lost his faith, is especially effective and discomfiting. Rich Renner is amusing as the peculiar, fastidious, and weaselly Undertaker who’s taken over the saloon, wiping down the tables even as he is hiding under them. Jessica Pagan’s Lightbearer is astonishingly chilling with her slow, deliberate movements and a deep, grim voice that’s in striking contrast to the sharp trebles and petulant whines of the other misfits at the bar. She’s a bit of an old-school Halloween Monster, relishing her chance to deliver one hell of a smackdown. The rest of the ensemble rallies around them and creates an interesting vision of the Old West.

Billed as a comedy, the show is more whimsical that comic, and while it makes for a pleasant Christmas fable, it is not quite as funny or disconcerting as it mght have been. Perhaps the play would have been served better if the comic elements had been played up more. Some of the criminals seem more lost than evil, more pathetic than malicious. The director seems more intent on delivering the message than letting the story speak for itself, and the play suffers as a consequence: when Lightbearer offered his chosen villains a choice, there was never any suspense as to what they would decide. They may have “the dickens” scared out of them, but they never seem as unredeemable as they are purported to be.

Still, the play is a lively addition to the Christmas canon, and Firebrand Theory has a visually beautiful, quirky, and earnestly delivered play.

I love to go to the theatre.

The protagonist of The Drowsy Chaperone, a pathetic fellow known simply as Man in Chair who is alone on stage sitting in what appears to be his living room, tells us before he tells us anything else that he hates to go to the theatre; right away I wondered what he and I might have in common. More to the point, I wondered what Bob Martin, Don McKellar, Lisa Lambert, and Greg Morrison and I might have in common; they are the creators of this new musical (the first two wrote the book, the latter two did the songs), a perfunctory and entirely shallow affair with pretensions toward post-modern hipness that wants to be as many different things to as many different people as possible. The answer to my query turns out to be: not much.

Ok, here's one thing we all seem to agree on: Man in Chair gripes almost immediately in his opening monologue about how much he dislikes it when characters in shows break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. Our reaction is supposed to be: ha ha—he's breaking the fourth wall himself, talking to us! How hilariously and hiply self-aware this is! Or something to that effect.

Oops—sorry: my reaction was: Who is this guy? Why is he talking to me and what does he think I'm doing in his living room? And y'see, Bob and Don and Lisa and Greg and Man in Chair have all lost me, immediately. I never bought in to their would-be ironic conceit. Instead I got increasingly annoyed as they trashed Elton John and Les Miserables and Miss Saigon and Cats; yeah, that's a cool thing to do because nobody likes any of them. And I got confused as Man in Chair started to rhapsodize about one of his favorite musicals, a little ditty called "The Drowsy Chaperone" allegedly written in 1928 whose original cast LP (!) he likes to listen to...oh, look, he's going to put it on for us so we can hear it; oh, look, the whole show is materializing in his sad little living room.

A great deal of The Drowsy Chaperone is this "re-creation" of "The Drowsy Chaperone"—essentially a dozen musical numbers with some flimsy but convoluted plot wrapped around them purporting to be a vintage musical comedy. What are we to make of it? Neither a sweet-tempered valentine to bygone innocence/nostalgia nor a deft parody of same, it amounts to a dumbed-down and dopey mishmosh of old movie cliches and thinly barbed jabs at some more contemporary targets. There's nothing quintessentially '20s about it: some of the tunes approach the mindless naivete of, say, a Good News, but none of the performances ever do; and the jarring concatenation of hackneyed styles—here a Busby Berkeley-esque larger-than-life musical sequence (sans chorus girls) that almost works as a pastiche of early '30s Warner Brothers movies; there a weird star turn by our supposed leading lady who's wearing Ann Miller's hair, Judy Garland's pantsuit, and gesticulating and belting like a latter-day Liza Minnelli—well, they're scattershot, all over the map; taking no prisoners, and not particularly hitting any targets.

The big belly laugh of the evening comes when the lady of the house, a Mrs. Tottendale (played by a very underwhelming Georgia Engel in a bid for nostalgic star quality) repeatedly spits out her drink in the face of her butler, Underling (played by a seemingly ill-at-ease Edward Hibbert, slumming). Hilarious. Just like that famous '20s musical comedy starring...the Three Stooges.

Huh?

Interspersed with this lame excuse for a show-within-a-show comes commentary by Man in Chair. I didn't get him either. He's got a thing for the leading man (indeed—and please pardon my lapse into vulgarity here, but I want to be clear—he apparently gets a hard-on just listening to this guy on the record). He sings along exuberantly with the leading lady. When the building superintendent turns up in his apartment and asks him if he likes musicals, in a moment of weird show-queen panic he emphatically denies it. But he's not gay or anything. He was married. He has issues.

I repeat: Huh?

If the creators of The Drowsy Chaperone had the courage of their convictions—if they appeared to have any convictions at all—they'd let Man in Chair run off with the super (who, being the one well-adjusted and normal presence on stage, easily admits to liking musicals). Or they'd let Man in Chair and us sink all the way into the delicious fantasy that this show might have been, dropping the self-aware posing and allowing us all to enjoy the sweet, drippy charm of a musical that actually deserves this fellow's affection, letting us feel that an ending in which our hero is whisked Wizard-of-Oz-like into the world of his favorite show is actually earned and wonderful instead of just pathetic.

If only they had believed...then I could believe.

But they don't. The Drowsy Chaperone is surely the only musical that tells its audience, frequently and in no uncertain terms, how great its score is, knocking the competition all the while; if Dame Edna were a musical comedy, this is the one she'd be. But this isn't shrewd satire: it's smug, dishonest, and as crass and cynical a creation as has ever found its way to the Broadway stage.

The package is disarmingly slick. Casey Nicholaw's direction and choreography look good (though there are many slack spots; the evening feels long). The cast, led by Sutton Foster (who has a great many fans, though I confess I am not among them) and Martin himself (as Man in Chair), do commendable work, but only that; the one really satisfying performance comes from Troy Britton Johnson who, as the toothy, empty-headed, handsome leading man, gets the tone and style of what he's satirizing precisely right. Beth Leavel is at sea playing the title character, a boozy amalgamation of, I don't know, Elaine Stritch and Bebe Daniels (but she's glorious when she gets to dance for a few moments); Danny Burstein is channeling Bert Lahr, I think, as her love interest, an offensive Latin-lover caricature named Aldolpho. Kecia Lewis-Evans is entirely wasted in what amounts to a cameo as Trix the Aviatrix.

