nytheatre Archive
2000-01 Theatre Season Reviews

Tabletop seems to me to be, first and foremost, a celebration of professional pride: playwright Rob Ackerman, director Connie Grappo, set designer Dean Taucher, costume designer Ilona Somogyi, lighting designer Jack Mehler, and an ensemble of six remarkable actors make life in the commercial film studio where Tabletop takes place so vivid and immediate that it almost feels as if we're intruding. Tabletop moves naturalism to a deeper level than usual: the air is infused with the palpable verisimilitude of this production: every nuance of speech, substance and style feels authentic and right. Anyone who's ever worked for a long time in an office or at a particular occupation is going to recognize this milieu; and they'll feel, reflected back at them, the stubborn obstinacy, arrogance even, of the craftspeople who make their livings--and define themselves--in such an arena.

I love the details in Tabletop: the refreshing blend of vernacular and jargon that smoothly coheres as workplace chatter; the easy, unstated competence and respect that permeates the room. I love the characters, too: Oscar, the free-wheeling gaffer/grip/jack-of-all-trades with an entrepreneurial bent; Jeffrey, the perennially sour cynic who serves as property master; Dave, the soft-spoken assistant director who is trying to find time to have a personal life; Andrea, the bitchy boss-lady who is determined to stay on top; Ron, the bumbling assistant who is an explosive combination of naïf, gnome, and budding genius; and Marcus Gordon, the tyrannical impresario at the helm of this studio, half Cecil B. DeMille, half Max Bialystock: a supremely egomaniacal director before whom all others cower and tremble.

They do so because Marcus is the Boss, and also because Marcus is an artist: behind the bombast is a man who knows and loves his craft and who has won the respect of his colleagues/underlings. And Ron, the new kid--because he is so clearly a Marcus-in-the-making--understands the master's genius more than any of the others. So naturally, he is the one who challenges it, giving Ackerman a plot hook and Grappo and her actors something to play.

Alas, Ackerman falls short on the follow-through. When Ron has his inevitable confrontation with Marcus, he tells him he's a fake, which is precisely the one thing that Marcus is not. Ackerman lets this moment go unchecked, and then tacks on an ending that makes Marcus look foolish and the rest of the characters (including Ron) noble. It's a jarringly false note in a play that otherwise contains such clarion truth. (Tabletop is also about fifteen minutes longer than it ought to be. Ackerman might want to eliminate the subplots involving Dave's "coming out" and Oscar's dream hardware store, neither of which has a satisfactory payoff, to tighten his script.)

Tabletop's problems are especially disappointing in light of how fine the script otherwise is:  this is some of the sharpest writing I've come across in quite some time. I sincerely hope Ackerman finishes shaping it into the really excellent play that it has the capacity to be. What should not be fiddled with is the production itself: director Connie Grappo is to be congratulated for pulling together such a superb team. Dean Taucher's meticulously detailed set is nothing short of miraculous; Ilona Somogyi's costumes and Jack Mehler's lighting are so natural that you never notice them for a second. All six actors are splendid, with Rob Bartlett's blustery, profane Marcus and Dean Nolen's even-handed but simmering Jeffrey the standouts.

A few thoughts based on a second viewing of Tabletop. First, and most important: Ackerman has made almost no revisions to his script, which is unfortunate: all of the problems noted above remain unsolved. Indeed, Tabletop's flaws and inconsistencies are, if anything, more glaring this time around. Ackerman's messy ending bites him, badly: Tabletop is obviously pro-worker, but it also feels anti-union; similarly, the utopian democratic ideal that Ackerman seems to be preaching is antithetical to the genius-Superman persona of his hero, Ron. Finally, it's not really clear what the author wants to tell us about his subject.

A second problem arises from the venue itself. At the Schonberg Theatre, Dean Taucher's phenomenal set looked real; the person who saw the show with me said it felt to him like the wall had been lifted away and we were sitting in the same room with Ackerman's characters. At the American Place, that wonderful illusion evaporates. Physical remove from the stage eliminates the intimacy, and the smaller, differently shaped playing area cramps Taucher's artistry badly. The play suffers from this--a lot.

Rob Bartlett continues to inhabit the role of Marcus vividly, in a finely-realized performance. The other actors, including Dean Nolen, seem to be playing a bit more broadly and less sympathetically than before.

I guess this is the definitive Tabletop, the one that playwright Ackerman intends. If so, it's a disappointment.

There is no curtain on the stage at the Atlantic Theatre, so as soon as you arrive at your seat you get a look at Scott Pask's masterful set for The Beginning of August. It depicts a portion of the backyard of a suburban house in homely, mundane detail: vaguely unkempt grass; an unpainted wooden fence; a spigot jutting out from the aluminum siding; a screen door leading, we imagine, to the kitchen inside. What struck me immediately was how remarkably real it all looks--real at some ineffable level beyond naturalism. I mean, it looks like people actually live here.

It is, it turns out, exactly the set that Tom Donaghy's new play needs and deserves. For what Donaghy does in this deceptively ordinary backyard drama is capture, with astonishing acuity, the way real people are. His characters are maddeningly, frustratingly alive, behaving in the sometimes well-intentioned, and sometimes self-defeating, manner that we all do. We're conscious in this play, much more than usual, of the author's selection process: that he has chosen to reveal to us particular events of a particular day, involving these five people. Because these people seem to have lived lives before the play started, and will go on living after we leave; indeed, Donaghy has shrewdly constructed The Beginning of August so that its catalytic incident--the event that starts the thing in motion--has occurred before the play begins; and his story's ending, similarly, will happen sometime after the play ends.

For a while, we get to observe them--and that's all. The genius of The Beginning of August is, our observing really does provide us with insight into the human condition. 

At the center of The Beginning of August is Jackie, a young man whose wife has suddenly abandoned him and their infant daughter. Jackie has invited his step-mother Joyce to watch the baby while he's at work. Today is the first day of this arrangement, and although Jackie and Joyce's relationship is more than a little strained, both are clearly interested in making it work, more or less permanently; or at least until Jackie's wife Pam returns from wherever she is.

As the day wears on, Joyce meets Ben, a young housepainter who idolizes Pam; and Ted, a neighbor who winds up telling Joyce something totally unexpected. Jackie arrives home with a fax from Pam, who says she'll be back home by dinnertime. And, while Jackie dozes (for he's narcoleptic), the baby disappears.

Donaghy alternates trivial details with earthshaking revelations almost randomly, so that we never see what's coming in this play, and we never finally or fully understand what any of the five characters are about. Which is not to say that we don't understand or empathize with them; indeed, Donaghy's triumph is that we do, almost too much. But we do not--cannot--know them any better than they know themselves.

Neil Pepe's staging is superb. I love especially the way he shows us the passage of time, subtly making us aware of its acceleration and deceleration within Donaghy's narrative. Christopher Akerlind's lighting and Ilona Somogyi's costumes are as natural as breathing, perfectly complementing Pask's amazingly authentic set.

The actors are superb, too. Garret Dillahunt is exactly right as the troubled, vulnerable Jackie; his scene, near the end of Act One, when he finally explodes with anger at the absent Pam is nakedly real. Mary Steenburgen is equally perfect as Joyce, showing us the loneliness and resourcefulness of this complicated woman--and also her great humor, as in a wonderful scene in which Jackie asks her to read from a mail-order catalog while they wait for Pam's arrival. Jason Ritter (Ben), Ray Anthony Thomas (Ted), and Mary McCann (Pam) are impressive in smaller roles.

The Beginning of August cuts no breaks for either its characters or its audience: there's a palpable feeling of unfinished business when it ends. But I found that my vague dissatisfaction was replaced, soon, with warm regard for the less concrete but more profound way that Donaghy's play lingered in my memory. In this genuine slice of life, what's been pared away is finally inconsequential as we savor the zest and flavor--bitter and sweet--of what we've been served.

Echoes of too many plays pervade Theresa Rebeck's The Butterfly Collection, finally draining this interesting new work of both consistency and focus. There is, for example, a lot of Death of a Salesman in this play, which pits a harsh and unloving father who may or may not be a fraud against his equally weak-willed and narcissistic son. The shape of this family--which includes another, less volatile but just as psychological damaged, brother; as well as a mother much beloved by all three men--suggests the Tyrones of Long Day's Journey Into Night. And the play's catalytic situation, in which a talented and possibly conniving young writer enters the employ and confidence of an older, celebrated author, recalls Donald Margulies's Collected Stories.

Useful models all; but uneasily grafted together as they are here, they don't cohere meaningfully or even usefully. Rebeck is interested, I think, in telling the story of Sophie, that young writer I just mentioned, and what happens to her when she spends an eventful summer as writer's assistant to a cantankerous and possibly used-up Nobel laureate. Sophie gets the play's opening and closing monologues and mostly drives the play's action: she's clearly meant to be the protagonist.

