nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

I don't get what John Issendorf is trying to do in 3 Sisters Lounge. I'm very sure he's trying to do something: he's taken Chekhov's Three Sisters and reset it in a contemporary lounge bar, in a place that could be Soho but isn't. He's excised at least half of the play's text, and a few of its characters; but he's preserved plot, mood, and at least one major theme. He's added what he calls an Obligatory Avant-Garde Dance Number, and he's placed three TV screens on stage that play, for the first three acts, a muted videotape of The Poseidon Adventure.

The perfectly reasonable question is: what for? Unfortunately, the production doesn't yield a satisfactory answer. Is Issendorf going for parody? Possibly: he doesn't seem to have cut a single one of the sisters' whiny lines about longing to return to Moscow; 3 Sisters Lounge feels, at times, like a Chekhov cartoon. But most of the time this show feels serious instead of funny, so perhaps 3 Sisters Lounge is a face-value adaptation--a contemporary take on what's timeless and essential about the original.

Issendorf has absolutely got the mood right: the melancholy languor, the emptiness, the stifled desire all hang palpably in the stagnant air of the lounge. And a lot of the tangible changes that Issendorf has made to the play--switching its setting from a provincial estate to a lounge bar, first and foremost, but also turning Andrei into a fogged-out DJ and supplying Natasha with a cellphone--are dead-on, finding felicitously appropriate parallels between the world as we know it and the world as Chekhov knew it.

But, especially in Act IV, significant plot points like the duel between Baron Tuzenbakh and Solyony remain resolutely rooted in the 19th century, feeling anachronistic and out-of-place in this 21st century landscape. And that Obligatory Dance, while stunningly well-realized, feels thrown in. Where are we supposed to be, exactly?

If the concept feels fuzzy, the staging is dazzling throughout. And there are some super performances here. Paula Ehrenberg's whiny Baby Doll of an Irina is wonderfully valid, though annoying by design. Barbara Sauermann's gauche and nasty Natasha feels exactly right, and both Steve Sherling (Vershinin) and Tom Bartos (Tuzenbackh) have some terrific moments, especially in their long monologues. And Jason St. Sauver, hiply deadpan as diffident Andrei, scores the evening's biggest laugh.

It could be simply that Issendorf needs more time to realize his vision. As is, however, 3 Sisters Lounge is unsatisfying and incomplete, which is a shame given the enormous talent and imagination that has clearly gone into its creation.

A little more than halfway through the first act of Pulse Ensemble Theatre’s revival of Georges Feydeau’s farce A Flea in Her Ear, the jolt of comic energy the audience has been waiting for finally arrives with the entrance of Don Homenides de Histangua (Christopher Daftsios), a hot-headed, jealous Spaniard. As soon as he suspects that his wife, Lucille (Natalie Wilder) may be cheating on him, he erupts into uncontrollable paroxysms of physical and emotional rage. For Don Homenides, this is serious business. But, for the audience, this is just the perfect bit of over-the-top daffiness they’ve been expecting. As played by Daftsios, Don Homenides is so short-sighted, paranoid, and controlling that, as scary as he may be to the other characters, he can only cause fits of hilarity in the audience.

Daftsios is right in tune with the comic style that the rest of this Flea in Her Ear, which has been updated to 1940s New York, unsuccessfully tries to achieve. Unfortunately, the show isn’t about Don Homenides or his wife. It’s about Manhattan socialite Yvonne Chandel (Elaina Wahl), who so vehemently suspects that her husband Victor-Emmanuel (Michael Gilpin) is cheating on her that she sets out to trap him in the act. Since it’s a farce, there are plenty of slamming doors and mistaken identities. You can guess the rest from what I’ve already told you.

Director Alexa Kelly has steered the actors towards result-oriented performances that aim to “be funny,” instead of letting the comedy emerge out of how truthfully they’re playing the scenes. This results in making the cast look like they’re desperate for laughs, and prevents them from showcasing themselves in a flattering way. It also makes all of the characters look really stupid. Add to that some unimaginative staging–especially in Act II, where histrionics are favored at the expense of emotional truth right from the get-go–and you can imagine how tedious and one-note this Flea in Her Ear is.

Kelly is also not served well by her designers. Set designer Zhanna Gurvich, while getting much of the furniture right, makes a fatal error by decorating the walls of the Chandels' apartment entirely with beige draping, instead of trying to make it look like wallpaper. She also creates an Act II set–for the illicit hotel where everyone is trying to have an affair–that wastes much of the stage space and forces Kelly to block the scenes in cruelly unnatural ways. Bryan Keller’s lighting, unfortunately, helps in this regard. And, Terry Leong’s costumes, while doing fine by the men in the cast, manage to make all the women look terrible. (I must give kudos to the stage crew, however, who execute some deft set changes during A Flea in Her Ear’s two intermissions.)

A few of the other actors manage to rise above the onstage frenzy and give notable performances. Rick Coons excels as a speech-impaired secretary who can only pronounce vowels; Byron Loyd is very good as a cuckolded butler; and Joel Jeske does some nice work as Yvonne’s potential lover. As for the rest of the cast, they make up in enthusiasm what they lack in skill and execution.

Aside from so many slamming doors you’ll wonder why the flats don’t fall down, and a guarantee that you’ll be completely exhausted by the end of it, there’s little to recommend A Flea in Her Ear except for Daftsios’ superb performance. I hope we’ll see more of him in the future.

With Antigone, A.D., young Pilot House theatre company takes on its most ambitious project to date, and they are to be commended for that. The story of Antigone is a complex but very important one; adaptor/director Don Jordan clearly wants us to think hard about its implications in his solemn, contemporary rendering of the centuries-old tale.

Antigone is one of four children of Oedipus. Her play begins after her two brothers have killed each other in battle, one attacking and the other defending their ancestral home city of Thebes. Polyneices, the attacker, is condemned as a traitor by Creon, Antigone's uncle and the current King of Thebes; as such, he is denied proper burial. Antigone, placing familial duty over loyalty to the laws of her king, defies Creon's order and buries her brother. When her act is discovered, she is condemned to death by Creon. This in turn leads to the deaths of Creon's son Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, and of his wife. Thus the curse of Oedipus spreads to engulf the entire royal family.

In this bitter and brutal story, Jordan sees resonance most in the King's resolute tyranny: his Creon refuses to consider any point of view but his own, with tragic results. Antigone's character is less clearcut: her actions here sometimes feel less like the principled defiance of a political activist and more like the desperate measures of a religious zealot. (Of course, in a world where teenage girls blow themselves up to liberate the Palestinian people, it's not easy to tell the difference between the two. Which may be Jordan's point.)

The "A.D." in Jordan's title, by the way, comes from the replacement of a single Christian God for the traditional Greek gods in the narrative. It provides an interesting twist to a piece that is explicitly challenging and provocative.

Antigone, A.D. is performed by an ensemble of thirteen actors on a stark unit set by Orit Jacoby Carroll that is appropriately lit by Raquel Davis. Costumes, by Jessica Jahn, evoke the timelessness of the play, with some characters in modern dress and others in more traditional garb. The most effective performances, interestingly, come in smaller roles, especially Aaron J. Fili as the Sentry bearing the news of Antigone's defiance, and Jarel Davidow as the blind prophet Tiresias.

George Bernard Shaw had a good deal of fun deflating the egos of overwrought romantic schoolgirls, overtstuffed pompous military heroes, and just about the entire population of Bulgaria in his 1894 comedy Arms and the Man. This congenial satire is being given a jolly hearing at Jean Cocteau Repertory, under the direction of Ernest Johns, with Jason Crowl and Mark Rimer obviously having a fine time as two of the main characters.

The play begins in the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a preternaturally romantic young woman of the Bulgarian haute monde. She is engaged to marry military dazzler Major Sergius Saranoff, but we suspect that it is her mother Catherine, rather than Raina herself, who most approves that match. Anyway, into her bedroom this fateful night arrives Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary working for the Serbians (i.e., the Enemy). At present Bluntschli is fleeing battle, and he asks Raina to harbor him from the Bulgarians. Sensing an Adventure, Raina of course gives in. During the potentially scandalous evening they spend together (she's in her nightclothes and there's no chaperone), he tells her how he fills his bags with candy instead of ammunition and she dubs him her "chocolate cream soldier."

Complications ensue in Act Two, when Sergius returns from the war (victorious, I should add), along with his commander, Major Paul Petkoff, who is Raina's father. Sergius is here to claim his bride, though she is becoming more and more reluctant to be claimed. When he and Paul recount a story they heard about a Swiss who spent the night in the room of a Bulgarian young lady, Raina and Catherine become alarmed. And when Bluntschli himself turns up at the Petkoff household, all sorts of unforeseen (and entirely foreseable) stuff starts to happen.

Arms and the Man is easy fare; a forerunner, I think, to screwball comedy. Shaw scores laughs at each of his characters' expense; and lest you think he's being too unkind to the Swiss and the Bulgarians, he takes a shot or two at his British countrymen as well. (That said, some of the sweeping generalizations about how women are like this and Bulgarians are like that feel both snobbish and uninformed; they date the play rather severely.)

The Shavian social agenda plays out in a subplot involving Raina's forthright maid Louka and the Petkoff's subservient butler Nicola.  Director Johns hasn't found a way to make their story palatable, but neither did Roger Rees in the recent Roundabout revival; this, too, may just be hopelessly out-of-touch with contemporary sensibilities.

But the love triangle of Raina and her stuffy major and her chocolate soldier has plenty of appeal. Rimer (as Sergius) and Crowl (as Bluntschli) turn in vibrant, colorful performances; Amanda Jones' work as Raina is a bit uneven (I suspect it suffers from my still-vivid memory of Katie Finneran's lively portrayal at the Roundabout last year). Harris Berlinsky is delightful as Major Petkoff, and Marlene May is fine as Catherine: watch her mentally add up Bluntschli's net worth when he enumerates his inheritance. Carey Van Driest and Michael Surabian fill out the cast as the servants.

Arms and the Man isn't my favorite of Shaw's works, but it's nonetheless a good deal of fun. If this production is perhaps not the tasty, airy confection it could be, it's certainly a satisfying rendition–diverting frivolity for an audience that deserves some.

It's 2-3/4 hours long without an intermission. It tells a complicated--some would say convoluted--story involving dozens of characters and subplots. It's packed with every hoary theatrical cliché in the book. And it requires its audience to traipse around in the dark trying to catch up with a band of noisy but wiry actors who keep turning up in ever more unexpected (and distant) locations within Riverside Park.

It's Cymbeline, Gorilla Rep-style. Common sense says it shouldn't work, but it does. This is the most fun way I can imagine to introduce yourself to one of the Bard's lesser-known (and lesser) works. It's certainly one of the most fun ways I can think of to spend a summer night in Manhattan right now.

Gorilla Rep's Cymbeline is a living tribute to Shakespeare as storyteller: against the odds and our better judgment, we find ourselves utterly caught up in the thing, entranced and enchanted and eager to learn what's going to happen next. It's also a tribute to the artistry of Gorilla Rep's founder Christopher Sanderson, who has staged it in the most gloriously stage-y natural settings imaginable and paced it within an inch of its life to ensure that no one in earshot is going to be bored and that no one, no matter how slowly he or she trudges from one scene to the next, will miss anything important. It's masterful work, which shouldn't surprise us given Sanderson's previous outdoor productions of Shakespeare, though it probably does surprise us, given the immenseness--no, unwieldiness--of this particular play.

I'll do my best to encapsulate the story: Cymbeline, king of Britain at the time of Julius Caesar's invasion, has three children. The two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, were stolen by the soldier Belarius and are now being brought up in a cave far away, unaware of their true history. The daughter, Imogen, is married to the noble Posthumus Leonatus; but Cymbeline's Queen (who doesn't seem to have a name) wants her doltish son Cloten to marry Imogen, thus securing his succession to the throne. Cymbeline banishes Leonatus, who then gets mixed up with evil Iachimo, who bets Leonatus that he can seduce Imogen. Duplicitously, Iachimo convinces Leonatus that he has won the bet, causing Leonatus to order his servant Pisanio to kill Imogen; Pisanio instead persuades Imogen to disguise herself as a boy and journey to the place where Leonatus is so that she can see for herself what's going on. There, she meets up with Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus (only they have different names); Cloten shows up, too, disguised as Leonatus. Guiderius slays Cloten, leaving his body for Imogen to discover. Leonatus, meanwhile, gets captured by Roman soldiers under the command of Caius Lucius. While he is in jail, he is visited by four ghosts and then by Jupiter himself, who starts to set things right. Eventually, in the play's improbable and amazing final scene, everyone finds out who everybody actually is and a happy ending is provided.

That happy ending isn't a surprise, by the way: Cymbeline, for all its epic complications, never feels like anything so much as a fairy tale, especially under Sanderson's lighter-than-air direction. We are nevertheless transported to this magical, long-ago place and watch and listen breathlessly as this endlessly exciting story spins out. And we're amused by the plethora of cheap theatrics that Shakespeare applies so shamelessly, from mistaken identity to cross-dressing to the Merchant of Venice ring game to a deux-ex-machina (albeit a Roman god rather than the Christian One).

