nytheatre Archive
2000-01 Theatre Season Reviews

Within a tight economy of thirteen scenes, Saved charts a series of events in the lives of a group of working class men and women. Len goes home with his one-night stand Pam and ends up moving in with her troubled family. Pam leaves kind-hearted (albeit ambivalent) Len for the often-sadistic Fred, but Len remains in the house, trying to help Pam who is now a single mother. Events unfold, and in the play’s most talked about scene, a mob of young men, which Fred eventually joins, viciously murder Pam’s baby in its pram. Fred goes to jail for the crime. Pam pines for Fred, but Len remains with the family, even after a final vicious row between Pam’s mother and father.

While Saved’s story is a straight-forward one, the play vividly creates the meandering feeling of domestic life. There are long scenes where the characters watch TV, eat dinner and squabble over missing magazines. Woodruff’s directing in such scenes captures that ebb and flow, while contrasting it with the quick pace of the young men’s banter as they hang out in a park, talking trash about women and work. And the infamous scene where the baby is stoned is truly horrifying. The lengthy scene begins slowly and quickly builds into a frenzy. At the performance I attended, a surprisingly large number of audience members left during the scene, even though the theatre posted signs at the entrance warning them about the production’s violence. The couple sitting next to me kept muttering that they were going to get up and leave, but they just couldn’t.

For me, however, the production’s most harrowing moment came earlier, when the baby was left to cry, cough and sputter for an entire scene while Len, Pam and her parents went about their business, barely noticing its shrieks. This moment hit home the most, and I realized how the baby can be a symbol for all the world’s horrors which we routinely ignore during our daily lives. Woodruff’s production makes clear what Bond has been saying all along; the stoning of a baby is "typical English understatement" when compared to the atrocities of the twentieth century.

The production and design is full of eye-opening wonders. I especially love the set changes between scenes where the stage is transformed, in a Brechtian way, into the various locales by young men in contemporary American garb, work boots and all, in full view of the audience. Douglas Stein’s set perfectly captures the play’s world: large cement walls which a large black curtain slices horizontally during the interior scenes, creating a palpable sense of the characters’ confinement by economics. And even when the curtain reveals the entire set during exterior scenes, there is only more cement coldness outside the home to greet the characters.

Pete Starrett gives a career-making performance as Len, showing him to be an actor of great depth and bravery. He captures Len’s deep-rooted compassion to others, while also showing the character’s confusion and terror when faced with conflict. The same depth is present in Amy Ryan and Norbert Butz in their portrayals of Liz and Fred. Ryan and Butz both walk that fine line which makes their characters both sympathetically recognizable as well as horrifyingly callous. As pleasurable as it is to watch these younger actors, Randy Danson and Terrence Rigby are breathtaking as Pam’s parents. These two seasoned actors provide the production with its moments of real humor (albeit of the Oedipal variety) as well as poignancy, Rigby especially in the play’s penultimate scene.

In short, Saved is must-see theatre. While not for the faint of heart, it is a stellar production of a important play which resonates as powerfully as it did almost forty years ago.

See Bob Run is as intense an hour of theatre as you're likely to experience: an excruciating, harrowing journey through the  psyche of a frighteningly disturbed young woman. Susan O'Connor, the remarkable young actress who takes us on this journey, gives a performance so blisteringly, nakedly real that the stakes are raised even higher, making See Bob Run almost painful to witness.

Bob--short for Roberta--is a young Canadian woman who has hit the road in search of her father. Alone with just a single forlorn piece of luggage, she is hitchhiking, heading east; toward the Water, she says, the only clue she has about the whereabouts of the man her mother ordered out of the house a long time ago.

As she climbs into one stranger's car after another, Bob tells stories about her past. It's not long before we piece together her history; I don't think I'm giving too much away by telling you that Bob suffered serious abuse at the hands of the man she is now seeking out. But there are other threads in Bob's narrative that are even more disturbing: the layered memories that she is running from offer a horrifying account of the lasting damage that one human being can do to another. In the end, playwright Daniel MacIvor gives us a heroine beyond repair, if not beyond redemption.

Originally written in 1988, See Bob Run is perhaps less shocking in the theatre than it once was. But it still packs a significant emotional wallop, especially in the hands of skillful director Timothy P. Jones and lighting designer John Pinckard, both of whom create an evocative landscape where it becomes more and more difficult to tell what's real and what's imagined in Bob's increasingly agitated consciousness.

O'Connor is nothing short of masterful in the play's single role, at once charming and repelling us as she plunges courageously into Bob's scarred psyche. It's an unforgettable performance, one that knocks the wind out of us. (Charlayne Woodard's Hester-as-Mother Courage in Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood is the only comparable one I can think of.) O'Connor, who was so vital to last summer's Never Swim Alone, really gets to move us this time around: no telling what this actress will be able to astound us with next. 

A wealthy but cash-poor art dealer named Flan Kittredge ("Newport, but not along the ocean") and his elegant wife Ouisa are entertaining a South African businessman named Geoffrey, in hopes of getting two million dollars out of him to finance the purchase of a Cezanne. Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and a young black man bursts into their Upper East Side home, good-looking and well-dressed but bleeding from a stab wound. He knows their kids, he tells them, from Harvard; he identifies himself as Paul Poitier, son of a very famous movie star. Flan, Ouisa, and Geoffrey are instantly enchanted; Paul cooks them a gourmet meal and regales them with stories about his father and a thesis he has written about J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. The evening goes swimmingly. Geoffrey gives Flan the two million he needs.

End of anecdote: beginning of play. Paul isn't Sidney Poitier's son, and although Geoffrey never need find out, Flan and Ouisa soon become more involved with this puzzling, captivating young man than they ever intended. Especially Ouisa, the smart, questing, empty woman who is the heroine of Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare's essential play, now revived by T. Schreiber Studio in a powerful production staged by Charles P. Armesto. Ouisa characterizes herself as a "collage of unaccounted-for brushstrokes," but she finds purpose in connection with this odd stranger who comes from a world she can't know:

He wanted to be us. Everything we are in the world, this paltry thing--our life--he wanted it. He stabbed himself to get in here. He envied us. We're not enough to be envied.

Six Degrees is a rich, deep, immense play, one that can't be boiled down to a few platitudes or sound bites. It's a piece to relish, and to cherish; having it on stage in New York again is a gift. See it: you will quickly become immersed in Flan and Ouisa's story, and in the story of their remarkable visitor Paul. What they say and do and think will resonate deeply. And afterward, you will not look at your comfortable existence--or the next stranger you meet on the street; or the next panhandler on the subway--in quite the same way. This really is theatre that touches so profoundly as to change lives.

