nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

The Japanese term mono no awari means “an awareness of loss,” the perception of an object’s beauty through its impermanence. The art of theatre embodies this concept: once finished, a play will never be performed the same way again. Yet if the viewer is moved to both think and feel, he or she will understand the world better. The paradox is that art of the intellect seems opposed to art of the senses. This apparent contradiction, two sides of one coin, stands at the center of 36 Views. In investigating the tension between ideas and beauty, 36 Views both explores the meaning of art and stands as a moving work itself.

To do this, the play follows the relationships among artists, curators, collectors, and dealers as they encounter a “pillow book”—a kind of scrapbook created by aristocratic women in medieval Japan to record poems, lists, diary entries, descriptions of nature, and philosophical thoughts. In 36 Views, the book works as a catalyst, transforming the lives of whoever comes into contact with it.

By using the pillow book to drive the plot, playwright Naomi Iizuka copies the structure of Kabuki theater, in which the plot focuses on a letter, a necklace, or an umbrella rather than on a character. The play follows the book, hopping from place to place and moment to moment mirroring the patchwork pillow book itself. Iizuka, a Japanese-American, creates a sum of impressions as well as a linear plot. The cumulative effect demonstrates that the old idea of a collision between East and West no longer holds: in the 21st century, their essences have mingled and fused. Iizuka is aware of what each culture has lost, but also of what both cultures have gained.

Directed by Mark Wing-Davey with a precision that is almost choreography, the play uses many elements of staging, reinforcing this notion of a complex, interconnected world that carries the past into the present. In the play’s opening moments, a Japanese woman removes her kimonos one by one until she is left in a modern black evening gown. Similarly, some set pieces are moved by black-clad Kabuki stagehands, while others slide with silent mechanized efficiency. Designed by Douglas Stein, the set follows the horizontal simplicity of traditional Japanese art. David Weiner’s lights, on the other hand, dazzle with the complexity of modern Tokyo at night. Matthew Spiro’s sound design melds the sounds of old and new, and of East and West, by using the wooden clappers and flutes of Kabuki, classical Western music, and, after the show, raucous Japanese hip-hop.

A play that sets ideas against beauty is in danger of losing its humanity in the process. But the actors always maintain their individuality as they discuss abstract ideas. Stephen Lang, as Darius Wheeler, a cavalier dealer in rare works, provides the play with a strong backbone, as love softens him unexpectedly. His lover, a professor who asserts the legitimacy of the pillow book, is played with rare vulnerability by Liana Pai. And Elaine Tse bursts across the stage as a surly young artist who claims to be her own evil twin. These actors, as well as fellow cast members Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Rebecca Wisocky, and Richard Clarke, all understand that the play’s heart lies in their characters’ reactions to the events and to each other, rather than in the ideas they espouse.

36 Views sounds incredibly complex, and it is. But it never gets confusing, because it always puts the information at the service of the drama. In this the play follows Tom Stoppard’s masterful Arcadia; like that play, and indeed like all truly great art, Iizuka’s drama has people and relationships at its center. As the characters react to the pillow book and to each other, they change. Some are happy with the changes, others are not. In the play’s final moments, Wheeler smiles at his own former arrogance and his failure to love. He experiences mono no awari, an awareness of loss, as he reflects on his own life. 36 Views will only show for a few more weeks; its pleasure too derives from mono no awari. See it before it’s gone, and treasure the memory.

With A Clockwork Orange, Joe Tantalo and Godlight Theater Company firmly establish themselves in the front ranks of New York's off-off-Broadway theatre community. Working on a tiny stage that's about the size of my kitchen, they take audiences into Anthony Burgess' scary world-of-the-not-so-distant-future and create, right before our eyes (or, more accurately, in our mind's eyes) rowdy "milk bars," police stations, hospital examination rooms, darkened cottages, and gritty street scenes. Andrew Recinos' sound design, Jason Rainone's stark lighting, Christian Couture's simple costume plot, the meagerest of props, and Tantalo's remarkable visionary staging remind us that less is almost always more in the theatre. The resultant experience is as vivid and intense an evening of drama as can be found anywhere in town right now.

At the center of it all is an extraordinary performance by David L. Epstein, who plays Alex, the teenage thug who is A Clockwork Orange's protagonist and narrator. Alex begins his story in a milk bar, a gathering place for young hoodlums like himself, where the beverages are laced with drugs and the talk is of conquest and night-prowling. We soon see Alex and his gang, the Droogs, in action, as they beat up a helpless old bum strictly for a lark, and later attack a young writer and his wife, brutally raping her.

We get quick glimpses of Alex's home life with a pair of utterly indifferent parents, and of his already checkered juvenile record when his parole officer, a menacing fellow named Deltoid, checks in on him. The only thing Alex loves more than violence and sex is the music of his idol, Ludwig van Beethoven; but the Ninth Symphony isn't enough to keep Alex from going too far. He does, one night, when he murders a woman whose house he and the gang break into. This time, Alex is sentenced to prison, where his spirit is systematically broken.

A couple of years later, Alex gets a chance for early release, via an experimental program spearheaded by a ruthless scientist named Dr. Brodsky. Alex is brainwashed by being forced to watch film after film of acts of the most horrifying violence imaginable: scenes from Nazi concentration camps and Prisoner-of-War camps; depictions of torture, castration, execution, and rape. The procedure conditions Alex to become physically ill at the mere thought of violence—which, importantly, is not the same as learning to hate violence or expunging it from his soul. The experiment turns him into an automaton. The remainder of the play shows what happens after he returns to society (which I leave it to you to discover for yourself).

The play is as aggressively provoking as Tantalo's production is audaciously challenging. Two elements—the enforced intimacy of the space and the story-theatre approach of both script and staging—make A Clockwork Orange wrenchingly immediate. The monstrous disregard for humanity that runs through Burgess' play feels especially chilling in such close quarters, almost as if each act of physical violence or mental cruelty diminishes us in the audience along with the characters on stage. It makes for potent theatre.

Epstein, as Alex, guides us through the horrific world of this cautionary tale; his performance is harrowing, running the gamut from disarming youth to dehumanized victim and back again. Nine actors portray all of the play's other characters. All do outstanding work; some of the neatest portraits are offered by Catherine Dyer (memorable as both Alex's murder victim and the single-minded Dr. Brodsky), Jason MacDonald (as a sinister Secretary of the Interior and also the author of a novel-within-the-play also called "A Clockwork Orange"), Rob Maitner (as Dim, the most savage of Alex's Droogs), and Josh Renfree (authoritative as both Deltoid and the Prison Chaplain). David Lefkowich's fight direction also must be singled out for praise—it's taut and intense and scary without being stylized or balletic and (miraculously) without spilling over into the very close-by audience.

Indeed, the whole show is staged and performed with impressive precision and attention to detail. Moments like the prison scene, evoked with startling impact by the simple act of two guards pacing the perimeter of the playing area, in effect patrolling Alex and his fellow inmates; or the brainwashing scene, in which a Rube Goldberg-styled headgear focuses Alex on the violent images he must watch and focuses us on Alex's horrified reactions—these are moments that reveal the genuine artistry and intelligence of Tantalo and his collaborators. They are on the leading edge of New York's vibrant, thriving alternative theatre sector. Their work needs to be seen.

Notwithstanding the terse, pithy synopsis that the Signature Theatre Company has provided for John Guare's new play, A Few Stout Individuals is in fact about nothing less than history, memory, celebrity, posterity, government, power, racism, imperialism, money, marketing, accountability, accounting, literature, loyalty, gullibility, culpability, family, country, and—why not?—God. That's the short list. A Few Stout Individuals, Guare's meditation on everything that's bothering him about America right now, is epic in ambition if weirdly limited in actual execution. Guare is a smart man and a funny, thoughtful writer, and so A Few Stout Individuals offers plenty to challenge and provoke its audience. But it doesn't function terribly well as a play, almost certainly because of its diffuse proliferation of themes. As a glimpse into the minds of one of our country's brightest minds, it's valuable; but as theatre it's a rather exasperating evening.

That exasperation starts early, when a glance at the playbill reveals that the apparently secret subject of the play is Ulysses S. Grant. I have no idea why the advance materials failed to mention that Guare's leading character is one of the most famous personages of American history; and of course by no means should anyone assume that anything in A Few Stout Individuals has a solid historical basis (which is another reason why the play exasperates). Guare depicts Grant at the end of his life, dying of cancer and using morphine, cocaine, and brandy to relieve his excruciating pain, retreating from the task of remembering his life and therefore from writing his memoirs.

Grant's memoirs are, of course, the stuff of legend: a heroic undertaking that saved his family from financial ruin and salvaged his diminishing reputation by transforming an important general and a poor president into a great (and best-selling) author. Guare subverts what we think we know by showing the president being exploited by everyone in his family and by the beloved writer Mark Twain (who published Grant's autobiography); by having him forget his own history so that others can appropriate the parts that suit them for their own purposes; by making him tell us that the happiest moment of his life was on a visit to Japan when the emperor told him that they (Grant and the emperor) were the two most powerful men on earth.

There is method to all this, of course. Guare is ruminating on the way the famous and powerful manipulate collective memory (i.e., history), how everything noble seems to be devalued by consumerist culture (just look at the souvenir stands springing up in front of Ground Zero if you need evidence), how ends—no matter how virtuous—may not always justify disastrous means. It's all valid fodder for deep thinking in our post-9/11 world. I just wish Guare had ordered his thoughts a bit more. And that, in the service of his antic vision—for, yes, there are spectacularly chaotic moments in A Few Stout Individuals reminiscent of The House of Blue Leaves at its surreal craziest—he hadn't so deliberately sacrificed veracity himself.

Director Michael Greif imposes little on the piece to make it more manageable for the audience. He's cast it well, though, with Donald Moffat (Grant), Polly Holliday (the flighty but loving Mrs. Grant), Charles Brown (Grant's valet, Harrison), Mark Fish (Grant's irresponsible son, Buck), T.J. Kenneally (Grant's slightly less irresponsible other son, Fred), and Michi Barall (the Empress of Japan) all turning in excellent, memorable performances. William Sadler plays Hal Holbrook instead of Mark Twain—a misstep; Tom McGowan is very annoying as the piece's ostensible villain, Adam Bedeau, which is probably as it should be (but nevertheless still annoying).

More to the point, no one succeeds in making his or her character the least bit pleasant, which is one of the reasons that the play feels longer than its two-and-a-half hour running time, which in turn makes A Few Stout Individuals hard to sit through. Like I said: exasperating. Though—perhaps—worth it: even at their rawest and most disorganized, John Guare's thoughts are worth discovering.

It wouldn't be Christmas in New York without at least one new rendition of A Christmas Carol. What story has quite the same hold on our collective imagination? This year, in particular, there's an almost palpable desire to revisit, with Scrooge, ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Be and remind ourselves of the comforts and joys of giving, of service, of community. It's a voyage you'll be invited to take over and over again until Christmas Day, on TV, in the movies and on stage. My advice: let SourceWorks Theatre's A Queer Carol be one of them.

