Flying Fig Theatre’s mission is to produce compelling stories about women. Their latest offering, The Guts Girls, most certainly fits that description. However, I must admit that while I was compelled by the themes in the story, my attention was not held by this production.

I’ve seen one other Flying Fig production and I thought it was great. However, this production is problematic several reasons. The play has a great message but the characters are merely mouthpieces of the playwright’s beliefs rather than real people. The women are a cross section of stereotypes and all the men are either wimps or jerks. Also, at almost three hours, it’s just too long. That fact coupled with so many scene changes, the heat, the noise of the fans and the hard-to-understand dialect makes The Guts Girls a bit hard to sit through.

Penned by the didactic British feminist playwright Sarah Daniels in 1988, this play has not been seen here in New York since 1993. Set in London in the early 1900s, it tells the true story of a group of women who work in the slaughterhouses. They are relegated to removing the entrails of the slaughtered beasts, hence their catchy nickname. They are paid relatively well for doing what they do and they have achieved a certain amount of financial independence. This independence, and the fact that these women are brash, fun-loving and do not fit into (nor do they wish to) the traditional view of what a “lady” should be, set them at odds with the establishment. In fact, they are considered to be one step above prostitutes.

Into their lives steps a wealthy woman (ironically she is herself financially independent and yet wants to take away the guts girls’ independence) who wishes to convert these rough women into more refined, God-fearing ladies. She opens a club for these women and teaches them how to sew undergarments (because it’s rumored that gut girls don’t wear any) and reads Bible passages to them. The playwright takes plenty of time establishing just how independent these women are so when it comes time to break their spirits they have that much further to fall.

Time is an issue in this production. The playwright spends so much time establishing character and giving exposition that literally nothing happens for the entire first hour before the intermission. Things really start to pick up after intermission—we’re finally given some conflict as we see how the fate of these women will be decided, but that only takes about an hour. The final hour consists of mostly unnecessary wrap-ups that squash the spirit of the climactic middle hour.

This is ironic because the squashing of the spirit is the major theme of the play. These girls were liberated from societal norms and that made many people want to crush them. The issues raised here are still very relevant today. Daniels’s dialogue is quite stirring and often funny and I think the story is well worth telling, but the sheer girth of the script is overwhelming. I felt my own spirit was crushed by the end of the performance. I wonder if the play could be cut down to half its running time (with permission from the playwright) without losing any of the play’s poignancy or effecting its message.

Readers should know that the Chocolate Factory is not air-conditioned. This really didn’t bother me at first but as the night wore on I became more aware of the heat. Also, most of the actors use a Cockney dialect and that forces most people in an American audience to have to listen just a little bit closer, which is fine; but the theatre has several fans set up that are blowing full-blast which caused me to lose a lot of dialogue. I could only strain to hear for so long before I became exhausted.

The ten-member ensemble gets a real workout, playing double roles in lovely costumes (courtesy of Deb E. Miner) that plant them firmly in the period. Some highlights include Irene McDonald’s self-righteous patroness Lady Helena, Soraya Broukhim’s transformation from a shy, obedient wife to an outspoken woman, and Tiffany Green’s portrayal of the strong leader of the group who is forced to give in.

Director Michaela Goldhaber does a good job putting her vision for the show into action. She wisely places scenes around the playing area in multiple settings to eliminate some of the scene changes and uses lighting to draw the eye. She also does good job of eliciting an even acting style from the whole cast and vocal coach Linda Jones keeps everyone pretty much on the same page as far as dialects.

This will not be the last Flying Fig production that I see. I think they have a lot to offer the theatre scene. As for this production, perhaps they should take a cue from the title characters and gut this beast of a play and just give us the meat.

Some thirty years ago, Tom Stoppard’s groundbreaking play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, gave audiences a new way to see Hamlet, through the eyes of two minor characters on whose lives the plot of the play turns. The Hamlet Plays is a collection of six ten-minute plays, which are playing in rep with a production of Stoppard’s play. Each of the plays is written by a Milk Can Theatre Company associate, and as the press materials state, the plays “[allow] each artistic associate to take a crack at what Stoppard did 30 years ago.” The result is a very entertaining and enjoyable hour of theatre.

The set for all six plays is an almost-bare stage with a two-story scaffolding, which I assume is part of the Rosencrantz set since I can’t imagine why the company would have built it for these “no-frills” pieces, which nonetheless use it effectively as a bedroom, a grave site, an apartment, and the edge of Ophelia’s pond. Although the design in the plays is minimal, certain aspects stick out—particularly the funny props in Baloney and the costumes, designed by Marija Djordjevic, in Maybe He’s Just Not That Into You…. The music between the plays, designed by Nick Moore, showcases the work of other artists who have written about themes in the plays.

The Player King Musical takes a look at a modern-day version of the Player King, viewing him as a frustrated actor forced to leave New York City for a paying gig teaching second graders. The show features two talented singers, Dennis Clark and Carrie Ann Champlin, and provides a high-energy opening to the shows. As I am not familiar with the specifics of the Player King in Hamlet, while watching the show, I found myself wanting to look it up. That’s certainly a good sign!

Baloney, which features the philosophizing of two gravediggers, attempts a self-conscious humor, with props serving as jokes and some meta-theatrical moments, such as breaking the fourth wall and some self-conscious lines. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it really reached the tone it was after—a sort of ironic, self-aware wit. Nonetheless, I appreciated the work of the actors, Byron Blevins and Timothy Cole.

The Match, about two competitive roommates, one decisive and the other slower to act, takes a contemporary look at the fight between Hamlet and Laertes. I enjoyed figuring out the connection to Shakespeare and the surprise ending. The actors Derek Peith and Nick Fondulis make it easier to enjoy the surprise with their quick transitions.

The Lamp’s Lit, the most serious play on the program, shows a different side of Gertrude. In this play, I particularly enjoyed writer Cheryl Davis’s dialogue. The way Roya Shanks’s Gertrude negotiates speaking and interacting with both TJ Morton’s Ghost and Andrew Zimmerman’s creepy and unaware Claudius make for some very interesting staging.

The two treats of the bunch, the ones I found the most entertaining, are Bethany Larsen’s Maybe He’s Just Not That Into You… and Decisive, with music by Nick Moore and book and lyrics by Susannah Pearse.

Maybe He’s Just… makes fun of the currently popular “women obsessed with bad relationships with men” genre (think Sex and the City, of course). The three fantastic actresses in this piece, Cynthia Rice, Lauren Mary Gleason, and Katie Northlich, seem to be having so much fun with Bethany Larsen’s story, nailing the way women talk to each other obsessively about men. I particularly loved Larsen’s characterization of Ophelia as a frazzled drama queen. As portrayed by Gleason, she is desperate, annoying, dumb, sweet, and troubled. I either wanted to hug her or push her into the pond myself.

Decisive ends the set on a very high note. This musical—about a support group for people who cannot be satisfied after playing Hamlet—is really funny and really campy, seeming to draw choreography from both The Rocky Horror Show and the video of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Standing out in the cast is Reza Jacobs as one of the Hamlets and the keyboardist. I also loved Jennifer Stackpole’s Rachel, who’s so bright-eyed and energetic, and John Buxton’s Keanu Reeves-like Alex. Jared Dembowski’s Ricard, with his Clay Aiken hair, made me laugh out loud.

Overall, The Hamlet Plays is light and enjoyable while providing an intellectual tickle. Audience members who are concerned that the plays require a deep knowledge of Hamlet should not worry. I am certainly not an expert on the play and I really had a good time watching these playful views of Hamlet’s characters and this company of artists that makes it work.

The Heist Project begins with the audience being ushered into a large open room—a portion, we're told, of Isabella Stewart Gardner's museum. Though Mrs. Gardner died in 1924, she's here with us now, to guide us through our tour of some of her treasured art objects. Following her around the space—abetted by some friendly lights that helpfully shine brightly on our next destination—we encounter some paintings: a few Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, some Degas, and a Shang Dynasty ku (or beaker) over 2,000 years old.

What's particularly distinctive about these artworks is that they are represented here by original, new works of art—installations, really—that comment on or interpret the originals (see the information above this review for the names of the artists who contributed these pieces); and incorporated within each of these installations, the subjects of the paintings come to life, offering their takes on the works they're contained in: on the nature of ephemera and memory, and of art itself.

So Rembrandt's A Lady and a Gentleman in Black are seen squabbling about a theatrical event that they've been collaborating on; the anxious student in Vermeer's The Concert frets about being able to transcend performance to create art just for herself; and a writer experiencing a metaphorical Storm on the Sea of Galilee (after Rembrandt's painting, here) tries to work through being blocked. In one of my favorite sequences, a distracted gentleman rises from bed pondering the whereabouts of Degas's Program for an artistic soiree, noting—profoundly, I thought—that just such a souvenir is the only tangible evidence we have of a performance, when all is said and done: the only real "proof" that we were actually there to witness it. And in another choice vignette, Rembrandt's matchbook-sized Self Portrait argues with its creator about life, art, and the universe.

The Chinese ku even says a few words, about how under-appreciated it usually feels. (Paintings get all the attention, it tells us.)

After our journey through Mrs. Gardner's collection is complete, we are sent to a second area, where we see a film about the demise of a Jersey City landmark, 111 First Street, a haven for contemporary artists of all stripes, now torn down to make way for city redevelopment. Again, the question of what lingers in memory when art is experienced—and created—comes to the fore.

Finally, the evening wraps up with a re-enactment—extremely well-staged by the Project's director, Jack Halpin—of the theft of the art objects we've just spent time with. This actually happened, in 1990; it remains an unsolved mystery. (More here.)

The linkage is clear: whoever stole Mrs. Gardner's treasures is as culpable, in terms of denying future generations the pleasures and joys and opportunities that all great art provides, as the grinch who stole 111 First Street.

The Heist Project is breathtakingly ambitious and splendidly inventive. All of the artists involved—the visual artists who created and designed the installations; the writers; the actors; the filmmakers—are to be commended for engaging our imagination and intellect with such acuity. Kudos to the young New Jersey theatre company Art House Productions and its Producing Artistic Director Christine Goodman for dreaming this up and executing it so excitingly.

I will offer one piece of constructive commentary, which is that I would have liked to be able to spend more time with the art installations on my own, at my own pace, as my random curiosity led me around the "gallery"—as it stands, it's hard to get close enough to each of the installations and really study them in detail. (This would probably require (a) more physical room, and (b) actors to continuously perform their roles several times during the evening; I'm not sure how feasible this idea is, but it might be interesting to try out in any future incarnation of this piece.)

That thought notwithstanding, The Heist Project is a spectacular example of theatrical invention. It augurs well for Art House, whose future work I will eagerly await. It's just sad that, after this cycle of performances is over, this exquisite and genuinely innovative piece of theatre will fade, as its subjects would be the first to remind us, into the fleeting wisp of memory.

