nytheatre Archive
2000-01 Theatre Season Reviews

Vital Theatre Company's delightful new show Death in England is quite unlike anything I've ever seen. It's an allegory in the form of a British drawing room farce/thriller: a sort of Mousetrap gone metaphysical. In it, Death shows up at the home of a wealthy family to claim his next victim. But, in an unprecedented turn of events, he discovers that he has come to the wrong house. When his intended victim dies anyway, Death becomes alarmed: who has usurped his power and committed this murder? In short order, a cagey police detective is summoned, along with a number of people connected with the decedent, all of whom are potential suspects. And then a stranger arrives, a man who says he's an undertaker but is soon revealed to be none other than Life Itself. Can this be the culprit?

Written by veteran farceur Sam Bobrick, Death in England good-naturedly twits the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery genre, along with understated British manners, the time-honored British class system, and various other rather easy targets. At the same time, it manages to remind us, gently and modestly, to be grateful for our time on this planet, and to be just a little bit awed by the inevitability (and majesty) of our own mortality. It's smart medicine, delivered with more than a spoonful of sugar; for Bobrick has a wickedly clever sense of humor, and the laughs pile up, vigorously and hilariously, as Death in England wends its way through its remarkable premise to its unexpected (and wholly satisfying) conclusion.

All the clichés of the standard-issue mystery thriller get spoofed here, from the hyperactive maid given to long expository speeches, to the scrupulously sharp-witted police inspector prowling about in search of clues, to the utterly non-plussed upper class master and mistress of the house. Bobrick has lots of fun bringing Death and Life into his comedy, as well. When they fight, someone remarks (inevitably) on the struggle between Life and Death. And when the equally inevitable hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold succumbs to Death's amorous charms, it's with a duly-noted Kiss of Death.

Scott Embler has directed Death of England with a sure hand, though some of the more subtle comic moments could use some sharpening. The cast is very good, especially Kenny Morris and Karin Wolfe (as Death's unwitting host and hostess, splendidly stiff-upper-lipped), Todd Wilson (as a surprisingly likable personification of Death), and Polly Humphreys (as the often-hysterical maid Jane). Todd Butera is very funny as the snoopy Inspector, though his overtly self-referential mannerisms don't always fit comfortably here. And Joe McClean, who plays the only character who actually dies during Death in England, has a charming moment at the top of Act Two, performing "Always Look at the Bright Side of Life" (from Monty Python's Life of Brian) without a speck of irony.

The production values are exceptional, especially Katie Levey's detailed and appropriate set, which makes the Vital Theatre's little stage look about twice as big as usual.

Watching Michael Greif's energetic but diffuse staging of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, it's easy to imagine how terrific this material would be as a novel. Which is precisely what it was--Dogeaters began its life in book form. I haven't read it, but I suspect it could be made into an effective work of theatre. Unfortunately, this isn't it: Dogeaters, now at The Public Theatre, is an unsatisfying muddle of fact and fiction, presented in an amalgam of styles that fail to cohere successfully.

It's a shame, because the show's ingredients are both compelling and fascinating. Dogeaters tells the story of a Filipino-American woman named Rio Gonzaga, who returns to her homeland for the first time since her childhood. It's 1982, and the country, tired of the despotic rule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos,  is on the verge of revolution; indeed, while she's there, outspoken opposition leader Senator Domingo Avila is assassinated in the lobby of a trendy Manila hotel. His daughter, beauty queen Daisy Avila, is tortured by the military and then escapes into the mountains to join forces with a band of rebels.

As counterpoint to these momentous events, Dogeaters also details some ordinary lives: Joey Sands, a good-looking young hustler who is picked up by filmmaker Rainer Fasssbinder (in town for the Manila Film Festival) and who winds up in the hotel lobby at the precise moment when Avila is shot; Romeo Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa, lovers caught in the crossfire; "Perlita" Alacran, the drag queen manager of Manila's Studio 54, who is also Joey's employer and Rio's cousin; and several others.

Guiding us through this tour through Philippine high and lowlife are TV personalities Nestor Noralez and Barbara Villanueva (perfectly portrayed by Ralph B. Pena and Mia Katigbak). They're supposed to function like Cabaret's Emcee, but when Dogeaters' plotline gets fuzzily complicated in Act Two they more or less disappear. And once they're gone, providing distance and perspective to the frenzied, cockeyed goings-on on stage, the show falls apart, its epic quality almost completely diminished.

Apart from the structural problems, there's something else about Dogeaters that concerns me, and that's the easy blending of fact and fiction in which Hagedorn indulges. We know that Imelda Marcos and Rainer Fassbinder, who are both characters in the play, are real people; program notes remind us that Avila is almost certainly supposed to be Aquino and that an action film star dubbed Tito Alvarez is actually current Philippine President Joseph Estrada. But I'm no student of Philippine history or politics, so I'm in no position to judge how much of Dogeaters is true and how much literary license. The integrity of both play and playwright suffer significantly as a result.

Quantum physics is in: who knew?

The underlying principle of Anne Meara's new play Down the Garden Paths turns out to be Heisenberg's; toss in a little Schrodinger's Law for good measure and you have a terrific dramatic premise: given some random moment in a person's life, what might have happened if the molecules had moved just a little to the left or a little to the right? Schrodinger said that different versions of every event occur in alternate universes; the idea of Meara's play is to examine a few of them. What might we learn about the human condition if we could wander down a few roads not taken?

Alas, Down the Garden Paths offers little in the way of insight. Meara's execution of this promising concept is clumsy and superficial. She focuses her play on Arthur Garden, a scientist whose work deals with the application of Heisenberg and Schrodinger's ideas. Arthur has just won the Herschel Strange Award for that work; Down the Garden Paths shows us three versions of the family gathering following the ceremony, each following Arthur's divergent life stories based on the outcome on a particular event in Arthur's development.

That pivotal event--which everyone keeps calling a choice or decision, for some reason--is the time when Arthur and his older brother Maxie were fishing with their father and Maxie fell into the freezing lake. In version one, Arthur saves Maxie's life, then goes on to a successful but dysfunctional existence capped, at the moment, by an affair with Maxie's wife. In version two, Maxie drowns, and Arthur goes on to a successful but dysfunctional existence capped, at the moment, by battles with his drug-addicted daughter, openly hostile wife, and bickering, acrimonious parents. In version three, Arthur saves Maxie but Maxie suffers significant brain damage; Arthur, not surprisingly, goes on to a successful but dysfunctional existence capped, at the moment, by the recent gay-bashing death of his lover David, which leads to a bitter confrontation with his homophobic father.

Down the Garden Paths (get it: Arthur Garden's paths) really is as unsubtle as I've described it; and Meara supplies the pat ending that I'm sure you've guessed. What she fails to supply is any raison d'etre for these same-but-different meanderings down destiny's corridors: characters talk portentously and endlessly about choices not made, decisions regretted, and--to use Arthur's mother's awkward locution--"woulda, coulda, shoulda." But no one seems to learn anything; I'm stymied, finally, as to what Meara's point is here.

I'm disappointed, furthermore, by the facile and sloppy way that she exploits her premise. My fourteen-year-old niece wanted to know what it was about Maxie's brain damage that turned Arthur gay: good question. Myself, I wondered frequently during the piece about its roman a clef qualities. Arthur's parents, Sid and Stella Garden, are a famous TV comedy duo--he's Jewish, she's Irish--more than a little reminiscent of Stiller and Meara. A running (not very funny) gag is that Sid and Stella are on their way to the funeral of another comic named (oddly) Schmecky Cabot. Eventually Schmecky is described as a TV pioneer who used to wear outlandish drag and who, incidentally, was something of a ladies' man: sure sounds like Milton Berle to me. In both cases I have to ask: why? (Regarding Sid and Stella, by the way, I couldn't help feeling that Meara was writing, in part, some kind of apologia for her life. Again: why?)

