nytheatre Archive
1999-2000 Theatre Season Reviews

Act Two manages to tie things together, though still somewhat inconclusively and, alas, unsatisfyingly. Hurrah at Last finds Mr. Greenberg, the author of last season's excellent Three Days of Rain, in a contemplatively curmudgeonly mood, as it ruminates on what's true and what's false--what's meaningful and what's execrable--in our pumped-up, hyped-up, value-driven existences. What he has to say here is insightful and interesting but also frustratingly brief: the stylish and zippy dialogue uttered by Mr. Greenberg's angst-ridden yuppie hero and his friends and family add up to rather less than hoped for.

Ah, well: there's still plenty here to savor. It's all about Laurie, a 40-something novelist, author of erudite but relentlessly uncommercial works that make him, in his own words, a "writer's writer," a man whose mother earnestly entreats to try to write as badly as John Grisham so that he might have a bestseller. In Hurrah at Last's first act, Laurie is at an intimate Christmas party at his sister's; battling severe malaise and an even more severe cold, he hides out in the kitchen, where he is nonetheless forced to deal with the banal but defining obsessions of his sister, his brother-in-law, his mother, and his zealously devoted protege Oliver.

The cold develops into something more serious in the play's second half. Laurie is now in the hospital with an undiagnosed and alarming malady. Worse, he finds himself surrounded by the same pack of well-wishers, only this time they don't seem to be wishing him well at all. Laurie complains in Act One that he's tired of validating the illusions of his friends and family; in Act Two all illusions are cast aside as everyone tells Laurie exactly what they think. It's a nightmare, figuratively speaking; also literally, we realize, as it becomes clear that these scenes are fever dreams.

The truth--at least as Laurie sees it--frees him from his angst; Hurrah at Last ends with very little having changed except that Laurie's morose inertia has morphed into a kind of optimism. He has an opening image for the film version of his most difficult book: Thunder, whom he describes poetically as a "vast dog," breaking expensive objects in his sister's chic apartment.

Hurrah at Last functions competently as a morality play; it works rather well, though, as a contemporary comedy of manners. Mr. Greenberg writes pointed, aphoristic dialogue better than anybody nowadays, and Hurrah at Last brims with sparkling examples of same. Listen to Laurie's barbed commentary about his friend Oliver's new play, for example, or his deadly, detached analysis of his parents' combative relationship; you'll see just what I mean.

In Peter Frechette, Mr. Greenberg has the perfect leading man: his Laurie is exasperatingly difficult and exasperatingly always right; he's impossible to like, yet, inexplicably, he has our sympathy from the first moment we meet him. Offering excellent support are Dori Brenner as Laurie's irritating mother, Paul Michael Valley as the effusive Oliver, and Judith Blazer as his thickly-accented Italian wife; Mr. Valley, in particular, delivers a strong comic performance, even as he is required--somewhat gratuitously--to take off all of clothes to prove his devotion to his demanding friend.

David Warren's staging is generally fine, although the disorienting dream sequences in Act Two compare unfavorably with too-similar (but better rendered) counterparts in last year's A New Brain. And Dreyfus, as Hurrah at Last's living and breathing thematic emblem Thunder, is utterly magnificent: he simply drips with charisma.

This is the question at the heart of Arje Shaw's compelling new play The Gathering, now playing at Jewish Repertory Theatre. In it, an elderly Jewish man named Gabe, a survivor of the concentration camps who has made a life for himself in New York, journeys back to Germany forty years after the end of World War II. This trip, at once foolhardy and courageous, is planned as a protest against President Reagan's visit to Bitburg, West Germany, where numerous Nazi soldiers are buried.

But Gabe's trip does not go as planned, particularly when he comes face to face with a young German soldier. The issues surrounding the most supremely evil act of modern times turn out not to clearcut; blame and responsibility are not so easily assigned. At the end of The Gathering, there is a hint that the once implacable Gabe may be able to find some middle ground with this young German and all that he represents. And he may, too, at last come to terms with demons from his own past, demons that have isolated him from his son for many years.

Mr. Shaw's play is an intelligent, though occasionally rambling, examination of many of the issues confronting American Jews today. He considers not only the meaning of the Holocaust here, but also the more fundamental question of what it means to be a Jew. To this end, he gives us a family whose members run the gamut of contemporary Jewish-American experience: The patriarch Gabe is at once an old-world traditionalist and a defiant agnostic who has turned away from God, while his son Stuart is outwardly assimilationist but inwardly devout; Stuart's wife Diane, a Christian who converted to Judaism when she married, wears her new religion comfortably. Gabe's grandson Michael, 13 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah, is simply trying to make sense of all of the conflicting data being telegraphed among the adults around him.

Michael is our guide in this Gathering; Mr. Shaw's play ultimately raises many more questions than it can answer and so we, like Michael, are left to sort through the paradoxes and conundrums and figure it for ourselves.  This makes for stimulating talmudic study, but it's less satisfying as drama; Mr. Shaw might have produced a better play had he not attempted to tackle so many enormous, probably unanswerable problems at one time.

The Gathering is, nevertheless, indisputably compelling theatre. A good deal of the credit for that must go to Theodore Bikel, the veteran actor whose robust, powerhouse portrayal of Gabe gives the play the solid and firm anchor that it needs. Like a modern-day Tevye, Mr. Bikel's Gabe is bombastic yet pensive, stubborn yet questing, and in every way larger than life. He is abetted ably by Jesse Adam Eisenberg, the extraordinary young actor who plays his grandson Michael. Mr. Eisenberg has a naturalness and an ease that serve him extremely well on stage: he makes Michael a completely normal and entirely likable young man. The chemistry between Mr. Bikel and Mr. Eisenberg is remarkable; so strong, in fact, that one is hard-pressed to believe they are not, in real life, grandfather and grandson.

Susan Warrick Hasho and Robert Fass acquit themselves nicely in the smaller roles of Stuart and Diane; Mr. Fass has the harder time, because Mr. Shaw has stacked the deck rather unfairly against Stuart, particularly in Act One. Peter Hermann delivers a resonant performance as the young German soldier who confronts Gabe in the Nazi graveyard.

Plays like The Gathering are important because they remind us of the deeper human crisis that crimes like the Holocaust connote. This forceful drama of remembrance and forgiving has much to tell us about how to live with--and how to live past--these grim and painful shadows of our history.

About the show: It's a short, sweet tribute to the long friendship and occasional theatrical partnership of two legends, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. They met as children, performing arduously in the provinces, and forged a lifelong bond severed only by Ms. Lawrence's untimely death in 1952. Mr. Coward became the most versatile theatre personality of his day, writing and starring in dozens of plays and musicals and composing numerous popular songs. Ms. Lawrence became the toast of London and then New York, starring in hit shows like Lady in the Dark and The King and I. Mr. Coward gave Ms. Lawrence her first hit song ("Parisian Pierrot") and later co-starred with her in his plays Private Lives and Tonight at 8:30. They never worked together after that, although they always intended to.

If Love Were All chronicles all of this, more or less chronologically, and mostly from the point of view of an urbane but often wistful Mr. Coward. (This perspective is not surprising, given that all of the material included in If Love Were All was written by Mr. Coward.)  In between reminiscences, we see loving recreations of the Coward-Lawrence collaborations: the famous balcony scene from Private Lives; two delightful, deliberately corny music hall numbers from Red Peppers (one of the nine plays comprising Tonight at 8:30; the second of these numbers, "Men About Town," was the obvious inspiration for Irving Berlin's "A Couple of Swells"); and a beautiful sequence from Blithe Spirit, which Mr. Coward wrote for Ms. Lawrence (though she never appeared in it).

There are also plenty of vintage Noel Coward tunes, ranging from the mellow "Mad About the Boy" and "Someday I'll Find You" to the devilishly clever "Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington" and "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." And of course there's the title song, done as a sort of valedictory near the evening's end: "If Love Were All" is certainly my favorite in the Coward canon, especially the lyric (which became Mr. Coward's signature) "I believe/That since my life began/The most I have is just/A talent to amuse."

Really, you can't go too far badly with such rich material. Happily, If Love Were All goes enormously well. Twiggy's finest moment comes in the excerpt from Blithe Spirit; some canny producer ought to plan a revival of this comedy with her as the ghostly first wife Elvira. She does well with some of the ballads, too, notably "Mad About the Boy"; and she has lots of fun with the very silly tap specialty "I Like America." There's a moment in this number when she flashes her famous smile, as lovely as ever and yet also somehow self-deprecating: pure magic.

Lest you think that Twiggy is alone out there, let me hasten to add that her co-star, the dapper and elegant Harry Groener, is triumphant as Noel Coward. His renditions of the tongue-twisting comic numbers--especially "Mrs. Worthington"--are superb; he's just as effective delivering the plaintive, supple ballads (particularly the title tune). And the creators of If Love Were All have done Mr. Groener--and the audience--a great favor by inserting an incongruous but very entertaining dance specialty (Mr. Groener is a premier song-and-dance man; remember Crazy For You?).

Don't concern yourself, by the way, with the fact that Mr. Groener and Twiggy don't especially capture the particular magic of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in this show; they have more than enough of their own. This gossamer extravaganza is sheer delight: one of the loveliest evenings I've spent in the theatre in recent memory.

The story takes place on a large, successful ranch, presumably somewhere in the Canadian wilderness--one of those non-specific netherworldly isolated locations where brutal and bizarre goings-on are the norm. The ranch belongs to the aggressively butch Sabina, who dresses in riding clothes and is never without her riding crop, and her daughter Veronica, whose main claims to fame are that she is beautiful and a virgin. Veronica is engaged to be married to Acker, a wealthy neighbor. As the play begins, Sabina is unexpectedly visited by Forrest, the ugly man of the title; he's a fearsomely large and powerful man with the damaged face and deliberate scowling voice of Frankenstein's monster, and he's come for a job. Sabina takes to Forrest immediately, and it's not long before she has promoted him--ostensibly to chauffeur, but in fact to bodyguard-cum-spy for lovely Veronica.

Meanwhile, Acker has arrived for the wedding with his gay brother Leslie and Leslie's hunky friend (and sometime lover) Cole. Veronica and Cole are instantly attracted to one another; it is this event that triggers the spiraling occurences of depravity and murder that quickly overtake the ranch. Forrest turns out to be the catalyst for most of it, with his brutal strength and even more brutal directness proving to be irresistible to Sabina, Leslie, and--most dangerously--Veronica.

On the evidence of other plays like Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, author Brad Fraser probably has more on his mind in The Ugly Man than just frightening his audience. But that's the result: The Ugly Man is gratuitously violent, abrasive, kinky, and amoral; yet it never strays beyond the bounds of camp tastelessness, partly because there are physical limits to the amount of grossness that can be presented on stage, but also because Mr. Fraser never seems to take this bloodfest too seriously. (Note, for example, the casual nonchalance with which the characters treat the ghost of the evening's first murder victim; Mr. Fraser is definitely having fun with us.)

Director Weil Richmond strikes just the right tone in his staging, managing to keep us on the edge of our seats as the plot's depravity (and body count) increases, while at the same time keeping us sufficiently detached from the proceedings so that we won't have bad dreams afterward. To these ends he is ably supported by his design team, most impressively costumer Alexandra Bredenko, whose odd, other-worldly designs emphasize the unreality of the piece, and sound designer Will Pitts, whose wonderfully weird palette of whines, wails, and spooky music evokes the spirit of The Ugly Man with uncanny precision. The company of seven actors is effective as well, with particularly noteworthy work being done by Elena Vilardi as hard-as-nails Sabina and Andrew Robbins as the soulful monster Forrest.

