nytheatre Archive
2000-01 Theatre Season Reviews

I had always wanted to see A Phoenix Too Frequent, Christopher Fry's short verse play from 1946 about a young widow grieving in her late husband's tomb and the soldier who happens upon her and welcomes her back to life. It's a pretty play, but a quirky one; I am grateful to the National Asian American Theatre Company for giving it an airing so that its virtues (and little indulgences) can be seen and appreciated. What I have finally come to understand about this play--thanks to the clear-eyed direction of Stephen Stout--is that A Phoenix Too Frequent is very much about itself, in its time; which is to say, just after World War II, when a light-hearted and fanciful diversion such as this might have felt inappropriate after so many years of destruction and deprivation. Fry's young widow reminds us that it's alright for love to conquer the gloom of death, a thought that must have resonated strongly in the hearts of Londoners who were trying to rebuild lives after having lost so much. Alas, I'm afraid that the moment for A Phoenix Too Frequent has passed us by. But this is nevertheless an interesting and valuable production, and Mia Katigbak, who plays the widow's earthy, life-affirming nurse, is giving a wonderful performance in it.

A Phoenix Too Frequent is preceded by a curtain-raiser, Chekhov's The Harmfulness of Tobacco, about a hen-pecked husband whose scientific lecture about smoking turns into a humorous ramble about his own unhappy life. James Saito delivers this slight playlet with the requisite pathos.

Terese Hayden's revival of Edward Albee's All Over provides a splendid showcase for a trio of marvelous veteran actors. Jacqueline Brookes, who has been on the stage since the 1950s, plays The Wife in this bleak, cold play, one of Albee's first missteps (from 1971) following triumphs like Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance. She's a hard, bitter lady, who has lived alone for a long time while her husband--who is some sort of very wealthy, very famous old gentleman--lived with his mistress. Now he lays dying in the next room, and The Wife sits here with their son and daughter, his best friend, and--of course--The Mistress, waiting for the old man to die.

Brookes imbues this stolid but unpleasant woman with reserves of strength and humor that make her very nearly sympathetic--no small achievement. Veteran actor James Stevenson, meanwhile, brings enormous dignity and depth to the Best Friend, a man with some harsh and awful secrets of his own.

And then there's Hayden herself (who also directs and produces), making the relatively small role of The Nurse stunningly memorable, particularly in a long speech about how the relatively instantaneous deaths of then-recently assassinated leaders like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy deprived the nation of a much-needed psychological healing period.

This speech, by the way, suggests another reason to see All Over: unsurprisingly, Albee has a lot of interesting things to say in this play, and he says them well. Since the initial 40-performance run nearly three decades ago,  All Over has remained fairly anonymous, so it's of some interest to get a look at it now.

But I must warn you that it's nearly three hours long, and relentlessly talky and brittle; and Theatre 22, where this production is housed, is far too tiny a space to hold this show comfortably. Brookes, Stevenson, and Hayden are riveting, but despite their efforts, All Over makes for a long, hard sit.

This is the second production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal that I've seen in as many months--the other one was from Fovea Floods (see below). What I conclude first and foremost is that somebody is scamming us: this new American translation by Peter Mellencamp, directed by Jim Simpson for his Bat Theater Co., has virtually nothing to do with the show I saw last July. I'm no Brecht scholar so I won't say who's got it right and who's got it wrong.

I will say this, however: Bat's Baal is a near-egregious exercise in monotony: a brutally boring hundred minutes of mind-numbing poetry, accompanied by tooth-grinding jazz from a three-piece combo that reminded my companion of one of those William Shatner priceline commercials. (This is exacerbated, I should add, by the airless, uncomfortable non-cabaret space in which the play is performed.)

Simpson and Mellencamp reconceive Brecht's protagonist Baal as a Beat poet (a la Ginsberg or Kerouac): alienated nihilism as Cool. This feels, to me, rather different from what Brecht had in mind; midway through the play, Simpson and Mellencamp seem to reach the same conclusion, and their Baal shifts gears suddenly and illogically into a deadening study of dissolution and decay. That is what Brecht had in mind (I think); the trouble is, there's nothing in the first half of this version to explain what happens in the second half.

The trouble stems, mostly, from transplanting Baal's very pre-WW I European milieu to post-WWII America. Simpson evokes an atmosphere here but he doesn't make the play stick to it.

Performances are late at night: it's possible that this smoky, gray Baal is a show that will work better if taken with a lot of alcohol. But it just made me feel tired.

Fovea Floods, a theatre company based in upstate New York, has brought an electrifying production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal to the Ontological Theatre here in Manhattan. This extraordinary company of actors, led by co-artistic directors Josh Chambers and Timothy Fannon, has created a striking, sensate feast out of Brecht's first play, one that manages to shake us out of our complacency even as it finds startling contemporary equivalents to both the adolescent angst and the souped-up sensationalism that characterize the piece. Barraging the audience with a dizzying hyperactive carnival of multimedia theatrics, they've created one of the most exciting events of the summer. Unfortunately, they're only here until the end of this week, so you'll have to take quick action if you want to see this remarkable work.

Baal tells the story, in 22 short scenes, of the short rise and long, debauched fall of a man whose disdain for everyday morality defines and then destroys him. When we meet Mr. Baal, he's an anonymous clerk who also writes poetry. When one of his poems gets published, he drinks in his fleeting notoriety greedily, launching himself eagerly on a decadent path of self-indulgence. We watch him court celebrity as a flavor-of-the-month rock star; we watch him deflate and then implode as he sinks deeper in depravity and excess.

It's not a terribly original story. Brecht intended it, I think, as a reaction to the first world war: how could morality endure in a world capable of such mass self-destruction? Almost a century later, humankind is less naive about its capabilities, and so Baal can almost seem quaint. Credit Chambers and Fannon and their colleagues with finding several apt contemporary parallels that make this Baal as compelling as it is.

This Baal manages to assault us with such raw power that the production achieves something akin to the shock value that Brecht was also most assuredly going for; it also alienates us, profoundly--the way that his later creation, epic theatre, is supposed to. We're literally provoked into attentiveness by a relentless and uninterrupted flood of images and sounds, forced to parse the noise from the sense and to do it quickly, before the next onslaught of sensory data. The stark, minimalist set folds in and out on itself, accordion-like, to become a boarding house or a country inn or a forest; the lighting shifts moodily and mercurially from bright to dark and back again; the actors morph and mutate from character to character, here juggling and dancing, there defining arcs of space and time with near-mechanical precision--and doing so, mind you, all over the place: behind, above, and within the audience as well as on stage. All this synchronized to a booming, eclectic soundtrack; and all given a semblance of structure by a detached, disembodied voice delivering narration so coolly ironic that it only bothers to finish 21 scenes.

