nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

"Does God hold any indispensable?"

This is the question at the center of J. Scott Reynolds' fine new verse drama David and Bathsheba, which has been mounted in a too-brief run by the excellent young Handcart Ensemble theatre company. Reynolds uses the story from the Old Testament of King David and his love for the beautiful Bathsheba to explore issues of responsibility, expedience, and moral compromise. Can the ends ever justify the means? Are there some for whom the rules of right and wrong can somehow be bent?

Reynolds begins his play in the middle of David's reign, by which time the warrior-king had solidified his power and the prosperity of Israel. We meet Joab, commander of David's army, whose complicated feelings for his chief foreshadow the tragedy to come. We meet Uriah, one of Joab's best soldiers, whose loyalty to king and country far outweighs his desire to remain home with his beautiful wife Bathsheba. And we meet King David himself, reveling in his success, secure in the knowledge that it is both richly earned and deserved.

And then David meets Bathsheba, and love--or is it lust?--grabs hold of the heroic king. Reynolds doesn't show us much in the way of passion--we pretty much have to take their great romance on faith. He's far more interested in the consequences of David's actions, and the play really begins to soar as the author explores  David's ploy to deceive the ever-constant Uriah, ordering him home to spend time with his wife so that the child he (David) has fathered with Bathsheba might reasonably be assumed to be Uriah's. When this plan unravels, Reynolds takes us to even more thorny moral ground as David sends Uriah unaided into dangerous battle, effectively assassinating the soldier so that he may take Bathsheba as his queen. David's justification is that the continued unity and strength of the nation outweighs any one soldier's life. But there's rot at the core of such thinking, and Reynolds has David and the other principals in the plot try to sort through the moral mire. Appropriately, no answers are offered. But there's plenty to think about; and recent events, from Monicagate to the war in Afghanistan, add significant resonance to the ethical and philosophical quandaries David and Bathsheba raises.

Reynolds has staged his play with modesty and reserve in the tiny Beckmann space at the American Theatre of Actors. The cast is generally quite good, with particularly strong work turned in by James Mack as the conflicted king and Barrett Ogden as chorus/conscience Joab.

I've observed before, about Handcart Ensemble, that they are to be commended--highly--for their commitment to uncompromising, challenging new work with real moral heft and significance. David and Bathsheba reaffirms that commitment. I wish it would have had a longer run; very few readers will have an opportunity to see this play--unless of course an obliging producer comes along to give this worthy new drama the showcase it deserves.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, surely the Russians were perceived as the aggressors rather than the Cubans, right?

Yet Jennifer Barnes, the panicked housewife who is the heroine of Doug Field's inordinately dumb comedy Down South, decides, as she stocks up on canned goods and makes plans to build a backyard bomb shelter, that she needs to learn Spanish and prepare to be raped by Fidel's infidels. Amazingly, no one associated with the play seems to have caught this very obvious error.

Or maybe not so amazingly: after all, they all went along with putting this dim, one-note, dirty joke of a play on stage in the first place. No, I did not like Down South: when I tell you that the title refers not to that Caribbean island with the missiles but to a portion of Jennifer's body that she would like her husband to pay more attention to, you may begin to understand why. I'm all for well-crafted sex comedy. But Down South is as witless and vulgar (and subtle) as an episode of "The Ropers."

The joke here is that sitcom-perfect Jennifer and Bob Barnes (vague amalgamations of Rob and Laurie Petrie, Donna and Doug Stone, and Ward and June Cleaver) are really repressed, sex-starved sluts. She wants some oral satisfaction; he's a closeted homosexual. The Cuban Missile Crisis serves as foolish backdrop for over-the-top single entendre dialog that substitutes outrageousness for wit. The stuff about Bob, and his potential new sex partner Stephen Stevens, is worse than that, resorting to homophobic stereotypes that simply have no business being trotted out onto a stage in 2001.

Thankfully it only lasts a little more than a hour (though it felt longer to me). I must acknowledge that Audrey Rapoport is brilliantly funny as meddling neighbor Sue Stevens, and Patricia Peek and Paule Doss have provided fun, satirical hair and costume design, respectively. But the rest of the production falls terribly, terribly flat.

Ducks Crossing is the feel-good must-see comedy this town's been waiting for: just the thing to lift your spirits and remind you what a sunny, funny place this world of ours really is. Playwright Jane Shepard has created a lovable batch of zany eccentrics for us, and director Julie Hamberg and her superlative company of ten actors bring them to vivid life with warmth, conviction, and grand humor. It's as good a time as you can have in the theatre in New York right now, at off-off-Broadway's bargain tariff of $15. You'd have to be quackers not to see Ducks Crossing.

(Sorry about that pun.)

Our story unfolds in the Parthanon, a rundown pool hall/saloon in a very small town somewhere in America. The owner/manager is sharp-tongued Minerva Evans (Minnie to her friends), whose daydreams take her to the other Parthenon, in Greece. Helping her run the place are her wheelchair-bound sister Hostetta and the slightly dim short order cook/gas jockey Skud Thudder. Also on hand is Bob Bean, a gentle dipsomaniac who stopped in five years ago and never left, apparently supporting himself by teaching mail-order philosophy courses. Skud's busybody sister Twila is part of the scenery too, as is their slow- but gentle-witted nephew Scrumpy.

Shepard sketches these denizens of the Parthanon with affection and good humor, allocating big heaping portions of charm and goofiness to each. They're portrayed with glowing humanity by Casey Stewart-Lindley (Minnie), Katherine Gooch (Hostetta), Mark Watson (Skud), Jon Krupp (Bob), Anna Ewing Bull (Twila), and Tom Johnson (Scrumpy).

Into the Parthanon one day wanders Lester Francis (G.R. Johnson), who bears the unwelcome news that his brother Wally (George Sheffey), the town bully, is suing Minnie for $85,000–but he'll settle for the Parthanon itself. Seems Minnie threw Wally over the pool table a while ago, and Wally claims to have broken his arm.

Not to worry, though, for this is the kind of play where Lester will immediately fall in love with Minnie; where Minnie's comrades-in-arms will leap into uncoordinated and entirely useless action to try to save the pool hall; where a ghost named Mizz Dupree (Tasha Guevara) will materialize and try to help Minnie sort her situation out. It all culminates in a hilarious act-two courtroom scene, presided over by Judge Phneh (Carolyn Popp), which turns into a Rashomon-style recounting of what happened on that fateful night when Minnie and Wally got into their tussle. (This scene is so funny that I missed many of the lines and visual jokes, so dissolved in laughter was I. It's a showcase for the entire company, every one of whom has at least one moment to shine in this splendidly fashioned sequence.)

It's fast and furious fun, brimming with clever one-liners and just as many terrible puns. (Lester: "We'll have to act fast." Bob: "I can recite Hamlet's skull speech in sixteen seconds.") Ducks Crossing pokes gentle fun at its improbable characters and their homespun ways: Wally has a pet pig who helps him hunt for truffles, Skud mixes gasoline into the food he cooks, and Bob misquotes famous writers with singular regularity. But Shepard clearly loves and respects these folks, and so we do, too. They're as delightful, good-hearted, and–ultimately–wise as the Vanderhof/Sycamore clan of You Can't Take It With You.

Every aspect of the production is pretty much flawless, making Ducks Crossing another feather in the Vital Theatre Company's cap. The set (Heather Dunbar), lighting (Aaron Spivey), sound (Scott A. Josephson), costumes (Joanne M. Haas), and props (Hershey Hall and Gregor Paslawsky) are all outstanding; there are even some unexpected special effects (by George Sheffey) that are, indeed, special.

Eating the Dead is a story of love, betrayal, and redemption; by turns comic, melodramatic, supernatural, it traces the enmeshed affairs and accountabilities of three women over the course of the Day of the Dead in a remote Mexican garage.

This garage belongs to Brea, who uses it as a studio for her painting. Her current work is a huge female nude, apparently inspired by the garage's current occupant (and Brea's current lover), Jules. Jules, loving but highly unstable, is addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and apparently bent on self-destruction. Things come to a head when Jules' sister, Shay, suddenly shows up. Shay—blonde, cool, and self-assured—is Brea's former lover. She disappeared a few months ago without warning, leaving Jules to take her place; now she's back, possibly to stay, exposing wounds not just in Brea's heart but in Jules' and her own.

Complicating matters still more, a strange man named Aphim turns up the next morning. Aphim has a claim on Shay as well, and before the Day of the Dead is over, each of the four—assisted, sometimes, by Brea's Mexican neighbor Reynaldo—will battle each other and themselves, nearly to the death, in an attempt to settle old scores and repay old debts.

It's a compelling, intriguing tale, punctuated by fanciful spirits of the haunted night that may or may not be real, and also by bizarre coincidences and turns of events that strain credulity enough to be convincingly authentic. Playwright Jane Shepard takes her characters on some harrowing journeys during this two-and-a-half hour play, and the spot where she finally lands them isn't necessarily satisfying. But the trip itself is never less than riveting. And the points she makes—about responsibility to oneself and others, and about the different kinds of love that a person can feel for the people she is connected to—are certainly worth hearing.

Melanie S. Armer directs this sometimes chaotic play with a kind of pixilated naturalism that suits the material well. Chris Jones has provided a remarkable messy set that mirrors the clutter of the lives of the main characters. The contributions of the other designers—particularly the inventive puppets of Tom Keegan—serve the piece well.

Katherine Wallach, as the immensely complicated Jules, turns in perhaps the most persuasive performance in Eating the Dead. Danielle Delgado (Brea) and Michelle Torres (Shay) do fine work as well, but it's harder to get under their characters' skins, possibly because the writing doesn't offer the shadings that it does for Jules. Jeremy Brisiel is effective in the somewhat underwritten role of Aphim. And Johnny Sanchez, whose character, Reynaldo, speaks only a little English (quotations from poems and songs learned from his English instructor, Jules), demonstrates that there need be no language barrier if the actor is sufficiently skillful.