Gregg Barnes's costumes are plentiful and eye-filling, at least until the faux intermission separating the "acts" of the show-within-the-show (The Drowsy Chaperone is performed without an actual intermission). Many of David Gallo's sets—which pop out of the walls, nooks, and cranies of Man in Chair's apartment—are stylish and/or ingenious.

But whatever talent is on display here has been squandered. The Drowsy Chaperone, mocking itself and its audience with the same aggressive eagerness as Spamalot, proves as sadly hollow as that enterprise, the important difference being that Spamalot knows what it is and admits it, while this show hides behind its deconstructionist pretense. Don't be fooled: Man In Chair hates to go to the theatre, sure; but Man In Chair is really Bob Martin, author of The Drowsy Chaperone, and he's thrilled to take your $110 right here on Broadway. As a forgotten but genuine '20s icon used to say: hello, sucker.

The characters in Criminals in Love struggle with an impending sense of doom. They grapple with their feeling that their lives are locked into predestined outcomes, and that despite their struggle, they will end up becoming exactly what they don’t want to be. Written by George F. Walker, and currently running in rep with other plays from his "East End" series of plays at the Sightlines Theatre Company, the play is a thoughtful and funny look at a couple caught up in a web of family, love, and crime.

Set in a depressed area of an urban sprawl, the play centers around Junior, an earnest young man (wonderfully played by Franklin Clay Boyd), who is trying to escape his family’s criminal connections and looks to his girlfriend Gail, (Lila Donnolo), to rescue him from his fate. When Junior visits his father in jail, his father uses both physical and emotional violence to coerce him into helping his uncle. Enter the local philosopher-poet- alcoholic bum William, who befriends Junior and eagerly joins in the fray because he believes that he can save Junior and Gail from their fate. David Colacci plays William as an avenging angel with a filthy face, and his attempts to rescue Junior are both funny and touching.

This trio meets up with Wineva, Junior’s common-law aunt (Melanie Rey), who is Junior’s first introduction into this world of crime. Rey is a highlight of the show, managing to be both hilarious and menacing at the same time. With her brash and brassy bullying, she forces them into a life of crime. It’s all a marvelous and almost madcap caper as Junior, Gail, and William discover that incompetents and idiots run the mafia they’ve been coerced into joining. Boyd as Junior is quite funny as he discovers that his father is not the only inept criminal in his crazy family. All the characters resist the pull of their “destiny,” and yet find themselves inexplicably drawn into a humorous and all-too-human fate. Walker brings up some interesting and provocative points about destiny, family, fate, and love.

The first half of the play is comical and surprisingly touching, but the second half devolves into a long diatribe about class struggle, which literally becomes class warfare. Here, director Eileen Phelan seems more concerned delivering the social message of the play, rather than trusting the actors and the text to let the message speak for itself. Instead she bogs down the actors with a heavy-handed and overly sober delivery about the social injustices of the world.

The ensemble acting is terrific, but the coarse set by Ryan Kravetz seems to hinder the actors, as the scene changes are unnecessarily complicated, clumsy and long. Phelan is adept at creating compelling pictures on the stage, but struggles to pull all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Nonetheless, the costuming by Cady Zuckerman and lighting by Evan O’Brient add to the brilliant pictures, and makes for a visual feast. The fight choreography by David Brimmer is terrific and chilling, providing a remarkable counterpoint to the comedy of the play.

Criminals in Love is a wonderful play and the actors are engaging in their roles and, for the most part, this makes for a fun night of theatre.

Christmas means a lot of things to many different people, but what does it mean to those who live and work in its jiggly jelly underbelly? You may be surprised to find that not everything is jolly in the world run by the ol’ elf. In The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, things are being shook up from the bottom all the way up to the big guy who wears the big red pants (though he seems to be having problems keeping "little Santa" in them).

In fact, Santa is so evil in this play that I found it hard to believe that he would even waste his time flying around the world bringing joy into children’s hearts. In The Eight (referring to the eight reindeer that pull Santa’s sled) we are told that Santa is a drunk, a pedophile (he does terrible things to Rudolph), a rapist (Vixen is not just trying to get some attention), and that he enjoys the kids sitting on his lap for reasons no parent would want to think about. Okay, sure, Santa’s bad—but what’s the connection? I thought at some point the playwright would make the link between Christmas and greed or compare the dysfunctional North Pole workplace to the dysfunctional corporate standards in our economic system, but this never happens. It seemed more like gratuitous sex and violence. There are a couple of monologues that make clear indictments of society. Vixen’s, for example, has powerful statements on the recent rape cases against famous entertainers (the Kobe Bryant case immediately came to mind). After so much Santa-bashing, finally Comet comes to his defense and claims Santa saved his life by pulling him away from drugs and gangs. This is refreshing to hear but even still this monologue falters and doesn’t really stick to its guns.

The ensemble does an excellent job creating their characters. I really liked Peter Schuyler’s Dasher. He opens the show with a punch. Justin Plowman wrenches the pathos from every line in his Donner monologue. (Donner, if you don’t remember, is Rudolph's dad.) Amy Overman kicks out her Vixen monologue with searing sultriness. Her words stuck with me. The rest of cast—Robert Brown, Jennifer Jill White, Theresa Goehring, Jason Unfried, and Jennifer Gill—are all in full command of the stage when it’s their turn.

I think what I like best about The Eight is that all the monologues have a very nice connectivity. It’s not just a series of stilted speeches. They flow with considerable grace and have a smooth progression. Playwright Jeff Goode creates a set of characters with eight distinct voices. His writing is brutal at times, especially Donner’s monologue, but I couldn’t find the handle. The play is set in bar where the reindeer hang out and we hear all this “truth” told about Santa and poor Mrs. Claus (also a drunk and stag chaser), but we never really hear any deeper truth about why society is dysfunctional or how it might have gotten that way, and nobody ever does anything about it. Many of the things said need to be said, but in the world of the play they need to be said to Santa. But they never are. Perhaps that’s the point. If we can complain about dysfunction but never do anything about it, then we’re stuck with it.