The chaos of the presentation informs and then overwhelms the text, which is. of course, precisely the point. I think Brecht would have loved, for example, the intrusion, right in the middle of one of Baal's more harrowing scenes, of Freebo the Clown, reminding us to contribute to cultural institutions and to wear condoms. Our experience echoes Mr. Baal's as the play seems to spin more and more out of control and into a bleak, nightmarish dreamscape. What Fovea Floods does here is to really make us feel this: palpably; even painfully.

The dozen performers who play the nearly four dozen roles in Baal are extraordinary: disciplined, inordinately skillful artists of astounding versatility and ability. Timothy Fannon, who plays Baal, is electrifying, showing us the transformation of this man from a callous club kid to a Caligula-like satyr to a ravaged and polluted walking corpse. Bob Hendren, Ethan Cole, and Jason Berenstein, who take numerous roles as a sort of three-man chorus, are also worthy of special mention.

Theatre this visceral, immediate, and adventurous doesn't come our way very often. Get to Baal if you can; and watch for the next theatrical offering from this remarkable troupe known as Fovea Floods. I know I'll be waiting for it eagerly. 

I've searched and searched my copy of Beggar on Horseback, written in 1924 by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and I cannot find that line. Notwithstanding what Messrs. Kaufman and Connelly, were they still around to hear about it, might think of this liberty that has been taken with their script, I cite this newly added line as just one of countless modifications that director Dan Wackerman has made to this play. (I assume it's Wackerman: there's no adaptation credit in the program, although there ought to be.)

Beggar on Horseback is a very funny, very apt satire of expressionist theatre, as well as of the bourgeois middle class values of the time when it was written. In it, an idealistic but heretofore unsuccessful composer named Neil finds himself no longer able to pursue his calling. Though he has an earnest passion to create "serious" music, and a supportive (and really nice) girlfriend named Cynthia steadfastly at his side, Neil toys with the idea of marrying spoiled rich-girl Gladys Cady with the idea of letting her subsidize his art. The main part of Beggar on Horseback is the hilarious nightmarish dream sequence in which Neil imagines what his life with Gladys might be like. His psyche conjures up the scary, monolithic corporation where his would-be father-in-law forces him to work, and the nightly regimen of haute couture living that Gladys would require; in his dream, he murders Gladys and her family, only to find himself in a Chicago-style courtroom presided over by the very same father-in-law; and then he's sentenced to hard labor at an Art Factory, doomed to churn out commercial ditties that sell a million copies apiece.

And then Neil wakes up and realizes his folly; the curtain comes down on him in a clinch with faithful Cynthia, determined never to sell his soul and to remain forever devoted to his art.

Funny, incisive stuff; or at least it should be: there's almost no way to tell in this production. Wackerman has updated the play to the present day, so Gladys's world is club culture instead of high society and the music Neil abhors is gangsta rap instead of DaSilva, Brown, and Henderson. Prototypes for Neil and Gladys come from sitcomland--Chandler Bing and his shrill ex-girlfriend Janice, to be precise--recreated with astonishing verisimilitude by Todd Allen Durkin and Tara Sands.

But Wackerman's updates are selective: the courtroom scene, for example, still reeks of the '20s, quaintly and nonsensically; the hymn-reciting mother-in-law, incongruously shod in white sneakers, feels like a time-traveling Aimee Semple McPherson. What the heck is going on here?

Kaufman and Connelly had very particular targets back in 1924: plays like The Adding Machine and The Emperor Jones had only just taken the cognoscenti by storm. Experimental expressionist drama hasn't cut much of a swath lately, though, which leaves Wackerman bereft of the specificity that satire needs to succeed. Random pop culture references--no matter how funny or hip--are no substitute for the well-thought-out contemporary parallel that is, presumably, Wackerman's goal in this production: they're just lame: and they leave the ensemble and the play flailing unhappily for a hundred very long minutes.

Absolutely none of this would matter, by the way, if it didn't seem to portend a trend: last season, I got similarly incensed about Wackerman's similarly "updated" production of another fine old play, S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part. An attention-getting directorial signature--no matter how entertaining--does not excuse what looks more and more like reckless indifference to artistic integrity. I hope that in the future Wackerman applies his considerable talents and energies to crafting a truly original work of theatre. 

The Pearl Theatre Company's 17th season is off to a splendid start with a delightful revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. Breezily acted, smartly directed, and elegantly designed, this production is first-class in every department. It's a tasty, tony reminder of Coward's insouciance, wit, and peerless playwriting skill; and another impressive entertainment from this, one of off-off-Broadway's most consistently rewarding nonprofit companies.

The play takes place in the well-appointed living room of Charles Condomine's comfortable home in Kent in the year 1941. Here, Condomine, a writer, and his wife Ruth are entertaining their neighbors the Bradmans and an eccentric lady called Madame Arcati. This last personage is a medium, who gives séances and communes with spirits from the "other side"; she has been invited more or less as entertainment for the skeptical Condomines and Bradmans, and also as a kind of research tool for Charles, whose next novel will feature a psychic involved in a murder mystery.

Coward sets up the situation with felicitous economy and then delivers the theatrical raison d'etre of his play with aplomb: the assemblage do indeed participate in a séance, during which something unexpected (though entirely foreseeable by us in the audience) occurs: Condomine's first wife, the high-spirited Elvira, arrives on the scene, apparently having been summoned by Charles, consciously or sub-consciously. It's not long before Charles, with the ghost of one wife making mischief and a very-much-alive other wife quite reasonably upset by this turn of events, finds himself with his hands full.

I leave it to you to discover the fantastical conclusion to Condomine's conundrum; though I'd read Blithe Spirit years ago, I had forgotten how delicious is its second act climax. Such is the pleasure of having an opportunity to see an old favorite like this, especially in so well-put-together a production. Physically, the piece sparkles: Harry Feiner's spare but stylish living room fits the piece perfectly, Leslie Yarmo's attractive and interesting costumes are decorative and appropriate, and Stephen Petrilli's lighting is subtle and effective. Joanne  Camp is a delight as the sophisticated Ruth, throwing away her lines in exchanges like the following with expert timing:

CHARLES: Anything interesting in the Times?
RUTH: Don't be silly, Charles.

Hope Chernov is vivacious and funny as the ghostly Elvira; watch her, for example, as she ogles a tray of cucumber sandwiches--that, in her present state, she is quite unable to eat--with near-palpable lust.