Jason Lindner is making his New York playwriting debut with Egyptian Rat-Screw, and it's certainly a promising one. This dastardly, absurdist comic tale of intrigue and suspense is stylish, provocative, funny, and diabolically clever. Lindner demonstrates real flair in this genre piece that manages to simultaneously defy and parody genre conventions. And he's well-served by director Karina Miller and a cast of five sharp, smart actors.

Egyptian Rat-Screw (whose title is never explained, by the way) tells the story of Elton, a seemingly ordinary young man who works as an Interrogator at some unnamed government organization. (For that matter, the government itself is also unnamed, but is apparently the United States: the program says the play takes place "next door, last week.") Elton's chief pre-occupation, at the moment, is passing the necessary test to get a promotion and become an "upstairs agent." But he is being thwarted by the too-eager attentions of his wife, the weird admonitions of his boss, and--especially--the unexpected cheerfulness of his current victim, a musician who is suspected of serious involvement in the Underground, whose name is, conveniently enough, Vic.

Elton's relationship with Vic plays with and subverts the conventions of interrogation and torture--not just what we think we know about this sort of thing, but indeed what Elton thinks he knows as well. Vic simply isn't your run-of-the-mill Suspect, and even if you guess the reason why, you won't anticipate the twisted journey that Elton and Vic will take together as Lindner's ingeniously plotted play runs its course. Along the way, Lindner wreaks havoc on, among other notions, conspiracy theory, privacy, the sanctity of the government, and mindless bureaucracy. The observations are zany, surreal, and chillingly familiar; some of the ideas are superbly, darkly funny and original as well. But to tell you more will ruin Egyptian Rat-Screw. A thriller is a thriller, after all.

Matt Clifford is terrific as Elton, at once earnest, hapless, and befuddled--he makes likable a guy whose job includes wrenching teeth out of people's mouths with a pliers. Peter Katona is equally fine as Elton's masterful opponent Vic, keeping us guessing about his motivation and modus operandi until the very last minute. Jonathan Sale is quite funny as two very different (but very desperate) characters, Elton's anxious colleague Jack and a confused and broken prisoner named Cougar. Paul Molnar and Heather Dilly fill out the cast.

Kevin Judge's low-budget, high-tech set is remarkably impressive and Justin R. Burleson's lighting and Dan Taylor's sound are effective as well. Director Karina Miller is responsible for stylish costumes that do much to set the tone for Egyptian Rat-Screw.

I'm not convinced that the play's resolution is entirely satisfying, and some trimming would probably be helpful. But Jason Lindner's voice is distinctive and eminently interesting: this is a debut you don't want to miss. I'll be looking forward eagerly to whatever he comes up with next.

I wish I hadn’t heard anything about Einstein’s Dreams before stepping into the Kraine Theatre last weekend. High expectations can kill a theatrical experience. But the buzz about town was that Einstein's Dreams was as non-linear as it was heady–my kind of show. It had also been handed a few awards along the way, and was pretty consistently sold out during its successful run this past summer at FringeNYC. I hadn’t yet read the book that it was adapted from (Alan Lightman’s bestseller by the same name), although it’s been highly recommended to me by about 120 people. So I was ready to be blown away. Instead, unfortunately, I was mildly entertained by a fairly straightforward series of vignettes about a subject that is anything but straightforward–the infinite possibilities of time, space and how they dictate–or, under a myriad of different circumstances–could dictate our lives.

Tobacco Road Company utilizes dance, improvisation, and a gorgeous score by composer David Homan to basically not question our obvious conceit of time. According to Lightman’s fictional account of Einstein’s early years, the young scientist has a series of dreams on the character and possibilities of time while he’s working as a patent clerk in Switzerland at the turn of the last century. He dreams of the “what would happen if’s” of time–what would happen if time went backwards, forwards, if our lives only lasted for a day, etc. And on a more human level, how those who are just beginning their lives, and those whose lives are about to come to an end perceive the same situation. It’s all fascinating stuff–the kind of almost otherworldly questions that folks spend lifetimes ruminating over–what would have happened if we had taken the left turn instead of the right one, and how would our lives, our time, have been different.

A few things go wrong here. I’ll start with the company’s text interpretation and subsequent staging. Einstein’s ensemble continually transforms into children, lovers, elderly people and Einstein himself to illustrate the various scenarios/dreams that hypothetically plagued the great scientist before coming up with his Theory of Relativity. While the staging is inventive, it doesn’t offer much in terms of the director’s or the ensemble’s own points-of-view. Director Paul Stancato utilizes his nine actors, all dressed up and looking pretty in off-white period-ish clothes, to simply parallel the text that he’s co-adapted. There is a vital problem for a company to solve when attempting to bring heady narrative to life–how do they make Lightman’s words their own, and equally important, how do they make them active for us? For this tight of an ensemble with a director who seems not to be lacking in imagination, I wish they had explored the text with these challenges in mind. They could have, for example, juxtaposed images of the ending of one’s time on earth with a piece of text describing a child’s bright-eyed view of the world.

There’s also just too much of the same. One scene, for example, analyzes a conversation in almost slow motion, and because that’s all it is, it becomes an over-long scene that’s literally about nothing but a conversation in slow motion, instead of it resulting in a more surreal exercise in positing the mundane in a time warp. Another scene poses the question: What if there were only images, fragmented and fleeting, without having a timeline to place them in? And we get, unfortunately, only images from this question–one actor making a funny face, then a fade to black, another actor in a moment of thought, fade to black, etc. Those sorts of scattered tableaux  make the piece feel dangerously amateurish, and pop up way too often.

The last problem is Tobacco Road’s well-intentioned goal to make Lightman’s text and images beautiful and relevant, which actually backfires because we feel constantly reminded that they are creating something magical before our eyes. Nothing spontaneously beautiful can happen, of course, if beauty itself is being used as a tool to manipulate our emotions. What I missed from the ensemble was their important role in showing–and questioning–what it may have felt like to be inside the sleeping head of one of the world’s greatest minds. Instead they offer a series of graceful and inventive but ultimately pretentious illuminations.

Now I’ll reiterate that I’m in the minority here, and although I found the piece itself to be disappointing, many of the visuals are haunting and original and the ensemble is committed. But for me, Einstein’s Dreams’ downfall is that instead of questioning the elusiveness and pain of the passage of time, Tobacco Road tries to box time up for us and keep us from it. I haven’t read the book, but I’ll venture a guess that Einstein’s Dreams, and Einstein’s dreams, were a lot more jarring than this production led us to believe.

Stephen F. Kelleher has a flair for creating interesting, compelling characters. And so even though his new play Empire Gas is a little too long and a tad uneven, it's still thoroughly watchable, simply because we want to spend time with the motley collection of individuals that populate it.

At its center is Johnny Arno, played with enormous goodwill and humor by Greg Sims. Johnny, a little more than 30 years old, is a Vietnam veteran returning home to the suburban Long Island community where he grew up for the first time since the war. (The year, I need to tell you, is 1980; it's the summer of the Iranian hostage crisis.) The war clearly affected Johnny deeply; all we really know for sure is that he has spent the years since wandering around the United States, working in Alaska at a fish cannery, in Oregon as a cherry picker, and so on. Now he's back home, a couple of weeks following the death of his father. He needs a job, and he's come to Empire Gas, a service station near a sprawling shopping mall, to try to get one.

Empire Gas is operated by Sundeep and Karan, a pair of brothers who have emigrated to America from New Delhi, India, to try to earn enough money so that Sundeep can marry the higher-caste girl of his dreams. But things are going badly at the moment: neighbors have mistaken Sundeep and Karan for Iranians, and have begun an aggressive campaign to scare them out of business. Today the words "Apocalypse Soon" are smeared across the cashier's window in cow blood. Nevertheless, Sundeep hires Johnny and Johnny agrees to work here, despite dire warnings from Sundeep's landlord Ben, who turns out to be an old schoolmate of Johnny's.

Complications arise quickly. Stacey, the girl Johnny abandoned nine years ago when he went off to Vietnam, shows up, and the two have a stormy battle that leads to a possible reconciliation. To help save Sundeep's ailing business, Johnny decides to build an effigy to the Ayatollah Khoumeini and display it in the gas station lot, signaling to potential customers that the foreign-looking owners are friends to America and not to Iran. This in turn attracts a wheelchair-bound World War II vet who has suffered from "sympathetic paralysis" since the hostages were captured; it also brings, at long last, some paying customers. But the change in luck doesn't last long: as the curtain comes down on the play's first act, renewed threats promise a showdown in Act Two, one that will force Johnny to decide what's most important to him in his newly-reborn life.

Well, as the synopsis demonstrates, Empire Gas is loaded with plot—probably more than it should be. That doesn't mean we don't hang on to every word; though expansive, Empire Gas is a splendid yarn, and we really do care about what happens to Johnny, Sundeep, Karan, and Bill, the old WWII vet. Kelleher focuses us particularly on the strengthening and deepening bonds of these four disparate men, and their achievement of genuine understanding of one another is at the heart of his play.

Empire Gas boasts an excellent cast: the aforementioned Sims as Johnny, and also Marlon de Souza as stubborn, rigid, passionate Sundeep; Debargo Sanyal, sweetly hilarious as the dreamy, immature younger brother Karan; Minerva Scelza as the wounded but very grounded Stacey; and Jerome Richards as the damaged but wise Bill. Lora Lee Cliff, in the smaller role of Bill's caring wife Eugenia, also registers strongly.

Director Heather Ondersma keeps this sprawling tale moving swiftly and deftly balances the play's dramatic moments with its congenial offbeat humorous tone: though Kelleher and Ondersma want us to think seriously about issues like prejudice and terrorism and the horrors of war, they frame Empire Gas with a cockeyed sentimentality that assures us of their fundamental optimism and faith in ordinary people to do the right thing.

Scott Boyd deserves a paragraph of his own because his set is so ingenious, transforming inherent liabilities of the Bank Street theatre space into assets.

Empire Gas is touching, intelligent, thoughtful, and very entertaining. Even if some of Kelleher's many ideas don't quite work, enough do to make this a worthwhile evening of theatre.