Guare's glorious, heartfelt writing is what makes Six Degrees great. But bravo to director Armesto for allowing this complex piece to breathe and to soar.  He's staged it with unstoppable, restless energy that's as involving as it is inevitable, bringing us right into Flan and Ouisa's living room, and by extension into their souls. The glibness of the anecdote that starts the play is as visceral as the urgency of the crisis that ends it: Armesto grabs us even before the house lights are turned down, and he never lets go.

The production features a spare, interesting set by David Swayze and arresting lighting design (uncredited in the program, except for "assistant lighting designer" Sarah Gersick. The ensemble of eighteen actors does generally fine work, particularly David Aston-Reese as the impenetrable Flan, Ali Costine and Randy Kurstin as Flan and Ouisa's emotionally starved children, and Michael Salconi as a doctor whose life is also unexpectedly touched by Paul. Leopold Lowe (Paul) and Zoey O'Toole (Ouisa) are effective in the play's largest roles.

I saw Six Degrees of Separation when it first ran on Broadway, more than a decade ago. I thought then--and think now--that it may well be the play of our time--how much of Flan, Paul, and especially Ouisa exists in all of us! And I'll tell you this: it may well have been the play that made me want to write about theatre. It still does. 

The play tells the story of Jasper, a young man whose life has somehow gotten stuck. Jasper hates his job (in the viewers’ complaint department at a TV network), he has no girlfriend (and no prospects), and all of his creative and emotional juices seem in danger of drying up. A series of chance encounters–with a young woman at a party, with a stranger on a subway train, and with a homeless man on a Manhattan street–perk Jasper up. Sketched by Pospisil with deftness and great humor in a succession of short vignettes, these incidents eventually transform Jasper, all the while offering a witty, cockeyed optimist’s view of contemporary life in the city.

Everyone is likely to have their own favorites among the delightful comic scenes that comprise Somewhere In Between. Mine is the one that finds Jasper on a New York subway car, suddenly being asked directions by a stranger with a pleading face and a vaguely foreign accent. It’s not long before everyone in the car puts his or her two cents in, each convinced of the absolute rightness of the particular route he or she has offered. Something of a fight breaks out leaving the poor tourist out in the cold, and Jasper more disenchanted than ever with the Big Apple.

Pospisil gets these prototypical New Yorkers exactly right, as he does all the familiar types that populate Somewhere In Between. We greet each of them with a smile of recognition as the play neatly and lovingly skewers them. Five actors portray this panorama of urban life, usually with success: most impressive are Nick Janik as that poor foreign lady on the subway and Alex Miller as a surprisingly enterprising homeless man. Dale Ho, a fine young actor who registered strongly in last fall’s Washington Square Dreams (which, incidentally, featured a one-act play by Pospisil), is the play’s strongly appealing center as Jasper. Ho isn’t experienced enough yet to carry an entire play on his shoulders, as he is asked to do here; but he soon will be, especially if he keeps on attempting challenging assignments like this one.

Somewhere In Between is probably ten minutes longer that it ought to be; it’s actually quite a complicated play and director Zalben doesn’t always find satisfactory ways to keep it flowing smoothly. But, occasional slow spots notwithstanding, this is a very amusing, very entertaining production of a smart, sharply crafted play.

Michael Goldfried's revival of Charles Ludlam's Stage Blood is an orgy of silliness: a sublimely ridiculous feast of bad jokes and hoary shtick delivered with grandly over-the-top theatrical style. This smorgasbord of artifice and vulgarity and camp is as merry as a roomful of Santa Clauses and at least twice as much fun. Ludlam, I think, would be proud.

The play itself, which hasn't been produced professionally in New York since its premiere at Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre in 1975, is an honest-to-goodness lost treasure. It tells the story of the Caucasian Theatrical Company, a bedraggledly gallant troupe of four actors and a stage manager, who have brought their production of Hamlet to our theatre, with all manner of improbable consequences. The company's manager Carlton Stone, Sr., having seen better days, is now playing the role of the Ghost, while his son Carl Jr. is essaying Hamlet; Carlton's wife Helga Vain plays Gertrude and her lover Edmund Dundreary portrays, naturally enough, Claudius. Parallels with Hamlet abound as Carlton Sr. is suddenly found murdered in the dressing room and Carl begins to suspect his mother and her lover of the crime.

Additional complications are supplied by Elfie Fey, the young actress who literally jumps out of her seat in the audience to take on the role of Ophelia; and by stage manager Jenkins, who has written an 1800-page avant-garde play called "Fossil Fuel" that he wants the company to produce. There's also a mysterious man who pops up suddenly with a surprising proposition for Carl Jr. And just exactly how many actors are playing the Ghost, anyway?

The convoluted plot never flags, even as it provides Ludlam opportunities to make hay of Hamlet, Chekhov's The Seagull, backstage melodramas, method acting, and any number of other theatrical targets. Goldfried's staging, at requisite breakneck speed (and, shrewdly, without an intermission), wrings just about every possible drop of humor out of the hilarious script. And his (very occasional) updates, including a terrific cell phone joke that's been just waiting to happen, enhance the show winningly.

Six exceptional actors bring Stage Blood to screamingly funny life. Marshall Correro plays the leering, lascivious elder Stone as a sort of cross between Groucho Marx and John Barrymore. Bob Yarnall, clad in several skintight leather creations, is gleefully evil--and ambiguous--as treacherous Edmund Dundreary. Michael Nathanson is appealingly puppyish and klutzy as Carl, Jr.; in his on-stage scenes as a bizarrely blond Hamlet, he's a hoot, adopting, apparently, Katharine Hepburn (in her On Golden Pond years) as his acting model. "To be or not to be" will never be the same again.

Dara Seitzman's Helga is glorious. Dressed in get-ups that Norma Desmond rejected as too over-the-top, she mugs mercilessly for an unseen camera and chews relentlessly on scenery and anything else in her path. Jessica Chandlee Smith's ingenuous Elfie is a blissful comic contrast. And Tim Cusack, meanwhile, threatens to steal the show as geeky Jenkins. Watch him as he carefully hangs up a pair of bathing trunks on a plastic hanger; or, subbing in the play-within-a-play for the deceased Carlton Sr., he morphs Hamlet's Ghost into a lounge-act Phantom of the Opera.