I don't normally enjoy this sort of thing, but I have to hand it to the folks at Mefisto: they've done a sterling job making this rude and angry gorefest into a suspenseful entertainment that is at once compelling and repellent. This is not a show for kids or for the faint of heart or for the easily offended. But if you're in the right mood, The Ugly Man could be just the thing to satisfy those baser entertainment urges that you're ashamed to admit you possess.

Gemini tells the story of Francis Geminiani, a very smart, slightly overweight, utterly insecure young man, about to turn 21. His roots are in the tenements of South Philadelphia, where he lives with his exuberant father Fran and an extended family that consists of his father's short-tempered but genteel ladyfriend Lucille, his slutty neighbor Bunny, and Bunny's fat, backward, genius son Herschel. On the eve of his birthday, Francis gets some unexpected guests, Judith and Randy Hastings, rich WASPs from Harvard, where he goes to school on a scholarship. Their visit is entirely unwelcome, and not just because he is so ashamed and disgusted by his low-class relatives. No, the main problem is that Francis, who has been dating Judith, thinks he may be a homosexual. It's going to be a rough birthday.

The first third of Gemini feels like some weird mutant edition of The Rocky Horror Show, with Judith and Randy as Janet and Brad, fish entirely out of water in the wilds of South Philly. The culture shock is hilariously portrayed by Mr. Innaurato, as Judith and Randy try to process the--shall we say--unusually strong personalities of Francis's clan. Take, for example, this exchange, which occurs almost immediately after Judith and Randy arrive:

Bunny: I'm eatin' light, got stage fright. Gotta go to court today.
Fran: Yeah, why?
Lucille: Oh, Bunny, please, not in front of the kids!
Bunny: That bitch Mary O'Donnel attacked me. I was lyin' there, mindin' my own business, and she walks in, drops the groceries, screams, then throws herself on top a me.
Fran: Where was you lyin'?
Bunny: In bed.
Fran: Whose bed?

It's not long before Herschel is offering to show Randy his collection of subway transfers and Lucille is querying Judith about whether good teeth are required for admission to Yale. Judith and Randy take all this uninhibited eccentricity like good troopers, but you know they must feel like they've landed on Mars.

After they get their bearings, though, attention shifts to Francis's troubles, or at least what he thinks are troubles. Plenty of outsized and outlandish doings transpire before Francis's momentous 21st birthday is through, but underlying all of them is enormous compassion and love; in spite of their boorishness, their self-centeredness, their pigheaded stubbornness, every one of the people in this play genuinely cares for Francis, and somehow they all manage to see him through his crisis and happily and hopefully on his way toward greater self-understanding.

The theme of Gemini, I think, is that all of those gigantic, horrible things that plague us when we're young (like our parents, our sex lives, our career choices) turn out to be not so important with the passage of time. Bunny, who apparently attempts suicide on a fairly regular basis, complains while readying to leap to her death from a telephone pole that she is ugly and has no money and no prospects. Fran replies: "That's been true of my whole life amd you don' see me jumpin' off alley walls and takin' rat poison." Meanwhile Lucille has only one question for the about-to-jump Bunny: "Who's gonna clean it up?" Sometimes a little perspective can go a long way.

Under Mark Brokaw's assured hand, the love and cheer surrounding poor Francis is palpable, though it never defangs the outrageously sour hilarity that Mr. Innaurato has sketched here. All seven characters are sharply cast and played to the hilt: I'll single out Michael Kendrick, a sixteen-year-old actor in his New York debut who makes the relentlessly strange Herschel into an amazingly human and lovable person; Joseph Siravo, wonderfully and uninhibitedly effusive as Francis's dad; and Linda Hart, who more or less stops the show on a couple of occasions as raunchy Bunny. Brian Mysliwy is excellent as Francis, giving the piece the vital, sympathetic, entirely screwed-up center that it needs.

Let me say one more thing about this brilliantly funny production before you order your tickets: seeing Gemini in 1999, more than two decades after its premiere, is to realize how ahead of his time Mr. Innaurato turned out to be in 1977. Gratuitous grossness, foul language, and general excess abound here (though for good reason): there might have been no There's Something About Mary had that never been a Gemini. So go to Second Stage and see how modern comedy is done from the master.

If this were 1939, Gregory Murphy's new play The Countess might be ensconced in a Broadway theatre, where it would play for a full and profitable season before embarking, perhaps, on a year-long tour. Someone like Katherine Cornell would take the title role; she would appear in a dazzling succession of beautiful and extravagant gowns, framed elegantly against an inevitably well-appointed and lavish set. A mogul like Selznick would buy the rights for a movie star like Ingrid Bergman; all of the lush exterior scenes, implied but not included in Murphy's script, would be shot on location in glorious Technicolor, to the delight of moviegoers across the country.

Alas, it's 1999: The Countess is ensconced in a tiny off-off-Broadway house on Theatre Row; modestly produced; sharply but not starrily cast. Mind you, it's still a delight: this period romantic psychological thriller, an exotic blend of Wuthering Heights and Gaslight, makes for theatre that compels and fascinates and enchants. But it's not entirely satisfying, and I think that's mostly because it needs to burst out of the confining space of the Samuel Beckett Theatre. The Countess is Theatre with a capital T, a larger-than-life adventure that finds itself severely constrained by the boundaries imposed by today's economic realities. Too bad, too, because in the right venue, with appropriately outsized staging and performances, it could really soar.

As it is, we must content ourselves with the pleasures that this scaled-down Countess provides, which, fortunately, are many. The greatest is the story itself, a truly wonderful find from the annals of British art history, masterfully crafted by the talented Murphy (whose first play, astonishingly, this is) into a gripping drama. Set in the 1850s, it concerns the eminent art critic John Ruskin; his protege Everett Millais, a young pre-Raphaelite painter; and his wife, Effie, who finds herself caught between the passions of these two men. The Ruskins and Millais journey to Scotland for a summer of relaxation and inspiration. There, Effie and Everett fall in love, precipitating a scandal that threatens to rock the comfortable world of the Ruskins and their circle.

Murphy is at his best bringing Effie and Everett's romance to life: the scenes depicting its blossoming, quietly polite in accordance with Victorian mores, nevertheless burst with erotic electricity. The moment when these two finally bring themselves to call each other by their first names, for example, feels as passionate as the most ardent of love-making. And the scene in which Effie gives Everett a haircut rivals the eating scene in Tom Jones in its transformation of the most commonplace of activities into something spectacularly sexy.

Characterization is bit less sure, here; it's hard to tell whether the problem lies with Murphy's writing or the actors' playing. But Effie (Jennifer Woodward) comes across in the early scenes more timorous than willful--more Joan Fontaine than Jennifer Jones, if you will--which makes what follows a bit harder to accept. And Ruskin (James Riordan), conceived here as a rather arch and effete closet case, gives it all away much too soon: I think we need to like him and feel sorry for him before we come to understand his true nature.

Effie's confidante Lady Eastlake (Kristin Griffith) veers uncomfortably toward broadness: the scene in which she faces down Ruskin's intimidating and narrow-minded parents is the comic highlight of the play but it doesn't really feel organically part of it; Griffith has a field day nonetheless. Only ardent young Millais strikes me as a consistently realized creation, especially as exuberantly embodied by the dashing and earnest Jy Murphy. Murphy and Griffith make their characters ten times larger than life: they have found the outsized style that The Countess needs to really make it breathe.

Rest assured, however, that this production of The Countess is far from stillborn: in its cleverness and elegance, in its impassioned commitment to tell a passionate story, it is without peer among the plays currently on the boards in New York. The Countess is a well-made play, telling an interesting though uncomplicated story of romance and intrigue in a straightforward and linear manner (and in high style, to boot). Old-fashioned?--absolutely, but entirely welcome. It's a bit of a disappointment that our current theatre conventions can't quite support this sort of thing. But it's wonderful that someone is giving it such a game and rewarding try. 

In the first of the five long scenes that comprise The Voysey Inheritance, we find out just what this eponymous bequest is all about. It takes place in the offices of Trenchard Voysey, Sr., a well-to-do, highly respected London solicitor; the year is 1911. Edward, Mr. Voysey's youngest son and partner, comes to see him, clearly distracted and disturbed. He has been studying some files given him by his father and what he has discovered shocks him: Mr. Voysey has been secretly skimming off the capital of various of the firm's clients, essentially stealing money from them to subsidize his family's extravagant lifestyle. Because he consistently pays them the interest due on their non-existent investments, and because whenever a trust comes due he always scrapes together enough cash to pay it out, he has never gotten caught.

The inheritance turns out to be more than just the not insubstantial debt that Mr. Voysey will leave for Edward to repay to the firm's customers, however. It is--more significantly--the way of looking at life that has allowed Mr. Voysey to play so fast and loose with assets not his own. Mr. Voysey is a great capitalist and a greater pragmatist: for him, desirable ends justify any means whatsoever. His dream of being a rich and respected man of society, and of providing same to his family, is tantamount in his life and precludes any question of morality. In a way, he's Willy Loman made good; but the corrupt, phony values that he has bought into and that have earned him his fortune threaten to irredeemably damage his son's life anyway.

Or do they? One of the great strengths of this play is its unwillingness, finally, to judge the motives or deeds of its characters; and the ending is deliberately ambiguous: I'm not quite sure whether it is Edward or his father who emerges triumphant when The Voysey Inheritance is done. The playwright Harley Granville-Barker considers various aspects of the complex moral and ethical dilemmas that he poses. So, for example, when Edward confesses to an old family friend that his father naturally took larger sums from him than from strangers, that brusque old gentleman counters that as an old friend he would have expected to have been stolen from the least. The Voysey Inheritance sends us away pondering questions like these, questions that can only be answered when we search our souls for what finally matters in life.

That's why this is such a stimulating and lively piece of theatre: it resonates throughout with issues that engage our attention in this market-obsessed age. Indeed, a great deal of the talk is dry and fairly complex discussion of financial matters; I'll wager that these are the parts of the play that modern audiences most enjoy.

Mr. Granville-Barker has surrounded the two Mr. Voyseys with a large and articulate family with concerns of their own; they provide a suitable domestic backdrop for the central dramatic situation. Most compelling is the story of Mr. Voysey's middle son Booth, a pompous and egocentric major in His Majesty's Army, and his intellectual wife Beatrice. Beatrice confesses early on that she married Booth for his money, which makes her every bit the conniving and self-aware capitalist that her father-in-law is. Her inability to live with herself--and her unwillingness to do anything about it--provides a slightly tragic counterpoint to Edward's dilemma.

Gus Kaikkonen has done a splendid job staging The Voysey Inheritance, and he has been well-served by set designer Vicki R. Davis and costume designer Henry Shaffer. The play has been cast sharply, with excellent performances by George Morforgen as Mr. Voysey, Sr., Sally Kemp as his wife, Jack Koenig as Booth, and Lisa Bostnar as Beatrice. Fine, too, are Kurt Everhart as Voysey's somewhat slippery clerk Peacey, and Chet Carlin as the old family friend George Booth. Mr. Carlin embodies the sort of greedy gentility that borders on actual evil; it's an attitude that's too familiar among certain political leaders of today.

Kraig Swartz has the leading role of Edward Voysey, and he is superb as this conflicted young man who wants to do the right thing--if only he can figure out what that is. Mr. Swartz leads the ensemble impressively and commandingly in several of the key set pieces of the play, such as the post-funeral scene when he tells the family about his father's indiscretions, or the opening scene of Act Two, in which he spars sharply and sardonically with both Peasey and Mr. Booth. It's a performance that is at once thoroughly riveting and entirely believable; Mr. Swartz is an actor we should keep an eye on.

