nytheatre Archive
2000-01 Theatre Season Reviews

It is probable that playwright Glen Melzer intends to say something profound about the nature of art, or money, or friendship, or loneliness (or something) in his new play Anonymous. But his message is fuzzy and unfocused; the felicitous way to view (and review) Anonymous is as out-and-out comic satire, something at which it succeeds admirably until it falls apart about midway through Act Two. Until then, this broad, sketchy comedy about a novelist's reluctant renaissance as a successful advertising executive and ghost-writer is almost always amusing and sometimes downright hilarious.

Those times come mostly when Peter Appel is on stage. Appel plays Roy Canelli, a mobster with artistic pretensions who hires the novelist to fix up his magnum opus, a trashy gangster novel that--inevitably--becomes a best seller. Appel's scenes with Anonymous's writer-hero Harris Harbison (played with a sort of vinegary ingenuousness by the excellent Chip Zien) recall the recent film Analyze This a bit too much for their own good, but they're nevertheless enormously satisfying. Watch Appel flinch for a moment when he's asked by Zien how old his children are: this is a masterful comic turn by a character actor whom you will recognize, by the way, from countless TV and movie roles.

Zien's scenes with his ad agency boss Ed Lustig (nicely underplayed by Kevin O'Rourke) have a zingy absurdity that works well, too. But the more straightforward "book" scenes with best pal Tim (David Arrow), nutritionist girlfriend Donna (Betsy Aidem), and obsessed fan Michaela (Rosemarie DeWitt) feel strained at best, and as the play winds down (with Appel's character long gone from the narrative), Anonymous really does self-destruct. Elizabeth Franz contributes a delicious cameo as a TV interviewer in a videotaped sequence; set designer Edward Gianfresco's ingenious (and neatly detailed) fold-up set is a standout.

But for its crass, hateful ending, Steven Somkin's Autoeroticism in Detroit would have passed into ignominy as one of the hundreds of mediocre new plays performed off-off-Broadway every year. Believe me, it--and we--would have all been better off.

Here's what happens in Autoeroticism in Detroit: Chip Goodenough, upwardly mobile General Motors executive, gets picked by CEO Smith to head up the project to develop the first electric car for the company. While tackling this high-profile assignment, Chip takes up with Lucinda, the sexy girlfriend of Chip's son Brock. Eventually gold-digging Lucinda pressures Chip to leave his wife (and incidentally finally sees fit to break things off with Brock). Chip divorces his wife Natalie, gets Brock a job thousands of miles away, and winds up, in the play's final scene, contemplating a new extramarital dalliance--with his ex-wife.

Charming, don't you think? It's possible that Somkin is going for some sort of latter-day Sheridanlike/Jonsonesque social satire. But Autoeroticism in Detroit lacks both the wit and the bite to pull it off: until things really start to get stomach-churningly sour near the end, the play is mostly just ploddingly dull. It's also very weakly staged and performed, with only Stu Richel (doubling as the CEO and a waiter) offering anything like a believable characterization. Anachronistic props like a laptop PC and a cellphone further undermine the piece (which is set in the early '90s).

avow tr.v 1. To acknowledge openly, boldly, and unashamedly; confess.  2. To state positively.

Read the above definition carefully (courtesy of  The American Heritage Dictionary): it tells you everything you need to know about the subject matter and themes of Bill C. Davis's excellent new play Avow. Well, perhaps not quite everything: for that, we need to look to the title's homophone:

(a) vow n 1. An earnest promise to perform a specified act or behave in a certain manner, especially a solemn promise to live and act in accordance with the rules of a religious order.  2. A declaration or an assertion.

Avow is all about vows and avowing: it's about finding balance in a maze of promises and confessions and assertions, made to oneself and to one's God. Davis can't conclusively answer the questions he raises in this intelligent and thoughtful play, but he pushes us squarely in the center of a lively and provocative debate about the most fundamental and essential questions that human beings face.

It all starts when Brian and Tom visit their parish priest, Father Raymond, and ask him to sanctify their intended marriage vows. To their surprise--for they have come to respect Father Raymond as a liberal and forward-thinking sort of guy--he refuses. Further, he tells them that the Church can never sanction even their acts of lovemaking: because homosexual sex is by definition not procreative, it is forbidden. Brian is outraged, but Tom is reflective: the priest's response has struck a chord somewhere in Tom's consciousness, and he begins to question whether he can ever make love to Brian (or any other man) ever again.

And so begins a complicated chain reaction in which these three men and those closest to them examine, challenge, and renew their faith in God and the Church and themselves. Brian's sister Irene is single and pregnant; he and Tom are planning to adopt and raise her baby as their own. Clearly much more than a disinterested bystander, Irene tries to mediate between Brian and Tom and Father Raymond, only to find that she is deeply attracted to the priest. That attraction turns out to be mutual, forcing Father Raymond to re-evaluate his own choices vis-a-vis the Church and his own life. And in the meantime Brian and Irene's mother Rose learns tolerance and acceptance of her children's lifestyles and decisions from her own more enlightened confessor, Father Nash.

So from Brian and Tom's catalytic request come these five separate spiritual journeys: linked souls moving together and moving apart to each find God in his or her own way. Davis wisely steps back from his characters, seldom judging them; instead he gives them all vitality and dimension so that we care about and come to understand each one. Avow contains plenty of lively theological debate, but it's first and foremost a rich and complex human drama: there's nothing theoretical about Brian's breaking heart or Father Raymond's waking heart. And lest you think that Avow is deadly serious, let me add that there is also a good deal of genuine humor in this play.

An outstanding company of actors serves Davis's work immeasurably. Sarah Knowlton is exactly right as the pragmatic yet romantic Irene, imbuing her with intelligence and spunk and a smashing zest for life that makes her admirable and lovable at the same time. Christopher Sieber and Scott Ferrara are fine as Brian and Tom (respectively) in performances that are funny, warm, idiomatic, and wonderfully human. Jane Powell (yes, that Jane Powell, star of countless MGM films from days gone by) is delightful as the sweetly batty but grounded Rose; and Reathel Bean is splendidly dry and wry as her confessor Father Nash. In the most complex role, Alan Campbell is immensely appealing as Father Raymond, showing us the compromises and conflicts in which he finds himself suddenly mired, and the toll they necessarily must take on his wavering soul.

Avow is sharply and sensitively staged by Jack Hofsiss, though it seemed to me that scenes occasionally dissolved into one another rather more quickly than absolutely necessary. David Jenkins's unit set is effective and Julie Weiss's contemporary costumes are attractive and appropriate. Ken Billington's lighting is invaluable, especially when subtly deployed to move two characters, priest and parishioner, out of the confessional and into the rectory in a smooth and gentle arc. How powerfully altered are our beliefs and assumptions once a little light is shed upon them!

Ted, the hero of Israel Horovitz's Barking Sharks, is a rich, successful Baby Boomer yuppie with a midlife crisis. He realizes one day, after a business associate drops dead of a heart attack in the revolving door of his office building, that he's unhappy with his high-powered, low-impact job in advertising. So he quits, and moves to his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts to become a fisherman. He does this, mind you, against the wishes of his wife (who is now forced to commute weekly to New York to her own high-powered--though apparently more satisfying--job at a publishing company); also against the wishes of his healthy, normal, loving and communicative son; and of his father, who still lives in Gloucester and reminds Ted that he and his  mother didn't scrimp and save to put him through college so that he could end his days living just above poverty level as a fisherman.

