nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

Random Harvest is a delightfully intriguing new play by Richard Willett about a playwright named Aaron who finds himself embroiled in a pair of tragedies--one contemporary and one more than half a century old--and who is helped through them by, of all people, the ghost of Greer Garson.  The recent (and very real) tragedy involves the shocking, apparently unmotivated suicide of a popular, happy, well-adjusted teenager; Aaron's work as a fact-checker for a magazine article about it has put him in touch with the boy's badly hurting mother Donna.

Aaron's other--for want of a better word--obsession concerns Susan Peters, a Hollywood ingenue who got an Oscar nomination for the 1942 film Random Harvest and shortly thereafter was paralyzed from the waist down in a mysterious hunting accident. (Peters eventually died of  uncertain causes while still in her 30s.)  At first Peters just haunts Aaron's dreams, but soon he joins her in some sort of elusive purgatory where Susan and Aaron find themselves charged with helping each other on to the next phases of their respective lives.

All of this abnormal/paranormal activity tests Aaron's relationship with his longtime boyfriend Jimmy, not surprisingly; his ambivalence about being nominated for a major playwriting award is making him jumpy as well. Luckily, Aaron has a fairy godmother, of sorts, to help him through his suddenly complicated life, in the person (or, more properly, specter) of the late Greer Garson. (Garson was, of course, the star of the film Random Harvest.) Filled with Mrs. Miniver-like stiff upper lip, the ghost of Greer offers Aaron sympathy, common-sensical advice, and some much needed perspective. It's clear by the end of the play that he is going to emerge from this crisis smarter and stronger than ever.

It's all a bit improbable, and it would nice if playwright Willett found ways to tie together his divergent subplots more satisfactorily. But the writing is crisp and funny and the performances are winning and appealing. Special mention must be made of Patricia Randell's Greer Garson, a deliciously starchy caricature that brings to mind Carol Burnett's "Rancid Harvest" movie parody from long ago.

Real Live Sex on Stage is a lot better than you'd expect a play called Real Live Sex on Stage to be. Paul Wells' new serious comic drama is about a group of six young adults who are haunted by a devastating shared memory–a memory that has contributed, surely, to some of the dysfunction, sexual and otherwise, that they are experiencing in their lives. As advertised, there's a lot of sexual activity depicted in this play; know that Wells is uncompromising in showing his audience, in more detail than they're used to or than may be absolutely necessary, his characters' damaged sexualities. Know, further, that Real Live Sex on Stage includes a long sequence of male nudity and (obviously simulated) sex that, though integral to the story, may be more–what's the word?–frank than some people may be comfortable with. And know, finally, that there's actually not a single gratuitous moment in this play, which, though imperfect, is a compelling, rewarding, well-crafted exploration of childhood, fear, and memory.

Okay, now that all the summarizing and caveat-making is out of the way, let me tell you something of the story. Mike, Mark, Shelley, Maggie, Jennifer, and Lisa were friends twenty years ago in Rockford, Illinois. Now adults, they've spread out and lost touch with one another: Mike is a gay avant-garde performance artist in New York, Mark is a barker for a Times Square strip club, Shelley is the star of a popular sitcom, Maggie is a porn film star, and Jennifer is a high-powered real estate executive; only Lisa remains in Rockford, still living in her childhood home. We meet these six–as kids and as grown-ups–in a series of short interlocking scenes that serve to introduce us to the characters and to demonstrate, quite palpably, that something is troubling each of them.

All six are screwed-up, sexually and otherwise, though in different ways. Jennifer is a control freak with blatant intimacy issues. Mark is alcoholic and sometimes hits his girlfriends. Shelley struggles with loneliness and eating disorders. Maggie, a lesbian, makes straight porn films for pay. Mike channels his feelings of shame and inferiority in exhibitionism. And they're all having nightmares, recurring dreams of a barely-remembered event from twenty years ago that are tearing their lives apart.

Finally Lisa decides it's time to reconnect. Gradually, she makes contact with each of the other five, and they discover forgotten bonds that bring them together. You'll have to see the play to learn exactly what happened to these damaged souls on an afternoon twenty years ago, but I will tell you that when you do see it you'll sit riveted in your seat waiting to find out. And after you do, you won't be at all disappointed; Wells has crafted a fine, suspenseful drama.

He's also created a host of interesting and sympathetic characters for us to meet and care about, providing strong opportunities for his excellent cast. Michael Earle (Mark), Renee Erickson-Farr (Lisa), Laura Lanman (Jennifer), and Amy Overman (Maggie) do fine work here, as do Kevin T. Collins, Stephen Halliday, and Jessica Laulhere in a variety of supporting roles (Collins is a hoot as talk show host Larry King). Sebastian Sosnowski is even more impressive as Mike, showing us the little boy and the insecure man with great specificity; he also has that long nude sequence I mentioned earlier, a performance art parody that's at once alarming and funny and which he handles with grace and humor. And Amy Rush is terrific as Shelley; she has a scene where she suffers, more or less, a nervous breakdown on live TV that's quite remarkable.