End of the Line is a play with an extraordinary genesis. Rather than being developed by a single playwright or set of collaborators, End of the Line is a collage of short plays, written by eleven different people, melded together with remarkable seamlessness into a thoughtful and cohesive whole. The result is an earnest and intriguing tribute to a gathering place—in this case, the Albany-Rennselaer train station, on the weekend before its scheduled demolition. Like the place itself, End of the Line turns out to be more than just the sum of its parts: it's a unique consideration of happenings and happenstances; a true cross-section of humanity.

So we have here stories about all kinds of people, whose only common trait is that they're going to or coming from someplace else. Some of the tales are funny: In "We Love New York!" by Joe Murphy, a pair of tourists from an unidentified foreign country think Albany is really the Big Apple. In "Small Talk" by Jayne Napier, an annoying young guy chats up a preoccupied business woman and gets her to divulge all sorts of personal information. And in "Speak the Language, Do the Math" by V.E. Kimberlin, a seemingly ordinary middle-aged woman turns out to be running an Internet sex website right in the middle of the train station—that is when she's not charming creditors on her cell phone.

Others are more bittersweet: "Next Stop, Albany" by Tim Washer tells contrasting tales of a violinist on her way up and a marketing exec on his way down; "Missing Boo" by Jaene Leonard is a quirky piece about a woman, an old friend, a dead cat, and a lost mother; and "Pictures of Home" by Matt Denerstein manages a concise summation of what the about-to-be-destroyed train station building means to the people who have come to depend on it day after day.

The glue holding these sketches together is supplied by head writer-dramaturgs Denerstein and Leonard and director Celia Bressack. Some twenty actors bring the many characters to life; among the more indelible performances are Lisa Marty as the Internet sex entrepreneur, Matt Kelly and Jaene Leonard as "Small Talk"-ing couple, and Chris McGinn and Jason Scott Campbell as, respectively, a waitress at the station's coffee shop and the former manager of the station's newsstand.

Richard Abrons's jubilantly life-affirming new comedy, Every Day a Visitor, takes its title from one of the house rules at a Senior Citizens' Home in the Bronx. If one of the residents is hospitalized, he or she is guaranteed a visitor--from among the other residents--every single day. A nice notion, that; so is the residents' credo (which would have made a good title too): This is not a waiting room. The eight plucky seniors who comprise the entire population of Abrons' fictional home are committed to that philosophy, and band together to make sure that, even in the face of indifferent family, friends, and governmental institutions, their lives will continue to have real meaning, purpose, and quality.

The clever strategy that these folks devise to keep themselves going is a game, in which each pretends to be a famous person. Their choices are revealing: accountant Albert Grossman becomes Alan Greenspan, lifelong union stalwart Leon Davidowitz decides to be John D. Rockefeller, token Italian mensch Figliozo chooses Mayor LaGuardia,  grouch-with-a-heart-of-gold Feltenstein opts for Henry Kissinger, meddlesome yenta Tillie Marcus picks Bella Abzug and then switches to Golda Meir. Most significantly, the oldest and sickest of the group, a snobbish former lawyer named Stoopak, gets enlisted to serve as President over this fictitious enclave. What he and his comrades learn in the process changes their lives.

Abrons manages to make this game dramatically productive without being too obviously gimmicky; indeed, he's remarkably sensitive here to what life in a seniors' home is actually like. If the dialogue is occasionally a little glib, and the plotting too by-the-numbers, well, Every Day a Visitor is more than redeemed by its authors' well-intentioned and well-realized moral and by its oh-so-experienced company's professionalism. Tom Brennan, John Freimann, Sylvia Gassell, Helen Hanft, Joe Jamrog, Jerry Matz, and Anthony Spina are all excellent as the seniors, with Kenneth Gray, Lisa Bostnar, and Fiona Walsh offering invaluable support as the Home's resident manager, physician, and nurse, respectively.

Robert Joel Schwartz's homey, cluttered unit set serves the piece well, as do Dawn Robyn Petrlik's distinctive costumes; when both the room and its denizens get decked out in their festive best for a birthday party in Act Two, the place really sparkles.

I really wanted to like Everything That Rises Must Converge, Karin Coonrod’s staging of three short stories by Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. I became a fan of O’Connor’s Southern Gothic tales after reading her Collected Works. And Coonrod’s staging of Henry VI at the Public Theater a few years back was one of the standout New York productions of the 1990s. So, needless to say, I had very high hopes for Everything That Rises Must Converge. Unfortunately, the production currently running at New York Theatre Workshop does not live up to my (possibly) inflated expectations.

Instead of adapting each of the three stories—“A View of the Woods,” “Greenleaf,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”—into a more traditional play format, Coonrod has decided to perform them “in their entirety, as originally written,” according to the program, as story theatre, with the storytelling duties divided up between all eight cast members. This approach always has the potential to be exciting and very explosive, but, in this case, it is neither. The story theatre format causes all three of the stories to be painfully over told. Coonrod’s decision to keep all of O’Connor’s narrative and exposition gives the audience plenty of information about the characters. But, if a character is said to have raised their arm above their head, then Coonrod emphasizes that a moment later by having the actor who’s playing that character actually raise their arm above their head! “A hat on a hat,” as my girlfriend would say. I call it show and tell, and it happens all throughout Everything That Rises Must Converge. Doing one or the other would tell the audience everything they needed to know, but doing both is overkill that doesn’t allow them to experience the story and the characters themselves, or make up their own minds about them. Under these circumstances, the audience stops learning quickly because they stop paying attention: if there’s no room for them in the show, why should they?

Each of the stories is told by a narrator who does not appear in the story that he or she is telling. This automatically reduces the dramatic impact of all three because the narrator does not have a stake in the story. The audience doesn’t know why the story is important to the narrator because the narrator doesn’t act like it's important to them. They just moderate the action with old-salt vocal intonations that don’t cut it. Coonrod also has the actors comment on their Southern characters—most of whom are backwoods, country folk—in such a way that betrays her feelings of superiority to them. Such condescension may make some people feel more comfortable watching Everything That Rises Must Converge, but it distances the rest of us from the action even further.

Amidst all of this, it’s hard to know if the actors are any good, since they’re basically involved in nothing more than a glorified book reading. Laura Hicks manages to make a good impression as the frenetic protagonist of “Greenleaf,” and Kelli Rae Powell is positively terrific as nine-year-old Mary Fortune-Pitts, willful granddaughter of an equally willful landowner in “A View of the Woods.” Designers Marina Draghici, P.K. Wish, and Christopher Akerlind all make vivid contributions, as well.

Ultimately, Everything That Rises Must Converge is a noble failure. I have to congratulate Coonrod on her ambition in taking on such a project, and NYTW on their chutzpah for producing it. They clearly have good taste in source material. But, a little more heart and soul would do next time. O’Connor’s knife-in-the-heart climaxes are thankfully intact here, but, in this instance, they’re far more heart stopping when they’re read.

David Gaard's plays–most of them, anyway; certainly this one–are gorgeous, melodramas: romantic tales of passion, lust, sex, and love, filled with interesting, glamorous, and beautiful people. They're reminiscent of what used to be called "women's pictures" of the '40s and '50s–think Now, Voyager or Imitation of Life–but with a significant twist: all the characters in Gaard's universe are gay men. He's creating a body of dramatic work to fill a void that he and lots of other gay men felt keenly when they were growing up: instead of having a hero and heroine in a clinch at the final fadeout, Gaard's plays end with a hero and a hero.

His vision, as director and playwright, is extravagant and cinematic: eXs takes place in, to name just some of its settings, several grandly tasteful apartments in San Francisco, a sun-drenched Caribbean island, and on board a yacht in the Pacific Ocean. You can see all these fantasy locations in your mind's eye as eXs plays out, but it's definitely a workout for the imagination. Gaard's resources simply don't allow for the gaudy expansiveness that his script cries out for. So as we view eXs, performed under less than optimal circumstances with minimal production values and an ensemble of varied skill and experience, I suggest a certain amount of indulgence to maximize enjoyment.

eXs is about Exes (i.e., ex-lovers) and also about Excess; pronounce the title either way and it's appropriate. It tells the story of Lane and Ted, two young men who meet cute in a gym and later meet serious on a Caribbean island, where they fall in love. They move to San Francisco and, after an idyllic year or so, experience an explosive breakup following Lane's indiscretion with a pretty party boy. Most of eXs chronicles the hedonistic but empty rebound travails of both men; although this is depicted with more frankness (and male nudity) than you'd ever see in a mainstream film, the play is actually a cautionary morality tale, emphasizing the value of stability, integrity and virtue in a world that doesn't always seem to prize any of those qualities.

The script is certainly longer than it needs to be (I suspect some welcome cutting has occurred since I saw the show); performances range from quite good (especially John Jordan's in the leading role of Ted) to woefully weak. Objectively, eXs fails to measure up in many ways; but after you think about the giant cultural hole that Gaard so earnestly wants to fill for future generations of gay men, it's hard to take it too much to task.

Will Sheffer's Falling Man and Other Monologues consists of five brief one-man plays, all of which have to do with some aspect of gay love and/or sexuality. Four of them have a more substantive connection: these depict their narrator's "coming out," by which I really mean his self-acceptance as a gay man (as opposed to his announcing that fact to someone else). These pieces have authentic emotional weight and are each, in their own way, a little bit profound. They make this short evening of monologues well worth a visit.

The show begins with one of its strongest pieces, Alien Boy, performed beautifully by John Summerour. It tells the story of a very precocious 13-year-old, one who has become aware of his sexuality at the same time as he has become aware of all the stupid arbitrary labeling and categorizing that substitutes for understanding and tolerance in the real world. Alien Boy recounts defining episodes in this lonely teenager's life, from his insistence that his mother take him to see The Boys in the Band (to help him with his tuba playing, he explains), through a fateful encounter with a psychiatrist whom he hopes will "cure" him. This is a funny and insightful piece that will resonate not only with gay people but anyone who grew up feeling "different."

Fire Dance is about a semi-retired drag queen named Crystal, who reminisces about the older drag queen, Nubia, who befriended him years before. Crystal narrates the story while donning makeup, wig, and evening gown; Larry E. Johnson delivers this touching monologue with sensitivity.