For this delightfully witty re-telling of Dickens' most famous story is at once the hippest, the funniest, and the warmest stage version that I've come across this year. Author Joe Godfrey has transplanted it to contemporary Manhattan, where "Ben" Scrooge is a sour, tight-lipped, middle-aged interior decorator, a fussy and repressed old soul with taste and wealth but no talent for living whatsoever. In his employ is earnest Bob Cratchit, who toils patiently in Scrooge's underheated townhouse/office for too little pay and without the health benefits he desperately needs for his lover, Tim, who is sick with AIDS.

This Christmas Eve, though, events conspire to make Ben Scrooge change. After abruptly dismissing his Russian housekeeper Svetlana for the night, Ben is visited by a startling apparition. It's his old partner Jake Marley, as buff as he ever was in life, and laden with chains (and leather and a pair of handcuffs). Marley explains that he's here to help Ben learn the error of his ways. Ben scoffs, of course, but when the Ghost of Christmas Present, who happens to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe, turns up at 1am, he starts to pay attention.

And thus Godfrey spins his delicious take on the timeworn classic. A Queer Carol is, as you've come to understand and as its title suggests, a "gay version" of the story. So, sure, the Ghost of Christmas Present is an androgynous boa-wearing spirit whose sassy attitude and demeanor remind us of Pearl Bailey; Scrooge's colleague Fred  and his friend Noel play "Gay Trivia" at their Christmas party; and when Fezziwig sings "Don we now our gay apparel" he means something slightly different from the typical connotation. (And yes, the inevitable joke about "Tiny" Tim gets made--lovingly, by his boyfriend Bob.)

But what may surprise you about A Queer Carol is how felicitously true to the original it finally is. Its opening scene, in which Ben scowls and scoffs at the people around him who are trying to celebrate Christmas, feels more authentic than almost any Christmas Carol I can remember: when Scrooge rants about how the sick should just go ahead and die and thus decrease the surplus population, the effect is downright chilling. And later, when Tim, donning a silly Santa hat toasts his loved ones with a heartfelt "God bless us, everyone!"--well, it really is heartfelt. A tiny tear forms in the corner of the eye, unexpectedly.

I'd be remiss not to tell you that Mark Cannistraro's staging is flawless and that the ensemble is absolutely first-rate, led by John Marino as a crusty but redeemable Scrooge, and featuring J.D. Lynch as a hugely appealing Cratchit and Dan Pintauro, terrific as both Tim and the younger version of Scrooge. Henry David Clarke, Nathan Johnson, Cynthia Pierce, and Yaakov Sullivan do fine work in various supporting roles; Virginia Baeta is even better than fine, earning laugh after laugh with her crackerjack timing and delivery as Bob and Tim's caustic Dominican lesbian pal Maria. And Michael Lynch very nearly steals the show as the Ghost of Christmas Present: we could all use a spirit as life-affirming and life-embracing as his to rouse us from whatever holiday doldrums we may have sunk into. Bravo! (Brava?)

My only quibble is that Godfrey makes one small misstep in his adaptation of the story: he posits Scrooge and Marley as lovers as well as partners, which makes Ben's misanthropy slightly less understandable. (In Dickens' story, Scrooge forsakes his one true love in the name of mammon, a more plausible premise.)

Don't let that keep you away from A Queer Carol, though, which runs for just two more weeks at The Duplex. You won't find a more good-natured or heartwarming holiday treat anywhere in New York right now.

If you've never seen the work of C.J. Hopkins in the theatre, aboutFive offers you a splendid opportunity to catch up on what you've missed. This evening of four short plays offers a veritable primer on the irascible, provocative Hopkins canon, from the sly uber-irony of The Installation to the meandering, unexpectedly uplifting recursion of How To Go, with stops in between for the philosophical mini-monodrama Red and the barbed social-political commentary of Tea and Cake. It also, not so incidentally, showcases the impressive talents of nearly a dozen young actors and directors who have interpreted Hopkins's dense and complex texts with purposive style and clarity.

The evening begins with The Installation, in which two actors (referred to merely as "One" and "Two" in the program) talk to us, for about fifteen minutes, about the Installation they're about to do (perform). A veritable tour de force of artifice, this play also feels like a forerunner of, or introduction to, Hopkins's full-length Horse Country. Like that masterful comedy, The Installation is mostly about the circumstance its performance creates: there are two of them on the stage and dozens of us in the audience; now we have to figure out what we're all doing here. Dan Hope's broadly presentational staging focuses us keenly on the potential interactions suggested by Hopkins's script; it feels loaded and confrontational, bristling with potential energy that never gets expended. (We wonder: are these two actually ever going to "install" anything?  Like their predecessors in Waiting for Godot and Horse Country, no.) Amie Bermowitz and Jessamyn Blakeslee successfully stare us down as "One" and "Two" respectively in this dangerously whimsical exercise in tension.

The much longer piece Red follows, taking us into the mind of a fortune teller throwing Tarot cards for an unseen male customer. This turns out to be ripe Hopkins territory: this play, whose punning title ("Read") conjures the missed connections and ambushed communications that underlie the life of its absent hero. Punctuated by (uninterpreted) draws from the deck (e.g., "This covers him"), this long monologue both describes and comments on the places where randomness and destiny intersect in a life both unexamined and unfulfilled. Rachael Biernat, Erin O'Leary, and Alyssa Simon deliver the text under Eva van Dok's direction. I'm not convinced that van Dok's decision to give three voices to Red's single character enhances the work.

The evening's most successful segment, Tea and Cake (from Hopkins's play Texas Radio) comes next. Here, Sadie (O'Leary) and Katie (van Dok), two women of a certain age and distinct social background, chit-chat over, yes, tea and cake. Sadie punctuates her prattling with alarming announcements about her estranged husband and son, on vacation in Florida ("shooting reptiles"), and the woman who was killed in her building the other day. Katie listens but actually comprehends only a little of it; and then has an epiphany of sorts when she realizes what she's heard (or missed, or both). Superbly played by O'Leary and van Dok under Amantha May's stark but plausible direction, Tea and Cake is a brisk, funny comedy of manners with a social conscience and a surprising emotional core. Ivanna Cullinan is effective in the piece's smaller third role, as a man named Dino who becomes Katie's Interpreter/Guide.

aboutFive concludes with How To Go, in which van Dok plays a different sort of guide. She looks familiar--like a waitress at a highway truck stop--but this woman, dispensing homey wisdom that surprises us with its profundity and its weight, is, like all of Hopkins's characters, not necessarily what she seems. How To Go feels long, but that's its point: it's about the utility, sometimes, of taking the long way instead of the short way. To anything. At once covering a lot of ground and absolutely none at all, How To Go leaves us feeling somehow hopeful; it's a fitting ending to the challenging and thought-provoking roller coaster ride that aboutFive turns out to be. Under Tyler Marchant's sensitive direction, van Dok turns in a luminous and moving performance.

The entire production is beautifully served by Juliana von Haubrich's smart and simple set and lighting design. The latter consists of seven lampshades which, variously bright and dark, manage to evoke mood and place with remarkable specificity for each of the four plays.

There is a fifth Hopkins text performed here, by the way, though not in a traditional manner (hence the evening's title). Before the play proper begins, and between segments, recorded text taken from Cunnilinguistics is broadcast in the theatre. Directed by Erin O'Leary and designed by Jared Brown, it's an impressionistic collage of words and ideas, like overheard snatches of random scenes from another of Hopkins's ineffably magnetic plays--an entirely suitable way to begin this admirable evening.

How naughty do you like your theatre? Is naughtiness enough to sustain a play? Is described naughtiness– narrated naughtiness– is that enough? The Flea’s staged reading of Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan raises such questions. Director Jim Simpson and his cast present the naughty play with a stylized gloss that is provocative and engaging in spurts, but in the end, the play lacks the punch to say anything overly interesting about its subject: Sex for sex’s sake becomes banal? Men treat women as ciphers, vessels to be filled, literally and figuratively? Um, no shit Sherlock. Alice Tuan gives us plenty of sex, but to be blunt, the play lacks an intellectual money shot. And what fun is promiscuous theatre without the joy of a good climax or two?

Annette and Alma, while hanging out in their tiled steam room, prepare for a sex party where two men unknown to them, Jesse and Alexander, are coming over to engage in, well, sex. All four characters are drawn largely from the world of straight porn: flat, amoral, and drugged-out. In the case of Alexander, there lies beneath his insecurity and tanned exterior the threat of violence. And that vague sense of possible harm is the play’s only source of conflict. Tuan, therefore, gives her characters some interesting turns of phrase. Since language is key to the evening, Simpson opts for a narrator to read all of Tuan’s vivid stage directions, and each of the actors wears a microphone. This amplification allows for some interesting vocal effects to add to the evening’s synthetic aesthetic: glowing podiums, long echoes, and deep, deep stares.

Unsurprisingly, the foursome engage in sex. Alexander pummels Annette and Alma sodomizes Jesse with a gun, which he actually ends up enjoying. Thanks to Alexander’s comprehensive knowledge of the genre, Alma is recognized as an actual porn star, one renowned for her double penetration scenes. Alexander wants to try her out and seduces Jesse into tag-teaming Alma. Things take a twist and one of Alexander’s testicles ends up in Alma’s hand. This brings the evening’s events to a close.

Tuan’s play certainly poses a number of interesting problems for a director, but I remain unconvinced that this play is “unstageable.” Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus seem far more unstageable, but clearly they have been given the full treatment on stage. Though Simpson keeps things interesting with the microphones and lights, the lack of any sexual visuals seems to run counter to Tuan’s play which wants to represent the seemingly unrepresentable. But strong performances by Joanie Ellen (Annette) and Siobhan Towey (Narrator) along with Simpson’s ever-keen directorial eye keep things focused and the audience involved.

The play feels like a pastiche, a blend of porn and Greek tragedy, and reminds me of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis in its tone. Like Ellis, beneath the pornographic attention to detail lies the work of a moralist. But unlike Ellis’s recent Glamorama which complicates the terrain of his moral critique, Tuan’s point remains a bit obvious and the female rage of Alma and Annette feels uninspired, given how “not there” they are. In truth, I wanted more sex in this play, not to make it pornographic, but to make it erotic. It is easy to remain removed with straight-forward pornographic descriptions, but when it begins to turn you on, moral uncertainty packs a real punch: Desire, then, turns on you. Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye remains the best example of pornography that reaches such erotic and intellectual heights. I’d be curious to see if Ajax could approach Bataillan excess when it gets the full stage treatment.

But in the end, I remain unconvinced that Ajax is that strong a play. Tuan’s bio points out how the play was “written out of frustration with institutional U.S. American theatre” and in interviews, she has called Ajax her “white play” because it occurs “in a completely blanched world.” Clearly, Tuan wants to challenge theatrical boundaries and tackle the narcissism of a “bottom-line” culture. I respect that impulse, but in the end, there wasn’t enough new or challenging here to sustain the play for its duration. I still recommend the curious to check out Simpson’s presentation, if only for the performances and the joy of seeing a play that most theatres would be too scared to even touch.