Without losing sight of his play's genuinely serious theme, Wells also manages to insert lots of wonderful comic set pieces–most memorably Mike's crazy performance art exhibition, but also a porn film shoot, a phone-in TV talk show sequence, and an evening at a cruisy gay bar–all of which are witty and on-the-money.

Wells' script could probably do with some cutting. And his focus here on sex work–three of the play's six main characters are involved in it–may prove to be a limiting choice in terms of finding a broad audience for this play. But Real Live Sex on Stage is finally a gripping and well-made drama, staged with economy and sensitivity and intelligence.

Matthew Freeman's debut play, The Death of King Arthur, was a sprawling verse epic about love, morality, and politics in legendary Camelot. Now comes his second play, just six months later, and it couldn't be more different: Reasons for Moving is a dark, brooding, intimate, very personal drama about contemporary middle-aged American men in crisis. It's compelling, intense, discomfiting, even a little scary. And it marks Freeman as a writer of enormous promise, range, and maturity.

For what 25-year-old author takes as his subject a married, prosperous dentist who lives in the New Jersey suburb of Short Hills; a fellow named Mark whose life has been proceeding normally until, one day, the homeless guy staring at him on his lawn drives him to total, incalculable panic? Reasons for Moving begins with Mark's neighbor, a lawyer named Stephen, arriving in Mark's living room at the request of Mark's wife. Mark has been destroying most of the furniture in the house, and now he's hatched a plan to escape from the menacing presence outside: he will dig a tunnel from his basement to Stephen's. There, he believes, he will be able to emerge safely and securely.

Audaciously, all that happens in Reasons for Moving is this bizarre plan: its formulation and then—startlingly, horrifyingly—its execution. Freeman juggles traditions of theatrical angst from Beckett to Ionesco to Albee with enormous dexterity and finds his own resonant voice: there are passages here where he captures the impotence and inertia of privileged middle age with astonishing eloquence. "What's your basement wall made of?" Mark asks Stephen at one point. A long, flustered, semi-anguished pause, and then: "I don't know. It's made of wall."

Freeman is well-served by his director, Russell Marcel, who resists the impulse to go gothic here and instead keeps the play resolutely realistic, which makes it all the more harrowing, especially during the second act, set inside the tunnel. Matthew Trumbull gives a revelatory performance as Mark, exposing all the complicated, conflicting traumas burbling through this guy's psyche. Sean Elias-Reyes offers solid support as Stephen, Mark's partner in hysteria.

Reasons for Moving is the debut production for The Local, a new theatre company founded by Elias-Reyes and fellow actor Michael Colby Jones. Especially given their freshman status, they've done a remarkably professional job mounting this challenging play.

Abhor bad avant-garde theater. It’s nonsense: tricks and ticks, hackneyed ideas dressed up as profundities, a hipper-than-thou attitude emanating from the stage towards the audience, and video projections. Cherish good avant-garde theater, like Red Frogs at P.S. 122. It’s nonsense too, but every trick has thought behind it, brilliant ideas build on one another like a crossword puzzle, and the stage and audience share an in-on-the-joke camaraderie. And there are video projections.

Red Frogs fuses a bewildering variety of ideas and themes and styles into an almost indescribable but very exciting evening. Ruth Margraff has based her script on Aristophanes’ masterpiece The Frogs, though the Greek text is clearly a point of departure rather than a base of operations. Like Dionysus, media tycoon Beatifica Strata (a kind of Oprah/Martha Stewart composite) journeys to the depths of hell, or in this case, Coney Island. Unlike Dionysus, she returns to her heavenly residence—Nantucket—followed by three “aquarium trash” gals, who apparently travel by typhoon (perhaps a Coney Island cyclone). From here, the girls infiltrate the household, and launch a Marxist revolution, but one that borrows as much from Groucho as from Karl. The script’s flood of dada wordplay and rambunctious slapstick creates a world that resembles the satirical fantasias of writer David Foster Wallace and playwright Mac Wellman: a carnival of jaded opinions and disposable excess. Or as one character says, “A déjà vu that we once sci-fied.”

The production, directed by Elyse Singer, matches the verbal anarchy with Day-Glo visuals and energetic staging. Enormous set pieces in vivid colors—a yellow mustard bottle sticking halfway through the set’s wall represents Coney Island, mirroring Nantucket’s giant red crab opposite—complement the surreal language. Swanky costumes—stuffed conical bras on the Coney Islanders, a silvery purple dress out of a ’30s art deco apartment on the media mogul—suggest the immoderation of burlesque. Pulling from every kind of comedy imaginable, from the violent mugging of silent film to the lurid double entendres of contemporary television, characters slam heads in doors, poke stomachs with plastic hot dogs, and flog backs in slow motion. Many directors might have been overwhelmed by the amount of sensory information, but Singer has clearly made thoughtful choices that add up to more than mere chaos. If there is one problem, it’s that the audience loses the ideas, not because of the speed but because the actors don’t always seem to understand what they’re saying.