Tennessee and Me, which follows, is a clever fantasy in which the body of a hunky young male hustler is invaded by the soul of the just-deceased Tennessee Williams. Wittily written to incorporate snippets of Williams dialogue as well as brilliantly crafted faux-Williams phrasing, Tennessee and Me is also unexpectedly warm and smart. Both hustler and  playwright find they have much to learn from one another during their odd metaphysical union. Robert Hedglin performs the hustler with perhaps more assurance than the playwright, but he nevertheless puts the piece over nicely.

The final item on the bill is Falling Man, another lovely, eloquent piece of writing about a young ballroom dancer dying of AIDS, recalling the great love of his life (who of course gave him this horrible disease). It's an affecting, bittersweet piece, performed here by Ryan Migge.

I've skipped the fourth monologue, One Man's Meat, in which Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Jack Garrity) gives lessons on cooking and other subjects, presumably from beyond; it's a curious, vaguely distasteful sketch, one that doesn't fit in with the other four in terms of mood or theme.

Director Mark Cannistraro does his customary fine work helming Falling Man and Other Monologues. And playwright Will Sheffer reveals himself to be a writer of great wisdom, elegance, and wit in these pieces; we need to hear more from him in the theatre.

Fathers is a program of seven short plays about--what else?--fathers. It's presented by The Drilling Company, a relatively new group who commission plays on a single theme for evenings like this.  They've come up about 50-50 this time around, which isn't bad odds at all for a show of this type. Fathers features some outstanding performances and some terrific play ideas, and introduces us to at least three talented new playwrights. Not bad for a couple of hours in the theatre.

My favorite of the seven plays comprising Fathers is the first, You Can't Get There From Here. In this tight, sharply written 10-minute comedy by first-time playwright Mark Arnold, a father visiting his grown son in California asks for directions to an obscure town. The son, eventually warming to the task, reveals himself to be in every way a chip off the old block. Arnold's dialogue is entirely natural and very, very funny: this is a most promising debut. Jared Slater is letter-perfect as the son.

Brendan O'Brien's Worry is a charmer about a grown son who refuses to come to his father's wedding; Karen Kitz gives a warm and thoughtful performance as the soon-to-be second wife. Held Up, by Kerry Logan, is an effective comedy about a father conning his son out of some spending money; it's longer than it needs to be (and Ross Stoner's direction is too slow-moving), but Walter Cline and Andrew Lawton are splendid as father and son, and Cline gets to deliver the evening's funniest line, an unexpected boast from a mortician's assistant.

Three offbeat comic pieces are less successful, though each has a workable, original premise. Ben Boyer's The Lighter Side of Patricide attempts dark comedy in its story of a father trapped under his recliner; it's never as funny as it needs to be. Daddy's Little Girl by Brent Askari hits some of its marks with its over-the-top account of a father squabbling profanely with his daughter's date about sex and alcohol; but Patti Chambers's Dad and the Gypsies meanders weirdly without getting anywhere.

The evening concludes with a sweet monologue, You Were No Accident by Paul Siefken, in which an expectant father makes a video for his soon-to-be-born son. This one features an accomplished, affecting performance by Dan Teachout. 

Travel broadens; it's absolutely true. In this particular case, the joint memberships of the Polish avant-garde companies Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr are the ones who traveled–thousands of miles, in fact, for a US tour that will eventually make stops in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Princeton, and Bloomington, Indiana. Yet it is the audience whose lives are immeasurably enhanced by these visitors: their intriguing, ingratiating play, Ferdydurke, offers Americans an opportunity to experience theatre as a sensate, visceral adventure. How edifying and welcome this is!

Ferdydurke is a Polish nonsense word, equivalent to "fiddle faddle" in English, as good a title as any for the perverse and often scatological scenes and set pieces that comprise this play. The source material is a novel, published in 1937, by Witold Gombrowicz. I can't tell how like or unlike that work this show is, but I can tell you that if Ferdydurke the novel was banned for controversial content, its subversive spirit lives–gleefully unabashed–in Ferdydurke the play. At once a celebration and demonstration of the immediacy of theatrical storytelling, Ferdydurke takes us on a journey through time with its 30-year-old protagonist Joe as he relives his youth and rediscovers, well, discovery.

We follow Joe into the classroom, where he is lectured at by a comically horrifying schoolmaster who literally pummels his lessons into his charges' heads. The teacher's modus operandi is for his students to receive wisdom, again quite literally: it doesn't matter whether the so-called beauty or meaning resonates or even makes sense; accepted values must be accepted because they're accepted.

Joe lusts after a girl who is, socially speaking, too good for him. And his best friend lusts after a stable boy who is, clearly, nowhere near good enough for him. Neither relationship is allowed to persist; authority figures see to that.

I'm not sure that Ferdydurke adds up to much more than an energetic assault on an arbitrary Establishment; but the experience of Ferdydurke in a dark room with these four remarkable actors (backed by their equally remarkable directors and designers) adds up to a great deal. It's a show to be seen and heard rather than explained, which is why I'm a bit at a loss to explain it. It feels vivid and raw and shocking, but never sensationalistic; it's alien and freeing, but neither oblique nor  pretentious. I suspect that Jarry's Ubu Roi, which seems to me to be the direct lineal ancestor of Ferdydurke, caused similar reaction: an honest sense of wonder at the audacity and perverse naughtiness of what's depicted on stage.

For this is a very naughty play. Sex of various varieties is alluded to throughout (and, in perhaps the most amazing scene, depicted with equal parts raunch and artfulness). Urination and defecation are simulated and what polite people call "passing wind" is the source of more jokes per capita this side of a Mel Brooks movie.

Yet Ferdydurke is witty rather than skanky. We laugh, sure; but the overriding reaction is awe more than anything else: it's that well-crafted and that well-executed. The four actors–Jacek Brzezinski, Witold Mazurkiewicz, Jaroslaw Tomica, and Michal Zgiet–are astonishing in their dexterity and versatility, performing highly physical, highly complex choreography with heart-stopping agility. The text, adapted by Allen J. Kuharski, and the staging, by Mazurkiewicz and Janusz Oprynski, are deft and surprisingly accessible.

We don't see enough of the rest of the world's theatre in this country (at least the rest of the non-English-speaking world's); Ferdydurke tantalizes us by suggesting what we might be missing. Don't let this one pass you by; and if you live in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Princeton, and Bloomington, that goes for you, too.

Four is the first of Christopher Shinn's plays that I've seen (to the best of my knowledge, it's only the second of his works to be produced in New York). Shinn is just 26 years old: this play marks him as a remarkably gifted talent. See it for yourself. Let's hope we don't lose him to the movies or TV, at least not too soon.

Not to slight the other artists who have come together to make Four such an intense, challenging, provocative, and spellbinding work of theatre. Director Jeff Cohen (who deserves credit for putting the show on in the first place) has provided a spare and stark staging that zeroes in on what's essential about Shinn's script and characters. His vision is enhanced by the deceptively homely, simple contributions of designers Lauren Helpern (sets), Traci Klainer (lighting), Veronica Worts (costumes), and Paul Adams (sound). And Cohen has cast the play with four actors who seem born for their roles: Vinessa Antoine, Keith Nobbs, Armando Riesco, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. may be the finest ensemble working on a New York stage right now.

Okay, so what have these people created? An impressionistic panorama of contemporary American life; a portrait of disconnection and detachment, of aloneness and longing. It's at once sad, bleak, scary, and surprisingly hopeful; and it's breathtakingly, galvanizingly real. The Four of the title are all residents of the once-much-larger small city of Hartford, Connecticut; it's the Fourth of July, 1996. In the empty parking lot of a shut-down Marshall's department store, 16-year-old June (a boy--despite the name--played by Nobbs) is arranging to meet up with Joe (Whitlock). And on a cellphone in her family's living room, African-American teenager Abigayle (Antoine) is toying with going out with would-be homeboy Dexter (Riesco).

These folks all have baggage to spare. June is gay, scared, repressed, and nevertheless eager to explore his sexuality ("I'm horny" is how he puts it). Joe, who turns out to be Abigayle's father, is every bit as scared and repressed (maybe more so) and, apparently, a pedophile. Joe and June met on the Internet; the older man disarms June and us immediately by acknowledging that what he and his underage companion are about to do is against the law. Shinn uses our latent panic reflex to add tension to June and Joe's inherently uncomfortable situation, which may or may not be helpful to his ultimate intention. Suffice to say that when push comes to shove, June is surprisingly steely and commanding.

Abigayle (who most likely doesn't know as much about her unhappy dad as we do) is saddled with a demanding and incapacitated mother and, perhaps even more unfortunately, a mature, sensitive, questing intelligence that makes her long for much more than she finds herself settling for. Dexter (who, tonight, is what Abigayle will settle for) is a likable, confused, very ordinary young man with a decent heart but only average intelligence.

Everybody in Four sets out to have sex, and everyone has sex before the play is over. The question is: did anybody get what they want?

Shinn places his Four in a landscape of parking lots, movie theatres, playgrounds, and cars--public places that here feel staggeringly lonely and abandoned. These people live in a world of fast food and fifteen-minute-celebrities; everything is insubstantial and weirdly illusory: there's nothing for any of them to hold onto. Four would be a tragedy, only June and Joe and Abigayle and Dexter don't see it that way; that's why Four is, instead, so distressingly resonant. Shinn has captured the way we live now, or at least the way we live if we stop and think about it.

Tense and moody, Four is more a tug at the heart than a punch in the gut. It lingers, though; and it's the kind of play you may need to see more than once (I'm thinking I may want to).  It does what the best theatre should--reminds us of our humanity, and our commonality: there's more of Shinn's dissatisfied characters in each of us than we probably care to admit.

Like Bagdad in The Arabian Nights, the city of New York isn’t just a setting for stories. It’s a place whose atmosphere somehow intensifies the work, almost as if the city itself was a character. In Franny’s Way, playwright and director Richard Nelson envisions a New York of longing and confusion, of ended innocence and pending adulthood, more J.D. Salinger than Sweet Smell of Success. Unlike that ode to Gotham decadence, Franny’s Way—Playwrights Horizons’ latest offering, though staged at the Atlantic Theater in Chelsea while the company builds a new space—summons up a hot dreamy New York of fables, Little Red Riding Hood visiting Eisenhower-era Greenwich Village.