As I was leaving the Broadhurst Theatre after The History Boys, I overheard one patron say to another, "Well, that certainly was great theatre." And, as far as it goes, I have to agree: if you enjoy seeing a play that's clever and funny and reasonably intelligent without being particularly demanding, then I can unequivocally recommend this one.

But if you're seeking depth, or authenticity, or intellectual challenge and engagement, then I'm afraid The History Boys doesn't fill the bill at all; at least not for me. For it failed the most critical test that I have for a drama, which is whether I believed it or not. Alan Bennett's much-acclaimed play, glib more often than smart, didn't ring true for me, not for a minute.

It's about a group of eight boys—young men, really—who are studying for their university entrance examinations. (A helpful program note explains that in Britain in the 1980s, when The History Boys takes place, Oxford and Cambridge had their own exams that bright students would bone up for in special intensive semesters at grammar schools; that's what's going on in the play.)

The boys include Dakin, the best-looking and most confident among them; Scripps, Dakin's friend, wise and introverted; Timms, oversized and something of the class clown; Rudge, a jock who knows he's outclassed by the smarter boys here but is nevertheless determined to get into a "name" school; and Posner, who is younger, Jewish, insecure, very bright, and just realizing that he is gay and in love with Dakin. (The other three boys—Akthar, Crowther, and Lockwood—figure less prominently in the story.)

Their teacher, at the beginning, is a quaint old gent named Hector who alternately teases and badgers the boys to memorize a variety of objectively useless information (poems, Gracie Fields songs) in an effort to instill them with a love of learning. But Headmaster isn't satisfied with Hector's methods—he wants the school's reputation to be enhanced, and getting a boatload of students into top universities is what's called for. So he hires a hotshot young teacher named Tom Irwin to tutor the boys specifically for the exams and provide them with tools and techniques to master them. (He's sort of like a one-man Kaplan test-prep center.) Irwin's teaching methodology is all about making impressions and standing out; about selecting from what one has learned to accomplish very specific objectives. The contrast between Irwin's pedagogy and Hector's more noble brand of same is the crux of Bennett's drama.

But there's some melodrama lurking just beneath the surface. Hector, it seems, is a bit of a pedophile: afternoons, he drives some of the boys home on his motorcycle and he diddles with their private parts en route. Headmaster's wife catches him in flagrante. And so now Headmaster has to decide what to do with his errant teacher, and the history boys have to figure out what to make of the conflicting and even contradictory signals they're receiving from their elders.

The story takes a fairly predictable path, with Hector emerging as a heroic figure despite having done (apparently for quite some time) a most unheroic thing. And Irwin emerges as a sort of coward, not to mention a hypocrite, despite having produced precisely the results that Headmaster (and, presumably, the boys themselves) desired.

Bennett's writing is entertaining but largely uninspired, and some of the stretches he makes here defy credibility. Dakin, who is very proud of the affair he is having with Headmaster's secretary, suddenly sets his sights on seducing Irwin, which seemed to me a most unusual thing for a heterosexual teenage boy to do. Headmaster, a horror of a stuffed shirt if ever there was one, speaks unguardedly about his sex life to Mrs. Lintott, another teacher at the school (her purpose in the play, as she herself tells the audience at one point, is solely to receive confidences from the other characters); Mrs. Lintott, a consummate professional if ever there was one, joltingly interrupts a classroom session to complain about womankind's overall lack of influence in historical events (itself a surprising judgment in that era of Margaret Thatcher). These tangents and others like them feel entirely gratuitous: one is aware of Bennett making his play racier and juicier in hopes of making it more likable.

As for the play's central dramatic tension, involving Hector's fondling of his students—well, I had real trouble believing that an English teacher of around 60 years of age could drive a motorcycle at 50mph with one hand while the other was somehow behind him doing the dirty business noted; certainly not one built along the lines of Richard Griffith, the very overweight actor who portrays Hector here.

Structurally, I kept on having troubles with The History Boys as well. Bennett indulges, as so many contemporary dramatists do, in a loose narrative form that allows characters to step back and forth through the fourth wall as the playwright requires. Scripps does this the most, but other boys talk directly to us from time to time, and so does Mrs. Lintott in the most self-conscious example of this practice. Scenes begin with what appears to be a particular class commencing, only to be cut short some five or ten minutes later by the bell—that didn't feel real to me at all.

Bob Crowley's set design looks good, but it turns out to just be a higher-rent version of the same design used by low-budget theatre companies everywhere, which is to say that it consists of some tables and chairs that get rearranged in between scenes, over and over again, endlessly and without the benefit of much in the way of technology. The many set changes are masked by film segments depicting the boys wandering around a campus that we never see on stage, or occasionally by musical numbers performed live by Scripps and Posner. (The film segments pose another problem: the understudies aren't in them, and so at performances such as the one I attended when an understudy is in the show, the film version of his character doesn't match the live one. And one more thing: the actors in the film look younger than the ones on stage; indeed some of the "boys," nearly two years after the play had its London debut, have trouble convincing us that they are 18-year-olds.)

Now all that said, and as noted, The History Boys is an entertaining bit of theatre. The musical interludes—a rendition of "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" sung in glorious harmony, among others—are fetchingly executed (though I kept wondering which high-school-age boys in the 1980s would care to spend their time singing such songs). Some of the set pieces, especially one in which Hector (inexplicably) is conducting the class in French, are quite funny. And the acting is all first-rate, with particular standouts being Frances de la Tour as the unflappable Mrs. Lintott, Jamie Parker as the slightly enigmatic yet highly likable Scripps, James Corden as rambunctious Timms, and Russell Tovey as the ambitious Rudge. Richard Griffiths, in a performance that will undoubtedly be cited by various award bodies this season, is perhaps too comfortable in the role he originated; there's a showiness to his portrayal that jars slightly with the tone of the rest of the acting. Nicholas Hytner's staging is strong throughout.

I like that The History Boys considers subjects that are more challenging and enlarging than what is often attempted in a Broadway play. But I was disappointed that the consideration is so superficial. I'd venture to say that if this play hadn't come to us from England with its National Theatre credentials and its handful of London awards, it would not now be playing at the Broadhurst Theatre and winning the kind of acclaim that it has. We have good American playwrights with interesting stuff on their minds; what we don't have is a theatre establishment that embraces and nurtures them the way the UK does. And there, perhaps, is the real lesson to be learned.

Here's the bottom line on The Hollow Men: they're darned funny.

Almost every sketch in their show, now at the Village Theatre, lands squarely and wittily. Some of their stuff—like one involving a trio of chanting Gregorian monks—hits you out of nowhere and brings about great big belly laughs. Other bits--such as a recurring piece about a Very Bad Standup Comic whose tagline is a consistently mistimed "I knoooow!!"—are more off-kilter and/or surreal (the Comic is haunted by visions of a long ago schoolteacher/coach in an old-fashioned one-piece but surprisingly skimpy bathing suit). Still others—like a pair of sketches parodying Bad Film Noir Dialogue a la Double Indemnity—bristle with clever wordplay.

The Hollow Men are four young men from England (one of whom, according to the Internet Movie Data Base, is director Ken Russell's son). Their names are David Armand, Rupert Russell, Sam Spedding and Nick Tanner; they're Cambridge grads, still in their 20s (their youth and their background betray themselves in the name they selected for themselves, from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land). The press release tells us their comedy is rooted in Monty Python and Kids in the Hall, which is absolutely noticeable; they clearly have an appreciation for the absurd and the surreal. But some of their best stuff feels even more traditional, if you will: the movie sketch I mentioned could have been on the Carol Burnett Show (except that, times having changed, it's somewhat racier than it would have been then), and two of the bits performed (superbly) by David Armand reminded me of the best clownery of Red Skelton. In one of these pieces, Armand does an "interpretive dance" to a current dance music hit (sorry, I'm too much of a codger when it comes to contemporary music to be able to tell you exactly what the song was). Armand's work is hilarious and precise: he's in control of every bone and muscle in his body, and he knows how to play deadpan but deliver silly.

Even better is a sketch in which Armand lip-synchs to, of all things, Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman." The act includes one terrific bit where Armand formalizes something we've always suspected about this one-time top-ten hit—i.e., that it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense—and then builds from there to a delightful conclusion when the other three Hollow Men turn up and send the skit off into a couple of very funny, very unexpected directions.

The finale is a similarly wry take-off on the title sequence from the old James Bond flick, For Your Eyes Only.

I understand that The Hollow Men had, very briefly, a series on Comedy Central; my perusal of the episode listings suggests that some of what's on stage in their current show was seen on TV, while a good deal more is brand new, at least to us New Yorkers. They deserve a berth on TV, as well as lots of support and fans for their live show. Their comedy is smart, gentle, and never ever vulgar; and, as I said, it's almost always actually really funny. This is just the kind of sketch troupe we need more of.

I don't typically see college theatre productions because I'm not asked to review them; but Kevin Connell (who has been an occasional reviewer for nytheatre.com for several years) invited me to see his adaptation of Richard II, called The Holy Terror, at Marymount Manhattan College, where he is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, and so I went. And I am very glad I did.

I don't know if you share this misconception, but my memories of college theatre (from my own time, working in the box office and reviewing for a college newspaper, some 20-odd years ago) are of earnest but amateur work. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least not with regard to what I saw last night at Marymount. The Holy Terror's production values reflect not only a budget larger than most small indie theaters can muster but also significant talent and taste; the acting—by twenty juniors and seniors—is similarly impressive. Connell, who has also directed the piece, makes a lot of demands on his company: they have to master rigorous movement (lots of Wilsonian slow-and-steady pacing, here remarkably purposeful and useful to the storytelling) plus the difficult cadences and rhythms of Shakespearean verse. They acquit themselves not just competently but in almost all cases masterfully. Some of the young faces on the stage of the Theresa Lang Theatre are destined to be seen elsewhere, soon.

Speaking of young faces, one of the most striking and successful aspects of the production is the presence of a very young man as Richard II. Richard was just ten when he ascended to the throne and just 32 when he was deposed; to see him—in his 20s at the start of the play—portrayed by a man in his 20s is rare and useful. Will Trichon, who takes the role, does a fine job in it, traversing from a very spoiled, very petulant young man who believes absolutely in the divine right of kings (i.e., that his seat on the throne has been ordained by God) to a sadder but wiser man, cut down before his time and now entirely without resources in defeat, like a child star lacking any of the wherewithal to grow into an uncelebrated and ordinary human being.

Connell has cast the play sharply throughout, with excellent performances turned in by Lea Maria McKenna-Garcia as Richard's opponent Bolingbroke, Justin Morck as the marshal Exton, Michelle Navarrete and Caitlin McColl as Bolingbroke's supporters Northumberland and Percy, Limor Hakim as the Bishop, and—in two surprisingly vivid cameos—Nathaniel Vaky and Kaia Pazdersky as the two gardeners who inadvertently break the news of Richard II's capture by Bolingbroke to his hitherto in-the-dark queen.