An Immaculate Misconception is the first play by Carl Djerassi, the scientist who invented the birth control pill some five decades ago. The flippant sound bite here would be that Dr. Djerassi should not quit his day job. What he's created here, and somehow gotten Primary Stages to produce, is a rather foolish, heaving melodrama that is both bad theatre and bad science.

The main character of An Immaculate Misconception is Dr. Melanie Laidlaw, a scientist who is developing a revolutionary new reproductive technology, whereby a single sperm is injected into an egg under a microscope to achieve fertilization. The repercussions of Melanie's work are huge: functionally infertile men may suddenly be able to father children, for one thing; deeper, and possibly more sinister applications can also be imagined.

Djerassi pretty much ignores the fundamental issue about whether scientists should play God (he doesn't seem to think that's a problem). Instead, he focuses on the ethical question of using sperm without the father's knowledge. (There's even some rather alarming talk about harvesting sperm from recently deceased men.) The plot trigger in An Immaculate Misconception is that Melanie, who is using herself as guinea pig for her research, has not told her married lover that she has borrowed/stolen some of his sperm to have their child. A subsidiary plot point, not at all satisfactorily resolved, stems from a possible last-minute substitution of his own sperm by Melanie's research partner Felix.

The implications would be more disturbing if it were possible to take Djerassi's play seriously. Happily (I think), that's not possible. Stylistically, An Immaculate Misconception feels like turgid night-time soap opera, bordering occasionally on soft porn (there are two embarrassing nude love scenes, with actors Thomas Schall and Ann Dowd struggling to keep themselves covered with bedclothes).

As for the content of his play, Dr. Djerassi would have us believe that Melanie can conduct her experiment on herself, without the knowledge or approval (or, presumably, the funding) of the people who run the laboratory where she works; and that one scientist would be willing to risk compromising the integrity of serious research by, to put it bluntly, jerking off during the experiment; and that another scientist would actually refuse to allow DNA testing on the first child born of this new process for reasons of pride.

It's all preposterous. The procedure depicted here, by the way, called ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) is quite real and would make a worthy subject for any number of dramas, staged or otherwise. But An Immaculate Misconception isn't one of them.

Apocalypso! is an extremely pleasant, sometimes serious comedy about a group of eight disparate people whose lives intersect and intertwine during the days just before New Year's. Author William Donnelly has a genuine gift for creating likable, interesting, realistic characters: we come to care for these folks very quickly, and happily follow them on the occasionally metaphysical journeys their playwright has designed for them. Apocalypso! doesn't finally quite work, but it's an enormously enjoyable work of theatre, one that whets our appetite for future Donnelly productions to come.

The play begins in a bar, where Boone (J.C. DeVore) and Gus (Christopher Briggs) have struck up an acquaintance. Boone, estranged from his wife and out-of-work, lives with an old friend named Walt (Lee Rosen). Gus is an expansive barstool philosopher pondering the apocalypse, which he believes to be imminent. He's also a bit of a thief, unable to resist pocketing Boone's wallet when it drops to the floor as Boone heads off to the rest room. Anyway, when Boone returns, a mysterious young woman (Kate Hess) suddenly materializes and warns them that the end is near.

Ok, so we're immediately hooked. Action shifts to Walt's home, where Boone is agonizing over his wife's departure. Walt tries to change the subject, and we understand why when, in the next scene, we discover that Boone's wife, Gin (Amy Rhodes), and Walt are having an affair. Gin rushes off to have dinner with her sister, Cal (Kelly Lynn Harrison), but the two quarrel; Cal goes home to her husband, Dwight (James O'Shea), and these two wind up bickering unhappily as well. Meanwhile Gus and his live-in girlfriend Sherry (Colleen DeSalvo), who works at the bar where the play started, are also squabbling. And popping up everywhere is that mysterious young woman, until we learn that she is Dora, Walt's possibly loony little sister.

So everyone is heading into New Year's Eve uneasily; plus here's Dora, suggesting to all who may not have already had it on their minds that the apocalypse is at hand. We will sink peacefully into the void; or maybe the end of the world will take the form of a calypso dance-a-thon.

In Act Two, Donnelly explains heretofore unexplained connections among the characters and ties up all loose ends most satisfyingly. Apocalypso! ends, as it must, at midnight on New Year's Day, with everyone the better for the flirtation with infinity, including us in the audience.

Or was it merely a flirtation? I'm certainly not telling.

All eight cast members do fine work here, under Erin Brindley's brisk, intelligent direction. I feel compelled to single out a few of the actors: J.C. DeVore, who is deliciously, guilelessly open-minded and open-hearted as Boone; and Kelli Lynn Harrison and James O'Shea, who are remarkably convincing as a devoted married couple. Brian MacInnis' unit set, simplicity itself, serves the piece beautifully.

Apocalypso! doesn't deliver fully on its premise—what could?—but it stands nonetheless as a fine work of theatre. Even though it's slightly out of season at the moment, its theme assures its timeliness: it's certainly worth a look. 

The American premiere of Attempts on her Life, now running at Soho Rep, is full of theatrical surprises. The tight ensemble work by the cast, aided by inventive direction and design, makes the show a must-see. If you are looking for a night of thought-provoking theatre, this British play is worth your time and energy.

Martin Crimp’s play is composed of seventeen titled scenes, each of which can be played by a varying number of speakers. The playscript only designates when there is a change of speaker. Details like the number of speakers in a scene, or the gender and race of the speakers are all matters of interpretation. As a result, the play can be staged in any number of ways. What holds the seventeen “scenarios for the theatre” together is their subject: the mysterious Anne. Over the course of the play, Anne never appears; instead, various figures discuss her life. Anne could, perhaps, be a terrorist, a victim of violence, an underage Porno star or even an expensive car. Attempts on her Life is not about discovering the truth of Anne’s identity, but the process by which we try to discover that truth. The play is after the big question: How is it that we come to know the Other? Crimp suggests that the process of knowing is never a neutral one, and in fact, that the subject perpetuates a violence on the object that it seeks to know. It is no coincidence that the object of investigation in this play is a woman, since the female other has been the object of the male gaze since time immemorial.

Though this may sound like an academic exercise, as events of the last decade attest, it is an issue of real importance in our media-saturated culture. Crimp never lets his exploration of such a theoretical question turn his play into a mere exercise. What makes theatre of this kind work is the writing: Crimp’s prose can be gorgeous, even when it unsettles, and the play is peppered with moments of profound humor. Director Steve Cosson does a first-rate job allowing the language, which often achieves a novelistic quality, take center-stage. Whether it be a tag-team of writers in the act of composition or a trashy Euro-pop girl group performing their latest single, Cosson gives each of the scenes a world and grounds the speakers in it. The words never emerge from a void and as a result, the pictures that the actors paint are crystal-clear, even if the staging sometimes feels a tad too literal.

The cast is uniformly strong: T. Ryder Smith, who was excellent in last year’s Lipstick Traces, demonstrates his versatility as he seamlessly moves between roles. Damian Baldet excels in the play’s funniest scene, “The New Anny,” as he translates a car commercial which becomes increasingly fascistic in tone. Jayne Houdyshell and Christopher McCann also give first-rate performances. As McCann and Houdyshell relate tales of Anne’s childhood desire to be a terrorist in the “Mum and Dad” scene, they convince the audience that they know who Anne is. But by the scene’s end, we watch that certainty dissolve, again confirming that Anne is “not a real character, but a lack of character.” Houdyshell and McCann shine in the production’s simplest moments, when they each simply speak alone on stage (“Kinda Funny” and “Strangely!”). They never fail to capture the audience’s attention. The rest of the cast (Sara Barnett, Aysan Celik and Tracey A. Leigh) do equally strong work.

If there is any quibble I have with the production, it is that sometimes the individual scenes feel too similar. On the page, the scenes are more distinct than sometimes comes across in this production. That feeling of sameness slows down the pace at the start of the evening. Crimp’s irony is delivered a little too archly in places. Again, varying the tone and complicating that irony a bit more would have helped distinguish the moments. But in the final analysis, these are minor issues.

The cast take this challenging material and turn it into a fully engaging evening of theatre. Even if you disagree with the play’s argument or find its abstract style somewhat disorienting, Attempts on her Life provokes its audience. I left Soho Rep excited by Cosson’s excellent direction and hoping to see more of this experimental side of British playwriting in New York.

I don't get what Alex Dawson is trying to accomplish in his new play Barman.  The first act takes place in a "dilapidated New Jersey gin mill" (per the program), where bartender Jack dispenses beverages and occasional advice to a crowd of regulars: it's half blue-collar "Cheers," half Iceman Cometh before Hickey shows up. These regulars include Angelo, a salty middle-aged fellow with a penchant for tall tales; George, a grad student with a drug habit; Mike, a tough-talking, do-nothing barfly; Skip, ditto, but ganglier and geekier; and Billy, the old guy at the table by himself, as dilapidated as the bar itself. Rounding out the cast of characters are Bouncer Wes, a former employee who doesn't seem to get that he's former, and Grace, a hot young co-ed out slumming for the night. Jack alights on her temporarily, but nothing comes of it. Or indeed of anything: Act One of Barman is talk talk talk, most of it coarse and gritty and dripping with testosterone-laced bravado, almost exclusively about getting drunk or getting laid. Dawson has a kind of talent for this stuff, but it wears thin rapidly.

So we look to Act Two to provide something to take home from this evening; but alas, Dawson doesn't deliver. We are now in a fancy apartment in Manhattan; it's two years later and Jack has written a book ("Barman," natch) about his experiences pouring drinks in New Jersey. It's the tail-end of a big celebration in Jack's honor, and the regulars have all gathered here for the occasion. But no one's having a good time: though Jack protests more than once that it's his night, his old pals are angry because he didn't join them for Billy's funeral a few days earlier.

Dawson dances around the idea of betrayal and also flirts with that old saw about what happens when you get what you wish for, but little comes of either. Instead, Act Two, like Act One, is merely talk talk talk.

The cast of ten turns in serviceable work, with Joseph Prussak (Skip) and Joseph Pacillo (Mike) creating the most genuinely interesting characters; Jake Jordan gives Bouncer Wes a strange accent that renders much of his dialog incomprehensible. Staging by Jane Hardy is painfully slow; but Dawson's set design, especially the vividly realized bar in Act One, is noteworthy.

Beauty is a fascinating and necessary look at female sexual fantasy and desire, and how both need to be addressed, nurtured, and maintained in a long-term relationship in order to make it work. First-time scribe and director Stephanie Gill and Tess Gill make some bold moves in presenting a female protagonist so sexually hungry that she goes to unusual lengths to satisfy her hunger. Not all of them work, but they do add up to a thought-provoking show that is also more fun than you’d expect, and a little bit titillating as well.