Teenage girl Frances has renamed herself after Salinger’s heroine Franny, insisting on her nickname with a 17-year-old’s willful independence. Franny, her sister Dolly, and her grandmother come to town to visit cousin Sally, whose infant has died unexpectedly. The premature death implies a loss that has left these people fumbling and desperate for human contact. Not only does Sally no longer sleep with her husband or leave the apartment, but Franny uses her visit as an opportunity to sneak off for sex with an NYU student and Dolly secretly plans to meet her divorced mother at Gimbel's perfume counter. The relationships curdle and sour until events conspire to bring about the family’s rejuvenation, at the cost of Franny’s youth but not her vitality.

Holding the action together as Franny, Elisabeth Moss smirks at the phoniness of adults while remaining oblivious to her own unhappiness. Famous for her work on "The West Wing" as the president’s daughter, Moss shows relaxed control over her character’s complexities, making sure that these contradictions are the natural confusions of a 17-year-old. As her sister Dolly, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese captures the clumsiness of 15-year-olds by personifying a girl not quite in control of either her newly grown body or newly matured mind. Most movingly, Yvonne Woods depicts Sally as a woman whose natural sexuality has been stifled by depression and loss.

The designers equal the actors’ skill by setting a stage that supports the script’s emotional weight. Scott Lehrer’s music tints every scene with blue notes by leaking cool jazz from a Sullivan Street club into the apartment two floors above. The lighting, by Jennifer Tipton, complements the sound by dividing the apartment into oases of yellow warmth separated by hollow areas of cool blue. The tiny apartment set, designed by Thomas Lynch, is so perfectly cramped that the actors almost walk over each other to get around. A torn piece of wallpaper represents the play’s universe: barren, falling apart, and yearning for rebirth.

Richard Nelson, in full control of both the script and the direction, orchestrates these elements with a balanced eye, putting each element at the service of the whole production. Nelson has unfortunately had very few successes in America, although he’s found a second home in England, notably through commissions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a playwright, he focuses on the relationships that tie people together rather than the hurly-burly of life. In Franny’s Way, casual conversations hint at deep reservoirs of isolation and resentment, as when Sally wakes from a nap and comments with lethargic sobriety to her husband Phil, “I was dreaming of our baby. That’s the dream you woke me from.”

As the director, Nelson takes even bolder steps by leaving whole minutes onstage silent to let action and stagecraft speak for itself. When Franny walks through the dark apartment at night to get water from the kitchen faucet, Nelson and his collaborators show Franny’s insomniac excitement at visiting New York more explicitly than dialogue could. By filling out his melancholic tones of a half-remembered fairy-tale Greenwich Village with these frank and prosaic moments, Nelson avoids sentimentality. With its portrayal of an almost mythical New York, Franny’s Way ought to finally establish this expatriate's reputation.

Free Market is a program of eight short plays from The Working Theatre about life in the American workplace. Like most collections of one-acts, this one has its hits and its misses; despite the thematic linking device, the diversity of its plays' subjects and styles works against it, I think, making for an overall uneven theatrical experience.

The best pieces in Free Market are the most adventurous ones. Karen Sunde's 2020 Sex Care imagines a futuristic society where sex work is legal and thriving and then postulates the very valid workplace issue of a woman coping with her boyfriend's conflicted feelings about her profession. OyamO's Kickin Summit is a wry satirical work in which a "council" of black men in white face who debate whether to allow George W. Bush to join them in dividing up the world. The title piece, by Jim Grimsley, is an absurdist take on corporate America, where employees don't know what their jobs are or what their company produces. Overlong (and, to my mind, already a little dated), Free Market eventually coalesces neatly into a cynical commentary on the amorality of Big Business; but it takes too long to do so.

Less effective are Fire Drill by William Wise, a one-note plea for compassion in the workplace that feels, in this context, very much like preaching to the converted; Day of Our Dead by Elaine Romero, a turgid morality play about a Mexican spiritualist; Give Us This Day by Julie Jensen, an intimate duet for father and daughter set in a barn that feels out-of-place and awkward here; and Poodles, a faux-whimsical piece of magic realism about a dog groomer by Sachi Oyama. The final piece, Guillermo Reyes's The Border Crossers Lounge, has an amusing concept--a sleazy lounge singer interacting with illegal aliens, border guards, capitalists, and socialists--but emerges as heavy-handed political satire.

All eight plays are directed by Joseph Megel, who displays little empathy for any of them. They're acted by a company of six ethnically diverse actors (not a white male among them, interestingly): all turn in competent work, but none registers vividly.

Free Market probably seemed like a great concept on paper. Unfortunately, in theatre as in all other professions, best-laid plans are apt to go awry.

From the Top is an elegant, original, somewhat bittersweet new comedy by Scott C. Sickles. Structured something like Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests in miniature, it tells the same story three different times. Each time, we focus on a slightly altered subset of the evening's events, and each time we learn much more about the relationships among the various characters and the unuttered words that have kept—and may continue to keep—some of them from getting what they truly desire. It's a smart dramatic idea, well-realized here by playwright Sickles, director Max Montel, and the ensemble of five actors.

The apartment where From the Top takes place belongs to Brandon, a successful theatre director. Tonight he is going to the Tony Awards (he's nominated for one), along with his friends Cal and Irene (also nominated: he's a playwright, she's an actress). But the evening gets temporarily derailed by the appearance of Edmund, a young man who was a student of Brandon's and remains his great friend, and Paddy, Edmund's new boyfriend.

Telling you much more will actually spoil From the Top for you. I can add that Cal and Irene have been together for seven years but seem tonight to be on the verge of breaking up; and that Paddy, just 23 and a stranger from Ireland, is understandably and quite obviously in awe of Edmund's famous and successful friends. The rest you'll need to work out, either by trying to deduce the missing pieces of Sickles' puzzle as the story plays out for the first time, or—more advisably—by watching the details come into sharper  and sharper focus as From the Top's clever replays tie up all the loose ends.

What's good about the play is that its gimmick doesn't feel like one; instead, we genuinely gain insight and understanding as scenes two and three take us deeper and more probingly into the characters' inner lives. A bit of trimming might improve the piece—there's a long monologue delivered by Irene about Chekhov's Cherry Orchard that probably only needs to be heard once, for example—but in general, Sickles' choices about what to tell us and when succeed admirably.

From the Top is directed fluidly by Max Montel. The performances are generally fine, with the standout Gregory Sims as an engagingly self-aware Cal.

Fugitive Angels is a lovely new play from On the Verge Theatre Company that offers a possible explanation for what happened to famed pilot Amelia Earhart (Anna Fitzwater) and her navigator Fred Noonan (Yuri Lowenthal) on her second, fateful flight around the world. The play is ased on Jane Mendelsohn’s sexy, fluid novel, I Was Amelia Earhart. I was curious to see how playwright Beatrice Terry would adapt such a beautiful, but seemingly difficult, work for the stage. The answer is: very, very well.

Amelia and Fred are two people who could not be more different. Amelia is a driven pilot, trying to make it in a male-dominated field, whose achievements have propelled her into the limelight. Fred is a womanizing, chauvinist drunk whose alcoholism has alienated him from the rest of the aviation community so much that Amelia finally admits that she only hired him because he was the cheapest navigator around. Their relationship is more than a little contentious at the beginning of the flight, and only becomes more so as their journey continues. When their plane crashes on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific, the journey appears to be over. But, as Amelia tells us, it turns out to be “only the beginning.”

To reveal more would spoil the many surprises of Fugitive Angels. Terry and director Heather de Michele should be commended for fashioning such a linear, accessible play from Mendelsohn’s ambitious novel. Fugitive Angels has many worthwhile things to say about prejudice towards women and couplehood dynamics, and Terry and de Michele, taking their cue from Mendelsohn, say them in profound but subtle ways. They’re aided by Fitzwater’s strong performance as Amelia. Her six-foot lithe frame, deep voice, and confident stage presence convey an Amelia Earhart that is equal parts ambition, sensuality, and salt-of-the-earth. Lowenthal’s performance as Frank is far more problematic, unfortunately. In his early scenes, he tries so hard to make Frank’s drunkenness and southern accent convincing that he just comes off as affected. But, as Fugitive Angels progresses, Lowenthal gets more comfortable with Frank’s external characteristics, therefore easing nicely into his internal life as well. Designers Ray Neufeld (sets), Rebecca M. Makus (lights), and Adam Girardet (costumes) also make valuable contributions.

Fugitive Angels is a rewarding experience that offers a glimpse at a promising, young theater company that all theatergoers should keep an eye on.

Further Than the Furthest Thing is about the inhabitants of a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean that is equidistant from Africa and South America. In Act One, an industrialist from Capetown named Hansen arrives with restless native Francis Swain with the notion of building a jar factory there, but the island's nominal leader Bill Lavarello opposes the idea, and anyway, the volcano on the island erupts and all of the inhabitants are forced to evacuate. In Act Two, the islanders have been relocated to Southampton, England, where they are put to work by the same Mr. Hansen (with Francis as factory foreman). They are generally miserable: homesick and shunned by the English as backward outsiders, their only wish is to return to their homeland as soon as possible. But the British government has designs on it for use in its nuclear arms program; it appears that they may never get to go back.

As the foregoing demonstrates, the story that Zinnie Harris has concocted for Further Than the Furthest Thing—much of it based on true events that occurred on a similar Atlantic isle called Tristan da Cunha in the early 1960s—is an intriguing one. So it's baffling—and a crying shame to boot—that what Harris has written is so leaden and unconvincing: where has she gone astray? A fundamental problem stems from the fact that her island is wholly dependent on semi-annual visits of outsiders for sustenance. I suppose this could be true, though it's awfully hard to swallow; regardless, dramatically it rather severely undermines the fierce independence of Harris's characters: if they can't live without Her Majesty's navy checking in on them every so often, what right have they to complain about their new digs in Southampton?