Arthur Adair's new production of The Emperor Jones is grand, revelatory theatre. It's a testament to the audacity of vision of the young playwright Eugene O'Neill (who was about 30 when he wrote it); and, more generally, to the potency of dramatic storytelling. Drawing on the classical Greek model—only three actors and virtually no set to speak of, just three promontories that the audience looks down upon from seating that comes as close to recreating the side of a hill as it's possible to accomplish in an indoor space—Adair and his collaborators reinvent this famous but neglected play and show it to be an authentic tragedy, even arriving at genuine catharsis in the final moments.

The Emperor Jones tells the story of an African American man named Brutus Jones who, through a singular set of circumstances, has become the ruler of a remote island in the West Indies. In America, he was a Pullman porter, but after a fight over a crap game, he killed a man, was sent to prison, and then killed his overseer while out working on a chain gang. He managed to escape to this island, where he conned the natives into making him their emperor and where he has systematically stolen as much as he can get his hands on ever since.

But the winds are changing in the emperor's domain, and in the first scene of the play, Jones is informed by his white "advisor" Smithers that revolution is afoot. Jones decides to make a run for it, and most of the drama takes place that very night, as our protagonist flees through a very dark forest on his way to the coast, where a boat stands ready to transport him to Martinique and safety.

But the Emperor Jones has to get through that forest first, and as O'Neill has envisioned it, it's a hotbed of every fear, anxiety, and residual guilt dwelling inside Brutus Jones's mind and heart. "Formless fears" eventually give way to visions of his sins and then of the sins committed by Americans against his people. Jones is reduced from a cocky, self-confident, well-dressed autocrat to a raw primitive, stripped of his clothes and his assured bearing, as he is forced to confront and attempt to overcome the stuff that has eaten away at his humanity and soul.

Adair's approach to the material—which is potentially very melodramatic—is to transform it into something approaching ritual. All of O'Neill's stage directions are read aloud to us, at first by Xander Gaines (who plays Jones) and then for most of the play by Sheila Dabney (who also takes two other roles, at the very beginning and the very end of the piece). They read their texts from atop wooden peaks that rise from the stage floor behind the main playing area; the "stage" is a wooden square about 15 feet off the ground, accessible by two steep sets of stairs to the left and right. The only furniture is Jones's throne, depicted here as an oversized steel chair so high off the floor that Gaines's legs dangle when he sits on it; it is removed after Scene I and the rest of the play, laid in various locations within the forest, is performed on a bare stage. Dabney's expressive reading of O'Neill's wondrously vivid descriptions are all that we need to "see" where we are and what's going on (abetted, beautifully, by Adair's gorgeous and evocative lighting and sound design).

Right up front, Adair teaches his audience to trust their mind's eye instead of the tangibles displayed before us: he wants us to trust in the words and the theatrical effects to create the physicality of this play, and so what we see contradicts what the script tells us we see: the throne, we are told, is made of wood and painted scarlet, but we see a stark metal chair; the old woman (played by Dabney) is said to have a shock of white hair, but Dabney's is thick and black. Later, Adair will let his audience conjure everything from a slave ship to a crap game to a terrifying crocodile without putting a thing on stage. This is the most potent kind of storytelling.

And there's method to all of this, and art: because I was always aware of the artifice of the experience, I was able to get wrapped up in the story but remain detached from it at the same time. I found myself thinking, what would an audience have made of this remarkable play in 1920? Adair lets us separate the latent racism of the piece from the authentically radical attacks on institutionalized bigotry that are the most forceful components of its thesis; just five years after Birth of a Nation had become the most popular film in the United States, this play daringly tried to show how severely African Americans had been wronged at the hands of the white majority.

Adair also creates two uninterrupted hours of riveting theatre. Gaines is magisterial in the marathon role of Jones, while Dabney is unforgettable as the Chorus; theirs rank among the very finest performances currently on stage anywhere in New York. Brian P. Glover completes the cast most skillfully in the smaller role of Smithers. Adair is rapidly emerging as one of indie theatre's most exciting auteurs; if you care about the future of theatre, then this electrifying and imaginative production is something you won't want to miss.

Richard Maxwell’s new play The Edge of Reality is a powerful exploration of what it means to have fear and faith in an uncertain time. The show challenges the audience to deal with the question of which is more reasonable in an unreasonable circumstance: the faith or the fear? It also looks at the unsettling issue of whether either will make you more secure, or if both are equally meaningless distractions from an otherwise mundane existence.

The show takes place on a stage mainly composed of white surfaces, which gleam with the kind of unnatural cleanliness and nondescriptness of a hospital, under a mild florescent glow. There are three male security guards onstage initially, and what appears to be a large constantly changing live video feed, presumably of the area that they are guarding. A female guard soon joins them. After some discussion, a stranger appears, who, after a brief struggle, drags one of the guards off the stage. The woman is fired for incompetence in the event and replaced by another woman, the goddaughter of the chief security guard. When the stranger returns and attacks her, she manages to fight him long enough to have other guards help her. The rest of play takes place literally around the prisoner, who remains restrained for most of the play in the center of the room, silent, as the lives of the security guards unfold and unravel around him.

Maxwell deals closely with the idea of fear in this play, and, by proxy, the idea of terrorism. The hallmarks of terrorism are all present here: a man appears from areas unknown, instigates an unexpected violent act, then disappears, and leaves those left behind in an uproar of fear, rage, and confusion. But Maxwell’s unusual style has a strange power over this otherwise familiar material. When the “terrorist” appears, he elicits a laugh from the audience. Dressed in mismatched kneepads and bicycling pants, Jim Fletcher (as the attacker) brings a huge presence onstage; it's not that he's not menacing, but he is also undeniably comical. And since terror is almost the polar opposite of hilarity, Maxwell’s juxtaposition here places a totally unused lens on how one might be able to view the concept of terrorism.