When I bought the tickets for Down the Garden Paths I promised my aforementioned niece that, if nothing else, she'd be seeing some great acting. I was right: Eli Wallach is never less than a pleasure to watch, even in a role as unpleasant (and relatively small) as Sid Garden. But Anne Jackson seems to be playing Anne Meara rather than Stella Garden (see above); and little of the chemistry you'd expect between her and Wallach is evident. John Shea is interesting but manic as the three versions of Arthur--but then he's not really called upon to build a complete character but rather three caricatures. Acting honors here really belong to Adam Grupper, who walks through his trademark buttoned-up corporate type in the first scene and then reveals unexpected depth and poignancy as the brain-damaged Maxie in Scene Three.

End of the World Party is a warm, funny, and entertaining new comedy by Chuck Ranberg. Starting from what sounds like a mere high-concept situation--a group of gay men returning for an eventful summer in a shared house on Fire Island--Ranberg produces a play rich in dimensional, appealing characters who think and talk about very real issues with depth and understanding. No sitcom, this; and no soap opera, either: End of the World Party treats its characters and its audience with respect and intelligence and great humor. It's a fine work of theatre.

What I love about this play is the way that Ranberg fleshes out the men who inhabit it, painting very human and very affecting portraits of seven distinct and interesting guys. There's Hunter, a somewhat embittered and lonely man with a camp sense of humor and a drinking problem; his best friend Roger, who is obsessed about time's effects on his 40-ish but still hunky body; Travis, who is recovering from the recent loss of his partner to AIDS; Nick, a promiscuous, drug-addicted overage party boy; Will, a neurotic hypochondriac who lives for anonymous sex; Phil, the new roommate, a fresh-faced naïf from Minnesota; and Chip, also known as "White Overalls," a cute kid who catches the eye of, well, everyone--but especially Nick and Roger.

So where, you ask, is the humanity in what sounds like a pretty standard issue gay sex comedy? All over the place! Ranberg surprises us, constantly, with these guys, mainly by letting them all be, most of the time, grown-ups. Sure Hunter drinks too much and quips too much, but he's also thoroughly grounded and eminently pragmatic. And yes, Roger worries too much about his pecs and abs, but he's also trustworthy and smart and entirely companionable. Ranberg isn't afraid to let his characters, who are mostly on or approaching the far side of forty, behave like mature adult men, the kind we actually know and interact with in the real world. Expect no lectures on the difference between soundtracks and original cast recordings here; no paeans to Bette or Barbra: these guys have real lives, real jobs, and real problems.

I want you to see for yourself how End of the World Party plays all of this out. I will tell you that conflicts revolve around sex, drugs, grief, love, and loneliness; and that Ranberg never resolves any of them in a pat or hackneyed or facile way. He gives each of his men a reflective moment of direct audience address: listen, especially, for Roger's and Will's, which are unexpectedly moving. And he gives all of them moments of clear-headed and clear-hearted insight. End of the World Party turns about to be less about these seven men in particular and more about the patchwork families that men and women like them are creating for themselves nowadays. The love and support these men provide for each other is palpable and quite beautiful.

End of the World Party is seamlessly directed by Matthew Lombardo, and smartly designed by Christopher Pickart (sets), Michael Gilliam (lighting), and Raymond Dragon (costumes). It's impeccably performed by a terrific ensemble of comic actors, headed by Jim J. Bullock as Hunter and Christopher Durham as Roger. Durham and Bullock have marvelous chemistry together: they feel like they've actually been best friends for decades. But they're great apart, as well, as in the play's strongest scene, in which Bullock and Durham commune with the two youngest members of the "family" with memorable results.

David Drake (Travis) and Anthony Barrile (Will) lend able support, as do Brian Cooper and Adam Simmons as the youngsters Phil and Chip. Russell Scott Lewis is less comfortable as the troubled Nick.

End of the World Party heralds--with plays like Bill C. Davis's Avow, for example--a new sensibility for gay characters in the theatre, one that's long overdue. Check it out: I think you'll be well-rewarded.

Eula Mae's Beauty, Bait & Tackle is a moderately diverting comedy, imported to New York from Atlanta, Georgia where it apparently was quite successful. In the tradition of Greater Tuna, it's a paean to small town Southern life, delivered with tongue firmly in cheek by its two creators, Frank Blocker and Chuck Richards, who in addition to having written Eula Mae also portray all but one of its broadly quirky characters. It's a fitfully funny blend of shtick, sight gags, and mildly satiric humor--pleasant enough, but never as raucous or outrageous as it ought to be.

The story, such as it is, concerns Eula Mae, a self-reliant and rather brawny woman who runs the general store of the play's title--the equivalent, she tells us, of a shopping mall in her tiny town of Odeopolis, Alabama. Eula Mae lives with her opinionated mother Anna Mae (think Vicki Lawrence's "Mama" character crossed with Dame Edna), and spends much of her time fighting off the advances of Carl Joe, a likable if somewhat dull-witted neighbor. Meanwhile, Eula Mae's niece, Rita Sue, has entered the Miss Alabama pageant for the seventh consecutive year, for which she is being coached by the fading (and failed) beauty queen Sue Sue Daniels.

It all serves as a sketchy framework for what amount to, well, sketches, in which Blocker (Anna Mae, Carl Joe, Sue Sue) and Roberts (Rita Mae) cavort in female and/or redneck drag with varied comic results. Blocker is very funny as Anna Mae, indulging in some relaxed but sassy interaction with the audience that provides the evening's high point. He's less amusing as the more psychologically complex Sue Sue and barely registers as Carl Joe. Roberts, meanwhile, is a humorously ungainly Rita Mae in a Milton Berle-in-high-heels way; but he never takes the character to the outlandish heights that he needs to to make her truly memorable. Helen Bessette plays Eula Mae, offering solid if undistinguished support to her two co-stars.

At the performance I attended, Eula Mae's gags were generally well-received, but few had any real bite. The old TV sitcom "Designing Women" covered a lot of this same ground years ago, with a lot more genuine wit.

Sheila and Murray are trying to have their first date. But they keep getting interrupted: by her nagging mother and by his overbearing father and by his ex-fiancée (who aren't actually there of course, but much on their minds). Plus time won't stand still for very long: before they know it, they're engaged and then married. Murray finishes medical school and goes to work in a hospital; meanwhile, Sheila puts aside her dream of becoming a journalist when she discovers--too soon--that she is pregnant. And always the meddling parents, co-workers, and  friends are on hand, reminding them, mostly, of the unfortunate choices they've made in their lives.

That's most of First Date, the clever and innovative new comedy by Stephen Tesher currently at the Gene Frankel Theatre. I love the way Tesher has structured the thing, with Sheila and Murray's world constantly being invaded by their well-meaning but unhelpful friends and family: it's a neat way to crystallize the issues about love, marriage, relationships, interdependence, and independence that the playwright wants to examine. Unfortunately, the structure starts to unravel during the last third of First Date as Murray and Sheila's marriage starts to hit the skids: heavy-going for them and us. Tesher bogs down in Sheila's identity crisis--wise/mother vs. career woman--which is territory that was fresh perhaps thirty years ago but is well-trodden today.

This production of First Date, produced by the author, is only spotty: Robert Steinman and Rachel Matz are fine as Murray and Sheila, but Sarah Paulding and Quince Marcum, cleverly cast as both his and her parents, are way off the mark, falling too often into caricature that doesn't serve the play. Nicole Raphael and Aron Weidhorn are good as Murray and Sheila's kids, but less effective in various other small roles. Laura Pierce's direction is serviceable but feels a bit uneven; things move more slowly than they should here.