Harris further weakens the piece with a Brigadoon-ish unrequited love story involving forward-thinking Francis and tradition-bound Rebecca Rogers, and with a melodramatic Big Secret whose revelation pretty much derails Act Two. Economy, probably, caused Harris to put just four islanders in her script (the other one is Mill Lavarello, Bill's wife): the play's central theme of dislocation and otherness would have been realized more effectively with the inclusion of at least a few more dislocated others.

What's good about Further Than the Furthest Thing is the characters Harris has created. She has a true flair for vivid dialogue; the three older people, in particular, are richly drawn. They're beautifully played here, too, by Peter Gerety (Hansen), Robert Hogan (Bill), and, especially, Jenny Sterlin (a transcendent Mill). It's easy to see why these actors wanted to bring these people to life. What's harder to comprehend is what Harris expects them to accomplish in her underdone drama.

Galaxy Video is the freshest, funniest, most original new comedy I've seen in the theatre in quite a long time. Written and directed by Marc Morales, the play is set in a video store. A video superstore, I should say: this place is so big that customers literally get lost in its maze of aisles (and they aren't helped by clerks who send them to "aisle 27, shelf 13" for a particular movie).

This place is so big that it boasts an infinite number of titles, and we believe the claim.

This place is so big that it can hold—quite comfortably thank you—the whacked-out microcosm of contemporary urban life that Morales has invented and cheerfully parades for us in this hilarious jump-cut jamboree of a play. Galaxy Video introduces us to a delicious assortment of eccentric characters, all blissfully over-the-top and all spectacularly familiar: these weirdoes are our friends, our kids, our co-subway-riders. They include Marissa, a self-involved lady with a cell phone glued to her ear and an attitude at least as long as her stylish hairdo; Shelly, a narcoleptic clerk who alternates between dancing in the aisles to her walkman and falling flat on her face in (unintended) sleep; Simon, the store's Reverend Jim character, another clerk who hides out in the back of the store because he knows how incompetent he is; Scott and Erick, a pair of roommates fighting over what video to rent tonight, and living surprisingly dangerous lives that are oddly reminiscent of the plots of famous movies; Manny, a film groupie whose conversation consists almost exclusively of film quotes and movie star trivia; Jerry, the geeky video store clerk who actually likes his job; Beth, a seemingly ordinary woman whose only desire is to find a copy of Midnight Cowboy; and an unnamed clerk who has issues with people (she doesn't like them) but needs to work to support her art (she draws stick figures).

Galaxy Video is mostly about what happens when these and several other folks show up in this megastore on an otherwise uneventful evening; there they collide like atoms in a cyclotron, with similarly explosive results. And in the middle of all this random action is our hero, Russel, a writer who doesn't want to work in a video store all his life, forced into action when his ex-girlfriend Shelby and his ex-writing partner Barnaby Franklin both turn up on this very same night.

Morales keeps us interested in the nonsensical antics of Galaxy's kooky clerks and customers and in the much more grounded problems that Russel is dealing with. And he does so with great wit: Morales has a smart sense of humor and a shrewd sense of timing; he also has the satirist's eye for finding the absurd in the everyday. Allusions to, well, everything abound: Galaxy Video is, in fact, a live video, somehow managing to contain, among other things, a pair of ninjas, a couple of slow motion fight scenes, impersonations of John Travolta (excellent) and Jon Voight (rotten), and a full-fledged musical number.

Like Stephen Sondheim's Follies (with which it otherwise has absolutely nothing in common), Galaxy Video uses a generation's popular entertainment format to encapsulate a play about that generation's lifestyle. Form, you might say, is content.

Of course—and thankfully—it doesn't feel so eggheaded. Galaxy Video is exciting because Morales' vision is so authentically fresh and original, but it's entertaining because it's so cheerfully funny and so well realized. The cast of fourteen are remarkably accomplished; I will single out Christopher Frankie DiGennaro (Simon), Wynn Everett (Beth), Jeffrey G. Mccrann (Barnaby Franklin), Braden Moran (Russel), and Roxane Policare (Shelly) as simply the most memorable members of a splendid ensemble. The play's design and staging are wondrous, particularly given the constraints of space and resources this young company faces.

Galaxy Video still feels raw in places—its creators' youth and relative inexperience are apparent—but it's nevertheless an unqualified success for Morales and his collaborators. I will be watching eagerly to see what these folks come up with next.

What to do if you lose your credit cards? Well, you’d call the credit card companies up and get new ones, of course. What to do if all your credit cards and id’s are stolen? Report it to the police and call everyone to get replacements. What if the system loses you? You go immediately to the Department of People. And there begins this quite funny new play, God & Mr. Smith, by Travis Baker and produced by Kaleidoscope Theatre Company.

Set in NYC in the near future, we first meet John Smith (Jeremy C. Wolf) at the office of the Department of People where we learn all the computer files for all the people are kept. He has suddenly disappeared from the files–his social security number doesn’t exist, nor do his credit cards, mortgage, payroll files, etc. He, John Smith, does not exist. He arrives with his paper documentation to solve the problem. But this is only the beginning. According to the head of the department, Dr. Burger (Marc Moritz), no one believes paper documents. He bombastically explains that if you’re not on the computer, you don’t exist. So John enlists the aid of the receptionist, Steph (Najla Said), a would-be aspiring actress, and Andy (Daryl Lathon), a computer wiz (with a nerdish personality), to his cause.

The playwright takes us on a day’s journey as John Smith attempts to get his life back. There are some very funny moments such as when he goes home to the comfort of his parents only to find that if he doesn’t exist they’ll be audited by the IRS and fined for the years of deductions they have taken. Similarly, he finds his wife has her own set of problems. This all results in his being cast out of each safe haven he seeks. He continues his adventures, some funny, some extraneous, with Steph, the receptionist. The points Baker is trying to make would be better taken if he cut some of these side trips, as they tend not to be terribly funny and also travel too far a field. But then we get back to some more pertinent, very funny scenes when John meets Postal (Todd Allen Durkin), a former mail carrier whose mailbag became smaller and smaller until it became non-existent–replaced completely by e-mail. Now he is homeless and a drunk, although extremely personable. Even if he wanted to amount to something, how can he; he’s still wearing his summer uniform of shorts and tennis shoes. Durkin has a spin on this role that puts the second act right back on track after a period of floundering around.

All in all, the production is well staged with competent directing by Marshall Mays. It’s a funnier evening and more entertaining than you might find lots of places today and it’s a play that should be looked at again.

I liked Golden Ladder, the new comedy by Donna Spector at the Players Theatre, until its very last scene; then, unfortunately, I couldn't like it. Golden Ladder tells the story of Catherine Bronson, a young woman growing up in Pasadena, California in the 1960s. Her mother, Laura, is a church-going Presbyterian more concerned with appearances than doctrine; her father, Bernard, is a self-described Jewish atheist who Laura swears is a Christian. Religion hangs heavily over this family who otherwise seem reasonably happy and well-adjusted. But Laura's obsession with what people might think of her non-Christian husband (and her self-deception on the same point; and Bernard's well-intentioned enabling) take their toll on young Catherine, and as she grows up, she experiments with various forms of Christianity, trying to find a church that will make her feel completely at home.

Catherine's odyssey exposes her to the Presbyterians, who preach that non-believers such as Bernard are condemned to hell; to Catholicism, where the promise of the confessional feels refreshing but the complex categorization of sins feels forced; and to born-again fundamentalism, which quickly turns downright creepy. Spector has a good time making fun of some of the hypocritical and even intolerant practitioners of these faiths; she also scores useful points about idiotic stereotyping (Laura thinks that Catholics don't bathe, Catherine's best friend Mary tells her that Jewish girls have extra hormones that make them easy).

But Golden Ladder doesn't culminate in the thoughtful rejection of the surface trappings of organized religion that it feels like it's heading toward for most of its running time. Instead, Catherine—true, probably, to the play's autobiographical impulse—embraces Judaism and the unconditional love of stalwart boyfriend Aaron Feldman. Trouble is, Spector doesn't play fair: after subjecting all of Catherine's other religious choices to ripe satirical commentary, her Jewish phase comes off merely as a tacked-on ending, offered without explanation or wit. It's an unfortunate choice, dramatically speaking.

But Spector writes characters and dialogue beautifully: the portraits of Catherine, her father, and her friends Aaron, Mary, and Carole are rich and detailed and honest. Spector is well-served by director Thomas G. Waites, who provides a fluid, graceful staging for her episodic script; and by the entire cast. Amy Redford is smart and appealing as the conflicted heroine, Neal Lerner and Michael Anderson are sympathetic and funny as the two men who love her (Bernard and Aaron, respectively), and Marjan Neshat and Christi Kelsey are delicious as Catherine's teenage Christian friends. Only Annie McGovern, in the somewhat underwritten role of Laura, has difficulty creating a three-dimensional character.

Barry Arnold's unit set and lighting design are ingenious and enormously effective. Laura Frecon's costumes and David A. Gilman's sound design, both evoking the '60s and other eras, are invaluable.

Good Thing is practically the last new play to open in New York this year (2001); it's also one of the best. Jessica Goldberg has created a tight, powerful, and richly thought-provoking drama here, interweaving the contrasting lives of a young couple about to have a baby and a middle-aged couple coping with marital crises, and linking them together with the earnest machinations of a young woman who is desperate to set everything right. This excellent script has been brought vividly and memorably to the stage by director Jo Bonney for the adventurous New Group, with a cast of six remarkable actors doing some of their finest work as Goldberg's engagingly screwed-up characters. Letter-perfect design by Neil Patel (sets), James Vermeulen (lights), Mimi O'Donnell (costumes), and Ken Travis (sound) further help to make Good Thing one of the must-see productions of the theatre season.

Good Thing begins in a shoe store in a suburban shopping mall. (It takes place in Albany, New York, but it could be AnyCity, USA.) John and Nancy Roy, married high school guidance counselors in their 40s, are choosing sneakers for a planned camping trip. Their salesperson turns out to be Liz, one of John's former students. John obviously doesn't remember her, but Liz has never forgotten him; she clings to her memories of his advice, in fact, as justification for her recent decision to drop out of college and return home to this low-paying, dead-end job.