Kudos, then, to everyone involved with this marvelously successful production. These folks are to be commended for bringing this excellent and still timely play not only to our attention but to such vivid life. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear more about The Voysey Inheritance in the near future.

And yet I have very mixed feelings about bash. Its subject matter--good people doing evil, according to its author; more specifically, two cases of infanticide and one brutal incident of gay bashing--is inherently horrific and sensational. Its presentation, in sharp and deliberate contrast, is cool and sleek and devastatingly self-aware. bash is about the pent-up anger of seemingly ordinary people, but it's not at all an angry play. No, it's a cruel play--terribly cruel--and as I sat watching it in the theatre, and as I thought about it on the subway on the way home, I found myself coming back to the same question: what propelled Mr. LaBute to write this?

This is important, I think. The director, Joe Mantello, and the actors are clearly attracted by the possibilities that this material provides them to explore and grow as artists. And audiences are hooked by the stellar names involved: bash is an attention-getter, and a mostly pre-sold hit. So the content of Mr. LaBute's work is significant: what, exactly, is Mr. LaBute trying to say to us?

In the first piece, a long monologue called Medea Redux, delivered in arresting darkness by a deglamourized Calista Flockhart, a young woman describes her seduction, at thirteen, by a junior high school teacher, an act that eventually leads to the birth of a child and, later, its murder. The second piece, another monologue titled Iphegenia in Orem, is set in a Las Vegas hotel room and is a narration (performed by Ron Eldard) of certain aspects of the life of a young Mormon businessman; one aspect covered is the murder of his infant baby daughter. After an intermission, Ms. Flockhart returns with Paul Rudd in A Gaggle of Saints, two monologues, deftly interwoven, that recount the events of a weekend trip to Manhattan taken by a group of students from Boston College, which culminate in a brutal gay-bashing in a Central Park men's room.

Three crimes, at least two of them fatal, described unflinchingly and in detail; three criminals, calculatedly acting out their murderous impulses, coldly remorseless or at least resigned to their capacity to do evil. And so the question, again: what is Mr. LaBute trying to tell us?

There's a Mormon connection, clearly: bash's subtitle is "latterday plays," an allusion to the Church of Latter-Day Saints; and all of his characters are Mormon (as is Mr. LaBute). I don't know what to make of any of this, however. There's also a connection to classical tragedy: the first two pieces run strongly parallel to the famous legends after which they are named. But Mr. LaBute's characters have none of  the larger-than-life passion of great tragedy in either word or deed; the evil that they do, and the suffering that follows, is banal.

So I'm perplexed about bash. I am certain, however, that Ms. Flockhart, famous now for her work on the sitcom Ally McBeal, is a formidable actress, delivering the Medea monologue with detached intensity and creating an instantly recognizable and believable (and entirely different) character in A Gaggle of Saints, as the pretty, self-absorbed girlfriend of a very disturbed young man.  And Mr. Rudd, as that young man, is nothing short of superb, capturing all the goofiness and insecurity of a 20-year-old, as well as the latent rage, some hormonal, some deeper. Mr. Rudd's villain is the scariest in bash, partly because he seems so nice and ordinary, and partly because he, among Mr. LaBute's three protagonists, seems most likely to kill again.

Which, I suppose, might be what Mr. LaBute is about here: inside even the best of us, does not the capacity to do great harm to others exist? And to do it again and again and again?

Maybe he just wants to shock us. He succeeds ably at this: I noticed more than once during the performance I attended that audience members were covering their ears to avoid hearing what was being described on stage. Although he's not always as skillful a dramatist as he might be (the decision to have Mr. Eldard's character talking to some unseen confessor is an especially unwise one), Mr. LaBute is a masterful spinner of tales. We can only wonder what demons lead him to tell such cruel ones.

Benten Kozo is, in fact, an authentic Japanese play, written in the mid-19th century by Kawatake Mokuami, who was, according to the program, "the last great Kabuki playwright." It is a grand, epic melodrama about a roving band of samurai gangsters, a princess searching for her lost fiancé, and two orphan children separated from their parents at birth: a rambling, event-driven affair brimming with chance meetings, unlikely coincidences, and identities both mistaken and assumed. However, although Benten Kozo has enough plot for at least two normal plays, it turns out that story is the least of it. Benten Kozo is actually one-half sprawling adventure yarn (providing lots of opportunities for exacting stage combat), and one-half sentimental, romantic idyll (with ample space for interpolated songs, dances, and similar set pieces).

In other words, Benten Kozo is pure theatre, through and through. This is undoubtedly what attracted Bat Theatre Company artistic director Jim Simpson to it, and this production, which he adapted and directed, reflects an unabashed love for the innate theatricality of Kabuki while at the same time finding contemporary idioms through which to filter some of its foreign and outdated sensibilities. The result--a resounding success--is a very hip, '90s, American take on the styles and conventions of Kabuki; and at the same time, an equally hip, '90s, American comment on what Kabuki embodies and what Kabuki means. But of course it's never as academic as that last sentence might suggest: Mr. Simpson's Benten Kozo is too high-spirited and too high-energy to ever feel like the lesson in cultural history that it actually is.

And so we thrill to the exploits of the master gangster Daemon and her fearless warriors Nango, Tadanobu, and Benten Kozo; but at the same time we laugh at the foolishness of what they are being made to do and at the pungently witty way that Mr. Simpson and his cast and crew are sending it up. Observe, for example, the endlessly exaggerated ways that each of these brave and heroic creatures sound out their names, booming clarion calls designed to bring immortality to otherwise mortal men. This is, in fact, very much what real Kabuki feels like; yet as performed here by Nicole Kovacs, Dan Gurian, Sam Marks, and Jun Kim, it also feels very funny and very silly: the ultimate test of honor and bravado among a gang of immature, insecure, posturing macho clowns.

There are places where the deliberate anachronisms don't quite work: a long musical sequence at the end of Act One, for example, in which a chorus of one (a lounge singer who reminded me of k.d. lang) sings accompaniment while the princess and an unhappy servant attempt suicide, doesn't particularly scan well (and it goes on too long). But generally Mr. Simpson's multi-cultural, multi-layered approach is extremely successful, and it is beautifully sustained and supported by his company and crew. Especially noteworthy is the work of costume designer Moe Schell, who has found, in brightly-colored T-shirts and eccentric leatherwear, the perfect contemporary equivalent of the richly-patterned robes we associate with Japanese theatre.

Superb comic performances are offered by Natasha Piletch as a scheming servant named Tenzo, Dan Winerman as an unctuous floorwalker in a tailor shop, and Paul Siemens as a pert lady-in-waiting to the princess. And everyone in this energetic cast deserves recognition for expertly executing the exciting and athletic choreography that punctuates nearly every scene and climaxes in a couple of really exuberant battles. The musical score, written and directed by Michael Mills and performed by David Geist (bass) and Jeremy Blynn (percussion), is enormously effective.

So, to conclude: if you see only one Kabuki-musical-gangsta-comedy-anime-action thriller this summer, make sure it's Benten Kozo. I had a great time, and I bet you will too; it's one of the most imaginative, entertaining, and fun theatre experiences around.

This is an amazing piece of playwriting. It's epic in scope but intimate in execution; it's entirely faithful to its historical subject matter yet fully contemporary stylistically and thematically. It tells, more or less linearly, the story of the Revolutionary War, beginning with the Boston Massacre (where a disorderly British soldier is tarred and feathered by an angry American mob), right up to the defeat of the Redcoats at Yorktown and the subsequent signing of the Treaty of Paris by King George III, affirming the existence of the new United States of America. Along the way, we witness the growth of George Washington from reluctant candidate for general to victorious commander-in-chief--the transformation of a good man into a great one, an ordinary mortal into a legend.

We also meet Benedict Arnold, and watch spellbound as his frustration and anger over not receiving his due from General Washington eventually pushes him to commit the only act that he is remembered for: selling secret war plans to the British army and becoming the most famous traitor in American history. Arnold's story serves an interesting counterpoint to Washington's, the arcs of the two men's careers intersecting and then trailing off in opposite directions.

On hand, too, are such luminaries as John Adams, John Hancock, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Marquis de Lafayette, Aaron Burr, and many others familiar from history books (even--in passing--Nathan Hale); all deftly and economically sketched by Mr. Bromley and all representing different, though very recognizable, types of Americans.

But the real heroes of The American Revolution are The Rebel Mess, a ragtag group of five militia men who participate, usually unwillingly and often unwittingly, in some of the most important engagements of the war. (They eventually help capture Major Andre, the British agent who conspired with Benedict Arnold.) This quintet is led by the drunken, barely competent Captain Gutbreath; its other members, comprising a very 1990s-style cross-section of humanity, include Salem Poor, a runaway slave; Molly Pitcher, who may or may not be a man in drag; Tom Dodge, a wispy, whitebread intellectual; and Johnny Freeman, a rowdy, raucous rebel without a cause. Freeman's name is no accident: he is the embodiment of that most basic attribute of Americans, liberty. He's also a modern cousin to the slow-thinking, fast-talking, All-American hero of literature and drama, from Huckleberry Finn to George M. Cohan: the epitome of the American Spirit.

Playwright Kirk Wood Bromley weaves together the stories of all these disparate folk into a seamless, breathless whole. His American Revolution succeeds beautifully as a sharp, sly yarn about an important but neglected moment from our past: a wiseacre history lesson given a satiric, contemporary spin. But there's more to it than that. The American Revolution, carefully constructed to exploit the old saw about history repeating itself, is filled with resonant themes and images for the modern audience. This is a play not only about what Americans were, but what they are. And the main distinction--in this cynical era of ours--is how much we may have lost sight of the vision that the founders of this nation once had.

Mr. Bromley, who has written The American Revolution in both verse and prose, is ably served by this production. Director Emma Griffin has staged the play with sass and simplicity, giving it the kind of anarchic, free-spirited feel that it requires. Louisa Thompson has provided a versatile unit set that takes us, in our imaginations, from the steamy chambers of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to the frozen encampments of Valley Forge. And Alexander Dodge has designed hip and often humorous costumes that remind us of the timelessness of this tale.

The company of nineteen actors (playing more than seventy roles) is nothing short of extraordinary. In a bit of non-traditional casting, General Washington is played by a woman, Sheri Graubert, for no reason that I can see other than that she acts the part well. Some of the most memorable turns include Matt Peterson as a likeable, young and conscientious Alexander Hamilton (think Michael J. Fox in Family Ties);  Dan Illian as a strong-willed and temperamental Benedict Arnold; Lily Koster as a wry, wise Benjamin Franklin; and Al Benditt in a number of roles, including a very political John Adams and a very poetical hangman. Perhaps the most invaluable member of this ensemble, though, is Hank Wagner, who delivers a stellar performance as Johnny Freeman, accompanying himself (and others) on guitar with verve and brio.

The American Revolution is serious and funny, passionate and irreverent, authentically historic and completely up-to-date: as full of contradictions as America itself. It is also, I think, the finest work yet from Mr. Bromley; and among the finest new American plays of 1999. As well-produced as it is here, I'd love to see this play in a commercial venue, lavishly and lovingly staged by someone with the deep pockets that a work this important deserves.

But don't wait for that to happen: see The American Revolution now. You'll find yourself in for an exciting and invigorating theatre experience.