Sixteen actors, each possessed of boundless energy and greater talent, bring this pageant to life with gusto under the night sky. Particularly memorable are Michael Colby Jones as the virile, lusty Leonatus; Sean Elias-Reyes as dastardly Iachimo (watch him stroke his pencil-thin moustache, as if he were Snideley Whiplash); Jo Benincasa as impetuous young Guiderius and Ronald Messer as his more cautious brother Arivragus; Katharine Gooch as pure-hearted, clear-headed Imogen; Matt Freeman as the sneaky servant Pasanio; and Brian O'Sullivan as shrewd old Belarius.

Gorilla Rep's summer Shakespeare presentations are a great gift to New York City: believe it or not, they've got three different shows going on during the next few weeks. (The other two are As You Like It and Ubu Is King!) Get thee to at least one of them!

William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is a staggeringly unwieldy play. No less an authority on the subject than Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom wrote of it that it “will not abide a steady contemplation. One cannot even be certain that it behaves like a play: the plot is a chaos, and Shakespeare never bothers to be probable.” That’s as accurate a description of Cymbeline as any. And yet, it boasts some of Shakespeare’s finer, richer writing, and is completely satisfying and enjoyable for all of the reasons that make it troublesome.

So, how does one stage this conundrum of a play, which boasts virtues that are flaws and vice versa? Directors have been trying to answer that question for centuries. For Bartlett Sher, director of Theatre for a New Audience’s current revival of Cymbeline, it remains a mystery. He creates some striking visuals, has some inventive ideas, and gets some good performances out of the cast. But, ultimately, the choices he makes (as well as the ones he doesn’t make) end up trying to shackle a play that cannot be held.

The plot is way too complicated to relay here. Suffice it to say that the play is chock full of everything familiar to Shakespeare, and his legions of followers: two young lovers—Posthumus (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Imogen (Erica N. Tazel)—are separated by forces beyond their control, and must find their way back together amidst a sea of wicked stepmothers, long-lost children, banished lords, cross-gender disguises, mistaken identities, and war.

First of all, I’d like to say one good thing about this production, which is that it is not imbued with the heavy reverence for “Shakespeare” that weighs down so many potentially good productions of his plays. Many of the actors opt to speak in their own voices, instead of putting on the now-standard “good speech” voice that so many actor-training programs arm their graduates with, which makes them more comfortable with the language. There’s also a bold mix of historical eras and styles: Japanese noh drama, the wild west, and country music are all represented here. All of these moves help to refresh Shakespeare for the audience, and make his work a little more accessible.

Unfortunately, this Cymbeline has a problem with theme. Sher doesn’t seem to have a clear one, or if he does, he doesn’t communicate it clearly. He puts many fascinating and inventive stage pictures on display—he color-codes all of the play’s many locations with lights and costumes; he evokes a royal garden with nothing more than actors and flower-covered umbrellas. But, it’s never clear why he’s doing any of it. And, without any central idea to anchor them all to—without a moral to the story—they don’t mean much.

The acting falls into a similar trap. Everyone speaks the verse very smoothly and cleanly, but without purpose. Intentions are muddy, and, a lot of the time, one doubts that the actors even know what they’re saying. What follows is a lot of emotionally disconnected acting. Sher has let them get away with a lot of vocal rushing, also, which may speed the show along, but doesn’t allow the audience to connect to many of the sentiments being expressed.

As the young lovers, Stuhlbarg and Tazel don’t seem in love at all until they begin fearing the worst about each other. Stuhlbarg, especially, heats up after that, but then disappears for more than an hour. Tazel misses every opportunity Shakespeare provides to make Imogen sassy and interesting, or even a person. The usually excellent Boris McGiver fails magnificently as the villain, Iachimo. His performance suggests a refinement of all the bad choices made on the first day of rehearsal. He needs to be put on a tighter directorial leash in order to even come close to the cool, poker-faced scoundrel that Shakespeare wrote. Only Earl Hindman, Pete Starrett, and Roderick Hill make the most of their roles, as the exiled Belarius, and King Cymbeline’s missing sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, respectively. Their performances are full of what many of the other ones lack, and ground Cymbeline in not only its drama, but also its own looniness. They easily steal every scene they’re in.

In spite of all the eye candy, Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Cymbeline is pretty soulless. For a play as full of soul as Cymbeline, that’s a significant achievement, but not one that anyone would want to boast about.

The spring season at Metropolitan Playhouse this year has been about the notion of faith. Their first offering dealt with it explicitly: The Faith Healer pits a man whose entire life is defined by what he believes to be divine inspiration against others who are more skeptical. Now comes Moliere's Dom Juan, in a sparkling new translation by Alex Roe, and though at first glance it may not seem an obvious companion piece, it proves a far more compelling and urgent consideration of the subject at hand.

For Dom Juan turns out to be the story of a young man who learns, too late, that a life lived without faith in something bigger than oneself may not be worth living at all.  Don Juan's philosophy is based on self-actualization and only that: he's presented here not as a callow hedonist but as an intelligent individual whose belief system precludes any sort of higher power or spiritual existence. He lives according to a kind of moral code (of his own design), but his guiding principle is clearly to do what he wants when he wants, consequences be damned.

Roe does not shy from the notion that Don Juan's world view is shared by an awful lot of powerful people living in the world today; this gives the play a resonance that might surprise you. At the same time, Roe presents the piece not as polemic or allegory but as comedy—high and low—and the laughs flow easily and plentifully in his whimsically theatrical staging. Don Juan and his valet Sganarelle are each portrayed by a single actor (Tom Staggs and George Sheffey, respectively, both of whom are terrific). The other numerous characters are played by just three other actors, the remarkably versatile Stacey Cervellino, Sean Dill, and Stephanie Dorian. Together, they bring to life a diverse rosters of lovers, fools, and rogues, ranging from the irate, soon-to-be-shunned lady Charlotte (Cervellino) to Don Juan's hapless creditor M. Dimanche (Dorian) to a spectral Statue (Dill) who helps our protagonist learn the error of his ways.

It all adds up to a comic feast. Roe and collaborators Abby Smith and Asaf Ronen have fashioned deliciously expressive masks for the actors, a device that almost never works but here succeeds beautifully. Best of all is a suitcase full of masks for the Don himself, allowing him to put, so to speak, the proper face on for any occasion. Roe and Staggs have fun playing with them: there's a stunning moment in Act Two when Staggs's Don Juan, wearing different masks on either side of his head, becomes a literal embodiment of the term "two-faced."

Sheffey, meanwhile, gives a superb performance of Bugs Bunny-ish guilelessness and energy: watch, for example, his instantaneous, silent transition from valet to personal trainer as he prepares his master for a duel with an unexpected enemy.

Dom Juan moves lightly but incisively through adventures of women won and women spurned, honor assaulted and honor avenged. It's satire of the purest type: funny on the surface, pointed underneath. Finally, Dom Juan tells the truth about the human condition. There's plenty to laugh about during the two hours we're sitting in the theatre, and plenty more to think about after you get home.

If you've never seen Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, then the new production at Pearl Theatre Company is definitely for you: it's as clear and accessible a reading of the play as you're likely to come across: a splendid introduction to a classic Greek tragedy on themes both fundamental and timely. The story, from the very beginning of the legendary saga of the Trojan War, concerns King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces that will invade Troy. Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus, has lost his bride Helen to the Trojan adventurer Paris; thus the Greek invasion, for the sake of a woman, and one not so highly regarded at that.

The Greek armies have amassed at Aulis, where calm winds have prevented them from sailing on to Troy. An oracle tells Agamemnon that in order for the winds to return, he must sacrifice his first-born Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis. Agamemnon is torn between his duty to his army and his country, on the one hand, and his devotion to his family on the other; this conflict, between serving immediate interest or a perceived greater good, runs through the play and gives it its potency and resonance.

Agamemnon plots to get Iphigeneia to Aulis by telling his wife Clytemnestra that the warrior Achilles wishes to wed their daughter. This ploy, of course, unravels, and the results of Agamemnon's deception and eventual decision lead to the tragic end, not just of this play, but of the House of Atreus itself.

Director Shepard Sobel gives us a clear-eyed and objective read of the play, giving equal weight to all sides of the philosophical arguments presented in the piece. The primary advocates are Agamemnon, portrayed by Dan Daily as a profoundly good man cursed with a shrewd pragmatism; and Clytemnestra, rendered even-handedly by Carol Schultz, with passion but without venom. A chorus of two women, well played by Celeste Cuilla and Melissa Maxwell, provide running commentary on the play's issues. Among supporting players, the most noteworthy performances are Robert Hock's, as Agamemnon's attendant, and Michael Nichols', as the more reactionary Menelaus. Craig Siebels' unit set is evocative and interesting, and, with Robert Perry's lighting, serves the production nicely. But Melissa Schlactmeyer's costumes are less successful, suggesting, to their detriment, periods and locales other than ancient Greece.

Director Mary Zimmerman has solved none of the problems of that most problematical of Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure. For me the question has always been: why do actors and directors want to revisit this weird, unwieldy story? In it, the Duke of Vienna decides to abdicate from public life, ostensibly for a vacation. He knows the young man he leaves in charge, Angelo, to be both prude and hypocrite; he spies on him (disguised as a friar) and learns that Angelo is corrupt as well. Angelo nearly ruins the lives of three (relatively) innocent people--a young man named Claudio whom he sentences to death for the sin of fornication; Claudio's pregnant lover Juliet; and Claudio's chaste sister Isabella, whom he attempts to rape in exchange for her brother's life. The Duke waits until the very last moment before casting off his disguise and setting things right. He then banishes Lucio, the loud-mouth braggart who is also the only genuinely likable character in the play.

Okay, perhaps I've taken some liberties, but honestly, that really is the arc of the play: the Duke dallies with his townspeople, Prospero-like, for absolutely no good reason, and then emerges to "rescue them." If Measure for Measure has something more in it, I've yet to see what it is. Zimmerman and her company certainly don't reveal anything more about it in this production at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre. Joe Morton's Duke is pompous and windy and not much else; Sanaa Lathan's Isabella is convincingly innocent but enitrely passionless;  and star attraction Billy Crudup's Angelo seems not to be there at all--it felt to me like he was walking through the role that should be the centerpiece of the play.

There are some rewarding performances here, to be sure. John Pankow is most ingratiating as Lucio, and Christopher Evan Welch and Julia Gibson provide some broad comic relief as the managers of a local brothel. Best of all is Herb Foster as Escalus, who gives us a warm, generous, and most humane presence as the Duke's right-hand man, brightening up every scene he's in.

Zimmerman's design team lets her (and us) down badly, though, especially Daniel Ostling, whose maze of glassed-in terraces not only fails to provide a suitable environment for the play but also entirely obscures the Delacorte's renowned natural backdrop of trees and starlight.

Watching ancient Greek drama can be difficult for the modern playgoer. After two and a half millennia of Western civilization, Greek culture can seem alien and even barbaric. How else can you explain the tragic sympathy that Euripedes creates around Medea, a woman who kills her children to spite her unfaithful husband? Alfred Preisser, artistic director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, uses every dramatic tool in the theatrical toolbox to bring the ancient world into our own in his adaptation of Medea. The resulting production uncovers the dark, pagan face of the play by demonstrating that civilization in the past 2,500 years have only placed a mask on human nature, not changed it.

Preisser begins by adapting the script into modern speech and cutting the running time to just over an hour. He and his designers strip the setting to only a few well-chosen elements. Anne Lomel’s set contains only a metal platform flanked by steel towers. Christopher McElroen distinguishes between order and confusion by lighting patterns on the stage that spin at the moments of greatest energy and tension. Sound builds the performance’s atmosphere throughout, with design by Stefan Jacobs and music by Kelvyn Bell and David “Red” Harrington. The singing, often one or two words repeated by the chorus, accented by live percussion, uses the most basic musical instruments to stress the play’s primitive core.

Preisser and choreographers Tracy Johnson and Angela Hughes use the chorus also as a counterpoint to the action: through their dancing, six women, faces lined with paint, comment not on the action but on the actions’ implications. The dancers move, shout and stomp rhythmically to suggest a world more familiar with emotion than rationality. A choral leader (Zainab Jah) watches the action unfold, resembling some primal force as she leads chants, smears other characters’ makeup at their death, and extinguishes candles.

This leader eggs Medea on to her destiny when even the chorus hesitates, a physical incarnation of Medea’s instincts. With her motivation embodied onstage, the actress playing Medea (April Yvette Thompson) is free to concentrate on the emotions that her situation gives rise to rather than building a modern psychological portrait. Opposing her, Jason (Lawrence Winslow) is a man acting from understandable though despicable reasons; he embodies the smug practicality of rational thought, and his downfall occurs because he denies his own humanity.

Their choices reinforce Preisser’s vision of human nature stripped of the facade of civilization. The production presents a visceral dramatic experience, and more coherently than many large-budgeted productions. Preisser, by acknowledging the ancient source of his script, succeeds in reflecting the Greek culture in our own world. Midway through the show, three members of the chorus address the audience directly: “all history is a preamble to this moment” they say, claiming that we the spectators are therefore uniquely qualified to judge right and wrong. At that moment, audiences in Harlem may feel like ancient Athenians, witnesses to history who find themselves unable to remain apart from it.

In their program note, producer Peter Meineck and director Robert Richmond tell us that the word nothing was pronounced more like noting in Shakespeare's time; hence the central metaphor of '60s-era spies in their new production of Much Ado About Nothing. Meineck and Richmond have made their young Aquila Theatre Company modestly famous with their eclectic and original takes on classic works. With the present revival, one can't begrudge them their imagination or their fastidious, spectacularly detailed execution of their directorial concept.