Connell's adaptation, which adds text from a variety of sources to an abbreviation of Richard II, streamlines the story and themes of Shakespeare's original, honing in sharply on one main idea—the notion that absolute monarchy corrupts absolutely. His Richard takes and squanders freely because he knows he can, and the very idea that he can be contradicted—let alone deposed—is radical. Connell charts one of western civilization's first steps toward democracy in this account of Bolingbroke's courageous defiance of a king who supposedly has been anointed by God; the Bishop's horror at Bolingbroke's ascension amplifies just how revolutionary this victory actually was.

The Holy Terror does not shrink from other matters, however: we still hear Richard ponder the death of kings in the play's most famous speech (wisely uncut by Connell; I hate adaptations of famous plays that leave the most famous stuff out, making us wonder if we missed something). But this Richard's belief in the "hollow crown" feels more hollow than usual—Connell and his actors never let us forget that the movers and shakers of big events who populate this play are also just people, fueled by the same drives as you and me; this Richard never quite loses his petulance, even in defeat.

The set by Ray Recht is stark and imposing and lets us fill in, in our mind's eye, the numerous locations; Kirche Leigh Zelle's costumes—blending Egyptian and Roman styles with medieval England's—provide a timelessness to the piece and, in the case of Richard and his followers, a reinforcement of the culture of sensuality that would serve to bring them down. Geoffrey Mitchell's lighting is superb, especially in the second half, when the shadows of Richard and Bolingbroke hold our focus more and more frequently. Sound design by Connell and Geroge Jones—a mix of period and modern techno music—proves evocative and ambient.

Connell's staging is triumphant throughout. Not only has he succeeded in zeroing in, with real clarity and acuity, on a very specific take on a classic story, but he's also done a bang-up job of good old-fashioned storytelling. The Holy Terror holds our interest throughout: it's a ripping yarn. In the end, that's the best we can ask from theatre wherever we find it, on Broadway or on a college campus.

With a cast led by veteran Lynn Redgrave, Sir Peter Hall’s superb direction, beautiful Victorian costumes, and glossy sets, it is still the wonderful, witty words of Oscar Wilde that steal the show in the current production of his classic farce The Importance of Being Earnest, now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The implausible story involves two aristocratic, feckless young men, Algernon Montcrief and Jack Worthing, who invent alter egos to escape distasteful obligations and unpleasant relatives. This, of course, leads to a farcical mess when each falls in love with a lovely and equally shallow woman—Jack with Gwendolen Fairfax, daughter of the indomitable Lady Bracknell and Algernon’s cousin; and Algernon with Cecily Cardew, Jack’s ward. Mixed identities, marrying well, but most of all, presenting a good front, are plot vehicles for the steady stream of bold insights that Wilde uses to punch holes in the hypocrisy of late 19th century Victorian England. The insights are so keen, so timeless, and presented on such a finely polished platter that today’s audience howls in unison at the mirror before them.

James A. Stephens sets the tone when he enters the richly-appointed flat in near slow motion. He is Lane, the butler, and he, like all the characters, lives by wit. His pace is hilarious as he carries tea sandwiches to their resting place. They don’t last long as Robert Petkoff’s Algernon, a user and a man of entitlement, picks the plate clean even as his friend Jack, played by James Waterston, watches and before his expected guests, Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen, arrive. Petkoff and Waterston reel off their repartee with ease. Waterston plays Jack as a serious sort, who comes to the city from his country manor to swoon over Gwendolen and win her hand. His demeanor is a nice contrast to Algernon’s arrogance, although the chemistry of two good friends rarely surfaces.

Once Lady Bracknell arrives, she fills the stage as she is supposed to, and Lynn Redgrave gives her the dramatic sweep and imposing demeanor of the dominating relative who means for her daughter to marry well. In tow, but never subservient, is her daughter, Gwendolen, played with tart confidence by Bianca Amato. Amato moves like a woman with a plan, and it’s all too plain that her plan involves marriage to Jack despite her mother’s disapproval. By the end of Act I, the imbroglio is satisfyingly set in motion and hints of further complications are amply laid.

One of those complications involves Miriam Margolyes, beautifully cast in the role of Miss Prism, the plump tutor for Jack’s ward, Cecily Cardew. Although Margolyes periodically settles on a sing-song delivery, her presence manages to intimate a life of secrets and longing. A small gesture or a look gets every laugh she deserves as she crosses the stage like a hot air balloon floating two inches above the ground. Charlotte Perry does a nice job as Cecily, Algernon’s love interest. The remainder of the cast is rounded out by Terence Rigby as Reverend Canon Chasuble, Geddeth Smith as Jack's servant Merriman, and Greg Felden as the footman.

Production designers Kevin and Trish Rigdon have an eye for detail without cluttering. They create marvelous ambience. Each of the three acts uses a grand arch outlining doors for the comings and goings necessary in farce. In Act II, the draped wisteria around the arch denotes a garden, and it is simple yet elegant. Same with the costumes. The men parade in crisp suits, colorful cravats, and spats. The women’s gowns are made for swishing and turning. Redgrave’s boa permits her the perfect bold exit, Gwendolen’s hat feather rises and falls with each slight movement, and dainty, cloth handbags contain mysterious, unpredictable accoutrements.

It all comes together under Sir Peter Hall’s able direction. His affection for Wilde’s masterpiece is evident. The characters speak as if their words are pushed from the depths, giving emphasis to words of little importance. Other times they speak in run-on sentences to very comic affect. For Wilde’s characters, it is style, not sincerity, that matters. But Wilde is very sincere and his dialog nails his characters’—and society’s—hypocrisy dead-on. The audience, heaving with hilarity throughout, shows how current, how vital The Importance of Being Earnest is.

Rolin Jones’s excellent new play, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, is about the mistakes that parents make and then hand off to their children, and how much parents and their kids are alike, whether they like it or not. The protagonist, Jennifer Marcus, is a young, twenty-something Chinese woman who was adopted by American parents and lives in California. Her adopted mother, Adele, is a high-powered corporate businesswoman. Even though they aren’t blood related, Jennifer has picked up Adele’s drive, her stubbornness, and her never-ending quest for perfection. The latter helped Jennifer when she was in school: she was a straight-A student—but that could also be because she’s a scientific genius (Jennifer’s “day job” is re-engineering missile guidance systems for the Department of Defense). She’s also agoraphobic, which makes working and socializing a little difficult. Luckily for her, she can do both from the comfort of her own bedroom—on her computer.

Jennifer’s agoraphobia really becomes an obstacle when she decides to find her birth mother in China. Unable to leave the house, she comes up with a unique solution: build a robotic version of herself—named Jenny Chow (Jennifer’s birth name)—to send in her place. Aided by a former teacher, Dr. Yakunin, who specializes in artificial intelligence, and Todd, her pizza delivery guy/stoner buddy, Jennifer sets out to find her roots.

Now, if the plot sounds a little crazy, that’s because it is. But, in the hands of Jones and his collaborators, it’s also blissfully refreshing and vibrantly alive. In other words: The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow is a triumph on every level.

Jones paints a portrait of a young woman who has the world at her fingertips via the Internet: she makes friends with people halfway around the world (one such friend, Terrence, a Mormon missionary stationed in China, helps Jennifer track down her birth certificate in exchange for naked pictures of herself); she can even work from home (once the DOD gives her access to their mainframe, Jennifer is in business with those missiles). But, once her work on Jenny is complete, Jennifer’s doppelganger gives voice to her creator’s real desires. “I am a bird. I like to fly,” Jenny says late in the play—an admission that is only fitting coming from a machine that has been programmed by a shut-in. Jennifer’s other self is the person she wishes she were (i.e. mobile).

Lest it sound like Jenny Chow is heavy on drama, let me say that most of it is hilarious, with Jones, director Jackson Gay, the design team, and the actors employing an intoxicating blend of wit and zaniness. Jennifer is bestowed with a casual attitude regarding her brilliance, which sometimes gets thrown back in her face. Consider this exchange between her and Todd, right after she’s taken a moment to solve the Rubik’s Cube he’s been laboring over for weeks:

JENNIFER: It’s really fucking easy, Todd.
TODD: Yeah, so’s walking through a fucking door.

Then there’s the comic relief brought by Jennifer’s online acquaintances: Preston, the harried engineer in charge of Jennifer’s missile work; Col. Hubbard, Jennifer’s imperious, no-nonsense contact at the DOD; Terrence, the missionary whose optimistic and faithful communication with Jennifer reveals a problem with premature ejaculation; and Jennifer’s mercurial mentor, Dr. Yakunin, who, according to her, possesses “a Shakespearean sense of betrayal and outrage.” (His first scene, in which he rails at Jennifer for not being in touch more often, proves this allegation.) As performed by Remy Auberjonois, these roles become a scene-stealing showcase. His superb comic timing and talent for physical comedy bring all four characters thrillingly to life.

Director Gay’s and set designer Takeshi Kata’s contributions are also remarkable. Their physical conception of Jenny Chow moves quickly, much like the whirlwind events in Jennifer’s life. Kata’s design, which uses sliding wall and door units, is the perfect complement to the cinematic aspects of Gay’s direction. In one sequence, set to the Bay City Rollers song, “Saturday Night,” Gay and Kata execute a magical, wordless passage-of-time montage—the centerpiece of which is the development of Jenny Chow—that would not be out of place in a movie. Later on, the two pull off a terrific car chase sequence, with Todd tailing the flying Jenny through the California hills in his car, and Jennifer safe at home orchestrating the whole affair.

It’s only in the play’s final quarter that Jenny Chow turns serious. Once Jenny is sent on her mission, Jennifer’s fanciful world of possibility crumbles as reality encroaches. I won’t spoil the conclusion here, but suffice it to say that the age-old adage about history repeating itself is applicable. And, while some may find the sudden shift from comedy to drama jarring, I found it justified and mostly satisfying. The actual ending is a little abrupt (I would’ve preferred a little more tying up of loose ends, but that’s just a personal preference), but, as a whole, Jenny Chow’s changes of tone are consistent with the plot and the themes that Jones evokes.

Jenny Chow is also blessed with a spectacularly good cast. In addition to the wonderful Auberjonois, Ryan King pulls his comic-relief weight as Todd, adding substance and dimension to a role that could easily become one-note. As Jennifer’s adopted parents, Michael Cullen and Linda Gehringer are both splendid: Cullen’s loving-but-dreamy Mr. Marcus stands in contrast to Gehringer’s fiery, tough-love Adele, but both are equally convincing and compelling. Eunice Wong tackles the challenging role of Jenny the android with ease, morphing the character’s inherent artificiality into something more akin to an eager and curious young child learning about the world. Anchoring the ensemble is Julienne Hanzelka Kim’s outstanding, spirited performance as Jennifer.

The walls of Jennifer’s bedroom are covered with posters, postcards, and pictures. The room is dominated by a large window that looks out onto the rest of the world—appropriate for someone who longs to fly beyond her borders but cannot. Even though Jennifer herself cannot fly, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow soars. Catch it before its up and gone.