The design team--Michael Steinberg (lighting), Heidi Meisenhelder (sets), T. Michaell Hall (costumes), Adam Brown (sound), and Adrienne Gusoff (props)--must also be congratulated for their seamlessly tacky (and wonderful) contributions. Every drop of this Stage Blood is rich royal blue: its as perfect a rendering of the play as one can hope for, I think. I haven't laughed this much in a very long time.

This is the play, by the way, not the much more famous musical version. It's fascinating to see it sans that brilliant Sondheim score, even if you know the musical inside out and adore it. Sondheim and his collaborators imposed all kinds of stuff on the material to give it heft; playwright C.G. Bond does no such thing, letting the macabre tale spin out on its own. In case you're not familiar with it, here's the broad outline: Sweeney Todd returns to London after escaping from a remote prison abroad. Once a simple barber, he has turned outlaw to avenge the seduction of his wife by a powerful judge, the same one who trumped-up charges against him and sent him away so long ago.

Abetted by his neighbor Mrs. Lovett, a widow who makes meat pies, he hatches a plan to murder the lecherous judge, who in the intervening years has taken Todd's beautiful daughter Johanna as his ward. But when things go awry, Todd becomes bloodthirsty, murdering any and all who come to his shop, then turning over their remains to Mrs. Lovett to be baked into her pies.

It's a magnificently ghoulish tale, one that moves swiftly and inexorably to a chilling, bloody ending. Geller renders it here in stark black and white, with Frank DenDanto III's glorious shadowy lighting and Nathan Heverin's spare, brooding set providing the perfect physical background for the grim goings-on.

The play is sharply cast, as well. Edwin Sean Patterson is better than ever as the obsessed barber Todd, while Zoey O'Toole brings a kind of divine madness to the uber-Capitalist monster Mrs. Lovett. David Paterson is suitably gargoyle-ish as the lad Tobias who eventually becomes ensnared in Todd's plot, while J.M. McDonough is frighteningly corrupt as Judge Turpin. Michael Edgar Murphy, Gabriel Hernandez, and Tom Kulesa are splendidly creepy in smaller roles.

In the end, though, it's up to director Geller to find the proper tone and appropriate pace that will subtly shift spectators from nervous laughter to barely suppressed shrieks as the stakes--and body count--rise. He delivers, masterfully. His Sweeney Todd is as grand a scare as a speedy roller coaster or a devilishly clever haunted house, and just as much fun, too.

If content didn't matter, David Henderson and P. Jennifer Dana's production of The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant would merit nothing but superlatives. I can't think of very many shows produced in New York this year that can boast finer acting, more distinctive direction, or more consistent (and elegant) style in its production design than this one. Jeff Cowie's decadent, high-tech, mirrored, expressionist apartment setting; Greco's odd but eye-popping costumes; and Rick Martin's coolly atmospheric lighting combine to give Petra a Look that is as unforgettable as it is unremittingly fabulous. Ditto designers Poor Arnold West (Bray Poor, David A. Arnold, and Darron L. West), who give Petra an abrasively electronic Sound. And Rebecca Wisocky and Anita Durst, in two amazing powerhouse performances, give it Life; maybe even Soul.

But none of these theatrical wizards can give Petra what it most lacks. It turns out that content does matter, you see; and this curious specimen of polemical posturing masquerading as overripe melodrama finally possesses very little of that commodity. Thirty years ago Rainer Werner Fassbinder's sleek diatribe against the rampant decadence of the capitalist class might have had some resonance; and his sensational examination of a lesbian love affair turned sour might have possessed some shock value. Today, neither of Fassbinder's hooks holds much promise--and neither holds our attention.

One leaves The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant dazzled by its brilliance but dazed by its weird irrelevance--seldom is a production at once so artful and so empty. Count Petra as a triumph of style over substance; but be aware that the surprising absence of the latter renders the thing, finally, a disappointment.

Be aware, too, that Henry Miller's Theatre, the once-lovely Broadway house that is now home to this off-Broadway show, is only barely inhabitable, its original theatre seats having been torn out long ago and replaced with uncomfortable rows of armless benches on risers on which the producers are shamefully crowding the patrons. Placing Petra's lush extravagance amidst such squalor may make a kind of point, but at 42 bucks a head, patrons deserve better. 

And what a finish! Will it surprise you to learn that Peter Jones, the good-natured sap who becomes Jack and Joe's butter and egg man, winds up turning the show into a mammoth hit and re-selling it at a tidy profit? It shouldn't: Kaufman already had the formula for creating crackling, effervescent comedy down pat by the time he gave us The Butter and Egg Man, a work that, incidentally, was the only one he ever wrote by himself. You can detect the absence of a collaborator in an intangible way that's hard to describe. What's more interesting is how clearly you can feel, in this script, the vibes of masterworks-to-come like Once in a Lifetime, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and The Solid Gold Cadillac. There's also a long, rapid-fire recitation (put over hilariously by Smith's Joe Lehman) of the marathon plot of a play-to-end-all-plays, which manages to puncture the aspirations and pretensions of, by rough count, some dozen well-known works of the day.

A funny show, then, is pretty much guaranteed. I've told you the beginning and the end; you'll need to see the hour-and-three-quarters that comes between for yourself (and hurry: the show only runs until June 25). The Butter and Egg Man is a rollicking, free-wheeling comedy, and also a barbed but affectionate satire of Broadway in the '20s--and a valentine to it as well. Expect all the stock characters: the cigar-chomping, fast-talking producer; the pretentious, dictatorial foreign director; the temperamental, over-the-hill leading lady; the smart and sensible secretary who thinks she's plain and winds up falling in love with her boss: they're all here, speaking zany, zingy dialogue punched up with some terrific one-liners and business that keeps the audience rather consistently in stitches. (Sample: a hungry, squeaky-voiced chorus girl shows up for an as-yet-undelivered post-show supper in the producer's hotel room, holds up a knife and fork and inquires, "What goes with these?")

This is not, by the way, usual fare for the Jean Cocteau Repertory. A good deal of the fun of this production is seeing the members of the company take on characters so far afield from what they usually play. Elise Stone is a hoot as producer Lehman's caustic wife Fanny, providing immeasurable and invaluable atmosphere in a fairly small role. The aforementioned Berlinsky and Smith are fine, too, and seem to be having a grand time as well; Jolie Garrett and Neil Shah likewise pull out the stops, wildly against type, as the imperious director and a Runyonesque Broadway insider. Christopher Black is cagily appealing in the title role, and Amy Fitts is delightful as his love interest. And Tim Deak almost steals the show as a starstruck but very nervous hotel manager called Fritchie who becomes the last-minute backer for the butter and egg man's play. My favorite moment was when Fritchie and Jones are discussing their new hit show. Jones assures Fritchie that people are lined up in droves to buy tickets to their play. "But who will come tommorow?" counters Fritchie, a portrait of barely controlled panic bordering on hysteria. Another feather in the cap, this, for this excellent young actor.