 Once in Gloucester, Ted almost immediately embarks on an affair with his best friend's wife (the high school sweetheart he left behind twenty years ago). He also--though not so quickly--devises a plan whereby, thanks to the massive capital reserves his previous existence provided him, he will set up a fishing business that should effectively put his best friend out of business. Ah, the romance of the sea!

Somehow Horovitz wants us to believe that Ted is heroically pursuing his dream (or his manifest destiny, or something). Now, in his ruthless and selfish push to apply money and ego to acquire anything and anybody that he wants, Ted does have something in common with America's founding fathers--the ones who decimated the native population and the buffalo, that is.  But I'm guessing that that's not what Horovitz is going for. At any rate, I have real difficulty rooting for Ted: I find it hard to feel sorry when rich white American men complain too much about their lives.

Director Terry Schreiber's production is wildly uneven. The actors range from excellent (Jerry Rago as Ted's stolid best friend; Rob Dodd as Ted's teenaged son) to subpar (Bob Rogerson's utterly disconnected Ted). There are truly lovely projections by Michael Clark and Casey Guilfoyle, but there are too many pieces of furniture (moved far too many times) in John Pollard's busy set design. Peculiarly, Schreiber puts most of the action on the edges of the square playing area, leaving the center of the stage empty and idle for long periods of time. Some sort of metaphor, maybe; but as hard on the eyes (and neck) as Horovitz's play is on the spleen.

Bearded Iris is an enormously ambitious new play by David Stein. It's also, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment: few playwrights, living or dead, could pull off the tour de force that Stein intends Bearded Iris to be. It starts off in a suburban living room, where Gerald and Iris, an attractive married couple, are chatting about their day--she is an attorney, he breeds the flowers of the play's title. Suddenly, one of their bookcases crashes to the floor and Gerald's mother--or more properly, the spirit of Gerald's mother, for she's been dead for twenty years--stalks in and starts haranguing Gerald to stop grieving for her.

It's broad and weird and we're pretty sure that it's not to be taken seriously. So when two men stroll into the living room, seemingly out of nowhere, we're not too surprised to discover that they are playwrights, life partners (and sometime collaborators) named Roger and Gary. Roger is working on this new play, "Bearded Iris," and Gary wants to help him write it.

What follows are scenes of Gary and Roger's fitful, sometimes explosive, attempts to work together, interspersed with projected scenes from the "Bearded Iris" script. Some of it is humorous, like Gary's vaguely surreal contribution in which Gerald decides that he should become a ballet dancer rather than a botanist, while Iris sprouts roots and petals and begins to transform into the flower for which she is named.

But lots of it is ponderous, bogging down in emotional and psychological terrain that Stein hasn't prepared us for and doesn't adequately develop. Parallels between the Gary-Roger relationship and the Gerald-Iris relationship never emerge; we wonder what the play-within-the-play conceit is supposed to be telling us. The climactic scene, in which the two worlds of Bearded Iris collide, is sexy but unconvincing and, worse, very confusing; and then the whole shebang implodes, in ways that are at once predictable and haphazard. Stein's final twists are undoubtedly interesting, but they don't keep the play from collapsing under its own weight.

David Calafiore's staging is oddly listless, which makes it difficult to evaluate the performances of Bearded Iris's five cast members. Kevin Varner (Gerald) comes off best, largely because he has the most interesting things to do. 

Bedlam is billed as "Six Short Scenes About...Beds"; but beds turn out to be merely incidental in these mostly comic vignettes by Dan Remmes. To be sure, there's a mattress (and usually a box spring) in the center of each of these scenes. But Bedlam is fundamentally a comedy revue--a la the old Carol Burnett Show--shrewdly crafted to showcase the talents of the thirteen actors who appear in it. The good news is that this vehicle serves its cast extremely well.

A brief rundown of sketches and participants will tell you what you need to know: "Stick-Up" features Duncan Lee as a hapless would-be mattress store robber and Sherikay Perry as the confident but vulnerable robbee; good as they are, Wende O'Reilly walks away with this scene as a hilariously aggressive not-so-innocent bystander.

"Goodnight Kiss" has perhaps the best writing of the skits; it's about a middle-aged couple (realistically played by Susan Cameron and Chuck Powers) trying to work themselves out of a marital rut. "Sidewalk Sale" (with Amir Arison and Dan Martin) is a humorous look at two starving artists who share an apartment and come upon a used mattress on the sidewalk. "The Coatroom," the briefest and least successful piece, is an encounter between two women, picking up coats on their way out of a party, who have been involved with the same man. (Kathy Searle and Maitely Weismann play the women.)

Bedlam concludes with two hospital-themed sketches. In "George," a man struggles with his ambivalent feelings about his father, who is literally on his death bed. Playwright Remmes gives an affecting portrayal of the conflicted son in this piece, and Colette Porteous makes a strong impression as his supportive wife. The final skit is the clever "Spasms," in which Eric Giancoli gets to indulge in some very effective physical comedy as a man whose right arm seems, literally, to have a mind of its own. Charlotte Dooling provides able support as the physician trying to help him out.

Nothing earth-shattering here; just some old-fashioned fun, nicely acted, neatly directed (by Paula D'Alessandris), and cleverly wrapped together by that ubiquitous and versatile bed.

What makes David Gaard's plays so compelling and original is their authenticity: whether he's writing about a closeted gay politician (About Bernard Carlton) or a pair of Gen-X yuppies (Made for Each Other) or, as in Befriending Beau, three desperately lost Los Angeles teenagers, the result is always starkly and devastatingly real. Befriending Beau contains some of Gaard's finest recent writing, almost poetic in places, as it explores the sad, lonely lives of Tash, Beau, and Chili, three misunderstood kids cast adrift by careless parents and left to fend for themselves in a dangerous world littered with drugs and sexual predators.

The (silent) prologue of Befriending Beau reveals this world with eloquence and  economy. In his bedroom stage left is Tash, sitting cross-legged on his mattress with pens, paper, and scotch tape, carefully constructing the next issue of his 'zine "Splain." Center stage at a small table sits Beau, just as carefully preparing a shot of heroin and then injecting it into his battered arm. Two young men concentrating on their drugs of choice, aching to find escape: it's a vivid and unsettling picture.

When the play proper begins, Tash delivers a bunch of exposition in fairly short order that confirms what we more or less already know: his mother is running off with a new boyfriend to Las Vegas, and he is being sent to live with his father (who "loves Jesus") and his new family in San Diego; he's mildly into drugs and has recently been featured in a porn video shot by a sleazy older man named Mark. Tash confides that he doesn't understand why he does the things he does, and he tells us also that "Splain" is the only thing in the world that he really cares about. Except, that is, for Beau, his best friend and, he says, the greatest person in the whole world. Tash is obviously in love with Beau though a bit afraid of the implications of his feelings ("he's even straighter than I am"). He's quite clearly conflicted about--well--everything.

Beau appears to be more in harmony with the world, or at least pretends to be: he works in a music store and spends the rest of his time high on heroin, working on a novel that is, so far, exactly one paragraph long. It's not long before we realize, though, that the inarticulate and emotionally crippled Beau is in far worse shape than Tash; and not the least of his problems is his inability to deal with his feelings (which may or may not be sexual) toward his friend.