There are two important things to say about Aquila Theatre Company's latest opus, a stage version of H.G. Wells's famous novel The Invisible Man, created by Aquilans Peter Meineck, Anthony Cochrane, and Robert Richmond in collaboration with choreographer Doug Varone. The first is that it feels nothing like any other Aquila production I've ever seen—and I've been to just about everything they've put up in New York. What I expect from Aquila is playfulness: a reinvention of something familiar with boundless energy and irreverence. The Invisible Man isn't fun; it's somber and entirely serious from end to end. That's not a bad thing; it's just true—and useful, I think, in terms of managing expectations.

The second thing is that they have, nevertheless, certainly reinvented a classic. The Invisible Man—whether you know it from the book or the classic James Whale film starring Claude Rains or some other rendition—is generally construed to be about otherness; in Meineck's words, from a well-written program note: "One of the great surprises of the novel is the fact that we imagine all the advantages of being unseen but are actually shown the negatives: rejection, abject desperation, terrible loneliness, and violence." But this show takes a wholly different tack: it's not about how we'd act or feel if we were invisible, it's about how we feel and react to something invisible suddenly entering our lives. This production is about dissociation, panic, fear of the unknown. It's therefore enormously timely: the invisible stranger who enters the unnamed hospital where this piece takes place is a clear metaphor for any elusive lurking menace, from terrorists in a subway to suicide bombers in a shopping mall.

But once Varone and his collaborators have explored the ways that the characters behave when confronted with the stranger, they seem to run out of things to say. The Invisible Man loses steam for much of its second half, mostly repeating ideas that were introduced earlier. Not until the climactic "unmasking" does anything else really exciting happen in the piece.

The style of the show is heavily movement-based, either formal choreography or stylized movement/mime, all to Cochrane's amazing minimalist techno-mod score. The parts I loved best are the sequences where the actors, to cacophonous ambient noise (of, say, muffled sounds of machines, people, TVs from hospital rooms in distant corridors), depict the rhythms of routine life without actually doing or saying anything concrete—it's all suggested by exaggerated or approximated gestures and patterns of human motion. Varone and his cast are able to show us a splendid variety of everyday life in this manner, from the daily rounds of nurses to coffee breaks to a mild after-hours flirtation.

Interactions with the stranger are generally more dramatic and larger-than-life—a kind of muted fight choreography that makes the confrontation/horror feel removed from us and very far away. The vocabulary of movements for the stranger himself are jerky and pained, suggestive of his own agony. But the emphasis is always squarely on the hospital staff--stand-ins for us, the "normal" people, coping with something they can't see or explain.

The design—the sparest of sets by Meineck and Richmond, very cool costumes by Megan Bowers (including a well-designed head bandage for the invisible stranger), and stark, moody lighting by Jane Cox—contribute to the atmosphere of heightened unease.

The ten performers—all but one (Cochrane) members of Varone's company—are uniformly fine, with Peggy Baker and Larry Hahn particularly memorable as head nurse and janitor respectively; Daniel Charon has the challenging title role.

It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to put up a comedy show called The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, but Negin Farsad and Alexander Zalben, who usually go by "Madame Funnypants" when they perform together, run with a gutsy idea and mostly make it work. It helps, of course, that they're both naturally funny people: Zalben's stage presence is easy, dry, and vaguely intellectual, while Farsad is fearless and hilarious, bursting into song or taking on outlandish new characters with brio, and almost always hitting a bull's-eye.

It helps, too, that as writers, Farsad and Zalben are pretty smart. The central conceit of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is that the decades-old cycle of war and retribution in the Middle East is the result of a romance gone awry: Farsad and Zalben anthropomorphize (if that's the right word) the nations of Israel and Palestine (I'm using "nation" here in the conceptual sense of a group of people sharing common heritage and political objectives), having them meet cute during the Geneva Convention of 1948 (they seem to be assigned the same seat), go out on a date, fall in love, and then break up; basically, Israel doesn't call Palestine, and Palestine, feeling spurned, starts to hang out with the Arab states. Tension mounts and things get ugly, as they do among former lovers. Farsad and Zalben postulate a reunion, set in the future, with teary apologies and promises never to do anything bad again to each other; well, one can hope.

The idea of making Israel into a cute but nerdy guy and Palestine into a loving but needy girl works far better than I expected it to, and indeed Conflict is at its best when it finds unexpected comic parallels for the dry constructs of international affairs in teen flicks and/or pop culture. The Geneva Convention, for example, is depicted here as a Very Big high school prom, with Charles DeGaulle hosting an awards evening where countries win trophies in categories like "Most Cowardly Country" and "Best Second-Rate Axis Power" (I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea). A slide montage slowing the young and newly-in-love Israel and Palestine hitting Geneva's romantic spots (such as the "Geneva State Building" and "Geneva Square Garden") is particularly effective.

Later on, Farsad and Zalben treat us to faux Entertainment Tonight-style newscasts, a rap battle of the stars between ex-lovers Israel and Palestine, and a very funny vignette during which Iran is brought to the principal's office, like a high schooler caught smoking in the bathroom, for starting up its nuclear weapons program. (Iran protests that she saw India and Pakistan making nuclear bombs under the bleachers, but they didn't get into trouble.)

The sublime surrealism of it all gets interrupted a few times by some more direct political commentary, generally criticisms of Israel's handling of its Palestinian population in real life; this is jarring in the context of this show, which rises about specifics to make the very valid point that all of Middle Eastern politics is utterly absurd.

Much of the time, though, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict maintains its loose, free-wheeling bearings, and is a clever, entertaining ride through the insane world of international relations.

The dream of flying has no doubt been with us since we first glanced towards the sky. It is a dream that we have felt so compelled to express in literature, art, and science, that now we actually can fly. However, we cannot soar. Only the soul can soar. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates describes the soul as once having wings. Love, he says, revives the wings of the soul. Philippe Quesne’s The Itching of the Wings attempts to revive the wings of the soul by dissecting the concepts of the human desire to fly.

Indeed, the structure of the performance is its most interesting aspect. In these days of fragmentation in everything from music videos to political speeches to flavors of ice cream, it is interesting to see a performance that pieces together several notions of a single idea, i.e., the desire to fly. Quesne calls it “theatre in pieces”. It’s sort of like a review, but not of tired tunes from old musicals. (Though there is an inexplicable musical interlude courtesy of special guest band Mad Cow who play what they call “hard blues” aka punk rock.)

Here’s some of what’s “cut and pasted”: A brief reading of the above mentioned Phaedrus; a dental surgeon who builds model birds that can fly (well glide); another man who has learned to fly through the practice of White Crane Kung Fu; a contemplation of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; and a story of a man who thinks there are giant cosmic petals passing through space/time and if you jump off the world at the precise moment you can land on one of them. (Now that I’d like to try!)

One of the more technical and certainly the most interesting thing we are given to look at is a “flight simulator” that supposedly translates the movements of the person on whom it is strapped into an electronic signal that is then projected as a human figure onto a wall. One of the performers (we are never actually told who is who) Velcros these straps with wires connected to them to his arms and legs and one big strap around his torso. Then he puts on some dark ski goggles and connects what look like jumper cables to his ankles and off he goes. (Well sort of) His projected image takes to the air though he never actually leaves the ground. Not from lack of trying, however. His struggle to fly is an interesting irony as we watch his image soar. I don’t think the projected image was truly following his movements, it was more the other way around—but his frustration is palpable and funny in a way.

I think what I liked most about The Itching of the Wings is that I was allowed to create my own composition from the various fragments presented. I’m sure that every audience member has a somewhat different experience as they create their own whole from the pieces. At the same time the theme is clear and we all have the shared experience of thinking about the desire to soar. There are, however, some dull moments. There’s a lot of video-watching and all of the video speakers are speaking French. There’s a large screen on which a translation is being projected but naturally there is a lot lost in translation and of course much is lost in the act of reading instead of listening. The performers oftentimes just mill around on a set that is like an unkempt college pad with a glass-encased recording studio at its center. They casually wander on, talk to other performers while we watch a video, and then maybe do their bit or sometimes not. Quesne’s direction is laid back. There’s no sense of urgency and our eyes are free to wander about the stage much like the performers.

The performers—Gaetan Vourch, Sebastien Jacobs, Tristan Varlot, Rodolphe Aute, and Zinn Atmane—all do an excellent and unaffected job at presenting their pieces. I especially liked the guy who comes out and dances a silly dance in a suit of feathers as the end credits are rolling.

The Itching of the Wings is an intriguing offering from our neighbors across the pond. It’s very French, which is to say I didn’t get all of it, but still it’s very fresh and oh so post modern. I can’t say that my soul soared by the end of the performance, but it did take a few futile leaps into the air.

The short plays of David Ives are really a godsend for fledgling theater companies. They’re short, cleverly written, simple to produce, and give actors a lot to work with. Because they also come in such a variety of styles, Ives’s plays also are a great way to quickly learn where a company’s strengths lie.

In the case of the Bang Theatre Collective, physical comedy and sheer exuberance seem to be their angle. Their inaugural production, The Ives Six Pack, presents six of Ives’s short plays, “an evening of one-acts in one act,” as they call it. Even though I was very familiar with three of the pieces—I ran lights for another company’s Ives evening four years ago, and even stood offstage making monkey noises for the cause at one point—Bang Theatre’s approach is fresh enough that I often found myself laughing anew at familiar material.

The company’s staging of Words, Words, Words is one such example. Ensemble members Vinnie Penna, Ted Lewis, and company founder Gregory Abbey play three monkeys in a research facility who are daily locked into a room with three typewriters to test the premise that they might by chance eventually type out the script to Hamlet. It’s such a clever premise that the play is an Ives standby, but I’ve never seen actors throw themselves into the physical possibilities of the parts with such zeal. Penna in particular is especially good at, er, aping simian body language, scratching himself absentmindedly and using a bowlegged chimplike gait or outright somersaulting across the stage at some points.

Ensemble members Marc Thompson and Kathleen McInerny are other standouts, even though they are obscured by wings, goggles, and antennae in Time Flies. The pair are funny—and strangely sweet—as two courting mayflies who are suddenly confronted with their mortality. Both spend the whole piece with masks made of pipe cleaners and glasses over half their faces, but both are also so wonderfully expressive that within minutes the pipe cleaner proboscises become extensions of their own features.

The company as a whole is so physically expressive, in fact, that trying to curb that talent might be a mistake. I was a surprised to find a weak spot in The Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage, a spoof on English drawing-room mystery dramas. The ensemble seem to be throwing themselves into it gamely enough, but it falls a little flat alongside the other pieces; ultimately, the material itself is the culprit, as it simply doesn’t show off the cast to their best advantage. The pieces Sure Thing and The Philadelphia give each of their casts more to work with, but the ensemble still seem to be happier in motion; the whole of Philadelphia is a metaphysical conversation between two men at a restaurant, but both actors cast keep jumping up as their characters speak and pace the stage as they make their points. Conversely, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread offers its cast the chance to do an all-out spoof of interpretive dance and modern opera—and the zanier they can be, the better they are.