Kia Corthron has a lot of important things to say in Force Continuum, but she doesn't say them nearly as well as you wish she would in this frustratingly uneven new play. Charting events in the lives of three generations of a family of African-American New York City cops, Force Continuum offers salient commentary on racism, police brutality, neighborhood/community values, and various other issues. But the work is plagued by structural and production problems that ultimately overwhelm its good intentions.

A couple of stories play out in parallel in Corthron's drama. One is the saga of a black cop named Dece, a conflicted young man following in his grandfather's and both of his parents' footsteps by becoming a policeman. Corthron contrasts the punishing lifestyle of the contemporary NYPD with the more rewarding one experienced by Dece's grandfather, who patrolled in his own Harlem neighborhood.

Another story concerns Mrai, a young black woman trying to make ends meet (and support her younger brother Dray, a struggling artist) by working two jobs. When Dray becomes the victim of a police shooting (presumably caused by racial profiling), their lives become irrevocably tangled up with Dece's. And Dece must deal with racism and the toll it takes on those who live with it in an increasingly tragic way.

As I said, there's enough potent material for several plays here; yet Corthron squanders it, spending precious time and effort on stylized sequences that subvert her narrative and distract her audience. "More matter and less art," I felt myself calling out, over and over, especially during the play's turgid second act. I wanted Corthron to define her characters more: through them, we could start to experience and perhaps understand the effects of the explosive events depicted in Force Continuum. As it is, the characters remain ciphers, while the playwright and director indulge in trendy theatrical gimmickry that adds little to the work.

The piece is further hampered by a too-busy set (by Alexander Dodge), too-dim lighting (by Kirk Bookman), and a host of actors whose mumbling diction makes them very difficult to understand much of the time. Jordan Lage, as a representative from the "Police Benevolent Association," appears to be in a different play entirely. Only Myra Lucretia Taylor and especially Caroline S. Clay, each in several roles, seem up to the play's demands.

Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine, Warren Leight's follow-up to his wonderful play Side Man, must be termed a severe disappointment. This story of a pair of estranged twin brothers contains neither believable characters nor compelling situations: it's a morass of glib comedy and mumbo-jumbo memory play that never catches fire and consistently fails to engage. 

The play begins at a wedding in Greenwich, Connecticut, where trombonist Jordan Shine and presumably blue-blood high-powered businesslady Delia Glimmer meet cute over a spilled glass of wine. It turns out that Jordan's father was, more than three decades ago, a close colleague of Delia's father--they played trumpet together, along with Delia's uncle Martin, in bands and on recordings, and with some success. Delia's surprised reaction--her father never played in a band, and she has no uncle--sets off the chain of events that propels the play. Delia befriends Martin, and when, soon after, he becomes ill, she effects a reconciliation between him and her father Daniel. Inevitably, revelations about why the brothers split up and about a mysterious bond between Jordan's father and Delia's mother are eventually revealed.

Alas, the secrets of Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine are insubstantial and uninteresting: Leight comes up empty in his sojourn into Three Days of Rain territory. Unfortunately, neither does he recreate here the bittersweet ambience of Side Man, except fitfully. Finally, Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine emerges as an uneven and uninvolving two hours with four implausible and unappealing characters.

John Spencer is a crowd-pleaser as curmudgeonly old Uncle Martin, but he has no character to create here: his performance is a wily collection of tics and mannerisms (a lot of them reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's). Scott Cohen works hard to give Jordan some life; but Brian Kerwin and Seana Kofoed are, I think, miscast (too young and too cool, respectively) as Daniel and Delia. Evan Yianoulis's staging is dull and slow-moving, hindered by an atypical poor set design by Neil Patel that seems willfully to ignore the size and shape of MTC Stage I's playing space.

There's a pretty good one-act play inside Happy Anniversary: it just needs to be liberated from some logistical problems and some production-related misfires. Lou Reda's tale of a gay relationship in crisis on the eve of a long-planned fifth anniversary bash is funny, pungent, and original. Monogamous and lasting relationships don't get explored nearly enough in contemporary drama, let alone a gay relationship like the one between Mike and Chris. Reda has some useful and insightful things to say about how these two men almost succeed in sabotaging their happiness; Happy Anniversary will resonate, I think, with any couple (gay or straight)  facing the scary, joyous prospect of sharing the rest of their lives together.

There are, as I said, some problems with the piece. It's too long by about a half-hour: some tightening and selective editing are certainly called for. Mike and Chris are compelling, appealing characters: we want to spend our time learning about them, not embroiled in subplots like Chris's friend Cara's unhappy affair with a married man. There's also far too much downtime in Happy Anniversary: Reda, who directs his own script here, would do himself a lot of good by dispensing with the many extraneous locations called for in his script; or at least working with his set designer to realize them less naturalistically so that the long scene changes can be eliminated.

Performances are spotty: Darren Paul Kendrick and Paul Stancato do well as Mike and Chris, but some of the supporting roles are less sharply played. Brett Berkeley acquits himself well as two young men who become temporary distractions for our heroes. But Mike's archly long-suffering co-worker Thom--a really beautifully written comic role, by the way--is misread by Joe Gulla, who loses most of the character's laughs.

Reda's dialogue is sharp and interesting and he knows how to create characters who we like and believe in. With some judicious pruning and re-staging, the strong potential of Happy Anniversary may well be realized.

The first act of Historic Times takes place in Los Angeles in 1944, where some of the greatest thinkers in the world have congregated as World War II draws to a close. Many--such as philosopher Theodor Adorno and composer Arnold Schoenberg--have fled the Nazis, only to come under the thrall of Hollywood's twin seductions of fortune and fame. Whether the menace these people escaped from is worse than the one they've escaped to turns out to be a matter of debate; Case clouds the argument further by showing us the American-made Jewish mogul Sam Goldwyn in command of a bevy of secretary-serf-slaves who fellate him while he argues with Dorothy Parker about whether she should be allowed to have alcohol in her studio office. The Hollywood depicted by Case--whose other denizens include Dorothy Chandler (of Pavilion fame), Igor Stravinsky, an aspiring starlet named Valerie Vail who will eventually wind up dismembered in the Pacific, even William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald lurking in the shadows--is extravagantly impressionistic, almost phantasmagoric--like a fictional netherworld that happens to be inhabited by real people. It's a place where people do what they have to, and what they can. Has Case pinpointed the real beginning of post-modern life?

Flash forward fifty-five years to the Los Angeles of Act Two. Contemporary counterparts of the illustrious personages we met in Act One blip on and off the radar of a young man named Hamed who is a civilian investigator for the LAPD. There's a shellshocked, unidentified woman represented by strident feminist counsel; a proud African nanny called Precious Monday who turns out to be performing illegal female circumcisions; a climbing party-giver who uses Space Shuttle jokes to break the ice with her guests; and a performing artist named, of all things, Andre W. Case, whose newest (and last) act consists of staging his own suicide (Andre swallows some pills and then calls the pizza delivery guy, hoping he'll arrive in time to find him to get him to a hospital).

If anything, what playwright Case describes as "The Other War" in modern-day Los Angeles is more profane and more alarming than anything humankind imagined back in the '40s: irony and information and disingenuousness and disinformation run rampant and unchecked. Through it all, Case imagines a sweet, strange romance between Hamed and an emergency room worker named Suzanne. They're the ones who ponder the meaning of Paul Simon song lyrics and, more generally, of life; questioning the nature of a world where people do what they can instead of--here's the point--what they should. Case gives us, through them, a ray of hope.

I have not wanted to make Historic Times sound obtuse or difficult; it's neither, despite its depth and complexity. It's the very best kind of theatre, at once engaging and entertaining and richly rewarding; you'll think about and discuss this play for hours after you see it. It's been beautifully staged by Carolyn Rendell in the intimate 78th Street Theatre Lab downstairs space, and artfully designed by Jane Mancini (set), Deanna Berg (costumes), Eric Nightengale (lighting), and Michael Minn (sound). The ensemble of nine actors, who double and triple in roles, are superb: each creates at least one memorable character, to wit--Evan Zes (Schoenberg), Scott C. Reeves (Adorno and Andre W. Case), Kate Cordaro (Dorothy Chandler and party-giver Elizabeth Short), Livia Newman (Suzanne), Keri Setaro (Valerie Vail), Jeremy Alan Richards (Hamed), Zander Teller and Christian Pedersen (a pair of wannabe thugs in both acts), and Richarda Abrams (Precious Monday).