But Sophie is finally too vague and weak a character to star in her own play (and indeed Paul, the famous author she has come to work for, literally tells her so in the climactic second-act blow-up). Worse luck for her, she's surrounded in this glittering though dysfunctional family by outsized personalities far more dynamic than her own: Paul, and his complicated wife Margaret, and his appealing but screwed-up sons Frank and Ethan, even Ethan's long-term girlfriend Laurie, are all way more interesting than Sophie. So The Butterfly Collection winds up being a play without a heroine: Rebeck paints compelling portraits of every figure on stage save the central one.

This weakness is exacerbated by the casting, which pits newcomer Maggie Lacey as Sophie against the likes of Brian Murray (explosive and fragile at the same time as Paul), Reed Birney (gently steadfast and unexpectedly deep as the quieter brother Frank), James Colby (a cauldron of vanity and insecurity as the mercurial Ethan), Betsy Aidem (effectively understated as Laurie), and Marian Seldes (as the proud matriarch).

Especially Marian Seldes: she walks off with The Butterfly Collection, centering the play as the deceptively strong-willed Margaret, a woman whose endless accommodation and peacemaking among her embattled brood reflects clear-eyed self-interest as much as unflinching devotion. Seldes's Margaret anchors and grounds her flighty husband and sons: even in repose, observing abrasive arguments that pit father against son or brother against brother, her command of herself and her men is palpable.

Seldes also gets the piece's funniest moments, which she plays to the hilt. At the beginning of Act Two, with a temporary family truce threatening to unravel, Margaret decides to cook an elaborate dinner. She settles on a decidedly bizarre recipe of oysters, heavy cream, sauerkraut, lemon, and caviar. Ethan tries to dissuade her from this concoction, but Margaret--a true adventuress among cowards, in more ways than one--needs to think it over. Seldes takes center stage and proceeds, as only she can, to review the list of ingredients, savoring--practically tasting--each one as she calls it out. A delicious, show-stopping moment, and one that savvily reveals character. Seldes is practically peerless these days; thank goodness she works as much as she does.

Okay, back to the main point: as I said, young Maggie Lacey hardly stands a chance in this company, especially given the contradiction-ridden cipher she's made to play. Is Sophie an opportunistic Eve Harrington? Or is she an earnest young artist, turned against her will into a hapless fly by the spidery Paul and Ethan? Unfortunately, Rebeck never makes this clear, and The Butterfly Collection suffers as a result.

Yet there are moments of greatness here; not just in Seldes's riveting performance but in numerous smaller, telling exchanges between Rebeck's articulate collection of artists and collectors. They make The Butterfly Collection worth seeing, and also make us wish that the whole was greater than these oh-so-worthy parts.

The Chi is Gian DiDonna's first play, and it feels like it: there's evidence of raw talent all over the place, but it hasn't been channeled properly (yet) into a cohesive whole. There are two warring plot threads in The Chi. At first, it looks like a brutally honest exploration of a teenage boy's anguish at becoming a man. But about two-thirds of the way through it starts to feel like something very different: a fairy tale/fantasy about the same boy discovering his soul (chi) with the help of a guardian angel. These are both interesting ideas, but they don't belong in the same play; in fact, the naked specificity of the former undermines the ephemeral froth of the latter.

But DiDonna's ideas are inventive and plentiful and make The Chi worth taking in. His protagonist, a confused 19-year-old kid named Benny, is having an affair with an older woman named Francine. But a long-ago disastrous sexual encounter has left him unable to perform; this dysfunction has brought Benny to the brink of genuine psychosis, as he urges and baits Francine and his pal Ivan to beat him up and otherwise humiliate him in order to appease some hidden inner demon.

DiDonna's choice of subject here is unusual and worthwhile, though some shading might help as the revelations about Benny's problem come out. Too often, he feels like the helpless victim of predatory females, which I don't think is the author's intention. It's interesting enough that I'd like to see DiDonna carry Benny's story to its (probably more violent) conclusion; the sudden appearance of a girl Benny's own age named Luz doesn't feel, to me, like the right ending to The Chi.

Ron Russell's staging is exemplary, well-served by its stark playground set (by Dan Whedon) and evocative lighting (by Jason Cina). I love the way Russell has staged the play's two sex scenes, behind the fence backdrop with stylized movements that seem to conjure the dark reaches of Benny's disturbed mind: a really wonderful effect.

Michael Goduti, Sandra Bauleo, and Richard Rosario-Velazquez turn in fine performances as Benny, Francine, and Ivan. Taryn Smith seemed less assured as the admittedly sketchier fourth character Luz.

Sometimes casting, however well-intentioned, can defeat a play. This seems to be the case with Buddy Thomas's The Crumple Zone, a bitterly dark comedy about two interlocking love triangles that feels like a cross between The Boys in the Band and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Thomas's leading character, a desperately lonely and self-destructive gay man approaching middle age named Terry, is portrayed here by Mario Cantone. While Cantone's name might have some marquee value, his acting chops simply aren't up to this complex role: throughout The Crumple Zone, he is playing a shrll variant of his high-strung stand-up persona (with a little David Greenspan thrown in for good measure). His fans might enjoy themselves watching this, but he's doing Thomas's play no good at all.

Because--and I was surprised to find myself concluding this--this is actually a pretty good play. Eliminate the hysterical edge, and The Crumple Zone is a reasonably intelligent examination of relationships in transition. The relationships happen to be gay male ones, but except for the requisite bitchy talk and diva references that's not what matters here. Thomas shows us Alex, a man who is smashing up a long-term relationship because he has fallen in love with someone else. It happens that Alex's best friend (that's Terry) is also in love (unrequitedly) with Buck, the new paramour. Thrown into the mix are Matt, Alex's soon-to-be-ex, and a stranger named Roger who seems to have a crush on Terry and eventually proves to have a rather startling secret as well.

It could be the stuff of gay romantic farce, or of Knots Landing-styled melodrama, or of powerful drama. Thomas supplies some of each; but The Crumple Zone is absolutely at its best when he keeps things serious: in the climactic confrontation scenes of the second act, the intensity hits O'Neill-Albee levels (and I mean that in a good way). Thomas has written a forceful drama with insight and passion; he should strip away its facile veneer and let himself really go where his anguished characters want to take him.

Cantone's cartoonish performance aside, the cast is pretty good, especially Steve Mateo as the compellingly sexy Roger and Gerald Downey as the earnestly likable Buck. Dawn Robyn Petrlik's set is way too busy: director Jason Moore needs to work with the playwright to help him clarify his intentions; that will in turn guide Petrlik and the other designers to more appropriate results. (Another note: producer Marcus Kettles might want to supply regular theatre programs; in the one-page handbill supplied, not even a cast list is provided, let alone cast bios or other helpful information.)

Samm-Art Williams's new play The Dance on Widows' Row is a charmer: a funny, warm visit with four life-embracing middle-aged ladies who happen to have bad luck holding onto their husbands. Magnolia, Simone, Annie, and Lois all live on the same street in their North Carolina town--a street that's been dubbed "widows' row" and is considered to be jinxed because the ladies who reside there have lost something like twenty husbands among them. But Magnolia, who has buried two spouses herself, is  determined to do something about the situation. She's invited her three friends over for a tasteful soiree, and she's also invited four of the town's most eligible widowers and divorcees. She's set her sights on one of them, Deacon Hudson, but the others, she says, are up for grabs.

Will the ladies find companionship? Will the jinx be broken? Will the invited gentlemen even show up? These are the questions Williams poses and then answers in this slight but elegant comedy; he also has his characters ruminate on the nature of gossip, religion, and love. It makes for really welcome conversation upon which to eavesdrop.

I should tell you also that Williams has spiced things up delectably with the hint that one or more of these ladies may have actually murdered a husband or two. Much of the fun of The Dance on Widows' Row comes from guessing who's guilty and who's innocent among these worldly, engaging women.

The production at the New Federal Theatre, directed by the author, is delightful. The seven cast members--longtime theatrical veterans all--are doing fine work here. I particularly enjoyed Barbara Montgomery's richly textured Magnolia, a Dolly Levi sort who is ready to emerge from her cocoon and grab life head-on. Adam Wade's dapper Deacon Hudson and Jack Landrón's sly, excitable Newly Benson are also memorable. Felix E. Cochran has provided a smart, homey living room for Magnolia, ingeniously framed by a spare but lovely garden path that's needed for a few of Williams's cleverer scenes.

The Dance on Widows' Row fizzles out somewhat unsatisfyingly at its end, but for most of its playing time the laughs are abundant and the warmth is palpable. This is the kind of play that used to be a Broadway staple, but nowadays would typically wind up as a TV movie. Thank heaven the New Federal Theatre is here to keep solid domestic comedy alive! 

