nytheatre Archive
1997-98 Theatre Season Reviews

1776 is terrific. How good is it? It's so brilliantly constructed and so spellbindingly theatrical that there are moments--really--when we actually doubt that John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are going to pull off this idea of theirs of declaring independence from England. And when at last they succeed and they and sixteen of their colleagues in the Continental Congress come forward to sign the Declaration, we are genuinely moved.

Director Scott Ellis, whose past revivals at the Roundabout have included the excellent She Loves Me and Picnic, does his best work ever here, with a brisk and involving staging that never flags from the spectacular opening tableau to the heartfelt closing one. He has worked with librettist Peter Stone to revise the book ever so slightly but ever so effectively, helpfully clarifying some points that had in fact been confusing in the 1969 original. He has cast a strong ensemble of fine singing  actors, often against type, with outstanding results. I will single out a few but first state unequivocally that to a man this company is superlative--and both women are excellent too. Pat Hingle is gently sly as the great Dr. Franklin; Robert Westenberg makes the pivotal but relatively minor character Lyman Hall into a fully fleshed-out, very interesting person; Tom Aldredge is delightful as rowdy old Stephen Hopkins; Merwin Foard is great fun as the exuberant Richard Henry Lee. Gregg Edelman is chillingly evenhanded as Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, whose unwavering defense of the "peculiar institution" of slavery--on purely economic terms--provides the show its exciting climax. And Brent Spiner, most famously seen on TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a splendid John Adams, imbuing his bluster and bombast with enough underlying vulnerability and charm to make him the complete musical comedy hero, unlikely choice for one though he may be.

Yes, I said musical comedy, because that's what 1776 is and why it's ultimately so enjoyable: grand, funny numbers like "The Egg," "The Lees of Old Virginia," "He Plays the Violin," and "But, Mr. Adams" humanize a collection of men we know otherwise only from the history books; they make the work--and its generally accurate history--accessible. And like any good musical comedy, there are moments of great seriousness and enormous power: Dashiell Eaves as the young army courier, singing the great antiwar ballad "Momma, Look Sharp" at the end of Act One; Guy Paul as Secretary to the Continental Congress, reading the despairingly matter-of-fact dispatches from General George Washington; and of course that final debate on independence, played out before us with all of the drama and passion that the actual one in Philadelphia in 1776 must have had. At just about three hours in length, 1776 might be a long haul for the kids. But take them anyway: they'll love it; and the grand story of our country's birth should not, after all, be forgotten; and this is unforgettable theatre.

Meet Alexa Vere De Vere: agent, sometime actress, all-around Fabulous Person: a sexy, sophisticated and smart amalgamation of Sally Bowles, Holly Golightly, and Auntie Mame, with a touch of Tallulah thrown in for good measure. Alexa swoops into the life of a young novelist named Evan Wyler and immediately transforms him from an earnest but struggling artist into a suave and savvy player, exactly the right man to pen the screenplay of her life. Evan falls in love with Alexa, which is slightly surprising given the fact that he's gay. They're just about to go to Hollywood to clinch the movie deal at Paramount or maybe Warner Brothers, when suddenly...Alexa disappears. Evan is left holding the bag, so to speak, which in this case consists of several thousand dollars worth of credit card debt (Alexa never seems to have any money on her), a disgruntled rock band, and a gnawing feeling that is equal parts betrayal and bewilderment.

That's just the first act of As Bees in Honey Drown, the wonderful, very funny new play by Douglas Carter Beane that has already emerged as the new season's first hit. This first act is clever and stylish and hilarious; the good news is that the second act tops it masterfully. (You'll have to see it for yourself to find out what happens, but I will tell you that Beane has some nifty surprises for you.) On one level, Bees is a satire of a society whose values seem based primarily on brand-name recognition. But it's also a morality play--albeit an extremely funny one: a musing on what happens when we seek fame instead of our fortune, with the answer provided by the title.

But there's still another level to Bees, for this is a marvelous character study, as much a valentine to Alexa Vere de Vere as I Am a Camera is to Sally Bowles or Breakfast at Tiffany's is to Holly Golightly. And Alexa deserves it, because she's a terrific character, one of the best roles written for a woman in years (as evidenced by the rush of female movie stars, including Madonna, to play her on film). Her credo is self-invention, and she has a wondrous capacity for it; her modus operandi is to live for the minute, which she does with passion and flair. J. Smith Cameron embodies her in a star-making performance that is a true tour de force. Mark Brokaw, who won just about every theatre award available last season for the excellent How I Learned to Drive, repeats himself here with a fluid, stylish production that is smartly designed and impeccably cast. As Bees in Honey Drown is a must-see show for its pointed look at who we are, and its dazzling portrayal of the most interesting new heroine to hit the stage in many a moon. Plus it's a hilarious, rip-roaring good time: call for tickets now.

The key to all of the lunatic goings-on is the ship's steward Dvornichek, who is at once entirely incompetent and perfectly omniscient: the surreal deus ex machina that Turai and Gal's shows--and, by extension, their lives--thoroughly depend upon. At the start of Rough Crossing, Gal remarks to Turai that their new play's beginning doesn't work: "Curtain up. Chaps talking. Who are they? We don't know. They're talking about something they evidently know all about and we know nothing about. Then another chap. Who is he? They know so they won't tell us." (I love this speech.) Gal suggests that they need another character to explain to the audience who all these people are and what they're doing. Moments later, Dvornichek arrives and does exactly that, introducing Turai, Gal, and the rest of the characters with a flourish. That's the kind of play this is: an artifice about artifice; but somehow wryly wise, and continuously, antically funny.

Scott Shattuck's staging is just fine. Harris Berlinsky and Craig Smith, long-time veterans of the Jean Cocteau Repertory company, are well-matched as Turai and Gal. Tim Deak is very good as the hapless Adam, who suffers from (among other things) a psychosomatic illness that makes him hesitate many seconds or even minutes before he can speak. Elise Stone and Charles Parnell are just right as the exotic Natasha and Ivor. Best, perhaps, is Christopher Black, as the amazing Dvornichek, managing exactly the right balance of sense and nonsense as the omnipotent force that centers the play. Ellen Mandel's frivolous tunes are precisely what's called for in the sappy, convoluted musical-within-a-play; and Susan Soetaert's costumes are quite wonderful. This Rough Crossing is a most delightful and entertaining journey.

I can't remember the last time I saw a production as focused and clear as Eve Adamson's new staging of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Hedda is the daughter of a general, an aristocrat who left her with no money when he died. She has married George Tesman, a professor of history, largely because he was the only man who asked her. Now she is installed in Tesman's simple, middle class house, with only her piano and her father's pistols to remind her of her glorious youth. As portrayed by Elise Stone, she roams about the modest place like a caged animal, flinging herself into chairs and attacking the piano with an almost murderous exuberance. Hedda's restlessness and uselessness are palpable: she lives in Norway near the end of the 19th century, and women--especially aristocratic ones--are denied the opportunity of a career. So she pours her considerable talents and energy into manipulating others and destroying herself, dreaming about a single romantic and courageous act that will finally end her futile existence.

This Hedda is a feminist creation, to be sure; like Stockard Channing's Regina Giddens in last season's The Little Foxes, Elise Stone's Hedda Gabler is living about a hundred years too soon, a woman who can advance herself only by relying on the limited and limiting bag of tricks allowed to upper class ladies in the Victorian Era. But Adamson's point is not simply a feminist one; this Hedda Gabler has some interesting things to say about class differences and power, regardless of gender. Hedda spends most of the play making the other characters do things that suit her; she is matched in this only by the ruthless Judge Brack, who eventually comes close to gaining control even of Hedda. They are the only aristocrats in the play. Everyone else--Tesman, his aunt Juliana, his colleague (and Hedda's former love) Lovborg, and Lovborg's current paramour Mrs. Elvsted--is relatively poor. On one level, they all function as satelites revolving around Hedda or Brack, doing their bidding and offering little resistance. But we can't help noticing that they--and not Hedda and Brack--are the ones who are actually productive: they do things: create art, discover theories, care for the ill. In the weird power structure that Adamson has deduced from Ibsen, the lopsided advantage of the rich proves illusory: they have everything but freedom, and so have nothing. This is Hedda's tragedy, and so her defeat of it is a noble act, her triumph over circumstance and society.

If the foregoing sounds hopelessly elevated and academic, read the first sentence of this review again. The politics and the sociology are all there, not subtext but text, presented with clarity and precision by the director in a reading of Ibsen so straightforward that it almost seems cockeyed. Everything in this production is purposeful, which makes for theatre that is always understandable although sometimes less than believable and occasionally downright ugly. The performances are all fine, particularly Stone's radiant Hedda, Harris Berlinsky's simple and kind Tesman, Craig Smith's surprisingly cruel Judge Brack, and Patrick Hall's vibrant Lovborg. And the lighting, also by Eve Adamson, is stunning, particularly in the way it outlines and shadows Hedda's face even when she is in repose, waiting for her next manipulation to be played out. But the costumes and especially the set are visually disappointing; and despite the high quality of the ensemble there are moments that have been staged in such a broad and obvious manner that they border on camp. Yet everything on the Bouwerie Lane stage--even the disturbingly crumpled carpet that dominates the set--ultimately serves to illuminate Ibsen's intentions. And that's pretty darn impressive stagecraft.

Side Show is a musical based on the lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton, Siamese twins who as children and young women worked in carnival side shows, then appeared in vaudeville and even in a few movies including the Tod Browning horror classic Freaks. Lyricist-librettist Bill Russell, composer Henry Kreiger, and director-choreographer Robert Longbottom have crafted from this true story an original musical that is a genuine work of theatrical art. Honest: Side Show has one of the finest scores to reach Broadway in years; it is a work of dazzling showmanship whose first act alone has something like four or five showstopping numbers; it is an eloquent plea for tolerance and acceptance; it is an intense, deeply-felt story about persons who are "different" that, finally, packs an emotional wallop the likes of which I can't recall feeling in the theatre in quite some time.