Historic Times is one of those plays that deserves a life beyond its Equity Showcase run. It's inspired, stimulating theatre of the highest order. It demands to be seen.

Horsey People, Brent Askari's new play at Vital Theatre Company, aspires to mad farce a la Joe Orton, shining a bright light on the hypocrisy and foolishness of the well-to-do. It's centered around the Stevens family, who live on a couple of acres of land in Virginia's affluent Horse Country. Brittany, our heroine, is a nice, normal, somewhat spoiled 16-year-old teenager who rides horses competitively. Her dad, Horace, is a stressed-out corporate-type; her mom, Sydney, is a snob and social climber who desperately wants Brittany to be an Olympic equestrian.

But Brittany's riding career isn't progressing as rapidly as Sydney would like. So Sydney hatches a plan to help it along: Horace will kill Morning Sparkle, the champion horse ridden by Brittany's most serious competitor. Horace demurs at first, but eventually agrees to Sydney's dastardly plan. And then things really go haywire: Brittany becomes romantically involved with a common stableboy named Jake, much to Sydney's consternation; and meanwhile Horace finds that he is being haunted by Morning Sparkle's ghost.

As you can see, the setup is sweet; so, too,  for the most part, is the execution. Askari writes deliciously funny dialogue that takes wicked (but deserved) swipes at the warped values of rich Baby Boomers like Horace and Sydney. He has structured his play skillfully, providing can't-miss scenes like the one where Horace, pursued by the invisible phantom Morning Sparkle, tries to explain his predicament to Sydney, but only convinces her that he's hopelessly drunk.

The last scenes of Horsey People, though, feel scattershot, as if Askari couldn't decide how to end his play. Sitcom-like contrivance shows badly; there's also too much reliance on slapstick to get laughs in these final moments. It makes for a disappointing finish to an otherwise promising comedy.

Performances, under the direction of Laura M. Stevens, are generally fine. Bolen High is wonderfully dry as Horace, capturing the character's  James Thurber qualities perfectly. Diane Grotke is hilarious as the high-strung Sydney, and Ted Rodenborn is unexpectedly delightful as Morning Sparkle. Leigh Pittard and Jeff Patterson are believable and appealing as Horsey People's young lovers Brittany and Jake, a pair of decent kids caught in the crazy crossfire of Sydney's obsessions.

Howie the Rookie is a riveting evening of story-telling, deftly performed by two extraordinary young Irish actors, Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels. It consists of two long monologues, the first delivered by Howie Lee (Kelly) and the second by Rookie Lee (Shiels). These two young Dublin men share a surname but not blood: but the turbulent events that bring them together on a fateful couple of nights eventually unite them in ways neither could ever foresee.

Howie sets the story up for us: When a couple of his mates find themselves infested with scabies, all evidence points to Rookie Lee as the source of their condition. They decide to take revenge on him by roughing him up in a local pub. Howie finds a neighbor girl to watch his younger brother while he sets off with his pals to find Rookie; when he returns home, he discovers that things have gone tragically wrong.

Rookie takes the tale to its conclusion, which is even more tragic and follows an escalating series of wantonly violent and horrific events.

Everything is rendered in precise, poetic detail. Author Mark O'Rowe is clearly a gifted writer, and the language and images are always vivid and often quite beautiful. But, despite the visceral punch that Kelly and Shiels consistently give the material, Howie the Rookie always felt to me more like literature than drama. Structurally, this piece is very much akin to the works of Conor McPherson (St. Nicholas, This Lime Tree Bower), which is to say it's remarkably impressive story-telling but finally something less than a real play. O'Rowe's inability to differentiate the voices of his two characters exacerbates this situation: though very different in terms of background and outlook, Howie and Rookie sound the same.

And that's a problem, because it reinforces the artifice of the experience that is Howie the Rookie. What happens in this show--all that happens in it--is that an actor walks onto a bare stage and starts telling us stuff; and then he leaves and a second actor enters and does the same thing. For the audience, Howie the Rookie is about witnessing, not being: what's more alienating than that?

Still more problematic, for me, is why we're taking this journey through Dublin's underbelly in the first place. The events so skillfully recounted by Howie and Rookie are compelling and disturbing in the same way the 11 o'clock news is. I guess we can't be reminded too often that poverty and ignorance breed violence. But one hopes, after ninety minutes of scabies and pub crawling and more than a few random killings, for something a bit more substantial to leave the theatre with.

Es Devlin's design is nearly non-existent save the useful costumes--uniforms, almost--that help us understand who Howie and Rookie are supposed to be. And because the show is so bereft of the usual trappings of drama, it's tough to assess director Mike Bradwell's contribution to the proceedings. Actors Kelly and Shiels emerge as the evening's true heroes, applying their ample talents to O'Rowe's script to make it seeringly real in our mind's eyes. 

Sanchez uses the ephemeral stuff of gossamer and dreams to spin this touching and moving tale of boundless unconditional love. The play begins with the arrival of Altagracia and her brother Primitivo at a deserted house on a lonely beach. They decide to move in, along with their fellow traveler Mr. Ellis; but their plan is momentarily jeopardized by the arrival of a young man named Beau who actually knows the owner of the house (a guy named Frank) and is surprised to find three strangers living there.

What's so extraordinary about Icarus is the matter-of-fact way that Sanchez lays out this unlikely chain of events, as if people showed up at abandoned houses all the time. Still more remarkable are the people themselves. Primitivo is confined to a wheelchair and Altagracia's face is horribly disfigured. Mr. Ellis carries around a stuffed cat named Betty (whom he feeds and sets out on the beach outfitted in dark sunglasses). And Beau, alluding to some mysterious and recent accident, hides his face under a ski mask.

Occupying the house next door is the Gloria, a faded blonde beauty with one feature film to her credit. With the most economical exposition imaginable, Sanchez introduces us to these very special, very damaged characters: daringly, disarmingly, he lets them be who they are, with nary a why or how in sight. Early scenes portray, for example, the Gloria trying to connect with a Hollywood executive; or Altagracia and Primitivo practicing small talk for an imaginary power dinner (Patty Duke's seated on one side, John Astin on the other); or Mr. Ellis repeating a strange mantra on the beach ("I'm not staring. I'm not staring. I'm not staring."). Sanchez revels in their eccentricity, without comment or explanation: as if it all made perfect sense. 

And of course, it does, finally; for Sanchez's method of getting us into his characters' souls is dazzlingly effective and affecting. We quickly come to understand that Altagracia has stolen (or rescued) Primitivo from a hospital, and that she is keeping him alive by having invented for him a seemingly impossible task to complete: he must swim, farther and farther every day, until he touches the sun.

It becomes clear, too, that Altagracia and Beau are falling in love, initially attracted, perhaps, by the revulsion they believe their faces inspire in others.

I want you to see Icarus for yourself to find out what happens. I promise that you will be touched profoundly by Sanchez's affecting story of Altagracia, her brother, and the unexpected stranger who together learn how to give--and how to be worthy of--unconditional love.

And that wonderment I mentioned: you'll feel it, I think, as you watch Primitivo lure Altagracia and Beau into a first, tentative dance; or, later, when Mr. Ellis opens his tattered suitcase full of dreams so that the Gloria, badly beaten down after a distressing evening, can pick one out. The sorrows that Sanchez's characters have endured in life enable them to understand each other and reach out to one another in ways that are pure magic. At least a little of that magic lingers with us even after Icarus is over.