This is a big, sprawling play: it's three hours and five acts long, with no fewer than 68 characters listed in the program; it includes speeches in Appalachian Southern and African-American dialect, as well as Latin and Old English--some of them in verse; it addresses fundamental issues of faith and morality and responsibility. It's a Bromley play, and therefore by definition challenging and fascinating: filled with fancifully improbable (and unmistakable) poetics of a type that can only be called Bromleyesque; loaded to the gills with far-ranging and often extravagant ideas and images. It's huge: impossible, really, to digest in one sitting.

The fact that it's been staged at all--on an off-off-Broadway budget, yet--is testimony to the commitment and spirit of Bromley's Inverse Theater Company, which has produced his previous works (most recently, Midnight Brainwash Revival and The American Revolution) with vigor and intelligence. Bromley's voice, interpreted by this singular company of artists, reminds us always of the power of language. Here, interestingly, the work of director Howard Thoresen and his actors and designers reminds us just as strongly of the power of  live theatre.

The themes of this work weave and tangle around each other. At the center of Don Flagrante Delicto is a Civil War-era story about the emancipation of Black American slaves, with some accompanying, questing commentary on the nature of, and transition to, freedom. Wrapped around that is the tale of the calculatedly cruel white master who, terrified at giving up his way of life to presumably encroaching Yankees, decides to destroy it--killing himself, his family and his slaves on the very night of Lincoln's assassination.

And then, juxtaposed, is the play-within-the-play, a rococo account of the forced conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Dark Ages Britain. That both this play and the one that frames it are concerned with the violent transformation of a society from a supposedly immoral, unenlightened state to a supposedly moral, enlightened state is certainly not a coincidence; but Bromley lets us draw our own conclusions about this. He's more interested, I think, in yet another level of this work, the one where Don Flagrante the playwright intersects Bromley the playwright: how far can an Omnipotent Author go in testing the limits of morality--human dignity, even--before he has gone too far?

So Bromley, like his "maniacal" hero, has written a brutal, provoking play, one that exposes the very worst that mankind is capable of. There's humor in The Death of Don Flagrante Delicto--wit, even; but there's not a speck of joy to be found here.

This, not surprisingly, makes The Death of Don Flagrante Delicto difficult to love. But listen, for example, to this passage, spoken by Don Flagrante's slave, after a free Black man invites her to come away with him:

     Wut, can it be
That I'v a self beyond a self enslavd?
I merely noe I feel now to be free
Is life more livd, to cowr not, but crave
At powr, as this al-empowrng man
Invites, incites, excites me to. Y not?
Change is at hand, let my hand exchange it.
I'm dark, not dim, and tho wite most reflex,
Blak most absorbs the heat of hope, the flare
Of expectashn, and empowrd ax.
So, as he implorz, I will go with him
At season's end, and freedom's ofr take.
From centuries of sleep, at last I wake.

There's an undeniable passion and intensity, not to mention intelligence, to this work that forces us take notice of it.

There's also a theatricality, which director Thoresen has harnessed masterfully. He gives us silent tableaux and musical interludes that rival Bromley's poetry in their eloquence. An evocative score by Jessica Grace Wing, beautifully performed by Hank Wagner and other company members, proves invaluable as well.

The company, a mix of Inverse regulars and some newcomers, is fine. Bromley's words have seldom sounded more gorgeous than when spoken by Billie James, who plays the female slave Holard; and his intentions are never more explosively clear than when interpreted by free-wheeling forces of nature like Hank Wagner and Joshua Spafford. Company members Alan Benditt (as Don Flagrante) and Matt Oberg (in a variety of roles) also score strongly.

The Death of Don Flagrante Delicto is almost certainly too large for its own good. But it's undeniably engaging and challenging theatre of the first order.

The First Jewish Boy in the Ku Klux Klan marks the New York stage debut of a remarkable young actor named Peter Stadlen. We're fortunate to have him. He's got charm, presence, and a sure sense of comic timing; he's also got an ingratiating manner and quirky, boyish good looks that recall the young Matthew Broderick or Jonathan Silverman. Stadlen, whose father is the great comic actor Lewis J. Stadlen and whose grandfather is Allen Swift, seems naturally destined for a successful career on the stage. It's exciting to see him burst onto the scene in this modest off-off-Broadway comedy.

As for the play itself, well, the news is decidedly mixed. Playwright-director Lionel Kranitz has, it seems, a good deal on his mind; but the various plot and thematic elements of First Jewish Boy get irrevocably muddled in the show's wholly unsatisfactory second act. The main story concerns Sonny (Stadlen's character), a 21-year-old misfit who, instead of getting a job after graduating from college, is hiding out from real life in his parent's house (with their tacit permission). Sonny does outrageous things, presumably to get their attention, like sleeping naked except for his shoes and socks. His latest stunt is the one that gives the play its title: he has, much to their consternation, joined the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

The question, of course, is why this obviously intelligent, intellectual young man is behaving so strangely. The weakness of Kranitz's script is that no reasonable explanation is ever offered. Red herrings are fitfully doled out throughout, ultimately with little import: the most believable explanation, based on the sketchy facts--that Sonny might be gay (and therefore a pariah in this 1950s suburban Jewish household)--is fervently discounted midway through Act One.

So we're left with an appealing, visionary hero whom we never quite get close to; and a play that flails badly in its final half hour (after a fairly funny start, by the way, in its first act). Intriguing subplots of varying levels of seriousness abound--Why does the family keep an imaginary baby in a highchair at the dining room table? Will Sonny get lynched by the Klan when they find out he's Jewish? How bad is the mother's Happy Day cake, anyway?--but none of these ever amounts to anything substantive. We leave The First Jewish Boy in the Ku Klux Klan slightly amused but entirely perplexed.

Stadlen's stellar debut here as Sonny is matched nicely by Brad Surosky's work as his eager younger brother Arthur. They display good chemistry together, and Surosky has deft comic timing as well as a wise-beyond-his-years earnestness that serves the character well. Less assured work is turned in by Richard Springle as the father (admittedly the least well-defined role) and Mary Round as the mother (who, at the performance reviewed, went up repeatedly on her lines).

There's probably a workable play (or perhaps more than one) to be made out of this material. Alas, The First Jewish Boy in the Ku Klux Klan isn't it. But if this flawed but well-intended comedy can serve as the launching pad for young Peter Stadlen's acting career, it will have done a world of good.

Amos Kamil's new play The Flame Keeper tries to do a couple of very interesting things: It starts out as an unusual revenge fantasy, set in Berlin just after World War II, in which Reiter, a Jewish doctor, bullies and humiliates Gruber, a German cigar store owner, in a bizarre but painful attempt at retribution for the sins of the Nazis. But Kamil pushes deeper, having Reiter probe talmudically into the nature of Gruber's accountability and responsibility for the Holocaust.

And, as it turns out, his own: Reiter escaped the Nazis before they could deport him to a concentration camp, and spent the war years at an American university. Kamil then provides another surprise plot twist (which I won't reveal) that muddies further the distinctions between Gruber's Nietzschean views and Reiter's Spinozan ones, yielding up plenty of food for thought on a subject that can't ever be fully understood but most assuredly must never be forgotten.

Unfortunately, for all its weighty philosophical discussion, The Flame Keeper feels flimsy and unsatisfying as theatre. Part of this can be attributed to the static direction (admittedly dictated, at least in part, by Kamil's scenario, which plays out in a single confined space in real-time). Part of the trouble, too, comes from the contrived nature of Kamil's plot: would a Jewish man really spend morning after morning tormenting a German shopkeeper, particularly one to whom he has no apparent ties?

The Flame Keeper's biggest problem, though, stems from the fact that Gruber and Reiter have too little at stake to make their argument anything more than an academic exercise. Both survived the war more or less intact; relatively speaking, neither man suffered very much or lost very much. I suppose it's up to the survivors to make sense of a catastrophe such as the Holocaust; but why must it be left here to two such exceptionable, cowardly men?

Lenny Mandel (Reiter) and Paul Whelihan (Gruber) are adequate in roles that fail to provide them with the grounding they need to develop real characters. In fact the only realistic thing on stage is Kenneth Foy's beautifully detailed, stunningly claustrophobic cigar store, which manages to say more about these men's predicament than anything else is able to in this disappointing drama.

From this striking bit of historical trivia, Milton Frederick Marcus has fashioned a fascinating play. The Gardens of Frau Hess speculates about who one of those candidates might have been, and what might have transpired when he reported for duty at the Hess estate. This is plainly a work of fiction, but in its incisive characterizations of Ilse Hess and her "gardener" Isaac Baum it feels unflinchingly true, and helps bring us still closer to understanding the great unanswered question of the 20th century: How did it happen?