It should be noted that throughout the course of the play, Maxwell never uses the word terrorism. But, there are some words that should draw immediate attention from the audience in this timely piece. Maxwell manipulates words the same way many directors manipulate space and story, and it’s useful to note which words he does choose to include in his overtly verbose world. One of the characters, played with a tough grace by Marcia Hidalgo, talks to the prisoner about her life growing up. She speaks specifically about faith, and feeling uncomfortable in a home where she wasn’t living up to expectations, because she wasn’t sacrificing enough of herself for her family to be satisfied. She then asks him pointedly, “Are you a martyr?” It seems an especially strange word to use in this context, considering it is a “terrorist” that she’s speaking to.

Equally pointed is Maxwell’s highlighting of the word “security.” Costume designer Kaye Voyce has one of the guards onstage always wearing an orange vest that says “security,” in bold letters highlighted in yellow. Since they are security guards, the costume does not seem initially unsettling, but as the play progresses, and the actual security of the characters and the situation is made more nebulous, it is increasingly strange having someone dressed in an outfit that has such a loaded word written broadly upon their body.

Maxwell’s violence, like his story, is dream-like, unnaturally slowed down. It is also silent, which has the odd dual effect of making it both more funny and more frightening, helping to point at some of the play's central issues: What are the guards protecting? What is the meaning of the security in their collective and individual character worlds? Are their sacrifices meaningless, or are their lives meaningless without the sacrifice? And because of the themes being dealt with, most of what is happening onstage seems to be haunted by a dual relevance outside the world of the play. For instance, the prisoner on the floor, restrained indeterminately and berated by guards, produces unsettling echoes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

This play, which runs roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes without intermission, can seem slow at times. Maxwell toys with the audience’s conception of reality (in their relationship to time) within the structure of the play itself. Somewhere near the middle, he begins using a clock onstage—the live video feed, which at least one of the security guards checks constantly, begins to have the time included on it. It seems to reflect the real time, second by second, for about a minute or so, and then it disappears. When it reappears it says a different time; sometimes it says it is “Sat. January 14,” (which it is), other times that it is “Sun. January 15” (which it is not). No reference to those time leaps is made in the body of the play. And in these moments, the audience is implicated in Maxwell’s complex portrayal of reality. What we expect is true one moment is quickly challenged and changed by the next.

The End of Reality is likely a different show to every audience member. Maxwell’s tactics are in many ways anti-theatrical. He keeps shows of emotion to a minimum and generally, if changes happen, they happen very slowly. Maxwell’s style is not for everyone. Some might find the show’s tone and inaction tedious and unmoving. It provides, however, a relatively unheard voice when talking about fear, and since fear is being talked about so often these days, all unheard voices in the discussion are needed now more than ever.

The End of Reality is a challenging piece that is not always easy on its audience. It is, however, blessed with a gifted ensemble and design team, making what otherwise might be a bitter pill easy to swallow. Anyone hoping for a curious insight into an all too common theme need look no further than Maxwell’s experimental meditation on modern times.

So much of our lives is made up of the twisted little webs we weave. These webs can become so complex that we soon forget where we started or what we anchored on to in the first place. The line between reality and fantasy can become blurred as we knit new threads over old ones and we begin to believe our own lies. We question reality and filter fantasy for nuggets of truth until we come to the conclusion that a chair is not a chair until we sit in it. Morris Panych’s The Ends of the Earth explores these themes with dead-on and slightly absurd comic insight.

Two men, Frank and Walker, have come to believe their own paranoid fantasies. Each is convinced that the other is out to get him, and so they embark on a bizarre journey that leads them to (yes, you guessed it) the ends of the Earth. There is, of course, a crappy, half-fallen-into-the-ocean hotel at the end of the Earth where two ladies are simultaneously guests and proprietors. On their way there, Frank and Walker meet a series of oddballs including a gypsy psychic and a drugged-up truck driver who serve to feed their delusions. The funny thing is, both Frank and Walker seem to desire a relatively normal life, but at the same time it seems they really don’t.

It is this dichotomy—this inner struggle within each of them—that appeals to me most about Panych’s writing in this play. These two guys seem to want to be free of their paranoia but they come to realize that they’d be lost without it. They live in a world that has become part reality and part fantasy and they have trouble distinguishing between the two. Still they need something to blame for their problems and shortcomings and luckily they have their paranoia.

The play is certainly funny in a quirky sort of way, but not a gut-buster. I liked the intentionally obvious structure, it works to highlight their fated meeting, but I could have done with a little less direct audience address. No, it is Frank and Walker’s resistance to and constant search for personal freedom that, for me, makes The Ends of the Earth a truly remarkable play.

Peter Sanfilippo’s direction is so on the money that it seems as though he might have conceived and written the play himself. A curious parade of characters at the opening hooked me for the rest of the evening. His simple staging for the many different locations works to keep the pace hopping along and, with an across-the-board style of heightened reality, he creates an intriguing world all its own.

The cast appears to be as comfortable with each other on stage as they do in the multiple characters that most are called upon to tackle. David Jacks leads us off with a naturally nerdy Frank. Jacks does a great job pulling us into the bizarre world of the play. Leslie Loggans hits with an easily pushed over the edge Walker and Amy Broder is hilarious as the swindling gypsy psychic. But it is Kelly Miller who steals the night. Each one of his characters is so distinctly peculiar. He also wins the night for most characters played at no fewer than eight.

I had a good time at The Ends of the Earth. There were a couple of lines that I was still giggling over as I walked down the street. This production is cohesive in a raw, committed sort of way. Everyone seems to be on the same page. What more can you ask for?

The Fantasticks—the intimate Harvey Schmidt/Tom Jones musical comedy about the callowness of young love and the foolishness of those, of any age, who surrender to it—is back in New York, in Brooklyn this time, at Gallery Players. Just three weeks this time around (last time it stayed for more than 40 years). If you've not seen it, or feel a hankering to revisit it, this production, co-directed by Tina Marie Casamento and Dominic Cuskern, will mostly not let you down. It captures the charm of the piece, and probably most important lets us hear the lovely songs that made this show famous: "Soon It's Gonna Rain," "They Were You," "Much More," and the signature tune, "Try to Remember."