Side Show begins with its 22 cast members seated on bleachers, facing the audience and looking very much like them (that is to say, "normal"). They sing the show's rousing anthem "Come Look at the Freaks," telling about, but not showing, a geek, a reptile man, a bearded lady, a pair of siamese twins. And then, we come into the tent; the freak show begins (a dazzlingly menacing setpiece, brilliantly staged by Longbottom). In short order we meet this community of outcasts, and we are charmed in particular by the lovely Hilton sisters, two young blonde women joined at the hip but otherwise fairly unremarkable. Soon a promoter named Terry Connor proposes to take the girls out of the sideshow and into vaudeville. Some of their fellow freaks look upon this as a godsend while others view it as an invitation from the devil (in a wonderful gospel number called "The Devil You Know"). Daisy and Violet decide to go with Connor, and the rest of Act One depicts their rise to stardom in vaudeville, very much a la classic American musicals about show business like Gypsy and Dreamgirls. Indeed, "We Share Everything," the stylish Egyptian-flavored number that marks the sisters' ascension to celebrity, combines the energetic pastiche of "Let Me Entertain You" with the exuberant catharsis of "Dreamgirls" (the title song); it's a joyous and magical number, and it stops the show.

Act One ends with a song called "Who Will Love Me As I Am?" The title speaks for itself, and it anticipates Side Show's sadder, more personal second act, which focuses on Daisy and Violet's attempts to find something approaching a normal romantic life. I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that these attempts don't finally turn out happily. I'm not going to tell you what happens but I will say this: the ending is utterly devastating. The show's final image is powerful and disturbing and hard to shake. Yet the final message is uplifting: this is a musical that concludes that the real freaks are those who can't, or won't, look beyond superficial differences and accept others as they are. Side Show is played out exclusively in public spaces and that's no accident: Daisy and Violet's condition forces them to publicly display what most of us can hide. But they're just like us, you see: "We want what everyone wants," they tell us in their first song, and of course that's exactly the point.

I've already told you that Henry Kreiger and Bill Russell's score is magnificent. Let me add now that the show's design--Robin Wagner's sets, Brian MacDevitt's lighting, and especially Gregg Barnes' stunning costumes--perfectly realizes the authors' intentions. Robert Longbottom's staging and choreography are likewise exactly right, loaded with neat details that speak volumes. As for the cast, well, they are superb. Ken Jennings and Norm Lewis are standouts among the featured players as, respectively, the sideshow boss and Jake, the onetime "Cannibal King" who becomes the girls' closest friend. Hugh Panaro is touching as Buddy Foster, the vaudevillian who falls in love with Violet, and Jeff McCarthy is masterful as the conflicted Terry Connor. Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, who play Daisy and Violet, are incredible: standing hip to hip they move and behave as Siamese twins would, which is astonishing enough logistically but is all the more an achievement because of the emotional truth of their performance. Somebody tell the Tony Awards folks to make sure they bestow a double nomination on these two talented women.

How gratifying that we already have, so early in the season, such a terrific new musical on Broadway. Side Show will dazzle you and thrill you. Go see it.

Based on what I'd read and heard about it, I expected 2 Pianos, 4 Hands to be reminiscent of Victor Borge's Comedy in Music: an evening of light classical music, interrupted by amusing anecdotes and the occasional comic routine. To my happy surprise, I was entirely wrong. 2 Pianos, 4 Hands is a real play, written and acted by two engaging Canadian actors, Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt, who are also classically-trained pianists. It is that training, from roughly the ages of six to eighteen, that is the subject of this play. Its theme is more universal, though: it's about that rude awakening that almost all of us get when we reach adulthood and find out that we're not nearly as extraordinary or indispensable as we had heretofore imagined.

On stage are only the two pianos and the two actors. In a series of short, piquant scenes, Dykstra and Greenblatt recreate their youthful days of piano lessons, recitals, and contests. Each plays not only his younger self, but also numerous characters from the other's past, mostly a succession of eccentric piano teachers, vividly and often hilariously realized. Throughout there is lots and lots of music, beautifully played: familiar and unfamiliar pieces by all the biggies, like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and also more contemporary work like "Imagine" and Billy Joel's "Piano Man" and, inevitably I guess, Hoagy Carmichael's "Heart and Soul." ("Piano Man," by the way, is the source of the evening's funniest moment--but only if you know the song: watch for it.)

The music is of course the raison d'etre for this evening, but it serves the text as surely as the most tightly integrated musical play. 2 Pianos, 4 Hands is not precisely a musical--I'm not really sure how to classify it--but it masterfully and seamlessly weaves its two dozen or so piano selections within a tight, straightforward, well-written narrative to create an organic work of theatre that is enormously entertaining and, finally, quite moving. I'm no classical music buff, but I've never enjoyed or appreciated it more than here. I am (as I think you know) rather a theatre buff, though, and I rank 2 Pianos, 4 Hands as one of the better new plays of the season. It ends with its two heroes--Dykstra first, and then Greenblatt--coming face to face with the dreams of their youths: dreams that collide with a harsh reality and then explode. Even though we know how things are going to work out for these two young men--we are, after all, watching them in an off-Broadway theatre rather than in a concert hall--the effect of their rejections is cataclysmic. The little epilogue that follows, in which Dykstra and Greenblatt talk about what happened afterward, wraps things up neatly and wisely, and makes for a touching and moving finish to this winning work of theatre.

Dykstra and Greenblatt are thoroughly engaging performers, as skilled at comedy and drama as they are on the piano, which is to say very good indeed if not perhaps world-class. I enjoyed the two and a quarter hours I spent in their company, and I think the rest of the audience members did too. At the evening's end, the pair sit one last time at their pianos and play a well-received encore. It's richly deserved.

Three Days of Rain is a mystery play. What makes it so intriguing and, finally, so moving, is the fact that the mystery at its core is one that is common to everyone and one that, I imagine, almost all of us try to solve when we are grown up. For this beautifully written new play by Richard Greenberg is about a brother and sister trying to understand who their parents really were. And even as they play out lives riddled with the same mistakes that their mother and father made, even as they piece together facts and memories and hammer out conjectures, they are never able to discover the truth.

We in the audience do discover the truth, at least in part, thanks to the wonderfully elegant structure that Mr. Greenberg has given his play. Act I takes place in a bare rundown Manhattan apartment in 1996. Once shared by two young architects named Ned and Theo, it is now occupied by Ned's thirty-something son Walker, who has returned from a lengthy trip abroad to claim his inheritance, his father having died a few years earlier. Walker is visited by his sister Nan and by Theo's son Pip; Nan is a successful businesswoman stuck in a loveless marriage, while Pip is the star of a popular TV soap opera. Walker is a drifter, constitutionally incapable of settling in one place or concentrating on one job. (We will learn in Act II about the French flaneur, a person who, for a living, wandered the streets of a town just to soak up whatever was there to find.) These three, who haven't seen each other in several years, spend a harrowing and emotional day together, talking about their lives and unearthing secrets and repressed feelings. They are alarmingly articulate and yet entirely unable to understand one another; nor can they make sense of the events of their parents' lives. Ned was an apparently unloving and uncommunicative father who somehow befriended the shallow Pip in his old age; Lina, Walker and Nan's mother, was a severely mentally ill woman who at one point, we are told, threw herself through a plate glass window; and Theo, Pip's father, died young, a young star of the world of architecture who had shone brightly and then burned himself out. Walker and Nan talk about their parents and hypothesize explanations, tantalized by a single, singularly unhelpful clue: a journal that Ned started thirty years ago which Walker has found in the abandoned apartment. It is as unforthcoming as Ned himself was, filled with entries like the inscrutable first one: "Three days of rain."

In Act II, time has turned back thirty-odd years and we are in the same apartment, now new and busily occupied by the young Ned and Theo, who have just begun their architecture practice. I leave it you to discover what transpires; suffice to say that their children's conception of what happened is woefully inaccurate.

Three Days of Rain is a fine, fine play. Inhabited by six people who are never really able to fully express their feelings to one another, it cannot help but feel detached, even remote. But it is also immensely moving, as in the wonderful moment in the second act when we find out how Walker got his name. And it's smart too, and very funny: the young and still unmarried Lina, for example, tells Ned that she wants to have a daughter someday--"someone I can drink with." John Slattery gives an achingly beautiful performance as Walker in the first act, and then tops it with a portrayal of Ned that is as deeply sweet and sad as any child's memory of a beloved parent. Patricia Clarkson and Bradley Whitford do fine work too as Nan/Lina and Pip/Theo. (Kudos also to director Evan Yianoulis and set designer Chris Barreca, whose transformation of the apartment from neglected desolation to cheery comfort itself borders on the miraculous.) But Mr. Greenberg, carrying forward the mantle of great American theatre poets like Tennessee Williams and Lanford Wilson, has worked the most magic here. In Act I, Pip tells us that his mother was like the heroine in one of those sex comedies that used to litter Broadway in the 50s, a blazingly specific image, eloquent and eccentric and precisely right. This is lovely, elegant writing, and yet the effect of the whole is almost impressionistic, as dreamlike and selective as memory.

In the end, we don't--can't--know all there is to know about Ned and Lina and Pip and their children. But we do find out what happened during those three days of rain.

We begin at The Auction--you know the one: where a catalog-full of the personal effects of the late First Lady and 20th century icon Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were sold at outrageously high prices to well-heeled bidders. The next item on the block: "Under the Sink"--miscellaneous cleaning products from Mrs. Onassis's bathroom which go for, if memory serves, $3 million. Score one for playwright Gip Hoppe: a swift, hilarious, satirical jab at our collective jugular. Then the curtain rises and we have a transcendent moment: here is Jackie herself, as beautiful as we remember her, seated placidly atop a pedestal, inside something that looks like a monument, gazing through a telescope out her window at the public that idolized her. She asks, "What do you want from me?," and then she makes a deal with her audience. She will give us a quick glimpse into her life, but only if at the end of it we all promise to go home.

All of this makes for a promising start to Gip Hoppe's new satirical play Jackie: An American Life, and--for a while anyway--what follows lives up to that promise. Hoppe holds a mirror up to late 20th century American society and what we see reflected there is this great enigma of a woman: a Jackie O who needs to be adored by the masses but wants to be left alone; the perfect manifestation of our collective craving for celebrity. Jackie's journey as the ideal American woman--from debutante to girl reporter to wife and mother to First Lady to, finally, the beloved grieving symbol of our great National Tragedy--is portrayed here as both calculated and ingenuous. Jackie falls apart midway through its second act, with President Kennedy's assassination. Hoppe does a dangerous thing here: he puts Jackie onstage in that famous bubblegum pink suit. It's too familiar and too emotional a visual image even 35 years later, and Hoppe himself instinctively pulls away, leaving the final half-hour or so of his play to flounder inconclusively.