Based on the Luis Bunuel film, Belle de Jour, Beauty tells the story of Suzanne (Courtney Rose Costello), the virtuous trophy wife of Peter (Tom Bartos), a successful surgeon. They love each other very much, but he never does anything she wants to do. Either he’s too busy or he just doesn’t want to. This leaves Suzanne emotionally cold and distant with him. But, underneath her composed exterior rages a voracious sexual appetite and fantasy life, in which her blonde alter-ego (Veronika Surla) is continually whipped, tied up, and degraded at the hands of her husband; his obnoxious and slimy best friend, H (Al Hasnas); and a mysterious carriage driver (Jay Rosenbloom). Needing to finally fulfill her sexual cravings, Suzanne goes to work secretly at a brothel while Peter is at work. From there, other complications arise.

Visually, director Gill has cast Beauty well–all of the actors look their part, and many of them are up to fulfilling Beauty’s emotional demands. Bartos is very good as Peter, capturing his lonely frustration and lack of self-awareness perfectly. Dia Marie Shepardson is also excellent as Ms. Montez, the brothel’s sexy and mysterious madame. And, Jonn Jorgensen is both creepy and amusing as two separate brothel clients. Unfortunately, Costello does not fare as well in the lead role. She often seems to be as uncomfortable and inhibited as her character, even after Suzanne starts working in the brothel. That event, which should change Suzanne drastically, barely registers with Costello, who lets almost nothing affect her throughout the show.

Set designer Scott Schreck makes the most of the intimate Trilogy Theatre, and is assisted ably by lighting designer Pamela Kupper in successfully isolating and evoking Beauty’s various locations. Jen Moeller’s costumes also go a long way towards giving the audience valuable information about each of the characters.

All in all, Beauty is a successful production, and–dare I say it?–an important one. Anyone who cares about maintaining a long-term relationship needs to see it, if for no other reason than to see how not to do it.

Canada Lee is not exactly a famous name, but, as Mona Z. Smith's fine new play Becoming Something illuminates, it should be. His story is a piece of African-American history that is absolutely worth telling and remembering and—it is hoped—learning from. He was born in New York in 1907 and started out to be a violinist, until he noticed that all of the faces in symphony orchestras in the 1920s were white. Then he became a jockey, and, after that, a boxer, at which he achieved notable success, to the point where he almost fought the reigning white champ. During the Great Depression, Lee's life was tougher, including a stint as the owner of a fried chicken restaurant at one point. And then, in 1937, he was hired by the very young Orson Welles to appear in an all-Negro production of Macbeth under the auspices of the WPA. And his life changed.

Canada Lee was, it turned out, a natural actor. After Macbeth came the title role in Native Son on Broadway, a part in Alfred Hitchcock's war film Lifeboat, and, somewhat controversially, the lead in The Duchess of Malfi, for which he became the first black man to appear as a white character (in whiteface) on the American stage.

As his fame grew, so did his outspokenness about the way he and his fellow African-Americans were being let down by the United States. Lee was appalled that black men fighting for democracy in Europe and Asia were being denied equality here at home, and he was principled enough to use his position to call attention to the problem. This put him closer than was strictly safe to radical groups that, after World War II, became the subject of inquiry by the FBI for their supposed Communist ties; or perhaps just speaking out about institutionalized racism was enough to land Canada Lee on the blacklist—playwright Smith is inconclusive on this point. Inevitably, Lee wound up one of McCarthyism's earliest and saddest casualties. He was unable to work in the United States during the final three or four years of his life; he died of a broken heart (literally and metaphorically) at 45 years of age.

Smith recognizes that Lee's life really is the stuff of tragedy: she has him quote from Othello liberally throughout the play, though ironically that role was one he never got to play. Like Othello, Lee possessed a tragic flaw—an obstinate pride that allowed him to do perilous things like speak out at rallies, put on whiteface makeup (offending lots of people, black and white), and take on a powerful former friend like the journalist Ed Sullivan, who ultimately betrayed him. Lee's hubris brought him down as surely as Oedipus's, which is why Becoming Something is so potent and stirring.

Smith, with director Traci Mariano, tells the story sparely and fluidly, with five main actors (as Lee, his brother, his two wives, and his nemesis Sullivan) plus three more cast as "dead files," the characters both anonymous and famous who filled out Lee's biography. It's a very effective, theatrical technique; another conceit, in which key ideas from the narrative are printed on signs and papers that cover the walls of the stage works less well (and is pretty much abandoned in the play's second act).

The company is exemplary, with Johnny Kitt anchoring the play powerfully as an all-too-human Lee, at once heroic and fatally flawed. Anitra Brooks is hauntingly effective as Lee's first wife Juanita, while Beth Lein does solid work as the more sketchily-drawn second wife Frances. Michael Craig Patterson is fine as Canada's ne'er-do-well brother Lovey, while Christopher Wisner is excellent as the stalwart but ultimately hypocritical Ed Sullivan (smartly eschewing any attempt at impersonation, I might add). Patrick Riviere, Paschal Frisina III, and Sheila Lewandowski exhibit remarkable versatility and skill in literally dozens of roles: some that stand out in my mind are Riviere's dead-on Richard Nixon, Frisina's nervy Irish prizefighter Jimmy, and Lewandowski's wonderfully addled FBI employee-turned-spy Judy Coplon.

Becoming Something manages to be both entertaining and immensely informative, which doesn't happen nearly often enough in the theatre. I learned a lot about Canada Lee, someone I knew almost nothing about, whose life story continues to have tremendous relevance even fifty years after it ended.

If The Iceman Cometh were set in a gay bar and all of its characters were played by two actors (and Eugene O'Neill had thrown in some jokes), you'd have Belly Up.

Well, maybe not; not exactly—but Belly Up, the new play by Tom Bondi and Mark Holt, trades in the same truths as Iceman (for real): we need each other to sustain our illusions: sometimes a sympathetic ear (and glass) are all that's required to keep us going. This message, subtly and gently underlying everything that happens in this raucous, ribald comedy, is what transforms Belly Up from two-man tour de force to genuine dramatic literature.

Now, with that serious moment of sincere praise out of the way, let me state unequivocally that Belly Up is a scream. Populated with daffy, quirky characters who are recognizable and only slightly exaggerated, and loaded with enough snappy, sassy one-liners to choke Joan Rivers, Belly Up is as hilarious and irreverent an entertainment as anything on stage in NYC. Tom Bondi and Mark Holt, who are its writer-performers, are terrific, playing ten different roles (sometimes more than one at the same time) with on-target precision and timing.

Belly Up takes place in a less-than-trendy gay bar on a night when, it seems, absolutely everyone shows up. Regulars Sid and Marty anchor the place (and the play), a pair of retired older guys who tell each other stories they've heard a million times before while chatting up the hunky bartender and watching the passing parade. At the other end of the bar is Bev, a former "Price is Right" model in a bright red wig who now works at Rite-Aid. Always ready with a devastating quip ("That didn't sound like Destiny's Child. More like Destiny's Abortion."), tonight Bev is comforting her pal Tito, a cute Latin fellow recovering from a painful breakup with his boyfriend.

Hovering nearby are two guys named Jason, one an insecure middle-aged muscleboy ("My therapist told me it must be terrible to be an unattractive gay man"), the other an overweight obsessive ("Maybe body fat will be in next year"); two club kids named Christopher and Seth looking for an easy way to score some designer drugs; perpetual chorus boy Kyle (who does a spectacularly terrible musical number at one point); a tough but sexy hustler named Angelo and his fluttery mark, whose name actually is Mark; a boa-wearing queen named Max; a very weird man who shuffles along the floor telling people that they have nice legs; a zonked-out aging rock diva (think Joplin had she lived); and—briefly—a very short Asian guy looking for a leather bar.

There's also entertainment in this place. Two really awful drag wannabes show up and try out their act (eliciting Bev's previously cited comment, by the way). And every so often hot go-go boy Tony wanders on to bump and grind listlessly for the crowd. Tony, who may be straight, is the reason two vacuous high school girls named Debbie and Doreen turn up, hoping to catch a glimpse of him; he's also pursued by the sassy mother of his baby son, who winds up having a knock-down, drag-out fight with Doreen. All in all, it's an exciting evening.

Bondi and Holt divide up this delicious menagerie and create little comic masterpieces throughout the play. Highlights: Holt trying to pick himself up as Tito and one of the Jasons; Bondi as the former rock legend, staring blankly and endlessly at Joe the Bartender; Holt having a fight with himself as Doreen and Tony's jealous girlfriend; Bondi slaughtering a grotesquely inappropriate song during Kyle's Turn; Holt and Bondi, got up like a pair of Carmen Mirandas in camouflage drag, as the "entertainment," Lady Saffron and Violetta.

The set, by Andrew Harman, is perfect; as are Chris Leyva's minimalist costumes and Rick Martin's lighting. Nicolas Martin, on piano all night long as frustrated accompanist Jimmy, is invaluable. Director James Busby wraps the whole package together beautifully, ensuring that what could be a three-ring circus is instead an honest-to-God play, without sacrificing the splendid artifice of its two stars morphing from character to character, effortlessly but with neither pretension nor affect, right before our eyes.

It's interesting how little most of us actually know about Jesse James; at this point in the life of his legend, he's mostly famous for being famous, an outlaw of the Old West whose actual accomplishments are ill-remembered. Playwright Dan Dietz uses James' celebrity as the taking-off point for a "death and medicine show" about American mythology, history, and collective memory. In particular—much as John Guare does in his new play A Few Stout Individuals—Dietz explores here the ways we deliberately misremember our past and the reasons why. When we turn an unscrupulous villain like Jesse James into a cultural hero, what does it say about us?

Blind Horses is, therefore, a most intriguing play; and if it doesn't quite follow through with clear answers to the questions it poses, it nevertheless succeeds splendidly as wake-up call, provocation, and—importantly—entertainment. Dietz sketches in just a few key moments from the life of Jesse James to create a vivid but impressionistic account of the man. We learn about his difficult youth with a pious but unlucky mother and a string of abusive or absent father/step-fathers. We meet him as a teenager, shot up and shell-shocked following a bloody Civil War battle, getting sewed up (without anesthetic) by his cousin Zee. And we witness re-enactments of the first bank robbery, in 1866; and of two others that followed.

All the stories of James' life are presented within the framework of a medicine show run by his older brother, Frank: the flashbacks—Jesse's memories—are being packaged and spun into a consumable legend, for our edification and amusement. (Frank also has some patent medicine to sell us, a concoction called "Jesse Juice" that will help us be more like our hero.) Of course, inevitably the facts and the myths collide and then implode: Blind Horses exposes both the memories and the medicine show as lies. In the ugly and unforgiving trail of the remains of Jesse's innocent victims resides the truth.

Blind Horses is ambitious and relentless and fascinating. It's probably longer than it needs to be, and the medicine show framing device isn't always sustained effectively. Nevertheless, this production, directed by Jonathan Mazer, is excellent, featuring a riveting central performance by Travis York as Jesse James. Courtney Cunningham is haunting as the "Vaudevillian," Frank James' nameless assistant at the medicine show who stands in for all of Jesse's victims. Eric Alan Scott (Frank), Jennifer Bryan (Zee), Elsie James (Ma), and Eric Cross (Pinkerton, the detective) fill out the worthy cast.