But one can--should--question the concept itself. Noting for nothing? Historically true, perhaps; but hugely beside the point, it seems to me, and the evidence is right there on stage. Aquila's Big Idea for Much Ado feels grafted on the text, illuminating neither Shakespeare's intentions nor the play itself.

You'll recall that Much Ado tells the genial story of bickering would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick, along with the more conventional romance of Claudio and Hero, which is temporarily thwarted by villainous Don John. That blackguard's evil is exposed, hilariously, by the foolish local constable Dogberry. It's a play whose happy ending is apparent from the very start; one where almost nothing is at stake (hence the title!) and whose considerable pleasures come from the wit--here nimble, there broadly comic--with which Shakespeare has equipped his characters.

Richmond has reset the story in a post-modern spy-adventure-scape a la "The Avengers" (with echoes of "007" and others thrown in). The men are in smart black double-breasted suits with pastel shirts and ties; the women are in sexy vinyl cat suits. Movement is stylized and sleek; actors almost never leave the playing area, so that characters do indeed appear to be spying on one another throughout.

It's all terribly cool, but nothing in Richmond's staging ever showed me what connects this vision to the world of the play. Or, to put it more specifically: I don't think Beatrice is Emma Peel any more now than I did before I saw the show; what's more I don't think a woman as eminently sensible as Beatrice would ever allow herself to be seen in a vinyl cat suit.

Mostly, what I sense here is a production concept constantly getting in the way of a play. Scenes that should be uproariously funny--like the one where Dogberry questions Don John's lieutenant--fall horribly flat. (It wasn't just me, by the way: the audience simply didn't laugh.) The piece feels, more than anything else, directed: I was always conscious of the technical demands placed on the actors (most double or triple in roles; all are required to execute rigorous movement and choreography as well as sing, mime, and act clearly). That they all acquit themselves well is cause for admiration, but not for joy, which is what this production sorely needs.

Just when you despair of ever again seeing a Shakespearean comedy staged with the joyful brio that is its due, along comes the Pearl Theatre Company to show us all how it's done and remind us why we think of this playwright as perhaps the greatest of them all. Their Much Ado About Nothing sparkles! The wit is crackling, the melodrama is riveting, the broad farcical shenanigans induce stress-relieving belly laughs. Classic stage comedy doesn't get much better than this.

At the center of this inspired production are three invaluable players. If you've seen shows at the Pearl before, it won't surprise you that Ray Virta, Joanne Camp, and Robert Hock are outstanding in roles they were each born to play (i.e., Benedick, Beatrice, and Dogberry). Virta's Benedick rivals any I've come across: he's a delicious mix of intelligence, bravado, and—in the face of looming romance with Beatrice, the woman he's made a career of playfully abusing—sheer terror. I won't soon forget the look of panic that crosses his face when he realizes he must propose to Beatrice in front of people they both know; or the dopey, dewy-eyed stare that accompanies his foolish attempt to compose a song for his beloved. "The world must be peopled," he babbles happily; who can argue with that?

You sense, of course, that Camp's Beatrice would: that's why she's so perfect a match for Virta's Benedick. As elegant as she is tempestuous, this Beatrice is smart and sharp and quick; and also defiantly principled, when needed, and ardently romantic. The chemistry between Camp and Virta is palpable and intoxicating; they play the dueling couple as the most star-crossed pair this side of Verona. As they discover what we have known from the very beginning, we bask in the glow of their glittering naiveté.

Now consider Mr. Hock. Dogberry is the local constable who unwittingly uncovers the secret plan that propels the play's plot—the "much ado" of the title, if you will. He's a bit of a buffoon: he mangles the language on a steady basis, and he explodes with a kind of misplaced pride when a real live criminal labels him an ass, insisting that the Sexton put the remark in writing. In most hands, Dogberry is the play's fool. In Hock's, he's much more than that: there's an air of dignity and blithe innocence that transforms the character into a sublime satiric creation.

Pearl stalwarts John Wylie (as Dogberry's deputy, the even more foolish Verges), Celeste Cuilla (as Hero, the young woman whose thwarted marriage sits at the center of the story), Robin Leslie Brown (as Margaret, Hero's maid), Edward Seamon (as Hero's father, Leonato) and Dominic Cuskern (as Antonio, Leonato's brother—hilarious in a sword-fighting scene that is often cut in most productions) all provide their usual authoritative support. Guest actors Eric Sheffer Stevens (the villainous Don John), Evan Robertson (Claudio, Hero's intended), Matt Mundy (a boyish minstrel), and Andrew Firda (George Seacoal, another of Dogberry's henchmen) all register vividly, too.

The production, smoothly directed by J.R. Sullivan, sails blissfully along, despite its nearly 3-hour running time. (I don't think a single word has been omitted, and they all sound great.) It's staged on Beowulf Borrit's simple unit set, which serves double duty for Romeo and Juliet, which is playing in repertory with Much Ado About Nothing. Costumes, by Devon Painter, are lovely and evocative of time and place.

In a city filled with one-act plays and MTV-style quick-cuts, the Pearl's lush production of Much Ado About Nothing, brimming with sophistication and proudly taking its time, is a godsend. It's also a genuine pleasure: don't miss it.

Spartan knows Shakespeare.

The Spartan Theatre's new production of Much Ado About Nothing is a delight from start to finish; the antidote to the gimmicky revivals of so-called classics that proliferate all over Manhattan every summer. This young company, at least on the evidence of this show, gets it right. Their sole desire is to tell the story that Shakespeare wanted to tell: it's absolutely clear that director Leo Roberts and the company of twelve actors have spent their time trying to understand the play rather than interpret it. The result is a witty, wonderful production that reminds you why Shakespeare is so good--and why his work is meant to be performed and not studied. Hooray!

Please check out the synopsis supplied by the Spartan folks (reprinted above) if you need to, and then read on. The play begins with a lively spontaneous demonstration celebrating the return from some unnamed war of Don Pedro, Claudio, Benedick, and Don Pedro's sullen younger brother Don John. Quickly, the plot spins into motion: Benedick and Beatrice start sparring with each other, Claudio asks Don Pedro to speak to Leonato on his behalf about marrying Leonato's daughter Hero, and Don John begins conspiring with his man Borachio to sabotage everyone else's happiness.

Don Pedro also enlists Claudio, Leonato, Hero, and Hero's servant Ursula to help him ensnare Benedick and Beatrice into admitting their love for one another. And in the midst of carrying out Don John's wicked plan, Borachio gets caught by a night watchman named George Seacole, who brings him to the dim-witted constable Dogberry for some vigorous (and hilarious) questioning. As the title suggests, despite all of these complications, everything gets sorted out by the end: here the various couples swirl merrily around the stage to the tune of "You Always Hurt the One You Love" as the lights fade out.

Roberts's production is simple and direct, emphasizing what's archetypal and true about Shakespeare's plot and characters and letting them--and of course the play's glorious language--weave their magic spell, unencumbered and unhindered. A few liberties are taken: there's a giant banner across the back wall of the stage that says "Welcome Home, Heroes!" (which boosts exposition along neatly); there's a delicious gag involving a cell phone; and Benedick sings snippets of Kenny Rogers' "Lady" and a couple of other schmaltzy soft rock ballads whilst trying to find the right poem with which to woo his lady Beatrice.

But mostly the actors just play their roles, with enormous conviction and with earnest good humor, which has the effect of engaging and involving us in Much Ado in ways we neither anticipate nor expect. This is a production where we actually are moved by Hero's protestations to Claudio when he renounces her at their wedding; where we laugh unabashedly and out loud at Dogberry's skewering of the language and general buffoonery. Nobody in the theatre is just going through the motions of honoring a classic here: this is a production that breathes!

The entire cast does splendid work. Robert Casey, Jr. brings a sweet, serious earnestness to Benedick that's disarming and unexpected; watch, for example, how he transforms the speech that begins "Will Your Grace command me any service to the world's end?" into the strained embarrassment of a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Rebecca Poole's Beatrice is every bit his match and then some, fiery and confident and vibrant, with just the right touch of sentimentality. They're a couple to root for.

William Franke and Christina Lazarakis are fine as Claudio and Hero, giving this younger pair of characters more sparkle than we're used to. (I'd like to see Lazarakis's Hero melt a bit more willingly into Claudio's arms at the play's ends, but I can understand the choice she makes there.) Darlene Violette is lively and interesting as the servant Margaret, Chip Gudger is an appealing rogue as Borachio, Jesse Ontiveros is sly and likable as Don Pedro, and Peter Kendall is believable as the mercurial Leonato. Matt Stinton is all adolescent angst as brooding Don John, throwing more than one convincing tantrum on stage. Sean Judge is appropriately helpful as Friar Francis and appropriately foolish as the night watchman, while Sarah Sutel is so effective as the lady's maid Ursula and Dogberry's assistant Verges that it wasn't until the curtain call that I realized they were being played by the same actor. And Robert Grady very nearly steals the show in the enviable part of Dogberry. Decked out in an array of medals and patches and ribbons, he launches a full frontal assault on common sense and the English language that's as hilarious as it is fun. Wearing a goofy expression on his open face that reminds us of no one so much as Homer Simpson, he is irresistible.

As is this entire production of Much Ado About Nothing: this is a show that leaves us not just happily satisfied, but wanting more. If we're lucky, we'll get it; I know I'll be eagerly awaiting news of the next Spartan Theatre offering.

Timeless drama is timeless because human beings, fundamentally, haven't changed much in two or three thousand years of so-called civilization. At a moment of heightened consciousness of our puny impotence in the face of grand tragic events, a play like Oedipus the King reminds us that it has always been thus. And if the brutal inevitability of the gods quashing the hubris of an arrogant man doesn't exactly reflect the particular circumstances of the irrational and unpredictable terrors that New Yorkers face every day nowadays, the doleful lamentations of a chorus of ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire resonates mightily.

So how grateful we must be to companies like Jean Cocteau Repertory, who keep the classics alive and remind us why they're classic with clear-eyed and illuminating productions like this. Eve Adamson, the company's founder, is at the helm of this Oedipus the King. As usual, she has delineated the through-line of the play with assurance and authority. Adamson focuses us squarely on the big issues Sophocles presents in the play: Can we ever escape our destiny? And can anything but catastrophe result when a mere man goes head to head with the forces of nature?

The familiar story--rendered here in accessible, intelligent blank verse by translator Robert Fagles--plays out almost balefully. A plague has struck Thebes, and Apollo's oracle has indicated that the murderer of the late king Laius is the cause. The current king, Oedipus, who took the crown when he solved the riddle of the Sphinx, is determined to root out the transgressor. To his horror, mounting evidence suggests that the enemy may in fact be himself. Eventually his wife Jocasta, a messenger from his presumed birthplace of Corinth, and a shepherd who once served Laius all provide testimony that proves ineradicably that Oedipus has fulfilled the prophesy of his own youth and that of his dead father.

This mother of all tragedies brims with the stuff of great drama: the pull of events, horrible and overweening, is unmistakable and immutable. Adamson makes it all both immediate and remote, giving the principals moments of naked passion that we can't help but react to and recoil from, while at the same time stationing a three-man chorus (in more or less contemporary garb) between the play and the audience. They become a filter for the play's excesses, or a barrier: as they wail powerlessly to the gods about their fates, we realize how primitive was the world in which Sophocles lived and how removed from it is the America of free will and individualism and rewarded initiative. I don't think that Adamson is necessarily making a value judgment, by the way; she's just showing us a fatalistic mindset that is radically different from the one most of us live by. And she raises an interesting question: exactly who has the hubris now?

The production is played on a gorgeously stark set of ground and bare-limbed trees, designed by Robert Klingelhoefer. Adamson has, as usual, provided her own lighting (assisted by David Kniep), which serves the staging admirably. The company is excellent, with particularly commendable work offered by Harris Berlinsky as the prophet and the shepherd, Jason Crowl as Creon, and Elise Stone as Jocasta. Mark Rimer gets to stretch himself in the gargantuan role of Oedipus: if he doesn't quite achieve the profound and total sense of loss that's required at the play's end, he gives a compelling and vivid reading of the man on the way down.

You will not find much to comfort you in Jean Cocteau Repertory's Oedipus the King. But you will discover some essential truths about humankind, truths that great poets understood even in a world that seems--to us, anyway--to have been less well understood than our own.

Gorilla Rep's new production of Othello is so rivetingly involving that I found myself wishing that I didn't know how the play turned out. Once the villainous Iago sets his intricate plan in motion, transforming Othello from a mighty and respected warrior to an impotent and murderously obsessed monster, it's nearly impossible to resist being drawn into the story; Christopher Carter Sanderson's taut, focused staging underscores its relentless, inevitable pull. If you've never read or seen Othello, then you really must see this one; and even if you know the play well, you'll discover its savage, raw power anew in this exceptionally well-realized performance.

Two fundamental ideas differentiate this Othello from others of recent memory. First, the power relationship between Othello and Iago is exceedingly well-realized: this isn't one of those renditions where you spend all your time wondering why the thing isn't called "Iago." To be sure, David Blasher is a vivid, magnetically evil Iago here, but Reggie Austin's robust and vigorous Othello is always firmly at the evening's center. It's clear almost immediately that this commanding officer Othello is indeed in command; Iago is cagier and craftier but not necessarily smarter than the man he's chosen for his enemy, which makes for a more compellingly interesting match-up than usual.