Hoppe's message is serious but his medium is broadly comic: this is a very funny play. Jackie herself is presented straightforwardly and respectfully but all of the other famous and infamous characters who populated her American life are pretty much fair game, generally deservedly so. Hoppe, who also directed, has an ensemble of seven portray all of these people, about 125 of them altogether, and they use masks, puppets, and all manner of outlandish costumes to do so. The Kennedy clan, for example, are played by live actors, including an Ethel literally covered with Kennedy babies, plus a giant talking head as patriarch Joe. Derek Smith stands out among the company, delivering knockout turns as Jackie's dad Black Jack Bouvier, sister-in-law Jean Kennedy, and, especially, as presidential foe Dick Nixon, a walking visual joke in the TV debate scene in pasty makeup and an ill-fitting suit. Margaret Colin has the difficult title role and pulls it off with aplomb. She evokes the memory of Jackie, but this is acting rather than impersonation; she commands the stage with a grace and dignity that belie the darker side of an ambiguous nature. She also works enormously hard, for in addition to everything else I've told you, Jackie is a glorious fashion show, with Ms. Colin appearing in an endless parade of beautiful designer outfits and gowns, some authentic and some not, maybe 25 or 30 in all (I lost count).

Jackie: An American Life has, I think, been misunderstood by a lot of people. Because of its irreverent, jokey style, it has been characterized as a cartoon; in fact it's a very smart and intricate satire that misses greatness only because it pulls its punches in its concluding scenes. Stylistically, it is a daring and exciting work: almost all of the theatrical techniques so lauded in The Lion King can be found here, applied with more sharpness and wit. Bottom line: this is a funny, entertaining show quite unlike anything else on Broadway. It's well worth a visit.

I don't think it's spoiling anything to tell you that before Mr. Pim passes by one final time at the end of Act III, everything has been settled just at it should: this is, after all, that sort of play. No, in Mr. Pim Passes By, it's not so much what is going to happen as how. Milne's dialogue is witty and bright and endlessly diverting. The fine ensemble of actors here, under the sharp, brisk direction of the Mint's artistic director Jonathan Bank, bring Milne's words and characters to vivid, happy life. I can't think of a jollier group to spend an evening at the theatre with: Bill Roulet, positively Pooh-like as the well-meaning bumbler Pim; Ken Kliban, all deliberate pauses and meaningful pipe-puffing as the prototypically stiff-upper-lip British squire George Marden; Ian Merrill Peakes, a charming romantic naif as Dinah's suitor Brian; Kim Wimmer, Peakes' female equivalent as Dinah, possessed of an enthusiasm that is downright infectious; and Alice Cannon, perfect as George's proper old English aunt, someone who can easily be imagined doing something called "beagling"--whatever that may be--with precision and aplomb.

At the center of the piece is lovely Lisa M. Bostnar as Olivia, who gains one husband, and then nearly loses two in the course of an eventful afternoon. Bostnar is sublime: watch how placidly she sits sewing a set of curtains that husband George says he detests, her eyes clearly conveying her certainty that they'll be hanging up before nightfall. When Bostnar's Olivia thinks she may have lost her love, it's almost heartbreaking; but only for a moment, for she is soon planning a way not just to get him back but to make sure he knows just how much he loves and needs her. This is a tricky role, and Bostnar is marvelous in it. She's incandescent: vibrant and vulnerable and utterly, ineffably attractive; she makes Olivia the kind of woman any man would instantly fall in love with. Which makes George, who is after all the man she has fallen in love with, all the more admirable.

The production at the intimate Mint space is impeccable: Bank and his technical and design team have worked marvels, all the more impressive given the limited resources of an off-off-Broadway company. (John Kristiansen, in particular, has provided a simply glorious dress for Olivia.) The Mint's motto is "Good stories, well told," and they have more than lived up to it here. I left Mr. Pim smiling from ear to ear and filled with good cheer, and I suspect that you will too. The Mint is giving us a sweet, joyful holiday gift in Mr. Pim Passes By: go ahead and indulge yourself--it's nice to leave the theatre feeling perfectly happy.

Our first glimpse of Jackson is as a misunderstood thirteen-year-old boy living in Iowa, lip-synching "Everything's Coming Up Roses" in one of his grandmother's dresses. From here we follow his journey from naive young farmboy just arrived in New York and just beginning to understand himself and his world, to sadder-but-wiser middle-aged survivor of drugs and love affairs and friends and lovers lost to AIDS. Along the way we meet wonderful, vivid characters like Marvin Gross, the overweight "troll" who preys on handsome young men; Brian Goodman, the prototypical '70s "clone" who becomes Jackson's best friend; Josh Curr, the likable young man who becomes Jackson's first lover; Duke Sappho, the oh-so-butch lesbian who works with Jackson in a Manhattan bookstore; and Miss Anne Thrope, the fabulous drag queen who becomes one of the constants in Jackson's life in later years. For the most part they're terrific people, the friends that Jackson, who is the sweetest and most decent hero I've seen portrayed on stage in a long time, deserves. Which is not to say that Jackson doesn't go through his share of betrayals and sadness and loneliness; he probably has more than his share, in fact, which is what makes the play's idealized, romanticized optimism so wonderful and so uplifting. For at base this is a marvelously upbeat show, one that postulates that its eponymous pursuit of happiness is possible for everyone, even those like Jackson and his friends who find themselves somehow at the margins of society.

Julian Woolford's production could not be better. Six talented actors play more than twenty roles, with each given a chance to shine and each making the most of it. Elizabeth Bove is warm and hearty and brave as Duke Sappho; Isabel Keating gets a brief but hilarious turn as a drugged-out valley girl; Michael Curry is excellent as a complex, conflicted gay man and touching (in non-outrageous drag) as Jackson's mother; Eric Paeper is perfect as Brian, sensibly restraining impulses to be too over-the-top in a role that could easily lapse into caricature; and Andrew Allis is exactly as fabulous--and common-sensically stalwart--as Miss Anne Thrope needs to be. (Huzzahs, too, to costume designer Carol Brys, who does fine work throughout but clearly had a field day designing the outrageous get-ups for Miss Anne, including a divine Mrs. Santa Claus ensemble.) As Jackson, Charlie Schroeder is terrific. He's a very appealing performer: near the beginning of the play, a fellow high school student on whom Jackson has a crush rescues him from a bully; Schroeder's hangdog lovestruck look is so adorable and so touching that it's almost impossible not to root for him from this moment on. But as Jackson ages, Schroeder's performance becomes deeper and richer, effectively encompassing the longing, the loneliness, and always the inherent decency of this terrific character. He's a talented young actor to keep an eye on.

Like the very best theatre, ...and the pursuit of happiness takes us on a roller coaster ride that is by turns exhilarating and scary, entertaining and powerful: more than a few audience members, yours truly included, were stifling tears during the last half-hour or so. It's funny and sad and touching and sweet. It's also very real and very universal: Jackson's search for true love and meaningful connection resonates for everyone, straight, gay, or otherwise. I love this play and Rattlestick's superbly loving production of it. Go see it.

Just watching Eli Wallach eat a cup of matzoh ball soup can bring immense pleasure. It's not just the intense concentration that conjures up aromatic, piping hot chicken broth in our mind's eye; it's the way Mr. Wallach employs this fairly routine activity to create a full-blown, three-dimensional character, a man who is instantly recognizable by, among other things, the way he eats matzoh ball soup. Mr. Wallach's performance is truly a tour de force, an exhibition of talent and know-how that is probably unmatched right now on any stage in New York. It is also the main attraction of Visiting Mr. Green, the entertaining new comedy by first-time playwright Jeff Baron in which Mr. Wallach stars, off-Broadway at the Union Square Theatre.

Mr. Green is an 86-year-old Jewish man who lives alone in an apartment on New York City's Upper West Side. Recently widowed, he also recently had a minor accident when a speeding car ran him down on the street near his home. That car was driven by Ross Gardiner (Mr. Basche); as punishment for his reckless driving, Ross is sentenced to a six-month term of community service whereby he must visit Mr. Green weekly and provide whatever help he can to the old man. The outcome is as predictable as the premise is implausible: Mr. Green is at first aloof but eventually warms to the young man, and Ross, originally resentful at having to interrupt his week in this manner, grows fond of Mr. Green and comes to regard him as surrogate father. The particular complications that move the story through these paces are not in and of themselves uninteresting: Ross is gay and more or less cut off from his family, and Mr. Green turns out to have a daughter whom he has not spoken to in years because she married outside her faith. However, the contrivances through which these facts are revealed are, alas, clearly that; and the events that these revelations trigger seemed to me to be wholly unmotivated: Mr. Baron has an ear for dialogue but he has not yet mastered the subtleties of character development. So Visiting Mr. Green is, finally, not a first-rate play. It is, though an extremely well-intended and well-meaning work by a promising new author, one that shows signs of considerable talent and soul; it is, also, certainly entertaining.

And it has been given a splendid production. The cluttered apartment provided by set designer Loren Sherman is exactly right, as is the surprisingly interesting music by David Shire. David Alan Basche is appealing as the introverted yuppie Ross, although he is finally defeated by a role that is severely underwritten. And then of course there is the irreplaceable Mr. Wallach, truly a master at work. Every nuance of his performance is finely tuned--not just the chicken soup business but lots more, with teabags and table lamps and so on. He has created a completely believable very old man, with all the attendant vulnerability and irascibility and stubbornness and fear. There is, for example, a scene in Act Two when he awakens from a dream searching the apartment for the wife he has forgotten is now dead that is stunning in its beauty and poignancy. It's a first-class performance in a first-class production, and even though the play itself is less than perfect, it's still well worth a visit to Mr. Green.