There's another character in Befriending Beau, a teenage drug dealer named Chili. We don't find out very much about her, but it's clear that she's attached to Tash and Beau and we can't help hope that somehow these three are going to come together and create for themselves the family they've never had. The pain, confusion, and alienation--and the gnawing desire for understanding and happiness--that exists within these young people are all so palpably conveyed here that we can't help wishing that they'll get their happy ending. But Gaard ends his play deliberately ambiguously; you'll have to see Befriending Beau and then decide for yourself what lies in store for these kids.

And you'll want to, because the words Gaard places in the mouths of Tash and Beau are so vivid, ripe, and honest. Gaard has directed his play beautifully, and his two young leading men, Adam S. Barta (Tash) and Michael Goduti (Beau) give extraordinarily rich, layered performances.  All in all, a harrowing and powerful production that reminds us once again of the depth and humanity of Gaard's singular brand of theatre. 

The year is 1975. Itzhak is a broken old man, spiritually and physically, ill and battered by the horrific experience of life in several concentration camps decades before. His wife, Nessa, is very much his opposite: she's obsessed--one might argue dangerously so--with the past. Her obsession has alienated her rather severely from her grown children Rochelle and Sonny, both of whom she views as apathetic weaklings. But the generational conflict is not central here: for Nessa's single-minded objective in life is to catch a Nazi--a big potato (as opposed to a small one). Indeed, Nessa is planning to take Itzhak on a possibly life-threatening trip to South America in hopes of finding her potato. What's off-kilter here, though, is Nessa's reason: nothing about justice, or retribution, or revenge, but merely this: she wants to be on the six o'clock news, and she wants Itzhak to write a best-selling book. Think Simon Weisenthal by way of Gypsy's Mama Rose.

I have to admit that I'm baffled by Laurents's choice here: why has he made his leading lady into such a monster? Nessa's selfishness is so enormous that it overwhelms everything else in the play; it's hard, as I said, not to feel a morsel of pity for the elderly German officer who finds himself in Nessa's clutches, handcuffed to a wheelchair and undergoing a forcible hairdye job (Nessa is, improbably, a beautician).

There are occasional flashes of lucidity in the play, when Itzhak and the Nazi Paul share some fascinating intellectual conversation about their pasts. Two useful insights emerge. First, the Jews were not the only ones who suffered during the war (Paul suggests--and Itzhak agrees--that Stalingrad was in some ways equivalent to Auschwitz). More important, the men conclude that the experience of the Holocaust can never fully be understood by any but those who lived it; in this, a curious but unassailable bond between the two men is formed. This is provocative, intelligent stuff, into which we keep hoping the play will delve deeper.

But then Nessa comes barreling on, metaphorically if not literally, and all reason--and insight--disappears. Alas, though Laurents clearly dislikes his heroine, he hands her his play. This makes Big Potato not just unpleasant, but finally untenable.

Laurents, by the way, has disowned this production, as has director Richard Sabellico. Shame on them: the problems with this play are certainly not the fault of Paul Hecht or David Margulies, who turn in well-considered, accomplished performances as Paul and Itzhak; nor, to be fair, should we blame Dylan Chalfy or Joanna Glushak for their inability to create believable characters out of the underwritten Sonny and Rochelle. (Elzbieta Czyzewska, on the other hand, is indeed tragically miscast as Nessa, gesticulating and overacting uncontrollably in a broad, mannered style that is utterly at odds with the naturalism employed by Laurents, Sabellico, and the other actors.)

A final note: Laurents has Nessa and Itzhak tell us--and, as far as I can tell, we're supposed to believe them--that during the war they escaped from Buchenwald, Dacchau, and Auschwitz (twice!). Such extraordinary accomplishments, it seems to me, would be sufficient for a whole series of best-sellers: Nessa doesn't need her big potato after all. It's an inconsistency that's all too indicative of Laurents's work in this play, which must finally be judged as a work not yet fit for any kind of production. 

On a terrible August day, in an abandoned basement, a teenage boy and girl kill their newborn baby. Something like this happened in real life not very long ago: in her gripping new play Blood White, Laurie Sales attempts to comprehend how such a thing might happen.

Sales ranges far in her search for answers, plunging deep into the past to discover truths about the boy's parents that might explain something; and reaching ahead to the future to suggest the kind of legacy such an act might leave behind. It's all filtered through the eyes of Teddy, the boy's older brother, a young man whose ordinary middle-class existence went akimbo when he learned that he had almost not been born.

Superficially, at least, Blood White seems to be about the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons: Tony and Anastasia do an inordinate amount of wrong things for the wrong reasons on their way to becoming parents to Teddy and his brother. It feels almost like Sales is simply assigning blame, which is too facile for the complex structure she has fashioned in this play. It's the one real weakness of the piece, which is otherwise compelling and challenging and endlessly interesting.

Sales carries us in and out of Teddy's memories and dreams as he watches his parents re-live their troubled courtship and himself drift catatonically through a blearily detached love affair with a stripper in Amsterdam. With him, we process these images--some crass, some ugly, some tender; all nakedly honest--and try to piece together meaning.

The stagecraft of Blood White is extraordinary. Sales, who also serves as director, consistently finds original ways to tell her story. The depiction of the baby's murder, for example, is remarkable for its visceral impact. The ensemble of eight actors is fine, too, led by the excellent Timothy Fannon. Fannon, who appeared to great effect last summer in the title role of Bertolt Brecht's Baal, couldn't be more different here as the questing idealist Teddy.  His versatility, intelligence, and charisma mark him as one of our best young actors.

Severn Clay's set, constructed almost entirely out of stacks of books and open space, provides interesting counterpoint to the tale; his lighting design, alternating long patches of near-darkness with bright flashes of white light, and Jill B.C. DuBoff's eccentric soundscape, similarly serve the play's disturbing, alienating mood.

All in all, Blood White makes for an arresting theatre experience. I'll be eager to see what playwright-director Laurie Sales comes up with next.

Bobbi Boland takes place in a suburban Florida community in 1967, just as a simple, polite, old way of life was being usurped unceremoniously by a complicated, impolite new order. This transition is what Bobbi Boland is about. Its title character is a 40ish former beauty queen who runs a kids' charm school and, apparently, rules the cultural roost in her town with an iron fist. Bobbi is married to Roger, an attractive ex-football hero who supports her in comfortable, if not luxurious, style. Pretentious and temperamental, Bobbi is also genuine and gallant--an oddly admirable eccentric whom we are happy to accept as the heroine of her own play.

But things go badly wrong for Bobbi Boland (character and play), as no less a personage than the playwright turns against her. Enter Kim--gorgeous, sexy, arty, bohemian--a living embodiment of the most dangerous and attractive aspects of the '60s. Kim moves in quickly on Roger, for no apparent reason other than to provide conflict. Can Bobbi the Dinosaur hold her own against the teeny-bopper golden girl?

You've guessed, probably, that she can't. That's how the story plays in real life, practically as well as metaphorically: the uncertain morals of the 60s did supplant the fixed social order of the 50s; nothing to be done about that. But one wonders why playwright Nancy Hasty feels so compelled to let Bobbi go down to such ignominious defeat. It is, after all, Bobbi's play. 