Liz's immediate objective is to hook up with Dean, the high school boyfriend she abandoned when she left for college. Dean's plate is pretty full: he's married, his wife Mary is expecting a baby (any day), and he's struggling to make ends meet to support them plus his drug-addicted brother Bobby. Mary's got problems with drugs, too; so bad, in fact, that Dean keeps her locked in her room while he's at work so she won't fall prey to her addiction in Bobby's loving but unhelpful company.

Liz finds all of this out during one eventful night with Dean. What she never finds out is that a similar set of troubles plague the Roys, whose grown-up wisdom she so admires. John is in AA, and has apparently been unfaithful to Nancy with one of his students. Nancy, meanwhile, is an exhausted wreck who clings to the belief that if she and John had only had a baby of their own he wouldn't have strayed from the marriage.

Playwright Goldberg writes all six of her characters with compassion and understanding and depth, so Good Thing never feels like the soap opera it might. And then she gives Liz a Wonderful Idea–I won't tell you more–that sets an extraordinary chain of events in motion. Good Thing, finally, is a play about the complex tragicomedy that is life: the tough questions, the obvious answers, the endless peril of contemporary American existence. The best and the worst of us is up there on stage, making a mess of things. What might we do about it?

The performances in Good Thing are so smart and human and deeply-felt that they linger with us, like memories of old friends. Betsy Aidem and John Rothman play the older couple, Nancy and Roy, showing us their surface wisdom and their hidden insecurities and self-deceptions. As the youngsters,  Hamish Linklater (Dean), Cara Buono (Mary), Alicia Goranson (Liz), and Chris Messina (Bobby) have never been better. I love Goranson in this, especially each time that smart, eager Liz hatches a plan to Save Everyone's Life: I guess we were all that young and naive once. And Linklater's explosive turn as Dean should prove the breakthrough that this outstanding young actor deserves. He has a scene, near the end of the first act, when the pressures building up inside him finally bust loose–the barely controlled rage brings to mind Brando's Stanley Kowalski. Linklater's Dean is smart but tragically impotent; an underemployed invisible man on a fast track to oblivion: an anti-hero, really, for our time.

What's ultimately most satisfying about Good Thing is that, despite its serious concern for its subject, it's finally imbued with hope. Somehow these characters–whom we really come to love and admire in just two hours, by the way; somehow, they will find ways to reclaim their futures. There's a message to cling to these days.

Harbor Currents is an evening of new short plays by members of The Harbor Theatre. It's a fun and wholly enjoyable program, featuring solid acting and production values and a quality of writing well above average for this sort of thing. You won't love every one of the seven pieces comprising Harbor Currents, but you'll likely love at least a few of them. Here's how it played for me.

Pop Goes the Weasel by Henry Meyerson opens the evening on a high note. This sharp, very original piece uses musical chairs as a metaphor for the way we live now; it takes on a surprising added resonance in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. If it fizzles out a bit at the end, it's nevertheless a smart and interesting work. Watch for Marc Geller's attention-getting get-up and for a fine, measured performance by Patricia Marie Kelley.

Sex on the Beach by Jack Hyman has the unusual premise of a couple who can only be intimate while on the phone with a telemarketer. It's just a little less strange than it sounds, but there's some clever dialogue, well delivered by Charlie Fersko and Meghan Rafferty as the perverse lovers and, especially, Carolyn Seiff as a surprising succession of telemarketers.

I liked Donna Spector's The Crystal Ball a lot. In it, a medium named Anastasia finds herself haunted by her mother, who left her the fortune telling business after she died. Mother and daughter discover how much they need one another during the course of this kooky supernatural comedy, which is nicely directed by Mark E. Lang and features winning performances by Ellen Barry (Anastasia) and Georgia Southcotte (Mother).

The literal centerpiece of Harbor Currents, Stephanie Lehmann's Next, Please, is also the evening's strongest offering. It's the tale of a woman named Katherine, too often burned in matters of the heart, who now has taken charge of romantic affairs by requiring an in-depth interview with every prospective date. Next, Please is very, very funny and just bittersweet enough to feel true. It's also a boon for actors, with no fewer than eight parts, all of them choice, played here with gusto by Karin Sibrava (perfect as Katherine), and Michael Gnat, Charlie Fersko, Michael Anderson, Marc Geller, Sy Young, Patricia Marie Kelley, and Christopher Matthews as the interviewees. Amanda Selwyn directs with just the right mix of reality and fantasy. Good stuff.

A Plague of Little Miracles follows. This emotional drama by Stuart Warmflash tells the story of a carpenter and his prospective client, who happens to be a former lover. She is now an upwardly mobile business executive married to a much older man. The arc of the tale is somewhat predictable, but the sentiments all ring true. Warmflash directs his work, with Michael Gnat and Patricia Marie Kelley turning in solid performances as the protagonists.

Tick Tock, by Tony Howarth, is about a pair of strangers who encounter one another in a bar and, briefly, bond. What's intriguing about Howarth's play is that the strangers are a recently downsized young man and a lonely sixty-something woman who has just learned that her husband is having an affair. Howarth's language is inventive and interesting. Christopher Matthews and Georgia Southcotte are the appealing mismatched couple.

The evening concludes, on a high note again, with Garth Wingfield's ingenious and funny romantic comedy Touching Howard There. If I tell you why it's called that I'll give away the silliest of Wingfield's surprises. What I can say is that Karin Sibrava and Michael Anderson play a couple who make some neat discoveries about themselves and each other while making love in her bed. They're terrific, as is Wingfield's deft writing and Laura Josepher's nimble direction.

Doug Filomena works his usual wizardry with the lights (conjuring a dog out of thin air in the last play). And Joel M. Rapp works miracles, using a few simple pieces of furniture to create, most convincingly, settings as diverse as an upscale bar, a comfy bedroom, and a Greenwich Village fortune teller's parlor.

There's a lot that's right about Havana Is Waiting, the new play by Eduardo Machado currently running at the Cherry Lane Theatre. First, there's some fascinating, compelling writing: meditations on what it means to belong to a nation, and what it means to be an exile and never really be home; considerations of sex and sexual identity and gender; a savvy juxtaposition of a Cuban-American's return visit to Havana after nearly forty years away with the rescue of the soon-to-be-iconic Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez off the coast of Miami. There's no shortage of intriguing subject matter in Havana Is Waiting, and playwright Machado keeps us riveted as he selects and relishes items from this cornucopia of ideas.

There's also a first-rate cast, led by Bruce MacVittie as Machado's alter ego, a playwright/academic named Federico who was airlifted to the U.S.A. while still a small boy in 1961 as part of the "Peter Pan" operation which removed the children of wealthy Cuban families from the grips of the Castro regime. Ed Vassallo plays Federico's best friend, Fred, a conflicted bi- or homo-sexual whose refusal to acknowledge or admit his feelings about Federico mirrors Federico's own struggle with his identity as a child exile. And Felix Solis plays a contemporary Cuban citizen named Ernesto, who serves as tour guide to Federico and Fred when they make their journey to Havana in late 1999.

The journey is of discovery, of selves and otherwise. Federico wants to find the places he barely remembers from his boyhood, and he wants to locate and reclaim the sense of homeland that has eluded him all his life. Fred wants to help his best friend through what promises to be a difficult experience; along the way, he comes to understand the true nature of his feelings toward Federico and moves toward accepting and embracing them. Ernesto initially wants the American capitalists' money; but he, too, finds himself deeply affected and changed by his encounter with these two strangers. In the end, all three men learn a fundamental lesson about humankind that transcends the fictive constructs of national and gender identity.

Which brings me, unfortunately, to what's not right about Havana Is Waiting. In what may be a poet's attempt at extended metaphor or a dramatist's need to wrap things up in a couple of hours, Machado's earnest thinking turns rather sloppy in Act Two. Ernesto's confused politics and economics get mixed up with Fred's sexual ambivalence and with Federico's rage against a family and a regime that forced him from his homeland without his consent. Machado tries to explain all the ambiguity away with a pat, feel-good ending that suggests that if only we'd all sit down and really talk to each other, the world would be a terrific and hate-free place.

A nice moral, as far as it goes; but resoundingly naive, especially given the sophisticated discourse that has gone round and round and round on all of these subjects during the preceding scenes. Havana Is Waiting is indeed a brimming cornucopia of provocative subject matter; but trying to equate its apples, oranges, and plums to arrive at a neat ending proves both reductive and harmful. The play of ideas we've been hoping for melts away in  unsatisfying sentimental muck.

That said, though, I think Havana Is Waiting is worth your time: despite my disappointment in it, I still find it lingering in my consciousness more than a week after seeing it: this is definitely rich and compelling theatre. (And one last thing: Richard Marquez, the fourth cast member, provides, on drums, a spectacular accompaniment to the piece.)

The first act of Ellen McLaughlin's new play Helen is rich with promising ideas. We're in a very contemporary-looking hotel in Cairo, Egypt, in a luxurious but stark penthouse. Here Helen (of Troy) has resided for seventeen years, spirited away by the gods after the start of the War that her face supposedly launched, waiting for her Greek warrior husband Meneleus to come for her and bring her back home.

It seems that this particular day—after so many in which nothing happened— is going to be eventful. First Helen is visited by Io, a woman whose fate was similarly toyed with by the gods (she still bears the vestiges of Hera's spell: the ears of the cow that she had once been turned into). Next, the goddess Athena shows up, bearing the news that the Trojan War ended long ago. In between, Helen's servant, a seemingly impartial Egyptian who dresses her and massages her feet, tells her stories that have the resounding ring of truth.

The deliberate anachronisms; the obvious anti-war sentiment; the deconstructive clash of fairy tale and myth; the underlying foment of feminist empowerment: all these themes tantalize us during intermission as we wait to see where McLaughlin is going to go with them. So we're terribly disappointed that the answer, as Act Two ploddingly unfolds, turns out to be: nowhere. Meneleus arrives and, after his own very effective soliloquy about the horrors of warfare, leaves. And then the play more or less implodes: all the intriguing notions that Helen felt like it was going to traffic in vaporize.