If, like me, you have never seen The School for Scandal before, you are in for a delightful treat; hurry to the Pearl Theatre Company and catch this delicious and surprisingly timely show before it closes. This production, staged by the Pearl's artistic director Shepard Sobel and longtime company member Joanne Camp, is up to their usual standard. (See reviews of this season's Hard Times and The Forest for more about that standard.) There is at least one superb performance--Greg McFadden's, as the likeable profligate Charles Surface, an extravagant but guileless young man who figures in the main love story; and there are many other fine ones, among them Sybil Lines' elegantly malignant Lady Sneerwell, Bradford Cover's smooth Joseph Surface, Carol Schultz's unflappable Mrs. Candour, Hope Chernov's lively and witty Lady Teazle, and, in the center of it all, Dane Knell's disarmingly gentle Sir Peter Teazle.

It is Sir Peter around whom the story revolves: Wealthy and middle-aged, he has just married a much younger woman from the country. She is flirting with Society, in the form of Joseph Surface, a bright young man who has caught her eye, and his ally Lady Sneerwell. For her part, Lady Sneerwell is smitten with Joseph's younger brother Charles; he is enamored of Maria, Sir Peter's niece, and so Lady Sneerwell engineers a smear campaign against Charles so he might lose Maria's favor. Such is the plot of The School for Scandal, but the details hardly matter; what propels this wonderful play is gossip, gossip, and more gossip. It begins with Lady Sneerwell conspiring with her confidante Snake against various unseen victims, both all the while chattering about Lady This and Lord That. They are soon joined by Mrs. Candour and Sir Benjamin Backbite and, later, Joseph Surface and Lady Teazle, their discourse unfailingly about the affairs of others. On more than one occasion during the play, we will find these stalwart snoops literally stalking their prey, lined up one after another trying to get a glimpse of the action like so many Geraldos in 18th century clothing; inquiring minds wanting to know. "People will talk; there's no preventing it," says Mrs. Candour, and of course that's so: that's why this work is so enduring.

The bonus here is that the talk is so delectable. There's a reason why a play like The School for Scandal has become a classic: it's very, very good. Sheridan writes with rare grace and elegance; the show is brimming with epigrammatic wit. Every so often an idea is expressed so beautifully that it takes your breath away for a second, like when Charles says that his distresses are so great that he can't afford to give up his spirits. Plays are seldom written so beautifully, or, I might add, with such good sense. As I said, The School for Scandal was new to me, but I am sure that I will be enchanted when I get to see it again. For now, the place to see it in New York is at the Pearl; whether it's your first time in the delicious company of Lady Sneerwell and her gossip-mongering coterie, or your fiftieth, I think you'll have a good time.

It's remarkable what you can do with a few sheets of newspaper and some sealing tape! 70 Hill Lane, the new performance work at P.S. 122 that marks the American debut of London's Improbable Theatre company, begins with a demonstration. When the lights come up, the stage is empty except for a table with two sheets of newspaper laid out on it. Then Phelim McDermott, Steve Tiplady, and Guy Dartnell appear, and with a few quick, deft motions the sheets are transformed into two animated creatures and then into a single one. It's a puppet, but not like one you've seen before, and even though we see its three handlers behind it, it moves with a logic and locomotion of its own; it even has a personality (and a sweet one at that). Later the Improbable threesome will create windows, door, doorknobs, gardens, staircases, hallways, rooms, and even an entire house out of sealing tape, and each new creation brings a childlike sense of wonder and delight at the sheer inventiveness of it all. It's all the more joyous because this is not Ed Sullivan Show gimmickry. It's real theatre: a new way to tell a story.

The ingeniousness of this entertainment makes us wish that the story being told was a better one. It is ostensibly a reminiscence about Mr. McDermott's youth; specifically, one day when he was about fifteen years old a poltergeist visited his home and wreaked bizarre but temporary havoc on it. Around this tale Mr. McDermott weaves stream-of-consciousness musings about his family, his unrequited search for a "beloved," the creation of this play, and the current, cluttered disarray of his existence. Some, like the loving recollection of his grandmother, are quite touching; but others ramble along without really getting anywhere. The show is too long by half an hour or so, and despite some pithy encomiums delivered by the poltergeist at the show's end (along the order of "live life to the fullest"), 70 Hill Lane doesn't satisfactorily resolve itself.

But the artfulness of it all more than compensates for any deficiencies in the text! McDermott, in particular, is an engaging and masterful performer. In addition to his unusual proficiency with newspaper and tape (a skill shared, to be sure, by his co-stars), he is also a gifted actor (I love the way he is able to describe and define an imaginary setting for us, in colorful and vivid detail). He has a loose, improvisational style that is ingratiating and often produces very funny results. (At the performance I attended, he interrupted a riff on how he might impress some future hypothetical girlfriend with the line "Does she read the New York Times?," a reference to Ben Brantley's enthusiastic review in the previous day's paper.) In short, Mr. McDermott and his colleagues are possessed of that rare gift: the ability to utterly captivate an audience. They're young; they will surely find material that is the equal of their art.

In any event, don't let my tiny quibbles stop you from visiting 70 Hill Lane right away. It's only around until January 18, after which, I hear, the Improbable Theatre will journey to Egypt, of all places. I'm sure they'll be back, and I'll be keeping an eye on them.

Midway through Act One of Ragtime, Brian Stokes Mitchell leads the ensemble in the "Getting Ready Rag." His eyes sparkle, he smiles a broad, warm grin, his long, elegant fingers caress an invisible piano keyboard that seems to be hanging in midair before them, his feet start tapping, he takes a short, ecstatic leap and lands on his toes. It appears that any minute he will soar gloriously, powered by the joy that his character, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is feeling at this particular moment (he is about to reunite with his estranged lover Sarah). And then, imperceptibly, the number stalls, and then fizzles out.

That's Ragtime: The Musical in a nutshell. It's ambitious, it's stylish, it's packed to the gills with talent, it's got rhythm and melody to spare. But it never soars; for all its assets, there's one that's sorely missing: this show has no soul. Lacking that, the kinetic motion and energy of a hard-working cast of 58 is spent, but without a payoff. There's a lot of exciting stuff happening on stage here, and some of it is very good indeed; but the epic musical about America that we're promised by the show's title and by the musical numbers that open both acts--"an era exploding, a century spinning," according to one of them--is not delivered.

That said, let me tell you about what is delivered. Ragtime tells the interlocking stories of three families living in America at the beginning of this century. Mother and Father are well-to-do WASPs living in the new suburban town of New Rochelle, outside New York City. In her garden one morning, Mother discovers an abandoned newborn child who, it turns out, is the son of a scared young black woman named Sarah. Mother takes Sarah and her baby into her home; soon the child's father, Harlem ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker, Jr., arrives to claim them both. Mother and her family also come into contact with Tateh, a Jewish immigrant newly arrived from Latvia with his little daughter. Tateh and Coalhouse face prejudice and hatred and injustice and oppression and deal with them in very different ways: the unexpected curves and twists of these events form the core of the story. The impact of these events on Mother and her family gives the show its frame and its theme. It's like ragtime: the interesting syncopated melody of Coalhouse and Tateh's struggles, set against the more settled steady beat of Mother and Father's well-defined existence.

Providing a colorful backdrop for these three stories are numerous real-life figures from the era: Evelyn Nesbit, the "girl in the swing" who was the central figure in the twentieth century's first "crime of the century"; anarchist Emma Goldman; African-American leader Booker T. Washington; Henry Ford; J. Pierpont Morgan; master illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini. Some are woven into the show deftly, as when Morgan makes his first appearance literally on the backs of the working poor; others, like Houdini, are worked in less artfully. The effect, with these folks drifting in and out among the show's fictional characters, is rather like a pageant; it's enhanced by the show's staging, which is much of the time presentational rather than naturalistic, with the actors addressing the audience directly, narrating rather than enacting the story. This, by the way, is an off-putting, distancing technique; but what's lost in emotion is presumably made up in sweep, and so the tales move along, not so grand or epic as I would have hoped, perhaps, but certainly with efficiency.

I've already told you how good Mr. Mitchell is; let me turn now to some of the other talented players in Ragtime. Peter Friedman is fine as Tateh, with an unexpectedly fine voice and a strong stage presence. Audra McDonald sings the role of Sarah well, and Judy Kaye is a memorable Emma Goldman, conveying her strong principles, her dignity, and her sense of humor admirably. The score of Ragtime is lovely, too; it's written by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, a songwriting team whose versatility always manages to surprise me (their previous Broadway scores are Once On This Island and My Favorite Year).

I was, frankly, disappointed by Ragtime; it is, I find, just the latest entry in a season of musicals that have failed to live up to their prodigious hype. Ragtime is entertaining, but it's not engaging; maybe I am asking too much from the Broadway musical theatre. It will, I am sure, succeed, because of--and in spite of--all the publicity. I think I would like to see Ragtime again, and with a different set of expectations I suspect I'll like it a lot more the next time around.

Never the Sinner is a great play, and Ethan McSweeny's staging of it at the John Houseman Theatre is just about perfect. John Logan's drama is about Leopold and Loeb, two rich bored young men who decided in 1924 to kill a teenage boy, brutally and in cold blood, as a "psychological experiment," to see what it would be like to commit murder. Theirs was the crime of the century, proclaimed the media, and if other crimes have since eclipsed Leopold and Loeb's notoriety, their case still has the capacity to fascinate: here were two intelligent, otherwise rational men who somehow arrived at the conclusion that committing a random murder was not only possible but reasonable. Interestingly, it is not the crime that is most on playwright Logan's mind, though; it's the punishment: in the centerpiece of this powerful drama, defense attorney Clarence Darrow makes a well-reasoned, eloquent plea to the court to spare the lives of Leopold and Loeb. It's almost shocking because we've so clearly seen the ruthless arrogance of these two. But, Darrow tells us, while we may hate the sin we must never hate the sinner: in the dark, unyielding eyes and the disturbed, confused souls of the two killers, Darrow sees some light. Our humanity compels us to be merciful.