The production is beautifully directed by David Fuller, whose flair for Kaufman has been amply demonstrated by his outstanding revivals of Hollywood Pinafore and Park Avenue at Theater Ten Ten. Pacing can be tricky in these things, but it's near-perfect here: watch, for example, the precision with which an office door opens and closes near the end of Act III to build a gigantic laugh near the play's finish. Happily, Fuller has wisely bucked the current penchant for long intermissionless plays by leaving both of the intervals intact: he understands that audiences need a breather even--or maybe especially--from a show this congenial and fun.

Sets, costumes, and lighting are all swell. That's a good word to describe the whole production, actually: I did, indeed, have a swell time at The Butter and Egg Man. I bet you will, too.

The Conjure Man Dies is a breezy, engaging comedy in which a police detective, a doctor, and a bumbling ne'er-do-well busybody named Bubber Brown join forces to solve a murder mystery. The time is the 1930s, the place is Harlem, and the victim is Frimbo, an African King who has reinvented himself as a spiritualist, or "conjure man." Playwright Rudolph Fisher, who first wrote this story as a novel, furnishes a long list of suspects, including dim-witted Jinx Jenkins, the last person to see the Conjure Man alive; Spider Webb, a gangster with a nasty grudge against Frimbo; and Aramintha Snead, a God-fearing churchlady whose sudden appearance at Frimbo's place seems more than a little suspicious.

Others who appear to be hiding something are Martha Crouch (the undertaker's wife), Easley Jones (a mysterious fellow from out of town), the doctor who is helping solve the case, and--eventually--Frimbo himself. These and the rest of the colorful characters who populate this busy story keep us guessing for the play's 2-1/2 hours; if the final resolution of The Conjure Man Dies is a bit of an anticlimax, we certainly have a fine time getting there.

Lending still more interest to the proceedings is the fact that The Conjure Man Dies has probably not been seen in New York since 1937, when it was written. The piece is old-fashioned in a few different ways. For example, there's a long scene in which Frimbo and the doctor have a long, pseudo-scientific discussion that feels like pure mumbo-jumbo today, but would have been convincing sixty years ago.

More revelatory, though, is the way Fisher presents his characters, many of whom fit time-honored American Negro stereotypes of one kind or another. Most noticeably, Bubber and Jinx, who share a good deal of stage time, feel only slightly removed from the world of Amos & Andy: I'd love to know how Black audiences took to them when the play was first performed. Unfortunately, the New Federal Theatre provides almost nothing in the way of context for this piece, either in production or in the program.

At the performance I attended, Kevin R. Free pretty much stole the show as manic, foolish, lovable Bubber--he has since gone on to another project, however, so I can't comment on the current Bubber, Rafael Clements. Esau Pritchett (Jinx), Christine Campbell (Aramintha), and Tee C. Williams (Spider) all make strong impressions; as does Peggy Alston, hilarious as a willfully dense landlady from the Islands and stylishly sexy as a nightclub hostess.

The production is housed in the very inhospitable Experimental Theatre at Henry Street Theatre. Luckily, The Conjure Man Dies is entertaining enough to make you forget your discomfort.

The Double Bass, a solo play by the German author Patrick Suskind is a celebration of the Unsung Hero, in this case the Third Double Bassist in a large symphony orchestra. He loves music but hates his job, yearning for recognition both general (from the public at large) and specific (from the young soprano whom he is currently worshipping from afar, or at least from the back row of the orchestra). His anxiety about this has given way to a combination of rage and obsession; his love-hate relationship with the musical instrument that provides him with both his living and his life is the central conflict of the play.

Apart from its hero's inability to take charge of his destiny, several things about the piece conspire to alienate me. First, it's set in a very particular world--that of the classical musician--which I know very little about. The play begins with the bass player telling us in great detail how essential his instrument is to the orchestra; lacking knowledge to affirm or deny his assertion, I couldn't tell whether this fellow's pride was genuine or false bravado. It makes a difference: I kept coming back to it throughout the play, as I tried to get a handle on who this bass player really is.

Furthermore, the play is filled with inside jokes about classical music that I realized must be funny, but didn't get. The play is also very European, and not much has (or probably can) be done to change that. References to how much things cost in German marks forced me to do mental exchange rate calculations that distracted me terribly; references to the bass player's life as a civil servant (the orchestra is, apparently, nationalized) simply fell flat, lacking any sort of American equivalent.

Most alienating of all, though, is the play's structure: throughout, the bass player acknowledges our presence, but he's clearly in his own apartment. I don't mean to be too literal-minded about this, but where exactly are we supposed to be?

Michael W. Connors, an engaging and talented actor, makes the bass player a likable enough fellow. But I'm not sure he's getting deep enough under his skin: in the show's climactic scene, when the bass player essentially makes love to his instrument, the emotional frenzy simply wasn't there.  It seemed to me, too, that the pacing was a bit slow--moments like the one where the bass player listens to a recording of his beloved's aria lasted longer than they needed to.

The Double Bass is not without interest, and it's certainly not unentertaining. I think many people, particularly those intimately involved in the world of classical music, are going to get a lot out of it. But I have to confess that it left me cold.  

This is a play about relationships among three very ordinary sorts of people. Timmy, careless and undirected before the War, has found purpose after seeing and doing things he'd never imagined. The long-term plan is to go to college and become a writer, but it is his immediate objective that interests Gilroy here: to try to understand--and perhaps even mend--the hole in his parents' lives. His father, John, is a successful businessman, emotionally distant from the family; his mother, Nettie, is a devoted homemaker and mother, silently licking the wounds inflicted by her seemingly indifferent, philandering husband. The pivotal moment in the play comes when Timmy understands that he can't fix any of this: like them, he will move on and find his own way; and--also like them--he may discover that there's nowhere to go.