VELO/CITY is a day in the lives of three office worker bees, men whose (unnamed) job is rather like the one that Chandler Bing from Friends started out with (remember the WENUS?). They wake, grab their briefcases, and hit the street, competing venally for taxicabs that never come. They arrive in the office and put their various office supplies through rigorous paces. They take a break. They journey back home on the subway; they sleep, they dream.

Nothing extraordinary about any of it--until, that is, Mr. Lonergan gets his hands on it. Then the banalities of these men's existences are transformed into a glorious comic ballet that illustrates the minute-to-minute intensity and the overriding foolishness of the way all of us behave as we go through the motions of earning a living in this last decade of the 20th century. The briefcases are passed back and forth in a juggling free-for-all; the routine office tasks are performed as a percussive fugue for stapler, calculator, and pencil sharpener; the coffee break becomes a surreal show-stopping dance number featuring echoes of Astaire, street breakdancing, and Riverdance-ish Irish clog. It's at once joyously fresh and pointedly satirical, put over with breathtaking precision and perfect timing by Mr. Lonergan's talented and boundlessly energetic trio.

It's also very funny: Mr. Lonergan isn't afraid to use the oldest or silliest sight gag if it suits his purpose, and so it's no surprise to find a giant imaginary cockroach, signs that say "KICK ME," and big, floppy inflatable dolls crowded among the props and shtick included in VELO/CITY. All of them, no matter how corny, work within the context of this piece, combining to turn the mundane daily routine of these three characters into a unique and exciting work of art.

VELO/CITY is the last act of a triple bill dubbed 108 Degrees--I'm not sure why--by Mr. Lonergan. The opening act is a short, sentimental pantomime by Mary Purdy about a musician who comes to the big city in search of fame and fortune. At the performance I attended, the second act was an eccentric dance medley by a veteran tap/hat dancer named Rod Pallone. (In subsequent shows, he is replaced by Amy Gordon and Michelle Matlock in a piece called A Tale of Two Sillies.) Each exemplifies a tradition of silent performance, and each is clearly a personal expression of its creator(s). As in last year's Tenement Vaudeville, Mr. Lonergan is looking for a way to make oldtime vaudeville viable for contemporary audiences. And here, as then, he only partly succeeds: 108 Degrees conjures the spirit of the two-a-day (or, more accurately, the five-a-day) but not its scrappy personality. Only in his own work--VELO/CITY, I mean--do we feel the vitality and ingenuity that I think Mr. Lonergan wants us to feel in 108 Degrees.

One word of advice: the theatre is not air conditioned, so sit near one of the numerous electric fans scattered throughout the auditorium to ensure your comfort. But--lest you be discouraged from journeying down to the Lower East Side to see 108 Degrees--bear in mind that even on a warm summer night, few things are so invigorating as a first glimpse at the work of an exciting and original new theatre artist. VELO/CITY provides just such a glimpse, and it tantalizes us with the prospect of what the remarkable and talented Mr. Lonergan will give us next.

They worked together only one time, but the play--Pygmalion--was perhaps the biggest success of either career. Mrs. Campbell was the first to portray Eliza Dolittle, the stage's most famous cockney flower seller; in Dear Liar's wonderful first act set piece, we get to witness the molding of a landmark performance by a great theatre star at the peak of her powers. The brilliant "at-home" scene is recreated here, as played, tentatively but broadly, by Mrs. Campbell on the fourth or fifth day of rehearsal. (Recall that this is the scene where Eliza visits Henry Higgins's mother for tea, and then regales that lady and her guests with her theories about her aunt's demise: "Them what done her in would have done it for a hatpin, let alone a hat.") Ms. Seldes bites into this assignment with relish: she delivers Eliza's lines, which, in my opinion, are among the funniest ever written, in a delicious mannered style that suggests what the old-fashioned, unrealistic acting of Mrs. Campbell must have been like. And she doesn't miss a single laugh.

Astonishingly, this hilarious scene is topped in the second act of Dear Liar. Here Mrs. Campbell and Mr. Shaw read a scene from one of his later plays, The Apple Cart, which features a pair of characters rather frankly modeled on themselves. Ms. Seldes does a grand turn as a seasoned actress doing a showy cold read, but this time it is Mr. Donnelly who threatens to steal the show, giving us just the sort of grotesquely bad acting that could only come from an unrepentantly proud playwright. It is not the words themselves but the brio with which they are spoken by these two egomaniacs that makes this scene so singularly delightful.

Much of the text of Dear Liar was written by Mr. Shaw, taken either from his plays or his letters; it is therefore no surprise that it is so literate and so funny. Neither, though, should we be surprised by its political and social content, by its forthrightness, or by its sometimes dour and unremitting pessimism. Lots of ground gets covered here: not just the theatrical careers of the two characters, but also their marriages, their families, and their economic circumstances, always set within the larger context of a world that both find themselves less and less able to understand. The deaths of Shaw's mother and Mrs. Campbell's son inspire some of the most moving moments in the play; and the sad, inexorable decline of both into old age provides the backdrop for its sweetly touching conclusion.

This production of Dear Liar, smoothly staged by Irish Repertory's artistic director Charlotte Moore, is first and foremost a showcase for its two actors; indeed, I don't know where else in New York right now you can see such wonderfully assured, bravura star turns as the ones given here by Mr. Donnelly and Ms. Seldes. He is brittle and dry and staunchly curmudgeonly, yet the sentimental heart underneath is never entirely absent: it's a characterization that is at once sly, wicked, and utterly appealing. As for the commanding Ms. Seldes, she is in her element as a Great Star, chewing any and all scenery that happens to be close at hand with zest and flair. Yet this is also a performance of surprising depth and nuance: watch how Ms. Seldes transforms herself, first (through, one imagines, sheer force of will) into an almost convincingly 19-year-old Eliza Dolittle in the Pygmalion segment; and then, in Dear Liar's final scenes, into an increasingly frail and stooped old lady.

Let me conclude by telling you that Ms. Moore's designers have done magnificent work here. The set, by David Raphel, is an ingeniously lovely concatenation of two very tasteful but very different rooms, one Mr. Shaw's imposing study, the other Mrs. Campbell's airier drawing room. The lighting, designed by Gregory Cohen, is subtle and inconspicuous and always sets exactly the right mood. Best of all are the costumes, by David Toser: a pair of conservative suits for Mr. Shaw, and three stunning gowns for Mrs. Campbell, the second of which--a lavish brocade in shades of purple--is almost a show-stopper all by itself. Mrs. Campbell's wardrobe is cannily set off by some lovely and authentic antique jewelry, including an eye-catching comb of amber and marcasite and several rich-looking bracelets of burnished gold.

In every department, then, this is a production to treasure. Dear Liar offers us two marvelous actors, acting marvelously, and a witty and literate script, liberally sprinkled with the thoughts and bon mots of one of the finest writers of this century; all contained in a beautifully realized physical production that truly glitters. In every way enlarging and uplifting, it makes a night at the theatre feel like a special occasion--something that happens far too rarely these days. Dear Liar only plays a limited engagement through the end of the summer, so don't miss it: you'll have a grand time.

Here's what happened: just days after the world learned about the sinking of the Titanic, the U.S. Senate launched an inquiry into the accident, unshakably determined to uncover the truth and--most important--assign the blame. Surviving passengers and crew members were questioned, as were members of the crew of another ship, the Californian. The Californian, you may recall, was the closest vessel to the Titanic at the time that it struck the iceberg, yet the men on board apparently ignored the Titanic's distress signals.

On the Middle Watch distills the grueling and harrowing testimony of these witnesses--more than two thousand pages in all--into 2 1/2 hours of gripping and suspenseful drama. Act One focuses on the Titanic survivors and passengers, most still more or less shell-shocked, recounting the events that they alone lived through in grim and terrifying detail. Through it all a sad but intractable fact emerges to illuminate the true nature of the tragedy: that everyone was unable to do much good in the face of the horrendous catastrophe facing them; that in the end all that anyone could do was try to save himself or herself and whoever might be nearby. Virtually all of the survivors share one memory--the awful sound of the screams of the hundreds who drowned. Such was the final existential legacy of the night to remember.

Act Two deals with the far less familiar story of the men on board the Californian, especially the officer and apprentice who were on duty from midnight to four a.m., the "middle watch" that gives the play its name. What they saw, or thought they saw, surprised me: it accounts for everything that happened on the Titanic that night and, more importantly, it explains why no one on the Californian felt the need to provide any assistance. This material is the best in the play: once you hear 2nd Officer Stone's description of the Titanic's sinking, you'll never forget it.

In the best traditions of courtroom drama, On the Middle Watch builds to an exciting climax in which the Senators conducting the inquest attempt to "break" Captain Lord, the commanding officer of the Californian. But, though he can be blamed, he can't really be broken: the moral quandary at the center of the play remains unresolved at its end.

Indeed, unresolvable: On the Middle Watch, despite its deep roots in an event that happened almost ninety years ago, is as timely as today's news: the embarrassing attempts of the media to find a scapegoat for the accident that killed John F. Kennedy, Jr. are only the most recent examples of our futile obsession with explaining things that can't be explained. Maury Yeston has the ship's designer sing the line "I'm just in the business of building/It's God who sinks ships" in his musical Titanic; that's the point.

So On the Middle Watch gives us plenty to reflect upon as it spins its relentless and intriguing narrative of inquest and inquiry. Author Nicholas van Hoogenstraten has done a masterful job arranging the material, shaping it to particular good effect in Act Two, which is as exciting as any Perry Mason clone you've ever seen. And director Reagan Fletcher has staged the play extremely well. I especially liked the way Mr. Fletcher cast his actors in very different roles in the two acts, so that (for example) Matthew McIver plays the Titanic's earnest lookout Frederick Fleet in Act One and the Californian's rather belligerent radio officer Ernest Gill in Act Two.

All twelve of the performers do fine work here, notably Jeff Croteau as the injured Titanic radioman Harold Bride, Philippe Brenninkmeyer as officers on both ships, Vincent Wares as Titanic survivor Archibald Gracie, and Fred Burrell and Larry Swanson as the relentless grandstanding U.S. Senators who conduct the hearings with righteous indignation and moral outrage. They are the only characters in On the Middle Watch who weren't there on April 15, 1912, yet that are the ones who shriek the loudest. They search fervently, ardently, for the truth, but in the end they cannot understand what happened at all.

One final note: the producers have secured the rights to a digital recording of the actual steam whistle used on the Titanic, which they play twice during On the Middle Watch. This whistle, the largest of its kind ever built, hasn't been heard since it went down with the ship. It is, quite apart from this excellent play, a wondrous thing to experience.

Temporarily Yours, is about Pasha, a smart but otherwise rather ordinary woman, stuck in a dead-end job and living a fairly lonely and unsatisfying (though far from miserable) existence in Manhattan. At the office Christmas party one year, Pasha meets Tom, who works as a temp on the 47th floor. Tom is youthful, sexy, funny, outrageous, fearless, and more than a little dangerous, and Pasha is immediately attracted to him, in spite of--or maybe particularly because of--the fact that he is also gay. They become fast friends, and then roommates. The title gives away the outcome--I won't tell you exactly how; the play's end finds Pasha once again alone, but irrevocably changed.

The play's title also gives us clues to Mr. Connell's intentions. Temporarily Yours, is, I think, mostly about the impermanence of the most important and most fundamental things that make up a life; and about the fears--some, like the specter of AIDS, all too real--that prevent us from committing to those things. Mr. Connell can't resolve the paradox (who can?): nothing lasts, but the only things worth having are the things that do.