Eight actors, constantly poking through the so-called fourth wall to connect with their audience, tell the story of Matt and Luisa, and their journey toward true love. She is 16, naive, spoiled, and hopelessly romantic; he is 20 (and therefore ever so much more worldly than she), naive, earnest, and hopelessly romantic. When he returns home from school, he discovers that his father Hucklebee and her father Bellomy have erected a wall between their adjoining gardens. Over said wall, he discovers his heart's desire, and she, hers.

The fathers confess to us in short order that the wall was a device: they are good friends, not the feuding enemies that they've led their kids to believe, and have always wanted their children to fall in love and wed. The Romeo-and-Juliet idea is simply to speed things up, and it's working. Now they need a decisive final something that will clinch their children's union. Hucklebee has come up with a novel idea—to hire a wandering hero called El Gallo, who also happens to be the play's narrator, to stage a fake "rape" of Luisa. Matt will come to her aid, she and both fathers will be eternally grateful, and happiness will ensue forever after.

Of course, nothing in the world is so simple, and all four characters learn—abetted by El Gallo, his silent assistant (known only as "The Mute"), and a pair of ragtag itinerant actors—that, as the song puts it, "without a hurt, the heart is hollow."

That's pretty much all there is to The Fantasticks, but librettist/lyricist Jones dresses up the slight subject with lots of coy theatricks that were actually quite adventurous and novel in 1960 but seem merely quaint today, and composer Schmidt offers a wealth of simple, pleasing melodies that, even for their familiarity, still have the capacity to melt a heart. The old-fashionedness of the show is occasionally distracting—the emotional baggage that a 2005 audience brings to the word "rape" is sufficiently different from what the authors intended to render one of the big numbers, "It Depends On What You Pay," almost offensive—but mostly it's a sweet nod to a more innocent time, in terms of what audiences expected from storytelling in general and musical theatre in particular.

Casamento and Cuskern provide a staging that's generally a faithful reproduction of the long-running Sullivan Street Playhouse mounting, which is an excellent idea and not as easy as one might think. In places, they seem to forget that less is almost always more here: the Mute seems to be too busy, for one thing, and the opening "overture" sequence feels a little fussy. A few other minor quibbles: pianist David Libby sometimes drowns out the actors' singing, especially Bonnie Fraser (Luisa), whose voice is lovely but a bit thin; the "rain" and "snow" dispensed by the Mute can't be seen clearly by the audience; and Darron Cardosa's Mortimer (the younger of the two traveling actors) is too hip and knowing to fit comfortably in the world of the play.

But Cuskern and Mike Durkin, as Bellomy and Huckabee, respectively, have a fine old time and deliver the vaudevillian goods in "Plant a Radish," the fathers' paean to the dependability of vegetables vis-a-vis children. James Robert Winfield is as appealing a juvenile lead as we might wish for, and Julia Kelly, the first woman I've seen in the role of the Mute, is quite effective. Paul Niebanck's El Gallo isn't as wise as he might be, but he cuts a dashing figure and grounds the play nicely.

So whether The Fantasticks is brand new to you or as familiar and comfy as your favorite sweater, I expect you'll be happy to make or renew your acquaintance with it at Gallery Players.

David Gonzalez's The Frog Bride is a magical, enchanting hour of storytelling. I can't think of a more delightful way to introduce a young child to the joy of theatre. And I'm not sure I can come up with a more charming way for an adult to pass an hour, either.

The story of The Frog Bride comes from a Russian fairy tale. In it, a king tells his three sons—who are 17, 18, and 19 years old—that they must each go into the forest, cut down a tree, build a bow and arrow from the wood of that tree, and shoot the arrow. Whoever brings the arrow back to him must become the young man's wife. The elder two find themselves betrothed to suitable young woman as a result of this unorthodox methodology, but the youngest, a bit of a dreamer, doesn't quite do the assignment as laid out and is rewarded not with a human bride but a frog.

What ensues is a test of merit that reminded me a bit of "The Princess and the Pea," followed by a test of love something along the lines of "Rapunzel" or "Sleeping Beauty." But in fact the story is not much like any that I know well, which is certainly part of this show's appeal (how often do grown-ups—or savvy kids, for that matter—get a chance to be introduced to a brand new fairy tale?), and which is also why I'm not going to give any more of it away here.

Fun as the story is, the real magic is in the telling, which is pure theatre. Gonzalez narrates the tale grandly, using funny voices, lots of movement, and an up-to-date idiom that the kids in the audience not only "got" but genuinely embraced. He's accompanied only by two musicians, Daniel Kelly on piano, keyboards, and electronics, and Christian Howes on violin. This pair is terrifically accomplished, and they play Kelly's compositions along with Sergei Prokofiev's "Five Melodies for Violin and Piano," the latter as warm yet melancholy interludes between the segments of Gonzalez's story.

Behind Gonzalez on the otherwise bare stage is a screen, on which are projected the stunning, virtuosic images and videos of Matyas Keleman. This young artist's work (he's just 25) is spectacular: blending drawings, abstract pictures, and selctions from several paintings by Kandinsky, he creates a beautiful, fluid backdrop for The Frog Bride. Gonzalez and director Leonard Petit have choreographed the interplay between human performer and visual background with remarkable acuity and flair; at one point, Gonzalez seems to be inside one of the Kandinsky pieces, its geometric shapes transformed into an astonishing landscape through which the silhouetted actor (as the youngest prince, in search of his frog bride) appears to be traveling.

It all adds up to a feast of sight, sound, and imagination for any age—truly a theatre experience to enjoy and cherish. It's s a shame that Gonzalez and his co-artists are only at the New Victory through this weekend. I'll certainly be looking forward to their next stop in NYC.

The holidays come early this year to Theatre 80 St. Marks, where the Pearl Theatre Company is presenting the American professional premiere of The Gentleman Dancing-Master, William Wycherley’s 1672 Restoration comedy about affectation, parenthood, and good old-fashioned red-blooded common sense. In that sense it’s as timely today as it was 333 years ago, and the Pearl does a splendid, entertaining job in its handsome and elegant production.