Timmy's return to the family's middle class home--in the Bronx, New York, in 1946--is catalyst for various recriminations and revelations; superficially, The Subject Was Roses feels like the stereotypical kitchen sink melodrama that it looks like. (Robert Klinglehoefer's set, indeed, is dominated by a well-used kitchen table and a countertop loaded with appliances and gadgets.)  But, at least in this production, which is sensitively and subtly directed by David Fuller, these explosive incidents are, well, incidental: the real story here is about the fires burning below. Fuller and his cast plumb the depths of their characters, exposing, with great insight and intelligence, the honest American lives at the heart of Gilroy's story.

You won't see such nakedly truthful acting anywhere else in New York. Elise Stone's Nettie is almost a monument to disappointment, carefully marshalling reserves of control and strength as needed to cope with the bitterness of her marriage. Yet she's also wonderfully unguarded in a moment of simple enjoyment, reminiscing with husband John about honestly happy days in the past--for a moment, the life-embracing good nature that he must have fallen in love, so long stifled, rises to the surface.

Craig Smith is masterful as John, showing us all the contradictions of this self-made man. Watch him slump at the kitchen table at breakfast, or saunter in his business suit and wingtips--a man never quite at home in his shoes or his clothes, self-conscious and insecure that at any time his lack of education and social grace will expose him as a fraud. 

And then there's Christopher Black's open-faced, earnest Timmy, seeing, with us, his parents for the very first time. His journey through the play toward understanding and self-sufficiency is both heartfelt and heart-rending. I rank this performance among his very best work.

Fuller's hand is steady and inobtrusive, letting the three actors tell their characters' stories. Costume (Gail Boldoni), lighting (Izzy Einsidler), and sound (Charles Berigan) design are appropriate; as I've said, Robert Klinglehoefer's atmospheric and vaguely claustrophobic set is invaluable.

Theatre By The Blind turns in a pleasant two hours of diverting entertainment with their production of Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest. Their choice of this play is well-considered: it's vintage Christie, which means we get precisely what we expect: a suspenseful, stylish mystery, filled with red herrings, malignant motives, and fascinating characters. Better still, because The Unexpected Guest is not much done here in the United States, we get a Christie thriller that--unlike, say, Witness for the Prosecution or Ten Little Indians--we're not familiar with. Result: a corking good time, as one of her characters might say. Plus someone in the audience goes home with a prize, for correctly guessing whodunit at intermission.

Because this is a Christie play, by the way, one's chances of actually deducing the murderer's identity are fairly small: like her other works, The Unexpected Guest features a smartly-etched roster of suspects and colorful dialogue and situations, though not necessarily a masterful trail of clues. The story here involves a man who stumbles first upon the dead body of a curmudgeonly old eccentric, and then upon a houseful of relatives and caretakers each of whom could possibly have done him in. There's a pretty young wife and her aristocratic lover; an excitable, slightly retarded younger brother; a cagey valet; a wise and enigmatic old mother; and a potentially duplicitous nurse. There's also, inevitably, a craggy and earthy Inspector, diligently questioning the suspects to get to the bottom of things.

The Unexpected Guest never quite brings us to the edge of our seats, but its elegantly involving plotting never fails to hold our attention. This production is smartly directed by Ike Schambelan, and is generally well-played by a company of nine actors. Ben Rauch (as the younger brother), Xen Theo (as the valet), and George Ashiotis (as the unexpected guest of the title) are especially good. Merope Vachlioti's detailed set is invaluable in establishing the piece's mood and style.

Theatre By The Blind employs actors who are visually impaired. To everyone's credit, we're never aware of this except when we read about it in the program. 

So I'm not going to tell you my theory: the fun of Tiny Alice--the point of Tiny Alice--is to try to piece it together. If it's about anything, Tiny Alice is about subverting the theatregoer's most fundamental expectation about theatre: that a play means something particular; that a narrative can be followed; that a playwright won't mess with his audience, won't send them off into the dark and never come back to rescue them. In Tiny Alice, Albee's main intention is to do exactly that, I think; this play is meticulously and calculatedly crafted to confound us.

I think, further, that Tiny Alice's opaqueness is politically motivated: the idea behind the piece is to jolt us out of our complacency. Albee fills his play with lots of deliberately shocking and sensational stuff: a lay cleric whose perverse sexual fantasies involve the Virgin Mary; a corrupt Cardinal who barely flinches when a man is shot dead right in front of him; a whore-goddess called Alice who uses sex (including, apparently, some light forms of S&M) to exert power over the men around her. Tiny Alice's complicated plot--a tightly woven collection of trivia and incident, really--is heady and provocative even today: Albee wants to challenge whatever we think we know about anything and everything. Nothing in Tiny Alice is to be trusted, not even (or especially) what we think we see with our own eyes: the play's central image/device of a spectacularly detailed replica of Miss Alice's house exists to remind us that we're here and not here at the same time.

It's a neat exercise, though finally not a particularly satisfying one: Tiny Alice is probably better as a concept than as an actual theatre experience. That said, there are plenty of pleasures in the revival of Tiny Alice now at Second Stage Theatre. Albee's dazzling language is electrifying, especially when it's delivered with the assurance that this better-than-average cast possesses. Laila Robins is marvelously seductive as the mysterious Miss Alice, and Richard Thomas is superb as the guilt-ridden Brother Julian, who is Alice's--and Albee's--victim. John Michael Higgins is wonderfully droll as Alice's butler Butler, and Tom Lacy and Stephen Rowe are creepily menacing as the Cardinal and Alice's lawyer.

It's all thrillingly staged by Mark Lamos, who paces the piece smashingly; this Tiny Alice never lets up until its very last moments. Costumes (by Constance Hoffman) and lighting (by Donald Holder) serve the show beautifully; John Arnone's set is amazing in its detail and its technological wizardry.

Uncle Bob is a very unpleasant play about a pair of very unpleasant people. One of them is a young man named Josh, a directionless, angst-ridden twenty-something who has left his Ohio family home to take care of his Uncle Bob in New York City. Josh's self-hatred and homophobia--both of them rampant--are two of the keys to his character provided by playwright Austin Pendleton; his warped hero-worship of his uncle is the third. Josh is a case: read on.

Uncle Bob turns out to be a self-centered, self-loathing misanthrope who has convinced himself that the utter barrenness of his failed and wasted life is noble and heroic for proving the nihilists correct. He is dying of AIDS, which he contracted from deliberately meaningless unprotected sex with an infected man: see how his mind works? Despite Josh's presumably sincere interest in his well being, Bob is never less than malignant to his nephew. And the second act revelation that Bob has lusted after Josh's youthful body--and that Josh seems to want Bob to act on that lust--is as unconvincing as it is repulsive. We're supposed to care about these people?