Delphi Harrington, as the odd but stolid Madame Arcati, misses some of her character's stiff-upper-lip Englishness, but is otherwise quite effective. Newcomer Elizabeth Ureneck has some memorable moments as the Condomines' hapless servant Edith. Glynis Bell and Dominic Cuskern get the Bradmans exactly right, while Doug Stender, as poor besotted Condomine, has a field day with the play's wicked surprise ending.

The centennial celebration of Noel Coward's birth is nearing its end; how fitting that the Pearl chose to lead off their new season with one of the master's most successful comedies. Blithe Spirit is about as well-made as they come; enjoy it in its latest incarnation in the Pearl's capable hands.

This is interactive theatre taken to a new level: the audience troops around the various playing spaces within Show World, encountering new locales and scenes at every turn. Some of the areas are air conditioned, some are not; some have ample seating, some do not; some afford close contact with the performers, some require you to strain your neck and ears to follow what's going on.

And yet it works: in a show about sensibilities and perceptions, atmosphere and style are everything: there probably is no better venue for Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, in spite of--and indeed because of--all the inconvenience of this one. Cusack's challenge--no mean one--is to try to recreate the experience of ridiculous theatre for a Y2K audience. When Ludlam first staged this subversive text some twenty-odd years ago, gender-bending, partial nudity, kitschy pop culture references, and hip irony were novel; now they're practically passé. How then to capture the sensation (a carefully chosen word) of the ridiculous for a contemporary audience?

Cusack's solution is a full-frontal assault of convention-flouting theatrics, some inventive, some just cheap. Abundance and ambition are the hallmarks of this production: the mere act of coordinating the eight- or ten-ring circus that is this Ring would defeat Cameron Mackintosh's most trusted underlings. The Rhine maidens are scantily clad trans- (or de-) gendered go-go dancers a la The Donkey Show; chief god Two-Ton is a larger-than-life ringer for the Phantom of the Opera; his wife Fricka is a sequined, wigged RuPaul-esque drag queen giant(ess). Scenes unfold on top of billiard tables and behind what obviously was once a cocktail lounge bar; special effects range from a tacky fireplace video (for the circle of fire surrounding the sleeping Brunhilde) to a Fisher Price toy rocking horse.

Does it work? On one level it does, absolutely: the anarchic spirit of Ludlam and his contemporaries is very much channeled here: though he starts to run out of ideas near the end of the piece, Cusack surprises us with happy regularity. On the other hand, lots of stuff in Der Ring falls flat, mostly because its capacity to startle ore even amuse us has been lost with the passage of time. Robbed of its merrily subversive political subtext, how resonant can Der Ring really be?

Cusack takes several supporting roles in the festivities, acquitting himself nicely in each one. Ian Hill, as Two-Ton, is also effective, as are Peter Brown as a buttoned-up Alverruck the Dwarf, Xavier Smith as an improbable Sieglinda, and Matthew Pritchard as ethereally gay versions of Loge (god of fire) and a magic bird. Other cast members are game, and, if their characterizations are less polished, they're always in the right costume and the right room at the right time. With this show, that's no mean feat. 

Diana of Dobson's is yet another feather in the Mint Theater Company's cap--a thoughtful, respectful revival of an obscure play from nearly a century ago that provides us with a provocative and invaluable look at the theatrical tastes and social mores of our great-grandparents. Earlier this season, the Mint gave us Thomas Wolfe's Welcome To Our City, a look at progressivism and racism in the American South during the Jazz Age. Diana of Dobson's, by the British playwright Cicely Hamilton, has a similarly probing social conscience, examining the plight of a poor and exploited shop girl in the England of King Edward VII. It's a fascinating piece.

The time is 1908; the place, at least at first, is an assistants' dormitory at Dobson's Drapery Emporium in London. Here Diana Massingberd lives and works, for a pitiable five shillings a week (less frequent deductions for all sorts of infractions, real or imagined, as imposed by her supervisor, Miss Pringle). Diana once enjoyed a far less severe existence, helping her father with his small medical practice in the country. But when he died, he left her unprovided for and unmarried; Diana was forced to find whatever work she could, which is why she is subsisting here at Dobson's.

But then Diana gets a letter, one which changes her life. A distant relative, it seems, has died, leaving his fortune scattered among numerous heirs. Diana's share amounts to £300 (more than 20 times her annual salary, as noted most helpfully in the program). Although some of her coworkers advise her to squirrel the money away, Diana impetuously decides to enjoy her new-found fortune. She sets off for a month-long vacation that she will never forget, content to worry about what will happen afterward when the time comes.

And so, a few years before Shaw thought to do it, playwright Cicely Hamilton launches her leading lady into society (without the aid of a Henry Higgins, by the way), where she is an immediate and smashing success. We pick up Diana's story in a resort hotel in the Swiss Alps, where she is being courted by not one but two gentlemen, and even more ardently by the avaricious aunt of one of them. Sir Jabez Grinley is a middle-aged captain of industry, founder of a chain of stores very like the one in which Diana used to work (indeed, Diana was fired from one of Grinley's establishments before her arrival at Dobson's). His rival, Captain Victor Bretherton, is a handsome but rather idle fellow, a former guardsman in need of a rich woman to support him. Bretherton's aunt, Mrs. Cantelupe, decides Diana is the ideal catch for her nephew. Thus Hamilton's plot spins into motion, taking us into uncharted and unexpected territory as it plays out during the second act. That Hamilton and--perhaps more to the point--her audience were clearly of their time assures a satisfyingly romantic ending for Diana. But the road to it is bumpy and filled with unforeseen curves and turns.

Many of those curves enable Hamilton to address social issues that concerned her. Mrs. Cantalupe, speaking for the aristocracy, has plenty to say about the relative worth of inherited wealth versus earned wealth, and about the efficiency of the British class structure. Sir Jabez and Diana engage in a surprising amount of discussion of business and economics, reminiscent of similar conversation in Granville Barker's The Voysey Inheritance. And in its first and last scenes, Diana of Dobson's offers what must have been a remarkably frank examination of the quality of life of the working (and non-working) poor.

It's honestly fascinating stuff, and though Hamilton doesn't exactly manage to integrate it seamlessly with the more traditionally sentimental trappings of her play, it nevertheless serves to distinguish Diana of Dobson's from others that covered similar ground. Director Eleanor Reissa emphasizes this intriguing socio-economic commentary in her staging, which helps to clarify the relevance of the piece, though perhaps at the expense of the fairy-tale romance that the play ultimately is. Neither Rachel Sledd (as Diana) nor Karl Kenzler (as Captain Bretherton) communicates the passion that would make their love story truly satisfying here; the most interesting characters on stage are the Oppressors, Mrs. Cantelupe (Mikel Sarah Lambert) and Sir Jabez (John Plumpis).