What I like best about Blue, the new play at the Roundabout by Charles Randolph-Wright, is how inviting it is: the characters who inhabit this play are--despite their various faults--warm, caring, genuine people whom we are honestly happy to get to know and spend some time with. The central figure is Peggy Clark, a frustrated, worldly, intelligent, forever-striving woman who gave up a modeling career, with all its trappings, to marry Samuel Clark, Jr., then heir and now proprietor of an enormously prosperous funeral home in a small town in South Carolina. There's some of The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield in this lady and also some of Gypsy's Mama Rose--Peggy's big dream is for her younger son Reuben to become a renowned jazz trumpet player.

But, particularly as embodied here by Phylicia Rashad, there's a good deal of Auntie Mame in Peggy as well: watch her warm up to the task of taking country girl LaTonya Dinkins under her wing, or pitter-patter into the living room swathed in a colorful kimono to serve a meal of miso soup and seaweed to her unsuspecting clan. Rashad is an inspired choice to play this lady: Peggy's sass, elegance, charm, and intelligence mark her as kin to Rashad's long-running TV role Claire Huxtable from "The Cosby Show." But Rashad's natural warmth and self-confidence really define Peggy; instead of a larger-than-life caricature (or, even worse, an over-the-top monster), we get a real, flesh-and-blood woman. It's a terrific performance.

Randolph-Wright's other characters are just as vivid, mind you. Peggy's mother-in-law and nemesis, family matriarch Tillie Clark, is a tough, common-sensical old bird, as filled with determination and cantankerousness and, yes, hope, as Peggy herself. She's splendidly played by Jewell Robinson in a performance that's as heartfelt and subtle as it is un-self-consciously good-humored; Robinson and Rashad have wonderful chemistry (or anti-chemistry) which makes their characters' incessant feuding and fussing feel ripe and natural.

Caught between these two indomitable women is Samuel, the browbeaten husband and son who was nevertheless forceful enough to have defied Tillie by marrying Peggy. As Samuel, Randall Shepperd gives us a man of intelligence, strength, and good humor who is, above all, deeply in love with his wife and everything her impractical dreams represent.

Elder son Sam III grows from an irresponsible teenager (sporting a hip and extravagant '70s afro, borrowing the family hearse for make-out sessions with his girlfriends) to dutiful conventionality, carrying the torch as the next president of Clark Funeral Homes. And Sam's one-time girlfriend LaTonya is transformed, thanks to Peggy, from a wide-eyed hick to a self-assured and centered young woman. Howard W. Overshown and Messeret Stroman do extraordinary work in these roles, by the way, in sensitive, funny, sharply nuanced performances.

Finally there's the younger son Reuben, who is also the play's narrator. We watch him grow from an obedient, slightly spoiled pre-teen in the first act to a rebellious, stubborn and self-righteous young man in Act Two. Reuben is the protagonist of Blue: though Randolph-Wright writes in loving detail about Peggy and the other members of his family, it is Reuben's journey toward realizing his dreams that emerges as the play's central theme. Chad Tucker and Hill Harper share the role of Reuben and make him as special to us as he is to his doting mother.

There is one more character in this play, a brilliant and uncompromising r&b singer named Blue Williams. Blue turns up again and again, as the symbol of Peggy's sometimes misplaced aspirations, and as the embodiment of the questing artistic spirit that Reuben will eventually come to understand and embrace. He's played here by Michael McElroy with a smooth easiness that, we discover, belies his true nature. Blue is revealed to us through his music, a succession of songs that track the play's chronology (from the late '70s to the present) with canny precision; McElroy performs them beautifully.

Sheldon Epps's staging is superb; I particularly admire the way he has marshaled his designers to create a stunningly organic environment for Blue, one that shifts between reality and memory with ease and flair.  Especially noteworthy are the costume designs of Debra Bauer, which help us zero in on character with remarkable acuity.

The Clarks of Blue are indeed a family to care about. Kudos to Randolph-Wright and his producers at Roundabout Theatre Company for sharing them with us.

At one point in Joe Brady's wondrous play Bow Down, a character says "I know what I think about whenever I see a plane fly by." As someone who was evacuated from his apartment the day after the twin towers collapsed, I know exactly what that character is talking about. That's why I love this play—though it's sort of determinedly nonlinear and unconventional, it's stunningly heartfelt and authentic. New Yorkers were changed by the events of 9/11; Bow Down catches some of what we've been feeling and captures it in breathless vignettes, sketches, and theatrical images. It's valuable; we don't want to lose what we went through.

There are at least half-a-dozen story lines in Bow Down. One young man is dealing with a girlfriend who abandoned him to go to Europe on business, and has now suddenly returned. A young woman, who is apparently the stage manager of the show we're watching, reveals that she's pregnant and unsure of who the father is. Tom Hanks' son tries to make a movie, but it goes haywire. A waitress tries to take someone's order, but he never gives it. An actor tries to study acting, but winds up watching images of the universe on a TV screen that won't leave him alone.

And one young man, the one who talks about the airplanes, stacks unread newspapers on ever-growing piles. He wants to process the events he's witnessed, but he's not ready to do it now.

This, in fact, is what all the disparate characters of Bow Down share: a desire to deal with life's cataclysms but no clear means to do so. They talk about not bowing down (to terrorism, to pressure, to love—you name it), and armed only with determination, they don't. Brady's play is beautifully life-affirming as a result: witness not just to devastation but to survival and hope.

Others will undoubtedly find other things in Bow Down: this is a play, after all, in which a character sings the entire "Oranges/Poranges" song from, I believe, "H.R. Pufnstuf"; in which three senior citizens watch the action from the back as if it were a live daytime drama; in which a man has a rope tied around his ankle while another dangles objects over his head  from a fishing pole. In other words, we're very much in experimental terrain here. What's most exciting about Bow Down is that its creators have listened to their impulses to respond to events NOW: the rawness of their unedited and sometimes incoherent feelings makes Bow Down urgent and affecting.

Thanks to Rosie O'Donnell, gay parenting is a hot-button issue at the moment. It's the ostensible subject of Tom Donaghy's new play, Boys and Girls, but those in search of a probing exploration of this topic—which would certainly be welcome—won't find it here. The boys and girls of the title are not the youngsters being brought up by the lesbian couple and gay couple who together comprise the entire cast of characters of this play. No, these four adults—successful people, more or less, well into their thirties—are the boys and girls Donaghy is interested in. This drama, disappointing for several reasons, looks at four sad cases of stunted development: two pairs of overage adolescents who are having real trouble turning themselves into grown-ups, despite the fact that a four-year-old boy is in their charge.

The central figure of Boys and Girls is Reed (Robert Sella), a neurotic gay man who hasn't gotten over his breakup with Jason (Malcolm Gets), even though as far as we can tell said breakup was mostly his idea. Reed has a responsible (unnamed) profession, part-ownership in a group house in the country for weekend retreats, and a shadowy past involving alcohol and assorted wild times, including a one-night stand with his best friend Bev (Nadia Dajani) several years ago. The other characters in the play tell us what a great, beloved guy Reed is, but all we get to see of him are his insecurities and missteps.

From that latter category come two glaring errors in judgment that fuel Donaghy's plot. First is Reed's attempt to reunite with Jason, in spite of the fact that Jason hasn't changed all that much and, more worryingly, notwithstanding the existence of Jason's new, more supportive lover, William. Second, and perhaps even more damaging, is Reed's acquiescence to a bizarre request made of him by Bev and her current lover, Shelly (Carrie Preston). These two are the mothers of a four-year-old boy, who they believe needs a male "father" figure to assure his healthy development. Bev and Shelly ask Reed to serve in this capacity, but they set one condition before allowing him to do so: he must sever his renewed ties with Jason.

Incredibly (and I mean that literally), Reed agrees. We see him again nine months later, at the moment when the arrangement unravels, and, coincidentally, when Jason stumbles back into his life again (Jason just happens to be vacationing with William at the same beach where Reed, Bev, and Shelly are summering). Eventually Shelly and Bev break up, most acrimoniously, and by the end of Boys and Girls Reed and Bev wind up alone together, possibly asexually, trying to create some sort of family unit for themselves and the little boy they are raising.

Will they succeed? Of course—people even less emotionally mature than these two bring up children all the time. Sexual preference doesn't have a thing to do with it.

Will they be happy? Probably not. The four people who populate Boys and Girls revel in their unhappiness, it seems to me. Especially Reed, the oddly-drawn protagonist, who comes across as almost preternaturally self-destructive, seemingly incapable of ever making the right decision about anything important in his life. Forget about whether people like Reed or not: he's impossible to empathize with. (He's also, particularly as portrayed by Sella, an annoying amalgamation of almost every nellie-gay stereotype that, one hoped, our theatre abandoned long ago.)

In the end, Boys and Girls defeats just about all of the talented people involved with it. Director Gerald Gutierrez certainly doesn't seem to have gotten a handle on the material; neither do Preston or Dajani (Gets manages to be reasonably likable as the apparent heel Jason, however). The set, designed by Douglas Stein, is truly weird, dominated by a spiral staircase that reminded me of the one Stephen Brimson Lewis created for Indiscretions a few years back; that one was backdrop for some memorable stage pictures, but this one gets used hardly at all. Catherine Zuber's costumes, particularly Sella's skimpy bathing attire, are most unflattering.

In earlier work like The Beginning of August and From Above, Donaghy's greatest strength has been in creating characters of rare authenticity. It's a great disappointment, then, that Reed, Jason, Bev, and Shelly feel so shallow and unreal. Part of the trouble, by the way, may be the way Donaghy has these four talk—Boys and Girls is filled with clipped, mannered, elliptical overlapping dialogue a la David Mamet, which turns the two couples into even bigger clichés than they already are. Donaghy needs to reclaim his own unique, insightful voice.

In Brutal Imagination, playwright Cornelius Eady, inspired by the infamous Susan Smith case–in which a young, white mother claimed that a black man kidnapped her two children before confessing to the crime herself–imagines, “what if the imaginary black man…was, in fact, real? If he had a ‘life’ for the nine days it took for the police to break her story?” That’s the starting point for this challenging, fascinating, and engaging production, which follows Smith (Sally Murphy) and her creation, Mr. Zero (Joe Morton), during those nine days.

“When called, I come. My job is to get things done,” Mr. Zero tells the audience. He’s an amorphous figure, whose sole purpose is to personify all of white America’s fear about the black man. He takes on the identity of whatever type of guy the situation calls for. As an example, he cites the white Boston physician who murdered his wife in 1989, but blamed it on a black carjacker. “How I would love not to be dubious,” he laments.