The plot somewhat defies description, but here goes: Hippolyta is a 14-year-old girl who has been confined to her house for the past year as her father, James Formal, a wine merchant, travels the continent in search of a husband for her. The best he’s been able to come up with is his nephew, a France-obsessed, couture-mad fop. Meeting him for the first time, Hippolyta is desperate for another option and through a clever scheme manages to ensnare Mr. Gerrard, a handsome, dashing young London gentleman. Gerrard is pressed into service as Hippolyta’s dancing-master when her father, as crazed for Spanish Puritanism as his nephew is crazed for Parisian foppery, returns to London to oversee the marriage. The whole thing ends in a crazed festival of swordplay, convincingly arranged by David DeBesse, but have no fear—everything comes out all right in the end.

If you think girls grow up fast these days, you should have been around in 1672. The clever Hippolyta, played charmingly here by Marsha Stephanie Blake, manages to wrap cousin, father, and suitor around her little finger as she seeks happiness with the dashing Mr. Gerrard (Bradford Cover) and escape from a doomed engagement to Monsieur de Paris (a smashingly funny Sean McNall, who manages nonetheless to find a hint of desperate melancholy in the deluded young man). Dan Daily, as Hippolyta’s pitiless but similarly ridiculous father, convincingly draws all attention as he struts his way across the stage, unaware of the lascivious shenanigans going on all around him even as his sister, the wiser Mrs. Caution (Robin Leslie Brown), warns him against the sham dance instructor. Michele Vazquez, John Livingstone Rolle, Heather Girardi, Rachel Botchan, and Ryland Blackinton fill out the attractive cast.

Director Gus Kaikkonen keeps the stage briskly hopping as he finds the theatrical possibilities in this language-rich text (which is performed nearly uncut, quite an accomplishment itself), and he is well-supported by a team of richly talented designers (Devon Painter for the costumes, Stephen Petrilli for the lights, and Susan Zeeman Rogers for the set) and Jane Shaw’s period-appropriate original music.

Restoration comedy, exemplified by the plays of Sheridan and Wycherley’s own more familiar The Country Wife, has a reputation for being … well, slow and mannered, to put it politely. The Pearl’s production of The Gentleman Dancing-Master demonstrates that, with the right cast and under the sensitive hand of an insightful director, these plays can have all of the energy and relevance of a contemporary farce. If you’re looking for a delightful theatrical confection with which to start your holiday celebration, look no further than the Pearl’s current production.

If you are, say, a four- to twelve-year-old, you will probably get wrapped up in the story and message of The Gift of Winter, the current offering of Tada! Youth Theater. If you are any older than that, you will get a kick out of watching a slew of terrifically talented kids masterfully hold the stage for just over an hour.

These “triple threats,” as they will come to be called when they audition for college conservatories and summer stock seasons, sing, dance, and act with quite a bit of technique. But what fascinates is their sense of life onstage—the alacritous twinkle in their eyes that says how happy they are to be up there in front of us at this very moment.

Based on the book of the same name by John Leach and Jean Rankin, The Gift of Winter concerns a town where winter has finally become intolerable—just icy winds and head colds—all cons and no pros—nothing fun about it. The Townspeople demand of their leader, Mayor Maude, that she either abolish this lame and dreary season or she and her cabinet will not be reelected (that the cowboy-hatted Mayor does not believe in elections, notwithstanding). Thus a delegation is formed (Maude and her constituents) to go see Winter himself to discuss this matter; Ben and Carl, two townsguys who were not deemed “important” enough to join the delegation proper, follow anyway.

Throughout their whimsical journey, our characters must contend with show-stopping trees, abominables (menacing creatures with the power to freeze), and some soulful but bureaucratic secretaries before finally gaining audience with Winter. Surprise is not this piece’s strongest element, so I will go ahead and reveal that Maude and her delegation learn that they can’t make it without the help of the two young men, and through respect and kindness, they win an unexpected—and town-pleasing—result: snow.

The adults involved in this production all show great skill: a cute, punny libretto by Michael Slade (book) and Faye Greenberg (lyrics) with a political nod here and there; a many-flavored score by David Evans, performed with vigor by the band (Joe Brady and Jim Colleran, also the music director); and a wonderful bunch of designers (Peter R. Feuchtwanger, Shelly Norton, and Brian Aldous, on sets, costumes, and lights, respectively), assembled by director Janine Nina Trevens.

Trevens and Colleran’s greatest achievement, however, is the way in which they showcase their sparkling ensemble of actors: the feisty and unflappable Maya Park as Mayor Maude, supported to humorous effect, by her politico-chums (Julian Pavlin, Ryan-Ashleigh Reid, Gabriela Gross, and the particularly prickly Mary Claire Miskrell); the fiery-eyed Billy Rayner, flanked by Casey Wenger-Schulman and Merce Jessor as the Three Trees, who are more than ready to do Vegas; Tori Green and Emily Wexler, as the singing secretaries who could hold their own with any contestant on American Idol; those agile Abominables (Sophie Golomb, Jasmine Perez, and Katie Welles); Robert Aviles and Anthony Sanchez, the young townies, who shine in their sweet duet, “I Don’t Like The Dark”; and, of course, the thunder-voiced Winter himself, Norman Franklin. The Townspeople, a roster of names too numerous to mention here, deserve equal acclaim.

Would it be saccharine of me to say that watching the Tada! Youth Theater is as rousing as watching the first snowfall of the season? Yes, it probably would be. But there’s something very refreshing, very hopeful about this troupe that makes me excited for theatre seasons to come.

If hunchbacks, imps, and mutant girls were all part of your everyday life, you might think it best not to automatically judge a book by its cover. Such is the message of the Ateh Theater Group’s inaugural production, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a play whose aforementioned outcast characters repeatedly find love (or at least acceptance) after being judged for who they are instead of what they are. Director Bridgette Dunlap has adapted five short stories from Aimee Bender’s book of the same name, fantastical tales in which the boundaries of realism are stretched: a man inexplicably begins de-evolving; a mermaid hides her identity from her high school classmates; and a young girl can burn things with her bare hand. Dunlap crafts a fairy tale universe out of Bender’s work, and for the most part the results are well done and very enjoyable.