Impressive supporting performances are turned in by David Marantz (as a Swiss waiter and, later, as a London constable), Caren Browning (as one of Diana's fellow shop girls at Dobson's), and Glynis Bell (as Mrs. Cantelupe's great friend, Mrs. Whyte-Fraser). Costumes by Tracy Christensen are appropriate and lovely, as is Sarah Lambert's hotel setting (though her design for the dormitory is pitched too far downstage for comfort).

Diana of Dobson's is not a great play, but it's as much an artifact of its historical moment as, say, "Ally McBeal" is of ours. The Mint performs invaluable service to us as theatregoers and as citizens of the world when it mounts a show like this--placing us, in effect, in a time capsule, where we can see what the world was like a century ago, and where we can test that old saying about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Bravo to Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank and director Eleanor Reissa for granting us some much-needed perspective the next time we encounter the Diana Massingberds, Mrs. Cantelupes, and Sir Jabez Grinleys in our own 21st century lives.

With this esoteric pairing of plays, the Mint Theater Company once again gives audiences a lesson in cultural history. This time it's a study in contrasts: the two pieces comprising this double bill, Harley Granville Barker's Farewell to the Theatre and George Kelly's The Flattering Word, simply couldn't be more different. Both were written in the same year--1916--and both deal, more or less, with the same subject--the theatre. But the sensibilities of their authors--the one a 40-year-old English playwright/critic looking back on an already accomplished career; the other a twenty-something American ex-vaudevillian looking forward to even greater success--inform these works in fundamental ways that make this evening of theatre a fascinating and provocative one. 

Farewell to the Theatre is a florid valentine to the theatre, hearkening back to the glorious epoch of the actor-manager in British theatre: its heroine, Dorothy, is a stand-in for someone like Ellen Terry or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, one of those luminous stars who traipsed all over England in the days of Victoria and Edward VII. By the time of World War I (when this play was written), such careers were in decline: Farewell to the Theatre recounts the last gasps of Dorothy's, as she meets with her solicitor Edward to review the failing financial health of her company. The play is intended, I think, as a sort of last stand for Dorothy and the fading legends for whom she is a proxy; it's unfortunate that, at least at the performance I attended, Sally Kemp fell short of the larger-than-life star quality that would have made this the tour de force it ought to be.

There's also a love story between Dorothy and Edward--an unrequited one, as it turns out, for though Edward has nursed a passion for lo these many years, Dorothy can't abandon the profession she was born to. This aspect of the play works better in this production, thanks largely to George Morfogen's solid and unsentimental reading of Edward.

Farewell to the Theatre has, as far as we know, never been performed before professionally; kudos to the Mint for putting it on its feet. I wouldn't expect a rash of revivals anytime soon, however, for this is a rather prolix piece. Director Gus Kaikkonen has labored hard to give it some life, but it remains a difficult, awkward sit. Nevertheless it's certainly of interest, especially juxtaposed, as it is here, with its more-or-less opposite number in The Flattering Word.

This delicious little comedy is a revelation, at once a delightful expose of American provincialism and a sly tribute not just to the theatre but to the theatrical in all of us. Kelly's set-up is simple: Eugene Tesh, a noted thespian on a cross-country tour, drops in on his old schoolmate Mary Rigley one afternoon in her Youngstown, Ohio home. Mary is married to the Reverend Loring Rigley, who is both pillar of his community and something of a prig, especially in his narrow-minded opposition to the theatre. Rigley at first refuses to even see Tesh in his home, but Mary prevails and the dashing actor arrives and proceeds to turn the household upside down.

Tesh begins his conquest by wooing Rigley's busybody assistant, Mrs. Zooker, by giving her "the flattering word": dripping sincerity, Tesh inquires as to whether Mrs. Zooker has ever appeared on the stage. As the visit progresses, Tesh turns his flattery on the Reverend, while getting a bit of payback himself when Mrs. Zooker retrieves her shrill young daughter for an impromptu recitation of Tennyson.

It's a funny and charming piece from start to finish, and not so dated as you might expect. (And where it is dated, The Flattering Word gives us a healthy appreciation of what average Americans thought about the theatre some 85 years ago.) Stylistically the play feels very much like the smart, brash American comedies that Kelly would write in the 20s--The Torchbearers, The Show-Off, Craig's Wife, and others. And in Rigley and Tesh, Kelly gives us two classic American dramatic prototypes: self-important snob and smooth-talking wiseguy, the one ripe for comeuppance by the other.

Kaikkonen has staged and cast The Flattering Word flawlessly. Allyn Burrows is dashing and appealing as Tesh, while Michael Stebbins is likably foolish as the smug Rigley. Sioux Madden is fine in the small but catalytic role of Mary, and young Sara Barnett is a hoot as the talentless Zooker girl. Colleen Smith Wallnau, meanwhile, threatens to walk away with the play as Barnett's bleating, besotted mother.

I think it's safe to say that if you relish The Flattering Word you're going to be less than thrilled by Farewell to the Theatre, and vice versa. But don't let that keep you from sampling both: this savvy pairing lets us glimpse images of the theatre of a century ago, from both sides of Atlantic. It makes for a stimulating and absorbing evening. 

• The tale of a little girl from St. Louis whose secret lover is Toussaint L'Ouverture, who liberated  Haiti from the French
• The magical story of Sechita, who wore "sequined skirts" and "splendid red garters" and earned her keep dancing in New Orleans, "catchin stars tween her toes"
• The tragic life of Crystal and her drunken bully of a husband Beau Willie, who dangled her children out of a fifth story window
• The powerful affirmation of a whole stageful of black women, giving voice to feelings bottled within for far too long:

I am simply tired
of collectin
"I didn't know
I was so important to you"
I'm gonna haveta throw some away
I can't get to the clothes in my closet
for alla the sorries

Miraculous stuff, this: and not just gorgeous poetry, either, for Shange and her director, George Faison, have shaped her remarkable words into a profoundly theatrical piece--choreopoem really is the precise, correct word for it--that enchants and astonishes and holds us spellbound.

So how do I describe for colored girls to you? It's dance, and song, and incantation; it's storytelling and soliloquizing; it's a conjuration of pure, charmed, positive black female energy. It's a record of lives and of a way of life, hopefully dated now, some 25 years after it was written (but probably not nearly as much as we might wish). It's dazzling entertainment, filled with laughter and tears and evocative music. Perhaps most importantly, it's a way for people who aren't colored girls to begin to understand what being one might mean.

Faison's new production, which originated in Baltimore, Maryland, is sharply cast with seven remarkable performers. First among equals is the commanding Novella Nelson, one of our theatre's unheralded gems, an actress whose raw, fierce presence on stage is palpable. It is she, as the woman in brown, who welcomes us into Shange's play ("this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/but moved to the ends of their own rainbows"), and it's hard to imagine a more appropriate guide into Shange's world.