Giving Mr. Zero his say is an outrageous and exciting idea that Eady, at first, seems ready to explore. He’s more interested in examining white America’s relationship to the black man than Smith’s motives anyway. But, as Brutal Imagination progresses, it becomes clear that Eady is only using Mr. Zero as a mouthpiece for voicing some shopworn platitudes about cultural divisions and the sad state of race relations in the U.S. Thankfully, both Diana Paulus’ direction, and powerful performances from its two leads, save the play from being a one-trick pony.

It’s clear that Brutal Imagination, which began its life as a book of poetry, is the work of a budding dramatist. Florid, poetic language abounds, but there’s little necessity to any of it. Eady doesn’t write for character. The voice coming out of both Smith’s and Mr. Zero’s mouths is clearly his, which creates a sameness throughout the play.

Fortunately, Diane Paulus’ savvy direction boosts Brutal Imagination considerably. She has a good eye for creating striking stage visuals, and she has a very good sense of spatial relations with regard to the actors. Her staging tells stories that Eady’s script doesn’t, as in a scene, which runs antithetical to the dialogue being spoken at the time, in which Smith turns to Mr. Zero for some “physical” comfort. Paulus is further aided by Mark Wendland’s sets, Ilona Somogyi’s costumes, and Kevin Adams’ lights, all of which supply telling bits of unscripted exposition. Diedre Murray provides a versatile, evocative score that, with the exception of a painful musical flourish at the very end that nearly ruins the show, also proves to be an asset.

Murphy hits all the right notes as Smith. Her performance goes a long way towards filling in a lot of blanks in Eady’s script. By the time she claims, “I knew I could get farther if I said it was a black man,” it’s already redundant. Her behavior around Mr. Zero has already told the audience that, and a myriad of other things. And, late in the show, when Brutal Imagination finally gets around to briefly examining Smith motives, Murphy’s performance reveals the depth of the abyss that Smith found herself standing at the edge of, an abyss that the script only hints at.

Morton is perfect as Mr. Zero. He brings a professional and inspired polish to the entire proceeding that is a joy to watch. His Mr. Zero is rich, strong, and smart–far more so than Smith. Morton is especially strong in an extended section during which some of Mr. Zero’s cultural predecessors–Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, Buckwheat, Stepin Fetchit, and Stagger lee–all weigh in with their opinions on the situation. It’s an ambitious section that goes on way too long, and would bring the show to a screeching halt in the hands of many other actors. But, Morton miraculously manages to make it the high point of both the show and his performance.

Despite its failure to fully grasp the possibilities it introduces, Brutal Imagination is still a terrific and worthwhile experience that is elevated beyond its own aspirations by Paulus’ smart direction, and Morton and Murphy’s dynamic performances. Catch them all while you can.

Anna Paquin. Animal abuse conspiracies. French nature documentaries. The Civilians sing in one of the songs in Canard, Canard, Goose? that they can make a show out of anything. And with this performance piece, the new Downtown company sets out to prove it. They throw all of the above, plus musical theatre numbers, metatheatrical deconstruction, adept characterizations and duck bill strap-ons into their compositional Cuisinart, hit puree, and turn out a goose liver pâté that’s theatrically rich, nuanced in flavor and ooh-so-smooth. While not exactly substantial enough for a whole meal, it certainly awakens the appetite for more from this company.

On one level C,C,G? functions as a clever parody of Tectonic Theatre’s Laramie Project–the Civs undertake an in-person investigation of a terrible crime in the kind of back-water town no respectable denizen of the East Village or Williamsburg would be caught, ummm, dead in. This indicates goose egg–size cajones since Tectonic's artistic director Moises Kaufman sits on their advisory council and anything even remotely associated with Matthew Shepard has become so sacrosanct as to render even the simulated re-creation of his murder beyond spoofing. In many ways I actually prefer the Civs’ tweaking of the documentary theatre form to the solemn original. For one thing, C,C,G? never assumes the authoritative pose which underlay Kaufman & Co.’s exploration of the Shepard murder. For another, they are honest about the process of fictionalization, to the point where a disclaimer is made at the beginning of the show informing the audience that practically everything we are about to see is real, however some roles have been reassigned and some incidents invented. Most importantly, however, is the awareness that they’re not even sure that a crime has actually been committed. In this way their exploration becomes consciously as much or perhaps more about the construction of a myth as it is about the attempt to make sense of a great injustice.

Oh, yeah, right, the injustice. It seems that when Disney (or as it turns out Columbia) filmed the Anna Paquin movie Fly Away Home they trained a flock of geese to fly in formation behind an ultra light aircraft and then abandoned them once the shoot was over. This effectively stranded the geese–leaving them without a migratory leader to follow south out of the town of Long Lake in the Adirondacks. That at least is the story one of the company members hears while vacationing there, and, like in some Iron Curtain melodrama, her account galvanizes the collective to take action. At last, a chance for the little guys of culture to take on the two-ton bruiser of a Mouse and expose its cruel exploitation of these poor avian members of the proletariat! Our brave theatre soldiers jump into their kulturmobile (actually a company member’s station wagon) and head off north in search of the story.

What they find is like Rashomon cubed. Not only do the townspeople have different versions of what happened (no surprise there), but the Civs begin to realize that they and the locals are talking about two completely different films. Except the geese in that film, a French documentary, were imprinted also, but in a different manner and nobody seems to know what happened to them either.

This is all conveyed in first person narration as the mercurial cast slips from embodying one Long Laker to another and then back to themselves. These transformations take place against a constantly shifting world of faux wood paneling and stuffed game animals (kudos to director Steve Cosson for his subtle manipulations of theatrical space). All of the characterizations are deft and most are empathetic. I would single out individuals for praise, but the program doesn’t specify who’s playing which role, and trying to keep track during the performance proved beyond me. However, I’ve long been familiar with cast member Colleen Werthmann’s work, and it’s a pleasure to report that she is maturing into a fine actress. Her portrayals of both the waitress who relates the original story that sets in motion the wild goose chase, as well as the slightly pretentious innkeeper who also movingly reveals her aching loneliness are pitch-perfect. Without tipping over into parody, she makes us aware of both women’s limitations while also revealing their humanity.

Unfortunately, this is where my understanding of what the company was trying to do began to break down. I found Werthmann’s speech about the loneliness of the Adirondacks in winter to be deeply affecting and apparently sincere. And for a moment, it flashes in my mind that this is the “discovery” in the piece–a group of New Yawrk city slickers get a little education in human commonality despite the fortress of postmodernist distancing devices they have erected to protect themselves from such cheesy displays of sentimentality. Not an earth-shattering discovery as discoveries go, but certainly it’s something. Except–the woman behind me is snickering quite audibly during the speech, as are several other members of the audience. And it doesn’t seem like she’s laughing at what’s happening on stage; it seems like she’s laughing with it. And I’m searching what I’m looking at for some clue that I’m apparently missing. Or maybe my cool meter hasn’t been calibrated finely enough to detect such infinitesimal irony. And I honestly can’t tell if the woman behind me is an ignorant bore or I’m just not getting the joke. And there’s my problem–I don’t think The Civilians know either. The tone of the piece keeps oscillating wildly between knee-jerk irony and real moments of poetic beauty, occasionally finding a point of razor-sharp balance between the two. I’m not sure what else they could have done considering that their hard-hitting exposé turns out to be a canard, and they end up (to mix in even more animal metaphors) as sheepish poseurs.

Which is all fine and lots of fun, except that the net result is that the piece doesn’t actually mean much of anything. If everything is a pose, then nothing is real. And if nothing’s real, then why should the audience care about Hollywood’s mistreatment of animals or the isolation of upstate New York or how hard it is to make theatre out of all of this? The songs by Michael Friedman are better than most of the crap on Broadway, yet I can’t tell if I’m supposed to experience them as music or as “music.” And even worse, the more accurately the cast portrays the people they interviewed, the more of a betrayal it feels when the audience gets to feel superior to them. I hasten to add that I don’t think any of this is conscious on the part of the company, but their reluctance to commit to an emotional/intellectual throughline leaves too much up to the audience. My generation has been conditioned by twenty years of pop culture to deride or at least be suspicious of any display of sincerity. When theatre artists try to have it both ways in the current zeitgeist, smugness, since it’s a safe response, will always win out.

This inability to commit extends to the multitude of false endings that collectively form a sort of post–Long Lake coda. Three times I thought the show was over, only to be presented with yet one more musical number. Individually any of the endings would have clarified the artists’ intent; all together they merely cancel each other out. One negates the entire Long Lake experience. One is a musical number from the point of view of the movie ducks that exposes the cast’s anxiety over the influence of Disney in the theatre. One is a monologue by the man on whom Fly Away Home is based that seems to suggest that the whole piece was a flight from the horrible reality of September 11. It’s both admirable and frustrating that we’re left with such a multitude of possible landings. I just wish as audience that we had been guided back down to earth with a surer hand.

The Civilians seem to be groping for a way out of the hall of mirrors that most cutting-edge theatre has been trapped in for the last few decades. This is to be applauded. That they don’t entirely succeed isn’t entirely their fault. We need to retrain our audiences to see theatre again. Here’s my fantasy: that we start to take the passion and heart of Laramie Project and wed it to the smarts and wit of Canard, Canard, Goose? Then we’ll have a theatre that nobody will snicker at. 

Paul, the professor of Italian who is the hero of Mario Fratti's delightful comedy Candida and Her Friends, thinks his students revere and respect him for the meaningful life lessons he teaches them. They always make a point, he tells us, of letting him know that they read the paper every day, and that they vote: he is, he proudly informs us, an educator, from the Latin, "to lead out of ignorance."

But what have his students really learned? In the eventful couple of days chronicled here, Paul discovers the truth about molding eager young minds, and what he finds out astonishes him. His journey begins with a chance meeting, with Candida, who was a student of his nine years ago. Candida invites him to dinner; when he arrives, she greets him in a sexy red backless dress with the news that her husband is away and they are alone for the evening. The seduction that follows is far from subtle; indeed, nothing about Candida's life is low-key, from the outrageous stories she tells Paul about her remarkably liberated libido to the perversely accommodating Rudolph, the cross-dressing masochist who apparently lives with Candida and comes on, much to his surprise, to the professor.

Paul is intrigued and shocked by his ex-student, but never more than by her pronouncements--over and over again--that it was in his class that she learned everything about life. Candida remembers particularly his explanation of the Latin phrase carpe diem, which is by now her watch cry as she embraces experience after experience with wild abandon; thanks to that one semester of Italian Culture II, Candida left the convent where she was living and launched what appears to be a frontal assault on sensuality. Can this be what Paul has done to all his students?

Visits from two more students, one from Candida's class and one from his current one, provide contradictory evidence that nevertheless proves just as startling. In the end, it turns out that Paul has perhaps more to learn about human nature than any of his students.