The other ace up director Sanderson's sleeve is his contention that Othello is about a clash not of races but of cultures. He realizes this notion by casting an African-American actor as Iago: Othello's "otherness" is achieved by the sharply contrasted personal styles of Austin and Blasher rather than by the color of their skin. Sanderson reminds us that Othello is a drama of obsession and jealousy, not of race relations; freeing us from the baggage of black versus white puts us wholly in thrall of Shakespeare's canny and alarmingly beautiful portrayal of pure love envenomed.

So, as Hamlet once said, the play's the thing here. Gorilla Rep fans will be surprised to learn that the entire drama--2 3/4 hours of it, uncut and without intermission--is played on a very stage-like platform at the top of Summit Rock in Central Park; the audience doesn't troop around after the actors but instead sits still, on benches and on the ground. There's a majestic verdant backdrop of grass and trees to remind us of the grandeur and universality of Othello's themes. And there's a strange conspiratorial intimacy in watching actors in the dark without the usual theatrical trappings of proscenium, overhead lighting, scenery, etc. that makes the experience of watching this Othello spectacularly immediate and entirely engaging. Such is the splendid paradox of outdoor theatre.

The only other thing I need to tell you is that the entire ensemble of thirteen actors assembled for this production is exemplary. Austin's Othello and Blasher's Iago have already been praised here; I will add that Tracy Appleton invests her Desdemona with intelligence, pluck, and moral courage, all of which are usually absent from this character; that Roy Arias (Roderigo), Walter Brandes (Cassio), and Desiree Burch (Emilia) create fully-fleshed-out individuals in the key supporting roles; and that the others of the company--John Basiulis, Nicola Biden, Josh Drimmer, Ran Aubrey Frazier, James Luze, Betty Wolf, and Jonathan Wolf--are uniformly fine, many of them in multiple roles.

There will only be six more performances of Othello this summer. Did I mention they're free? All you need to do is show up at Summit Rock and allow Shakespeare and Gorilla Rep to work their magic on you.

Liev Schreiber's Iago makes the new production of Othello absolutely must-see theatre. Schreiber's work here is extraordinary: an arresting, endlessly fascinating characterization that makes us pay attention to a too-familiar play; makes us understand the work and the world anew, in fact. It's acting of the finest caliber: the performance of the year, probably.

Have I got your attention? Good: I can't remember being this excited by an actor's take on a classic role in a very, very long time. What Schreiber gives us in his Iago is a portrait of an ordinary man drawn to do evil. It's a very contemporary take that never feels untrue to Shakespeare: this Iago is a weakling and a coward, one who has positioned himself as a victim; one who, as the promotions and women and other imagined entitlements pass him by, rages and rails in his powerlessness and then plots revenge on the world that has snubbed him. No single-mindedly evil monster, this; nor a diabolical scheming genius. This Iago is an Everyman, perhaps a bit shrewder than average, whose petty grievance against what feels like an unjust conspiracy against him turns into an obsession.

Schreiber's Iago, in short, has something in common with the terrorist. What we get to witness, in this Othello, is the derailment of a beautiful mind. In the intimate Anspacher Theatre, each arched eyebrow, each nervous half-laugh, each wince of pain or perverse pleasure registers acutely. The actor places this tragic figure under a microscope, and lets us chart his disintegration with excruciating and exquisite detail.

I wish I could tell you that the rest of Doug Hughes' staging of Othello equaled Schreiber's Iago; unfortunately, it doesn't. The trappings, first of all, are bigger than they need to be--lots of portentous music and grandiose lighting and sparse but overdone scenery mar the proceedings (and on more than one occasion, they bring things to a complete halt). The work of the ensemble is only spotty: George Morfogen's wise, noble, and beneficent Duke of Venice adds a good deal to our appreciation of the play, as does Kate Forbes' secure, vibrant, altogether grown-up Desdemona. But Becky Ann Baker's Emilia is shrill and coarse; and she doesn't seem to be up to making sense, let alone beauty, out of the verse she's called upon to speak. And Keith David's Othello is finally unconvincing: he's impressively commanding as the wounded, angry cuckold, but when it comes time to carry out Desdemona's death sentence I sensed the actor pulling back--the passion and the conviction both seemed strangely absent.

But Hughes' work with Schreiber in creating this Iago is masterful. Scenes like Brabantio's tirade against the Moor and Iago's eleventh-hour comforting of Desdemona play as if you've never seen them before, feeding and fueling the vision of Iago as the real tragic hero of this complicated play. There's a clarity and sharpness of focus that cuts through the complexity and forces us to see this fellow anew. It's a thrilling experience.

Schreiber speaks the words in a gorgeous sonorous voice that brings to mind Burton's; his unshakable sense of hangdog supercilious inadequacy made me think, at one point, of Wile E. Coyote.  Schreiber's work here is electrifying: I found myself watching him wherever he was, whether reacting impassively in a corner or brazenly claiming his destiny center stage in a blazing pool of light.

This is, I think, a performance they'll be talking about for years. Even if this isn't an Othello to remember, Liev Schreiber's Iago is one you'll never forget.

The basic boy-meets-girl romance is probably the most popular story in human history. It’s no surprise: as much as people love a good tale of adventure, they can’t really relate to it, while almost everyone knows what it’s like to fall in love. But what makes Romeo and Juliet in particular one of the most enduring romantic tragedies? Five or six years ago, Baz Luhrmann’s melodramatic movie version substituted visual flash for Shakespeare’s poetic dazzle, proving that the story isn’t just in the poetry. Or more accurately, it’s not just in the verse: the play shows how love changes people, a poetic sentiment if there ever was one. Romeo turns from a self-absorbed boy into a man giving himself wholly to another; Juliet moves from demure frivolity to strong-willed decisiveness. Much of acting Shakespeare is about choosing between the speech and the action—the poetry of the words and the poetry of the characters. At The Pearl Theatre, director Shepard Sobel’s Romeo and Juliet opts for a traditional approach to the drama. This provides a good counterpoint to the film, but taken on its own it makes for less than a full evening.

A brief summary for those who haven’t looked at the play since high school English class, listened to West Side Story recently, or rented Shakespeare In Love: in Verona, the Montague and the Capulet families are engaged in a kind of gangland war. Romeo and Juliet, children of these opposing houses, fall in love and marry in secret. When Romeo’s friend is slain in a brawl, Romeo retaliates by killing Juliet’s cousin and is exiled. Juliet meanwhile has her hands full with an arranged marriage to a rich suitor. To avoid the wedding, she takes a potion that simulates death; Romeo returns to find her body in a crypt and kills himself, and she follows suit when she awakens.

Sobel, aware that every person in the Western hemisphere is acquainted with this story, focuses on the play’s beauty. The costumes, by Deborah J. Caney, are sumptuous and only vaguely Elizabethan, and the wide wooden stage, by Beowulf Boritt, matches them with its comfortable, earthy texture. In addition, the actors speak each line with an ear toward its poetic value rather than its evocation of character. Because of this, Shakespeare’s cadences bounce along beautifully, but his action gets lost. The resulting evening goes by without much ado, full of beautifully spoken poetry but lacking vivid moments that make the play live onstage. While the audience knows what will happen, that isn’t the same as watching the action unfold.

However, this does give certain performers the chance to display their talent for speaking Shakespearean verse. As Juliet’s Nurse, Robin Leslie Brown raises smiles with her bawdy, foolish prattle. Eric Sheffer Stevens makes the minor role of Benvolio into a major player in Verona’s conflict; his character embodies Verona itself, torn between violent impulse and the desire for peace.

At the heart of the play, the lead couple (Christopher M. Rivera and Rachel Botchan) conveys the excitement of love at first sight in their early scenes together, and in the balcony scene they avoid the trap of reciting every famous line with quotation marks around them. But as the play progresses, Botchan outclasses Rivera. Rivera captures Romeo’s cloying self-indulgence early in the show, but never develops it into maturity. Botchan’s Juliet is not only Romeo’s equal, she’s his better: more honest, and ultimately more stable. Her suicide seems much more reasonable than Romeo’s, the decision of a woman against the passion of a boy. In this production, Juliet grows up but Romeo does not.

This problem, added to the production’s bland and too-even tone, makes The Pearl’s Romeo and Juliet less than thrilling. Fans of traditional interpretations of Shakespeare may find the evening worthwhile, but those looking for Shakespeare with bite should look elsewhere.

There came a moment about halfway through Speed Hedda, Fabulous Monsters’ deliriously fun all-male drag reconstruction of Hedda Gabler, when I was struck by how successfully the Los Angeles-based troupe was pulling this enterprise off. Hedda, now a statuesque, pill-popping blond, sits in the middle of her serene, suburban living room, amongst the rest of the cast, and declares, “If only one had the balls!” The line is, of course, meant to have a double meaning: one within the context of the show, and also as a joke about Hedda’s obliviousness to the fact that she’s being played by a man. The night I attended, it got a decent enough laugh from the audience, but one not nearly as big as I’d anticipated considering its obvious design. And, then, it occurred to me that the entire audience (myself included) was so involved in the show, we’d forgotten that the women weren’t actually women! I don’t know if that was director Robert Prior’s intention, but I sure appreciated it.

Speed Hedda updates Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama to 1960s America. The basic plot remains the same: Hedda (Mark Brey) is trapped in a loveless marriage to bookish academic George (Jay Smith) that she yearns to be released from. But, from there, Prior (who also wrote this adaptation) does some embellishing. Now, instead of playing the piano in times of high duress, Hedda turns on her hi-fi system, which plays a steady stream of bossa nova, torch songs, and Camelot. Thea (Tim Dunaway) is now a big-haired, mod go-go girl. Eliot (also played by Jay Smith), Hedda’s iconoclastic old flame, is now a beatnik renegade. And Judge Brack has transformed into the hedonistic Dr. Brock (Chris Wells). Prior’s biggest addition, however, is turning Hedda into a speed addict, which, viewed within the context of the Ibsen’s original, explains a lot about her mood swings.

The show doesn't have any political agenda, aside from suggesting that all may not have been well under the "Camelot"-like veneer of 1960s America. Suburban discord may have gone deeper than we thought, which would explain why millions of people were legally being prescribed speed during that era. On the whole, though, Speed Hedda comes off more as a fun evening out than as a socio-political statement.

Prior clearly loves B-movies and soap operas–both of which he spoofs lovingly in Speed Hedda–and freely lets the rules of both genres govern the play. Everything, from the acting to the subplots and the costumes, is riotously over-the-top. It’s Ibsen à la Imitation of Life.

Prior also employs film techniques–such as jump cuts, close-ups, montages, and an onstage movie screen that shows credits and off-stage action to significantly reduce the amount of expository dialogue and make seamless scene transitions–that permit the entire show to be performed in a lean, mean 80 minutes.

The entire cast is perfect, especially the "women." Dunaway shines in his double role as Thea and George's Aunt Juju, differentiating them vividly. And Brey is superb as Hedda. They both make exceptionally convincing women, and, before long, have tricked the audience into forgetting that they're really men. The "men" are also excellent. Wells is sublimely smarmy as Dr. Brock. Smith shines as George, but slips up as Eliot, even though he differentiates the two as Dunaway does his two characters. I don't know if this is because he overplays Eliot's surliness, or because he's not quite as at home playing Eliot, or if because Eliot appears so late in the show that we're already too used to seeing him as George, but Smith is not quite as successful as Eliot. On the whole though, the acting is terrific.

Speed Hedda is just what the doctor ordered (no pun intended). It's a glorious camp-fest powered by dynamic ensemble acting, and a sense of ridiculousness that will undoubtedly brighten up a gloomy winter day, and tickle the funny bone of every person who sees it.

It took me a while to accept the crazed faces of the Theban women-gone-wild in this latest offering of Euripides’ masterpiece The Bakkhai. The evening begins with the maenads smeared in mud and not much else gyrating and conjuring to “oriental-rhythm-techno-fusion music." Their savage looks and tribal-like movements could have been construed as highly humorous. Something clicked, though, and I can’t exactly say what. Somehow they pulled me into their world, and I stayed there for about the first hour of the 90-minute play.

The Bakkhai is Black Moon Theatre Company’s premiere production, and Artistic Director Rene Migliaccio has chosen a clear, poetic translation by Paul Roche to introduce the company into the New York off-off Broadway scene. He’s also chosen to give Dionysus a new face—or rather a gaggle of new faces. The women that Dionysus plies with wine, dance and other acts of pleasure are also the facilitators of his mortal form. They speak in unison as his voice, and his body takes shape through the use of mask and switches from female to female throughout the play.Nikolai Kinski, son of Klaus, is dually featured as both King Pentheus and his mother, Agave. He has the difficult task of playing the cold and logical King and his wildly mistaken mother, who tears her son into pieces under Dionysus’s vengeful spell. Migliaccio’s choice to cast the talented young Kinski as both mother and son was chilling and grotesque, and Kinski’s powerful stage presence continually unifies the production.

Migliaccio’s decision to represent Dionysus through the women of Thebes is effective and at times confusing. I got a fleeting image of the possibility of the chorus willfully conjuring Dionysus themselves in an effort to be released from the mortal boredom of everyday life. Their wild eyes also begin to make more sense as the play progresses. The women must appear to fully embody chaotic passion and then quickly switch to embody the god himself, which they succeed at doing with a sustained, focused energy for much of the piece.