Jackée, who is the best-known member of the cast thanks to her TV work, makes a vivid impression as the woman in blue. She's toned down her outsized personality to render the various characterizations she assays here more real. But we love her most when she's her bodacious self, as she is on a couple of occasions here: she almost brings down the house when she joins her sister players in a chanted affirmation, cooing "my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face."

Lizan Mitchell (the woman in purple) and Carol Jean Lewis (the woman in green) register strongly in several well-turned set pieces; Katherine J. Smith (the woman in orange) and J. Ieasha Prime (the woman in yellow) have less to do but acquit themselves nicely as well. Eleanor McCoy (the woman in red) heats things up with a stunning dance turn and also proves herself a capable actress in the penultimate scene (the one about Crystal and Beau Willie): this versatile young performer is someone to keep an eye on.

Invaluable support is provided by the musicians Kimati Dinizulu (percussion) and René McClean (reeds). Walt Spangler's spare, evocative set, Robert Perry's moody lighting, and Ann Marie Hould-Ward's elegant costumes all help director-choreographer Faison realize a sensitive, full-blooded vision of Shange's work. 

Some of the finest theatre in town can be found at the Henry Street Settlement's Recital Hall, where Woodie King, Jr.'s National Black Touring Circuit is putting on a festival of some of Great Black One-Acts. Five weeks of this are scheduled, with a different program each week; on the basis of the first one, I'm tempted to go back and sample every bill. 

All I can tell you about, for now, is the program I caught, which closes on Sunday, July 9. It begins with Sugar Mouth Sam Don't Dance No More by Don Evans, a sultry, sly riff on the age-old theme of marital infidelity, beautifully enacted by Andre Mtumi as the sweet-talking rascal of the play's title and Marjorie Johnson as his long-suffering, long-term mistress. Revelations and recriminations pile up as expected, but the soul of this piece is in its atmosphere and, especially, in its smooth, vivid language: Evans's depictions of the lonely hearts inside and outside the rundown Chicago apartment where his story unfolds are stunning.

Sugar Mouth Sam is followed by a short, delicious comedy by Ben Caldwell called First Militant Preacher, which begins with the sounds of a young man breaking into an apartment that he quickly realizes is that of a local preacher. While this fellow is in the midst of robbing the place, the preacher comes home and, before stopping to notice that anything is amiss, falls onto his knees to ask God for guidance about how to deal with the more militant members of his flock. The burglar, hiding in the bedroom, is only too happy to oblige; what follows is a hilarious and pointed account of how the world may have gotten its first militant preacher. (Funniest moment: the preacher addresses his booming-voiced, unseen adviser as "Jesus." "My name's not Jesus," comes the reply; "it's God.") Ken Green (as the preacher) and Kim Sullivan (as the burglar) play this one for all its worth.

The second half of the program features a pair of plays that complement these first two smartly. Alice Childress's Mojo, the most profound and moving work of the evening, tells of the reunion of an estranged husband and wife. Childress shrewdly thwarts our expectations early on with the news that it was the woman, not the man, who ran out years before; and she keeps on thwarting them as the details of the couple's lives are revealed. Set in 1969, Mojo examines the hows and whys of love and pride within Black American culture in its portrait of two very deliberately indifferent lives, indelibly battered by the lingering racism of a country that is still far from able to heal itself. Anderson Johnson and Perri Gaffney portray the pair with depth and humanity.

Wrapping things up is a miniature one-act fantasy by Langston Hughes called Soul Gone Home. In it, Trazana Beverley plays a middle-aged woman mourning the death of her teenage son, who is laid out on a slab nearby awaiting the undertaker. "Oh my boy, speak to me!" she wails, and then she's surprised (not to say somewhat miffed) when he actually does. Especially because what's he got to say is all about what a lousy mother she was. Beverley makes it clear to us that the boy's not exactly lying, but she summons up all manner of righteousness to defend herself: "Sure, I could of let you die, but I didn't," she sniffles virtuously. "Naw, I kept you with me--off and on."

Just fifteen minutes long, Soul Gone Home strikes swift and deep in its subversive satire of racial and familial stereotypes. Beverley, a Tony-winning actress whom we don't see nearly often enough here in New York, is magnificent as the mother, giving what is surely the funniest and most honest comic performance anywhere in town. It's a true tour de force: if the evening weren't over, she'd stop the show.

But the evening is over, too soon. If the next four servings of Great Black One-Acts are even half as hearty and wise and funny and touching as this one, then the folks who get to see them will be a lucky audience, indeed.

One final note: Sugar Mouth Sam premiered in New York in 1975 and First Militant Preacher premiered here in 1969; neither has been revived here since. Mojo had a brief, solitary run in Hartford, Connecticut back in 1981, and Soul Gone Home, though published in 1937 and again in a collection of Hughes's plays in the mid-sixties, has, as far as I can tell, never been performed professionally anywhere. All of which is by way of illustrating the shameful way we're squandering our dramatic literary heritage, for reasons of racial politics, economy, or what-have-you. Plays this good need to be seen. I'm grateful to the National Black Touring Circuit for giving this festival to us. We need to return the favor and fill those seats!

Before you take your seat in Barbara Montgomery's production of Hymn to the Rising Sun, you are first escorted across the stage, on which is recreated a harrowingly realistic North Carolina prison, circa 1937. Rows of cramped, dirty bunk beds line the stage--one side for the white prisoners, one side for the black--each occupied by a fitfully sleeping prisoner. It's a disturbing and attention-getting way to begin this play, and entirely appropriate. Hymn to the Rising Sun is a play with a gigantic social conscience, worn proudly on author Paul Green's sleeve. Montgomery makes us gawk at her actors to let us know, up front, just how degraded and dehumanized are the prisoners that they portray. And Green's potent, angry play does the rest.

It's an overtly theatrical, polemical piece, constructed mostly as a monologue by the prison's warden, delivered to the convicts in his charge on the morning of July 4 (with all the requisite irony). Except for the patriotic festivity of the date--which prompts the warden to force a particularly brutalized prisoner to lead the chain gang in a heartbreaking rendition of "America"--and except for the incessant banging and yelping from the "Sweat Box" of a dying prisoner called Runt (who is being punished for a minor indiscretion by spending a couple of weeks in this stiflingly oppressive wooden cage)--except for these things, it's more or less a normal morning in this awful place.

That such a place ever existed seems difficult to comprehend nowadays; program notes tell us that Green sent a copy of this play to every member of the North Carolina legislature, and that Hymn was eventually instrumental in the abolition of chain gangs in that state.  Its power remains absolutely palpable, even if the broader human crisis of cruelty now sits at its center, rather than a specific social ill.