In the best of these stories, the everyday commingles freely with the outlandish and the freakish find comfort with their own. Mimi, the mermaid protagonist of “Drunken Mimi,” is wooed by an imp who wears stilts to school in order to hide his diminutive size. In “Legacy,” a pregnant teen finds love in the arms of her step-uncle, a hunchback. “The Healer” chronicles two former friends—mutants known as Fire Girl and Ice Girl, respectively—who warily come together again after one of them embarks on an ill-fated friendship with a masochistic young man. And, in “The Rememberer,” a young woman watches helplessly as her boyfriend slowly transforms into an ape, then a sea turtle, and finally a salamander. Only the title story—in which a young woman tries to connect with her ailing father in his final days—missteps: it feels out of place and too conventional among its whimsical and heightened counterparts.

Taking a story theatre approach to the material, Dunlap keeps the design elements to a minimum: Fire Girl and Ice Girl’s respective powers, for instance, are illustrated only with a small, colored flashing light in each of the actors’ hands and a couple of well-placed light cues. No outrageous makeup, costumes, or masks are used to evoke the strange population of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt—they are conjured, instead, through the magic of acting. The talented cast—Jeff Addiss, Cormac Bluestone, Ryan Canfield, Alexis Grausz, Kathryn Ekblad, Jeff Hughes, Madeleine Maby, Sara Montgomery, and Elizabeth Neptune—handles the heavy lifting expertly. They all work well together, and are clearly having fun. Their enthusiasm generates a soft hum of joyousness that pervades the production and rubs off on the audience.

The God Committee is a drama about a hospital transplant selection committee. Playwright Mark St. Germain deals with the issue of a panel of people who control the fate of their patients, deliberately selecting those they deem most worthy to live.

With roughly one heart donor for every ten people in need of a heart, the circumstances here are quite obviously fraught with drama. Seven people (three doctors plus a social worker, a psychiatrist, a nurse, and a priest) begin a meeting which starts simply enough. They are re-evaluating the patients on their transplant list, trying to decide who is to be upgraded. The candidates, whom we never meet, are as diverse as the decision makers. One is an older Hispanic mother, a community leader. Another is an overweight and unsuccessful poet, a mean-spirited pariah. Another is an older family man, the recipient of a transplant years before. He seems the most likely to receive the heart, but the wild card is the newest person on the list, a billionaire’s son, whose father is already a major contributor to the hospital. The meeting becomes ominously rushed when a heart suddenly becomes available and the group must deliberate as to who receives the organ in the next hour.

The criteria for organ donation, which are enumerated and described in the play, are as real as they are unbelievable. Age and race cannot be considered factors, though certain medical conditions that are related to those conditions must be. If a patient tests positive for drugs then he is not considered, as he is deemed likely to abuse his new organs as his last ones. Wealth cannot be a consideration, but insurance (and its willingness or reticence to support a surgery) most definitely matters. The play does give one a sense of the true inexactness of this selection process, and begs questions as to whether such a process can ever be anything other than accidental at best. Onstage, the presence of a billionaire on the list is the elephant in the room. When it is made clear that the billionaire’s father has pledged the hospital 50 million dollars since his son was added to the list, another complication emerges.

St Germain’s play, directed by Kevin Moriarty, clearly has all the characteristics of a successful drama: a central important event, characters forced to confront each other in a confined time and space, and complications that arise in their due course. However, in spite of this, something about the play never fully materializes. Though the situation is both grave and tense, the characters and the script are not as strong as they need to be to carry the magnitude of the story.

The characters tend to be a bit stock. The cold (but incredibly proficient) surgeon, whose calculations border on cruel. The hard-as-nails nurse, whom nothing gets past, and who, deep down, has a heart of gold. The aging, but universally liked, head of the department, who is reaching the end of his time at the hospital. Perhaps the characters themselves are not the problem, but the way the script glosses over them without probing is troublesome. The people onstage are both totally believable and ultimately predictable, which makes it quite difficult to sympathize with any of them, and thereby hard to decide with whom one wants to place their loyalties. Even their surprises tend to be not that surprising. In spite of this, the play does feature some excellent performances, especially from actors Larry Keith (as the senior Dr. Klee), Michael Mulheren (as the priest), and Ron Orbach (the wheelchair-bound social worker).

St. Germain sets the play in real time, with a clock onstage constantly drawing attention to a fast-approaching deadline, by which time the crucial decision must be made. The detail is very effective. Beowulf Borrit’s set is picture perfect, both realistic and suggestive, and bears every necessary resemblance to the kind of mundane space in which otherwise ordinary people play God. The onstage sound, which provides some important cues, is less perfected, as it distractingly seems to always be emanating from the same space and at the same level.

Regardless of any qualms about the play, The God Committee is both well-conceived and timely. St. Germain admits that he was inspired to write the play when a friend’s father found himself in need of a transplant. And with the play itself supported by the New York Organ Donor network, it would be impossible to say that this isn’t a socially responsible look into an important dramatic issue. However, when a person’s life and death are discussed over a boardroom table and diet cokes, there is potential to create a truly complex examination of human beings, of conscience, of morals, and of fate. The play falls just short of this complexity, and instead remains more straightforward in its questioning of the issues at hand. It is, however, a worthy introduction to an incredibly complicated and otherwise clandestine world, that audience members are likely to be enriched by.

When I was a boy, growing up in Prince Georges County, Maryland, we had a family friend named Joan who had been born and bred in a nearby Southern Maryland small town. Joan had lots of style, in her way, but not what urban sophisticates would call class. She had a joke she loved to tell, about how somebody had asked her what her dog Blaze's whole name was. Answer: Ass. (A pun on whole/hole, you see.) Telling this story, she would invariably dissolve into peals of raucous laughter.