I'm quite troubled by the notion that Bob (and playwright Pendleton) might be trivializing the very real menace of AIDS by positing it as an intellectually glamorous form of suicide. And although the homophobic garbage spewed by both Josh and Bob throughout the play is intended--I think--to be cautionary, given the author's cavalier attitude toward the AIDS epidemic, I believe that Uncle Bob may be more anti-gay than anyone associated with it would be willing to admit.

It's written, by the way, in long, erudite speeches that suggest Edward Albee at his most anti-social. But whereas in Albee's plays it's always clear that the characters are aware that they're performing for each other, there's no such awareness here: Bob and Josh appear to be interacting in the most naturalistic of styles. The fact that what comes out of their mouths is so jarringly unnatural just makes the play more of a chore to sit through.

George Morfogen, for whom the play was written, portrays Bob with panache, even relish. But he never convinces us that Bob is someone worthy of our interest or concern. Gale Harold, one of the young stars of Queer as Folk, is appealing and compelling as Josh, making him far less of a screw-up than the script suggests.  It's a game performance though not necessarily a good one.

The production, directed by Courtney Moorehead, is entirely professional. But Josh and his Uncle Bob are certainly not my idea of a good time. 

Finally everyone is talking about Valerie Solanas for the right reasons. You may recall Solanas as the subject of the 1996 Mary Harron film I Shot Andy Warhol. In many ways the first modern radical feminist, Solanas made news in 1968 when she shot Andy Warhol in the chest (nearly killing him) after he and his staff lost the only copy of her script Up Your Ass. The script was finally discovered over 25 years later by researchers working on I Shot Andy Warhol.

Now it has been revived by the San Francisco Company George Coates Performance Works. After touring for a year, it has opened at P.S. 122, where it will be up through February 25. 

Let me begin by saying that if I'd written Up Your Ass and somebody lost my only copy,  I'd shoot them, too. What a pity and what a loss that this woman spent the rest of her life as an "assassin" instead of a "writer". Nobody's fault but her own, of course, but then isn't that the definition of tragedy?

While somewhat raw and formlesss (faults that presumably would have been 
corrected by any subsequent production or publication during her lifetime), the play is not only still cutting edge (35 years after having been written), but massively entertaining. When Solonas wrote this play in 1965, theatrical audiences had been exposed to very little that today would be considered "shocking". Four letter words were used rarely. Those who employed them used them sparingly. The seamier aspects of urban life were almost never depicted at all; the sole exception that springs to mind is Lanford Wilson. Yet even Wilson never dreamed up this world of Bongi Perez (Solanas's alter-ego, played here by Sara Moore). Perez is a homeless, homosexual prostitute who drifts in and out of a bar to turn tricks so she can eat. Along the way, she meets transvestites, a woman who eats shit, a number of men only too happy to negotiate for back-alley handjobs, a cub scout with glue on his penis, and his mother, who strangles him to death. Binding all of this together is Solanas/Perez's hatred for men. (As a pyschology student at the University of Maryland, Solanas cooked up a theory that the "Y" chromosome is defective--all men are botched women, and are responsible for every ill that has ever befallen the human race.)

As one of God's mistakes myself, I am the last person to ever sympathize with
such a theory, although, let's face it, there's plenty of empirical evidence to back her up. Fortunately, in all of her work, there is the considerable palliative of her humor. To say that it is a saving grace would be an understatement. The woman expresses herself through the epigram, the highest means of expressing ideas in the theatre. Invented by the Romans, it is a way of communicating the truth through a shocking and humorous juxtaposition in one or two pared down sentences. Oscar Wilde revived the form to enormous advantage. Shaw employed it as well, although less memorably. Joe Orton virtually built his plays out of them. Camille Paglia uses it repeatedly in Sexual Personae. It is a demanding form. I can't think of a better indicator of a first rate intellect or a first rate heart than mastery of the epigram. Solanas uses them throughout.

I couldn't write fast enough to catch them all, but here are a few:

GINGER: Everybody knows men have better judgment than women.
BONGI: Yeah, they dig women!

GINGER: I need a man to protect me.
BONGI: From what? Other men?

RUSSELL: I'm a good conversationalist, but it isn't fair to judge it by what
I say.

RUSSELL: There are some advantages to marriage.
BONGI: Like widow's pensions

RUSSELL: Women are as good as men in every way.
BONGI: I've had enough of your insults.

BONGI: I'm so female I'm subversive.

Someone who writes this well and this incisively knows how good (and how rare) she is. The galling fact that her masterpiece was lost by a bunch of fashion
models and poseurs who had dismissed it as a "dirty book" surely drove her out of her mind. It would anybody. 

Now is the perfect time to revive this play. Not only is there an entire generation of radical feminists now in existence, which cut its teeth on such texts as Solanas's own Scum Manifesto , but the climate of the entire nation has changed. The idea of woman's equality is a given; the thought that all a woman should aspire to is motherhood or a menial secretary job is an abhorrent detail of history. There is infinite and universal sympathy for an independent woman (however hyperbolic in her pronouncements), swimming against a chauvinist tide. The level of graphic language, sex and violence on stage and screen has steadily risen over the past 30 years as well, gradually spawning an audience which can contemplate it without outrage. The British Nihilists--rumored to be the apogee now of such free expression, have helped pave the way for a play like this. So there is a receptive audience where the wouldn't have been when the play was written. 

Coates's production--and his talented all-female cast--set just the right tone of brazenness: an alloy part comedic and part just plain angry. The drag-kings in the cast are delightfully subtle. Mantra Plonsey does double duty as Russell (a Tony Bennett-esque male pig whose humiliation by Bongi sheds light on the play's title), and Mrs. Arthur Hazlett (a hilarious shrew who persists in getting pregnant because she likes conventional sex, but despises and is cruel to her children). Also impressive are Annie Larson and Chantel Lucier as a pair of transvestites--women playing men playing women.

All of the women are terrific singers. Though the play is not a musical,  Coates has set portions of the text to pop tunes from the last 40 years, with the premise that we are in a karaoke bar. The results are often amusing due to the shock effect of hearing vulgar lyrics to familiar tunes. Examples:  "Why should I dress to give men hard-ons?" ("Because the Night"); "That's a mighty fine dick" ("Tears on my Pillow"); "Scratch your own crotch" ("Bobbie McGee"); and "T-t-turd" ("Surfin' Bird"). This provides a wonderful showcase for the cast's talents as singers and dancers and makes for an entertaining evening, but it makes one to wonder if it doesn't distract from Solonas's original intentions. While I'm not about to castrate myself or jump off a building as Solonas might have liked, she has my undying respect as a writer.