Montgomery has wisely chosen to let the play speak for itself; this is a straightforward, mostly unencumbered rendering. All of the roles are vividly and movingly acted, including the dozen or so convicts who are mostly silent throughout the hour-long piece. Charley Hayward as the conflicted prison warden, Charles Weldon as the senior black inmate, and RS Call as the prison cook register particularly strongly.

With Life During Wartime, Inertia Productions once again proves why it's one of the most accomplished new off-off-Broadway theatre companies around. Six remarkable actors--Eric Alperin, Nathan Flower, Calvin Gladen, Danielle Liccardo, Missy Thomas, and Eric Walton--bring the play's fourteen characters to life in performances brimming with vivid details and emotional clarity; and they find--but do not milk--every one of the numerous laughs in Reddin's dark comedy.  Director Kevin Kittle and Assistant Director David Dannenfelser provide a staging that is smart and authoritative. And the technical team, especially set designer Eric Walton, has pulled off near-miracles: when was the last time you saw a revolving turntable set in a theatre the size of the Currican?

So I say bravo to all involved, and I say that despite the fact that I'm not entirely certain that Reddin's play is worth all the trouble. Life During Wartime is only ten years old but I fear it's already rather dated: try to remember the doldrums of the middle Bush era and compare how that felt to how we feel today and I think you'll see what I mean. Life During Wartime is a gloomily pessimistic comedy about a young man whose happiness is literally destroyed by the company he works for; a tacked-on philosophical ending and interpolated ironic commentary from John Calvin don't redeem it, though I think they're meant to.

This doesn't mean, however, that Life During Wartime isn't entertaining: it's very funny, particularly whenever Nathan Flower puts on Calvin's self-satisfied hairshirt and lectures the audience about its inadequacies. And it's even touching in places, notably when Aaron Stanford as the play's young hero and Danielle Liccardo as his significantly older girlfriend take the stage.

But that satisfying je ne sais quoi of genuinely vital drama is missing here. We have to content ourselves with the satisfaction of jobs well done by the entire Inertia troupe, which, happily, is enough.

With Love's Postman (or, Love on Crutches), The Metro Playhouse once again gives us a lost little gem of the American theatre. This one dates back more than a hundred years, to 1884, and it will surprise you how well-crafted it is: if you thought that the state of American drama back then was epitomized by Harrigan & Hart vaudevilles and hoary melodramas, Love's Postman will change your mind.

Love's Postman tells the story of Sydney Austin, a wealthy gentleman of leisure who has written, incognito, a sensational popular novel. He is currently stuck in a marriage of convenience with a proud and imaginative young woman named Annis (his convenience, by the way: he stood to lose an inheritance if he remained unmarried). Annis and Sydney claim to hate each other, though they've resigned themselves to a kind of truce. They console themselves with romantic correspondences under the noms de plume Pascal and Diana. Their friends Dr. Quattles and Margery Gwynn serve as go-betweens (the "postmen" of the title).

You don't have to have seen The Shop Around the Corner to know how this story turns out. The fun of Love's Postman is in the stylish twists and turns of circumstance that Daly invents; as I've said, they're refreshingly not old-fashioned and they give Love's Postman considerable elegance and charm. The language is a blend of Victorian formalism and 19th century American slang--a bit odd on the ear--but the jokes are clever even when they're familiar, and the farcical situations are well-constructed and nicely realized. (There's a delicious moment near the climax of Act Two where four characters are in pursuit of an incriminating letter for four different reasons that's simply marvelous.)

Director Scott Shattuck has set the play in the 1920s for no reason that I can discern, which makes some of the dialogue feel even more dated than it otherwise would. Performances are spotty: David L. Carson and DeBanne Browne are on the right track as Quattles and Margery, but Adam Smith and especially Erica Schmidt seem quite at-sea as Sydney and Annis. The finest work comes from Kennedy Brown, as a bored world traveler who is Margery's love interest. Christopher Holvenstot's sets and most of Fritz Masten's costumes are lovely and appropriate (though Masten has given Annis a really dreadful gown for Act III).

DJM Productions, a relatively young theatre company, scores a major success with its revival of Mass Appeal, now playing a too-short showcase engagement at The Producers Club. Cannily focusing on what's essential in Bill C. Davis's excellent play, producer Dave McCracken and director Karen Case Cook have wisely eschewed providing a realistic set or elaborate costumes on an off-off-Broadway budget and instead focused on delivering thoughtful, provocative drama. They have cast two expert actors in the play's only roles, Howard Thoresen as the comfortable middle-aged priest Father Tim Farley, and Chris Arruda as the earnest and immature deacon Mark Dolson. The result is an explosive and exciting fresh look at Davis's play: a riveting and touching theatre experience, loaded with passion and wisdom.

Mass Appeal begins with its two characters' initial confrontational meeting at one of Father Farley's "dialogue sermons." Mark, an outspoken young seminarian visiting Farley's church for the first time, contradicts the older man in front of his congregation. Farley gently chides Mark after the service, but is nonetheless taken with his guileless idealism: Mark is, Farley says:

... a lunatic. And the church needs lunatics--you're one of those priceless lunatics that come along every so often and make the church alive. The only problem with lunatics is they don't how to survive. I do.

Mass Appeal charts the growth of the relationship between the two men, illuminating the spiritual bond that brings them together and the more worldly matters that pull them apart. Mark decries Farley's detached, formulaic approach to his work; he questions the compromises that Farley continuously makes to remain popular with his parishioners and the subterfuges and white lies that keep him on the good side of his superior Monsignor Burke. For his part, Farley worries that Mark's blunt and tactless impatience with the hypocrisy of the Church's leaders and adherents will prevent him from ever becoming a priest. In particular, Farley warns Mark to back down when he takes a vehement stand against the Monsignor's homophobic dismissal of two seminarians.

The play's two big questions--Will Mark become a priest? Will Father Farley regain his conscience and his soul?--frame the dozens of smaller ones that actually propel it. Mass Appeal is a series of dialogues between two very articulate, intelligent men, on topics ranging from the best way to offer consolation to the purpose of the Church to the nature and meaning of love. Behind the discourse is the principled wisdom and unwavering faith of its author, Bill C. Davis. In the end, Mass Appeal tackles the most fundamental issues of contemporary life. In this cynical time, it's important to be reminded as we are here of concepts that are bigger than ourselves--notions like integrity, compassion, and humanity. 