McLaughlin's writing is distinctive and interesting, but it doesn't look like director Tony Kushner has done much to help her focus it or give it dramatic coherence.  The five actors all make strong impressions (especially Marian Seldes, who may be guilty of some scenery-chewing as the long-suffering servant, but is nevertheless darn funny). Donna Murphy is an elegant and persuasive Helen. Phylicia Rashad is sassy and nonchalant as Athena. Johanna Day is appealingly human as the bovine Io. Denis O'Hare is compelling as the battered Meneleus.

The play's design is glorious. Extravagant costumes (by Susan Hilferty) are a delight to the eye, as is the swankly ethereal setting by Michael Yeargan. (I particularly loved the bouquet of colorful fly swatters, arranged smartly in a glass vase on Helen's bedside table.) Paul Huntley's hair designs, especially Murphy's glamorous blonde tresses, are perfect.

But pretty picture though Helen is, dramatically it fails to satisfy as its promising thematic notions fizzle out, unfulfilled, long before the final blackout.

Homosexual Acts is a program of seven very different short plays that celebrate gay and lesbian life. Evenings like this are successful if three or four of the pieces are effective; the good news is that all seven of these Homosexual Acts have much to recommend them. Expect good writing, good acting, and smart, sensitive direction (by Mark Cannistraro); expect, too, to have a fun, enlightening, liberating time.

The evening begins with Doug Cooney's brief and humorous piece I Should Have Said No, in which Stephen Hope plays a recently dumped man who vents his spleen against his ex-boyfriend rather publicly, in the middle of one of those ubiquitous pre-show speeches (you know, the kind where you're asked to turn off your cell phone and unwrap your candy). Cooney has filled the announcement with equal parts absurd theatrical arcana and over-the-top vitriol; it's hilarious. By the way, although Hope's character is gay, like many of the people featured in Homosexual Acts his particular circumstance is hardly unique to gay and lesbians; this universality is one of the things that makes the show so refreshing.

Annunciation by Carl Morse, which follows, is a sweetly offbeat fairy tale with a Twilight Zone-y twist that is most satisfying. In it, Jessica Faller portrays an expectant mother named Melissa who is visited by a stranger with the news that her unborn son will be gay. Morse puts a sharp spin on this too-timely topic, connecting it with some essential human truths in an unexpected way.

Robert Shaffron's The Doris Day Collection, up next, mines the excesses of star worship to create a broad farce with a fun twist of its own. Stephen Hope and Gregg Moore are Hank and Stone, two old friends meeting in a vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood. Their purpose: to catch a glimpse of Doris Day, with whom Hank is alarmingly obsessed. In fact, it turns out that Hank's plans tonight go beyond mere stargazing. Brash and off-the-wall, The Doris Day Collection is filled with good-naturedly catty humor and intricate allusions to Day's movies: it's a fun, if slight, addition to the proceedings.

Anything For You is the next offering, with Suzanne Gilad and Suzanna Bowling as another pair of old friends meeting in a restaurant. This bittersweet, intimate comedy by Cathy Celesia takes a clear-eyed view of the long-standing relationship between best pals Gail and Lynette, and what happens when one of them proposes a one-night stand with the other as a means of spicing up her love life. This is a richer, more substantial piece than it might appear on the surface: it strikes me that the actors could have made entirely different choices about their intentions and the play would still work, though with altered resonance.

The Virtual Closet, by James Edwin Parker, also features some excellent writing. It begins in an Internet chat room, where a young gay man named Sajid is hooking up with a guy named Chip who seems to be the man of his dreams. What we know (but he doesn't) is that "Chip" is actually Benny, a cynical, middle-aged loner whose virtual personas keep him in the closet of the play's title. Parker hooks us quickly in this cleverly-conceived piece, and he supplies a terrific twist at the end; I love that he never loses sight of the fact that his protagonist is Benny rather than the more engaging and easier-to-root-for Sajid. Nathan Johnson and Gregg Moore are affecting as the younger and older men, respectively.

The next play, Tom W. Kelly's The Virgin Tango, is my favorite. It features A.J. Triano and Justin Wilson as Stan and Mark, a pair of teenage boys at their high school prom. But instead of being on the dance floor, these two are hiding out in a storage closet; though they're undeniably in love with each other, they need some time and space to work up the courage to announce it to the rest of their classmates. This is a sweet, lovely play, with our heroes enacting the traditional  mating rituals in the same tentative, fumbling way that everyone does, at once intoxicated by passion and hormones and scared out of their minds. Triano and Wilson are superb, getting all the details of these guys exactly right. Kelly gives the piece a gratifyingly hopeful conclusion.

Homosexual Acts' final offering is Susan Miller's It's Our Town, Too, which revisits Thornton Wilder's most famous play from the gay/lesbian perspective. Unfortunately, the brilliance of the original works against it: Miller's points about inclusion and tolerance and prejudice are all emphatically worth making, but they pale next to Wilder's broader observations about the human condition.

Overall, this evening from Sourcebooks Theatre must be counted a resounding success. Director Cannistraro has done a splendid job bringing this diverse collection of plays to life, as well as in showcasing the substantial talents of their seven authors and the seven actors who perform them.

Marika Mashburn's earnest new play, I, Unseen, has as its single-minded mission to promote awareness of the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban. It's fashioned as a series of brief sketches about the lives of four such women:  Nazanee, a pregnant seventeen-year-old who is beaten by a Taliban police officer for the crime of appearing uncovered in public; Zhara, her mother, a doctor who is no longer allowed to practice her profession or even to travel without a male escort through the streets of her home city; Khadija, a young mother who is raped in prison after searching for her husband, who has been missing for more than a month; and Meena, the organizer of an underground women's resistance movement, whose horrific punishment is brutally meted out by her own husband, a Taliban member.

Like accounts of any of the genocides and atrocities that shamefully dot the map of human history, these stories are raw and harsh: they make us very angry and very sad. Mashburn frames her four main characters' stories with recitations of statistics and facts about the rise of the Taliban, the devastating effects of their regime on women and children in Afghanistan, and  thought-provoking assertions about the culpability of institutions such as the United Nations and the U.S. government. It's hard to hear, and it's absolutely worth hearing.

Unfortunately, Mashburn's entirely admirable intentions aren't matched by skill: I, Unseen is hurt by two-dimensional characters and situations and dialogue that too often borders on cliche. Director Donovan Johnson notes in the program that the play is conceived as a modern counterpart to the famous Depression-era Living Newspapers that were sponsored by the WPA;  I, Unseen succeeds as agitprop if not as theatre.

Interestingly, and notwithstanding the importance of its subject matter, I, Unseen already feels very dated now that the Taliban has been driven from power. Nevertheless, Mashburn's work reminds us that we must all do what we can to route out repressive regimes wherever they hold sway.

Someone you love is killed randomly and horribly when a stranger decides to take someone with him in a suicidal crash. This is the upsetting central image of Daniel MacIvor's extraordinary new play, In On It: astonishing, isn't it, how art finds its time and place so serendipitously and yet so precisely. In On It--which is a wise, profoundly moving, wrenching, deeply touching play--is the most essential work of theatre to arrive in New York this season, and it probably would have been that even if the events of September 11 hadn't happened; but it is especially so since they did.

In On It is a play about two men creating a play, more or less before our eyes. Their play is about a man named Ray who, as it commences, is told by his doctor that he doesn't have long to live. The two playwrights enact short scenes about Ray as he struggles to deal with this terrible news. We see him with his son, Miles, who complains bitterly about his disorganized wife and goes immediately into denial when Ray explains how sick he is. We see him with his wife, Brenda, a difficult woman with a bit of a drinking problem, who has news of her own: she is leaving Ray for another man. And we see Ray, finally, with his rival's young stepson, helping him make sense of a world that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Interspersed with these scenes are other scenes in which the collaborators recall moments of their own troubled relationship. We never learn these guys' names, by the way; they're called This One and That One in the program and by each other. We see how the two met, roped into performing a dance routine at a birthday party for a mutual friend; and we watch their relationship blossom, quite by accident, and then mature and sour, petty quarrels about jackets and opera masking rawer emotional truths.

This One and That One also argue about their play--what it means, how it should proceed, how it should end. I leave it to you to find out what they together decide, as well as the stunningly ingenious way that MacIvor tightly wraps loose ends and thematic threads into a startlingly seamless whole. I will tell you that In On It offers insights about how to survive in a world filled with accidents of various kinds that are wise and beautiful. A lot of them have to do with endings--indeed the shape of In and Out is of a spiral, or rather a maze, constantly seeming to close in on itself but then finding its way to a new, unexpected place. MacIvor ends the play juxtaposing the notions of "ending" and "stopping"; I went to my dictionary for guidance and found that the former is a synonym for dying while the latter suggests cessation of something, with the possibility of another something to follow. And that is, for me anyway, the blessedly healing message of In On It. You will, I think, find your own message in this rich and rewarding work.

A few more things I need to tell you: First, if I've made In On It sound relentlessly somber and serious, then I'm not doing it justice. It's very funny, a lot of the time; and it contains a moment of pure, unadorned, joyfulness that's rarely achieved in the theatre, when our two heroes show us that goofy dance that brought them together in the first place. It's performed, so aptly, to Lesley Gore's "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows," which is precisely what it's about--that transcendent happiness that Chekhov kept hoping for warms us, if only fleetingly.

Watch MacIvor and his co-star Darren O'Donnell in this dance, and throughout the play: they're just astoundingly good. Ditto sound designer Richard Feren and lighting designer Kimberly Purtell, who have created, with MacIvor (who also directed the piece), an environment that serves this work splendidly.

In On It is powerful, thought-provoking, and awesomely wise; it really demands to be seen. I hope that it turns out to be the breakthrough that MacIvor has long deserved--New York (and the rest of America) needs to experience the brilliance of this remarkable Canadian artist. His work has much to teach us; this may just be the moment when we need it most.