The lessons of Candida and Her Friends are hardly earth-shattering, but they're unassailable; anyway, the real fun of the play is eavesdropping on Paul's topsy-turvy adventures as he navigates the sometimes murky waters of academe. Fratti's script is playful and broadly comic, toying with language, meaning, and conventional mores with palpable glee. It's directed here with just the right light touch by Michael Hillyer, and brought to life by five fine actors. Alex McCord, Caroline Strong, and Toks Olagundoye are strong, distinct presences as Paul's very different students, while Neil Levine registers potently in the small but showy (and fun) role of Rudolph. At the center of it all is Brian Runbeck, appealingly confused and disarmed as the questing professor.

Mark Symczak's mod, unnatural set provides the perfect environment for Paul's strange journey. Roi Escudero's costumes suit the characters impeccably.

Marc Palmieri, author and star of Carl the Second, has an engaging stage presence and a clever way with characterization and dialogue. Unfortunately, he hasn't been able to put these gifts to good use in this play, which is a rambling, unsatisfying, and generally unpersuasive affair. The play's title and ending both suggest a punchy drama about how a man turns his conviction that he is one of life's losers into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But most of Carl the Second's running time is devoted to the long-winded but humorous recounting of its hero's romance with a nice young woman named Christine. It's a pleasant, if often routine, romantic comedy; nice as far as it goes, but tangential, mostly, to what seems to be Palmieri's main theme.

That theme is further undermined by the casting of Palmieri as Carl. Hangdog cute and resolutely well-put-together, Palmieri never comes across as even half the neurotic screw-up that Carl turns out to be.

The play features a couple of interesting gimmicks. Its exposition includes a succession of girlfriends with whom Carl has had disastrous relationships; this sequence is nicely staged by director George Demas and well-played by Megan Pearson (who plays all the girlfriends). The play's climax, less successfully, brings literary characters with whom Carl identifies (he's the manager of a used bookstore) onto the stage. This weird fantasy segment  includes Madame Bovary's husband and Lady Chatterley's Lord, which is clever, and Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby, which is just strange.

Siobhan Mahoney does fine work as Christine. But Carlo Trigiani, Jeremy Johnson, and Brian Sloan–each in several roles–are stretched more thinly than desirable.

It's impossible for me to write about Castro's Beard without mentioning that it was the first play I saw after the September 11 World Trade Center disaster. I went to the theatre tentatively, in search of comfort and laughter. I found the latter, definitely: Castro's Beard is a very funny play, mostly. But I also experienced little moments of disquiet, as some of playwright Brian Stewart's gags--which would have seemed outrageously over-the-top just a few days before--suddenly took on a painful resonance. Overall, the experience was positive, and I commend The Deptford Players, a young nonprofit theatre company that has applied a significant amount of resources in mounting this production (and done so with great success), in going forward with a project that was incisive and edgy when they started out but now seems so at odds with the mood of the city.

The premise of Castro's Beard is simple: It's 1960, and four bumbling operatives are trying to figure out how best to overthrow Fidel Castro, the new, distrusted Cuban ruler. Stewart is poking fun at bureaucracy in general along with American arrogance in his play; the first act is a well-constructed farce, in which the four men begin by creating a symbolic pecking order/power structure (hilariously depicted in terms of who sits where and who sets up the overhead projector). It then proceeds to absurdist heights worthy of the Marx Brothers (though apparently always historically accurate), as the agents consider and reject ideas such as sending Castro an exploding cigar or filling his boots with a chemical that will cause him to lose his hair, the theory being that he, like Samson, will lose his power when his beard falls out.

It's funny stuff, and it's generally well-delivered by director Lorree True and her four skilled actors, Jeff Berry, David Hutson, H. Clark Kee, and Christopher D. Roberts. Unfortunately, in Act Two, Stewart turns more serious, adding to the mix an earnest critique of McCarthyism that just doesn't fit well within the broad farcical structure of the play. More damagingly, in light of recent events, there's a long segment about shooting down an American plane and making it look like Cuba did it--way too close for comfort to be funny right now.

Again, I credit The Deptford Players with integrity and courage: a play poking fun at the CIA and international assassination plots is a hard sell these days. Maybe the lesson is simply this: that we must be grateful to live in a country where a Castro's Beard can proceed on its own merits in times as troubled as these.

Your reaction to--indeed, your relationship to--John Guare's new play Chaucer in Rome is entirely dependent on whether or not you know and love his earlier play The House of Blue Leaves. I cherish my memory of the 1985 revival of that savage domestic comedy; and so when I discovered, more than halfway into Chaucer, that its protagonist is the grandson of Artie and Bananas Shaughnessy (the central characters of Blue Leaves), my experience of this new play was up-ended and utterly transformed. Hints of Blue Leaves kept making themselves felt in my consciousness up until that moment: an irreverent priest named Father Shapiro; a flock of pilgrims seeking instant salvation at the hands of the Pope; a long monologue, most tantalizingly, delivered by a character named Dolo, about all the famous people she dreams that she has killed.

And then, in an impromptu confession, Dolo's husband Ron starts talking about how his father killed his mother in their apartment in Queens, the same apartment where he still lives with Dolo, and where he fears history will repeat itself and he will one day murder his wife. And I realized: Ron is--Ronnie Shuaghnessy, Artie and Bananas' son. And this play, Chaucer in Rome, is about what happened to him. It's not properly a sequel to The House of Blue Leaves, but knowing Ron's background makes worlds of difference in how you react to it. For history does repeat itself--keeps repeating itself--in a world where people want to be noticed but not blamed, a world keenly observed and encapsulated by a playwright who is not just three decades older but also three decades sadder and wiser.

It's possible, by the way, that I'm not supposed to be telling you this; maybe we're all supposed to be surprised by the Blue Leaves connection. In any event, Chaucer in Rome is only peripherally about Ronnie; it's really about three young Americans living in Rome at the turn of the millennium. They're all artists, and they're the best of friends. Matt is a brilliant painter, who is recovering from cancer caused by the toxins in the paints he uses. Sarah, his fiancée, is a museum curator; and Pete, his best friend, is an academic studying Renaissance painting. The beginning of the play suggests that Matt is its protagonist, his illness having forced him to switch to a less lethal vocation. But it turns out that Matt and Sarah are quite adept at reinventing themselves: on Pete's suggestion, they launch a post-modern performance art project in which they impersonate priest and nun, recording people's confessions to reveal the secrets buried in the 20th century psyche.

It is Pete who also has the idea to use his parents Ron and Dolo as the first unsuspecting subjects/victims of this plot. What he learns--all tied to that revelation I mentioned at the start of this review--changes his life. Some secrets aren't to be disturbed.

I don't know if Chaucer in Rome is as focused or profound a play as Blue Leaves, with which I am inevitably drawn to compare it. The present production, directed by Nicholas Martin, certainly lacks the antic vigor of Jerry Zaks' hysterical staging of the older work. That play was all about bombardments of cosmic rage in an absurd universe; this one feels more ordered and more angry but far less urgent--polite, almost. Blue Leaves also was one of the single funniest theatre experiences ever, while this Chaucer is downright somber. Polly Holliday's casting as Dolo, for example, feels like a serious misstep: she softens the character's rampant paranoia into likable eccentricity, stopping far short of that scary fine line between tragedy and comedy that will make us laugh until it hurts during that amazing monologue of hers.

But Martin seems to pull away from the material throughout, and his cast of excellent actors mostly does so, too: there's none of the go-for-broke bravura here that made Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation the brave, searing, honestly life-changing experiences that they were. Has Guare mellowed? Maybe, but I'd like to see Chaucer in Rome served up by a more simpatico director before I make the final call.

That said, there are some fine performances on view here, notably Dick Latessa as hapless, grown-up Ron Shaughnessy, Bruce Norris as the prodigal son Pete, and Lee Wilkof in a variety of fancy-free roles (not least of which is the insightful and gleefully cynical Father Shapiro).

Chaucer in Rome is dense and disturbing; a smart, bracing meditation on the state of the world as we begin the third millennium. We need to hear from master playwrights like Guare, to get our bearings and to gain perspective. The most telling thing, finally, about this production may be its inability to generate any sparks whatsoever, either on stage or in the press. Can we afford to be so disengaged from work this provocative?

Lots of times, the words "experimental theatre" are a euphemism for the half-baked work of a well-intentioned but not particularly innovative director or playwright. Take note, though, that when I tell you that Cheap Thrills is experimental theatre of the most exciting and fundamental kind, I'm not saying it to make anybody feel good about themselves. Peter S. Petralia, the director-playwright-designer responsible for this weird, intoxicating show, is a true visionary: he has a unique take on how theatre should work, and this show, second in a trilogy that started with last year's Bunny's Last Night in Limbo, is a living laboratory where all of us—artists and audience alike—can explore the dynamics of a form that is breathtakingly original. Hence, experimental theatre: the actual kind.

I saw and was knocked out by Bunny last year (so much so that I included it in my latest anthology of new plays, Plays and Playwrights 2002); so I guess I'm predisposed to—and, to the extent that it's possible to be, prepared for—Petralia's work. Newcomers may need some time to get acclimated, to take it all in. Do, though: it's worth it.

What you'll see when you enter the mainstage space at HERE, where Cheap Thrills is playing, is a strange scattering of artifacts and several distinct playing areas, cordoned off by what look like (and probably are) plastic shower curtains. What you'll discover, soon, is that this is the interior of a strange old house, a dusty gothic mansion like the ones The Munsters and Baby Jane lived in (that's Baby Jane as in, Whatever Happened to...). Only the walls—and the cobwebs—have been stripped away so we can see through them. Only before the evening's over, you'll see the dank drafty walls and the cobwebs in your mind's eye.

Here Petralia and his collaborators play out for us a lurid and funny horror story about an epically dysfunctional family. It's odd and in-your-face and off-putting for a long while—something like what you'd imagine Brecht would write if he worked for Showtime. The story seems to be about a dislocated young man named Dave who turns up on the doorstep of a crazed clan that consists of Mme. Les Roux, an eccentric and exotic harridan who combines all of the worst qualities of every overage, over-the-top movie scream queen from Joan Crawford to Elvira; Jesse, her eerily placid (and decidedly perverse) brother; and her two children, Sissy and Danny, the former a hyperactive junior nymphet, the latter a poster boy for why the Radical Right doesn't want gays in the Boy Scouts.

Together, the family spooks the bejesus out of Dave by indulging in surreal, sometimes dangerous games like Call The Pizza Delivery Guy and Pretend To Tie Up And Shoot People. Eventually Dave gets his sea legs, so to speak. And finally Cheap Thrills turns out to really be about something else: nothing is what it first appeared to be. Along the way, characters pause for brief interview sessions, in which, like guests on "Larry King Live" only they're ordinary folks, they reveal important secrets and answer probing questions (like "What's your favorite artery") truthfully. Or they don't.

So why this carnival-like journey through kitsch and psychology? Well, on the surface, it's to provide the audience with a good old-fashioned scare: Cheap Thrills lives up to its title, delivering the same vicarious wollop as any well-crafted horror flick. But Petralia is certainly after something deeper here, and he mostly gets to it. He's put lots of what's disturbing about American family life and family values into a funhouse setting here, and when the giddy charade suddenly turns real, something palpable happens in the room. The distortion goes away; the danger, and the rot just behind it, comes into sharp focus.