Mr. Connell has included a comma at the end of his play's name, and he means it to be there. (In fact, I received a friendly but scolding e-mail from David Scott, who is Distilled Spirits' producing director, reminding me to include it in my listing.) Mr. Connell isn't being quirky or self-indulgent; in some ways, that comma is emblematic of what Temporarily Yours, is about: not so much the metaphorical pause for breath between events in our lives (though it is that), but the connective punctuation that signifies that something important has happened and promises that something even more important is about to come.

Such were some of the thoughts that crossed my mind after viewing Temporarily Yours,. Mind you, it's not all there yet: the final scene of the play meanders badly, and throughout there is still too much information about both Pasha and Tom that is missing. But what's here now is always interesting and sometimes really original and lovely. Mr. Connell has a poetic streak, and the best parts of Temporarily Yours, come when he lets it run loose, as in Tom's opening monologue, for example, a breathtaking beat-poetic riff about sex and the city. The play is structured in fragments rather than traditional scenes, some of which are truly skillful and original, like the aerobics workout montage entitled "An Exercise in Futility" during which we see Pasha and Tom's relationship deepen and falter at the same time. At moments like this, Temporarily Yours, dazzles with its theatricality and insight.

Mr. Scott has staged Temporarily Yours, on a simple and remarkably versatile unit set (beautifully lit by designer Doug Filomena), dominated by a large bed and surrounded by surtitles that delineate the course of the play. Mr. Connell plays Tom with a mix of galling selfishness and sad vulnerability that feels entirely natural; we all know people like him, who can get under our skin in good and bad ways at the same time. Ms. Macy is superb as the questing Pasha, in a performance that runs the gamut from self-pitying desperation to assured self-reliance, and back again, in little more than an hour.

Few experiences are more gratifying than witnessing the genesis of a venture that bespeaks talent, craft, and courage. Temporarily Yours, which continues in this premiere production for just one week more, seems destined to be just such a venture. I expect we will be hearing more from Mr. Connell and his colleagues at Distilled Spirits soon.

The story, which is based on fact, is about five teenagers living in District Six in South Africa in the late 1950s, during the early days of Apartheid. They're just ordinary kids: Kat, a happy-go-lucky free spirit; Bingo, a girl-chaser who's constantly combing his eyebrows; Ballie, slightly dim but very good-natured; Magoo, a slight, geeky rich kid; and Lucy, Magoo's tough but loving older sister. Goofing around on the street one day, the boys discover they can sing pretty harmonies, and what's more that they really like doing so. With Lucy's help, they hone their harmonizing into an act, and they soon find themselves booked as singers at a local hotel. Calling themselves the Cavalla Kings (after a brand of cigarettes), Kat and his friends become a hit, and within a couple of years they are cutting records and performing in exclusive nightspots throughout South Africa. But the tightening restrictions of Apartheid, along with the inevitable changes that accompany growing up, combine to pull the group apart.

The story is narrated by an older version of Kat, a spry middle-aged man in his late fifties whom we encounter at the start of the show on a street in contemporary Cape Town. He's shining shoes there, so we know right away how Kat's life is going to turn out. And so the sheer joy that Kat and his pals experience as they discover their gifts and make their big (but temporary) splash is tinged with poignancy.

But only a little: the creators of this show never allow us to get maudlin, indeed never stay too long in one place to let us worry about anything. Kat and the Kings bounds from one potent musical number to another with buoyant pleasure. Act One is mostly about the evolution of the young Cavalla Kings, from their earliest impromptu collaboration in a local hangout ("American Thing") through their debut at the Tafelberg Hotel ("Lonely Girl"). These songs resonate with the utter exhilaration of youth.

Act Two finds the group on the road. Its centerpiece is an explosive 20-minute medley of the Kings' greatest hits, an energetic mélange of rock 'n' roll pastiche songs alternately peppy ("The Singing Sensation"), silly ("The Invisible Dog"), and sexy ("Hey Baby"). The company tears through this medley with such vibrant passion that the house combusts; I've never seen anything quite like it in a Broadway theatre. And then they follow up this show-stopping sequence, after a brief scene in which the story's loose ends are tied up, with a sensational finale that has the audience clapping, cheering, and on their feet.

Apartheid lingers as subtext throughout Kat and the Kings, giving the show depth. But its real substance comes in the contrast between the omnipresent older Kat and the younger version of himself and his friends, reminding us, touchingly, of the arrogance and the possibilities of youth.

The real business of Kat and the Kings, though, is to entertain the audience, and here it is resoundingly successful. The songs are tuneful and the lyrics are witty, with not a dud in the bunch. Saul Radomsky's costumes are bright and colorful and fun.  The choreography, by co-stars Jody Abrahams and Loukmaan Adams, is original and energetic.

And then there's the cast. Each of these six amazing performers can, apparently, do everything: they sing, dance, clown, and act with astonishing flair. Each, too, gets at least one moment in the spotlight: Terry Hector, as the older Kat, cuts the rug vigorously in "If You Shoes Don't Shine"; Alistair Izobell as the goofy Magoo sings in a clear falsetto and executes complicated comic dance moves in numbers like "Blind Date"; Junaid Booysen shines as the Charlie Brown-ish Bingo in the very funny "Josephine"; Kim Louis sings wistfully and powerfully about a time when Apartheid won't exist in the anthemic "Shine"; and Loukmaan Adams as Bingo sings and dances sublimely and effortlessly in numbers like "The Bell Hop."

Jody Abrahams, who plays the Young Kat, is first among equals. In Mr. Abrahams we are witnessing a star in the making: this young man has talent and charisma to burn. Watch him do some impossibly complicated dance steps in a song like "The Singing Sensation," and then watch him work the audience in the sexy number "Hey Baby" and you'll see what I mean.

Enough said: buy your tickets to Kat and the Kings and have a grand time at the show.

On the Clock opens with the deceptively affable How to Entertain the Rich. Six people, presumably actors, line up across the stage and discuss, among themselves but obviously for the audience's edification and enjoyment, how to entertain the rich. You see the self-referential nature of this: they are entertaining the rich (i.e., us) by talking about how to entertain the rich; grab hold of this concept and you're well on your way to grasping Mr. Hopkins's meaning.

The third play of the evening, titled The Installation, is similarly recursive: two actors portraying technicians of some sort--cable TV installers, perhaps?--tell the audience about what they do. What they do, they say, is provide their customers with the means to accomplish something, apparatus that enables people to divine some sort of meaning out of the signals and noise that surround them. Maybe they are just talking about hooking up a cable box, but I think their message is deeper. They're talking about themselves, actors in a play, and they're talking about us, in the audience, who have a choice as to whether we allow ourselves to be engaged by--perhaps even changed by--what we witness here.

Sandwiched in between these two very brief, utterly charming, entirely disarming pieces is the evening's main event, a disturbing contemporary horror story called Psychohaiku, or The Light at the End of the Tunnel. It's about two men waiting late one Sunday night for a subway train. When one of them--a well-dressed, seemingly respectable, apparently upper-class man--starts to behave in unusual ways, he gets the other's--and our--attention. Having won that, he proceeds to demolish much of what we understand about civilized behavior, in the process demonstrating that the kind of success that he and others like him achieve and respect comes precisely at the expense of so-called civility.

Psychohaiku is clearly intended to be socio-political criticism. But it's scary not so much in its depiction of an amoral capitalist monster inhabiting Manhattan in 1999. No, its power comes from the shocked reaction of the other man, the innocent victim. Or rather, the lack of reaction, because he finds himself entirely unable to understand what is happening to him, and entirely incapable of defending himself. Tension compounds as we wonder whether he finally will do something. And if, in his place, we would.

In Pyschohaiku, Mr. Hopkins commits not only assault on his audience but also battery: the cheerful passivity that we arrived at the theatre with has been bullied right out of our systems. Notwithstanding the obvious sort of shakeup that accompanies a well-executed horror tale--I know that I looked around carefully when I walked down to the subway platform after the show--Psychohaiku and the other plays in On the Clock jolt us out of our seats and back into real life. Without indulging in any kind of audience participation tactics, these plays engage us: they remind us that we're experiencing something with these actors, and that together, maybe, we'll find something meaningful in that experience.

I don't know about you, but that's precisely the reason I go to the theatre.

Some quick notes about the production: director Joshua Goldberg has served Mr. Hopkins well. The actors are all fine, especially the two women who perform The Installation, Renee Bucciarelli and Rebecca Wisocky. I can't tell from the program who's who: Ms. Wisocky  is spectacularly intense, while Ms. Bucciarelli  is sublimely seductive; both read Mr. Hopkins's remarkable minimalist text brilliantly.

Echoes of Brecht and Beckett and the avant-garde movements of the late '60s are apparent in these plays, but Mr. Hopkins's voice is uniquely his own. On the Clock is very funny--savagely so--but it's also brutally honest: these plays resonate with their clear-eyed but critical assessment of the apathetic and apolitical way that too many of us spend too much of our time nowadays.

The familiar story revolves around a parsimonious and provincial old merchant called Zangler, who has decided to spend the day in Vienna so that he can march in a Grocers Association Parade in Vienna and also so that he can call on his intended bride, Madame Knorr, the proprietress of a lady's hat shop. He places his store in the charge of his chief clerk Weinberl and the apprentice clerk Christopher; these two take advantage of Zangler's absence by closing up at lunchtime and heading to Vienna for an adventure of their own. Of course, once they get to the big city they find themselves in the midst of Zangler's parade; when they run away to avoid being spotted by their cantankerous employer, they dodge into Mme. Knorr's shop.

Matters are complicated by Zangler's young niece and ward Marie, who wants to marry a young man named Sonders without her uncle's permission; Zangler's dotty relative Miss Blumenblatt, in whose care Marie is supposed to be entrusted; and a Viennese widow named Mrs. Fischer who finds herself unexpectedly married again in Mme. Knorr's shop. Observing all of these events, and occasionally lending a hand in their convolution and/or resolution, is a cagey servant named Melchior who has arrived, Dolly Levi-like, to assist Zangler with all of his difficulties. It all adds up to a marvelously complicated plot; as Zangler himself says at the beginning of the play, if these people aren't careful, they will wind up with a farce on their hands.

And so they do. As masterfully written by Mr. Stoppard, On the Razzle is indeed the farce to end all farces: if there's a place to hide, then someone's hiding there; if there's an identity to mistake, then someone's mistaken it; if there's a meaning to misconstrue, then someone's misconstrued it. An aura of gay lunacy pervades On the Razzle from start to finish, resulting in a satisfying set of adventures and romances for all of its participants, and non-stop laughter for the lucky crowd in the audience.

Mr. Stoppard's trademark wordplay dominates the evening. Here's a typical line: "He'll alter her before dessert....er, desert her before the altar." The puns, double entendres, and silly epigrams flow with such speed and regularity that it's impossible to catch them all. No one writes this sort of thing as well as Mr. Stoppard; it's a genuine pleasure to listen to it.

Especially, as here, when it's done well. The large cast, which includes many Jean Cocteau regulars along with some new faces, are uniformly fine, with standout performances offered by Elise Stone as the canny Mme. Knorr, Angela Madden as the sometime widow Fischer, and Jason Crowl as the wise and wily Melchior. Company favorites Harris Berlinsky, Craig Smith, and Tim Deak are excellent as Zangler, Weinberl, and Christopher, respectively. Director Scott Shattuck keeps things moving quickly and quirkily, making especially good use of every inch of the Cocteau stage and auditorium (even the exit door is incorporated in the fun).