It's the summer of 1944. (Recall that D-Day was June 6 of that year; the Germans have nearly lost the war.) Three years after her husband abandoned Germany for England, where he was immediately incarcerated, Ilse Hess remains at the family home, in an ambiguous state that feels a little like imprisonment and a little like self-imposed exile. She has one servant to help her run her enormous empty household, plus she's been granted her request for a gardener. Of the six prisoners on the list Himmler sent her, she's been through two; today, the third arrives--Isaac Baum, a broken-down, middle-aged Jew who was once a professor of botany at Leipzig.

The remarkable meeting between Frau Hess and Herr Professor Baum is depicted in the play's astonishing first scene. It's infused with a kind of desperate surrealism, as Marcus introduces us to his two characters, who are at once prototypes and victims of the off-kilter society that Germany has somehow turned into. Frau Hess is proud and aristocratic and elegant, a vestige of an extinct social order where racial/religious bigotry melded seamlessly with noblesse oblige: it is sheer, cold detachment--not rabid hatred--that she feels for a Jew like Baum. Baum, meanwhile--foul, dirty, unsure of where he is or why--is trying to reconcile himself to his new lush surroundings after years at Birkenau. Frau Hess orders him out of his filthy prison clothes and into the shower, and Baum thinks nothing of stripping naked in front of her; neither does she, and in a way that's all we need to know about both of them.

Eventually Baum proves to be not only a successful gardener but also an ideal companion for Ilse. The play's subsequent scenes depict the deepening and strengthening of their relationship. Inevitably each reveals some excruciating secrets from their past, but rather than being mere fodder to the story's obvious melodramatic arc, these serve to further illuminate Marcus's thesis. We learn that Frau Hess has been trained, from an early age, to place ends ahead of means, regardless of how evil those means may be. And we learn that Baum renounced  his Jewish identity early on to achieve personal success and wealth. As the story hurtles toward its strained conclusion--framed, always, by the coming catastrophes that will defeat the Nazis--Ilse discovers that she cannot forget who and what Isaac really is. And, perhaps more significantly, Isaac discovers the same thing.

The Gardens of Frau Hess is imperfect: its final scene, particularly, veers badly off track. But it's a compelling, provocative piece throughout, raising issues and questions that honestly illuminate the underpinnings of the great tragedy that was the Holocaust.

This production, by Jewish Repertory Theatre, is graced by two superlative actors. Joel Leffert is masterful as Isaac Baum, showing us his character's transformation from the beaten-down victim of the concentration camps whom we first encounter, to the proud, powerful, conflicted Jew of the play's final scenes. And Lisa Bostnar is excellent as haughty, passionate, complex Frau Hess, never letting us forget the spark of  self-preservation that underlies every word she says and every move she makes. The appropriately lavish set and (for her) costumes are by Richard Ellis and Gail Cooper-Hecht, respectively; the play's moods and themes are enhanced by Richard Latta's lighting and Steve Shapiro's sound design.

The Gardens of Frau Hess is not like any other Holocaust play I've ever seen. It takes us outside of the horrific events, and then takes us inside the psyches and souls of its two antagonists--and it does these things with welcome and surprising intelligence and perceptiveness. The result is a play that transcends its subject: anyone who cares about the progress of human society ought to see it. 

Innocence doesn't just die in The Play About the Baby. It's squashed, annihilated, beaten to a bloody pulp; conquered unconditionally and unmercifully by the practiced calm of Experience. This newest play by Edward Albee is steely and heartless and cruel--so much so that for all its stageworthiness, I felt entirely repelled by it. This is undeniably a potent play, but I cannot and will not pretend to like it.

I'd be more tolerant of The Play About the Baby, I think, if I detected any real passion behind it. Bitter old men write diatribes all the time: Arthur Miller's most recent works certainly fall squarely into this category. But watching Mr. Peters' Connections or The Ride Down Mt. Morgan I was always aware of the still-questing soul behind the work: Miller wrote those plays because he was compelled--even at the end of a long and productive career--to keep exploring the Big Questions that trouble him.

Whereas, in The Play About the Baby, I sense no longing, no urgency; nothing, indeed, but contempt. I worry that Albee has written this play not because he had to, but simply because he can.

Now, having said all that, it would be wrong for me not to say next that The Play About the Baby is masterful theatre. Albee's trademarks are all here: a preternatural fascination with words; an enigmatic, twisted plot line; a thread of dark, bitter humor that is often profane and just as often profound. There's also a palpable desire to shock--in Act One, by having an attractive young couple scamper about in the nude for a few minutes; and, more bracingly, by having the same couple (clothed) brutalized by a pair of deadly serious pranksters in Act Two.

That last sentence, by the way, traces the arc of this play: Adam and Eve come into the world full of hope and happiness, and then Something (God? Mankind? Reality?) arrives on the scene to dash both of those unobtainable ideals forever. Albee fills the play, as he does, with lots of fascinating ideas about the nature of life, theatre, and reality; most of The Play About the Baby is ontological game playing, albeit of a highly particularized and dangerous sort.

Oh yes, there is a baby; and despite what you may have heard or read, it is precisely the same kind as the one in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is to say a metaphorical one. Here it represents all the stuff that was lost when we got tossed out of paradise. Albee insists that this baby is real, and he's right: that's what The Play About the Baby is about.

David Esbjornson has staged the piece smartly on John Arnone's delicious, stark set composed of mismatched and outsized baby things. The cast of four is exemplary, with the young people David Burtka and Kathleen Early more than holding their own opposite the formidable Brian Murray and Marian Seldes. (Indeed, one truth that this production does unambiguously reveal is what, if anything, might divert an audience's attention from the always-riveting Seldes; the answer turns out to be a stark naked Burtka cavorting innocently just a few paces away from her.)

Murray's is the plum role and he's brilliant in it: cast as a non-character whose most important attribute may be his self-awareness, Murray transcends artifice to create a kind of menacing omnipotence. It's one of the scariest performances I've ever seen.

Should you see The Play About the Baby? Of course: it's among the most accomplished theatrical works in town right now. Just don't blame me if you find yourself stuck, for hours afterward, with a persistent and sour aftertaste.

The evening begins with "How It Ended," adapted by Robert Lyons from Jay McInerney's 1993 piece about two married couples who meet on holiday and wind up swapping anecdotes about their histories. The focus is on the younger man, whose account of a life as a drug-runner is funny but rather startling: it's never clear whether or not he's pulling our leg. This piece is probably the weakest in The Playboy Stories, fizzling out unsatisfyingly before anything's resolved (is that McInerney's fault or Lyons's?)

Next up is "Modern Love" (1988; Celia Montgomery/T. Coraghessan Boyle), a cute but somewhat dated tale about a young woman who believes in VERY safe sex and the hapless young man who tries to woo her. This one features some clever writing and some sharp performances by Michelle Maryk (as the woman), Ethan Kent (as her diabolical doctor), and especially Martin Everall (as the well-meaning fellow). Everall's character also serves as the narrator of "Modern Love," which means that this piece, alone among the five Playboy Stories, is shaped more like a story than a play. It's also the most effective: see what I mean about this tricky adaptation business?

The third play is "A Fine Son (1959)," from Roald Dahl by way of John Byrd. This quirky piece is about a husband and wife whose marital discord is finally resolved by the promise of their beautiful newborn son; it's Dahl, remember, so I can't tell you what it's really about. It's delicious, even if you figure out where it's going before it gets there. Roy Bacon gives an accomplished performance here as the doctor who guides the anguished new mother toward acceptance and then joy.

Jack Kerouac's "Good Blonde" (1965, adapted by Richard Harland Smith) opens Act Two, and is the centerpiece of The Playboy Stories. It's clearly been written and directed with immense care, and there are moments when Smith and his director John McDermott get the atmosphere and attitudes right; but "Good Blonde" is a rambling mood piece about nothing and everything, the epitome of untheatricality: you keep waiting for something dramatic to happen, but nothing ever does. Ethan Kent makes this piece a showcase for some wonderful, mostly silent acting as Kerouac; Roy Bacon has a small but triumphant moment as a friendly gas station attendant.

The last piece is Richard Matheson's "A Flourish of Strumpets," a one-joke satire from 1956 that has been clumsily adapted by Mike Bencivenga without a bit of irony and without a single concession to the myriad changes in sexual politics that have occurred in the past half-century. The idea here is that a troupe of gorgeous prostitutes set up shop in a small town and start advertising their services by going door-to-door. But what was wicked and sexy in the '50s is either lame or offensive or both in 2000: including this story without somehow commenting on it begs a whole lot of questions. "A Flourish of Strumpets" is also way longer than it needs to be (you figure out the punchline about five minutes after it starts), and is performed and designed with maximal vulgarity. You have to ask yourself why.