The trouble with Migliaccio’s decision to unify his chorus as Dionysus is that it begins to weigh heavily on the play’s pace. The trance-like quality of the womens’ voices, although beautifully effective in the beginning, fails to grow in intensity along with the natural rhythms of the text. It also becomes increasingly hard to follow the confrontations between the chorus, Dionysus, and Pentheus.

That being said, the overall clarity of language and emotion continually shines in the production without the ensemble needing to resort to naturalism to facilitate it. The gods of naturalism have descended upon the speech and staging of many a Greek tragedy these days, and in a time when suddenly nothing seems arbitrary or commonplace anymore, the heightened emotions that accompany tragedy are brimming at the surface of everyday life. It’s a pleasure to see this company tackling The Bakkhai’s emotional and physical challenges with such veracity.

To get at the tragedy’s emotional core, Migliaccio utilizes his own “signature style” that he defines as Expressionistic Realism, which seems to be a device to reach the heightened language and emotions of a classical text from the outside in, through gesture and physical stimulation, rather than the notion that an actor’s emotions will in turn inform his or her physical choices.

The Bakkhai’s timeless themes of reason vs. chaos, man vs. god, and passion vs. logic are clearly weighed against one another in Black Moon Theatre Company’s inaugural production. Their effort is visually stimulating, risky and emotionally present without being over-the-top.

Why do we need theatre companies like Jean Cocteau Repertory? Because they show us, time and again, why classic works of theatre are classic:  actors and directors here don't self-indulgently reinvent famous plays to show us how smart and talented they are; they reanimate and revivify old scripts to remind us why their authors are (or, in some cases, should be) revered.

Case in point: August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. On Broadway, last fall, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren turned this play into a showcase for their not inestimable talents; fun to watch, in a way, but providing no substantive answer to the entirely reasonable question, "why are you showing me this play, and why now?"

No such question will plague you after you've seen Jean Cocteau Rep's Dance: director Karen Lordi and actors Craig Smith, Elise Stone, and Jason Crowl make this nearly 100-year-old play at once immediate and eternal, even while placing it squarely in the progression of modern drama from Ibsen to Beckett.

Strindberg's play is set in a fortress on a remote island off the coast of Sweden, where Edgar, an Army captain, and Alice, his wife, who used to be an actress, live in a marriage that is more bitter stalemate than loving relationship. It's nearly their 25th anniversary, and as if to help them commemorate their enduring love/hate, Alice's cousin Curt arrives from the mainland. Curt introduced the pair years ago, and although he hasn't seen them in more than a decade, Edgar and Alice prove ready—eager—to sink their teeth into him, embroiling him in the deadly earnest waltz (or tango—pick your favorite) that is their life.

What I like best about this Dance of Death is that for once the three antagonists are more or less equally matched. Craig Smith's Edgar is a petty tyrant and a coward, a masterful manipulator who knows how to instigate and chide and wheedle and bully to bend others to his will. Elise Stone's Alice, aware of the inequities in status imposed on her sex, is a shrewd, cunning spider, spinning an intricate web of intrigue and innuendo to make sure she gets her way. For both, the marriage has devolved into a harsh, endless game: more than once, Smith and Stone's characterizations made me think of Edward Albee's George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so much so, in fact, that I even began to wonder if the children they keep talking about in "the city" really exist.

 Now enter Jason Crowl's Curt, descending upon them so unexpectedly yet so welcomely. From his perspective, it seemed to me, he's a perverse angel from God come to visit their peculiar Garden of Eden, to judge him and to tempt her. From their point of view, he's Godot, at last arrived. That he ultimately proves entirely unsatisfactory to Alice and Edgar is the point, I think; and so the play ends as it began, with the couple stuck together in this place they call "little hell," in each other's company eternally, one imagines—a two-person, endlessly looping Huis Clos.

What's exciting of course is that all of this and, I suspect, a lot more is suggested by this production: Lordi and her actors fill the theatre with Strindberg's possibilities and leave them to us to draw them out and fit them together. The play's fundamental strength is palpable: its ideas about human psychology and relationships and behaviors are compelling and provocative and even, sometimes, profound. Stone, Smith, and Crowl—whose long years working together on the Cocteau stage inform every moment of this piece—unravel and uncover these ideas for us, letting us discover what we will from Strindberg's rich, dense text.

Important contributions are made by set designer Robert Klingelhoefer, who has designed a stark, barren sitting room that suits and defines Edgar and Alice perfectly. I particularly love the desk where they play cards, too large to work comfortably, but clearly impossible to replace by a pair so intractably locked in place. Robin I. Shane's costumes, Brian Aldous' lighting, and Robert Pound's score also serve the work commendably.

Whether or not you've seen The Dance of Death before, this production is invaluable and essential theatregoing. It is, of all things, almost a joyous experience—intellectually exhilarating, at any rate: a rewarding play of ideas and an elucidating lesson in how these ideas have evolved in the century since Strindberg first thought about them.

In Tom Stoppard’s fantasia on Elizabethan tragedy, Shakespeare in Love, John Webster is portrayed as a creepy street urchin fond of torturing small animals, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow’s betrayer. In reality Webster was the son of a businessman who supplied cartage for theatre folk and their many theatrical enterprises around the city of London during the late period of the Virgin Queen’s reign. In all likelihood, therefore, Webster grew up knowing the most regarded players and playwrights of his day, albeit from the backstage worker’s point of view. One can only speculate about the kinds of resentments this would have engendered in the budding poet, but the sublimated torments he visits on actors through their characters offers some clues. Stoppard may have distorted the facts of what we know of Webster’s childhood, but his characterization of the dramatist as an embittered sadist suffering from arrested development dovetails with the sense one gets of Webster from his work, especially his greatest achievement, The Duchess of Malfi.

The Duchess is a very odd play. Its action stretches out over the course of several years. The title character has only five lines in her first appearance on stage and is killed off in the fourth act. The first scene of the play modulates from blank verse to prose back to blank verse, and then back again. Webster’s little joke is that, contrary to the standard dramaturgy of the time, it’s the Duchess’s aristocratic brothers, Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal, who speak in the prosaic. However, he quickly seems to tire of this device, and the rest of play, with the important exception of the villain, more or less adheres to strict metrical parameters. It’s this same villain, Bosolo, who avenges the Duchess’s death—a death that he himself has orchestrated and which he directs.

In addition to wreaking havoc with the structure of the play, Webster takes every opportunity to remind his audience that, yes, we are watching a PLAY, something that is nothing more than an inherently false sequence of theatrical conventions. The dismembered corpse of the Duchess’s secret husband, Antonio, turns out to be exactly what it is—a mannequin drenched in stage blood. As she is about to be strangled, the Duchess spins an elaborate metaphor describing death and her acceptance of its inevitability; part of its meaning depends on the audience’s awareness of an actor about to make her final exit. Webster goes so far as to wink at the audience over the arbitrary way in which he kills off Antonio. After Bosolo is asked why he stabs Antonio (in a case of mistaken identity, although for whom Bosolo mistook him is entirely unclear), he actually says, "I know not how;/Such a mistake as I have often seen/In a play."

Other examples of Webster’s metatheatrical foolery are too many to list here, but suffice to say that one can’t help but get the feeling that if Webster were writing today he would be one of the darlings of downtown theatre. There’s the same preoccupation with obsessive, twisted, preferably intrafamilial, sexuality; the same Baroque violence; the same exhausted sense that every possible theatrical trick has been played and the only viable strategy for dealing with this creative impasse is to mock it. However, what makes Webster’s theatre different from ours is that within this shiny, plastic setting he places real diamonds and pearls of feeling and poetry. Characters may complain of the tediousness of their guilt, but guilt and lust and honor are very real moral conundrums for these people, not attitudes to be tried on and taking off at will. And the language he gives them to express their experiences of these passions ranks second only to Shakepeare’s in its startling originality and imaginative scope.

It’s in elucidating Webster’s language that the cast of The Queen’s Company scores their highest mark. The words are, for the most part, sensitively and easily spoken; line readings are clean, with little of the verbal filigree that mars so many downtown productions of classic plays, and the pace is fast. As a result, the auditor of this production is splashed with a clear, swift-running stream of Webster’s poetry. Unfortunately, when it comes to sounding the depths of human experience lying beneath the surface of his words, Rebecca Patterson’s production falls woefully short. It’s not that her players couldn’t be up for the task—on the contrary, the show is well cast and the acting is quite fine—but one senses a reluctance on everyone’s part to engage with the more troubling aspects of their characters. Rachel Leslie’s death scene as the Duchess is heart-wrenching in its directness and simplicity, and her stage presence is every inch a ruler. What isn’t apparent, however, is the almost manic drive within this woman that compels her to risk her very existence on the love of a man from a lower station. Yes, we get from the all-female and multicultural cast that this love is transgressive, but that’s also the stuff of daytime drama. What’s lacking is the cosmic inner transgression that pitches Webster’s heroine from soap opera into tragedy. While Webster may want us to sympathize with the Duchess’s inherent goodness, that doesn’t necessarily preclude him from seeing her actions as inappropriate, if not downright sinful. This moral paradox, essential if the play is to work as tragedy, is never meaningfully addressed in the production.

Sheila Lynn Buckley, as her brother Ferdinand, rages quite powerfully, but the source of his rage, an incestuous fixation on the Duchess, remains within the viewer’s mind, never embodied on stage. The most glaring absence, though, occurs in the production’s reading of the play’s villain, Basolo. Virginia Baeta has been directed to so bleach the character of any unpleasantness that this Basolo threatens to upend the logic of the entire play. Why this pleasant, slightly earnest fellow who wryly comments on the dramatic action for the audience’s amusement would commit such unspeakable acts as strangle a woman and her children is frankly bewildering, unless it’s someone’s idea of "humanizing" the character. What makes the character human is his tortured self-doubt, capacity for cruelty, class resentment, and bitter humor about all of his and other’s shortcomings, none of which is evident on stage. The only exception to the general timorousness of the acting is Elissa Olin, who attacks the role of the Cardinal’s mistress Julia with a lusty specificity that charges her two scenes with the kind of electrochemical spark that seems to have been Prozacked out of her cast mates.

Still, the Queen’s Company should be commended for tackling this devilish difficult text—a welcome anti-coagulant to the glut of Shakepeares clotting the off-off Broadway scene—and for doing it so well. It whets the appetite for theatre artists with the ovaries to do it great.

Instead of the expected pre-show speech about turning off cell phones and what's coming up at this theatre, Jean Cocteau Repertory's new Marriage of Figaro begins with Christopher Black, in costume as Figaro, doing the honors, all the while reminding us that he's an employee of the theatre and an actor in a play. It may not be madness, but nevertheless there's method in it: Rod McLucas, author of this new English version of Beaumarchais' play, wants us to focus from the outset on twin themes. One, more powerful people exploit less powerful people all the time. And, two, people play-act all the time.

These aren't startling revelations, but they do drive The Marriage of Figaro: there's distinct edge in this mostly frothy comedy about an overbearing Count who decides that he ought to have first crack, so to speak, at his valet's bride-to-be. Frenetic, farcical shenanigans are set off as Figaro frantically conspires with his beloved and her mistress, the Countess, to prevent his master from having his way. And additional complications are thrown into the mix by a local doctor, a litigious old maid, a sneaky music teacher, and a guileless, love-struck page.

The comedy earns plenty of laughs, but, at least at the performance reviewed, the production never quite crackles. Director David Fuller has placed the action in a resort in Palm Beach, Florida; this choice feels somewhat at odds with the almost ethereal theatricality of McLucas's adaptation. Costumes, by Irene V. Hatch, confuse rather than clarify who's who: a maid wears flashy, contemporary fashions while her mistress wears dowdy, floor-length gowns; the servant Figaro is clad in full-dress regalia throughout, but a Judge wanders about in Bermuda shorts. What are we supposed to make of this?

Fuller has cast the play almost entirely with the newest members of the Cocteau's repertory company. Some acquit themselves beautifully—Mark Rimer proves that he was born to play the Count, for example—but others simply lack the experience and the technique required for this admittedly difficult piece. Company vets Black and Harris Berlinsky fare better; Berlinsky has what I found to be the single funniest moment in the show when, as the Doctor, he stealthily tries to sneak away from an engagement he'd rather not keep.

Target Margin's new production of The Marriage of Figaro makes deconstructionism look even worse than it already does (if that’s possible). The kind of deconstructionism that’s carried out by director David Herskovits and his designers isn’t connected to emotion or storytelling, only gimmicks. They pile on device after device in an attempt (I’m assuming) to illuminate the story in a new and compelling way. Unfortunately, their efforts come across as glaringly self-conscious, which results in a show that feels passionless, and coldly academic.

“The Marriage of Figaro concerns the valet Figaro, who vows to outwit his master when he learns his master the Count has designs on Figaro’s bride-to-be, Suzanne.” Simple enough, right? But, I only know that because I read it in the press release, not because of anything I saw on stage. That’s how much Herskovits & Co.’s parade of recurring sound effects and musical themes, adaptable set pieces, and costume pieces from a variety of historical eras get in the way of the story. Their efforts call attention to themselves in a way that brings to mind theater students playing with a big budget for the first time: they finally have the money to do all the things they’ve always wanted to do, so they do them all, regardless of whether or not they’re right for the show. An eagerness to show off permeates The Marriage of Figaro, but the creative team doesn’t emotionally invest themselves in the story because they don’t seem to care about it. They seem to treat it as a mere vessel for their “concept,” whatever it is.