This is essentially the kind of humor you can expect at The Great American Trailer Park Musical. This celebration of Trailer Trash/Redneck Dumb-As-A-Doorknob Kitschy Vulgarity is probably a lot of fun, if you like that sort of thing. It is exceedingly well-crafted, featuring a tuneful score with appropriate and occasionally even clever lyrics by David Nehls, a gag-laden book by Betsy Kelso, exuberant direction by Kelso and lots of nifty retro choreography by Sergio Trujillo, garish costumes by Markas Henry and equally outlandish hair design by Josh Marquette, and a septet of high-energy performances by Broadway-caliber singer/dancer/actors Marya Grandy, Linda Hart, Shuler Hensley, Kaitlin Hopkins, Leslie Kritzer, Orfeh, and Wayne Wilcox.

The crowd at the performance I attended seemed to be having just the time of their lives. I, it must be said, was not; Trailer Park actually made me very sad. Some of the time—regarding Tony winner Shuler Hensley (Jud in the recent Trevor Nunn Oklahoma!) as a singing toll booth attendant, or powerhouse Linda Hart (who stole the 1987 Anything Goes revival out from under Patti LuPone when she did her show-stopper "Buddie Beware!") pretending to be a very poor man's Sally Jesse Raphael—all I could think was, how the mighty have fallen. And some of the time—as during the lengthy production number "Storm's A-Brewin," which looks and sounds like it's been appropriated from about a half-dozen different pop cultural sources, but darned if I could actually identify a single one—I thought, man, am I outta touch.

Most of the time, though, I was thinking that songs about roadkill just don't strike me as very funny. Trailer Park—I repeat: extremely well put-together—feels, to me, like a very sorry squandering of a lot of wonderful talent.

But who am I to judge?; as my companion, whose reaction was very similar to mine, remarked later, people are under a lot of stress these days—they need to just let go. I guess Trailer Park is as good a place to relax as any; I just wish it had a little more wit and little more intellectual heft on its bones.

It has almost none. It's about a couple named Norbert and Jeannie who live in a trailer park in Florida. Their marriage is on the skids, at least in part because she hasn't left the trailer in more than a decade, since their only child was kidnapped. A stripper named Pippi, on the run from her boyfriend, arrives from Oklahoma City and moves into the trailer next door. She and Norbert commence an affair. Will Norbert and Jeannie get back together? Will they ever find their son?

I confess that I don't know the answer to either question, because I exited Trailer Park after about an hour and a few minutes; I just couldn't take it any more (maybe I'm sentimental about my Southern Maryland roots). But I bet I can guess, and I bet you can too. Hensley and Hopkins play the couple; Orfeh (big-voiced sensation from Saturday Night Fever) is the stripper; Wilcox is the stripper's boyfriend; and Hart, Grandy, and Kritzer are a sort of three-woman Greek chorus who keep the thing moving along.

Major kudos to Derek McLane's set, which deserves a way smarter show to be in. In fact, that's pretty much true for everybody and everything involved in The Great American Trailer Park Musical. But I may just be some sort of anti-dopiness grinch, here, and if so I'm sorry. People around me did seem to be having a pretty lively time.

In Charles Messina's comedy The Great Divide, audiences find themselves in the midst of a personal and marital crisis. Paul (Ernie Curcio) is confiding in his best friend Max (Johnny Tamaro) about his longings and confusion regarding a woman in his office, Nicole (Barbie Insua). Paul seeks Max’s advice, fearing that he may have already committed a kind of adultery, or, worse yet, that he may be in love and be obligated to leave his wife of ten years, Sara (Gina Ferranti).

The Great Divide addresses many of the concerns of modern couples, especially with regard to adultery. What constitutes adultery: a dream, a feeling, an action? What level of action is acceptable? What level of feeling? Is honesty always the best policy, or is it more fair to spare a loved one the possibly unnecessary grief?

The play, in a series of realistic interchanges and some dreamlike moments, attempts to explore Paul’s confusion since having met Nicole five weeks ago. The audience experiences the events as Paul relates them to Max, who is having relationship troubles of his own. Paul has obviously upset his wife by telling her that he has feelings for another, though he technically has not had “an affair” with the other woman—or at least, he thinks he hasn’t.

The most memorable character here is, without a doubt, Max. As rendered by Johnny Tamaro, Max seems to be the only one talking any sense. His advice is often unorthodox, but never, it seems, poorly considered. His character is also easily the funniest, and the most true to life. Where the play ballooning around him seems occasionally cartoonish, Max seems to stay relatively grounded, or at least sympathetic.

In contrast, it is sometimes hard to root for Paul. Paul is whiny; he is an indecisive screw-up who laments (endlessly) how he hates himself and doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but in the meantime is prolonging the agony of all those involved. It seems he is ill-suited to be around anyone,

There are three possible endings for the piece, and the audience votes nightly on which one the play will culminate in. After intermission, when the votes are counted, the “second act” is really just the few minutes of wrap-up based on what ending the audience has declared—without spending much time to delve into intricacies and consequences of each of the possible endings. If Paul stays with his wife, how might they possibly work out this episode? If Paul leaves her for Nicole, will Nicole ever feel secure with a man who was able to leave his wife after ten years? What might Paul discover about himself if finds himself alone? None of these questions is really explored. Ultimately, these possibilities are a bit disappointing. They seem more useful as a device with which to end the play, rather than to actually examine the repercussions of Paul's decision.

Also, the excitement of deciding Paul's fate is a little diminished because it’s frustrating to let him off the hook. He spends the entire first act avoiding action, only to avoid it again in the form of an audience intervention. Audiences may find themselves desiring exactly what the women do for Paul: to make a definitive and informed decision, instead of so much dalliance and self-questioning. There isn’t a lot of joy in finally telling Paul what will happen to him. Paul remains predictably removed from the process of deciding his own fate, and in the end, he seems cowardly.

At some point, Max advises Paul, “Some things you work out, you die with them,” and it is through this epithet that we understand what makes Paul and Max so different. It is Paul’s endless self-questioning that causes his anxiety and his difficulty taking any kind of action. Paul’s case is not an unsympathetic one. Anxiety and self-doubt are virtually synonymous with modern man. Paul never does “work it out;” though he desires to do good; he stays too indecisive to do much of anything. The Great Divide works with an emotionally complex idea, and does so generously through comedy, rather than the tear-jerking drama it would most surely make. The problems it rasies are likely to resonate with many audience members, and there are some genuinely humorous moments that help along the story.