That question applies, finally, to the entire enterprise. I haven't read any of these Playboy Stories in their original versions, but my instincts tell me that they're all sharper, tighter, and more satisfying than any of the plays on view here. To be sure, The Playboy Stories is no disaster, but--apart from the excellent work of actors Ethan Kent, Martin Everall, and Roy Bacon--it's not really a success, either. 

Ellen Melaver's The Right Way to Sue is a delightful contemporary farce with a happy ending and a satisfyingly clear-eyed moral. Maggie, a high-powered executive at a company that markets newborn personality-IQ tests, is a harried and floundering new mother. The main problem is that she keeps losing her baby, much to the consternation of her well-meaning but equally inept husband Tom. On this particular (very busy) morning, Maggie has accidentally left Baby Victoria at the cheese counter at Zabar's. Luckily, a strange young woman named Sue shows up with the baby in tow. As Maggie and Tom are already late for their next appointment, they prevail upon Sue to watch the baby until they get back.

Unluckily, Sue is indeed a strange young woman: she kidnaps the baby, taking her to an obscure hideout in Atlantic City where she intends, for a while anyway, to raise her as her own. When Maggie and Tom discover what's happened, they begin a wild goose chase that takes them all over (horrors!) New Jersey and plants them in the beauty salon and car of a bizarre, hairdresser/hair products addict named Trina. By the time our hapless hero and heroine find Sue and their lost daughter, they have reassessed their values and learned most of what they need to to at least become successful parents. (Sue, Trina, and a mysterious stranger named Walter are in for some happy surprises as well.)

Melaver and director Anne Kauffman keep The Right Way to Sue antic and broad, which is precisely right: we're bombarded alternately with contemporary satirical jabs at Maggie and Tom's self-involved Upper West Side lifestyle and outrageous, goofy gags (like the male actor T.R. Knight in a succession of get-ups as a series of New Jersey Moms suspected of being Sue the Kidnapper). Until things bog down in the middle of Act Two, The Right Way to Sue is enormously merry fun. Melaver might want to cut Maggie's scene with her brutishly venomous boss Franklin, which slows the play down on its way to a happy denouement at Sue's Atlantic City hideout.

All six members of the cast are terrific; apart from the aforementioned Knight, they are Kelly AuCoin (Tom), Jennifer Morris (Maggie), Caitlin Miller (Trina), Stephanie Brooke (Sue), and Robert English (Walter). Melaver's sensibility and style are dead-on; I look forward to the next product of her outrageously fertile imagination. 

The legend of Martin Guerre is inherently captivating: In a remote corner of France in the 1600s, a dissatisfied and melancholy man suddenly abandons his young wife and family to find adventure in the army. Years later, he returns to his family, utterly changed--more loving and gentle, and ready and eager to tend his lands. But the new Martin Guerre seems too different to be real: even his shoe size has changed, according to the local cobbler. Slowly, suspicion mounts that he is an impostor.  Eventually, his uncle Pierre takes him to court.  And then a crippled man appears, who claims to be the real Martin Guerre.

It's the stuff of grand drama, as evidenced by the excellent French film starring Gerard Depardieu and, more recently, the recent London musical adaptation. The tale is packed with edge-of-your-seat suspense: Who is the real Martin Guerre? Why does Martin's wife Bertrand side with the supposed impostor? Why does the impostor--whichever one he is--go through with the masquerade?

Frank Cossa, in his new play The Trials of Martin Guerre, is looking for an original way into the legend, to make it his own. What he does is at once perilous and admirable: starting at the point of the Impostor Martin's trial, he commences his drama after most of the inherently dramatic material is over with; but, in the tradition of, say, Shaw's Saint Joan, he peppers his work with religious, political, and social references that transform a mere recounting of an oft-told tale into something of greater historical significance.

Indeed, Martin Guerre--in either incarnation--is not even the main character of Cossa's play. That honor falls to Jean de Coras, the magistrate who is trying the Guerre case before the King. Coras is presented here as a modern man in a medieval world, a religious skeptic and advocate of personal liberty. Cossa's concept here is that the two Martin Guerres--as experienced and understood by their bride Bertrand--represent the duality of medieval and modern man. The playwright wants their story to epitomize the struggle of enlightenment to burst forth from darkness.

It's not an unreasonable goal, but Cossa doesn't quite pull it off: he actually needs to pull even further away from the Guerre legend, I think, to fully realize his objective. Meanwhile, by giving dramatic short shrift both to the Guerre story and Coras's would-be crisis of faith, he has produced a play that is mostly devoid of conflict.

Problematic, too, is the prologue, in which for some reason the actors are made to "assume" their roles in 17th century France in an awkward pantomime; several times elsewhere in the script come additional wordless passages. I can't tell whether this is Cossa's idea or director Mark Bloom's, but I will say that these jarring dumbshow sections hurt the piece badly.

Performances range from indifferent to excellent, with Joseph Kamal (Coras), Susan Matus (Bertrand), and Jeff Berry (Arnaud--the false Martin Guerre) falling squarely in the latter category.

If you're still young enough to believe that you can have anything you want in the world, you will love The Vocal Lords; and if you're old enough to know that you can't, you'll love it all the more. Once again, Eric Winick has written a play that captures, with perfect resonance, what it means to grow up with stars in your eyes. Inspired by the real-life stories of Marty Joltin and Steve Tudanger, a pair of Bensonhurst kids who almost-coulda hit the big time in the music business, The Vocal Lords is a funny, sweet, moving, and wise tale of childhood dreams and adult accommodations; of growing up and growing apart; of the ways that bonds break and friendship endures. It's a lovely play.

There's another story to be told here, I hasten to add. The Vocal Lords is also, as it turns out, a showcase for a pair of remarkable young actors who, I suspect, are going to hit the big time themselves one of these days (soon, I hope). Their names are Fred Berman and Ethan James Duff, and they play young Steve (Tudie) and Marty (Butchie), respectively. They're like breaths of fresh air: so alive, so innocent, so full of themselves--and so full of infectious energy and enthusiasm that their unbridled vitality pours over the footlights. Plus they're terrific singers, doing a capella two-part harmony on doo-wop classics like "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" and "I Only Have Eyes for You." We'll be hearing more from these gentlemen.

Okay, back to the story. The Vocal Lords takes place at Marty Joltin's printing store on 42nd Street in present-day Manhattan and in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the late 1950s. At the print shop, Marty and Steve Tudanger meet for the first time in about thirty-five years. They reminisce, inevitably, about the past, when they were kids and best friends. We watch, in their minds' eyes as it were, their younger selves discover a mutual love of and gift for singing, which leads naturally to the formation of a neighborhood doo-wop group (Marty and the Joltineers), which blossoms into the Vocal Lords, a foursome that looks to be going somewhere. They actually cut a record, and they get a big break when their idol, Dion (of Dion and the Belmonts) comes to watch them perform at a local Chinese restaurant.

Of course we know, eavesdropping on middle-aged Marty and Steve as they eat Chinese take-out at Marty's cluttered desk, how the Vocal Lords' story turns out. Steve went on to some success in the music biz in the '60s, singing backup for the Archies and writing dozens of jingles for TV commercials. But Marty dropped out, leaving the group for a steadier, if less glamorous, life as a businessman, husband and father.

The big question of the play is: why did Marty leave? We find out; but what makes the play special is the way that Winick shifts gears as The Vocal Lords reaches its climax. He eschews simple, pat answers for the subtler profundity of real life: the honest joys of this show come from observing its heroes, then and now, wrapped tightly in a heartfelt friendship that time finally can't touch. The final image--young and old Marty and Steve, cutting loose in rapturous four-part harmony--is richly satisfying and honestly indelible.

At nearly two hours long, The Vocal Lords needs either a bit of pruning or (a better idea) an intermission. And there's a slightly problematic section in the second half, in which the adult Steve's recriminations get the better of him, that feels at odds with the rest of the play. But overall the writing is exquisite, especially in the scenes depicting Tudie and Butchie: Winick shows us the boys at once growing together and growing apart with clear eyes and a full heart.

As I've already said, Duff and Berman, as Tudie and Butchie, are ideally cast; Philip Levy is commendable as the older Steve, but Joe Ragno is a bit unsteady as Marty. The staging, by Chekhov Theatre Ensemble artistic director Floyd Rumohr, is brisk and vivid if perhaps a shade too romantic: the place where the young and old versions of the characters intersect feels more unsettling than it needs to, I think. Andrea Huelse's costumes and Dominic Housiaux's lighting are lovely and appropriate. The doo-wop arrangements (by musical supervisor David Andrews Rogers, I presume) are unfailingly delightful. And the set, by Russell Schramm, is miraculous: its impressionistic Bensonhurst street corner alongside a naturalistic rendering of Marty's cluttered print shop provides the perfect setting for this beautiful and moving play. 