Directors James Snyder and Anthony Salerno wisely use a minimalist approach to the production, placing the actors and the material itself center stage. Time Flies is arguably the most technically complex of the pieces with its mayfly “costumes,” but even here there is a charming scaled-back approach—the company even adds a sweet epilogue onto the story simply through the use of a pair of shadow puppets.

The Ives Six Pack makes a fine introduction to a new company; one I’m hoping tackles more physical work in the future.

Yuki Kawahisa has accomplished something remarkable in her solo show, The Kimono Loosened. It won’t surprise anyone who hears her heavily Japanese-accented English to know that it is not her mother tongue. (She claims, in the program notes, to have hated studying English grammar at her ESL school in Vancouver.) Still, her skillful performance in a foreign language is eclipsed only by the play itself, which is a subtle and unnerving puzzle that amounts to genuine poetry.

Kimono tells the story of Tsukiko, a young Japanese girl who is sold to a Geisha house by her father—to say more would spoil the surprises. Kawahisa, with the cooperation of director/dramaturge Maureen Robinson, doesn’t linger on the exoticism of the Geisha figure; there is remarkably little that’s sentimental or romantic in this piece. Through the scenes of Tsukiko’s unhappy childhood, which are interspersed with dreams, layers of narrative gently peel away to reveal a lurid gothic thriller that recalls Edgar Allen Poe. Tsukiko’s doll, Sakura, who according to the Japanese tradition has a living spirit, becomes Tsukiko’s sole confidant and avenging angel. The proposition that Tsukiko’s doll lives seems terrifyingly plausible by the end of the play.

I was impressed with Kawahisa’s determination to create stillness and silence within her performance. Less confident performers lack the patience that she has to generate the atmosphere of mystery and menace that pervades the play, but she is saving the best for last. The intensity and detail of the characterizations deepen significantly as the play progresses. Kawahisa performs all the roles herself, dressed in sumptuous traditional Japanese garments and attended only by masked silhouettes that represent her mother and father. Grandmother, the Geisha house owner, memorably appears halfway through the piece to score some unexpected laughs. Late in the play, Kawahisa becomes mesmerizing as the vividly sensual older Tsukiko. The sexuality in the play is unabashedly unhealthy and never divorced from the sense of subjugation that tattoos Tsukiko’s life, but it still smuggles a lip-curling thrill.

The real success is the play itself. The language is disarmingly simple and unmannered, but Kawahisa gingerly layers fiction, fable, and the mystique of a faraway place in another era into an entrancing creation sweetly poisoned with the taboo. If the final sequence of dreams and fantasies confuse the storytelling somewhat, it doesn’t diminish the final moment, when we sense that the enchained crimes of the mother, the daughter, the enchanted doll, the possessors and the possessed, the punished and the punishers have all blended together until their separate identities are lost and forgotten. The performance ends with a crisp final tableau in which the doll, the mother’s mask, and Tsukiko’s living face are briefly, but startlingly, indistinguishable.

The Laramie Project is arguably one of the most influential plays of the last decade. Not only because of its hot button issue of hate crimes, but also because of its unique and highly theatrical structure. It has replaced plays like Our Town as one of the most produced plays in high schools. This statistic tells us a lot about what's going in our schools (not to mention the national atmosphere) and of the number of drama teachers who want to address the issue of why we hate and the effects of hate. I highly recommend the Gallery Players' production of this important and moving play (with a certain sense of urgency).

The Laramie Project is an interview-based play about the brutal beating and subsequent death of Matthew Shepard. In 1998 Shepard, a young gay college student, was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die in rural Wyoming. The event shocked the nation and stirred up a media frenzy that in turn produced much public debate on the issues of homosexuality and hate crimes. In response, the Tectonic Theatre Project, led by director/playwright Moises Kaufman, traveled to Laramie and over a year’s time collected more than 200 interviews from residents and whittled them down into a tight two-hour play. The script also contains excerpts from the journals of the interviewers.

The interviewers were all members of the Tectonic company who (in the original production) played the very people they interviewed. In subsequent productions, this ensemble-driven piece has each actor playing several different Laramie residents as well as a member of the company. Actors announce who they’re portraying just before launching into a character voice and posture. The play has no entrances or exits, no scenes as we know them, and no main character (unless you consider Shepard the main character—but we never meet him, we only hear accounts of him). The juxtaposition of opinions in this extraordinary play is ceaselessly engaging and powerful; it’s at times enraging while at other times overwhelmingly beautiful and emotional as it seeks to find the motivations behind hate and prejudice. And still it never forgets to be entertaining, offering bits of humor and plenty of theatrical aesthetics.

The Gallery Players production is replete in such aesthetics. The set is simple but not bare. The costumes (by David B. Thompson) are of one or two pieces that give just enough of a hint at who is speaking. Jennette Kollmann’s lights are subtle and draw the eye very effectively. Director Neal Freeman does an outstanding job staging a play that can be quite challenging; his direction of the controlled chaos of the media frenzy is particularly striking.

The ensemble is tight and precise. It is quite evident that each actor has put a lot of work into creating character distinctions using their voices and their bodies. Stephen Tyrone Williams and Flannery Foster, in particular, stick in my mind. But it is Daniel Damiano who steals the night with his amazingly colorful characters and larger-than-life presence on stage.

Dialogue about the Matthew Shepard incident and others like it should never die away. Hate crimes will not just vanish. It will take cooperation, understanding, and possibly some legislation. (Ironically, Wyoming is one of only seven states that have passed no hate crime legislation.) One of the characters says, “That kinda thing doesn’t happen here in Laramie.” Later another character points out that it did—so how can it be said that it doesn’t happen. Indeed, it can happen anywhere. Essentially, that’s what The Laramie Project brings to light. And that’s kinda scary.

When you think of eastern Long Island, bohemian artists and poets who led a movement in American cultural history are not foremost in mind. That is, unless you know the lives of the New York-based artists of the 1950s and '60s such as writer-curator-poet Frank O' Hara, saxophone player-turned-painter Larry Rivers and painter-muse Jane Freilicher. These three and others are portrayed in The Last Bohemians, which is written and directed by Stellios Manalakakis, to mixed results.

The play starts with Rivers and Patsy Southgate, a daughter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief of protocol and a co-founder of the Paris Review, as they attempt to write their eulogies of O'Hara after his sudden death. When words fail them, we see, through flashbacks, that final summer weekend when they were all together. Southgate, owner of a Hamptons summer home turned studio, invites O'Hara and Rivers along with others for a weekend of art, sex, alcohol, and drugs. O'Hara brings his long-suffering roommate and ex-boyfriend Joe LeSuer, a poet and writer who is also a Mormon and Joan Crawford's nephew; and the beautiful young surfer Golden, a composite character of two of O'Hara's real life protégés, the painter Michael Goldberg and poet Bill Berkson. Other houseguests are Rivers's ex-mother-in law and group nurturer Berdie Berger, with whom Rivers lived even after his divorce from her daughter and who was the subject of many of his nude paintings; and Jane Freilicher, Rivers's lover, a painter of the naturalist school.

O'Hara was the creator of a movement he called "Personism." Not only did artists borrow from each other's genres so that painters added poetry to their paintings and writers wrote in a freeform jazz style creating the forerunner of multimedia art, but they would mine personal experiences from their lives and those around them for their work. This creates a whole series of ethical questions about, among other things, the moral responsibility of an artist, that are examined beautifully in the script but unevenly by the actors.

For example, Berger, the mother-in-law, is not terribly bright, may not be able to discuss art on the same level of cultural sophistication as the rest, but every year she has a dinner, a "soul feast" to remember the dead and let them know how much they are loved. In turn, Rivers and O'Hara pet her, condescend to her, and tickle her deliberately until she wets herself. In one scene, Rivers commits a sex act upon her while she is asleep. He is a monster of selfishness for all of his brilliance and she is a simple woman who is the moral center of that universe. Although, in no way is this the sole message of the play, I felt that it was not grasped emotionally by the cast. That is not to say that the actors do not give it their all, especially Ian Tomaschik as Rivers. He has created a remarkable physical life for his character and Lucas Steele as Golden, the aptly named young man everyone is trying to seduce plays his part with just enough charm and simplicity to be deceptive.

But there were also intellectual ideas expressed by the characters in the script, and I felt they were not really given sufficient weight. Passionate conversations about art and the role of the artist in society are given short shrift in favor of the more hedonistic actions of casual sex and drug use. That's easy and fun to do on stage but if it can be matched with an intellectual and emotional understanding of the script, then there could be characters who are brilliant, beautiful, and reckless—as complex as the people on whom they are based.

March is possibly the most difficult month of the year. It is, at least in New York, the last month of winter and therefore the longest. In March the last bit of snow seems incapable of melting, the temperature, though warmer, is still too low to wear only t-shirts, and the trees still seem painfully bare. And for those of us who do not have a spring break, March marks the halfway point between winter holidays and summer vacations. What we need, and what The Last Night of Salome (L'ultima notte di Salome), a new play by Emanuele Vacchetto, gives us, is a brief respite from the cold, a vacation to another place and time—a small bar in Italy in the 1950s.

The story of The Last Night of Salome is fairly straightforward. It’s another late night at the bar and the owner, Desi, is once again left to clean up the mess while her husband sleeps off his latest binge, when a famous actress, Veronica Lopez, comes in from out of the rain. The women quickly become acquainted and start trading stories over drinks about their good-for-nothing husbands and their lost lives. So far we could be anywhere, right?

But, what makes Salome so magically transportative isn’t the story, but rather the wonderful way in which the story is told. For starters it’s in Italian (with supertitles). Secondly, unlike the movements and gestures of many American actors, which tend to be more naturalistic, the actors in Salome perform with so much gusto and physicality that they nearly become cartoons. Carla Cassola, who does a superb job playing the grand diva, moves with a slinky air of entitlement and creates entire paintings in the sky with her voluminous gesticulations. Lydia Biondi, who does an equally fine job with the Desi, finds brilliant and unexpected moments of physical humor to contrast with her character's understated emotions. To add to the heightened emotion of the piece, the director, Maria Luisa Bigai—with the help of Alessandro Molinari, who wrote original music for the show—has scored nearly the entire piece with melodramatic classical music filled almost exclusively with strings. The net effect, to Bigai and Molinari’s credit, is the feeling that you have been transported out of New York and into a Fellini movie.

Even the sets and the costumes, designed by Natacha Tanzilli, give the feeling that you have just stepped into one of the hidden bars along Rome’s narrow cobblestone streets.

If there is anything negative to say about the play, it is the development of the story. Emanuele Vacchetto has written a very funny script but the themes are only partially developed and the conclusion feels a bit forced. I would have been happy watching this Italian Odd Couple just play out their impulses without getting bogged down with the ultimate significance of their meeting. Perhaps I just need a vacation more then most.

At the performance reviewed there were some technical difficulties. The sound, which I acknowledge was quite an undertaking what with the number of sound cues, often cut off abruptly or came in late, which ended up also being a problem with the supertitles. Occasionally a line would come too early or too late, leaving half the audience laughing while the other half was trying to listen.