Dennis Smith, founding director of The Fourth Unity, has staged the play beautifully, drawing us immediately into its exotic-yet-natural world. The designs of Andris Krumkalns (set) and Renee Molina (lighting) serve Smith's vision well; the actors are magnificent. Ann Chandler blends pathos, dignity, and just the right amount of self-awareness to make the Gloria unforgettable and heroic. Marlene Ramirez-Cancio reveals Altagracia's vulnerability, inner strength, and pride; while Matthew Gorrek is perfectly unaffected and unsentimental as Beau. Tony Hamilton's Mr. Ellis is quirky and touching. And Ivan Davila shows us a Primitivo at once graceful and clumsy, repellently spoiled and infinitely generous: a gorgeous performance in a gloriously uplifting play.

When the first act of "If It Was Easy..." finally ended, I turned to my companion and remarked, "This is the worst play ever written." She agreed.

When the second act finally ended, I said to her, incredulous, "The second act was even worse than the first act." And again, she agreed.

Bear in mind that I see upwards of 300 plays every season.

How bad is "If It Was Easy.."? Before I tell you, I need to supply some background: This ungrammatically-titled play tells the story of Steve Gallop, a Broadway producer who is down on his luck, and Randi Lester, the powerful newspaper gossip columnist who turns his business--and life--around. She convinces Gallop to produce a musical based on the life of Frank Sinatra (to be called "Sinatra, The Musical"). Against his better judgment, he agrees to do it, only to be visited by a Sinatra fan from the Mob named Joey Fingers who agrees to back the show.

OK, so how bad is "If It Was Easy..."? This is a play whose grip on reality is so tenuous that its hero is a producer who claims to have had only two or three shows lose money in a long Broadway career, and its heroine is a theatre columnist whose scoops consistently run on the front page of the major New York daily tabloid for which writes. (I should mention here that the authors of "If It Was Easy...?" are themselves a theatrical producer and a former newspaper gossip columnist.)

This is a play where most of the major characters undergo complete and unmotivated personality transplants during intermission.

This is a play where even the most obvious stock device--a closet door that sticks--is referred to repeatedly but never actually used to advance the plot.

This is a play in which the following actually occurs: When savvy producer Steve wants to cast 60-something Vegas has-been Robert Goulet in the title role of his mega-musical; Mr. Fingers suggests that bigger names are needed and proceeds to call Barbra Streisand, Barbara Walters, and Leonardo DiCaprio in rapid succession on his cell phone, obtaining instantaneous commitments from each. Class action suit, anyone?

This is a play, in short, that insults the intelligence of any theatergoer over the age of four; the sort of blatant vanity production that should have been laughed off stage during previews if not on opening night.

John Jellison, a talented actor, should be blamed only for poor judgment in attempting to bring Steve Gallop to life. (William Marshall Miller, as a woefully stereotypical Joey Fingers, has had the sense to depart from the show since the performance I saw.) Bonnie Comley, who plays Randi the columnist/love interest, is playwright/director Lane's wife.

Got the picture? My one regret is that "If It Was Easy..." didn't open on Broadway. Then it could have gone down in history as the biggest flop since Moose Murders.

Some advice to consumers, to begin with: If you decide to buy tickets to Jesus Hopped the A Train, try to get seats in the center section. The set for this play is a rectangular prison yard, framed on either side by a wall of chain link fence; the stage at the East 13th Street Theatre is of the thrust variety, which means that the view from the seats to the left or right of the playing area is obstructed.

I mention this particularly because the thoughtless bravado (or arrogance) that allowed the producers of Jesus Hopped the A Train to put their show in a theatre that can't comfortably hold it is indicative of the entire production. Director Philip Seymour Hoffman--who came to this play directly from an acclaimed Broadway run in True West and a high-profile year as filmdom's favorite young character actor--has not so much staged the play as provided volume control: low and deliberate for some scenes, loud and piercingly shrill for others.

And playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis's work is disappointingly sloppy. The title suggests that this is to be a play about spirituality and redemption, and indeed a good deal of it takes the form of long monologues, delivered by the two prisoners who are its main characters, regarding the nature of faith and God and their relationships to these concepts. But strung around these weighty speeches are hackneyed plots that would be more at home on a TV police drama than they are here: a young Hispanic anti-hero who murders the leader of a religious cult to save a buddy from his clutches; a savage prison guard who systematically brutalizes his charges; an ambitious public defender who knowingly (and repeatedly) breaks the law to win her client an acquittal because she thinks that the murder he committed was justified. Guirgis subverts whatever power these stories might have by consistently telling (as opposed to showing) us what happened: the vivid descriptions offered here of the murder, the trial, and even the motivating flashback, are more suited to the page than the stage. 

The prisoners--the young murderer Angel Cruz and the older serial killer-who-finds- Jesus Lucius Jenkins--dominate the play with their talk. More than articulate, they're remarkably well-spoken; which makes for cogent debate but frustratingly unbelievable theatre.  I wondered, too, why Lucius is given so much time to ramble on about his relationship with Jesus--far more than is necessary to make the point about his character. Is Guirgis indulging in some proselytizing of his own?

Ron Cephas Jones breaks through the artifice of the script and the staging to create a compelling and three-dimensional Lucius. John Ortiz (as Angel), David Zayas (as the sadistic guard Valdez), and Elizabeth Canavan (as leggy defense attorney Mary Jane Hanrahan) do not. Salvatore Inzerillo, in the strange, small role of D'Amico, a more sympathetic prison guard, is surprisingly memorable.

You don't expect a play called Killer Midgets to be good, let alone profound; but this one, written and directed by a strikingly talented fellow named John Dapolito, is both. Dapolito takes on no less a question than the secret of life itself, and comes up with some surprisingly convincing answers. Along the way, his bizarrely absurdist tragicomedy considers a number of other lesser philosophical issues, with commanding and startling insight.

Now, having said all that, it's going to be tough to tell you too much more, because a good deal of the impact of Killer Midgets depends on the various surprises that Dapolito springs on the audience at key points throughout the piece. The play takes place in a filthy, tiny apartment in New York City in the early 1990s, "eight years after the Cabbage Patch craze" an announcer informs us. That piece of information turns out to be important, because Rich, one of the two men who lives in this squalid room, used to work in a toy store. But on the day that a flock of crazed grandmothers attacked him to get the last Cabbage Patch doll in the shop, Rich resigned not just from his job but from society. For the past eight years, he has not ventured outside this apartment, which he shares with his friend Mike.

Our first look at the apartment, spectacularly rendered by set designer Michelle Malavet, is shockingly revelatory: it's a claustrophobic, square chamber, meagerly furnished with a table, a couple of chairs, and a decaying refrigerator, awash--there's no other way to describe it--in newspaper. Seated in one chair, dressed only in his underwear and sporting castaway-style unkempt beard and mane, is Mike; somewhere, buried under some of yesterday's news, is a similarly decked-out Rich.

Dapolito's neat trick is that we quickly grasp the internal logic of Mike and Rich's world as the two chat during the play's remarkable first act; it even starts to make a kind of sense. Killer Midgets does exactly what the best absurdist writing should: through the prism of Mike and Rich's warped and highly original approach to life, we gain significant insight into our own. Mike's the philosopher of the pair, and his strange comic musings on a variety of subjects are astoundingly incisive.

Eventually, a missive from the outside world causes Rich and Mike to take unprecedented action. I won't give too much away here, but it involves stolen newspapers, a mysterious neighbor, and an enigmatic note written with mold retrieved from the long-dysfunctional refrigerator. It leads to a visit from the midgets of the play's title, which itself precipitates a more pointed--and poignant--philosophical discussion that you absolutely don't see coming. The ending is a knockout.