The lack of theme and emotion does nothing for the cast, all of whom look like they’ve been told to play qualities instead of intentions. By doing so, they prevent their characters from growing and changing, and thus the audience from learning anything about them. Herskovits & Co. seem to have forgotten that watching characters who are exactly the same at the end of the show as they were at the beginning is not very interesting.

The Marriage of Figaro is an empty exercise in technique that the audience cannot emotionally invest in because they’re never given anything to care about. I used to hate shows like this because they made me feel stupid, like I needed to know something I didn’t know in order to “get” them. But, as I’ve seen more theater and gotten older, I finally understand the real reason I should hate shows like The Marriage of Figaro: because the creators aren’t doing their jobs.

The Master Builder doesn't get revived nearly as often as A Doll's House or Hedda Gabler; this production, from Century Center for the Performing Arts' Ibsen Series, is the first one I've ever gotten to see. It's a fine, clear, accessible introduction to the play, featuring solid performances by Dennis Parlato, Wendy Barrie-Wilson, and Tami Dixon in the leading roles, and benefiting from the elegant intimacy of the Ballroom Theatre, which makes us feel as if we are flies on Halvard Solness' wall as we take in the tumultuous two days recounted in Ibsen's compelling drama.

Solness is the Master Builder; he's a self-made man who worked hard to become the leading builder in his town, first of churches and now of houses. Friends and colleagues attribute his success to luck and/or talent, but Solness carries a dark secret that has slowly gnawed away at his self-confidence. He's also becoming more and more consumed with guilt about the condition of his wife, which has deteriorated since the death of their infant sons. When we meet him, he's a petty tyrant in his office and so unsure of his own ability that he concocts devious manipulations to prevent his apprentice from obtaining commissions of his own.

And then into Solness' life, quite out of the blue, comes Hilda Wangel, a radiant young woman whom Solness knew briefly while she was a little girl; she remembers that he called her a princess then and promised her a kingdom, which she says she has come now to claim. Solness sees in Hilda all of the boundless hope and idealism of his own lost youth—the Master Builder yet-to-be filled with plans and dreams rather than the Master Builder that-was. Hilda's inspiration leads him to confront the demons of his past and attempt one final heroic act.

The play is vintage Ibsen, which is to say that it is exceedingly well-crafted and supremely single-minded. To today's eyes and ears some of the mustier passages will feel like melodrama; but Ibsen's insights into the psychologies of Solness and his wife are smart and timeless and his creation of Hilda Wangel is inspired: for all the drab naturalism of The Master Builder, there's a keenly-felt possibility that this apostle of pure youth may be more symbolic than real.

J.C. Compton's staging emphasizes the tight bonds among the characters—not just the pivotal deep and complicated relationship of Solness and his wife, but also the subordinate ones involving Solness and his secretary Raja, his apprentice Ragnar, his ex-employer Knut Brovik, and his longtime friend Dr. Herdal—giving the builder a rich back story that provides important subtext to the play. The cast of seven is fine, especially David Jones as the doctor, Tami Dixon as the exuberant Hilda, and Wendy Barrie-Wilson as Solness' sad, stoic wife. Dennis Parlato captures all of the complexity and inner conflict of protagonist Solness in a measured, intelligent performance.

The Ibsen Series is nearly done with—there are just two more entries left, both planned for later this spring—and the Century Center is to be commended for giving us a chance to explore the entire canon of this seminal modern playwright instead of just the familiar stuff. Particularly if The Master Builder is new to you, this is a valuable production indeed.

Revolving Shakespeare's excellent new production of The Merchant of Venice is being presented in conjunction with the premiere of a sequel, The Doctor of Rome. I've just seen Merchant and I can't wait to find out what happens next: as director/adaptor Ralph Carhart rightly points out in program notes, one of the things that sets The Merchant of Venice apart from Shakespeare's other comedies is the fact that, though the story has come to an end, almost nothing seems to have been settled.

Of course, the other distinguishing feature of this difficult, complicated play is its theme of anti-Semitism, and it is here that Carhart's production really raises the bar. Carhart has rearranged Shakespeare's text, a practice I'm not usually in favor of; but it's been done here with exceeding skill and for worthy purpose.

This Merchant of Venice is an exploration of intolerance and prejudice and the blind hatred they cause, certainly a subject that has been and needs to be on our minds these days. Antonio, the merchant of the title, is a bigot of some zeal, denouncing the Jew Shylock as a cur even as he stoops to borrow three thousand ducats from him. Shylock despises the Christians who persecute him and becomes obsessed with the idea of murdering one of them as a symbolic act of vengeance. Jessica, Shylock's daughter, fears her father's obsessions and hates the virtual imprisonment that, because of her religion, has been her lot; consequently, she eagerly embraces the chance to run off with the Christian fortune-hunter Lorenzo, probably against her better judgment.

But Carhart doesn't stop here. He makes much of Portia's racist denunciation of the Prince of Morocco; though he's clearly less a fool than the Caucasian Prince of Aragon, he nevertheless comes in for far more of her wrath. And later in the play, when Lorenzo chides Shylock's former servant Launcelot for fathering a child with a Moorish girl, an exchange that's usually played for laughs feels very ugly indeed. The one thing worse than marrying a Jew, according to Lorenzo, is to marry a Negro.

Carhart sets the play in the Italy of Mussolini, which works well. The reduced liberties of an independent woman like Portia tie in deftly with her assumption of male drag as a lawyer in the play's second half. And the unstated imminent fate of European Jews like Shylock provides potent subtext for the piece.

So Carhart mines Shakespeare's comedy for its most serious revelations about humankind's ignorant hatreds and we wind up with plenty to think about throughout the play. This does not mean, though, that this Merchant is overly dour; indeed, the scenes involving Portia and her suitors come off as the light-hearted fairy tale they should. Carhart has cut the character of Gratiano (Bassanio's servant who flirts with Portia's maid Nerissa); this helps move things along more quickly without any real cost. The clown Launcelot, happily foolish in the early scenes, joins Mussolini's Black Shirts near the end of the play, becoming a menacing thug—a shrewd notion, that.

The production features the intelligent, well-crafted performances that are Revolving Shakespeare's hallmark. Lou Tally is superb as Shylock, revealing the layers of complexity of this man. When, after Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, he speaks of the loss of his diamonds, it's clear that it's the daughter, not the stones, that he is lamenting. Lanie MacEwan (Portia), Michael Mendelson (Antonio), Miles Phillips (Bassanio), Derek Johnson (Lorenzo), Matthew Pendergast (Launcelot), and David Alan Bachrach (Balthazar) also offer particularly finely-wrought characterizations. Rob Langeder is supremely funny as the annoyingly egotistical Prince of Aragon.

Sebastien Grouard's unit set is effective and, especially during the scenes at Portia's home in Belmont, quite lovely. Andrew Dickey's lighting and Jim Parks' costumes serve the production well.

Giving us a Merchant of Venice that is entertaining and thought-provoking, Carhart and the Revolving Shakespeare folks prove that this play need not be the problem it is often presumed to be. They're breathing new life into the canon, and they deserve our gratitude for that.

Though never popular with scholars, The Merry Wives of Windsor has always found favor with audiences. With the Gorilla Repertory Theater Company’s production, it’s easy to see why audiences feel that way: it displays Shakespeare’s comic talents at their bawdiest and wackiest. Holding court over a madcap comedy is one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly lovable characters, Sir John Falstaff. Introduced in Henry IV, where his anarchic spirit steals the show and threatens to corrupt the Prince of Wales, Falstaff exemplifies the deadly sins at their most appealing. He’s pompous, uncouth, cowardly, lecherous, eternally half-drunk, and always trying, and failing, to scam money out of people. He’s the entire cast of "Cheers" rolled into one enormous body.

In this play, fat old Falstaff laughably attempts to seduce the titular women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. They see through his inept advances easily, and spend the next several hours testing how far they can lead him on without committing or telling their husbands. Ellen Lee and Johanna Leister play these matrons as female Marx Brothers. They dump him in the Thames, dress him like an old woman, and eventually have the entire town of Windsor pushing him around. Ed Lane’s lugubrious Falstaff looks like it hurts him to think, especially that early in the afternoon.

Shakespeare also provides two subplots: one involves Mistress Ford’s jealous husband, who dons a disguise and pays Falstaff to confirm his suspicions. Michael B. Healey ratchets up Master Ford so tightly that he earns the scorn he deserves as a near-cuckold. In the other subplot, almost an afterthought on Shakespeare’s part, Mistress Page’s ingenue daughter is ripe for marriage but disagrees with her parents over whom she should marry. A standard love story, the romantic couple are winsome and the other suitors annoying, but they don’t engage the audience the way that Falstaff’s schemes do. Filling out Windsor’s population are characters from Wales and France whose command of English is tenuous, a tavernkeeper whose horses get stolen, and several of Falstaff’s henchmen who both abet and prevent their master’s schemes. The Gorilla Rep performs them all without missing a laugh or dumbing it down.

Director Brian Olsen stages the action well, relying on the simple plot and making sure the actors understand what they’re saying: he has encouraged the ensemble to channel a strangely Victorian method of recitation to give the characters more bombast. Staged outdoors along a path in Riverside Park (around 79th Street), the production balances urban and sylvan, reinforcing the play’s Englishness. The audience runs back and forth, following the actors from glade to glade for scene changes, giving the show more energy than many Shakespearean productions. Jenna Rossi’s costumes complement the play’s energy and verbal flash, all primary colors in patchwork patterns. Shakespeare hasn’t written a deep play here, but he proves that he knows what audiences like. Likewise, this production of The Merry Wives of Windsor is thoroughly entertaining, and it takes itself only as seriously as it needs to.

The Gorilla Repertory Theater Company has been a summer staple of New York theatre for a decade, providing free Shakespeare in the park without the celebrities, lines, and fanfare that their distinguished competition seems increasingly reliant on. Unfortunately, the 2002 season will be their last for the near future: the company’s artistic staff have planned sabbaticals to pursue other projects. With several more productions coming up this summer, they’re rewarding their audiences with a big, free sendoff. If The Merry Wives of Windsor is any indication, New York’s cultural mix will be poorer without them.

I had a grand time at Pilot House's revival of The Misanthrope, and I think you will, too. I went to the theatre with a real craving to laugh, and Moliere's broad farce about a man who decides he will only tell others the truth turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. Happily, director-adapter Don Jordan has emphasized the hilarity in this production--there's no profound reaching for deeper meanings here. Instead, he's encouraged his talented ensemble (and his imaginative costume designer) to take this show over the top, giving us all a good hearty guffaw over how foolish we humans sometimes are. Not a bad thing at all.

The misanthrope of the play's title is Alceste, an overly earnest fellow whose disgust and disdain for the hypocrisy he sees everywhere around him has driven him to become a maverick and an outcast. He declares at the beginning of the play that he will only speak the truth to every one he meets, no matter how damaging that may be. His friend Philinte is understandably concerned, especially when Alceste's resolve is put to the test by a pompous but powerful colleague named Oronte. Oronte insists that Alceste give a "sincere" reaction to a truly horrendous poem that he has composed; when Alceste obliges, he is rewarded with a lawsuit.

Alceste faces even worse trouble on another front, however. He is in love--head-over-heels--with the beautiful and coquettish Celimene. Celimene is renowned in her circle for her scathing wit, and surrounds herself with a retinue of shallow, empty-headed social climbers for her own amusement. This distresses Alceste, to say the least. When Arsinoe, who is jealous of Celimene, makes some false reports about Celimene's fidelity to Alceste, the misanthrope faces the greatest challenge yet to his embattled principles.

Unlike your typical farce, The Misanthrope doesn't end neatly with all loose ends tied up and everyone living happily ever, which is probably why it continues to endure. And Jordan, to his credit, makes the play's ambiguous conclusion even less conclusive than usual. He gives us, instead, a moral along these lines: fools will be fools, coquettes will be coquettes, and the rest of us... well, hopefully, like Alceste's friend Philinte, we will win the love of our choosing and go on with our life as best we can.

Chad Smith, a veteran of several Pilot House productions, is outstanding as Alceste, flopping around like the fish out of water that he is, railing at the gods and his fellow creatures with so much impotent bluster that you think Ralph Kramden has landed in the middle of a stylish French farce. Karen Krantz is a commanding, enterprising, and surprisingly sexy Celimene; Jordan lets us see the obsessed Alceste through her eyes a lot of the time, allowing us to root for her a bit more than we might otherwise be inclined to do.

The supporting cast is generally quite good, with particularly fine work turned in by Julie Zinkewicz as Eliante (her rendition of the speech in which she rebuts Alceste's misanthropy is especially memorable), Jeff Pagliano as Philinte, Stephen Remund as Oronte, and J Grawemeyer, who is absolutely hilarious as Basque, Celimene's maid. (Basque, alone among the play's characters, speaks French, which turns out to be a superb comic idea.)

Jessica Jahn's costumes work beautifully, telegraphing information about the characters to us with acuity. Celimene's boas and scarves, Eliante's tennis whites, Acaste and Clitandre's over-the-top black-on-black chic--all these designs tell us just what we need know about these people the minute we lay eyes on them.

The comedy moves briskly and wittily under Don Jordan's assured direction. Indeed, Jordan and his Pilot House theatre company keep on getting better every time I see them; their happy take on The Misanthrope is a most pleasant gift to New York's theatre scene at the moment.