Never the Sinner is such a rich theatrical experience that a mere summary of story and theme necessarily fails to do it justice. Nonetheless, let me try to flesh it out for you. It is, first of all, a brilliantly constructed courtroom drama, with the first act roughly corresponding to the prosecution's case and the second act more or less the defense, filled out with flashbacks showing the crime and the events leading up to it, along with a few other scenes depicting some of the time that Leopold and Loeb spent in jail during the trial. Never the Sinner is also an intense character study, or rather the study of two sad characters caught in an amazing symbiosis: aloof, intellectual Nathan Leopold, whose fantasy is to serve and protect the perfect man, and handsome, dangerous Richard Loeb, who dreams of breaking out of society's strictures and laws. These two feed upon one another, providing yet another level to this complex and rewarding work, for Never the Sinner is also a tale of seduction--and I'm not referring, by the way, to its depiction of a forbidden homosexual love (although this is handled masterfully). Logan takes us into the minds of his protagonists, and with them we experience the sick thrill of planning and then executing the horrific murder, as well as--powerfully and vividly--the ultimate banality and emptiness of the deed. Near the end of the play, Leopold and Loeb talk for the last time before their sentencing: Loeb wonders whether it will hurt to be hanged. Their vulnerability and their regret, though still perhaps without remorse, is absolutely palpable, and it's achingly sad to watch.

Jason Bowcutt and Michael Solomon give remarkable performances in the two leading roles. Bowcutt's eyes--deep, penetrating, and brooding--give us our first clues about Leopold's troubled character; while Solomon projects Loeb's restless, dangerous nature in his long, limber arms and legs, repositories of nervous energy that never cease to be in motion. Bowcutt and Solomon's work here is nothing short of tour de force: watch as they celebrate their murderous pact of friendship in a graceful, melancholy waltz; or as they re-enact the murder, mostly in pantomime so eerily evocative that we actually see their invisible victim enter their invisible car, actually hear the invisible car door slam shut. These are intense, thoughtful, fully-formed characterizations. Bowcutt and Solomon are both appealing and charismatic as well; I am certain they will be heard from again.

Robert Hogan is also memorable as Darrow; he gets the play's pivotal speech, and he embues it with exactly the unemotional pitch that it needs: one of the things that most struck me about this plea against capital punishment is that although it deals with a question of morality and ethics it arrives at its conclusion almost solely on the basis of rational, well-reasoned argument. Whatever your position is on this issue, Never the Sinner gives plenty of fodder for thoughtful reconsideration and discussion, which to my mind is just about the best thing that a play can do; it also tells a terrific story, powerfully and well. This is theatre at its best; don't miss it.

The Capeman begins with a little boy, barefoot and wearing an improbable bowler hat, looking very serious and standing stock still at center stage, as if posing for a picture. He is young Salvador Agron, and in his short, sad life he will gain notoriety as "The Capeman," a 16 year-old Puerto Rican immigrant who gets mixed up with a gang called The Vampires and unaccountably murders two innocent teenage boys. Later he will grow into a wiser man of 36, finally paroled after a lifetime in prison and ready to begin anew. He will die just a few years later in the Bronx. What does such a life signify?

Paul Simon's beautiful new musical The Capeman asks this question with eloquence and compassion, and if in the end it is unable to provide an answer, its journey through the mind and soul of a man is powerful and affecting. In a series of impressionistic songs and scenes, moments of Salvador's life are depicted, from his boyhood in Puerto Rico right up to his death, propelled by the pulsing but muted rhythms of the Barrio and the streets and the churches and the prisons, and distilled through the bitter and regretful haze of memory and time. Events and remembrances flash past us like sepia-tinted old photographs, occasionally evoking a smile, more often bringing us nearer to tears. The cumulative effect is almost unrelievedly sad, yes, but somehow almost exalting, too, as we struggle to understand how a young man can go so irredeemably off course, and how--whether--such a man can ever hope for redemption.

The Capeman is an intense work of theatre and an effective, though flawed, work of art. Its tribulations are well-known; the miracle is that Simon and his collaborators, who include (credited) director and choreographer Mark Morris and (uncredited) director Jerry Zaks and choreographer Joey McKneely, have solved most of the problems presented by such difficult, heartfelt material. There are some slow spots, to be sure, and some things don't quite work or make sense; but why focus on the show's liabilities when its assets offer such riches? The design, by Bob Crowley (sets and costumes), Natasha Katz (lighting), and Wendall K. Harrington (projections) is stunning, including a couple of startlingly unusual, beautiful stage pictures in a church and in the prison that will take your breath away. Crowley, in particular, evokes the claustrophobia of the Barrio, experienced not just by the teenagers, by the way, but by their elders as way; this is also highlighted pointedly by the show's choreography which, although not as extensive as you might expect, is nonetheless right on target. The company of forty actors, singers, and dancers is excellent; the production's three stars are superlative. Mark Anthony is charismatic and sexy, yet manages to convey the confused cockiness of 16-year-old Salvador. Ruben Blades, as the adult Salvador, shows the rage and despair bubbling underneath a subdued, controlled surface; he too is marvelously commanding. Ednita Nazario is superb as Salvador's mother, elevating what could be a clichéd character into a tough, loving, completely sympathetic woman. Her clear, melancholy singing gives voice to the sad and unsolvable puzzle of the Capeman's life.

The Capeman is the work of many collaborators, but its chief creator is undeniably Paul Simon and in his words and music we find the soul of this spare and serious show. What Simon does best is to use the soundtrack of our subconscious to express the inexpressible: in the center of The Capeman's first act, he does exactly this, in a series of six beautiful songs whose shifting rhythms and lyric ideas articulate the almost infinite longing of a sixteen-year-old boy trapped in a cold and hostile city. Near the end of the second act, Simon does something similar, this time neatly juxtaposing the jubilation of a Puerto Rico Day celebration with the utter aloneness of the adult Salvador, now paroled and ready to return home. Simon's score is stunning and entirely unlike anything else you hear in the theatre. Some of the standouts are "Satin Summer Nights," "Bernadette," "Dance to a Dream," and "Quality." Simon's trademark pseudo-poetic lyrics are here, occasionally missing the mark (as has always been true of his work) but sometimes exactly right, as in this description of an Irish kid who has insulted Sal's friends: "He looks like a ton of corned beef/Floating in beer." Or consider this stanza from "Born in Puerto Rico," which opens the show: the adult Salvador watches as his younger self plays with some of his friends from the Vampires gang:

No one knows you like I do
Nobody can know your heart the way I do
No one can testify to all that you've been through
But this will

It does. It seems to me that there are some in the media who have been gunning for this show, hoping for it to fail. That kind of thinking is inexplicable to me; it's unforgivable when it's applied to something that not only aspires to but often achieves true theatrical grace. The Capeman is far from perfect, but it breathes and sings from the hearts and souls of the men and women who created it and the man who inspired it.

The first act of Cafe Society is dizzyingly, daffily hilarious: it's the funniest hour I've spent in a theatre in a long time. So I wasn't really prepared for the second act, when playwright Robert Simonson reveals that he's got something serious on his mind. It turns out that Cafe Society is satire, a dark and cynical view of how we negotiate our lives and our relationships in the 90s in urban centers like New York. In a way, the Seinfeld-ian turn that Mr. Simonson takes after the intermission is a letdown, because he does screwball comedy so well in Act One. But somehow the playful silliness of Cafe Society's first half and the uneasy absurdity of its second half are of a piece: the world of Cafe Society is wacky and dangerous, but not to be taken lightly.

Our heroine is Karen, a nice young woman who works as an editor at Lincoln Center. Her adventure begins one morning at the gourmet coffee shop that she has been going to for more than a year for her daily iced decaf, when the 15-year-old counter girl, Lucy, suddenly asks Karen if she would like to be her friend. Karen says yes, and the next thing she knows the eagerly accommodating Lucy has invited her to a party at her house. The party is the grand set piece of Act One, the comic highlight not just of this play but (so far, anyway) of this year. Lucy has assembled a small group of marvelous eccentrics--all of them "friends" that she has made at the coffee shop--whom she and her equally off-balance father Sal ply with a stunning array of gourmet beverages and pastries. They are joined by Karen's sardonic friend Stacey and, later, by Lucy's eccentric cousin Roald, an author of children's books who travels with a Secret Service agent because he is under a death sentence from the Ayatollah for having written a presumably sacrilegious story in which a Christian cat from Cleveland and a Muslim cat from Algiers get married, sail down the Nile on a tuna fish barge, and give birth to a kitten who grows to be 95 feet tall and is eventually worshipped by the Egyptians. (I think this gives you an idea of Simonson's wild and wonderful comic sensibility.)

Anyway, Karen is asked out on a date by the Secret Service agent, Sean. Lucy has a serious crush on Sean and becomes jealous; she insists on joining them on a double date with one of her other guests, the nebbishy Nathan. Then Roald decides he too must accompany them, inviting Stacey to make it a triple date. At this delicious moment, the curtain falls.

Everything that happens in Act Two is entirely unexpected, random even. Transported from the surreal surroundings of Lucy's pixilated apartment to an anonymous supper club, the sextet starts to show their true colors. Essentially, Mr. Simonson provides us, in three interesting monologues, with three different recipes for living in modern urban America (cafe society?). Stacey copes with the world by being self-interested and assertive; Nathan complains that he is bullied by the people around him but ultimately plays the victim; Karen, finally, learns to be wary but firm in negotiating for what she needs. Only two of these approaches seem to guarantee survival, and only one seems even remotely likely to be successful. Simonson surprises us with a fairly dark world view here, one that is unsettling and uncomfortable. I would have enjoyed Cafe Society more if its second act had been as funny as its first; but I think that that is precisely Mr. Simonson's point.

There are many other intriguing notions presented in Cafe Society, with varying degrees of success; throughout, though, the writing is sharp and intelligent and witty. The production at Manhattan Playhouse is generally excellent, especially in the acting department, with Jacqueline Lucid (as the earnestly sinister Lucy), Jill Abramovitz (as the sardonic, quick-witted Stacey), and Scott Bowman (as the stalwart and upright bodyguard Sean) giving especially fine performances. Mr. Bowman's deadpan recitation of Roald's "incident" with Norman Mailer (Q: "Does he know Norman Mailer?" A: "Well, yes and no. He introduced himself at the Russian Tea Room.") made me laugh so hard that I didn't hear all of it. And the onstage food, courtesy of the nearby Culinary Arts High School, looks absolutely yummy.