So Bobbi Boland is finally a real curiosity: a star vehicle where the star gets soundly thrashed before the curtain call. It's truthful, I suppose; but it's really really unsatisfying to watch, especially because Hasty sets up character and situation so skillfully and likeably in her play's fine first act.

The production is nicely directed by Evan Bergman, and features a perfectly appropriate living room set by John Farrell. Performances are generally good, especially Gregg Henry's sensitive, layered portrayal of Bobbi's husband Roger and lovely Tanya Clarke's guileless turn as the villainous Kim. The playwright herself stars as Bobbi, a last-minute replacement for another actress: she's game, but entirely wrong for the part.  

I've got a soft spot for women like Bobbi Boland: from Scarlett O'Hara to Amanda Wingfield, they're almost always depicted as survivors, which is what makes them such durable leading ladies in the theatre and on celluloid. Too bad Bobbi Boland's author seems so determined to let her creation sink instead of swim. 

Boss Grady's Boys is a gentle play, but in its quiet, poignant way it is enormously moving. It tells the story of Mick and Josey Grady, two old men living in an isolated house on the edge of a remote Irish town. Josey is a bit simple-minded, liable sometimes to mingle his memories of the past with his awareness of the present. Mick is sturdier, and once a week he heads into town for a game of cards with some of the old timers who remember him there. But most of the time, he and Josey man their lonely homestead, together and inseparable, bound by a brotherly love of profound proportion.

Playwright Sebastian Barry has sketched Mick and Josey's relationship with remarkable incisiveness. Boss Grady's Boys is a touching exploration of the nature of unconditional love: of the loneliness it cures and the loneliness is causes.

The play itself is a series of vignettes depicting their simple daily routine, interspersed with their occasional remembrances of younger days, including the deaths of both of their emotionally elusive parents. There's also a marvelous scene of Mick at cards with cronies Mrs. Molloy, Mrs. Swift, and Mr. Reagan, in which Barry deftly and economically reveals the broader shroud of loneliness that pervades the Gradys' sad, desolate town.

Director Ina Marlowe has staged Barry's script with great sensitivity. Designers Eric Nightengale and Moira Shaugnessy provide an appropriately stark but natural look for the piece, although I wonder if the delineation between real and imagined scenes might be more clearly realized. At the center of the production are the two splendid performances of William Andrews and Tom Toner as Mick and Josey, respectively, each of whom creates a wondrously individual specimen of humanity while at the same time evokes the unique symbiosis that binds their characters together. Alfred Cherry, Margo Skinner, and Kay Michaels register strongly in their single scene as Mick's card-playing buddies.

Boss Grady's Boys was written some fourteen years ago, and is only now receiving its New York premiere at 78th Street Theatre Lab. The company is to be commended for bringing this worthy play to us at last. 

Immediate impressions of Boxing 2000, written about an hour after the play ended:

If the business of theatre is communication, then I have to rate Boxing 2000 a failure: I am at a loss as to what Richard Maxwell, the play's author and director, intended to communicate to me during the hour he had my attention this evening. That's not a value judgment; it's just the truth.

Boxing 2000 begins with three men entering the stage--the houselights go down, but the stage stays as brightly lit as it was before the show started. The men stand in awkward poses, not exactly facing the audience and not exactly facing each other. They speak in language that approximates actual speech without duplicating it; they act--in the sense of performance--in an artificial and stilted manner, without expression, or at least without appropriate expression. People in the audience laughed at some of what they said, but I couldn't say why. Fifteen minutes into the piece, with very little new having happened, I wondered to myself if this play came with directions.

I wondered this because it's clear, very quickly, that Maxwell means for us to see what I saw, more or less: the artifice is deliberate; the deadened tone, the weird pacing, the odd phrasing are all intentional. The question is, what's the intent? As the play progressed, encompassing a boxing match that feels like a surreal put-on (and is actually somewhat funny), I found myself no less perplexed. There's a reason for all this detachment, I thought, but darned if I could make out what it is.

The play's about an hour long: is it really worth pondering? Maybe: Maxwell has a considerable reputation as a theatre artist, and this is my first encounter with his work; so I intend to do a little digging in the next few days to see if I can get some clues about Boxing 2000's meaning.

The most important clue will come from my own brain, though, later tonight and tomorrow, when--if--something from the play starts to resonate somewhere in my subconscious. It is possible that, with time and reflection, some communication will have actually occurred. I'll let you know. 

Boy Gets Girl, Rebecca Gilman's slick but unsatisfying new drama, suffers from schizophrenia. Part of the time, it wants to be a sleek, dark thriller in the Silence of the Lambs mold, with its sophisticated, smart heroine stalked by a fascinating but treacherous villain. And part of the time it wants to be a socially conscious cautionary tale about Victims Rights and the Contemporary Urban Problem of Stalking. Had Gilman stuck to one of these ideas, she might have wound up with a play that works. As it is, Boy Gets Girl veers sloppily between and around both genres, and fails to convince as an effective example of either one.

The girl in Boy Gets Girl is Theresa Bedell--hardly a girl at all, she's a successful single woman in her thirties who is a respected reporter at a large New York-based magazine. The boy is a guy named Tony--younger, less settled, and needier than Theresa, but likable if it weren't so obvious from the get-go that he's going to be Theresa's Stalker. They meet on a blind date and clearly don't gel; then they have another date, against Theresa's better judgment, which ends with her attempting to end their relationship.

It turns out that she can't: Tony's deluge of flowers and phone calls is an annoyance, but the threatening phone calls and letters that follow are far more disturbing. As Tony's obsession gets scarily out of hand, Theresa's life, at home and at the office, spins terrifyingly out of control.

Stalking is sufficiently uncharted territory, drama-wise, to make Theresa's experience resonant and compelling: there's real potential here to craft a modern urban horror story that will deliver a good old-fashioned scare to its audience. Theresa is smart and self-assured, but she's also appealingly vulnerable, which makes her the ideal heroine for this sort of thing. And the events of the detailed, naturalistic plot are generally plausible enough to make us look over our shoulders as we venture out of the theatre and onto the street.

But Gilman undercuts her play's thriller potential with dramaturgical choices that feel very deliberate. She goes out of her way to make Theresa as unsympathetic as possible, which makes her plight no less alarming, but a great deal more difficult to care about. She adds a foolish subplot in which Theresa interviews a reprobate soft-core exploitation movie director a la Russ Meyer with the unlikely name of Les Kennkat; we're somehow supposed to believe that the aggressively independent and increasingly mistrustful Theresa becomes friends with this character.

Finally, Gilman inserts in her play several scenes that deal with the larger social problem that Theresa's predicament supposedly represents. Some, like Theresa's scenes with a police detective, are informative if clinical, demonstrating the need for some rethinking of how stalking cases are handled by law enforcement agencies. But others, like the unconvincing conversation between two of Theresa's male co-workers in which the sensitive one compares his own un-acted-upon lustful thoughts about women with the heinous behavior of the now-lethal Tony, are not just unlikely but downright unfathomable: most healthy men know the difference between objectification and rape, and between rape and murder.

The production, staged by the late Michael Maggio and "supervised" by Manhattan Theatre Club artistic director Lynne Meadow, is generally well-executed, with Ian Lithgow the standout among the cast in the menacing (but surprisingly brief) role of Tony. But Boy Gets Girl is finally sabotaged by all this baggage that Gilman has imposed on it. 