I can certainly understand why Don Jordan and Michael Criscuolo, the co-artistic directors of the young theatre company Pilot House, want to try their hands at Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  And I certainly commend their effort. But unfortunately this essential work proves problematic for a number of reasons--most of which Jordan and Criscuolo can do little to rectify.

Consider, first, the venue: the tiny Abingdon Theatre, located on the fourth floor of a walkup on 42nd Street. Setting aside the distraction of a noisy Tartuffe being performed upstairs, the playing space presents two probably insurmountable difficulties. The stage is too small and too square to allow for comfortable placement of the requisite tree, stump, and interlopers Pozzo and Lucky, causing Jordan to block their scenes awkwardly: Estragon & Vladimir's powerlessness to help the fallen Pozzo is diminished because they're simply too close to him for it to register. Similarly, the proximity of stage to audience in this intimate room is damaging: Jordan tries to solve this problem by having his tramps acknowledge the audience a couple of times during the play. But if Estragon & Vladimir aren't absolutely sure they're completely alone in their barren wilderness, what is Godot about?

Other difficulties arise from the economics of off-off-Broadway production. I'm not sure how much time Jordan and his company have spent preparing the show, but I can tell you that their entire run spans just ten performances of which I reviewed the very first. Waiting for Godot requires letter-perfect timing to get its rhythms right,  and Criscuolo (Vladimir) and Jeff Pagliano (Estragon) haven't found it yet. That's not to say they won't: I've seen their work and know them to be talented actors. But they've not even begun to mine the humanity and profundity of this rich work, and I suspect they'll need more than a couple of weeks to even scratch its surface. (Maybe they'll see fit to come back to it in a future season.)

All that said, Godot is always worth seeing, and we are fortunate that companies like Pilot House, representing the coming generation of theatre artists, are challenging themselves with work of this caliber.

If Ned and Warren Beatty's insatiabilities
Call not your rustling uzos to the uzi,
Then what, e plunderus ovum, could untap
Your buds of taste to caw beyond the frigid fold,
And order you a jumbo dumpster pie? Hu?

(Selected, I might add, more or less at random: a typically Bromleyesque response to a character's complaint that she didn't order a pizza.)  It may surprise you, however, to know that this play also contains this speech, in which an aspiring actor essentially announces his resume:

Rock Random, thespian and Yale graduate. My roles include Esophagus in "Six Lazy Vivisectionists," The Loud Party Goer in "What's up with Birds?", Grey Poupon in "10 lbs. of Ground Chuck," and the Seal Pup Mother in the almost reviewed "O, Eskimo!"

Yes, it's Bromley the Joke Machine: Absurdist subtlety a la Woody Allen by way of Steve Martin. It's new ground broken in the Bromley canon for this theatregoer; or, rather, old ground, for Want's Unwisht Work is a revival, having premiered in 1996 at the now-shuttered Lower East Side institution Nada. You may be thinking: five years isn't so very long--is this play really ripe for revival? The answer is, mostly, yes: most people didn't get to see Want's Unwisht Work back then; now that Bromley's reputation and work have ripened (cf. The American Revolution, Midnight Brainwash Revival), there's real merit in getting a look at this earlier piece which both portends the brilliance of the later plays and outflanks them in terms of sheer audacious energy. Want's Unwisht Work is a brazenly exuberant bit of grandstanding by a genius still finding his voice, no doubt about it. But it's also vital, joyous, hilarious, antic, and endlessly inventive. 

A quick synopsis would be good here, if not perhaps possible. I'll try: Want's Unwisht Work begins with a prologue in which we meet Richard, a young playwright, and his harried working wife Elisa. It's her birthday, and Richard has written her a play, which he then proceeds to enact for her, with a company of mysteriously conjured players, even as she sleeps in the audience. The play is a wacky farce set in a "house of feminist study" in which mismatched (and often cross-dressing) pairs of lovers chase after each other while the clear-eyed and pure-hearted heroine Corme rescues her lover Erad from the clutches of a crazed academic. Complicating matters are a quartet of Information Age good ol' boys (one of whom I've quoted in the first speech, above) and another quartet, called the "Wishful Waiters," of would-be (and probably doomed always to be out-of-work) actors.

It's all as convoluted as it is casual: it's clear right away how things are going to turn out, and just as clear that taking the trip is more essential than actually getting there. Bromley packs the play with eccentric characters and extravagant wordplay; he also pays lavish homage--more than I could keep up with while watching the show--to his artistic ancestor William Shakespeare. (The whole structure of the play is like a cockeyed Love's Labor's Lost, and references to Hamlet and other works are peppered throughout.)  So Want's Unwisht Work emerges as a kind of outsized tribute to the playwright and the actor; the one showing off his superpowers by putting pyrotechnic language in the mouths of his characters; and other(s) showing theirs by bringing all the dazzlingly irreverent and hip zaniness to life.

All of that said, I wish I could report that the present production, directed by Alexander Yannis Stephano, shows Want's Unwisht Work in its best light. It doesn't: Stephano, particularly in the (wordier) first act, has substituted clatter for anarchy. Actors race around the space and shout their lines; it's frantic rather than antic, and a good deal of humor (and clarity) gets sacrificed. The garish costumes by Karen Flood don't help. Performances range from sublime (Alan Benditt's superbly nuanced Gene, head of the Wishful Waiters; Matt Daniels's diabolical Richard/Vazoline) to, well, not so sublime (Shirley Roeca and Elisa Pearl Blynn as two of the feminist students struck me as the most glaringly out of their depth). Spencer Aste and Elizabeth London do good work as the lovers at the center of the play-within-the-play.

A definitive rendition of Want's Unwisht Work--which would probably be a still-more-edited one--remains to be produced. But for now, the raw but vibrant genius of this early Bromley play is cause for genuine excitement. Even if this revival sometimes misses the mark, it nevertheless gives us a still-rare look at a play well worth looking at.

A bright young man grows up in a small North Carolina town at the beginning of the 20th century. He goes off to Harvard at the age of twenty, where he gets his first taste of a world he had only read about before; he comes in contact with alluringly dangerous new ideas like socialism and racial equality. And then he returns home the next summer; but, as he learns, you can't go home again: the place of his youth now feels foreign and constricted and hopelessly provincial.