Howard Thoresen and Chris Arruda offer near-perfect portrayals of the two adversaries-turned-friends. Thoresen shows us Farley's slick veneer and also the long-hidden vulnerability underneath; we can actually feel the conflict between pragmatism and righteousness play itself out in Thoresen's performance. Arruda, meanwhile, is vigorous, forthright, and even a little bit dangerous as Mark, wearing his arrogance and his tactlessness like badges of honor; but the childlike openness is never far from the surface. Arruda and Thoresen are the most evenly matched pairing I've yet seen in a production of Mass Appeal: their interplay is endlessly compelling.

So kudos to producer McCracken and director Cook and everyone else involved in this excellent production, especially for getting out of the way and letting Davis's vivid, essential characters--so ably enacted by Messrs. Thoresen and Arruda--have their say.

Neil Simon's Hotel Suite re-packages four one-act play from earlier works (one from Plaza Suite, two from California Suite, and one from London Suite) into a new piece that traces the lives and relationships of two very different married couples. It's generally satisfying, though uneven in a surprising way: the pair of plays about one couple--weaker from a writing standpoint--are beautifully realized here, while the other pair--which includes what is perhaps Simon's best short work--is disappointingly miscast and limpidly directed.

The good stuff, first: "Diana and Sidney" and "Diana and Sidney, Part II." These tell the story of an insecure but successful British actress and her remote but caring homosexual husband. We meet them first just before and after an Academy Awards ceremony, where Diana is a nominee and Sidney her reluctant escort. In Act Two, we catch up with them several years later: Diana is now the star of a hit TV sitcom and Sidney has moved to a Greek isle with his male lover. Both plays chart the conflicting feelings these two have for each other, with the second especially revealing how a failed physical romance can nevertheless deepen into a strong and lasting, though unromantic, kind of love. Helen Carey is luminous and vulnerable as Diana in the evening's most humane performance; Leigh Lawson is somewhat less sympathetic as Sidney.

"Visitor from Philadelphia" and Visitor from Forest Hills" comprise the second pairing. In the first piece, Marvin wakes up in his hotel suite next to a hooker who has consumed a full bottle of vodka: he doesn't remember how she got there, he can't wake her up, and his wife Millie is due to arrive any minute for his nephew's bar mitzvah. In the second piece, Marvin and Millie's daughter Mimsey has locked herself in the bathroom of their Plaza Hotel suite just minutes before her wedding, and she's refusing to come out or even talk to anyone. These pieces are beautifully written to straddle that fine line between farce and tragedy; well-produced, they produce peals of laughter and then bring us to the brink of tears. That doesn't happen here, though, because neither Ron Orbach or Randy Graff plays a real person: under John Tillinger's surprisingly limp direction, they push hard for laughs without digging into their characters. Nothing's ever at stake for them, and so both pieces misfire badly, their comic potential severely underachieved.

Tillinger makes another miscalculation in having his four "on-stage scene changers" cavort rather foolishly between the plays; the schmaltzy faux-nostalgia soundtrack undermines things as well. The sets by David Gallo are appropriate, even ingenious; but the costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge lack subtlety (and don't seem to fit Carey very well).

Race was written in 1933 by Ferdinand Bruckner, just a few months after the events depicted in it, according to an image projected on the back wall of the theatre as the lights fade for Act One. Those events are, first, the Nazi Party's victory in the national  elections in Germany, effectively ending the Weimar Republic and beginning the Third Reich; and, second, the government-sanctioned arrests and acts of violence against the Jews that shortly followed.

Bruckner, and his faithful adaptor Barry Edelstein, show them to us in scenes both strange and familiar. The centerpiece of Act One, for example, is set in a Beer Hall, where a cross-section of Germans celebrates the Nazi victory with increasingly raucous fervor. As the rowdy beer-drinking competitions give way to ominous goose-stepping, we think: we've seen this before, in Cabaret and The Producers and dozens of things in between.

But other scenes aren't so easily parsed or dismissed. The play's opening takes place in a park near a university where Peter Karlanner and his friends Tessow, Seiglemann, and Rosloh all attend medical school. It's Election Day, and Tessow is trying to convince Karlanner to vote for the National Socialists. Tessow is young and bright and eager, and he talks passionately about the vitality of the Party--the way it will restore prosperity and honor to the German people after the twin horrors of World War I and the Depression. Then he launches into an attack on the Jews--how they're racially inferior, how they're the enemy of German progress. Karlanner, whose girlfriend is a Jew, is horrified.

So are we, but not just in the expected kneejerk way. Watching this scene, which incidentally includes the Jewish student Seiglemann laughing off Tessow's diatribe, I thought: I can understand how attractive this whole line of thought must have seemed to people; and more importantly, how easy it must have been for everyone, Jew or Aryan, to tolerate it, coddle it, even laugh at it the way Seiglemann is doing. It's clear that for these students the Nazis look, at the moment, like the means to a very desirable end: crackpot racist nonsense like the stuff spouted by Tessow aside, who in that park can possibly believe that the systematic genocide of the Holocaust lay just a few years in the future?

Later, Karlanner fights with his Jewish girlfriend Helene; and then convinces himself to join the Nazi Party. We watch him wrestle with the warring issues of morality and efficacy inside his mind; we watch, too, as demagoguery turns into brutality as Seiglemann is arrested and beaten and, later, wholesale violence against Jewish merchants erupts in the streets.

No surprises here whatsover. Except this: In Race, the madness plays out with an intimacy, a visible logic, that's been missing from other works. Maybe it's the machinations of Bruckner's dramaturgy, maybe it's the immediacy of Edelstein's riveting staging: there's a visceral real-ness here that eventually overwhelms the iconography and the artifice. At some point in Act Two, detachment melted: I stopped watching myself watch Race and got swept up in its momentousness. Then, devastated, there was nothing left to do but shudder and reflect.

A brief note about the production itself: Edelstein has directed with an intelligence and a kind of relentless inevitability that underscore the potency of Race's themes. The actors are excellent, with particularly fine work by Stephen Barker Turner as Karlanner, Tommy Schrider as Tessow, C.J. Wilson as the Nazi Rosloh, and especially Jeremy Shamos as the doomed Seiglemann. Spare sets by Neil Patel, framed by Jan Hartley's newsreel-like projections, and lit by Russell Champa's stark lighting, provide the piece with the perfect environment. Edelstein's final image--plunging his set and the world into everlasting darkness--is unforgettable.

The Empire Theatre Company deserves nothing but praise for mounting Roberto Zucco, a difficult and uncompromising contemporary work by the late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes. Too little serious continental European drama finds its way to the New York stage these days, and so Empire's impulse to give us a look at this fascinating though repellant work is commendable.