I saw Theatre for a New Audience's productions of Richard II and Richard III in a single day, as, I think, they hope many people will choose to do. That's about seven hours of Shakespeare in two sittings, enough to make you start thinking in iambic pentameter; it's a wonderful and unique experience, and I recommend it if you're up for it. Should you partake, you'll see two beautifully-written plays, brimming with timeless poetry and sterling wisdom. You'll marvel at how the austere playing space at the Theatre at St. Clement's Church is transformed from a stately medieval cathedral (Richard II) to a stark contemporary field of battle (Richard III). And you'll delight in watching a company of fine actors take on two, three, or more very different roles in the course of an exciting, entertaining day. I asked Laurie Kennedy, one of the talented members of this ensemble, how she and the others manage to cope with these two immense works; she replied that it's more fun to do two plays at a time than one. Believe me, it shows.

Richard II is the longer and more difficult of the plays; I also think in this production it is the more successful. Steven Skybell plays the deposed monarch with grace, humility, and deep self-knowledge; if his Richard doesn't make the epic journey of the classical tragic hero, he is entirely and touchingly human. This is a good but weak man who happens to be a king; a very young (just 31 years old!), very well-intended man forced to do a job that would vex someone twice as old and twice as wise. It's a fascinating characterization.

Christoper McCann rips into Richard III with enormous vigor and relish; making this portrait of unmitigated evil completely entertaining, if a bit over-the-top in the final scenes. The emphasis in this play is more political than personal, but the most memorable moment comes when the three queens--Queen Margaret (Pamela Payton-Wright), the Duchess of York (Laurie Kennedy), and Queen Elizabeth (Sharon Scruggs) grieve for their lost husbands and children. In particular, Miss Kennedy's silent, unutterable expression of grief is unforgettable.

In fact, almost all of the performances are good or very good, and the scenic and lighting design by Neil Patel and Donald Holder, respectively, are superb. (Which makes, incidentally, the oddly unattractive and inappropriate costume designs of Constance Hoffman--which include modern-day pajamas for John of Gaunt and King Edward IV, and what looks like a dressing gown for Buckingham--all the more anomalous.)

Richard II is a majestic requiem for the death of order and faith; Richard III is a profane study of chaos and immorality. The latter is more fun but the former is more moving; consider, for example, the contrasts between the coronation scenes in these works as staged by Ron Daniels, the one melancholy but stately, reminiscent of, say, Camelot; the other an extravagant ballet straight out of The Great Dictator. Each in its way is riveting theatre; together they make for an extraordinary opportunity to view The War of the Roses from either end and to examine Shakespeare at his most introspective on the one hand and his most blatantly crowd-pleasing on the other.

"Such is the power of the breath of kings." Shakespeare's Henry Bolingbroke utters these words after Richard II pronounces sentence on him; how they resonate in this beautifully-realized production of this rich, complex play! Shepard Sobel, the artistic director of the Pearl Theatre Company off-Broadway, has staged Richard II with a directness that belies the swirl of intrigue and ambiguity that propels this play. Everything in this remarkable (and happily gimmick-free) production is straightforward: the action unfolds on a spare, unadorned set, with only minimal props; the lighting is evocative without calling attention to itself; the costumes are appropriate to the period but, except for the king's lavish royal robe, surprisingly simple. The company of actors bring Shakespeare's characters to vivid life, and speak his poetry clearly and well. Like Theatre Ten Ten's Hamlet and Jean Cocteau Repertory's Hedda Gabler earlier this season, this Richard II is astonishingly clear: it's a powerful and honest rendition of an outstanding work of theatre.

The story is fascinating but complicated; here's a synopsis: Richard II's grandfather was King Edward III, a strong and popular king who ruled England for fifty years. When he died, the laws of primogeniture required that the crown pass to his 10-year-old grandson Richard, the son of his firstborn son. While Richard was a boy, Edward III's younger sons John of Gaunt, Edmund of York, and the Duke of Gloucester held the true power of the throne; but as he reached manhood he asserted himself and gradually seized control from his uncles. Though he believed himself to be ordained by God to be king, he was a weak and ineffective monarch, and by the time Shakespeare's play opens in 1398, 31-year-old Richard finds himself besieged by potential usurpers. In the first scene, two noblemen--the Earl of Norfolk and John of Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke--accuse one another of treason; Richard orders them both banished in the speech that prompts Bolingbroke's eloquent remark quoted above. This is Richard's only victory in this play; essentially Richard II is the story of his sad, fast fall from grace. Richard seizes Bolingbroke's lands; Bolingbroke retaliates by launching an invasion of England from France. Most of the nobility quickly ally themselves with Bolingbroke, and by intermission he has successfully usurped the crown from the king.

Shakespeare classifies Richard II as a tragedy, and Bradford Cover's excellent performance in the title role helps us understand why. His Richard starts out as an arrogant, capricious monarch who takes almost a childish delight in his authority. However, as his opponents grow in number and power, Mr. Cover's king starts to acquire maturity, then wisdom, and finally self-knowledge, so that by the play's final scenes he has come to understand the sad paradox of his life. In the tradition of the classics, Richard has the fatal tragic flaw of hubris; Mr. Cover's thoughtful and engaging portrayal lets us see and feel the tragic arc that Richard traverses in this play.

The rest of the ensemble is generally fine, with standout performances offered by Greg McFadden as Richard's treacherous cousin Aumerle and Dan Daily as Norfolk and the Duke of Northumberland. What's best about this Richard II is, of course, the majestic language, smartly untouched and unelaborated by Mr. Sobel and so able to work its wondrous magic on its own. In what is perhaps the play's most famous speech, King Richard, on the brink of realizing that his crown is lost, beckons his supporters to sit on the ground and talk of the death of kings. Mr. Cover's reading is simplicity itself, but a hush descends over the audience as we are drawn into a moment of honest, sad catharsis. Richard II is not among the best-known of Shakespeare's works: this examination of the breath of kings and the death of kings is unexpectedly potent and enormously moving. The production at the Pearl more than does it justice; it's outstanding theatre, well worth a visit.

It's not exactly a news flash, but the fact is that Alan Alda is a supremely funny man. In the excellent new play Art, he stars as Marc, a curmudgeonly intellectual who is stymied by the fact that his best friend Serge has paid 200,000 francs for a painting that consists of some white lines on a white background. Shortly after the play begins, Marc goes to see the painting for the first time. Observe Mr. Alda in this act of observing: he steps back, he squints, he puts his glasses on, he adjusts his head, he blinks, he takes his glasses off, he moves right up to the canvas--it's almost a ballet, this hilarious, futile attempt at comprehending what his pal sees that he cannot see. Every movement and nuance is precisely perfect, and the laughter builds and builds: it's an enormously pleasurable mini dissertation on the art of timing: a comic master at work.

But understand, please, that this is not a comedian's shtick: everything Mr. Alda does here and elsewhere in Art is deeply rooted in the character he plays and, more importantly, provides us with information to help us understand that character. Mr. Alda is a superb actor; I've never seen him give a better performance than the one he gives in Art: it's a role that suits him perfectly, and he plays it with easy authority and exceptional clarity. Marc finds, when this exaggeratedly blank work of art comes between him and Serge, that in losing touch with his friend he has also lost a part of himself. Even though their relationship is defined largely in terms of power, there is nonetheless a strong undercurrent of tenderness--a sense of connection and shared experience that helps each man dispel some essential loneliness. Marc is the only one of the three characters in Art who always tells the truth, and it is that honesty--searing and brutal--that causes both the rift that propels the play and the healing that shockingly but somehow inevitably completes it. This honesty is also at the heart of Mr. Alda's characterization, illuminating playwright Yasmina Reza's themes and making Art a supremely touching and moving work of theatre.

Mr. Alda is joined in Art by two other actors who give outstanding performances. Victor Garber, last seen in New York in Arcadia, is terrific as Serge, more than holding his own with his vitriolic co-star; he imbues Serge with a wit and sense of purpose that allows us to understand why Marc cares so much for him. And Alfred Molina does an excellent job as Yvan, which in some respects is the showiest role: he gets a long (5 minutes or so) monologue in which he rails hilariously about the various humiliations being heaped upon him by fiancée and family members as he prepares for his upcoming wedding. Mr. Molina stops the show with this breathlessly funny riff; but for me what's most memorable about it is the astonished reactions it draws from Mr. Garber and Mr. Alda's characters. The dynamic of this friendship--this play--is that Marc and Serge stand firmly at its center while Yvan flails around its perimeter; an eccentric, diverting presence existing, it would seem, solely for Marc and Serge's amusement. Yvan gets to state--astonishingly straightforwardly--the theme of the play, but it sounds like a joke when he says it and gets a big laugh. Later, in the fairly harrowing climactic moments of the piece, Marc and Serge show us the theme, and it knocks you out with its raw, honest simplicity.

That theme is that we are defined as much by who we are as by how we relate to others; boiled down to its essence, Art is about the fundamental ways we reach accommodation to connect with others so that we are not alone. It's a superb play: neatly structured; loaded with observations that are variously astute, eccentric, witty and wry; utterly funny and unexpectedly wise. The production at Broadway's Royale Theatre is superlative: its impressive parts--the brilliant performances; the crisp, efficient staging by Matthew Warchus; the elegant, defining clothes and the spare, illuminating sets by Mark Thompson; the stark lighting by Hugh Vanstone and the staccato music by Gary Yershon--combine with marvelous synergy to create an even more impressive whole. As Stephen Sondheim once said, "Art isn't easy": there's a lot more to this work than Mr. Molina's broadly comic soliloquies and Mr. Garber's and Mr. Alda's neatly-timed quips. No, this Art bears reflection: mine this work for all its riches and you'll be rewarded with a powerful and moving experience.

"We know too damn much," observes Phyllis Gold midway through the second act of Jonathan Tolins' fascinating play The Twilight of the Golds. She is talking specifically about a recent (fictitious) breakthrough in the science of genetics that enables doctors to predict, with 90% certainty, that her pregnant daughter's unborn child will be homosexual. And Mrs. Gold wonders, in an intelligent, beautifully-written monologue, whether such a breakthrough truly constitutes progress.