My guess is that the technical issues will have worked themselves out by now. Either way, it is a small price to pay for such a delightful bit of theatre. For those of you who do not believe in going to the theatre to read, I beg you to take a chance on The Last Night of Salome. Some of the best work I’ve seen this year has been in other languages with super- or sub-titles. Foreign theatre has the potential to offer us insightful reflections of our lives and, as is the case with Salome, a vacation from ourselves when we need it most.

Sometimes simplicity is all. The Ledge, a new play by Jack Hanley, has just one actor (Mike Houston) and the sparest of production elements—a hint of music before the play proper begins (written and sung by Alicia Mathewson); a subtle but evocative soundscape; and a stunning, sometimes abstract, sometimes representational backdrop, created from prerecorded video projected onto the rear wall of the intimate Dixon Place stage (this provides the only lighting on stage throughout the piece; with the sound, it's created by Christopher Eaves, who is also the director). The result is a theatrical experience of rare power and beauty: an exploration of our humanity that has the profound capacity to move and uplift its audience.

The Ledge is based on a short story by Lawrence Sargent Hall. I wasn't familiar with it (it won the O. Henry Award in 1959): it's about a Maine fisherman who, as the story begins, is lying dead on a wharf, drowned. It's the day after Christmas, and his wife has come to find him. The last time she saw him before this was Christmas morning, when he went out duck hunting with their son and nephew. For both boys, it was their first day of shooting. The play is told in flashback by the drowned man, who recounts to his wife the catastrophe that transpired.

They leave before dawn, and journey out on a boat into Penobscot Bay. They soon arrive at their destination, a promontory called the Ledge that, for a few hours each day, protrudes far enough above the water to allow men to occupy it—this is the best place to shoot ducks, he tells us, because it's isolated and closer to the ocean, providing first crack at the flocks as they head inland. With his two young charges, the man maneuvers a skiff from the boat to the Ledge, and here they set up temporary camp, waiting for their prey to appear overhead.

It is a stormy day.

Hanley and Houston get us right inside the head of our narrator—proud, resourceful, stubborn, tough. Rugged self-reliance is what he's about, and he's determined to instill the same qualities that have made him the man he is into his son and, if possible, his nephew (the latter boy is soft, he assesses, the result of growing up on a farm instead of by the sea). The first half of the tale is the stuff of an adventure story: teaching the boys how to shoot, setting up decoys, scrambling onto the slippery slope of the ledge. The man's short temper makes it hard-going for the boys; call it tough love.

But when things start to fall apart—and they do, though I won't say more here—the man's tenacity shifts into overdrive as he tries to figure out how to protect the boys and survive himself. The Ledge, slowly and unexpectedly, turns into an epic tale of man against nature, of hubris, and of the redemptive power of love.

The writing is by turns vivid, exciting, intoxicating, and poetic. Hanley's clear, clean words conjure the water, the Ledge, the flocks of ducks in the sky, the gale, the rising water at high tide. Eaves's design—sound and video—provides potent and beautiful imagery from which our mind's eye and ear create the rest, planting us squarely in the middle of the storm with our narrator. As in their previous collaboration Self at Hand, Hanley and Eaves use the simplicity of language and this streamlined video/lighting technique to create a remarkably evocative theatrical experience.

Houston, our narrator/protagonist, delivers an extraordinary performance. His characterization is spot-on and ultimately very moving. Under Eaves's direction, he has perfected a precise vocabulary of movements that define the various constricted spaces in which the story is played out—the boat, the skiff, the Ledge, and the wharf, where he lies dead at the play's beginning and end. We never forget who this man is; or rather, who he was—for we also never forget that it's a drowned man talking to us.

The Ledge is being presented as part of Dixon Place's Under Construction Series for a few more weeks; in its union of experimental video and robust storytelling, it's as affecting a work of theatre as I've seen in quite some time. It deserves a long life after this developmental run.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is about a terrorist who, as he is just about to slice off one of the nipples of the drug dealer he's torturing, gets a cell phone call from his Dad, indicating that his beloved cat Wee Thomas is feeling poorly. So our terrorist—his named is Padraic—leaves his victim's nipple intact so that he can hurry home. What he doesn't know (but we do know, because we got to see it in the play's opening scene) is that Wee Thomas is not ill, but in fact dead, having been shot in the head and then run over by a bicycle. Padraic's father, Donny, and his dim-witted neighbor, Davey, are trying to keep the news from Padraic, who has a bad temper; and so they steal another cat and paint it black using shoe polish, in the hopes that it can pass for Wee Thomas when Padraic returns.

Later, three terrorists who work for the same organization as Padraic (a fictitious band called "INRA," supposedly a splinter group of disaffected ex-IRA men) turn up at Padraic's place with a plan to assassinate him. Further complicating matters is Davey's sister, 16-year-old Mairead, who wants to become a terrorist herself, and has blinded several cows with her pop gun as a sort of practice run (she says she's protesting against the meat industry).

Eventually all of these heavily armed people arrive in the same room and the carnage begins in earnest. The body count rivals Hamlet and the gore rivals Titus Andronicus (in one scene, Davey and Donny are seen wielding knives and saws, dismembering some of the dead bodies).

Does this stuff sound like the makings of the feel-good comedy of the season? Apparently a lot of folks seem to think so, including many of my colleagues in the critical corps and many members of the audience at the performance I attended. But I steadfastly refuse to find The Lieutenant of Inishmore hilarious.

This takes a little doing, mind you, because as playwright Martin McDonagh has demonstrated time and again, he's a talented writer with a warped but pungent wit. The scene in which Padraic interrupts his nipple-cutting to take a phone call is actually very funny in its dark way—it reminded me of the "Piranha Brothers" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus in its cruel and outlandish absurdism and its wicked satire.

But two unrelieved hours of heartless bloodshed proves excessive. Inishmore isn't a schoolboy's prank, but as the gratuitous grotesquerie mounts, it becomes hard to understand it as anything else. If it's satire, then I don't know what it's a satire of; if it's a tragedy, then McDonagh needs to insert some gravity and some consequences for a cast of characters who resolutely acknowledge neither as they blithely kill or maim (or watch other people kill or maim). If it's a horror tale à la Tarantino then I suggest that film would be a much more effective medium: it's impossible to scare people by sawing off the head of what's obviously a mannequin.

If it's just meant to be good fun, well...allow me to humbly and respectfully state that those who find this sort of thing fun may want to look into their hearts a little and see exactly how such a circumstance has come to pass. The Lieutenant of Inishmore isn't funny, not ultimately; but the fact that nobody seems to be particularly appalled by it stands as testament, it seems to me, to how degraded and desensitized our mainstream culture has become.

McDonagh's writing is up to his usual high standard, I just wish I knew why he wanted to squander his talent on stuff like this. Ditto the production, which is exemplary as far as it goes. David Wilmot (Padraic), Peter Gerety (Donny), Domhnall Gleeson (Davey), and Alison Pill (Mairead) have the most to do here, acting-wise, and all acquit themselves well. And some fine actors, such as Brian d'Arcy James, Dashiell Eaves, and Jeff Binder, are earning paychecks for supporting roles in this Mission: Impossible of Broadway shows; I guess that's a good thing. Scott Pask's set, Obadiah Eaves's sound, and Matt McKenzie's music (with lots of exciting percussion to heighten the suspense) are impressive as well.

Well-executed though it may be, it's hard for me to imagine that theatregoers really want to pay as much as $91.25 to see a thing as bleak and devoid of social purpose as this. I know I'd rather wait for a rerun of the "Piranha Brothers" Monty Python episode on BBC America.

Let’s get the warnings out of the way first: Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant Of Inishmore is very violent. There is torture, dismemberment, blinding, desecration of corpses, and point-blank execution of people and animals. It was necessary for the Atlantic Theater to post a sign in the lobby with the standard ASPCA advisory that “no animals were harmed in the production of this play.” Those who are especially sensitive to violence against people or animals, especially cats, should consider this fair warning.

But if you do go, it’s also really funny.

The Lieutenant of the title is Padraic, played by David Wilmot, who is such an impassioned and violent man that the IRA rejected him for being too crazy. Padraic has one great love—his pet cat, Wee Thomas, whom he’s had since he was a boy and considers his best friend. He left Wee Thomas with his father Dan (Peter Gerety) back in the Aran Island town of Inishmore while he was on the Irish mainland fighting with an IRA splinter group. But at the very top of the play, Dan and a local boy, Davey (Domhnall Gleeson), have just discovered the body of Wee Thomas lying on the road, brains knocked out. Padraic, they know, is not going to be pleased.

Their first plan, to make a series of calls to Padraic over the course of a week to tell him of Wee Thomas’s decline and death from an illness, spins out of control when a distraught Padraic says he’s coming home the minute he learns Thomas is sick. Davey is dispatched to find another black cat to stand in for “Thomas,” finally resorting to covering an orange tabby with shoe polish. Complicating things for the pair are Padraic’s fellow Irish National Liberation Army members (Andrew Connolly, Dashiell Eaves, and Brian D’Arcy James) who all seem to know more about the death of Wee Thomas than they’re letting on. There is even a budding romance between Padraic and Davey’s sister Mairead (Kerry Condon), a militant hopeful and expert shot with a pellet gun who shares Padraic’s loves of Ireland and of cats. Speaking of cats, her orange tabby Sir Roger is now missing….

McDonagh gives the cast a lot to work with, but under the direction of Wilson Milam, the company pulls off the juggling act with aplomb, carrying not only the tight, crackling plot but also the comedy in it. Everyone in the play has a character quirk that leads to a laugh—even James (Jeff Binder), the drug dealer Padraic is torturing when he gets the call about Thomas’s “illness,” stops his pleading for mercy to offer Padraic advice about how to pill a cat. The chaotic final scenes—after which the stage is littered with dead bodies, blood, wooden stakes, two handsaws, guns, a box of cereal, and half a can of shoe polish—make perfect, if crazy, sense as every last loose end manages to get tied up. (If I may also add one personal note—speaking as a stage manager myself, I’d like to tip my hat to stage manager James Harker and his crew for having to clean all that up every night.)

Some have said the play is about the folly of the escalation of sectarian violence that has plagued so much of Irish history. And yes, “the patriot game” is what motivates many of the characters. But the play reminded me more of Pulp Fiction than it did Borstal Boy—it’s an outrageous comedy that just happens to have a lot of blood, gore, and quirky characters of questionable virtue. Gerety and Gleeson’s conversations in particular sound very like John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson discussing the “royale with cheese.”

The Lieutenant of Inishmore received raves at its world premiere in London in 2003, and stands ready to enjoy the same success here. Just be warned that if you’re a cat owner, you’re probably going to feel a little guilty about laughing at some parts—just pick up some Fancy Feast on the way home, maybe.