Unique is an overused word, but if anybody's life qualifies for that appellation, it's Brian Belovitch's. As he reveals in his new solo show Boys Don't Wear Lipstick, Belovitch has lived roughly half his life as a man and the other half as a woman. He's been an army bride in Germany and a nightclub chanteuse in the States; he's also been a broke street hooker, desperately turning tricks for five dollars to make ends meet. His, in short, is a story that ought to hold unparalleled fascination for audiences.

So it's a serious disappointment that Boys Don't Wear Lipstick turns out to be such a misfire. In developing this autobiographical show, Belovitch seems to have made poor choices almost every step of the way. The surprising result is that Boys Don't Wear Lipstick manages to make Belovitch's life the one thing it almost certainly never was: cliché.

Three problems plague the piece. First, there's the matter of selection: Belovitch seems fairly willing to bare all for his audience; indeed, he literally does so at the end of the show, shucking off his clothes and stepping into a shower. But just as he fails to give us in this final moment the full frontal jolt we've been waiting for, so throughout does he fail to fill in important gaps in his remarkable life story. He tells us, for example, that he convinced his boyfriend Denny to marry him, but he never tells us how or why; similarly, we hear him announce to an old friend that he wants to leave the marriage and move to New York, but we never find out how that got accomplished or what impact it had on the young husband who, one assumes, had taken a significant risk in marrying Belovitch in the first place.

Later, Belovitch's rise and fall as singer Tish Gervais are dutifully charted in vignettes that recall, say, an old Susan Hayward movie. But meaty and useful details are missing, so we never really get to know our hero/heroine.

Which brings me to problem number two. Belovitch doesn't provide much in the way of insight or analysis; given his extraordinary perspective about gender and identity and sexuality, I think it's reasonable to expect at least a little. But all Belovitch seems to have learned from his amazing experiences is that it's hard to be a man and harder to be a woman. And the meager explanation he posits for his initial foray into femininity--decades ago, while still a high school student--is his anxiety over being gay.

Boys Don't Wear Lipstick might at least succeed as a weird sort of peep show if it were well-executed; alas, it is not. The show's third principal difficulty stems from Belovitch's decision to re-enact episodes from his life rather than recount them. Projected slides show us that in the past Brian-as-Tish was convincingly alluring; but nowadays, in middle age, and after a fair amount of surgery and hormone treatments, Belovitch in drag looks more like Divine than RuPaul. His acting chops, too, are really not up to the admittedly difficult task required here: Belovitch is, oddly, never quite believable as himself. Keith Greer's pedestrian direction, which features lots of dead air while Belovitch changes costume offstage, doesn't help matters.

There's indisputably a compelling story buried within Boys Don't Wear Lipstick. But buried it remains in this production: Belovitch needs to clarify what he's trying to accomplish, and rethink how best to accomplish it. Then, perhaps, the key to this oh-so-worth-examining life may be discovered.

There is much to admire in Peter S. Petralia's intriguing, disorienting new play Bunny's Last Night in Limbo. Petralia's theatrical vision is original and fascinating, using stylized acting, specifically defined stage spaces, and a pulsing, often dissonant, continuous soundtrack (music by Max Giteck Duykers) to tell the story of Bunny, a boy coming of age in a weirdly dysfunctional suburban family.

An older, confident Bunny narrates the tale, which he tells us is a dream but which plays out as a stream-of-consciousness series of chronological vignettes, chronicling the simultaneous dissolution of Bunny's family and his budding self-awareness as a (homo)sexual being. Stylized sequences, seamlessly incorporating mime, singing, and other disparate theatrical elements, depict the increasingly unsatisfactory home life of Bunny and his family. Mother is an overbearing, oversexed hairdresser (played, with over-the-top bravada by Lu Chekowsky in Divine drag); Father (Dan Sherman) is a philandering loser who, in a scene of remarkable potency, abandons the brood. Sister (Stephanie Sanditz, in a brilliant tragicomic turn) is so hungry for attention and affection that she literally eats her lipsticks.

As for Bunny himself, he and us are always aware that he somehow doesn't fit in with this bunch. But it's not until he starts encountering a mysterious Boy (an intensely playful David Sochet) that he comes to understand the nature of his otherness. It's never entirely clear whether the Boy is real or illusory, but what he represents to Bunny ultimately rescues him. The play ends a bit abruptly, but it appears that, away from the bitter trappings of his youth, Bunny will find his way in the world.

Tom Pilutik is excellent as Bunny, perfectly embodying the divergent aspects of his young, questing personality--he's naive, precocious, innocent, sexy, powerful, and vulnerable all at once. Petralia's script could use some clarification and some expansion; for example, I'd like to see more material like Sister's speech about why it's important to be pretty that helps us place these characters in a larger context. But his direction is outstanding: the startling ways that he uses the intimate space to reveal character and plot are especially exciting. He's definitely a talented artist to keep an eye on.

Burnt, Rhett Rossi's autobiographical one-man play, is a remarkable work of theatre. Even it weren't so nakedly honest, it would still qualify as thoroughly compelling storytelling. And even if it weren't so courageously and wrenchingly insightful, it would still be a stunning tour de force for this excellent young actor.

In Burnt, Rossi recounts events from three years of his life, when he was in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade--a time when his transfer from Catholic to public school precipitated a crisis of identity that grew into a crisis of faith. The play takes the form of a confession, made by the adult Rossi to an unseen priest. During the course of this confession, Rossi recalls and re-enacts pivotal memories from his early adolescence. He plays all the roles, bringing to life his mother, his father, his protective but loving older brother Ric, and a whole host of neighborhood kids, ranging from Paul, a "cool" hoodlum-in-the-making, to Danny, Ric's tough, wisecracking best friend. Rossi acts them all with warmth and humor and great affection, so that the storytelling that is at the heart of Burnt is always vivid and  entertaining.

He also explores how these people--and some truly shocking events--helped shape his character. During the play, teenaged Rhett slips further and further away from his family as he gets mixed up with some bad kids, drugs, and even some minor violent crimes. His awakening from this sad period of his life is not unexpected--the grown-up, real-live Rhett is before us, after all, telling us the story--but it's nevertheless urgent and uplifting. 

At the end, we sit astonished by Rossi's talent--which is prodigious, as writer, actor, and entirely charismatic performer--and also by his fortitude. How must it feel to revisit one's childhood every night?

Kevin Kittle, who developed the piece with Rossi as well as directed it, has done a tremendous job giving it shape and substance. Lighting (Michael A. Reese), sound (Steve Shirk, Pink Noise), and video (Scott Illingworth) all contribute much to the show's overall quality.

As personal as it is, Burnt feels, in many ways, like Everykid's story: I think there's a significant audience for this piece if only the word gets out. Rossi's fine work here deserves wide exposure; I'd love to see Burnt have a life after this showcase production.

Gabridge's Christmas Breaks starts the evening off nicely. Melissa Quirk stars as Marcie, a hapless young woman who is mercilessly dumped on Christmas Eve by her suave but selfish boyfriend (smoothly played by Eddie Goines). Quirk is enormously appealing as Marcie, as is Joshua Knapp as the young man who helps her set things right.