This is the huge question at the heart of this funny, wise, maddening, important, frustrating play, which has been given a splendid production by James Knopf and the New Voices Theatre Ensemble. The Twilight of the Golds considers a comfortable, fairly ordinary Jewish family living in present-day Manhattan who are suddenly forced to confront an issue of earth-shaking significance. The fifty-something parents, Walter and Phyllis, are worldly, loving, and distinctly of their time; the children, Suzanne and David, are smart, spoiled, self-absorbed and slightly neurotic; all four are fundamentally good, caring people. Suzanne is a buyer for Bloomingdale's, David--who is gay--is a set designer for the Metropolitan Opera. When we meet the Golds, Suzanne and her husband Rob are celebrating their third wedding anniversary with the family. The evening ends with Suzanne's announcement that she is going to have a baby, and Rob's subsequent announcement that the biotechnology company he works for has developed a new genetic screening process that will enable them to acquire a great deal of data concerning what the child will be like. Rob and Suzanne try out the experimental procedure, and learn that their child--a boy--is "normal" in every way except that he is almost certainly going to be "like David." This news sets in motion a family crisis, with Suzanne and Rob considering aborting the baby, and David pleading for his unborn nephew's--and, as he says, his own-- life.

The Twilight of the Golds is occasionally political but mostly philosophical: it brings up more questions about family and society and love and tolerance than it can possibly answer. Therein lies the play's great weakness, by the way: it's done in by its author's ambitions. Especially damaging, to my mind, is the dangerous and explosive curve that the story takes midway through Act Two, when David confronts his family's latent homophobia. Suddenly, well-reasoned discourse is replaced by kneejerk melodrama: Twilight turns tragic, but this tragedy never feels inevitable.

The play's greatest strength is its characters, smartly drawn, three-dimensional people with whom it is hard not to sympathize. Mr. Tolins could, for example, have sketched the Jewish parents as stereotypes, but he doesn't: instead, they're sophisticated, genuinely funny and genuinely nice. When Suzanne protests as her brother is about to explain the plot of Wagner's Ring Cycle, her father tells her "You'll like it; it's about jewelry." Mrs. Gold, meanwhile, dryly observes that the reason that gay men are so good-looking is that they don't have any children. Especially as played here by Jane Ross and Len Stanger, they are strong, admirable people, and so the tragedy that gets played out as The Twilight of the Golds comes inexorably to its end resonates all the more.

I love this play because it has the courage to probe a fundamental moral issue. The Twilight of the Golds takes its title from Wagner's Gotterdamerung (Twilight of the Gods), and David tells us why: At the end of the Ring Cycle, the gods decree that everything must be destroyed so that a new world may be born that will hopefully be better than the last. Advances like the biotechnoloigcal marvel that Rob and Suzanne experiment with allow us, in effect, to play God. Will the world that we create be a better one or a worse one?

If, like me, you're not familiar with improvised theatre, then go immediately to see Honey Harlowe to find out what you've been missing. Performed by the six-person troupe Amnesia Wars in a tiny third-floor space called the Red Room in the East Village, with different guest artists every night, Honey Harlowe offers some of the sharpest, smartest, and funniest theatre in New York.

Here's how it works. The evening begins with a guest star--different at each performance (there's a complete list available in the credits box, above). The night I attended the show, the opening troupe was Sacred Ape, and their piece was a riot. It starts out as a Learning Annex-type seminar about how to write teen sitcoms for television (think Saved by the Bell): three professional writers describe their process and share summaries of some of their favorite episodes to an unctuous interviewer. The satire here is dead on, especially the synopses, which include sentences like "Corey and John accidentally hypnotize Mrs. Dupree." A fight breaks out among the panelists, which allows for a neat and swift segue to about fifteen hundred years in the future, where, in a post-apocalyptic church service, these very same plot outlines are the sacred texts of our descendants. Sacred Ape, who developed this scripted comedy using improvisational techniques, are gifted not just with brilliant comic ideas but with superb writing, timing, and delivery. I'm looking forward to seeing them again (which you can do, by the way, in a show called The Swarm, which plays at Solo Arts Group Saturday nights from April 11 through May 2).

On, now, to the main event: the six talented young people who comprise Amnesia Wars (for the record, Michael Bertrando, Celia Bressack, Hector Hill, Laura Klein, Jennifer Nails, and Rob Reese) now emerge on stage. They ask the audience to provide them with three ideas, and from these they go on to craft an intricate, sophisticated one-act comedy. (Later, they create a second improvised play based on Sacred Ape's TV sitcom premise.) The skill of these six performers is absolutely awesome: in a series of deft, quick scenes they create characters and build and reinforce thematic ideas; they make a real play, no cheap laughs or hoary shtick anywhere in sight. This is remarkable all by itself; it's also enormously entertaining because these folks are so very funny and original. There's never any dead air, and a surprisingly large percentage of the material hits its satirical and/or comic target. The best fun is watching when a good idea catches fire: at the show I attended, for example, a scene in a church confessional attained heights of hilarity when it became clear that there were four extra priests gleefully eavesdropping on the would-be penitent.

Honey Harlowe--named, by the way, for the wife of the great comedian Lenny Bruce--is different every night. My guess, though, is that it's always sophisticated, witty fun: an ideal way to wind up a night at one of the many nearby theatres in the East Village.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane has emerged as the season's most acclaimed new play: reviews to die for, scads of accolades and awards, and--at the moment, anyway--long lines at the box office. Coming to it as I did after all that hoopla, the question became not "Is it good?" but rather "Is it really that good?"

Alas, "no" on both counts, I'm afraid. Martin McDonagh is unquestionably a talented young writer: he has a positive flair for the poetry of everyday conversation, a strong and sure sense of plot and incident, and a knack for creating lovable characters against rather sizable odds. Putting all of this to good use, he has created in The Beauty Queen of Leenane a skillful diversion about a mother and daughter who live to drive one another crazy. It's entertaining, even crowd-pleasing, but it's also completely calculated and regrettably empty: this is a soap opera, not a play, and there's nothing to be gleaned here about the human condition or the human heart.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane (pronounced--beautifully by the cast members, by the way-- as "luh-nahn") is about a forty-year-old spinster named Maureen who lives in a remote Irish village with her mother Mag, a nasty old piece of work whose only purpose in life, apparently, is to annoy her daughter. Mag spends her days in front of the TV, whining about the lumps in her broth and complaining rather complacently about whatever strikes her fancy. She gets up only to go to bed and--in a scene that drew great guffaws from the audience--to dump the contents of her chamber pot down the kitchen sink. And, oh yes, she finds time to sabotage Maureen's one and only chance at happiness, first by neglecting to tell her that she has been invited to a party for Pato Dooley and then, later, by burning a letter from the solicitous Pato.

Mind you, there's nothing in the text that explains where all this gleeful wickedness comes from: Mag's actions suggest some sort of deep psychological trouble, but Mr. McDonagh doesn't go there, preferring instead to let us watch Mag and Maureen torment one another, resolutely but inexplicably. It's an experience as immediately gratifying and as ultimately unsatisfying as watching Crystal and Alexis duke it out on Dynasty.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is blessed with some fine performances, especially Anna Manahan's memorable, eminently watchable Mag; she makes the old witch almost lovable, loading her up with all manner of sly tics and tricks. Brian F. O'Byrne manages to make a three-dimensional character out of Pato, while Tom Murphy, in the showier role of Ray, Pato's dim-witted punk brother, earns laugh after laugh playing off the estimable Miss Manahan. Marie Mullen is less successful as Maureen, but that may be because she's trying to locate a character where the author has failed to supply one, or perhaps because, after months of playing this cipher here and in Britain, she's given up.

The question remains, though: why did The Beauty Queen of Leenane strike such a chord with the New York critics? I suspect that its appeal is similar to that of the deplorable revival of Cabaret: the cognoscenti this season seem to equate base vulgarity with high art. Beauty Queen is never as vulgar as Cabaret, but when it stoops lowest, as in that chamber pot scene I mentioned earlier, it seems to win the deepest belly laughs from its audience.

There's no doubt that The Beauty Queen of Leenane is an entertaining work of theatre. But it's no work of art.

A Shaughraun (pronounced, roughly, "shock-run") is a wanderer. Conn, the Shaughraun in this play, is a dreamer, a drinker, a drifter, and a ne'er-do-well. For him, life offers adventure at every turn. Certainly during the course of the two days depicted here, Conn gets more than his share. He has just returned to his home in County Sligo, Ireland, having helped his friend Robert Ffolliott escape from wrongful imprisonment in Australia. Robert's escape has put him in jeopardy with a British regiment, dispatched to bring the fugitive to justice; and also with the evil Corry Kinchela, who engineered Robert's conviction in the first place and has since been scheming to gain control of Robert's estate and to marry his fiancee, Arte O'Neal. Further complications arise when the captain of the British soldiers, the sweet-natured Harry Molineux, falls in love with Robert's sister Claire. And then there's Conn's own love interest, Moya, niece to the local priest, who is the least likely man in the village to approve of a Shaughraun for a nephew-in-law.

I am giving nothing away when I tell you that everything works out fine in the end. I will not, however, disclose the many twists and turns that this neatly-written play takes before its happy conclusion. The Shaughraun is unapologetically a melodrama, but it's an excellent one, one that demonstrates why this genre was so enduringly popular. It's funny, it's exciting; it's packed with action and surprises; it's sweetly moralistic and simple-minded. There are hokey jokes that make you laugh out loud in spite of yourself: at one point, for example, Robert sends Conn a letter, forgetting that the Shaughraun can't read. Too proud to admit this in front of his mother, Conn pretends that the missive is in a foreign language; when someone arrives who can read, he hands her the letter. "It's in pencil," she declares. Conn, to his mother: "I told you it wasn't in English."

The two-and-a-half hours fly by pleasurably. The second half, in particular, has any number of exciting highpoints, including two wonderfully choreographed fights and a gloriously comic wake. Peter Dobbins's staging is excellent throughout, not least because he lets the play stand on its own. Sure it's naive, sure it's (very) old-fashioned, but the innocence and sweetness are the keys to its charm. Mr. Dobbins has wisely directed it with respect and love, never making fun of it, never going for cheap laughs.