Killer Midgets is a rich, engaging script, and it's been smartly directed by the author. Joseph Kamal (Mike) and George Deihl, Jr. (Rich), onstage throughout, give exceptional performances, at once deeply nuanced and--especially in Deihl's case--brazenly and fearlessly physical. Ethan Crough, David Steinberg, and Mark Trombino are effective as Frankie, Tommy, and Joey, three men who turn out to be much more than the killer midgets of the play's title.

Dapolito's bio in the program says he's giving up playwriting after this show closes. I hope he'll reconsider.

A playwright friend of mine talks sometimes about a drawer full of material he has in his apartment. It's stuff he's written, he tells me, that he wants to hold on to, but he "doesn't know what it is yet."

Y York, the author of Krisit, seems to have the same kind of drawer. The problem is, she pulled Krisit out of it and handed it over to Primary Stages (where it is currently mounted) without having figured out what it was.

There's talent galore in evidence in this script; what's missing is anything resembling a coherent plot or theme or style. Krisit begins, coolly surreal, in what's described in the program as a "grand bathtub in a grand bathroom," where a faded movie star talks elliptically, a la Sunset Boulevard, about making a comeback. Cut to a high-powered Hollywood restaurant, and a realistic scene between the movie star's maid and a has-been director, in which we learn that the maid is not a maid at all but some sort of apprentice dealmaker.

Three more scenes follow--two in the tub, one in the bar--in which the aging actress confronts the director during what he thinks is an audition; and then the actress, somehow having wound up with the upper hand, invites the others into the tub for a victory splash.

Confused? So was I: Krisit switches gears abruptly and peculiarly with each scene change, unsure whether it's to be a satire of Hollywood dealmaking, or an empowering tale of the old outwitting the young, or a broad gender-reversed expose of vanity and superficiality (the male director has had, as they say, work done).

Mind you, individually York's ideas are terrific. She just hasn't satisfactorily shaped them into anything like a play: Krisit doesn't seem to me to be much beyond first draft stage. Director Melia Bensussen compounds Krisit's troubles by staging it at snail's pace: it drags so badly that I actually started to nod off a couple of times, something I never do. Scotty Bloch, Larry Pine, Jessica Stone--accomplished actors all--do what they can with what they've been given. But they haven't been given nearly enough.

One positive note: York's script calls for Bloch and Stone's characters to appear to be naked in the bathtub at various times in the play, for which costume designer Claudia Stephens has devised an ingenious and elegant solution. 

There's so much that's genuinely likable and interesting in Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom that I honestly wanted to love it. Playwright David Zellnik has lots of really wonderful stuff in this play: a writer of gay porn named Puppy who sprinkles his work with agitprop content (e.g., a story set in a nuclear power plant that pauses in between sex scenes to comment on the political impact of the end of the Cold War); a disabled man (the same porn author), discovering love and sexuality at the same time when his best friend moves in and gives him some experimental new pills (presumably Viagra; the play is set in 1996) that awaken his sex drive; and a pair of HIV+ thirty-somethings, coping with illness and, yes, wellness in the post-AZT AIDS era.

At least three potentially terrific play ideas: alas, mixed together, they amount to an unsatisfying whole. Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom is often very funny and often very touching, but it's just as often disconnected and uneven. The play's aesthetic, vis-a-vis gay sexuality, is off-kilter: the read-aloud excerpts from Puppy's writings go on far too long, the (R-rated) sex scenes feel more clinical than sensual, and the continuous objectification of presumably straight Latino men is more than a little off-putting.

But the three main characters--Puppy and his friends Jake and Samson--are well-drawn and generally believably sympathetic. They're also extremely well acted here, by Steven McElroy, Grant James Varjas, and Andy Paris. McElroy's Puppy, in particular, is so sweet and vulnerable that his rather unusual profession doesn't faze us, and we root for him to find the happiness he clearly deserves.

The piece is well-directed by Dave Mowers, who keeps things moving briskly and negotiates some of the play's rawer portions with good cheer and good taste. Sets (Murker54), costumes (Charles Schoonmaker), lighting (John Finen & Guy Smith), and sound (Ian Murphy) all serve the play nicely.

So, despite its faults, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom is a likable play. I'm most impressed by its message of optimism. Playwrights seem to have stopped talking about AIDS, for the most part. We've witnessed a First Wave of educational-prescriptive plays (As Is, The Normal Heart) and a Second Wave of apocalyptic epics (Angels in America, Love! Valour! Compassion!).  Perhaps Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom heralds a new school of drama whose common theme will be hope.

In a season of few new noteworthy American plays--in the high-profiles venues, at least--Lobby Hero looks and feels mostly like the real thing. I have some reservations about it, but here's my bottom line: this new comedy-drama by Kenneth Lonergan (the hot, Oscar-nominated writer/director of You Can Count on Me) is a mighty fine piece of work. And the production at Playwrights Horizons, masterfully staged by Mark Brokaw, is well-nigh perfect, with terrific, breakout performances by Glenn Fitzgerald and Heather Burns as the play's unlikely hero and heroine.

Fitzgerald is Jeff, a twenty-seven year old doorman--excuse me, Security Specialist--at a Manhattan apartment house. A self-described screw-up, Jeff is an accident waiting to happen, although he seems pretty safe working the graveyard shift here, where his duties consist  mostly of reading the paper and trying not to be caught napping on the job.

Then, something interesting happens. Jeff's boss, William, a buttoned-up, by-the-books, rather square sort of fellow, confides that his brother has been implicated in a brutal murder. Although William was not with him at the time, the brother has asked William to give him an alibi, by saying they were together at the movies when the crime was committed. William is torn apart by the situation, agonizing over whether to be loyal to his family or to stay true to his principles.

Jeff listens attentively, and in his bumbling way tries to be helpful. And then something else happens: two cops turn up, an arrogant, much-decorated veteran named Bill and an earnest but generally clueless rookie named Dawn. Bill makes his way quickly to Apartment 22J, ostensibly to visit someone named Jim; but Jeff soon reveals to Dawn that the real occupant of 22J is a lady, one with a lot of male acquaintances. Dawn has a bit of a crush on Bill and Jeff has a major crush on Dawn. Stuff starts to percolate; and then Bill and Jeff get entangled in William's trouble and the percolating escalates--big time. By the middle of Act Two, Jeff is in way over his head, and it's not clear how he will find his way out.

Unfortunately, Lonergan doesn't really find a satisfactory way to end his play (I told you I had reservations). But the journey is generally quite entertaining, especially when Jeff and Dawn are alone together (waiting for Bill to complete his assignations, mostly). Fitzgerald and Heather Burns, who plays Dawn, have wonderful chemistry, and they make this unlikely pair into a romantic couple to root for. He's all goofy insouciance, she's all gruff eagerness; they're dopily sweet, reacting and relating to each other with eloquent inarticulateness.

Lonergan, by the way, writes this stuff better than anybody: his ear for the way people actually speak is unsurpassed. The natural rhythms and the natural wit of ordinary joes like Jeff and Dawn are brilliantly captured in Lobby Hero; the laughs, which are plentiful, are easy and organic, flowing out of the smartly-etched characters and situations in the play. (Now if only he could stay focused on a single theme...)

Tate Donovan, as the jerk/villain cop Bill, gives an unexpectedly perfect comic performance; if you've seen him only as bland juveniles in the likes of Amy's View and Picnic you're in for a surprise. Dion Graham (William) acquits himself nicely in the play's least interesting role. Brokaw's staging is flawless, as far as I can tell; Allen Moyer's homely, naturalistic set is astoundingly real-looking; ditto Michael Krass's costumes. Mark McCullough's lighting adds interest and focus to the environment on stage, serving the piece splendidly.

I don't think the through-line of Lobby Hero will bear much scrutiny; but the play--at least in this exemplary production--is so entertaining and so skillful that I don't think that much matters. Kenneth Lonergan is a natural playwright and his works are a gift to the theatre. That's scarce enough these days to make this show a winner.