Cheap Thrills doesn't wholly succeed, in my view, in making all its points about the decay of responsibility/morality that Petralia sees so acutely. But the ways it subverts our expectations of how we think even avant-garde theatre is supposed to work keeps us off-balance and makes us somehow less passive as spectators. By engaging and involving us in the off-kilter world he presents on stage, Petralia creates a theatre experience that sticks to us, that gets under our skin.

A moment now to mention the many talented people whose artistry contributes so much to Petralia's overall vision. Actors Max Faugno, Lu Chekowsky, David Sochet, Joshua Pohja, and Stephanie Sanditz work passionately and fearlessly and achieve remarkable results; if you saw Bunny's Last Night in Limbo, you'll be impressed, especially by Chekowsky and Sanditz's astonishing versatility. Designers Rebecca M.K. Makus and Michelle Shaffer work magic on an off-off-Broadway budget (and with a funky downtown palette); composer Max Giteck Duykers furnishes a soundscape that completes the eerie picture perfectly.

Cheap Thrills is imperfect; that's why this theatre is still experimental. But Petralia and his colleagues are doing work that's so arresting and so invigorating that the ride is worth everything. They're getting closer to where they want to go; I don't know about you, but I intend to be in the theatre with them when they get there.

Chocolate. Shoes. Breasts. Sand. Out of these elements Betty Shamieh weaves her multi-layered prose poem of one Palestinian girl growing up poor in Spanish Harlem. But the scope of her vision encompasses the privileged children of the white ruling class, African-American dance instructors, Jordanian princes and Latina prostitutes. Structured as three monologues performed by Shamieh alternating with two others performed by the amazing Piter Fatouche, the fragments of her narrative slowly assemble themselves into the story of a smart, driven, college-aged woman’s Pyrrhic victory over the rich boy who sexually assaults her on a beach—and the steps over her lifetime that lead to that beach and her ankles jammed up over her ears. Described in the Fringe Guide as an "irreverent solo...about...the problems of growing up in between two cultures," the piece is neither irreverent nor a solo, as Shamieh pushes past a simple articulation of her outsider-ness to engage in a rigorous interrogation of the ways in which barriers of class, race, gender, language and politics intersect to create so much misery both here and in the Middle East.

Starting with the night a very drunken Aiesha stabs the scion of a wealthy family (and her classmate at the elite college she attends) in the eye with her red stiletto as he tries to rape her, Shamieh reverses the flow of her heroine’s history, bringing us next the teenage Aiesha’s complicated relationship with her middle-aged dance mentor, Red, and then finally her childhood self’s fruitless gesture of rage against the neighborhood shopkeeper who violates her innocence. Although just how innocent Aiesha is, or to put it another way how complicit she is, in any of these encounters is left uncomfortably unresolved. This is to Shamieh’s credit, as is her determination to show her character always fighting back against the men who try to colonize her body, either physically or emotionally. The irony is that every time she fights back, she harms herself as much as them in the process, or perhaps worse still, the man in question isn’t even aware that she’s resisted. The result is a woman who is on the edge of becoming unhinged because of a world determined to marginalize her at every turn.

Interspersed with Aiesha’s first-person accounts are two outside witnesses to her story: the king’s son who attends the same American university as this daughter of peasants and whose own Palestinian mother may or may not have been assassinated by his father; and the shopkeeper’s nephew who is writing a book on women’s oppression at the hands of men and who hires prostitutes to tell him the gory details of the frontline battles in the war between the sexes. Fatouche magically embodies all of these characters, equally believable as both the heir to the Jordanian throne and, hilariously, as Liza, the prostitute who wants to write a book about men, which will consist in its entirety of the single word "bastard" printed on every page.

Racially, her characters inhabit an indeterminate place in the ethnic pecking order of America. Called "sand nigger" by whites and "towel heads" by blacks, these Arabs are not above playing the race card themselves when push comes to shove. Aiesha insults her black teacher’s lack of education, and the author of the book about women’s oppression has an almost pathological need to psychologically dominate and control the Latina working girls whom he interviews.

What turns up the heat on these political ideas is that Shamieh fuels them with the passions, needs and vulnerabilities of her characters. Prejudice and oppression are manifest in the ugly things otherwise fine people do to each other. Like melted chocolate scorched from exposure to too much heat, her characters’ basic sweetness has turned acrid from the cruelties of the world. For these people, chocolate is not just a description of their skin tone. The substance itself becomes in their hands a tool of seduction; a token of romantic love; a forbidden desire; a sweet reward; an instrument of revenge—and a symbol of the innocence they’ve stripped from each other.

Remember this name: Paul Sparks. He’s an actor you’ll be hearing a lot about (and seeing a lot of in the future, I suspect), based on the strength of his excellent performance in John Walch’s new one-person show, Circumference of a Squirrel.

Sparks plays Chester, an aimless, but endearing, grad school dropout whose marriage has recently fallen apart. As he struggles to understand how, and where, his life went wrong, he uncovers the root of his problems: his anti-Semitic father, whose fear and hatred of squirrels, it turns out, is the foundation on which Chester’s life has been built.

Obviously, this is not your standard one-person show fare. Playwright Walch has a wry sense of humor that is enthusiastically on display through the first half of Squirrel. But, in the second half, when things get serious, Walch’s writing veers dangerously close to prose instead of spoken dialogue. Fortunately, director T.L. Reilly and his crackerjack design team—Michael Fagin (sets), Jeff Nellis (lights), Marc Gwinn (sound), and Venantius Pinto (slides)—keep Squirrel lively and theatrical with some terrific scene transitions and visuals.

Sparks, however, provides the play’s emotional anchor. He hits every note perfectly, and owns the stage from the get-go. His onstage ease lures the audience into the story immediately. He’s just as comfortable with Chester’s pain and confusion as he is with the insouciant hipster cool that masks it. And his acting choices are so clear and specific the audience is never in the dark about where Chester is emotionally, and how he feels about his story. Sparks also shares Walch’s smart-ass sense of humor, which provides a nice antithesis when the script goes dark, enabling Chester to remain likable and affable throughout the show—even when he’s clearly in the wrong.

All in all, Circumference of a Squirrel is an excellent showcase for everyone involved. Walch is clearly a writer on the rise, and one worth watching. And, as I’ve already said, Sparks is an actor to keep your eye on. A couple of more good parts like this one, and he’ll be leading the pack of the next generation of New York theater actors, pointing towards which way they should go.

David Foley's Cressida among the Greeks is one of the best new plays I've come across this season.  It's a contemporary retelling of the story of Troilus and Cressida, by which I mean that it's a faithful account of a two-thousand-year-old legend made accessible—no, pertinent—to people living in America today. That's no mean feat; and the fact that Foley's collaborators include the imaginative director Samuel Buggeln, the excellent lighting designer Farley Whitfeld, and an outstanding company of actors makes Cressida among the Greeks even more impressive an achievement. The run lasts just one more week, so get your tickets immediately.

Now that you're back from the telephone, let me fill you in on the plot. In terms far clearer and more concise than Shakespeare was able to manage in his Troilus and Cressida, Foley lays out the classic story thus: Cressida is the daughter of Calchas, a prophet who once advised King Priam of Troy but abandoned his homeland to join their Greek enemies when he saw that the Trojans would lose the war that bore their name. Cressida lives in isolation in Troy, attended only by her uncle Pandarus, who one day arrives with the news that young Prince Troilus, a son of Priam, is in love with her. Cressida and Troilus eventually meet and she soon falls in love as well. Then trouble strikes: Queen Hecuba (Troilus' mom) commands Cressida be traded to the Greeks in exchange for the return to Troy of a captured warrior. This sets off a chain of tragic events that in turn bring about the end of the Trojan War.

Foley presents the romance matter-of-factly, practically without passion: are Cressida and, especially, Troilus, perhaps fooling themselves? More to the point, is Cressida a more strategic thinker than we, and Shakespeare, and other poets through the ages, have given her credit for? In Danielle Skraastad's cool portrayal, one detects more calculation than expected as Cressida negotiates the dangerous circumstances that the powerful people around her arrange.

Indeed, Foley's view of the world, at least in this play, is rather sad and weary; it would be cynical if weren't so demonstrably true. Troilus and Cressida are nominally the protagonists, but the most interesting characters by far are the ones who already know what those two learn during the course of the piece: Hecuba, Priam, and, in particular, the cursed seer Cassandra. Foley has an intriguing take on Pandarus, as well, giving this shrewd procurer a romantic side: he is in love with Troilus and, by extension, with the idealism and nobility Troilus represents: this Pandarus wants to believe in the same things Troilus does, even though he knows he should not.

Foley lets us into the heads of the larger-than-life royals and heroes who populate his play by eschewing scenes of battles and throne rooms, instead focusing on the domestic lives of his characters. The best scene, possibly, is set at the dining table of Priam, Hecuba, and their children (see photo at the top of this page): Hecuba casually chats with her son Hector about what happened in the war today while the beleaguered Cassandra raves to her dad Priam about the prophesies haunting her brain. On the surface it plays like a dopey TV sitcom, but the substance is chillingly significant. Inspirations like this set Foley and Cressida apart.

Sam Buggeln has directed the play so that the stark, cold realities of its message achieve maximum impact. The rolling carts that comprise most of the (uncredited) abstract set—they bring to mind recent productions of Mother Courage and The Iliad—are moved around more than they need to be; but the bleak, angular lighting by Farley Whitfeld sets the mood flawlessly. Costumes by George Rios—Greek-style robes over sweaters and blue jeans, for the most part—and high tech sound/music by Mark Huang try to do more than they need to, though: my gut tells me that less would be more for a script this evocative and potent.

The nine actors are outstanding. Cristine McMurdo-Wallis is magnificent as Hecuba, trying to hold together a crumbling family and kingdom in unimaginably trying circumstances. Warren Watson is superb as Priam, old and senile, a shadow of his former self, yet still far more aware of what's going in than he wants to be. Katie Byxbe Pessin is a riveting Cassandra, etching her pain and her sorrow in an unforgettable portrait that feels at once classical and thoroughly contemporary. Ronald Cohen (Calchas), Jeremy Brisiel (Diomedes), and Nathan A. Perez (Hector) offer fine support in smaller roles. However, Michael McKenzie, hitting all the right aesthetic notes, to be sure, strikes me as both too young and too urbane to entirely convince as Pandarus.

Bryant Richards gets the puppydog innocence of Troilus exactly right, but Danielle Skraastad, as I said, gives us an icy Cressida: would more convincing chemistry in Act One's love scenes yield something bigger at stake in Act Two?

The bottom line, though, is that Cressida among the Greeks is must-see theatre, especially if you need some perspective on current and timeless catastrophes wrought by humanity, and certainly if you're interested in acquainting yourself with one of our next potentially great playwrights. Foley's work here has certainly put him on my list of writers to watch; I look forward eagerly to whatever he does next.