The last New York production of The Phantom Lady was more than a decade ago; that's reason enough to get to the Pearl Theatre Company, where this delightful gem of a play is being presented for what is certainly going to be the first time for most audience members. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, author of The Phantom Lady, is often compared to his near-contemporary Shakespeare, but our Anglophilia (and xenophobia) have relegated most of his work to relative obscurity. So I say bravo to the Pearl for giving Calderon space on its stage! The Phantom Lady is a bewitchingly charming comedy, as insouciant and witty as Much Ado About Nothing, and a thousand times fresher for its unfamiliarity.

The story begins on a street in Madrid, where inveterate adventurer Don Manuel, with his servant Cosme, arrives in search of his old friend Don Juan, with whom he will be staying while attending to some business at court. All of a sudden, a beautiful young woman, heavily veiled and obviously in distress, runs past. She stops long enough only to beg Don Manuel to save her from the man from whom she is fleeing. Don Manuel's natural chivalric tendencies are instantly aroused, and he swears to protect the mysterious lady, challenging her unknown assailant to a duel as soon as he appears on the scene, moments later.

It's an exciting, fantastical beginning to a broadly romantic play that invokes just about every breathless, cherished tradition of the age of Knighthood, even as it cheerfully skewers them all. Especially in Edwin Honig's deliberately contemporary (and occasionally anachronistic) translation, there's a palpable sense that the characters are sufficiently self-aware to realize how foolish all their outsized posturing really is. The Phantom Lady laughs happily and devilishly at itself, letting us enjoy this pleasing diversion guilt-free.

There's a conniving female servant (Isabel) and a foolish, greedy, clownish male one (Cosme); there's a brooding but essentially non-threatening villainous younger brother (Don Luis) and a bounteous, tradition-bound older brother (Don Juan); there's a posturing, hollow, handsome cavalier of a hero (Don Manuel) and a clever, high-spirited, independent woman for a heroine (Dona Angela). There's also a secret passageway, a devious female phantom who leaves mysterious notes on Don Manuel's bed, and at least one flashy, exciting swordfight motivated by besmirched honor. And of course there's a happy ending that finds everybody paired up just as you knew they would be; a satisfying finish to such extravagant fancy.

The Pearl Theatre's resident acting company excels at this sort of thing, and the principals of The Phantom Lady never disappoint. Celeste Ciulla is vivacious and appealing and appropriately lovely as Dona Angela, while Ray Virta is all manful pride and chivalric pomposity as heroic Don Manuel. Dan Daily is suitably blustery and benevolent as Don Juan. Dominic Cuskern is engagingly foolish as the clown Cosme, while Robin Leslie Brown does her trademark soubrette to the hilt as Dona Angela's crafty maid Isabel. Rachel Botchan, Aaron Ganz, and Emily Gray offer fine support in smaller roles. Only Jason Manuel Olazabal–significantly, a guest artist in this production–seems ill-at-ease with the frothily frivolous nature of the piece. Similarly, director Rene Buch's sometimes lumbering staging feels at odds with the congenial light-heartedness of the comedy; this is reflected, too, in Sarah Lambert's eye-catching but ultimately disappointing set, in which spatial relationships are all but sacrificed to moodily self-conscious stage pictures that flatten the play's natural effervescence.

Nevertheless, this is a most agreeable introduction to a work I hope we see more of in seasons to come: there are opportunities aplenty for actors and directors and designers to realize in this delicious but little-known play.

It begins, so simply, with the sounds of distant voices amid rustling leaves and blades of  grass.  Medvedenko and Masha are wandering through Sorin's slightly unkempt garden. He asks her, famously, why she always wears black, and she replies, even more famously, that she is in mourning for her life. Ah yes, it's Chekhov's Seagull; but both familiarity and portent have been stripped away somehow: these two seem like ordinary people having an ordinary conversation, and we just happen to be nearby, eavesdropping.

Such is the power of Mike Nichols's beautifully realized production of this oft-done play. Near the end, there's a moment that's absolutely transcendent, one that epitomizes, for me, what Chekhov's work is about. Sorin and his extended family are playing a game of lotto in the drawing room and variously chatting about this and that. We've seen these people through three acts and two years by now; each has had (and eloquently aired) his or her share of heartbreak, unrequited love or desire, and general dissatisfaction with their lot in life. A servant announces dinner, and everybody gets up and exits. As they file past us, they seem to linger for just a second at the edge of the stage, long enough for us to search their faces and to understand. We're unhappy, we want what we don't or can't have, we're suffering. But... we're hungry; we might as well eat.

Flashes of insight like that don't just happen: this is a smartly conceived, stunningly executed production of one of the theatre's masterworks. Nichols imposes nothing on the text except for clarity; this is--and certainly translator Tom Stoppard needs to be acknowledged here as well--an accessible, open, friendly version of The Seagull. Nichols works with his cast to make Chekhov's ten characters interesting, quirky individuals rather than the brooding archetypes they too often become on stage. This is a play where everybody's right and everybody's wrong--precisely the profoundly funny and truthful slice of life that its author intended.

You're waiting for me to tell you about the cast. Well, they're a pleasure to watch. The Dream Team ensemble concept really works here: ten astoundingly accomplished professionals have assembled and inspired each other to do really wonderful work. At the head of the production, and in a class by herself, is Meryl Streep, who is this Seagull's raison d'etre and acknowledged chief attraction. She's as beautiful and radiant as you'd hope; she makes Arkadina so lively and unpredictable and magnetic that you never wonder why every man in the play is in love with her. Streep's own natural intelligence and grace work the same trick on the audience: she's so extraordinarily in command, seemingly able to do anything: she sings, she dances, she clowns--she even, at one point, falls to the floor in a breathtaking and lovely dramatic swoon. Watching her act is like listening to Perlman play the violin or Pavarotti sing: you're in the presence of someone who is one of the very best in the world at what she's doing, and that's a rare thrill indeed.

Streep's characterization is simple, pretty much taking every word or action at face value: the subtext is always that this woman is a survivor who wants--and gets--whatever she needs whenever she needs it. Nichols connects Streep's Arkadina, intriguingly, with both Christopher Walken's Sorin (with whom she shares a sort of brazen outsize-ness) and Natalie Portman's Nina. Nina is the central figure in this staging of the play, and Portman captivates in the role. She surprises us, too, with a determination and steeliness that I'd never detected in this character before. Portman's Nina is the seducer in her long scene with Trigorin; and at the play's end, when she returns in disgrace long after their affair has ended, it's clear that she is going to not just go on, but prevail. Did Arkadina find her stamina in similar circumstances?

Walken is good-humoredly cantankerous as Sorin, bringing his trademark eccentric touches to the role (not least of which is a kvetchy Bronx accent that is entirely out of place and at the same time entirely suitable). His scenes with Streep are glorious, making it clear that the one, single constant in the lives of this particular brother and sister is their devotion to each other.

Kevin Kline is not quite as successful as Trigorin. I loved his scenes with Portman; the famous Act II exchange that includes "Here lies Trigorin..." resonates perfectly. But the love scene with Streep doesn't quite jell: it was clear to me that she knew she was pulling out the stops to get her way, but it wasn't clear whether or not he knew it. Philip Seymour Hoffman underplays Konstantin, to the detriment of the piece. It's particularly jarring, for example, when Nina, the supposed love of his life, suddenly faints from hunger and exhaustion and he merely saunters away to get her some water. Where's the urgency of Konstantin's grand passion?

The sterling supporting cast is terrific. Marcia Gay Harden gives Masha life and even a little humor; Stephen Spinella is engagingly sympathetic as her hapless suitor Medvedenko. Larry Pine is fine as Dorn, the doctor who is in love with Arkadina. And the casting of John Goodman and Debra Monk as Masha's parents turns out to be a superb notion: Goodman's ingratiating teddy bear personality softens his boor of a character, while Monk's natural spunk awakens Polina: watch her steal the show, at least for a minute, with a well-timed gag at Nina and Dorn's expense.

This remarkable assemblage of actors has been given costumes that are appropriate and, in Streep's case, lavishly eye-filling; and they've been placed in a spare but evocative set that makes the most of the Delacorte Theatre's gorgeous outdoor setting. Designer Bob Crowley is responsible for all of this; bravo. Ditto Jennifer Tipton's lighting and Mark Bennett's moody music.

All in all, it's as nearly perfect a Seagull as anyone has a right to hope for. Thanks, Public Theatre, for giving us Chekhov, Nichols, Streep and company to fill our midsummer nights.

It’s always a pleasure to see an Off-Broadway production that looks like someone’s spent money on it. The Pulse Ensemble Theatre’s current outdoor mounting of The Tempest by William Shakespeare is such a production. Director Alexa Kelly and her design team look like they have spared no expense creating the play’s remote island setting. Wood planks, scaffolding, a pair of platforms, and some well-placed plants adorn the Pulse’s courtyard. The entire cast is even clad in period costumes! Before long, the audience is transported to a magical world where they quickly forget that they’re only a few feet away from 42nd Street traffic. That’s only one of the many impressive things about this impressive production.

The Tempest tells the story of Prospero (Damian Buzziero), an accomplished magician and the banished Duke of Milan, who has been stranded, along with his young daughter, Miranda (Nalina Mann), on a remote island for many years. He conjures a great tempest to strand his usurping brother, Antonio (Glenn Stoops), and the King of Naples (Roland Sands) on the island, so that he and Miranda may finally escape, and that he may finally reclaim his Dukedom.

Director Alexa Kelly is not trying to make a grand statement with The Tempest. She’s simply trying to tell Shakespeare’s story as best she can. And she succeeds. Her staging is efficient and economical without being self-conscious. This Tempest is refreshingly concept-free. Instead, Kelly has placed a premium on the verse, which she instructs her cast to speak as cleanly and beautifully as possible. While this approach sometimes deprives the play of some dramatic and emotional fire, as well as some vocal variety, the audience can still always hear the actors, and they always understand what they mean.

Kelly’s approach also hinders the cast a little bit. They all start out on unsure footing, but get better as they go along. Eventually, most of the cast does very well. Buzziero is convincing as Prospero. He is simultaneously humane and in charge. Mann and Joe Versiglio make wonderful young lovers as Miranda and Antonio’s son, Ferdinand. Their scene, at the top of Act II, in which they let their feelings for each other be known, plays beautifully. Sandy York is also very good as Prospero’s indentured fairy, Arial. But comic relief Ron Nahass and Kurt Uy nearly steal the show as Trinculo and Stephano, two swabbers from the King’s shipwrecked boat. Their first scene with Prospero’s slave, Caliban (Erik Baker), is terrific, and they only get better from there.

The real star of the show, though, is the physical production. Set, costume, and lighting designers Roger Hanna, Terry Leong, and Zhanna Gurvich have created a spectacle, a pageant of a show, that makes excellent use of the Pulse’s outdoor layout.

My only two complaints (and they are very minor) are Caliban’s costume, and the staging of scenes at the high end of a diagonal plank that runs the length of the stage. The former—made up of a black, mesh catsuit, and natty-looking dreadlock wig—is very distracting. The latter is just liable to give one a severe crick in the neck. Nothing, however, seemed to deter the audience from enjoying the show. On the night I attended, they clapped at the end of almost every scene.

Alexa Kelly and her cast’s efforts have paid off well. Pulse Ensemble Theatre’s production of The Tempest is a perfect late summer evening’s entertainment. On a clear, dry, summer evening—which were the conditions when I attended—you can’t beat it. Catch it while you can.

The Underpants is very funny.

Actually, and more grammatically-correct-sounding, the underpants are very funny, too. In fact, they're the first thing we see when we enter Classic Stage: a show curtain filled with ladies' underpants of various sizes, colors, and styles: a broad visual clue to the unabashed silly shenanigans that await us.

Byron Jennings stars as Theo Maske, a middle-aged German clerk whose wife mortifies him one day when her underpants fall down, in public, in the middle of the town, just as the King is passing by in a grand parade. Theo is a pompous, bellicose mediocrity and he handles this perceived emergency the same way he trundles through the rest of his life, which is to say stupidly. The joke is that Theo emerges triumphant, consistently besting people who on the surface appear to be his superiors, which is to say just about everyone. This joke gives The Underpants its satiric thrust: this is a comedy about how buffoons run the world. It's a theme as resonant today as it was a hundred years ago when Carl Sternheim first wrote it.

Theo is also a quintessentially Steve Martin-ish character, which is  not surprising since Martin is the author of this new, very contemporary-sounding and -feeling adaptation of The Underpants; nor is it surprising that, brilliantly funny as Jennings is, Martin's spirit pervades practically every line he utters. As indeed it infuses the entire piece: Theo's three prospective tenants (for he is trying to rent a room even while having to cope with his wife's lingerie's malfeasance) are all endearingly wacko, from the Jewish hypochondriac Cohen to the romantic boor Versati to the spinsterish old prude Klinglehoff, who emits a torrent of 4-letter words when he gets agitated.

Versati and Cohen are united by their feverish adoration of Louise, Theo's pretty and somewhat coquettish young wife; the sight of her underpants, in fact, has driven them here in fits of perverse obsessive passion. Louise favors Versati and pities Cohen, and their farcical attempts to woo her, abetted by Louise's encouraging upstairs neighbor Gertrude, propel the plot. It spins out with gleeful absurdity until everything is properly resolved, at least according to Theo's taste; and then there's a delicious surprise ending that I will not in any way spoil for you.