No matter how much it's dressed up in artistic chic and European sophistication, Madame Melville is, at heart, a smutty like joke of a play. At best, this story of a fifteen-year-old boy's seduction of/by his sexy French teacher, is a teenager's wet dream fantasy; at worst, it's a perversely amoral account of child abuse. Either way, as far as I'm concerned, it's Porky's with a pedigree. Call me provincial, but Madame Melville's not at all my cup of tea.

Playwright Richard Nelson was born in the same year as Carl, the young narrator of Madame Melville (conclude from this what you will). Carl relates for us what clearly was the pivotal 36 hours of his adolescence, taking us back to Paris, 1966, where his father had brought his family from Ohio to live while on foreign assignment. Carl tells us he was shy and rather a misfit at the American school, yet on this particular day he maneuvers (by hiding out in the toilet) to get some time alone with his teacher, Mme. Melville, at her apartment. The long cat-and-mouse seduction scene that unfolds feels straight out of a soft porn movie: oh-I-missed-the-last-train-home followed by you-can-sleep-on-my-couch followed by ooh-take-a-look-at-this-book-about-the-Kama-Sutra. It's easy to guess what comes next: it's not shown and only talked about it in hushed, tasteful language, but there's no doubt that Carl has lost it to his teacher, a woman who is probably a good deal older than the lovely actress Joely Richardson looks.

The post-coital bloom is tarnished next morning by the appearance of neighbor Ruth, who actually turns out to be comic relief, and by the melancholy specter of Paul, another of Carl's teachers who, though married, is Mme. Melville's lover. Things get even sourer when Carl's parents start wondering where he's been all night. Carl makes a brave if indisputably adolescent stand against authority, wishing to stay forever in the paradise of Mme. Melville's apartment. But of  course that's a thing that Cannot Be. Mme. Melville can take some solace, though, in knowing that when Carl thinks back on all of this, he is very kind indeed.

Culkin, raison d'etre for the present high-profile production, is cannily cast. But neither he nor Richardson feels particularly authentic, at least in part because both seem to have been directed to play automatons rather than people. As the director is author Nelson, I suspect there's some Artistic Device at play here that I'm just not getting. In any event, it has the effect of handing the evening's actor honors to Robin Weigert, effervescent and vivid as the messy, moody neighbor Ruth.

The richly detailed set by Thomas Lynch, featuring dozens of cluttered book shelves and an impressive collection of long-playing records, feels at odds with the impressionistic style of Nelson's memory play. But the score (soundtrack?), a melange of period jazz and classical works designed by Scott Myers, is exactly right.

The creators of Man in the Flying Lawn Chair say their objective is "to investigate obsession, fame, and the consequences that follow actually doing the one cool thing that you dreamed about doing when you were 8 years old." All this they do, using the story of Larry Walters as their starting point; the "consequences," you will probably not be surprised to learn, are tragic and, ultimately fatal. 

Walters did in fact commit suicide in 1993, about a decade after his remarkable flight, 16,000 feet above the earth, in an aluminum lawn chair onto which some four dozen weather balloons had been grafted. So the folks at 78th Street Theatre Lab, who created this play from the raw materials of Walters's unusual life story, have indeed done their homework.

But they haven't built the play that Walters deserves! I'm not usually one to argue with the choices made by theatre people in their creative process, but Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, informative as it is, feels to me like a gigantic missed opportunity. A few times, early in the play, we watch Walters at work in his makeshift laboratory (his garage, one imagines), trying out various off-the-wall ideas that will eventually find their way into his extraordinary flying machine. During these scenes, the play soars with the thrill of discovery and exploration, even though nothing is happening on stage that couldn't happen in a high school science classroom.

Yet when it's time to unleash the magic of theatre in the service of the story, director Eric Nightengale and his collaborators let us down. The obvious moment is, of course, when Larry actually flies--a euphoric moment that should be unforgettable in a play like this. Here it's reserved for the very end, and it's sadly anticlimactic.

It's as if the creative team who were originally attracted to telling Walters's story have been utterly defeated by it: only the cliched, obvious parts at the back end get told felicitously. This modern-day tall tale deserves better.

The world of John Jahnke's Mercurius is unlike any  I've ever seen, real or staged. It's a place where people speak fervently and fluently; where blood flows bright, bright red and water runs deep, deep blue. It's a place filled with magic, where a hermaphrodite spirit can conjure a long-lost family and a newborn infant can devour itself; where a transparent canister filled with sand can become a warm, embracing beach, and where a woman's blue skirt can unfold to become an ocean's waves, gently but unrelentingly pushing her down to a watery grave.

Truly amazing, even shocking, things happen: An old man is given an enema; the  hermaphrodite gets a sort-of makeshift cesarean section; couples copulate and a rusty old gramophone appears out of nowhere playing a scratchy old, vaguely familiar tune. Somehow, it's all beautiful, the way a half-remembered dream is: it's like Jahnke has put the whole show behind a thick piece of gauze, or--more accurately, I think--beneath a kaleidoscope's lens. Mercurius is ostensibly about becoming: the two sisters who are its heroines dabble in alchemy, attempting to turn their leaden existence into golden paradise. But I think it's really about being: Jahnke takes the audience on an extraordinary ninety-minute excursion that satiates the senses even as it confounds sense. We may never be exactly the same again.

I realize that I need to give some hint of the play's surprisingly strong narrative element, now, lest I give the impression that Mercurius is entirely abstract. (It is abstract--just not entirely.) The story concerns Leopoldine and Odile, sisters who live on a remote island where they were abandoned, years ago, by their parents. Together they use Leopoldine's alchemy text to conjure the spirit Mercurius, who in turn conjures the girls' parents. Odile wants revenge while Leopoldine wants truth: Mercurius metes out a kind of justice for both sisters and parents as the play spins ornately to its oddly satisfying conclusion.

Six actors--Sabrina Artel, Louise Edmunds, Salvatore Garguilo, Kathryn Gracey, Mort Kroos, and Tanisha Thompson--realize Jahnke's script grandly. A fleet of visionary designers--notably Hillary Moore (costumes) and Luigi Murenu (hair)--bring the thing to life. Sexy without being gratuitous, baroque without being obtuse, Mercurius is indeed a rarefied feast. John Jahnke's imagination is fertile and his sensibility is utterly original: this is an adventure in theatre that can honestly be called unique. I can't wait to go on the next one. 

Robert Christophe is an extremely talented actor: you'll want to see Michigan Impossible to watch him transform himself into a host of wonderful characters, right before your eyes. Dressed simply in a vest, long-sleeved shirt, and neat trousers, he's Jesse Boles, a young man driving through a blizzard to his boyhood home in Michigan for his grandmother's funeral. Add a bit of cloth (for a shawl) and some black-rimmed glasses, and he's Jesse's grandmother, a lively centenarian whose anecdotes and folk wisdom help Jesse deal with his mixed heritage (part Indian (two tribes), part African-American, part Irish-American).

Add some nerdy glasses (and, later, a boy scout cap), and Christophe is Jesse's earnest and relentlessly un-hip guidance counselor, a well-meaning fellow who eventually brings Jesse and his pals out of their inner city neighborhood for a camping trip that changes all of their lives. Remove the glasses and add some attitude, and Christophe is all of the members of Jesse's gang, street kids with names like Fat Man and Little Santos who are struggling to deal with their own identities (as teenagers and as members of various ethnic/racial groups).

Jesse--lighter-skinned than his friends--faces real obstacles trying to fit in. This, in fact, leads to the most exciting episode in Michigan Impossible, during which Jesse tries to rob a bakery truck to prove his manhood: Christophe's recreation of the abortive robbery, and especially of Jesse's bragging account of the same event, mouth stuffed full of stolen donuts, is wonderfully funny and honest.