Teresa Sullivan's Karmic Cafe follows, a somewhat light-headed, daffy piece about a psychic waiter who wreaks havoc on a seemingly happily married couple. Susan Estes is excellent as the grounded but adventurous wife, while Chuck Powers is convincing as her ordinary Joe of a husband. Trevor Jones has fun as the eccentric waiter, but probably could cut loose and make the character even more outrageous to increase the laugh quotient.

A second Gabridge piece comes next, Counting Rita, in which two women have a short, sharp confrontation about--what else--a man. Gabridge is attempting a David Ives-type comic device to propel this play (one of the characters clicks off the lies told by the other on a counter), but it doesn't really pan out--it's too easy to see where Counting Rita is going. Nonetheless, Sherikay Perry offers a nice turn as the surprised victim of a wronged wife's weird revenge.

The fourth play, Lindsay Price's Liver for Breakfast, is probably the strongest work in Cafe Encounters.  The central situation--three adult siblings meeting for breakfast just before going to visit their newly divorced father and his fiancee--is resonant and interesting; that plus Price's finely-tuned ability to quickly sketch out her quirky characters makes Liver for Breakfast a more substantial, satisfying repast than its cohorts. It's also solidly acted by Dan Remmes, Susan Estes, and Kathy Searle, who convince us that they're really related to each other.

Up next is PS Lorio's Cognito, a neat little comedy with a nifty twist at the end, depicting the unlikely meeting, in a deserted restaurant, between a successful female executive and an overly friendly, squeaky-voiced, not-so-dumb blonde. Lorio's dialogue is consistently amusing, and even if we can guess the outcome a little sooner than we should, the piece is quite satisfying. Maitely Weismann is gloriously over-the-top as the blonde.

The evening's final piece is Mary Lathrop's somewhat mistitled Menstruating Waitress from Hell, which delivers not the fire-breathing dragon that those words suggest, but instead a cynically detached veteran who has seen it all, and offers a sarcastic guide to how she plies her trade. It's a funny piece, but it's bitter rather than edgy. Wende O'Reilly is fine in the title role, while Carrie Yeager is excellent as the Everywoman customer who is her foil.

Paula D'Alessandris directs all six plays comprising Cafe Encounters with assurance. Dan Martin's versatile unit restaurant set manages, with very little accoutrement, to complement each of these very different works nicely. 

I was so afraid that Camp Holocaust was going to be smug, or gratuitous, or stupid. The idea behind it--so elegant and so obvious--is ripe for the crassest kind of exploitation: two American Jews, children of Holocaust survivors, decide to build a concentration camp theme park in Poland. Clearly we're in "Springtime for Hitler" territory here: the question is, are authors Adam Melnick and Joshua Tarjan going for grossly offensive or over-the-top kitsch?

The answer, miraculously, is neither: Camp Holocaust is serious satire, brilliantly conceived and even more brilliantly executed, utterly worthy of the attention of anyone who cares about the theatre, the world, or both. It's also--to be sure-- very much a work-in-progress: at present, it's packed with too much incident and too many conflicting thematic impulses for its own good. But believe me when I tell you that there is greatness here. If Melnick and Tarjan successfully sift through and sort out their priorities, Camp Holocaust could be a work of real stature and significance.

As things stand now, the first half of the play works remarkably well. Ed, an aimless and undirected American Jew (and son of a Holocaust survivor) conceives the idea of building Camp Holocaust, a place where people like him--whose lives have been shaped so profoundly by events that occurred decades before they were born--can experience first-hand some of the horrors that their parents and grandparents went through. (It's important to understand, by the way, that Melnick and Tarjan are entirely aware that Ed's vision is absurd and provoking and misguided and very dangerous. But Camp Holocaust turns on this device, so if you're feeling disgusted at this point, please bear with them and me.)

Ed's friend Dave seizes on the concept, and soon the pair find themselves on their way to a remote town in Poland, armed with hundreds of thousands of Deutsche marks from a mysterious German donor. They are--incredibly, preposterously--two Jews about to build a brand new concentration camp.

Melnick and Tarjan seemingly step back, now, as their awesomely terrible idea takes root and grows. The local population is at first appalled by the idea of having a concentration camp in their town, but Dave manages to ingratiate himself with vodka, cigarettes, and cash. Soon, the camp is built and a waiting list of weirdly masochistic Jews stand ready to relive the horrors of Auschwitz. Vignettes chart the treacherous and hilarious course of events that follows: We see an old Jewish tourist named Bromowitz haranguing a reluctant Nazi guard who won't shave his head; we listen to an earnest American schoolteacher describe how much she's looking forward to spending three days on a cattle car (the first "ride" in the Camp Holocaust experience); we watch, with Ed, as Dave shows up in full Nazi uniform, armed with a box of Camp Holocaust t-shirts and barbed wire key chains. All of it is outrageously funny and outrageously terrifying.

Dave begins to lose his hold on reality (not to say morality) as the theme park prospers; through him, Melnick and Tarjan take Camp Holocaust to what they accurately describe as its chillingly logical conclusion. I'll leave it to you to discover exactly what that is; I will tell you that I didn't see it coming and that, in its way, it's as bloodlessly perfect a final solution as anything Hitler ever thought of.

Unfortunately, the character of Ed proves more problematic for the playwrights: he's functioning as both protagonist and conscience, but as written he doesn't successfully manage to be either. Stuff happens to Ed: he falls in love with a local Polish girl whose ambition is to become a Jewish wife in Israel, for example; and he gets entwined in a surreal escape plot involving Mr. Bromowitz, during which he learns some disturbing things about himself and his fellow humans. But these incidents don't jell with his framing story of self-realization and coming to terms with his heritage. Melnick and Trajan need to clarify who Ed is; they also need to edit out some of the extraneous details of plot that detract from the main arc of their play. Right now there's too much noise in Camp Holocaust, and it makes the play less explosive and less dangerous than it ought to be.

Melnick takes the role of Dave, leading an expert ensemble of a dozen actors. I was especially impressed by Johanna McKay, Christopher Roberts, and David Gochfeld, each of whom plays many minor characters in this extravaganza; also by Steven McElroy's earnest (if confused) Ed, Jeff Bearden's charming Polish student Wotjek, and Amalie Ceen's efficient, chameleon-like Anna, Dave's Polish translator-turned-girl-Friday. Tarjan's staging is superb and inventive: I love, for example, the way he lets us know whether characters are speaking in Polish or English.

Kudos to The Present Company for putting Camp Holocaust in front of an audience. I hope that all the creative people involved finish shaping this provocative, intelligent work into the masterpiece it has the potential to be.

T. Schreiber Studio's production of Israel Horovitz's Captains & Courage represents theatre at its finest and most essential. Armed with nineteen committed actors, a team of expert designers and technicians, and a crackerjack percussionist named Eliza Ladd; and with talented director Michael Cecchi at the helm, this company has crafted a rich and exciting theatrical adventure. It's first rate storytelling, and it's first rate stagecraft.

Captains & Courage transports us to the rugged New England coast, where Ben Cheyne and Roland Troop make their livings--barely--as fishermen. Bucking more congenial occupations, these two men decide to go out for a make or break voyage, accompanied only by a homeless teenage kid named Manny who sought refuge on the ship after an aborted robbery.