There are ample pleasures in The Wax, the new comedy at Playwrights Horizons by Kathleen Tolan. One of the main ones is its adultness, if that's a word: Tolan's script is about nine approximately middle-aged people who actually behave like grown-ups. Their problems--loneliness, inertia, pangs of regret about paths not taken--are the ones that real middle-aged people actually go through; and their solutions--to go listen to some jazz, mostly--ring breathtakingly true.

The scene is a New England hotel room (recreated with uncanny homeliness by designer Walt Spangler). A wedding has just ended, and out-of-town guests Kate and Christopher, painfully aware of the rut their marriage is in, are each toying with using the room for an assignation. Neither gets a chance to, however, as old friends (also guests at the wedding) start to pour in and out of the room with alarming frequency. Kate's pal Angie shows up and friskily suggests a little lesbian tryst. Then Hal turns up, his clothes soaking from the drink his ex-wife just threw at him. Next Christopher arrives with Amelia, a schoolmate whom he has not seen in years, who seems to be carrying a torch for him; and then the intense young man that Kate had her eye on, Bert, wanders in. Soon Hal's current lover Ben and ex-wife Maureen put in appearances. And in the end, Lily, a robust, clear-eyed Russian immigrant, arrives, deus-ex-machina-like, to give Kate the bikini wax she ordered at the beginning of the play.

Throughout, recriminations fly and hormones rage as couples, trios, and larger groupings variously vent spleen and passion. (Sometimes the same couple does both.) Like characters in a Feydeau farce, these people tear in and out of their clothes and hide under beds and in closets with astonishing regularity. And that's Tolan's point, or part of it: The Wax is about the farce called middle age. Kate fancies herself the tragic heroine of her own private opera. But, as Lily wisely tells her, providing some much-needed perspective during the merciless waxing operation, it really doesn't hurt.

Tolan blends the classic farcical structure with a very contemporary naturalistic drama in The Wax, and the result is sometimes uneven: these widely divergent styles don't mesh easily. But it's an interesting choice; and the play crackles and fizzes with a kind of electricity that's downright visceral, so well-drawn and clearly-voiced are its characters.

Brian Kulick's staging straddles the warring styles of the play: I wonder how The Wax would feel if it were done either entirely--or not at all--as an all-out farce. But the performances, for the most part, are terrific. Mary Testa is the play's joyously erratic life force, finding every bit of comedy in a characterization that is nevertheless surprisingly truthful. Robert Dorfman and Laura Esterman bring real dimension to Hal and Maureen, while Gareth Saxe is wonderfully obtuse as Bert, a younger guy whose thought patterns are jarringly alien to everyone else. Mary Schultz (Amelia) and Lola Pashalinski (Lily) are very effective in the play's smallest roles. Karen Young is an achingly open book as Kate, and Frank Wood, at once cerebral and simmering, is subtly moving as Christopher.

David Greenspan is badly miscast, though, as Ben, his trademark mannered performance style utterly at odds with the earnest sincerity of Tolan's script.

The Wax is neither grand nor profound, but it succeeds admirably in depicting that uncertain angst of encroaching middle age. Watching Tolan's hotel roomful of players thrashing out the human comedy is a lot more fun than having to live it yourself.

One of the most gratifying--not to mention exciting--things about my job is getting to watch young talent learn and grow. The Wild Ass's Skin is a recent, vivid example: its author/director, J. Scott Reynolds, and its leading actor, Barrett Ogden, made their New York debuts a year ago in Reynolds's adaptation of Racine's Andromaque, and while their ambition and effort were praiseworthy, their craft was not yet solidly developed. Look at them now: Reynolds has written a gorgeous, thoughtful dramatization of Balzac's novel, and staged it sparely and beautifully as a simple, powerful parable for the theatre. And Ogden has honed his craft impressively, delivering a near tour de force in the physically and vocally demanding role of a suicidal young man who learns that the thing to beware of most is to get what you wish for. The Wild Ass's Skin is a special kind of theatre--entirely uncommercial and entirely uncompromising. Bravo to Reynolds, Ogden, and their colleagues at Handcart Ensemble for having the courage and good sense to create art to please themselves. Those who come to see what they've done will be pleased as well.

The story of The Wild Ass's Skin is actually quite simple. Valentine, a young man on the brink of suicide, happens upon a bountiful shop filled with all sorts of enticing objects. Its owner turns up, telling him that he's a man who takes pleasure only in acquiring beautiful things: keeping them isn't important. Valentine can have anything in the shop he wants, he says, and then he produces a magical donkey skin to tempt the young man. This skin has the power to grant anything its owner wishes; but the charm comes with a price, for with every wish granted comes a commensurate reduction in the owner's life span.

Valentine takes the donkey skin, meets up with some friends with whom he recounts the unrequited romance that drove him to want to kill himself. He ends the evening in good humor, wishing for vast wealth and riches. Instantly, he gets his wish--and the ass's skin magically shrinks to about half its original size, its charm and its curse both exerting their powers on the stunned young man.

I won't tell you how Valentine's story ends, but I will tell you that you'll be on the edge of your seat waiting to discover what happens next--that's how involving Reynolds's script and staging are. Performed by just five actors on a bare stage with a few props and costume changes, the play engages the imagination and the heart, with sincerity and clarity. Reynolds is becoming quite a fine director: I love the way, in an instant, he is able to take us from a remote street to the lush magical shop or from a dank and drafty boarding house to the Paris Opera, and always with just a subtle change in lighting or attitude. (Designers Tamara Shelp and Mireille Enos should be acknowledged for their contributions here as well.)

Ogden's portrayal of Valentine is layered and touching, showing us the desolation and despair, the elation, and then the gradual achievement of profound knowledge that accompanies this young man on his remarkable journey. In multiple roles, Kevin Ashworth, Christy Summerhays, Erin Treadway, and especially James Mack deliver fine work: Mack's portrayal of the old shopkeeper, in particular, is memorable.

Reynolds's verse is attractive and sometimes quite beautiful, and he's structured his play to make the traditional forms he employs (e.g., iambic pentameter) vital and contemporary, shifting easily among several narrators and through time and space. My only quibble is that the ending seems to come rather too suddenly: I wasn't quite ready, emotionally, for Valentine's story to conclude when it did. But this is a fine piece of work, notable for both its originality and its integrity. 

Thief River, Lee Blessing's new play at the Signature Theatre, exerts a real fascination. It tells the story of Gil and Ray, two young men who live in a rural community in the American Midwest. We first meet them in 1948, when they are eighteen years old, in an abandoned farmhouse not far from the river of the play's title. Gil rushes in, bleeding and terrified, followed soon after by Ray. Once Ray tends to Gil's wounds, he learns what has happened: Gil has been the victim of what we could call nowadays a gay bashing; to make things worse, he shot his assailant in the hand.

But that's only the beginning. Before this night is over, Gil and Ray will be visited by an evil-minded old drifter named Harlow, and by Ray's hard, reactionary grandfather; more important, they will be forced to come to terms with their relationship, which as you have probably guessed is a sexual one. But it's also a passionate one, based in real, honest love, a love that, for Ray anyway, seems frightening and forbidden. How Gil and Ray decide to deal with that passion--and how it alters the course of both their lives--gets revealed, little by little, in the remaining scenes of Blessing's intriguing play.

The playwright moves us, skillfully and purposefully, back and forth from 1948 to 1973 to 2001, from that initial momentous night to the next two times when Gil and Ray meet. The occasion for the first reunion is the wedding of Ray's eldest son; Gil brings his young boyfriend Kit along, with explosive results. The final meeting, with both men at seventy or so, is prompted by a strange request made by Harlow's son-in-law. Telling more will reveal too much of Blessing's story, which is structured precisely like a murder mystery. What got murdered here is not so much a man but a possibility: Thief River is mostly about squandered lives, victims of fear and intolerance that--one fervently hopes--no longer can cause such brutal damage.

Blessing's theme resonates even as it raises a few mystifying questions, the principal one being whether it ever makes sense to hold onto a lost love for as long as Gil and Ray do. (Fifty-plus years of unrequited passion would seem to test the limits of reasonability.) But Blessing has created such compelling characters in Gil and Ray, who, as lovers and as adversaries, reveal much about the consequences of fear, compromise, hypocrisy, and homophobia. This is a rich, challenging play that will spawn plenty of interesting post-theatre conversation.

Mark Lamos's direction is brisk and sensitive, and the ensemble of three pairs of actors is superb. Each pair plays Gil and Ray at different ages, and they are so simpatico that we have no trouble believing we are actually watching these two men age seamlessly. The actors also portray one peripheral character each, and do so convincingly: particularly impressive are Jeffrey Carlson (Gil at 18 and Jody, Ray's grandson) and Remak Ramsay (Gil at 70 and Perry, Ray's father-in-law).