As you can see, there will be no beating around the bush in this review, my friends: I’m going to tell you how I really feel about this show.

Angry: this production's blatant and pointless deconstruction of a bona fide American classic is an insult to audiences. Here is a Streetcar where the poker game is played without chairs, table, or even cards; where the climactic second act dinner party is played without a dinner table (forcing Stanley to walk offstage to obtain some dishes to break); where Blanche plays the penultimate scene on the stage floor, curled up in the fetal position, back to the audience, delivering her speeches in a dull, accented monotone that renders them insensible.

Annoyed: this production’s excessive, utterly un-erotic nudity and its overuse of stylized technique never enhance the play’s meaning and always detract from its beauty. As Blanche, Elizabeth Marvel is required to plunge into the onstage bathtub five times—three of them completely naked, the other two fully clothed. Bruce McKenzie’s Stanley similarly must chug-a-lug bottle after bottle of beer and must play the final rape scene in a drunken stupor with his red silk pajama bottoms twisted around his ankles. Both of these actors, along with Jenny Bacon as Stella, make all of their costume changes on stage, in most cases having to strip naked to do so. Why?

Disappointed: given the foregoing, some may be tempted to look beyond Mr. van Hove’s insane staging and find merit in the work of the actors; and indeed all of them clearly work hard to deliver the self-indulgent nonsense that is this production. Ms. Marvel is naked and wet much of the time, crawls about on all fours, and screams like a banshee whenever she finds herself illuminated by direct light; none of this can be technically easy or comfortable. Mr. McKenzie is less frequently naked and wet, but he screams his lungs out more or less continuously--so much so that by the time he is called upon to bellow one of those famous "Stella"s he is already too hoarse to do so. Plus he smashes to bits an entire china service and at least three chairs; again, not exactly a cushy job.

But Ms. Marvel and Mr. McKenzie presumably have minds of their own. Each is playing one of the sterling roles of the American theatre. Does Ms. Marvel really want to be known as the Blanche who dived head-first into a bathtub? Does Mr. McKenzie really want us to remember, as we compare his Stanley to Marlon Brando’s indelible original, how he clownishly thrashed about the stage with his pants down, genitals flying every which way?

Because, believe me, that is exactly how they will be remembered. So shame on them, and on everyone else involved in this calculatedly awful shambles of a show. Christopher Evan Welch, for example, whose work I have consistently admired in the past, plays Mitch as a soulless buffoon. And the show’s designer, Mr. van Hove’s frequent collaborator Jan Versweyveld, has provided Stella and Blanche with a ridiculous wardrobe, the comic highlight of which is a pair of matching dresses made, apparently, out of feathers: Blanche’s is white, while Stella’s is the same color and texture as Big Bird.

Finally, despite what you may be thinking, this production isn’t even over-the-top enough to become a camp classic: most of the time, we’re simply bored by whatever inappropriate device Mr. van Hove and his company have selected to not illuminate Mr. Williams’s beautiful play.

Your curiosity has undoubtedly been aroused, but do not yield to temptation! I repeat: this is a very very bad production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I sincerely doubt that theatre can get much worse than this.

All of which is by way of introducing the amazing wake-up call that is Peter Handke's Offending the Audience, now playing in a sturdily affronting production by Mefisto Theatre Company. This play, just an hour long, asks us why we go to the theatre; i.e., what is the purpose of an audience coming to the theatre. And it reminds us of the answer, coyly at first, and then with startling abruptness: we come to get shaken up, to have our assumptions about things questioned, to do this--here's the important point--in public, with strangers. Theatre is necessary to society, but it's also a privilege: passivity is its enemy. Mr. Handke's play is the antidote to the inertia bred by Disney-esque spectacle and sitcom-ish comedy.

Offending the Audience is very tricky theatre. Six actors appear on stage, dressed in ordinary clothes and moving and speaking in what appear to be random ways. They tell us, repeatedly and emphatically, that they are not playing roles and that this is not a play; this is an experience centered on us, the audience. (To reinforce this concept, the houselights go all the way up when the play begins, casting the audience in the same bright light that shines on the actors on stage.)

Of course, everything the actors tell us is, on some level, a lie: this is a play, and there is nothing random about the movements or the words (or, I dare say, the costumes). Mr. Handke has carefully constructed a sort of suspense-melodrama about the nature of theatre, with clues to his meaning dropped cleverly and subversively throughout the first 45 minutes or so; the author leaves it to us to find them and piece them together. They include discussions of the unities of classical drama (time, place, and theme); of the experience of preparing to come to the theatre; of the communal event itself; of our individuality within this community; of our manipulations of the people and events on stage, and their manipulations of us. This will all mean different things to different people, but it's potent and provocative stuff.

At the denouement, Mr. Handke has his actors do what the plays title tells us they will do: one actor looked me square in the eye and called me a chucklehead. For an instant, it made me feel bad, which immediately made me feel good because it meant that Offending the Audience was working.

The young, adventurous Mefisto Theatre Group is to be commended for bringing this thought-provoking piece to us. Under the assured direction of Jaret Christopher, Offending the Audience accomplishes its mission superbly. His company of actors, in what surely must be a dauntingly challenging assignment, are excellent: Weil Richmond, Lora Chio, and Elena Vilardi, especially, get it exactly right, forcing--daring--us to rouse ourselves: to become present in--to connect with--the event.

It is also, happily and surprisingly, a delightfully entertaining and accessible work. This is largely due to the contributions of its energetic and endlessly appealing star, Masayuki Imai. Mr. Imai is also the play’s writer and director: he is in fact a true man of the theatre, in the way that, say, Laurence Olivier was one: a thrillingly commanding and talented professional who can seemingly do anything. As Aniki, Mr. Imai clowns and jokes and indulges in hoary slapstick bits with his straight man-partner Kinta; he also grows convincingly from a slaphappy callow youth to a sad young man too wise before his time. Mr. Imai makes us laugh uproariously as he demonstrates, in one of Aniki’s comedy routines, the difference between a Japanese and an American. And he makes us weep, uplifted, as he shows us Aniki, in the guise of his past self Lt. Kishida, about to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country and himself.

Mr. Imai the director dazzles throughout this briskly paced evening as well, but never more so than during the scene, near the center of the drama, when Aniki and Kinta find themselves in the cockpit of one of the Kamikaze bombing planes. Our two young heroes suddenly realize that they know how to fly the thing: in a breathless, glorious moment, they take off, and we soar with them, at once exhilarated by the sensation of flight and unsettled by the grim anticipation of the suicide mission that now inevitably awaits them.

Mr. Imai the writer, meanwhile, keeps us skillfully off balance as he juxtaposes the modern attitudes of his 1990s misfits with the somber, dogmatic beliefs of the World War II pilots. Although The Winds of God is resolutely anti-war, there are no easy answers in Mr. Imai’s drama: the courage and nobility of the pilots make for rather stunning contrast to the foolish affability of Aniki and Kinta. Or, to put it another way: what could be more futile than killing yourself in a suicide mission? The answer is: killing yourself in a suicide mission when you know the war is already lost. But Mr. Imai proposes an alternative: drifting aimlessly and soullessly through life without having anything real to believe in.

Mr. Imai’s play has been well-translated into English by Yuko Florence Yunokawa (though the program, or "Drama Bill" as it is called, has not, with occasionally humorous results). The company of actors, all from Japan, perform miraculously in what to them is clearly a foreign tongue; Mr. Imai, particularly, but also Hiroshi Shimizu and Eijiro Ozaki as two of the doomed young pilots are very effective indeed. The production design by Toshiyuki Tashiro (sets) and Hitoshi Suzuki (lighting) is lovely in its simplicity.

Blood Knot is set in South Africa in 1962, in the "non-white location" of Korsten. Apartheid is the law; under it, two colored brothers, Morris and Zachariah, live in squalid poverty in a one-room apartment. Zachariah works all day at some unspecified job, one that leaves his feet painfully blistered and calloused. Morris keeps house and manages the finances. As the play begins, he has squirreled away 45 rand--enough, he hopes, to make a down payment on a farm far from the city, where he and his brother can find freedom and self-respect, living not as boys looked down upon by the white bosses, but as men.

Two complications arise to spoil Morris’s dream. The first is Ethel, a young lady with whom Zachariah has begun a correspondence after seeing her advertisement for a pen pal in the newspaper. (More accurately, it is Morris who is doing the corresponding; Zachariah can neither read nor write.) The problem comes when Ethel sends Zachariah a small photo of herself. She is white, and it is illegal for Zachariah to associate with her.

The second complication is more insidious. Zachariah is dark-complected, but Morris is very light, so light, in fact, that he can pass for white. Zachariah decides that if he can’t have Ethel for himself then his brother should have her; in a moment of impassioned impetuousness, he "gives" her to Morris. Later he spends the 45 rand on a new suit of clothes for Morris, to enable him to meet his new lady friend in the proper style. Morris tries on the suit…and the brothers’ world explodes.

Blood Knot is not a subtle work; it is, objectively, rather clumsy and contrived. But the force of its portrayal of the inevitable ugliness that surfaces when Morris is allowed to act as white as he looks is undeniable: you will not forget the shock of the moment when brother turns suddenly and ferociously against brother. The damaged soul of the one nearly equals the wounded soul of the other: Mr. Fugard understands that an oppressive social order brutalizes and dehumanizes everyone.

Mr. Fugard’s language succeeds where his plotting and characterization sometimes fail: at once poetic and direct, his words force us to face head-on the unconscionable rancidity of Apartheid. He does so, astonishingly, without ever being heavy-handed and often with great humor: Zachariah muses, for example, about an insult he received from a white man: "inhumanity and prejudice in the same sentence."

Steven F. Blye and Vincent Sagona turn in fine performances as, respectively, Zachariah and Morris. Mr. Blye brings a quiet dignity to the simple, uneducated darker-skinned brother, while Mr. Sagona’s Morris is never free for a moment of the moral burden that his lighter skin has wrought. Joseph Megel’s staging is straightforward and unfettered, allowing Mr. Fugard’s powerful work to speak firmly for itself. The excellent work of Mr. Megel’s designers (Si Joong Yoon and Yong-Seok Chon, sets; Tiffany Robertson, costumes; and David Kissel, lighting) provides sad, stark testimony to the impoverished existence of Morris and Zachariah: it’s enormously effective.

Mr. Fugard has written better-crafted and more mature plays in the nearly 40 years since he wrote Blood Knot. But he has not written more passionately about the bitter self-destructiveness of a social order based on prejudice and arbitrary hatred: Blood Knot is a painful reminder that, though it may be hidden deep inside, we all bear the mark of Cain.

So a play like Cloud 9 would seem to have little relevance in 1999, save to point out how much life has changed in the past two decades. That said, let me tell you that in its current revival at T. Schreiber Studio, directed and mostly designed by Marc Geller, Cloud 9 succeeds winningly as a facile, even tame period comedy, staged stylishly and saucily and filled with delicious funny moments.

Make that two period comedies: Cloud 9's first act takes place in British colonial Africa in 1880; its second act is set in London one hundred years later. Both acts concern the affairs, sexual and otherwise, of a presumably typical British family. Clive, the patriarch, is some sort of high-placed government official, minding an outpost of the empire with appropriate paternalistic zeal. With him here in Africa are his wife Betty, his children Edward and Victoria, his mother-in-law Maud, a governess named Ellen, and his loyal servant, a native named Joshua. Young Edward is blazingly effeminate; he is also, it turns out, a willing sexual partner to Clive's close friend Harry Bagley, a robust explorer. Harry lusts after Betty as well, as does repressed lesbian Ellen; Clive, meanwhile, finds himself more or less permanently aroused by another visitor, Mrs. Saunders. Betty is played by a man, Edward by a woman, and Victoria by a doll. Are you getting the idea?