Barry Edelstein keeps the manic energy high throughout  without making us dizzy, in keeping with the broad satiric tone of Martin's script. The cast is excellent and seems to be having a fine time: Cheryl Lynn Bowers is appealingly sweet and (more or less) innocent as Louise; Kristine Nielsen is a hoot as her randy neighbor Gertrude; William Duell and Lee Wilkof are appropriately foolish as Klinglehoff and Cohen, while Christian Camargo is deliciously over-the-top as the boundlessly poetic Versati. Patrick Boll is perfect in his cameo at the end. And I've already told you that Byron Jennings is terrific as the blustery, bullying bureaucrat Theo.

Scott Pask is responsible for the detailed unit set, including, presumably, that curtain of underwear I mentioned at the beginning. And the titular garments, and all the others worn by the cast, have been designed by Angela Wendt with genuine wit.

All in all, a most pleasing bit of foolishness; a blissful ado about, well, almost nothing. Theo says early on that one must "never underestimate the power of a glimpse of lingerie"; here is an Underpants that will keep you in stitches all evening long..

In the theatre, as in life, sometimes the very best solutions are the simplest. So it is with Theater Ten Ten's production of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, which solves the famous "problems" of this quirky comedy by, for the most part, ignoring them. Director Tom Rowan has staged the play as a fairy tale, as if in a Victorian toy theatre; he and his actors tell the often far-fetched fable directly and forthrightly, with thoughtfulness and conviction. It's a delight from start to finish.

What vexes directors and other theatre artists in The Winter's Tale is the stark contrast between its rather sinister beginning and its sunny, almost pastoral end. The play begins with King Leontes of Sicilia dissolving, for no apparent reason, into a jealous rage, ordering his wife, Hermione, imprisoned for adultery, accusing his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, of being her lover. Hermione gives birth to a baby girl, Perdita, while in prison; Leontes orders the child banished to a distant shore where its life or death will be determined by the fates.

In the second half of the play, sixteen years have passed, and Perdita has grown up, raised by a simple shepherd and his even simpler son. She lives in Bohemia of all places, and Polixenes' son Florizel is in love with her, though of course he doesn't know who she really is. When the still embittered Polixenes discovers that his son wishes to wed a shepherd's daughter against his will, he disinherits him. But eventually a reconciliation is realized with the help of Leontes, back in Sicilia, where all the characters converge for a happy ending that includes the reanimation of Hermione, who has conveniently been looked after, in the form of a sculpture, by her loyal servant Paulina.

What I love about Theater Ten Ten's production of this oh-so-improbable Tale is the entire absence of second guessing. For King Leontes to learn a lesson about jealousy and impulsiveness at the end of the story, he has to be in need of the lesson when The Winter's Tale begins. And so we have a Leontes, played with passion but without guile by Michael Mendelson, who simply is obsessively jealous; no deep psychological/social/political explanation provided. Similarly, we have a Paulina (played with splendid bravura by Judith Jarosz), who defends Queen Hermione's innocence with spirit and a sharp tongue, but who accepts an arranged marriage to the King's advisor Camillo with dutiful grace—no prototypical feminist, she, just a woman who does what the author's machinations will.

And so on: Elizabeth Zambetti gives us a Hermione of true beauty, inside and out. Alan Jestice, as Polixenes, is a festive best friend in the first part of the play and a petulant wronged enemy in the second half. David Arthur Bachrach is wittily roguish as the thief Autolycus, who invades the proceedings for no other reason than to provide broad comic relief. Ashton Crosby and Brian Houtz are splendidly rustic as the shepherd father and son who improbably find themselves related to the Princess of Sicilia. Nicol Zanzarella and Gabriel Vaughan are convincing and appealing as the young lovers Perdita and Florizel. Rounding out the company, in various supporting roles, are Ben Masur, Stephanie Gaslin, Kyla Marie Mostello, Lawrence Merritt, Neil Shah, Jason Wynn, and, alternating as young Mamillius, Jonah Meyerson and Justin Thomas Riordan. All perform with assured aplomb, pushing the sometimes fantastical story forward with an earnestness that is charming and affecting.

The result is, you'll find yourself believing in all the coincidences and extravagances and complications; you'll be genuinely sad when Leontes sacrifices his beloved wife and child to his impetuously rancorous mistrust; and honestly cheered and touched when he is able to reunite with his old friend Polixenes, his lost daughter Perdita, and—eventually—his dear Hermione.

Rowan's staging keeps the audience literally in the thick of the story too, with characters entering and exiting from all corners of the auditorium; as many scenes are played in front of the stage as on it, making for nice variety and immediacy as well. Pretty music, composed by Jason Wynn, complements the production nicely. Kari Martin's modest unit set comprising a couple of archways and staircases and little else serves the piece most effectively. The eye-filling Victorian-era costumes are by Joanne M. Haas.

All in all, a lovely, light-hearted take on a play that is too often rendered ponderous and heavy. There are quite a few Winter's Tales on the boards in New York this winter; you positively won't go wrong if you opt for this one.

Susanna Centlivre doesn't even rate a listing in my Encyclopedia of Literature (Merriam-Webster, 1995), nor have I ever seen reference to her in any theatre history book. Fact is, this playwright—who thrived, we're told, in the early 1700s in England—is darned obscure; T. Schreiber Studio has really done some digging to find The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret, one of Centlivre's comedies. That said, it would be nice also to say that they've made a significant rediscovery. But I won't: this is very much second-rate material; bringing it back on the boards is as valuable as mounting a production of, say, a Norman Krasna comedy will be in 2202. Which is to say: of passing interest as social history, but rather negligible as theatre.

Which is not to say that the Schreiber production lacks merit. Quite the contrary: though hurt by the script's predictability, long-windedness, and repetitiveness, this is nevertheless a congenial evening of theatre. The Wonder! tells the story of a Portuguese gentleman named Don Lopez whose children are quite unwilling to do his bidding. His son, Felix, is head-over-heels in love with Violante, but Violante's father only wants her packed up to a convent (here peculiarly termed a monastery) so that he can embezzle her inheritance. Lopez wants his daughter Isabella to wed an unpleasant elderly rich man, but she balks at that suggestion, choosing instead to escape the house in search of her own fortune. She takes refuge at Violante's house, but not before jumping out of her window into the arms of a mysterious stranger with whom she falls instantly in love.

Echoing such disparate sources as Calderon's The Phantom Lady, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, and any number of Restoration Era comedies, The Wonder! spends the remainder of its running time thwarting both pairs of lovers with a relentless succession of mistaken identities, half-heard conversations, misunderstandings and the like. Poor Felix explodes in jealousy and then recants obsequiously at least half a dozen times; Isabella's mystery man—a visitor from England named Colonel Briton—is spirited away or lured to battle under false pretenses on an equal number of occasions. All of this foolishness is echoed in subplots involving Violante's servant Flora, Felix's servant Lissardo, and Briton's servant Gibby. Some of this is actually quite funny, but there's more here than we need. Some judicious cutting is essential to making this thing playable.

Nevertheless, several of the actors emerge victorious. Brian Avers, as hapless, overwrought, over-the-top Don Felix, steals just about every scene he's in, wooing his beloved Violante with blissfully comic zeal that's exceeded only by the inflamed passion with which he denounces her whenever she appears to be untrue. Luisa Tedoff is lively and vivacious as Violante's clever maid Flora, while Wry Lachlan has a field day creating a thick and impenetrable Scottish brogue for the bombastic servant Gibby. J.M. McDonough is ingratiatingly wily as Violante's greedy father.

Director Elizabeth Swain choreographs the swirling action, which involves some fifteen actors, with assurance and grace, especially given the relatively small stage space available to her. Opulent costumes (by Jamie Suter and Melissa M. Veira) and wigs/hairstyles (by Paul Huntley) are impressive and appropriate.

The Wonder! is certainly an interesting piece to see staged, and the folks at T. Schreiber Studio are to be congratulated for deciding to tackle it. But ultimately, Centlivre's clumsy scripting defeats the good intentions: The Wonder! doesn't pass the seat-of-the-pants test; i.e., the fun we're having watching the play doesn't outweigh our fidgets and squirms in less-than-optimally comfy chairs.

Because American theatre generally frowns at color-blind casting, especially in realistic plays, many actors of color never get the opportunity to perform Ibsen, O’Neill, or Chekhov. Some companies, however, ignore the incongruity of blacks in Russia and boldly embrace the opportunities Chekhov gives actors to explore the subtleties of human character and relationships. Others adapt the work to more reasonable settings, remaining faithful to the play’s ideas though not its world. As demonstrated by the generally good but uneven production of Three Sisters by the Prospect Theater Company, this solution can create as many problems as it solves.

In this production, adapted by director John-Martin Green and dramaturg Shawn René Graham, the Peterson sisters mix with an all-black army regiment stationed in Brownsville, Texas, falling slowly into tragic love affairs as they plan their constantly postponed trip to Philadelphia. The action still takes place in the early years of the 20th century, which means that these people are the first generation of blacks born after the Civil War, members of the Negro intelligentsia that included W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. The cultivated abstract thinking of that subculture makes a good analog to Chekhov’s upper-class Russians. And the constant self-analysis of Chekhov’s characters meshes well with the tentative optimism of the black community a century ago. When these characters ask, “What will life be like in 300 years?” the racial undercurrent adds depth to the original by coupling philosophy to sociology, remaining faithful to Chekhov while establishing the new setting as legitimate. They talk about bettering the race but they do nothing.

The Texan setting also serves a larger function by adding a mythic element to the discussions. These are intelligent blacks living on the frontier, finally free to pursue the American dream in the central setting of American myth. At its best, the play recalls moments of domestic tenderness and melodrama in John Ford’s westerns, just before the men ride off to shoot Indians. But these characters, like Chekhov’s Russians, are consumed by a languid inertia that wastes the potential of an entire people. In part, Three Sisters asks why and how a nation falters and fails: Russia in the original and America in this adaptation.

But Chekhov’s true magic is in his roles, and happily, every actor finds an opportunity to create a moment of true humanity; this is why every actor should have the opportunity to perform his work. Each sister performs with graceful sadness, most notably Siobhan Juanita Brown, whose Mary seems from the first act to foresee her unhappy ending: trapped in a loveless marriage when her lover’s regiment moves to Arizona, she seems not merely resigned to her destiny but wryly pleased. Her face, youthful at the opening, somehow shows the lines of impending middle age by the curtain. She is well-matched by Dennis Reid as her lover Col. Vernonson, whose philosophical speeches show a man more comfortable with thinking than with socializing. Equally subtle is Kalimi Baxter, who as the socially mobile sister-in-law Natalie, relishes her character’s philistine assertiveness. She captures that Chekhovian balance between selfishness and self-hatred.

But unfortunately, these glimpses of humanity are soon lost in the hubbub of a small, crowded stage. As often happens with Chekhov, the actors play emotions instead of actions. This fumbles the melodramatic climax of the play, when the fiancé of the youngest sister, Irene, is shot by a jealous suitor in a duel. As with the original, this moment—a lone, unexplained gunshot—happens offstage. But here it seems irrelevant even when we know that it’s happened, because we don’t know why it’s happened. The resulting production is a series of moments, beautiful in themselves but solitary and unconnected. These characters don’t drag their past with them, or push into the future. There’s no sense of a journey, of loves lost and lives unlived.

The original play connects these moments by showing the actions of the characters through the choices they make, hiding the melodrama offstage but revealing the effects onstage. This production, however, never shows the characters in action, it only listens to their ideas. Chekhov’s abstractions are essential to his magic, and difficult to capture; to its credit, the adaptation does this beautifully. But in focusing on the ideas and the setting, the production forgets the people and the choices they make.

What You Will, Holderness Theater Company's new production of the play usually called Twelfth Night, annoyed me inordinately. It felt to me like a collage of random ideas–some original, some copped from other directors–foisted onto Shakespeare's well-known comedy with the sole purpose of calling attention to themselves. To wit: Orsino lives in a sea of paper, presumably wadded-up love letters to Olivia. His singer (the one he bids "play on" at the beginning of the play) is a Lea DeLaria-ish lounge singer in a tuxedo warbling "Perhaps." Curio is clearly a cross-dressing woman with a painted-on moustache and goatee. (Picking up on this theme, there's a man named Todd Lawhorne who is listed in the program as "Lady Dancer.") On the other side of Illyria, Sir Toby Belch is a sullen, arrogant club kid in designer hip-hop duds. Maria re-arranges those crumpled-up pieces of paper to create a circle for Olivia to stand inside. Malvolio is seen behind a scrim, walking in Robert Wilson-esque slow motion across the stage, carrying a goldfish bowl.

Does any of this help us understand either (a) the nature of Shakespeare's play, or (b) director Rebecca Holderness's take on it?

No to both. Indeed, all of this baggage ultimately–and rather painfully– detracts from the work at hand. For example, Malvolio's "letter scene," a surefire comic treat if ever there was one, drew nothing more than a few occasional giggles from the spectators I was with.

I admired the work of both Christianna Nelson (Olivia) and Kevin Kuhkle (Feste), both of whom bring intelligence and arresting nuance to their roles.

There's a fine line between trying to interpret Shakespeare's works and trying to improve them. Too bad that it feels like what Holderness and her colleagues have set out to accomplish is the latter, oh so foolish, objective.