A quick search on Google for information about Pier Paolo Pasolini surfaced this tidbit (here):

Pasolini was murdered brutally by being run over several times with his own car at the beach of Ostia near Rome. Pino Pelosi, a hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. On May 7th, 2005, he retracted his confession, claiming that unidentified men had killed Pasolini. He gave threats of violence against his family as the reason for his erstwhile confession. The investigation into Pasolini's death has been re-opened following Pelosi's recantation.

This interesting real-life development pretty much cancels out whatever intriguing speculation about Pasolini's murder might be contained in Michel Azama's play, The Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, which was written in 1984. So, perversely, it's kind of a lucky break that the play in fact contains very little that's revelatory about the man, his controversial career, or his sensational death.

The play, about an hour long, jumps back and forth through Pasolini's life, from his first brush with public controversy when he was ordered out of the Communist Party because of a sex scandal involving three underage boys, up through his fateful late-night cruise in a Rome piazza where he met 17-year-old Pelosi. Scenes of Pasolini's life and death are crosscut with courtroom sequences where a judge (unseen, always voiced by Sandra Shipley) interrogates, chides, and punishes Pasolini for his various obscene creations; one actor (Arthur Aulisi) plays all of Pasolini's prosecutors/accusers. In court and, often, outside of it, Pasolini defends poetically the impulses behind his work. Azama, by way of translators Nicholas Elliott and Elizabeth Williamson, is a little fuzzy on this point, but what I basically gleaned from the script is that Pasolini intended his art to (a) remind us of the holiness and beauty of what we too often take for granted, and (b) rail at us for refusing to see the obscenity in a decadent, consumerist culture.

The play references his novels and three of his films, including his last one, Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, which he is shown here as planning to be as outrageously unwatchable as it is generally considered to be. But his description of Salo follows a (very unconvincing) scene in which his longtime lover Ninetto announces that he's leaving him to get married, leaving us with the implication that Pasolini's most political work was in fact the churlish reaction of an aging cuckold.

There's the vaguest of insinuations that Pelosi acted in concert with others (or took the fall for others), but no alternative theory of the murder is put forth.

Beyond the clichéd treatments—Pasolini as tormented (and occasionally fined, or even jailed) artist; Pasolini as gay predator; Pasolini as the victim of a brutal unsolved murder—there's finally not much here to absorb about a man whose life and work would seem vivid enough to fuel any number of plays twice as long as this one. It occurred to me as I was watching the play that in its determined orderliness—slides announce the time and place of each scene; the scene plays out; a blackout follows; and then the sequence is repeated—The Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini is veering about as far as possible from the methods and objectives of its subject. Where's the subversion? Where's the shock effect? Where's the breaking of taboos, the rubbing of noses in said breaking, the jolt of surprising and unforgettable images and ideas?

Now, I can't tell how much (if any) of the bite of Azama's play was denatured in translation and staging (Williamson is the director; her work strikes me as competent but not very inspired). But the fire in Pasolini's belly—the presence of which seems pretty much indisputable from the record of his accomplishments—is almost entirely absent here.

Drew Cortese, in the title role, comes close to finding it, though, with really passionate readings of the lengthy monologues in which Pasolini justifies himself, to us, and to himself. I wouldn't mind seeing this actor tackle this complex man in a play more worthy of both of them. The rest of the cast members are less successful: Ian Oldaker is generally effective as Pelosi, except he looks to be just about the same age as Cortese (Pasolini was 53 when he was killed); Dan Domingues has almost nothing to do in the underwritten role of Ninetto; and Aulisi, as half-a-dozen different versions of "Those Against" (as he's billed in the program), works hard to distinguish one from the other with only pale results.

I was excited to see a play about Pasolini: I don't know much about him, and I'm eager now to learn more. But I found that my curiosity was much better satisfied by my Googling after the show than by anything gleaned from the show itself.

The Lightning Field (1977) is an art installation by the American sculptor Walter De Maria. It is a work of Land Art situated in the high desert of southwestern New Mexico comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. The Field is more than an invitation for lightning strikes, more than a piece of art, it is destination for lost souls in search of an improbable stroke of fortune.

The Lightning Field is also the inspiration for David Ozanich’s new play, which is a must see! at the New York International Fringe Festival and certainly deserves an extended theatrical life. Ozanich is a daring writer, eager to give voice to the brewing storm churning inside his characters. His writing is complex without relying on sentimentality. He articulates, with skill and maturity, an ugliness in human nature that is beautifully dangerous and painfully honest.

Ozanich’s story is told through the lives of four characters, two lovers and two parents. His play delves into issues of divorce, infidelity, physical abuse, and the merits of marriage and commitment. It happens to be told through the eyes of a gay couple and two of their divorced parents. On a pilgrimage in a car, going west to understand yesterday and find tomorrow, Sam and his father Gerrit, and Andy and his mother Lori, ultimately arrive at The Lightning Field where Sam’s desire to propose marriage to Andy bolts the play into action. It is here that we discover the complexity of Lori and Gerrit’s failings in marriage and as parents, and their effects on their children. It is here that we witness their efforts to save and protect Sam and Andy from repeating the regretful mistakes of their own pasts. And it is here that all four characters choose to embrace the light of a newly redefined love, in spite of the pain of secrets revealed and the uncertainty of the next moment.

Jared Coseglia’s direction has finessed Ozanich’s play with a raw sense of compassion and risk taking. Without apology he delves into the play's emotional life and graphic physical and sexual expression. He trusts the simplicity of stillness on stage and the economic effect of each gesture. I credit Coseglia’s direction for the depth, integrity and honesty of each of the four performances and for the seamless integration of the production’s design elements.

H Clark and Cory Grant give generous and revealing performances as Sam and Andy. They both avoid the clichés of “playing gay” that could have diminished the depth of their characters' wants and needs. But both play men that I know and recognize—maybe even are parts of myself, and my friends—and with respect to that, they are more universal than the labels of their sexual identities, making this play identifiable to a broad contemporary audience.

As Lori and Gerrit, Bekka Lindström and Ron McClary are moving as the mid-to-late-40something parents. Their performances are responsible for bringing hope into a production about second chances.

Paul Hudson’s scenic and lighting designs effectively rely on the boldness of a lone silver pole center stage with moving shadows of light diminishing as the hours approach the ghosts of night. Amanda Ford’s costumes capture with accuracy each character’s personality without looking theatrical. And Drew Brody’s original music moves like the wind through the psychological and spiritual bones of this tale.

This is smart and responsible theatre. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be recognized.

I am very glad that Douglas Carter Beane's new play The Little Dog Laughed is a hit. It's one of the most important plays of the season, I think, as well as one of the most entertaining. It is ostensibly about what Beane calls the last taboo—being gay in Hollywood (and in this sense it's kind of like the anti-Take Me Out, the shameful truth rebutting Richard Greenberg's grotesque fantasia). But it's really about us, and our post-1984 polity and world. Funny, sure; and a little bit scary.

At the center of the play is a movie star named Mitchell. He's an up-and-comer, but he's not quite there yet: a big, important film is what he needs to propel him into the rarefied universe of Tom Cruises and Johnny Depps. And his agent—supportive-to-the-point-of-suffocating Diane—has found the property, a serious and critically-acclaimed New York play. Problem one, that the play is heavily gay-themed, is easily fixed, in rounds of arduous negotiations whose result will be the wresting of artistic control from the (bought-off) playwright. Problem two is more, well, problematic: not only is Mitchell gay, but he's actually thinking of inching out of the closet. And an openly gay actor can't star in a gay-themed film (just look at this year's crop of "progressive" movies if you don't believe me).

Mitchell is, apparently, aware of his orientation, but he's also aware that his orientation has to remain not just a secret but a thing to be constantly denied. He generally satisfies his physical needs with what Diane coyly calls "rent boys" (we Americans call them hustlers). But one particular boy—an earnest young prostitute named Alex—brings to Mitchell heretofore unfelt feelings of something akin to love. The movie star, keenly in touch with the crazy paradoxical loneliness of his situation, suddenly things he's found a helpmeet, a partner.

What the heck is Diane going to do?

The brilliance of Beane's play lies largely in the answer to that question, which I will not even hint at here. Figuring in Diane's masterful machinations, though, is the play's fourth character, Ellen, the young woman with whom Alex has heretofore been living and in love (or at least puppy love). The ending is like something out of a fairy tale, one written by Karl Rove and Louella Parsons. The sheer gall of the resolution feels almost apocalyptic, or at least it would if director Scott Ellis didn't pull some punches in the play's second act climax, pushing Little Dog away from the terrifying tragedy that it actually is and toward the glib and cynical standard of most processed American entertainment circa 2005. (Note that this is probably a very canny and deliberate choice, a decision calculated to make the piece more palatable to the masses. I'm all for it, if the masses who see this play will really think about what it actually says about us: that everything is for sale, and, worse, that nothing is "wrong" unless we name it so.)

Now, let me jump off my soapbox and say simply that its serious intentions notwithstanding, Little Dog is a hilarious, enjoyable comedy, breezily staged by Ellis and splendidly produced by Second Stage Theatre. Julie White steals the show as Diane, in a performance so calculatedly cold that any pretense to humanity is gleefully abandoned; I actually don't care for it because I think a Diane with a soul would be more interesting than the monstre sacre that White creates here, but it's a crowd-pleaser, no doubt about it.

For me, the center of the piece is Neal Huff's Mitchell, the finest performance yet from this excellent actor. Especially in the first act, when Mitchell's egoism threatens to at last be clipped by some authentic tenderness for another human being, Huff shows us a man stung by an authentic dilemma: he can have everything he ever wanted in the world, if only he didn't want to love a man. The directness of his plight, not to mention its seeming enviability, is surprisingly moving in Huff's capable hands.

Johnny Galecki (Alex) and Zoe Lister-Jones (Ellen) complete the cast. Galecki is enormously likable as Alex, while Lister-Jones plays to type as a stereotypical "party girl." But both seem a bit too old for their roles, making characters who are in their very early 20s feel like disjointed 30-year-olds. A small quibble.

See this play if you want to laugh at the expense of, well, lots of sacred cows; see it and try to figure out if there's any way out of this system that Beane has really convincingly nailed and that his leading lady Diane, as you'll see, has mastered.

As part of their ongoing look backward at the roots of off-off-Broadway, TOSOS II and Peculiar Works Project are presenting a revival of Lanford Wilson's 1964 one-act play The Madness of Lady Bright. The production, directed by Mark Finley and featuring a shrewdly dense yet abstract set by Michael Muccio, is excellent, and Michael Lynch, in the title role, and his co-stars Melissa Center and Marlon Hurt give superb performances. Playing at the Duplex in Greenwich Village on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 7pm, this 45-minute piece is the perfect start to an evening out on the town.

The "Lady" of the play's title is Leslie Bright, a gay man of indeterminate (middle) age who's feeling, on this particular hot Saturday New York night in the early '60s, old, alone, and desperate. His only companion is a princess-style rotary phone (how quaint such an instrument looks in this micro-cellphone age!), but the only number that answers when he calls is Dial-a-Prayer: everyone he knows seems to be out.