Act Two finds most of the same characters in London in 1980, but they have aged only 25 years. So Betty (now played by a woman) has left Clive to find fulfillment in a job and (alone) in bed; Edward (now played by a man) is involved with a promiscuous pretty boy named Gerry; and Victoria (now played by a live person) is embroiled in a complicated love triangle with her feminist husband and her sensitive lesbian lover.

As I said, the once-outre attitudes and artifices of Ms. Churchill's work have almost no bite in 1999. But credit Mr. Geller with giving them lots of punch: this Cloud 9 is enormous fun. Mr. Geller has devised an ingenious unit set that, combined with Frank DenDanto's artful lighting, serves as both an African jungle and a London park; his costumes and wigs wittily transform a grown woman into a fussy young boy and a grown man into a four-year old girl.

Mr. Geller's staging is fast and assured, and his cast is generally fine. Effie Johnson is the standout among the seven actors in the company, delivering a brief but compelling turn as mother-in-law Maud in the first act and then knocking us out with a beautifully-realized, sensitive portrayal of Victoria's lover Lin in Act Two. Also impressive are Sean Fri as the raucous but conflicted Harry Bagley and Tracey Gilbert as the contemporary grown-up Victoria; both succeed in making us want to know more about these characters than Ms. Churchill's deliberately superficial portraits convey.

Mr. Geller himself nearly stops the show as the African servant Joshua and Lin's little daughter Cathy. Accessorized with a prominent nose ring (in Act One) and foolish Little Lulu pigtails (in Act Two), and displaying--without irony--ample amounts of well-muscled hairy leg in both acts, Mr. Geller has fun twitting the idea of the supposedly untamed savage in these two very different incarnations. He may, in fact, be having too much fun: no matter, for the audience eats up his over-the-top deadpan drag acts with evident glee.

Cloud 9 tells us that we can't be happy unless we are true to ourselves. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes; it just doesn't go all that far. Nevertheless, we have here a fine and funny production of it, one that gives Mr. Geller and his company plenty of opportunities to make us laugh and, occasionally, make us think.

In, out, and all around the doors dash the cast members, costumed grandly by Ilona Somogyi in period dress (mid 1700s, Italy), the men in rich shades of green, the women in warmer golds and oranges, and the title character in deep, bright red. We’re not used to such eye-filling extravagance at the Pearl; and the style of the piece is clearly different from the reliably naturalistic productions that this company is known for. There’s an overture, for example, consisting of the characters racing around the set like so many Keystone Kops at a game of musical chairs, tracing the arc of the farce that’s about to unfold. It’s funny but already we can feel the sense of detachment: a very ‘90ish sort of irony underlies this Mirandolina. It’s Italian renaissance comedy, but it almost feels Brechtian.

Mirandolina, written by Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18^th century and newly translated here by Michael Feingold, tells the story of the proprietress of a provinicial Italian inn and how she tricks a shrewd and hard-hearted colonel into falling in love with her. She does this while juggling the overwrought overtures of two other would-be suitors: the Marquis of Forlipopoli, an aging fop possessed of a grand title and a grander self-image but little else; and the Count of Albafiorota, a vain young upstart who has bought his title and, with seemingly endless supplies of cash, seems bent on acquiring everything else. Also vying for Mirandolina’s affections is her faithful servant, the plain but honest Fabrizio.

When the bombastic Colonel Ripafratta proclaims his invulnerability to the charms of all women, Mirandolina leaps into action. He turns out to be fairly easy prey for this clever but devious woman, but complications ensue that threaten to get our heroine into trouble before she can complete her mission of turning the colonel into a cuckold. All ends happily, however, with the Colonel smartly put in his place, the Marquis and Count intact but alone, and Mirandolina, perhaps just a shade wiser than when she started, resolved to marry Fabrizio.

As things are pretty much the same at the end as they were at the beginning, the fun here is in the journey. Director Lou Jacob and his excellent company do not disappoint: Mirandolina is all glittery delight, a charming and entertaining diversion brimming with quips and tricks that charm the eye and ear. Robin Leslie Brown is a deliciously wry, clever Mirandolina, and she’s well matched by her four suitors, each played to the hilt in outsized turns by Bernard K. Addison (the Colonel), T. Ryder Smith (the Count), John Wylie (the Marquis) and Dan Daily (Fabrizio). Matthew Gray has a memorable cameo as the Colonel’s servant, himself as lovesick over his hostess as the other men. Helen Mutch and Carol Schwartz do well as two traveling actresses who happen into the inn at a slightly inconvenient time.

It is, as I’ve said, a good deal of fun. Yet I couldn’t help feeling a notch or two removed from the proceedings: chic and brittle and blazingly theatrical, Mirandolina amuses and impresses but it never quite wins us over.

A one-hour, one-man show is not sufficient to contain the ambition, imagination, and versatility of Michael Goldfried. His new play The Making of Michael Gold, running Friday nights at the Kraine Theatre, serves as an introduction to this talented young actor, but it only hints at what he's capable of. There are tantalizing strains of not one but three different plays coursing through this piece, making for an exciting but ultimately unsatisfying theatre experience.

The evening begins on a high point, with Mr. Goldfried sitting on the floor in the lotus position, the unemployed actor at yoga class. Through voiceovers, we hear what Mr. Goldfried is thinking as he moves through the various yoga exercises. The juxtaposition of the contorted body and the raging mind is clever and original; the places where the mind goes are hilarious and resoundingly authentic. Mr. Goldfried argues with himself about whether he should go to a trendy party tonight, about the suitability of the good-looking man in front of him as boyfriend material, about the pros and cons of yoga itself: all very funny stuff.

The next scene finds Mr. Goldfried at the very party he was obsessing about--to network, you understand--attempting to sell an unnamed producer or agent on the idea of his one-man show (which begins in yoga class). Mr. Goldfried, hyperactive to begin with, hyperventilates in his eagerness to please and then self-destructs. It's a great piece of writing and a great piece of acting.

At this point, though, The Making of Michael Gold takes an abrupt turn into less stimulating and less innovative territory. Through flashback vignettes, we meet Mr. Goldfried's teenage self, a '70s disco pretty boy trapped in the body of an '80s suburban high school misfit. This material feels like the gay Jewish version of a John Leguizamo show; some of it is very funny, but in large measure we've been here before.

After about a half-hour of this, Mr. Goldfried takes another leap, into what amounts to the third of the evening's plays: a wistful, melancholy portrait of the artist as a much older man. We have moved thirty or so years into the future, and we find our hero morphed into Michael Gold, an effusive and extravagant middle-aged lounge singer: a lonely, aging queen who's just self-aware enough not to be pathetic. Mr. Goldfried offers a vivid portrayal of this character; An Evening with Michael Gold has promise should Mr. Goldfried choose to develop such a show. But unfortunately, neither the smart and overeager Michael Goldfried of the first two scenes, nor the edgy and neurotic younger Michael of the ones that follow, have very much to do with this sadder older alter ego. The Making of Michael Gold finally feels schizophrenic: it's a terrific showcase for its versatile star, but it doesn't hang together as a unified piece, structurally or thematically. 

Mr. Goldfried needs both to edit and enlarge the disparate pieces of this show. On the basis of what's here now, he's well on his way to creating something that will be funny and special and uniquely his. He's certainly a young performer to keep an eye on; I look forward to see what he will finally make of Michael Gold.

This obscure one-act play, written by Williams in the mid-1960s,  has perhaps played a total of 20 performances in New York City in the 30-odd years since it was written. But it has happily been rediscovered by a brand new company called Theater Ten Thousand, who have revived it at the Ohio Theatre. Deliberately, challengingly obscure, The Gnadiges Fraulein nevertheless (and paradoxically) presents us with a straightforward and unobstructed view of the heart and soul of one of Williams's walking wounded.

The Gnadiges Fraulein (she is given no other name) is a Viennese entertainer of long ago who has found her way to an itinerant boarding house at the tip of the Florida Keys. Here she supports herself by running down to the docks each day to catch fish, competing for them against the terrifying cacaloony birds who, as the play begins, have already retaliated by putting out one of her eyes. We are told that the Fraulein was once a "celebrated soubrette," and we discover, after she begs a visitor to select a musical number for her to sing from an old and faded playbill, that she is possessed of a beautiful, trained voice and a wistful, graceful gallantry. This is the stuff that has allowed her to survive in a cruel world even as it has left her vulnerable to its blows. How has this songbird come to be reduced to wallowing among these parasitic cacaloonies?

No answer is really provided in this weird, cockeyed play. Williams contrives a bizarre history for his Fraulein but there's no way to tell in the hazy, off-kilter universe of The Gnadiges Fraulein what, if anything, we should believe: this, I think, is also Williams's intention. He has surrounded his damaged heroine with a strange batch of characters: Molly, the earthy and profane landlady who sends the Fraulein off each day to earn her keep on the docks; Polly, a local society reporter who plans to write an article about Molly's boarding house and its occupants; and Joe, a hunky blond Indian worshipped by the Fraulein who may or may not be a fugitive from a movie set. Molly and Polly's endless vulgar chatter--a babbling chorus of self-interested, self-involved, and self-promoting gossip--propels the play. Against it, the Gnadiges Fraulein's tragedy stands out starkly and savagely.

Williams has also made literal the Fraulein's final struggle, in the form of an actual cocaloony bird, who more or less presides over the play. (The cocaloony is pure Williams invention: he describes it as a "sort of giant pelican.") Indeed, he is experimenting prodigiously here, not always successfully: The Gnadiges Fraulein has an off-balance feeling throughout, here veering too sharply toward hallucinogenic expressionism, there careening too suddenly into shrill social commentary. Yet its cadences and rhythms bear the unmistakable mark of America's master dramatic poet: consider the opening speech:

Was that two cocaloony birds that flew over or was it just one cocaloony bird that made a U-turn and flew back over again? OOPS! Bird-watchers, watch those birds!

No one but Tennessee Williams could have written those lines. This is dialogue that soars splendiferously, even when you don't know what the heck it's talking about.

The play's inherent strangeness presents many challenges to director Arnold Barkus and his collaborators which in large part they have met. They have succeeded masterfully in bringing the cocaloony to life: Sam Chan is convincingly, awesomely terrifying acting the part, and the combination of sounds and low-tech special effects devised by Mr. Barkus to simulate the cocaloonies' flight is impressively effective.

Less well-realized is a too-busy set upon which some ineffectual slides are occasionally and distractingly projected. And the performances (of admittedly difficult material) are uneven, betraying perhaps lack of experience and/or rehearsal time: Mary Barto is magnetic as the Fraulein, but neither Nancy Castle (as Molly) nor Patti Chambers (as Polly) has quite found her character yet.

But Ms. Castle and Ms. Chambers are to be commended--strongly--for their efforts, for it is they who have founded this fledgling theatre company and brought Mr. Williams's lost play back into view. The Gnadiges Fraulein is probably second-rate Williams; at any rate, in its studied bizarreness it is definitely not the sort of Williams you're used to. Yet it has, nevertheless, a kind of poetic beauty: I'll not soon forget its potent images of a sad little Viennese woman, reveling in memories of glorious days gone by, suddenly jumping to attention at the wailing of a ship's bell, ready to battle the cocaloonies for another day's fishing.