The company he has assembled is extraordinary. Standouts in the terrific ensemble include Laurence Drozd, perfect as the gentle, befuddled British captain; John Regis, broadly, hissably villainous as Kinchela; and Kate Brennan, Colleen Crawford, and Dee Ann Newkirk, all three spirited and lovely as Moya, Claire, and Arte, respectively. Stephen Logan Day, as Kinchela's bumbling lieutenant, and Joani O'Keefe, as the most enthusiastic mourner at the wake, have wonderful comic moments. Best of all is the superb Mr. Horgan, who brings the title character to vivid, captivating life. Mr. Horgan, who as far as I can tell has worked principally in daytime TV drama, is a true find: with grand comic brio, perfect timing, and a strong, charismatic presence, he embodies the tale-telling, dream-spinning hero from his thick Irish brogue to his dirty, worn boots.

The sweet, pat ending suggests that the Shaughraun may reform ("I will, whatever that means"). But his wandering nature will undoubtedly get the best of him; this kind of man doesn't stay put. Unfortunately, this thoroughly delightful and enjoyable show isn't going to hang around for long, either; the scheduled run is just four weeks. So waste no time and hurry to The Shaughraun, which, by the way, is exactly the antidote to all of those dark, brooding Irish tragicomedies now dotting the New York theatre scene. It wants nothing more than to entertain, and that it does, joyously and eagerly.

Performance Hell turns out to be just what its name implies: the place where bad performers go when they die. In the dozen sketches that make up Performance Hell, the breathtakingly funny and smart "avante-vaudeville" from the Baby Jump Project, we encounter several of the condemned. There's a young man spending eternity auditioning for a part in front of a director, assistant director, and, way up in the balcony, a janitor who, he knows, hates him. There's a former child star reduced to playing bass in a polka band. A woman working in a nightclub in Performance Hell sings "Danny Boy"--in the wrong key--over and over and over; at the end of each chorus, she checks her watch and it's always ten minutes to two: she has five more minutes till the end of her set.

Performance Hell is as surreal and bizarre as, I hope, these examples suggest. Our host (sort of) is a slippery, unctuous fellow in a pinstripe suit with Ed Grimley hair and bright red nails; try to imagine Wayne Newton as the MC in Cabaret and you'll have some idea of the dissonant weirdness of this character. The Gertrude Stein Choir makes two appearances during the evening, first in a breathless, impeccably timed round of stream-of-consciousness and later in the tour de force act before closing, a Punch and Judy show about a performance art phenomenon known as the Art Baby. And Jayne Mansfield, of all people, turns up in Performance Hell as well, only she's living in a man's body.

It all whirls past at about a hundred miles an hour: absurd, inspired, clever, hilarious, strange, pointed, and brilliant. It's so densely packed with sharp, satirical, surreal humor that I don't pretend to have gotten it all or understood it all; but I had a terrific time. It's dazzlingly fresh: a man, looking for something to watch on TV one night and finding an old Greta Garbo movie, remarks "What's she doing up so late?" And it's edgily, not-so-subtly barbed, directing its offbeat, parodistic wrath at the self-promoting, relentlessly hyped contemporary artists who have squandered their talent--if they had any--for quick fame and easy money. Message to Hedwig, Sam Mendes, and Martin McDonagh: beware.

Performance Hell was written by the late Philip-Dimitri Galas, whose untimely death from AIDS was clearly an enormous loss to the theatre. It is performed by four incredibly talented individuals, Valerie Buhagiar, Lynne Griffin, Mark Lonergan, and Sean Sullivan. These folks can, seemingly, do everything, and they do it well, with great style and at breakneck speed. Watch, for example, as Mr. Lonergan impersonates the insidious master of ceremonies, a man who has, he tells us, "Talent Beyond the Law." Behold Lynne Griffin killing the art of improvisation by showing us twenty spontaneously original ways to say "I'm so clever"; or Sean Sullivan, capturing the essence of modern acting in perhaps ten seconds, shifting effortlessly from Uta Hagen to Grotowski to Lee Strasberg's Method. Or observe Ms. Buhagiar, as a photographer's model ("Mona Rogers Before She Never Got Famous"), running through a series of provocative poses with titles like "Catching the Pizza" and culminating in three indelible ones illustrating how such a hopeless career might logically come to an end.

Performance Hell is preceded by a curtain raiser called Velo/City, a "live action silent film" conceived and performed by Stephen Guy McGrath, Scott McCord, and Scott Sprague. Not so dark as Performance Hell, Velo/City is a whimsical, lightly satirical, New Vaudeville take on the modern businessman. Three men, dressed in identical dark gray suits, juggle briefcases and acrobatically compete for a taxicab on their way to the office; once there, they work, hunched over desks, with rhythmic precision, playing a sort of percussive fugue with calculators, staplers, and other office supplies. It's sublimely, absurdly funny, and beautifully performed.

The Return of Avante-Vaudeville, as the evening has been titled, is one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking shows I've seen this season. It represents the first New York appearance of the Baby Jump Project, an amalgamation of two Toronto-based performance troupes (Baby Monster Productions and Parallel Exit), since their debut here in last summer's First International Fringe Festival. We need them to keep coming back; they're among the brightest and smartest companies around. This time, they're at Nada for just two weeks, so I advise you to obtain tickets immediately. Performance Hell is clearly not a place you'd want to live, but it's great fun to visit.

Having forgone a life of comfort with Percy, Lily turns to savvy Wall Street tycoon Gus Trenor for help. She soon discovers that Gus expects more than gratitude in return, but her need to subsidize her extravagant lifestyle leads her to another married man, George Dorset, for support. At first George's selfish wife Bertha encourages Lily's harmless flirtation with her husband, the better to distract him from her own more serious affair with young Ned Silverton. But eventually this arrangement turns sour, and the play's climax finds Lily banished not only from the Dorset home but from New York society.

Lily's downward spiral, presented as the inevitable result of her own frivolous, misplaced desire for luxury and extravagance, transforms The House of Mirth from the comedy of manners that, on the surface, it appears to be to the tragic melodrama that it actually is. The script is by Clyde Fitch and Edith Wharton from her novel, and it dates from 1907; this is the first New York production of record since the original one more than ninety years ago. Like the Mint's production last fall of Uncle Tom's Cabin, this revival of The House of Mirth affords us a unique glimpse at our social history as reflected by the theatre of a bygone era.

The production is fine. John Kristiansen's costumes are lovely and appropriate, and Vickie Davis's unit setting is supremely evocative and surprisingly effective, making excellent use of the Mint's tiny stage. Lisa M. Bostnar is exquisite as Lily, capturing all of the guileless gallantry of this sad woman; at times she brings to mind Blanche DuBois, in the sense that Lily has come so poignantly and foolishly to the end of her rope; other times, she reminded me of Regina Giddens, a woman forced by the mores of her time to relinquish control of her life to the men around her. The House of Mirth is a splendid showcase for the talents of Ms. Bostnar, and her performance alone makes this production well worth seeing.

But of course others in the company are doing excellent work here as well. I was particularly struck by G.R. Johnson as callow Ned Silverton, Michael Stebbins as stuffy, henpecked Percy, Mike Hodge as expansive, egotistical Gus Trenor, and Jennifer Chudy as Gerty, Lily's one true stalwart friend. Director Jonathan Bank moves the story along masterfully with great sensitivity and intelligence. He and his company paint a vivid picture of a milieu built around rumor and greed and self-interest, affording us the chance to see how far we've come--and, perhaps, how little things have changed--since Miss Wharton's day.

The Talley family is ostensibly headed by Eldon, the prosperous, middle-aged proprietor of a successful clothing business that is thriving selling uniforms to the Armed Services (the play takes place on the fourth of July, 1944, during World War II).  Eldon has two sons, Timmy and Buddy, both fighting in the war but coming home for the holiday because their grandfather, Old Mr. Talley, has taken a turn for the worse and, it is thought, is near death's door. Mr. Talley has rallied, and Buddy is back at the Talley home in Missouri; but Timmy, who is the first character we meet, is there only in spirit. At the end of Act One a telegram arrives informing the Talleys that Timmy has been killed in the South Pacific, and it is this event that ultimately triggers the demise of the Talley family.

That family also includes Eldon's wife Netta, Buddy's wife Olive, the aforementioned Sally (Eldon's daughter), and Lottie, Eldon's sharp-tongued, intelligent sister. The only thing that holds the unhappy clan together is a shared faith in the future, a nod toward immortality that, while different in the details for Eldon, Lottie, and their father, nonetheless unites them and forces them to keep the family together. Timmy's death shatters this faith, and we watch, sad and dumbfounded, as the Talleys rip apart in Act Two. It's excruciating but it's also uplifting, especially as we witness Timmy's spirit urging his sister to make a life for herself away from the decay of the dying family.

This is a wonderful play. The writing is beautiful throughout; the characters are compelling and honest and sympathetic even at their most monstrous--Mr. Wilson knows that people have the capacity for great goodness and monumental badness within them, and doesn't shy away from depicting both. The production at Jean Cocteau Repertory, as staged by the company's artistic director Scott Shattuck, is sterling, well-cast and eloquently played, finding all of the warmth and the humor and the sadness contained within this tale; it's a profoundly moving work of theatre. There are two unforgettable performances here: Elise Stone's Lottie, passionate, stolid, and possessed of enormous inner strength; and Craig Smith's Mr. Talley, a manipulative, unyielding old patriarch who is both terrifying and terrified at the prospect of imminent death. Excellent, too, are Harris Berlinsky as Eldon, Tim Deak as Timmy, Patrick Hall as Buddy, and Sidney Markus as Sally; together these six created as believable and organic a family unit as one is likely to see on stage.

It is this sense of closeness, of oneness--which may be a function of working in a repertory company, by the way--that makes the inevitable wrenching apart of that family unit so shattering. There are moments in Talley & Son where unbridled hope for the future and boundless disappointment in the present coexist so sharply that the characters' pain is palpable. Such moments are rare in the theatre, and to be treasured. Unfortunately, Talley & Son is only around for a limited run, so do not dally: hurry to the Bouwerie Lane Theatre for one of the finest productions to reach New York this season.