And so, in between increasingly panicky efforts to find someone to communicate with, Leslie reminisces. What he's thinking about, mostly, are all the men he's loved—or at least had. In a gorgeous picaresque touch worthy of Tennessee Williams, Wilson has his protagonist live in an apartment whose walls are full of autographs, placed there by the many young men he's brought here and had sex with. (Leslie would undoubtedly prefer the more romantic and euphemistic "made love with," but the play's raw candor prompts an observer to state the truth, however unpolite or unpleasant.) The wall feels like a funeral guest book that's been filled out while the body is still alive and breathing.

Leslie also conjures some painful memories of his mother, and from time to time he rallies to imagine himself at this or that party or bar, though the results are ultimately no less painful. Wilson's painting for us here the portrait of an isolated old queen at the end of her rope. Looking back on it from our perspective 40 years later, we see how daring, how open, and how compassionate the work is; what a shocker this must have been to any audience in those pre-Stonewall days! We can also see that it's the work of a young gay playwright trying to understand older confederates and acquaintances; Leslie Bright is distilled through the kind yet uncompromising eyes of the young, literally represented on stage alongside him in the persons of a Girl and Boy who observe, comment, and occasionally role-play the sad, circuitous thoughts inside Leslie's head.

Michael Lynch is grand as "Lady Bright," never resorting to camp or maudlin self-pity; it's a forthright, funny, self-aware performance. Melissa Center and Marlon Hurt are superb in the much smaller roles of the Girl and Boy; Hurt, in particular, is affecting and memorable as one of Leslie's earliest conquests, the handsome young man who was the first to sign his name to Leslie's wall.

It's valuable to have an opportunity to see this seminal work in a first-class production. If you're curious about how gay drama in particular and contemporary American drama in general developed and grew, you will not want to miss The Madness of Lady Bright.

The prospect of seeing Jean Genet's play The Maids twice in a single evening may strike you as daunting or ludicrous or enlightening; I have to admit that, having seen a quite commendable production of this piece less than a year ago in the very same theatre, I certainly didn't feel a strong need to come back to the work not one but two more times at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre. But this venerable off-off-Broadway venue—long the home of Jean Cocteau Repertory—is now housing a brand new theatre troupe, the EgoPo/Cocteau, a merger of JCR with a New Orleans-based company that lost its home in Hurricane Katrina. Lane Savadove is artistic director of this new entity, and The Maids x 2 is his and the company's introduction to the New York theatre community. So it felt imperative to have a look, any possible redundancy notwithstanding.

It is, most noticeably, a very long look: though it's advertised as running 2 hours, 40 minutes, the evening clocked in at more than 3-1/2 hours, including an intermission of fully one hour, during which the unnecessarily elaborate and busy set for the first rendition of The Maids was replaced by the spartan ugly one on which the second version is played. I was tantalized by the promise that Maids #2 would be performed in the round (if you're familiar with the Bouwerie Lane's deep, squarish proscenium stage you'll understand why), and indeed audience members are placed around the set (on folding chairs behind and on either side of the action), though to what purpose apart from being able to prove the claim I could not say. I will say that the transformation of the space, such as it is, did not strike me as being interesting or impressive enough to justify my having to linger in the basement of the theatre for an hour.

The point of The Maids x 2 is, according to a note in the program, to enable audiences to compare and contrast the "traditional" approach to staging the play (i.e., with a female cast in what Savadove describes here as "a fully-realized fantasy world") with Genet's intended, more subversive conception of the piece (i.e., with a male cast, who portray prisoners who are "imagining the life of two inferior servants"). So the question is, does the juxtaposition add value to the auditor: do the two approaches inform one another, enlarging the experience of the play?

For me, the answer is a resounding no, and I think part of the reason is that although Savadove has made his Maids look quite different from each other, he hasn't made them sound or feel very different at all. Both productions are played at hystrionic level, pretty much unvarying throughout; both are violent and highly physicalized; both feature actors/actresses leaping all over the available furniture with no apparent motivation (would a wealthy young woman really jump all over her bed as if it were a trampouline? would prisoners sharing a small cell stand on their sink and toilet?) Savadove seems interested in sensational effects more than psychological insight.

More problematic is the fact that, while the female rendition of the piece anchors the maids' fantasies of tormenting and killing their demanding mistress in a reality that we can understand, no such grounding exists in the male version. Savadove gives us two men in a filthy jail cell who refer to each other using feminine names and pronouns and a guard whom they call "Madame." Why does this guard change into a red dress when he arrives in the prisoners' cell? Where did the red dress come from? What does the guard mean when he orders one of the prisoners to go out and find him a taxi? Where does the prisoner "go"? I went into this second round of The Maids assuming that the prisoners would be role-playing, but there's nothing in this production supporting that idea. I was confused: what are we supposed to understand about these men who don't seem to be pretending to be servants and mistress but instead appear to actually think that, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that's who they actually are?

Surely Deathwatch is the Genet play about fantasy and the dynamics of dominance and submission inside a prison. The Maids performed with men acting the roles of women is "gender-bending" (a term applied, incorrectly I think, to this production); such a rendition might have something interesting to say about gender roles, sexuality, power. But I don't know what The Maids set inside a men's prison is about at all.

A few more notes about what I saw: there are a couple of worthy performances here, both in the role of Solange—Leah Loftin has many potent moments in the first half, while Kevin V. Smith's technical prowess is quite dazzling throughout the second. But the casts are uneven, with J.J. Brennan as Claire particularly out of his depth (he is made to perform the end of the play completely nude, for which he gets points for guts given the very intimate setting). There are practical aspects of the design that are troublesome as well, such as the dust raised, in very close proximity to audience members, every time the prisoners' mattresses are turned over (this happens several times during the course of the play), and the incongruity between the soiled, torn prison uniforms worn by Smith and Brennan and the sparkling white Gap underwear they're sporting beneath them. Attention to details like these might go at least part of the way toward making the production more effective.

By any measure, Stolen Chair Theatre Company's production of The Man Who Laughs must be reckoned a triumph. Billed as a live silent film for the stage, that's precisely what it is: a faithful, loving recreation of an art that already seems ancient; not played for laughs or even curiosity value, but rather as a meaningful end in itself—a pastiche, yes, but also, if you will, a proof. There is something to be gained, and learned, from all that innocence that we've lost touch with in the eighty-odd years since the Silent Era.

The story, a touch maudlin and more than a shade macabre, is from Victor Hugo's novel L'Homme qui rit. It takes place in Europe in the late 1600s/early 1700s, where a young boy named Gwynplaine is kidnapped by a band of marauders known as comprachicos who terrorize the countryside by capturing innocent people and disfiguring them so that they can be sold as sideshow freaks. To Gwynplaine they affix a permanent smile, carving up his face so that his lips are enlarged and forever curled upwards in a cruel and grotesque parody of clownishness.

The comprachicos flee before they can profit from their handiwork on Gwynplaine, however. The boy wanders through a horrific storm—the kind that Lillian Gish always seemed to find herself alone in—during which he happens upon a dead body in the snow, clutching a still-breathing infant. He rescues the babe, and continues his journey with the tiny girl in tow. Eventually he happens upon the home of Ursus ("a misanthropic ventriloquist," a title card tells us, but one who, as we will see, has a heart of pure gold). Ursus takes the two children in. His reluctance is tempered by his sympathy for the little boy whose face, he soon discovers, has been so hideously scarred; and for the girl, whom he names Dea, who, it turns out, is blind.

Nineteen years pass. Ursus has taught Gwynplaine and Dea to become performers, and he presents them in fairs and the like as "The Laughing Man" and a tragically unsighted ingénue. Their life is modest but generally happy—except for the occasions when Gwynplaine broods about his fate. He wants people to stop laughing at him; he wants to be taken seriously as an actor and a man; he wants romance. Though he and Dea are deeply in love, they behave as brother and sister; so when a ruthless and spoiled Duchess takes an interest in Gwynplaine, he runs off with her. The results are predictably tragic; I will leave it for you to discover exactly how the story plays itself out.

The folks at Stolen Chair tell the story with economy and affection in about ninety minutes. All of the accoutrements of the silent film are here: A dark translucent scrim stands between actors and audience, giving all the action a grainy sepia look that's spot-on. Titles—on transparent cards; there's no high-tech PowerPoint presentation here to jostle us into the 21st century—are projected on the scrim, providing narration and dialogue as required. (They're written by scenarist Kiran Rikhye, who has done a skillful job.) A live soundtrack is played by pianist Emily Otto, stationed just to the front left of the screen; next to her, Aviva Meyer takes care of the sound effects. From somewhere in the back of the theatre is a sound of a film projector—a really lovely touch.

The action, delivered (astonishingly!) by just six actors, is performed in the heightened expressive style of silent movies. The actors never speak, of course, but they mouth dialogue frequently, often so distinctly that their words can be read on their lips. The costumes (by May Elbaz) are all in blacks, greys, whites, and sepias, providing an uncanny black-and-white look that's matched by David Bengali's ingenious sets. Bengali's lighting completes the illusion of an 80- or 90-year old film coming to life on stage.

The performances are splendidly stylized. Director Jon Stancato maintains consistency of tone, pace, and approach throughout with remarkable acuity. Jennifer Wren, as Dea, is the standout: in her long blonde curls, she's channeling Gish and Pickford in a portrayal of pure and unfettered innocence that comments on itself without seeming reflexive or ironical. Her "speaking" of the dialogue has spectacular precision, and her movements are exaggerated just so, not too big but not so subtle that we will miss them; she understands what Norma Desmond meant when she said "we had faces then," and even with the limitation of not being able to act with her eyes (her character is blind, remember), she's able to convey an astonishing array of emotions.

Jon Campbell, as Gwynplaine, is nearly as impressive, in a wrenching performance of the tragic hero. (We're aware, but only subliminally, of the painful apparatus that distorts his mouth and prevents many of the muscles in his face from being used; this is a fearless and dedicated actor sacrificing for his art.) Alexia Vernon is suitably malevolent as the Duchess, while Cameron Oro is, until the final scenes, mostly comic relief as her languid lover Lord Dirry Moir. Rounding out the company are Dennis Wit, invaluable as Ursus, and Ariana Seigel as the young Gwynplaine. One of the many amazing things that Stancato and his collaborators accomplish is the illusion of crowds and minor characters, bolstering the scenario though always unseen.

Otto's accompaniment, which (she confided in a talkback after the performance) is mostly improvised, feels entirely authentic. The sound effects are used sparingly, and provide some neat surprises.

But nothing surprised me more than the fact that, not only was I bowled over by the precision and commitment that brought together this bona fide tour de force of theatre, but also that I enjoyed it so much on its own terms. The journey back in time that we take in The Man Who Laughs is neither academic exercise or gimmicky theme park ride—it's a genuine immersion in a kind of storytelling that, for all its apparent hokeyness and naiveté, has the real capacity to tug at something inside of us and make us feel in a raw, spontaneous, and very essential way. Bravo.