Before he departs, Ben tells his young children the story of his great-grandfather Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled rich kid who fell off a luxury liner a century earlier and was rescued by a Portuguese immigrant named Manuel and mustered into the crew--against his will--of Disko Troop's fishing vessel. The two stories--the contemporary one plus this one, based on Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous--play out side by side in Horovitz's skillful narrative. They keep us on the edge of our seats: will Disko and Manuel make a man of Harvey? And will Ben, Roland and Manny survive a life-threatening storm and bring home a profitable catch?

Director Cecchi brings both of these journeys to life with vivid immediacy in a brilliantly imaginative staging. John Pollard's versatile set doubles as both Ben and Disko's ships, while Sandra King's ingenious costumes serve to remind us which story we're in at any given time. Jane Cox's remarkable lighting, Lori Russo's choreography, Joe Furnari's sound, and Eliza Ladd's extraordinary percussion combine to create stunning effects that are so convincing that you actually feel wet during the thunderstorm and, when Ben and Roland examine their haul, you actually see a net full of fish.

The entire company is terrific, with particularly fine work turned in by Paul Frediani as Ben and Manuel, Leopold Lowe as Roland and Disko, James Aaron as young Manny, and Thom Geraghty as Harvey.

Herewith, not so much a review as a response to what could be a good, even  great, play.  I am not at all familiar with Mac Wellman's work, but I have no doubt whatsoever that he is a highly intelligent man, extremely adept at the mechanics of both language and playwriting.  What he is not adept at--and seems to have little interest in--is the act of communication.

Rather, Wellman prefers to show off his intellect, knowing this will so impress a certain segment of the audience that they will leave the theatre touting the greatness of the work. To create a masterpiece or even a piece worthy of being potentially a masterpiece takes work: much more than merely putting some thoughts to paper in a clever  manner. 

Yet that's all that Cat's Paw is.  I admire Wellman's spectacular use of language, his ability to find the exact right word or words for a particular speech.  I became fascinated by his fascination with the sound of his words; by the use of made up words that are able to portray meaning through their sound.  But I was appalled when this became greater and of more importance than their place in a given speech or their meaning in the play as a whole; when the words took on a life of their own; when my mind stopped following the thread of the play and pondered the meaning and exactness of the phrases being used.

Enough said about my opinions of Cat’s Paw as a piece of dramatic literature.  As for the production, I’m not sure.  The performances of the four women are seriously hurt by the limitations--and, I suspect, their limited understandings--of their roles.  Each is required to recite the most erudite, scientific dialogue interspersed with brief spurts of contemporary, political, sophomoric humor, which would be difficult for even the best-rehearsed, most ideally-cast actors to accomplish.  The device of the complete circle, a la La Ronde, works well but is obviously a device.  The set suggested a mathematical model of a slice of infinity.  Again a grandiose idea; again a bid to fool the audience into believing Cat's Paw is far more significant than it really is.

Three people eating a microwaved pizza bagel is not inherently funny. But watching three people eating a microwaved pizza bagel on stage–having an audience watch them struggle with the rubbery dough and greasy cheese, having us experience in real time the intervals of chewing needed to swallow down a bagel–now, that is funny. 

Richard Maxwell knows the humor that the mundane possesses when transposed onto the stage. He knows the essence of comedy lies in the revelation that people are machines; that our basic actions are, in truth, weirdly mechanistic, almost alien, gestures. In removing the performative element from acting, Maxwell creates a deeply theatrical world of robots, a deadpan so deadpan and yet so full of humor and energy. It is a hyper-realism that is, at the same time, devoutly anti-naturalistic. This style has made Maxwell a downtown name of increasing importance. His plays reek with charm, but he manages (at least at present) to avoid letting this get the better of him. His work is still a great deal of fun.

Maxwell’s latest Caveman is yet another installment in his growing canon of hour-length plays. And while there is no big artistic breakthrough, Maxwell, with the devotion of an modernist painter, once again displays his precise method. Caveman is another excursion to Maxwell-land: where the actors stand in lines, speak without intonation, and for no rational reason, break out into songs with the most banal of lyrics (“Cause I love you,” is a favorite refrain in Caveman). The show is all performed with an expert inexpertness by a cast of Maxwell regulars. If this is your cup of tea, this makes Caveman a must see.

Caveman concerns three figures: W, C and A. W (Tory Vazquez) lives in her trailer park home hoping to get a car so she can go to San Antonio where her son may or may not be. C (Lakpa Bhutia), presumably W’s husband, is a foreman at a factory and has returned from work. Eventually one of C’s employees, A (Jim Fletcher in an amazing pair of jeans), stops by to enjoy a Coors Light and a pizza bagel. Following this snack, the two men partake in sexist banter while smoking some buds. Maxwell, time and time again, portrays these marginal figures, people who are devoutly not middle class, those still called “white trash” by some parts of society. Maxwell’s loving attention to detail makes these portrayals come off as not condescending, but rather, loving, honest and deeply American, not so different from the figures found in early Sam Shepard pieces.

After the meal, a fight for the love of W ensues and predictably, C and A come to blows. The plot clearly is not where the action is. The power and movement of Caveman, instead, unfolds from the weird and wonderful juxtaposition of dead language and touching music. While the jury is still out on whether or not there can be a successful melding of rock ‘n’ roll and theatre, Maxwell proves that an indie rock theatre can be done and done well. All the songs are great and I get the sense that somebody has been listening to some Belle and Sebastian recently. The music is performed live with skill and verve by a three-piece (Scott Sherratt on guitar, Bryan Kelly on bass, and Greg Hirte on violin), seated in front of the set.

While it is hard to evaluate the acting in Caveman using traditional standards of judgment, all three performers are uniformly strong presences on stage, mesmerizing to watch. Vazquez is the most “actorly” of the three Maxwell muses. She has a great voice and it gives her songs a punch. But the two men, most clearly not singers, are a real joy to watch as they break from stoic deadpan to vain attempts at singing. As in the best American indie rock, it’s not the skill with which the words are sung, but the intensity with which they are delivered that makes a great song great. By this standard, A’s (Fletcher’s) final song is a real theatrical treat. It doesn’t rock, it “rocks.” And what higher praise in Maxwell’s world of nudges and winks is there?

Caveman is another great addition to the fast-growing phenomenon that is Richard Maxwell. And while I highly recommend the piece, I couldn’t help but feeling that Maxwell’s style is getting increasingly close to the world of gimmick, a place he really doesn’t want to be. And in the finicky world of theatre critics, one can smell a backlash brewing right around the corner: “What’s this, but yet another deadpan meditation on modern life which Maxwell has done before and done better?” For Maxwell to sustain his already-impressive achievement, a new artistic development is increasingly becoming necessary. But for a handy consolidation of his aesthetic breakthrough so far, check out the excellent Caveman playing at Soho Rep.

I say "I think" because I'm not entirely sure; despite what I'm certain are the best of intentions, Cellini is a muddle-headed mess of a play that finally says nothing definitive or coherent about anything, least of all its ostensible subject, the Florentine Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. Nearly eighty years ago, playwright Edwin Justus Mayer wrote a broad (and hugely successful) swashbuckling romance called The Firebrand that critic Burns Mantle praised as capturing the spirit if not the letter of Cellini's life. Shanley's play does the opposite: while it appears that much or most of Cellini is reasonably factual, it has none of the crackling bravado that has come to characterize this larger-than-life, self-invented artist-memoirist-lady's man-adventurer.