Michigan Impossible succeeds better as a series of vivid, disarming character sketches than as the play it actually hopes to be: Christophe, who is also the author, does make a few points about racial identity in America, but he fails to pull together other themes introduced in the various set pieces in any compelling way. Nevertheless, the people who inhabit this work--and the fascinating and candid stories that they have to tell--make Michigan Impossible a worthy evening of theatre.

Michigan Impossible is sturdily directed by Kim Waldauer, and features effective sets and lighting by Hiroshi Iwasak and Jerold R. Forsyth. The (uncredited) soundtrack is invaluable in setting mood and tone; some new age-ish music by Will Brock, though, is somewhat distracting.

A very problematic play, this: author Davey Holmes has written a very long script whose only truly admirable quality is its ambition. More Lies About Jerzy tells the story of the unraveling of a very successful writer after his signature work is revealed to be fraudulent. Twin threads about the writer's veracity--one dealing with a proofreader's claim that he contributed more to the work than mere editing; another, more serious, dealing with usurped life stories that Jerzy took as his own to create his powerhouse memoir--run parallel courses through the play, documenting the downward spiral of the protagonist's credibility and, eventually, his own ability to live with himself.

It's certainly interesting, but here's the trouble: More Lies About Jerzy is obviously and openly based on the life of Jerzy Kozinsky, the Polish-American author whose life story, in broad outline, is the same as this Jerzy's. What we don't find out  is: how much. Holmes winds up committing the same sin as his play's anti-hero, and even taking into account the cute warning offered by the play's title, it's hard not to detect at least a whiff of hypocrisy in this enterprise.

The production, staged by Darko Trenjak, is generally competent, though there's no way to overcome the play's fundamental dishonesty. Or--alas--loquaciousness: Jerzy is at least a half-hour longer than it ought to be. Performances range from Betty Miller's powerful cameo as one of Jerzy's forgotten victims to Jared Harris's flashily self-conscious, constantly arresting turn in the title role. But the three actors who are called upon to double and triple in supporting parts--Martin Shakar, Adam Stein, and Gary Wilmes--are mystifyingly inadequate: it was hard, particularly in the case of Stein, to know which character he was supposed to be at any given moment.

Gretchen Egolf, who is fairly likable as Jerzy's lover, has to endure a nude scene that's entirely gratuitous (if the lady feels comfortable taking off her clothes in front of Jerzy, why does she immediately cover herself up with a blanket?). And Lizbeth Mackay is fascinating as Jerzy's more mysterious lady friend: an interesting character, though we never find out who the heck she is. Production credits are up to the Vineyard's usual standard, but Linda Cho's gaudily ugly polyester creations for the male characters perhaps go too far: I remember the '70s, and I don't think they were as bad, sartorially speaking, as Cho seems to imagine.

Guillermo Reyes's Mother Lolita is billed as "an outrageous new comedy" and I suspect that's accurate. But its world premiere production at Urban Stages is disappointingly uneven, and what's missing, more than anything else, is the outrageousness.

The play centers on Lola, the sexy and flamboyant manageress of an apartment building in a Latino area of Los Angeles. Revolving around her are Capo, the handsome and lusty handyman who is her latest conquest; Xavier, her spoiled, relentlessly swishy son, who has returned home from jail to pursue an acting career; Sister Ellie, a gringa missionary who says she is carrying Xavier's child; and Franco, the owner of the building and, maybe, Lola's legal husband. Reyes concocts an elaborate, convoluted plot that involves these eccentric characters in all manner of crimes against God and humanity, some of them legacies from their respective old countries in Latin America, others of more recent vintage. Act One ends with a murder that may or may not be Lola's doing; Act Two climaxes with Sister Ellie giving birth in Lola's bedroom while simultaneously negotiating with a TV studio.

Clearly, Reyes doesn't intend this to be taken seriously, especially since so much genuinely grave stuff happens with such alarming regularity in Lola's world. Mother Lolita is a farce, a la Joe Orton, gleefully subverting what we think we know about the contemporary immigrant experience to grand effect.

Unfortunately, this sort of play requires a very specific sort of performance, and it's mostly not getting it in this production. Roman Tatarowitz's flashy set and gawdy lighting feels right; but elsewhere Mother Lolita, as staged by T.L. Reilly, is too naturalistic and fleshed-out for its own good. Lola and her coterie need to be over-the-top, but except for Caesar Samayoa's Xavier and, sometimes, Piter Fattouche's Capo, they never are. The action bogs down particularly in the second act, when it should  be speedily frenetic. Mother Lolita's internal logic has little to do with the vagaries of real life, but Reilly and most of his actors remain resolutely life-size. For the play to work, though, they need to be larger than life.

I'll bet Mother Lolita reads well; hopefully it will find its way to another production soon where its wickedly dangerous comic potential might be realized.  

Remember the name Chris Burns. With a string of productions at downtown
venues such as LaMama, Westbeth, Cucuracha, and Naked Angels, this playwright/director/actor has over the years developed a strong and distinctive style that might be called hyperrealism. As with the painting style, it implies a strong fidelity to objective reality, but with an attitude behind it that brings out life's natural surrealism. None of the dialogue in his new play My Mother's a Baby Boy rings false yet it is all breathtakingly weird and absurd. Lines like "Whether he had coffee or  not, Jesus would be Jesus", that are non-sequiturs out of context, make total sense to the audience, if not to the other characters.

The play is a complex tapestry of five interwoven vignettes, each related in some way to the difficulties of modern communication. Distraction is chronic. In the most breathtaking (and hilarious) example, Helen Coxe plays a woman on a date who is obsessed with her cell phone, so concentrated on the little inconsequential calls that she may or may not get (and the workings of the device that delivers them) that she can't focus on the person she is talking to for more than 20 seconds at a time. "I have emotional amnesia," she says. Indeed, so do all the other characters in the play. Burns does an outstanding job of structuring dialogue so that there are always at least three levels going on all the time: the characters' emotional reality, the serious conversations people attempt to have, and the constant, incessant intrusions and interruptions of the reality of the moment: headaches, the need to eat, a tossed beach ball. People avoid confrontation and contact by speculating about irrelevancies such as the meaning of the word "picnic". Scenes range from incredibly minimal (one character, no dialogue) to incredibly dense and multi-layered. One portion even has two separate scenes taking place simultaneously, the separate, but related dialogues overlapping in a macaronic fashion. One of the lesser threads concerns a cheerful man who keeps stopping people on the street whom it is obvious he has met, but who don't  remember him. It is essentially a clown bit, and like the best clown bits, possesses a layer of poignancy under the humor.

Never has the phrase "style is substance" had better application. When major events in the play's main two trunks (a marriage/pregnancy and a riot) inspire philosophical speculation by these addled characters, though they are bromides, they strike one as wise, not only because Burns has directed the cast to deliver them so genuinely, but because their Zen-like simplicity cuts through the mountain of compost the characters have heretofore uttered. In the context of this play's complex structure, phrases that would be unbearably banal in a made-for-TV movie become positively Beckettesque: "Things just happen," "Life isn't as complicated as you think," "There's no one to blame," and "We're all just trying to get by". (One of these phrases "My Mother's a Baby Boy", however, makes for a very weak title.) 

A third "main trunk" (the other two have very little dialogue), concerning a jilted gay man and his self-involved friend, also evolves from naturalism to an even more Beckett-like exchange of phrases, and is the one obvious misstep in the play's construction. Like the other four vignettes, it was adapted from a one act. This one would have been better off on its own as breaking it up into scenes  spoils the momentum of the verbal disintegration it was meant to have.

The ensemble cast is top-notch (in particular Burns himself, Helen Coxe, Andrea Cirie, Stephen Speights and Tim McGee) and Burns's direction throughout is clean, spare and masterful. See this play if you can--but turn off your cell phone.