Such, more or less, were the circumstances surrounding the development of Welcome to Our City, a play written by a 22-year-old Thomas Wolfe when he returned to Harvard in 1923. It's an enormous, ambitious epic, teeming with local color and righteous indignation: all of an earnest young man's passion and anger and disappointment got crammed into a vessel that appears to be a play but in fact is, in every way but the crucial one, a novel. Wolfe would discover his true calling soon enough; here, he poured heart and soul into an unwieldy dramatic structure that, unsurprisingly, didn't find its way onto a New York stage until some sixty years after his own untimely death.

For that, we have Jonathan Bank and the Mint Theater to thank, by way of Professor Richard Kennedy (whose scholarship first unearthed the text). And to both Bank and Kennedy we must be grateful: for at last putting a formative work by a great American author on its feet; and, perhaps more significantly, for giving us a unique glimpse into the heart and intellect of a brash and brilliant young man at a very particular moment in the American Century. 1923 was a time of great prosperity and great deprivation; of labor unrest and a Red Scare; of Harlem Renaissance and a reawakening of simmering racism via a strengthened Ku Klux Klan. All of this is filtered through Wolfe's eyes--at once brightly innocent and sadly disenchanted--in a play that, for all its structural and dramaturgical flaws, absolutely demands to be seen. Bank and the Mint have done this trick before of turning the whole theatre--stage and audience--into a mesmerizing time capsule. (I'm thinking particularly of their invaluable mountings, recently, of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Miss Lulu Bett.) We are undeniably better off for their efforts.

At the center of Welcome to Our City is a conflict between an aristocratic white businessman named Rutledge and an aggressive black physician named Johnson. Rutledge's father was once the richest man in town, but after the Civil War he was ruined, and eventually the family was forced to leave their grand home and rebuild their fortunes elsewhere. That home has since passed into the hands of Dr. Johnson, a fact which rankles Mr. Rutledge, who can still remember when his family owned slaves. Now the town's leaders have embarked on a campaign to reclaim some choice real estate from the black community; the Rutledge-Johnson house sits smack in the middle of the targeted lands, giving Rutledge his chance to get back what he thinks he wants.

What he actually gets, though, is a lesson in the depths of his own racism and in how much the world has changed since his youth. Johnson refuses to sell, and eventually that decision sparks a race riot that devastates the town.

Bank's staging of Welcome to Our City hinges on this central, racially-motivated conflict, focusing Wolfe's play on this single significant theme. This helps ground the piece, but it also diminishes it, I think: the grandeur of Wolfe's vision--putting a whole corrupt, idiosyncratic community on stage--is not really achieved here. (Mind you, I'm not sure it ever could be: Bank's choice to zero in on the most compelling evil among a whole host of options presented by Wolfe is a sound one.)

Economics and pragmatism have much to do with that choice, by the way: the Mint is an off-off-Broadway company, and it's downright heroic how much they're able to do here given available resources. Welcome to Our City has twenty actors--more than the combined casts of all the dramas on Broadway right now. It has a grand-looking unit set by Vicki R. Davis and scads of authentic-looking costumes by Elly Van Horne. There are some memorable performances, including Lee Moore as the conflicted Rutledge, David Winton as blowhard politico Governor Preston Carr, and Brocton Pierce as one of the town's soon-to-be-dislocated black citizens. And there are  resonant moments, like the scene where Rutledge and his wife discuss how to cope with blacks such as Dr. Johnson who don't seem to know their place; or, near the end of the play, the galvanizing call to freedom issued by a visiting Northern black man to his Southern brethren. Considering what Bank and Company have to work with (and I include Wolfe's difficult script in that package), the production we're seeing is an impressive achievement.

But the main reason to see Welcome to Our City is not to satisfy the urge for compelling drama. Go to learn your history: there's an authentic, heretofore undiscovered bit of Americana on the Mint stage right now, and the opportunity to soak it up in all its unfettered glory is one you shouldn't pass up. 

I had a ripping good time at Praxis Theatre Project's Zastrozzi, and I bet you will, too. Even if the darkly ironic socio-historical subtext of George F. Walker's play doesn't particularly register here, the bravura swashbuckling theatricality of it rings loud and clear. This Zastrozzi is all about Heroes and Villains, Grand Gestures and Great Loves. Above all it's about our common love--and need--for drama that's larger than life; for outsized personalities treading boldly across life's glorious stage. See Zastrozzi to enjoy its six young actors have a blast inhabiting these characters, each a legend in his (or her) own mind. And stay tuned for a climactic second act swordfight that is among the most exciting I've ever had the thrill of witnessing.

The story of Zastrozzi is surprisingly straightforward. It's the 1890s, and we're in Europe (probably Italy, according to the program). Zastrozzi, master criminal of all Europe, is carefully planning revenge on Verezzi, the man who killed his mother. Verezzi is an artist and also, as it turns out, something of a madman--convinced, it seems, that he is some sort of religious prophet. Zastrozzi concocts a plot to destroy Verezzi, using his sometime mistress Matilda as bait to trap and then destroy his arch-enemy. Meanwhile, a beautiful and innocent young lady called Julia manages to capture the hearts of Verezzi, Zastrozzi, and Bernardo, Zastrozzi's henchman. It is left to Verezzi's canny tutor Victor to try to rescue the young man from Zastrozzi's diabolical scheme.

Director William Gilmore and the game young ensemble have elected to play this out in the broadest possible fashion, with delicious results. Zastrozzi (Matt Bray) and Verezzi (David Heckel) are presented here as insatiable egoists; their cartoonish preening is hilarious. Matilda (Kelley Murphy) and Julia (Kate Anthony) are wrought equally large: Anthony's big scene, in which Julia is abducted by Bernardo, is superbly over-the-top. Bernardo (Jonas Abry, cast against type, but with fine results) is a plodding would-be brute; while Victor (the galvanic Todd Butera) is a firecracker and a force of nature.

Top praise must be reserved for the spectacular, lengthy duel between Bray and Butera that caps the piece, choreographed with grand style by Ian Marshall. Crackling with energy and filled with electrifying, daredevil swordplay, this scene keeps us on the edge of our seats as we wonder, awestruck, whether the forces of evil (epitomized by Bray's dashing, insouciant, too-perfect Zastrozzi) or the forces of good (represented by Butera's earnest, ambivalent, street-smart Victor) will emerge triumphant.

I leave it to you to see Zastrozzi to find out the answer. Half outrageous melodrama, half loony fairy tale, it's a thoroughly diverting entertainment; another feather in the cap, to be sure, for Praxis Theatre Project.