As to the work itself, there are two matters to be considered here. First, there is the play itself: a nasty piece of business, I'm afraid, calculated to shock and satirize a corrupt, disaffected, post-everything audience. It tells the story of Roberto Zucco, a criminal driven to murder and brutal rape by a culture that at once rejects and worships him. Zucco's alienation--as outcast and as celebrity--provides a framework for Koltes's ironic, bitter commentary on the rampant dysfunctionality of a society that values money above love and self-interest even higher. It's an unsubtle, polemical, angry play, attempting to jolt us out of complacency much as the works of Brecht or Genet did in previous generations.

It's also an alarmingly difficult play: the Empire's production, staged with intensity by Daniel Safer, is ambitious though perhaps not entirely successful. Safer has conceived the piece as a nearly two-hour assault on the audience, on all fronts: we are pitted against unsettling sounds and sights throughout, from the simulated bowel movement of a prison officer that opens the play to the garishly loud bloodbath at its climax. I can't tell how faithful Safer is being to Koltes because I'm not familiar with Roberto Zucco; but the limitations of an off-off-Broadway company tell on Safer's concept. As a result, many effects  fall flat, slowing down the show's already relentless, lumbering (and intermissionless) pace. Zucco's descent into hell is felt perhaps more keenly by the audience that even Koltes or Safer ever intended.

But Safer and his company must be recognized for their effort: this is an astonishingly physical production, and the mere fact that the performers don't collapse under its metaphorical weight deserves positive comment. Peter Bisgaier, in particular, who has the toughest assignment in the play's title role, makes a strong impression.

Roberto Zucco is undeniably of interest, but be cautioned that it will test any theatregoer's patience and endurance.

Rope, written in 1927, was inspired--like many other dramatic works--by the sensational murder committed by Leopold and Loeb. These two well-educated young men killed an acquaintance solely for the thrill of taking a life: to demonstrate, it was said, some of Nietzsche's ideas about the Superman and the death of God. Playwright Patrick Hamilton (who also gave us Gaslight) grabbed hold of this astonishing story and shaped into a brilliantly crafted play that functions, on one level, as a compellingly taut thriller and, on another, as a sharp and well-considered refutation of the amoral impulses that Nietzsche had supposedly inspired.

So Rope begins with its two handsome and sophisticated young heroes, Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo, stuffing the lifeless body of their 20-year-old victim Ronald Kentley into a massive chest that has been dragged into their drawing room. Having done their "perfect" and "motiveless" crime, they now need to finish off the deed with the requisite bravado that will prove their superiority to Ronald and the rest of humanity: they will have a small party, with a buffet supper to be served right on the incriminating chest, and with the murdered boy's father in attendance. It's a breathtakingly heartless scheme and even if you've seen the Hitchcock film version or otherwise know the piece you'll watch spellbound as Brandon and Granillo flaunt the murder and floutingly tantalize their guests into discovering what they've done.

Hamilton's great idea, here, is the inclusion among those guests of Brandon's old schoolmate Rupert Cadell, a brilliant, effete wit whose World War I experiences begot a severe disenchantment with humanity. Rupert's bitter cynicism would seem to make him the one man who might understand what this murder really means. This turns out to be exactly the case, although not in the way that Brandon might wish: Rope's great strength is its supremely rational, moral perspective. The protagonist of the play turns out to be Rupert, and the journey that he takes toward humanity is surprisingly redemptive.

This production does Hamilton's work proud, but it makes a serious (though easily rectified) error. Hamilton's play is constructed in three acts, with the two intervals positioned very specifically to optimize tension and suspense. For some reason, director Courtney Patrick Mitchell has eliminated both of them, transforming Rope into a long one-act that, alas, loses a good deal of steam as it rushes, rather too quickly, toward its climax. A play like this demands some time for the audience to savor and ponder what it sees: those intermissions are absolutely vital (and I hope they'll be restored).

That said, Mitchell has otherwise done a fine job making this Rope as thrilling as it ought to be. The design team has contributed enormously to the success of this endeavor, with a heroically detailed, elaborate, and expensive-looking set provided by Joel Mathieson (who has, as if by magic, somehow transformed the tiny Theatre on Three playing area into a credible London drawing room); appropriate and attractive costumes by Abby Smith; really remarkable lighting by Michael Abrams; and superbly precise sound design by Martin Miller. During Act Two, especially, we really feel the thunderstorm outside and the deepening tension of the atmosphere inside in a terrifically palpable way: it's that goosebump-y feeling that we go to the theatre for.

The performances are all quite good as well. Jonas Abry, Jim Siatkowski, and Cynthia Sepe are fine in the play's smallest roles; and I was greatly impressed by Kristin Kahle and Kevin Townley as a pair of quintessentially frivolous silly-ass English people, perfect foils for the mannered cynicism of the three leading characters. Those gentlemen have been cast to perfection in this production: David Heckel is a study in panic, and then utter fear, as the less nervy Granillo; Matthew Bray is unsettlingly smooth and cold-blooded as the brilliant, amoral Brandon; and Todd Butera is urbane and articulate as Rupert. All three performances are hurt, a bit, by the too-rapid pacing of the final scene; nevertheless, each of these actors reveals the soul of his character to us, nakedly and compellingly.

So, a fine rendition of an excellent play that doesn't get done enough, which is another reason for you to check out this Rope. And keep your eye on Praxis Theatre Project: this is a really propitious debut.

Women's Shakespeare Company has done a more than credible job reviving Tom Stoppard's seminal comedy Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead; just having this fine, challenging work on the boards in such good shape merits our gratitude.

Written in 1967, R&G is the next milestone in contemporary dramatic literature following Beckett's Waiting for Godot (I think it's too soon to be sure what comes after it). Stoppard's play bridges the gap between postwar alienation and postmodern irony: Beckett's clowns wait, while Stoppard's wait to die--the ultimate cosmic joke.

R&G's plot, such as it is, concerns those two hapless minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from the time they have been summoned by King Claudius to spy on their friend right up to their death sentence. Symbolically as well as literally they are mere pawns in a drama they only fitfully comprehend; filled with in-jokes and recursively meandering word games and thought puzzles, R&G encompasses multiple layers of  meaning. The third key character, apart from the titular duo, is the Player (the one that helps Hamlet fix Claudius's guilt): he's here to remind us that no matter what drama we find ourselves in, there's a role for us to play.

This production, ably directed by Brian PJ Cronin, features an all-female ensemble (in accordance with Women's Shakespeare Company's mission). We're almost never aware that the mostly male roles are being filled by women here, which is meant as a compliment: the eleven actresses in this ensemble fill their roles with surety and skill. Particularly convincing are Clayton Dowty's Guildenstern and Cheryl Dennis's Hamlet.