Alison’s House is the Stanhope homestead, the New England house where John, Agatha, and Alison Stanhope were born and grew up. Alison and Agatha, both unmarried, remained and Alison died here seventeen years ago; as the play begins, the ailing Miss Agatha is about to move in with John, and the family is closing up the house, which is to be sold and demolished.

So why is it Alison’s House? Because after Alison died, the family discovered the many poems that she had left behind, poems that when published made Alison Stanhope world-famous. The place where she created this extraordinary body of work has become part of her mythology; Alison’s family and her fans are eager to preserve the legacy that is represented and embodied by Alison’s House.

Any resemblance to some of the facts surrounding the death and discovery of Emily Dickinson is entirely intentional: Ms. Glaspell is exploring here the nature of celebrity and the price of fame. When does a private life become public property? When Alison’s niece Elsa discovers—as we know she will—a packet filled with hitherto unknown and unpublished poems, the ones that spell out the details of Alison’s unhappy and unrequited romance with a married man, the family must decide whether the poems belong to the memory of their beloved relative, or to the ages.

Ms. Glaspell gives their dilemma particular resonance by setting her play on December 31, 1899. Standing on the brink of a new century, the Stanhopes’ choice to destroy or preserve Alison’s lost poems becomes emblematic of the larger decision of whether to hold onto the safe but rapidly obsolescing values of the 19^th century, or to embrace the intimidating inevitability of the 20^th. Living astride two centuries ourselves, we are in a unique position to understand what the Stanhopes are going through.

Yet despite the timely and thoughtful problem at its center, what I find most compelling about Alison’s House is its intimacy: this play is at its best in its portrayal of a believable, quirky, loving family. The Stanhope clan are instantly interesting and tantalizingly complex: father John endured a loveless marriage while cherishing a young woman with whom he may or may not have had a daughter; elder brother Eben has dutifully entered the family business but clearly craves something more exciting; and younger brother Ted, though a playful and careless university student, seems nevertheless headed for a similar fate. Their sister Elsa, meanwhile, has defied the family by running off with a married man, replaying Alison’s story with a different ending. All four share a strong and unbreakable bond with Alison—and with each other—that finally defines them.

The relationships among the family members are vividly realized in this production, particularly among the three male Stanhopes. As portrayed by Lee Moore (John), Gerard O’Brien (Eben), and Matt Oparny (Ted), they feel uncannily like a father and his two sons, joshing around with one another with a casual affection that is palpable. Their interplay is the best thing about Alison’s House; its naturalness raises the stakes as generations clash over their duty to Alison and to the world.

Alison’s House is not a well-made play, and it is resolutely old-fashioned in its sensibility and its construction. (It’s the kind of play that seems to have built-in pauses for applause when the characters enter a scene; where women in period costumes melodramatically fall to their knees with alarming regularity.) Director Linda Ames Key has perhaps too contemporary a touch to quite do it justice, and not all of the actors are exactly right (Ann Hillary looks much too youthful and vigorous to be convincing as Aunt Agatha, for example, and Karla Mason’s Elsa lacks the fortitude and nobility that she ought to have). These small problems notwithstanding, this is an excellent rendition of a play that has undeservedly been cast aside; Alison’s House is a splendid work of theatre, one that will tantalize you with its unsolvable questions about a poet, a family, and a house caught between the past and the future.

Their current production of Rachel Crothers's A Man's World offers an excellent case in point. It's nearly impossible nowadays to comprehend the fact that it was just 80 years ago that women were granted the right to vote in this country, and that for decades afterward the notion of a self-sufficient, independent female was anathema to the American establishment. Flashback to 1910, when Ms. Crothers, our pre-eminent feminist playwright, brought A Man's World to Broadway: what a daring piece of work this must have seemed then!

In it, Ms. Crothers tells the story of Frank Ware, a spirited and intelligent young woman who lives in an artists' boarding house with a small boy, Kiddie. Frank makes her living as a writer, but truly lives for only two things--first, to care for her young charge, whose parentage she steadfastly refuses to discuss; and second, to help fallen women like Kiddie's late mother get back on their feet and make their way in the world.

Complications arise, however, in the person of Malcolm Gaskell, a bright, tough-minded fellow writer with whom Frank has, for better or worse, fallen in love. And there's also Lione, an opera singer who lives in the boarding house who becomes jealous of Frank's friendship with her accompanist Fritz. Lione spreads some gossip insinuating that Kiddie is really Malcolm's son (the implication being that Malcolm and Frank had the child together out-of-wedlock). This rumor soon poisons life throughout the boarding house, and threatens to ruin Frank permanently.

The horror with which Lione's accusation is regarded by everyone in the play feels downright quaint today; in this respect, A Man's World is very much of its time, as innocently melodramatic as anything by Belasco or Fitch. Where it differs from the works of those gentlemen, though, is in its treatment of Frank (and, indeed, all of its female characters): in a Fitch play, Frank would have collapsed in hysterical remorse or even been made to die, but here she not only recovers but emerges victorious. Ms. Crothers believes firmly that women's abilities equal those of men, and she works hard to convince us of this by demonstrating Frank's rectitude, firmness, and strong moral fiber. As several characters tell her during the course of the play, it's a man's world, or at least it was in 1910: a Frank Ware has to work twice as hard to get half as far as a Malcolm Gaskell (one of the other male characters even suggests that Malcolm has ghostwritten Frank's novels, suggesting that a woman couldn't write that well!). The double standard that makes an unwed mother a pariah but looks the other way at the father is all too real.

Of course the great virtue in seeing a play like A Man's World is that it forces us to examine how far we have progressed since it was written. I leave it to the reader to decide for him or herself.

Director Rebecca Taylor has done a splendid job realizing Ms. Crothers's work in the tiny Metro Playhouse space. Brian Jones's ingenious and homey boarding house set spills into the auditorium, so much so that we feel like we are actually in it; in fact as we enter the theatre, most of the inhabitants of the boarding house are already on stage, engaged in the activities of a typical late afternoon, as if we have just dropped in for a quick visit. This immediacy whisks us back in time ninety years in a matter of seconds; it's a terrific device.

Impressive, too, are Susan Soetaert's simple but elegant period costumes and Doug Filomena's evocative lighting. The ensemble is outstanding, with Missy Thomas turning in a performance of great intelligence and insight as the heroine Frank, and outstanding support offered by Jeremy Stuart as the troubled, hypocritical Malcolm and Adam Smith, Jack Serra, Jane Labanz, Gregory Couba and Page Clements as Frank's fellow lodgers in the boarding house. Young Brandon Beeler is most appealing as Kiddie.

Old-fashioned A Man's World may be, but it is far from irrelevant: this is one of the most satisfying shows I've seen this season, and I highly recommend it. I also strongly commend the folks at Metro Playhouse for bringing this play and others like it to our attention. I'm looking forward to what they do next.

Enter Benny Bennet, a sweet but goofy country boy who has had six months of acting lessons and has run away from home to become a movie star. And enter right behind him his slightly more grounded brother Phil, who has come to take Benny back home. But it's the middle of the Great Depression and extras get paid a dollar a day plus meals and lodging; Benny easily convinces Phil to stay. Before you can say "The Ten Commandments," our heroes are in costume and toiling under the hot sun as Pharaoh's slaves. And they've both become smitten with Louise, the pert blonde who is their immediate boss.

It really is a grand idea, one that should allow for plenty of fun at the expense of the various eccentric, pretentious types you'd expect to find on the set of this colossal turkey; there's also a rather sweet romantic comedy here, as well. Yet Epic Proportions delivers none of the above, at least not consistently: things have gone badly off kilter, with the result that the show--pared down, now, to a brief 80-minute one-act play--is as misguidedly muddle-headed as the fictional movie that it is satirizing. It's not a disaster, but it is a severe disappointment.

So what went wrong? I hate to say it, but probably the first blunder was casting Kristin Chenoweth as Louise. Before you start hollering at me, hear me out: Ms. Chenoweth, who has emerged in the last couple of years as a bona fide star (most recently in her Tony Award-winning turn as Sally in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown), is a treasure and a delight. She is a superb comedienne, and she proves here that she is a genuine stage presence as well, carrying this show on her tiny shoulders as if it were a pebble and she were Atlas. She's interesting and funny virtually every minute that she's on stage. Epic Proportions should, if nothing else, serve as the breakthrough for this dynamo: let's hope she gets a better, more suitable vehicle soon.

Ms. Chenoweth is, however (and unfortunately) miscast as Louise Goldman. Or, to state it more accurately, misused: Ms. Chenoweth, a brilliant clown and a brilliant star, has been given here a secondary role, and an essentially non-comic one at that. Epic Proportions, to the extent that it's about anything, is about hapless Benny and his rivalry with Phil, who turns out to better than him at being a movie actor and at winning the heart of Louise. Even though the authors have beefed up Louise's role, giving her some very amusing business at the beginning of the show in which she lectures the extras on how to do their job, the fact remains that most of the funny things that happen in Epic Proportions happen to Benny. Ms. Chenoweth simply doesn't have enough to do.

Benny, meanwhile, has problems of his own. Probably due to the frantic rewriting that indisputably took place right up to opening night (the playbill tells us, for example, that there will be a fifteen-minute intermission--but as I've already told you, there won't), Benny's character lacks clarity. In one scene he is an earnest but bumbling fool; in another he's a spastic nitwit; in yet another he's a stalwart romantic hero. I fear that part of the problem lies in the casting of Alan Tudyk in this role. Mr. Tudyk, whom we have seen in Misalliance and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, is a fine comic actor in his way, but he's not a clown: he simply isn't up to the outrageous physical shtick that's called for here.

The absolutely funniest set piece in Epic Proportions is a scene in which Benny is playing one of the Egyptian Queen's slaves. He begins the scene fanning her with one of those broad leafy fans that you see in movies of this ilk. The Queen then asks him to fetch her sewing basket; it turns out that it contains a nest of asps, which attack the Queen, after which the Queen's guards attack Benny the slave. It probably doesn't sound funny at all as I've described it, but because Benny doesn't know what's going to happen to him in this scene, it could be--and should be--a scream. Mr. Tudyk, lacking the requisite technique, can't pull it off: a potentially show-stopping comic tour de force falls flat. (In my mind's eye I kept seeing Lucille Ball doing this scene, which is in fact very reminiscent of the sort of stuff she used to do on I Love Lucy; she was hilarious).

Jeremy Davidson, as Benny's brother Phil, is likewise too stiff to play his comic moments with the necessary panache. Yet even the far more experienced comic actors Ross Lehman, Richard Ziman, and Tom Beckett don't really shine in any of the dozen or so roles that they tackle. They should positively crackle as they zip in and out of William Ivey Long's outlandish costumes, shifting instantaneously from put-upon extras to temperamental actors to agitated support staff, but they don't. Only Ruth Williamson, who plays the film's leading actress and a rather outré lesbian costume designer, gets the style of the thing right.

She also gets to deliver what turned out to be my favorite line: near the end of the play, during the climactic and inevitable chase scene, she observes sardonically "I hate these goddamn steps." (She's referring to the oversized staircase that is the play's unit set, and I have to agree with her: I'm sick of all of these staircases too: it's time for a new paradigm in scenic design.)

Epic Proportions is not unentertaining: you will laugh and you will enjoy yourself. But with its mucked-up script, its muddled casting, and its hit-or-miss staging (courtesy, by the way, of the usually competent Jerry Zaks), Epic Proportions is far from a first-rate entertainment: I'm not sure that I can in good conscience advise you to plunk down 65 bucks for a ticket.