Cellini, instead, rants and rambles through two long, tiresome acts, trying on and discarding numerous themes and theatrical styles, to no particular purpose, along the way. Sometimes Cellini feels self-consciously modern, with characters conspiratorially chatting with the audience about the flow of the narrative. Other times, it's docudrama, quoting, presumably verbatim, from Cellini's own flowery, long-winded writing or painstakingly explaining, ad nauseum, the mechanics of casting bronze. Still other times, the play feels like bad Masterpiece Theatre, with its chorus of kings, popes, dukes, and various doubleted underlings plotting and scheming about this or that in overwrought declamatory speeches. And there are still other times--as when one of Cellini's enemies pleads for his life with the portentous line "Honor God!"--when I expected F. Murray Abraham as Salieri to stroll onto one of the balconies that anchor Adrienne Lobel's massive unit set, so Amadeus-ly fraught had the proceedings become.

Shanley the director compounds Shanley the playwright's error. The play's long climactic scene, in which Cellini defies the odds to create his massive sculpture of Perseus, is staged as though it were the centerpiece of a disaster film, complete with giant wooden derrick, simulated thunderstorm, explosions, and the entire cast scurrying about the stage as if they were drowning passengers in Titanic. It's busy, but it's incomprehensible; worse, there's no payoff: Phantom without a chandelier; Les Miz without a barricade.

Another thing: Despite the fact that, except for a brief sojourn to Paris, the entire play takes place in Italy, everyone speaks with an accent (though not necessarily the same one: some of the characters speak a cartoony Italian dialect that suggests Chico Marx, while Reg Rogers, in the title role, tends toward round, full tones--beco-o-oze for because--that would not be out of place on the stage of an opera house).

In short, Cellini is a mess; and a sad one, because, as I suggested at the start of this, Shanley clearly has some interesting things on his mind. He depicts Cellini as a plain-spoken, free-thinking, fundamentally honest and independent man, and the compromises he makes with powerful patrons and scheming politicos eventually do diminish him: there are a couple of moments when you can practically see him slapping Jesse Helms on the nose and telling him to stop interfering with the NEA. But the message is buried, mostly, in the debris of this too-ambitious drama. And in the end, even the inherent romance of a life lived to the fullest--Cellini tells us more than once how happy he is to have been born--is somehow excised.

In the title role, Reg Rogers is commanding but erratic; at least he's less mannered than he has lately been. Jennifer Roszell, as Cellini's fitful love interest, is called upon to be either nude or lewd. (I can't wait for this post-feminist backlash to be over.) An ensemble of seven other actors, in seemingly dozens of roles, work hard but fail to distinguish themselves. 

It is fitting given the ironies and contradictions of her brief, yet impressive career that Sarah Kane would receive her official introduction to US audiences in a play that she wrote under a pseudonym. Kane was something of the enfant terrible of contemporary British theatre, emerging in the flurry of exciting theatre in the mid-1990s. Kane along with Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking) and Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane) were quickly dubbed by the press as the “New British Nihilists.” Her first play Blasted, written when Kane was only twenty five and which featured scenes of cannibalism and sodomy, was quickly made infamous by the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker who called it “a disgusting piece of filth.” The play quickly became a media event and Kane’s strengths as a writer were overshadowed by debates about why the Royal Court would stage a play which, according to Tinker and others, “knows no bounds of decency.”

After further exploring issues of violence in Phaedra’s Love (her adaptation of Seneca) and Cleansed, a different Kane emerged in late 1998. Crave was a poetic drama in which four speakers, two men and two women named A, B, C and M respectively, muse on the turmoil of loss and desire. No sodomy, strippers or severed limbs here. This play focuses solely on language, and Kane’s writing in Crave, as even her critics would admit, was haunting and lyrical, not unlike late Beckett, while still displaying a biting sense of humor throughout. First staged as part of the Edinburgh Festival, far from the notice of the London critics, and credited to writer Marie Kelvedon (whose humorous fake bio includes a stint as a roadie for the band Manic Street Preachers), Crave marked a transition. While not without its flaws, the play promised a new and exciting period in her work. Sadly, this was not to be. Kane, while being treated for depression, committed suicide in February 1999.

The Axis Theatre company is to be commended for staging the challenging work of a British playwright, one whose work has been largely overlooked in this country. With the exception of readings at New Dramatists (where Kane spent time on a playwriting fellowship), Kane’s plays have not received a venue in New York City. As a result, I urge all those with an interest in contemporary theatre, especially those who want to know what is going on in London beyond West End fare, to check out this production by a theatre company which is emerging as an important force.

That said, however, I cannot recommend Randy Sharp’s flawed production. Sharp and her four actors (Blondie’s Deborah Harry, David Guion, Kristin DiSpaltro and Brian Barnhart) turn Crave into a static and dull piece of theatre. Sharp’s use of video projections and stylized lighting make the piece sculpturally beautiful, but the show is theatrically dead, lacking the irony and humor that makes Kane’s writing so potent. With few exceptions, the production renders the play’s satire and edginess dull and flat. Case in point is A’s (Barnhart) monologue: his obsessive-compulsive listing of a lover’s sappy desires, written as a textual burst of hysteria meant to be spoken quickly, is delivered by Barnhart as a real emotional moment, complete with lengthy pauses and tears, no irony to be found anywhere.

And this fatal lack of humor is only compounded by the play’s staging. Sharp sets the play in a disembodied nowhere space where the four actors clad in black stand in a line, while videos that play over the actors' heads set the piece firmly in New York City. While the play does not specify a setting, a director would be wise to give the piece a sense of location, as Vicky Featherstone did in the play’s first production when she put the four speakers in a mock talk-show environment; but a specific geographical location only makes Crave a cliché of urban angst. In straddling nowhere and downtown, Sharp makes the play a boring exercise in existential angst. While many have said that Blasted and Cleansed are distinctly British, Crave instead feels distinctly European, as B’s occasional use of Serbo-Croatian, German, and Spanish attests, and the play benefits from that context: that sense of the Old World on the verge of collapse. All of this is lost in this production.

Certainly, it is a piece of genius to cast Deborah Harry as M, the older woman who, as B notes, is “not older per se.” But Sharp does not allow Harry’s new wave persona to come through, and Harry and her fellow performers (especially the usually excellent Guion) seem trapped and unsure on stage. While that may be Sharp’s point, that road has been traveled way too much to still be interesting to an audience, and no amount of video and lighting effects can hide that tedium well-done is still tedium. A more physical, more ensemble-style approach among the four actors would have injected a good deal of life into the production.

And that is what most troubling about Axis’s Crave; it lacks life and seems more a testament to Kane’s death than to her life. When I attended a memorial reading of Crave at New Dramatists after her death, the artistic staff and her fellow playwrights, especially Eduardo Machado and Paul Slee, spoke passionately of Kane’s energy, her relentless humor and her commitment to the art of theatre. While the Axis Theatre showcases Kane’s technical skill as a writer, it does a disservice to the humanity and humor of a play like Crave. See Axis Theatre’s Crave and you will recognize what the theatre lost in February 1999. Unfortunately, this one only reminds us that we are still waiting for a worthy stateside production of Kane’s work.