Three Valises is an evening of linked one-act plays by veteran playwright Stan Kaplan. The title (and press materials) suggest that they all turn on the notion of "what may come from a suitcase," and indeed three valises do appear during the course of the program, each containing something pivotal and unexpected. But the real impetus for Three Valises is a writer's rediscovery of a long-dormant creative impulse. It is Kaplan's fertile brain, rather than anything created by Samsonite, from which the stuff at the center of these fascinating dramas really springs.

The first, Fixit-Night, is a middle-aged man's reminiscence of a long-ago family ritual. In it, Kaplan recreates the terror and shame--magnified, to be sure, in his then- adolescent imagination--of having to deal with household repairs: how could such a smart and well-educated brain possibly occupy the same body as the miserably uncoordinated klutz who emerged when it was time to hang a curtain rod or change a fuse? This valise is filled with ancient tools of various types, all of them employed by the teenaged Stan as hammers to pound away these simple but inscrutable demands of real life. 

Schrodinger's Cat is a sly game between actor and audience. Onto a set containing seemingly unrelated furniture--a dentist's chair, a floor lamp, a VCR--comes a man bearing a suitcase that contains its own set of apparently random objects. From these, the actor spins a gruesome narrative that manages, plausibly, to account for each of the disparate objects. But Schrodinger's Cat finally has very little to do with the man's compelling, horrific tale. Kaplan is exploring, tantalizingly, the relationships between playwright, actor, and audience: who finally decides what happens on stage--the observers, or the observed?

Wrapping things up, and obliquely tying them together, is An Idea About an Idea. Here, Kaplan recalls the genesis of an idea--presumably the one that eventually turned into Three Valises. This piece meanders through Kaplan's mind--half laboratory, half playground--where the Idea--and the idea of having the Idea--get poked, prodded, studied, and jostled. An Idea About an Idea records and rejoices in the creative process, reminding us--as its inspiration reminded Kaplan--that the real pleasure in life comes from defeating the practical and mundane and reveling in the unexpected. 

Three Valises adds up to a captivating exploration of imagination. Its three component monologues are performed by Will Rhys, Timothy Doyle and Raul Aranas; Doyle is particularly effective. George Ferencz is the director; he and Kaplan would do well to clarify and concentrate their themes by shaving off about half-an-hour from the total running time.

It has taken Unmerciful Good Fortune five years to get to New York; this fine early play by Edwin Sanchez (Barefoot Boy With Shoes On, Icarus) provides still more proof that he is one of our best and most original young dramatists. It tells the story of Maritza, a lawyer in the Bronx District Attorney's office, and her transforming encounter with Fatima, an enigmatic young woman who has been arrested for poisoning several of her customers at the McDonald's where she works.

Fatima's enormous inner strength comes from her extraordinary ability to read people--she is able not only to divine their futures, but also what's in their hearts and minds right now. That gift led her to kill her victims, each of whom she mercifully freed from an irreversibly wretched existence. It has also brought her to Maritza, who spends her days toiling in the D.A. office and her nights caring for Luz, her mother, a terminally ill invalid who lives, mostly, in a  sad haze of memory induced by the drugs prescribed to alleviate her unbearable pain. Although they are initially antagonistic to one another, Fatima and Maritza eventually form a deep and loving bond that allows them to free each other from their respective prisons.

The central theme of Unmerciful Good Fortune, rendered with even greater insight in Sanchez's later Icarus, is one of redemption and salvation. Here, it is tempered by the melancholy details of Luz's wasted life and, with grand wit, by scenes depicting Fatima's strange power over her would-be prosecutors. Sanchez's writing is outrageous and profound, heroically poetic and stunningly original. His visionary work makes him the contemporary successor to Tennessee Williams. It needs to be seen by a wider audience than a limited off-off-Broadway engagement like this one can reach.

Liza Colon-Zayas is superb as Fatima, in an explosive performance of star-making proportions that likewise isn't getting the attention it deserves. Michelle Rios (as Maritza's mother Luz), Carlos Molina (as her octogenarian father Pito), and Liam Torres (as the slick Bronx D.A. rendered impotent by Fatima's powers) lend outstanding support. All are directed with sensitivity and compassion by Max Ferra. 

So why, then, is Valerie Shoots Andy finally a disappointment?

The paradoxical answer is, I think, that the whole is very much less than the sum of its parts here; while at the same time, Kreitzer and White's vision of their work is too far-reaching for its own good. Valerie Shoots Andy's creators have taken on no less a task in this show than the reclamation of the life of Valerie Solanas: giving it context and therefore meaning by juxtaposing it against the turbulent era in which she had her fifteen minutes of fame; giving it resonance by contrasting it with the gratutious posturings of an iconographic Other (Warhol). That's a lot to accomplish in ninety minutes, and alas Kreitzer and White don't come close to pulling it off. The lunatic passion of Valerie Solanas, who invented a theory that the Y-chromosome is defective and promulgated a manifesto advocating the castration and killing of all men, is finally overwhelmed by the glossy glamour of Warhol's Factory. Valerie Shoots Andy winds up more an indictment of post-modern detachment than an exploration of the world's first radical feminist.

Kreitzer gives lots of stage time to the anti-Valeries: Viva, Nico, and especially Edie Sedgwick, the pleasure-seeking glamour girls that made the Warhol Factory famous (and vice versa). They exert the same perverse hold on us here that they did in real life thirty years ago: one of Kreitzer's points in this play is that the world of onlookers is going to favor an Edie over a Valerie any day of the week. Kreitzer eventually hammers this idea home by banishing Valerie from her own play, which is a neat concept, but too subversive for its own good. On paper, eliminating content to prove a point might have looked good; but the audience needs something to anchor it in the theatre: if all we have is Warhol and his deconstructed universe to grab onto, we lunge for it. And we lose sight of the bigger tragedy of Solanas: she's still just the crazy lady who shot Andy Warhol.

So the play, finally, gags on its own irony. But we nevertheless have a great time reliving the twin circuses of Valerie's failed revolution and Andy's too-successful one. Kreitzer ingeniously gives us two of each of her play's main characters: an older-but-wiser Valerie (beautifully acted by Lynne McCollough) along with the genuinely impassioned hotheaded younger one (Heather Grayson); and a scarily silent Andy (Walter Magnuson, in a brilliantly nuanced performance) and the neatly-packaged road-tour version (Jeff Burchfield). Christy Marie Moore breaks our hearts as Poor Little Rich Girl Edie, while Anushka Carter and Laura Ruth are diamond-hard as Nico and Viva, respectively.

And there's plenty to laugh at--and be astonished by--in Kreitzer's complicated script, in White's fluid staging, and in a production design that is truly spectacular by off-off-Broadway standards.

So, despite its flaws, Valerie Shoots Andy is absolutely worth seeing: the explosion of energy and talent on the stage of The Present Company Theatorium right now is priceless.

The eight plays comprising the show were commissioned by Gorilla Rep, the off-off-Broadway theatre troupe led by Christopher Sanderson that has been bringing irreverently high-spirited revivals of the classics to New York theatre audiences for more than a decade now. Their annual summer production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the inspiration for Washington Square Dreams. In wildly different ways, each of these short pieces celebrates Shakespeare's and Gorilla Rep's ethos: the transforming power of romance, poetry, beauty, and all things theatrical.

Take, for instance, the frustrated young theatre critic Celia, who is the heroine of the first play, Anthony P. Pennino's Forgeries of Jealousy. She and her boyfriend (and fellow critic) Jeff spend their time at a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream bickering about everything from sandwiches to arcane (and hilariously ludicrous) academic dramatic theories. Leave it to no less a personage than Christopher Sanderson himself to straighten things out, giving Celia the chance to fulfill her long-held dream of playing Titania.

And then there's Nick (in Arlene Hutton's Faerie Tale), a buttoned-up, burned-out executive, whose passion for life is rekindled by an accidental encounter with Finuella, a fairy who is protesting Shakespeare's treatment of her "people" in his play. Or consider Jude (in St. Jude and the Donut Queen by Gary Giovannetti), a pixilated misfit searching for the legendary Washy, a relative of Bigfoot who haunts the park at night, living on parking summonses, who finds true love with one of the Gorilla Rep actresses.

These Washington Square Dreams remind us, over and over again, that the impossible can--and often does--happen, especially when we're lost in an enchantment woven by the likes of Oberon or Titania or William Shakespeare;  or--as Jeni Mahoney & Ben Sahl's Throw of the Moon demonstrates-- even the guy from New Jersey who holds the follow spot.

Each of the eight plays in its own way is captivating and lovely: there's not a dud in the bunch. Sean Elias-Reyes, Katherine Gooch, Dale Ho, and Rachel Jackson play all of the characters, beautifully. I am particularly impressed by the extraordinary Mr. Ho, whose range is astonishing in Washington Square Dreams: from the effetely snobbish theatre critic of Forgeries of Jealousy to the ingenuous young Washy-hunter of St. Jude and the Donut Queen to the earnest student-turned-revolutionary of Guerilla Gorilla, Ho dazzles with his appeal and versatility.

The evenings are too brisk this time of year for Gorilla Rep to delight our ears and fill our hearts with their inimitable Shakespearean reveries. But Washington Square Dreams is the next best thing.

Han Ong's new play Watcher is fascinating but flawed. The fascination stems from Ong's characters, vividly though sketchily drawn (and, in every case, strongly played by the excellent cast). At the play's center is Angelo (Orlando Pabotoy), a young man of 19 who is trying to navigate a steady course in a situation of great uncertainty. His mother, Loretta (Mia Katigbak) has recently emigrated with him to New York from California, escaping a marriage of unspecified (but presumably dangerous) difficulty. Loretta works at the box office of a Times Square movie theatre; her co-worker, the middle-aged Cinquenta (Gilbert Cruz), is gently wooing her, despite Angelo's vocal objections.

As Loretta and Cinquenta cement their romantic relationship, Angelo drifts away from his mother. He eventually becomes involved with Nestor (Anthony Ruivivar), a savvy gay hustler who supplements his income by filming amateur porn videos. We also meet, briefly, Nestor's overbearing grandmother Tia Maria (Ching Valdes-Aran) and Loretta's equally overbearing (but well-meaning) relatives Bessie (Virginia Wing) and Jun (Jojo Gonzalez).

Watcher's flaw is that despite the interest and sympathy generated by this diverse cast of characters, the play itself makes very little sense. Loretta begins the play clearly both damaged and dangerously possessive of Angelo; yet by the end of the piece she is content to settle down with Cinquenta and without her now-absent son. Cinquenta, soft-spoken and accommodating throughout Act One, turns selfish and cold-hearted in Act Two. Most damagingly, Angelo is never satisfactorily explained: he's still in high school at 19, but we don't know if he's slow or just uninterested; he tells Nestor offhandedly that he's gay, but he seems curiously asexual. Watcher feels like Angelo's story, but we can't make out what kind of story it means to be: coming-of-age? coming out?

Ong oddly hangs his plot on the sex industry: Loretta's romantic crisis comes to a head when the movie theatre where she sells tickets converts to porn, and Angelo and Nestor become partners not sexually but in the sex film business. Sex for sale is made to feel really dirty in both cases: Why?

And so, despite the fine work of an exceptional company of actors and director/set designer Loy Arcenas, Watcher leaves us mystified and out in the cold.

When Real Life Begins is an extraordinary solo play about passion, love, and theatre. Written by Karen Sunde, performed by Raye Lankford, and directed by Ken Marini, it's a remarkable collaborative dramatic work, one that will impress you with its honesty and intelligence.

There are two stories in When Real Life Begins, inextricably linked but oppositely arced. One is tragic: the long, painful death from cancer of Sam, an actor and artistic director of a small off-off-Broadway company. It's recounted for us by Anne, his widow and partner, a woman whose sorrow and loss as she watches her husband ravaged and then defeated by a terrible disease are finally profound and unknowable.

At the same time, though, Anne finds herself blossoming as a theatrical producer, assuming the reins from--and carrying the torch for--her beloved Sam. Her discovery, within herself, of a passionate, artistic visionary, is startling and uplifting. Anne's journeys--the one characterized by the bitter, ugly details of trips to hospitals and bouts with despair and exhaustion; the other by the sheer joy of creation and accomplishment--form a moving and resonant counterpoint, and make When Real Life Begins a very special play indeed.

 Playwright Karen Sunde spins Anne's story in a single, long, breathless strand of stream-of-consciousness, moving backward and forward through time and in and out of Anne's mind and memory. Director Ken Marini provides physical metaphors for the story that are breathtaking in their simplicity and specificity: we're always aware that, alongside the sad romantic play that is at the core of When Real Life Begins, we're witnessing a theatrical novice coming into her own on stage.

Raye Lankford is nothing short of extraordinary as Anne, embodying the many sides of her character with tenderness and intelligence and truthfulness.

When Real Life Begins is calculated, I think, to put some distance between its story and the audience; that's due in part, I suspect, to the fact that the story it tells is true, having been lived first by Claire Higgins, the artistic director of Chain Lighting Theatre and producer of this play. I missed a more visceral emotional connection to the material; but the purity of the piece's vision and execution nevertheless packs an undeniable wallop. This is a play that you won't soon forget.

Catherine Gillet's Wyoming offers a glimpse inside the troubled mind of a psychologically disturbed woman. Its protagonist, Sheila, suffers from delusions and perhaps schizophrenia; we meet her, first, having an animated conversation with a man named Wes--and it's immediately clear that no such person actually exists. We next encounter her in a car with two friends, fellow inmates--and now escapees--from the institution where Sheila had previously found herself. After a fitful start, this trio decides to set off for the place that has always represented serenity and peace in Sheila's addled brain: Wyoming.

The remainder of this ninety-minute play traces the journey to that ideal state. It's filled with adventures ranging from mild (trying to figure out how to read the map) to dangerous (an encounter with a solitary stranger in a desolate spot in Kansas). Sheila and her comrades Jasmine and Annie squabble and bicker and gossip. And Sheila continues to commune with Wes, who seems to be guiding her to a magical Wyoming river where her troubles will somehow be lifted from her shoulders.

Playwright Gillet keeps things deliberately fuzzy and off-balance, in part to simulate the malfunctioning synapses of her main character's brain, and in part to distance us from Wyoming's bitter truth. When we figure it out, things do fall into place; but I'm still not convinced this is an entirely satisfying piece of writing. It's moody and evocative, letting us feel a little of what someone like Sheila might feel. But the final leg of Sheila's journey--the one she has to take without her friends Jasmine and Annie--feels abrupt and a little pat: after so much time in Sheila's company, this jolt of reality is hard to take.

78th Street Theatre Lab's staging of Wyoming is exemplary, with sensitive direction by Eric Nightengale and a quartet of fine performances by Marylouise Burke (Sheila), Rosalyn Coleman (Jasmine), Camilla Enders (Annie), and George R. Sheffey (doing excellent work as the various men the women meet during their journey). Lenore Doxsee's simple set and Alison Brummer's effective lighting enhance the production nicely.

It's not surprising, then, that Jack and Chris, the protagonists of Harris's play, meet while serving in the Peace Corps. It's the mid-60s, in Colombia, and these two fresh-faced idealists have arrived here determined to do some good. Things get more complicated when they fall in love: Jack, who is Roman Catholic and has never had a homosexual relationship before, is troubled by his feelings for Chris. He breaks things off, and returns to the United States. Chris sends letters asking Jack to reconsider, but Jack can't accept the idea of living as an outsider (this is the 1960s, remember): he wants a traditional life with wife and children, and nothing Chris says sways him.

But it's clear that Jack and Chris's relationship, though brief, is destined to be the most important one in either of their lives. After a few years of silence, they renew their friendship. The remainder of You Look for Me shows how it deepens and thrives, even as the two men pursue utterly separate lives: Chris marries and has two daughters, and works as a lawyer in the Washington, D.C, suburbs; Jack lives as an openly gay man in New York, becoming a partner in an architectural firm and dating a succession of men until finally finding, in middle-age, a true helpmate. Though there are occasional moments of "what-if," sexuality and sexual preference become largely beside the point as Jack and Chris's love deepens into a powerful bond of trust, acceptance, and mutual support.

You Look for Me is structured as a series of letters between the two men, which facilitates its near-epic survey of 35 years of personal and cultural history. Jack and Chris write about themselves, of course, but they also write about what they think about things: even seemingly trivial references to a favorite Honeymooners episode or Mayor Giuliani marching in the Gay Pride parade resonate because of what they reveal about these two men. At one point, early in their correspondence, Chris tells Jack that he believes that other people's opinions about the way he lives are none of his business. Near the end of the play, looking back from middle age, Jack acknowledges how grateful he is to have lived in such interesting times. There's wisdom in this: You Look for Me turns out to be mostly about the way a life is lived.

You Look for Me is acted admirably by Tom Foral (Chris) and Don Price (Jack). Director Elowyn Castle and lighting designer Jason A. Cina have done their jobs with simplicity and grace, though perhaps a bit more variety in staging and palette might be welcome. Harris's writing is evocative and unfailingly intelligent and touching and profound (though there are some mistakes in chronology and dates that he needs to repair): I found myself, most unexpectedly, tearing up in the play's final moments.