Fortunately, the actors keep their energy up even in those moments. As Beatifica, Molly Powell supplements snobbery and confusion with a patient denial of erupting anarchy, like Margaret Dumont playing straight man to the Marx Brothers. Nicole Lowrance plays Shirley Goodness as a winsome innocent, her kewpie doll eyes less and less astonished at the stupidity of others. Similarly, Stacey Karen Robinson’s uses Mabie Main’s Nantucket drawl to spout wisdom that hints at stretched tolerance of the morons around her. Most impressively, Nina Hellman confidently navigates the complex role of Beatifica’s maid. She manages to look both cunning and idiotic as her character reverses the master-servant relationship and then happily burrows between Beatifica’s legs with a feather duster.

All of which only begins to suggest what Red Frogs is actually about. The mounting confusion mirrors the fervid but seemingly inane epiphanies that each character reaches and forgets. Finally, two of the girls, who turn out to be mother and daughter, reach a kind of concord. Chorus-like, they admit to each other that they aren’t quite sure where their adventure has taken them, but they’re sure they’ve learned something. The audience may not know where we’ve ended up either, but it’s a roller coaster of a ride.

In Response: Stories About What Happened, three playwrights begin to come to terms with the rampant emotions that followed the World Trade Center attacks. The four pieces included in this program are raw, honest, and heartfelt; they represent the first wave of what will almost certainly be a new movement in American theatre, especially here in New York City. These pieces are useful if not quite cathartic, and it will be interesting to see where explorations like these early ones will take us in our understanding of the complex events of 9/11 and their even more complicated aftermath.

The evening begins with Leslie Bramm's The Uncaring Dog, an allegory, mostly silent, about an everyman/tramp out for a walk with his dog. The immediate problem faced by this fellow, whose movements are hampered by bum legs that require the use of a pair of crutches, is how to dispose of the dog's droppings. When some much-needed newspaper blows near, our hero tries but fails to catch hold of it; eventually—inevitably—he winds up falling into the doggie-doo face first. But our hero has pluck, as well as dreams, and he manages to extricate himself from the mess and move on.

As performed by the immensely talented Maggie Cino, with the (mostly offstage) assistance of Jamie McLaren Lachman as the dog, this is an entertaining and affecting piece. The fact that, for much of the piece, it's not clear who's leading who on the leash, suggests that Bramm intends the dog to stand in for a higher power (dog spelled backwards?). The Uncaring Dog is a brief but touching reminder of the cosmic joke—fate? randomness?—that everyday results in some of us perishing in accidents or disasters while the rest of us simply go on.

The New Sign, by C. Rusch, is the next item on the bill. Set in a suburban community in the South, it tells the story of two workmen trying to put up a new message on one of those roadside signposts you see outside Holiday Inn and Denny's and Stuckey's and places like that. The men disagree about what the sign ought to say: one favors a message of support for the armed forces, while the other thinks it's still necessary to commemorate the WTC victims and their families. Their discussion takes them through a consideration of various topics, all related to what's really important in life and what's not. The words they finally agree upon for the new sign provide a lovely ending to this thoughtful short play.

The production is, alas, marred by a technical problem: the final sign—projected on the rear wall of the stage—is almost impossible to read. Performances, by Ed Miller and Morgan Parker, are less effective than one would wish as well; these actors seem more focused, at this point, on their accents than on the meaning of the lines they speak. Nevertheless, The New Sign is a worthwhile piece of work, one that deserves life beyond this presentation.

A second piece by Bramm, Lovers Leapt, follows. In this short fantasy play, a man and a woman who have worked together in the same office for a long time without connecting finally do so as they leap to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center. The play mostly takes place in the air during their freefall, as they say (and think) things they never thought to say or think before. Priorities, again, are the key in this slight but touching play about how short life ultimately and always is. Sheila Carrasco and Joshua Gartland play the couple.

After a brief intermission, Julia Lee Barclay's No One concludes the evening. Written in the same stream-of-consciousness style as her earlier Word To Your Mama, No One is a journey through one woman's thoughts on a sleepless night shortly after the attacks. Fears and ideals and solutions and hopes collide with mundane anxieties and annoyances as the unseen protagonist tries to process the recent cataclysmic events in her overloaded brain. The language and ideas are compelling and revelatory: as in Word, Barclay taps our collective subconscious with remarkable acuity here.

The piece has been staged with seven actors (in a rotating cast of ten), who divide the text in an improvisational fashion; the actors similarly use a vocabulary of movement and gesture ideas to amplify the text, responding to one another's choices in a manner akin to the way jazz musicians riff off each other's music. This is a complicated directorial concept and the actors—who are quite wonderful—haven't gotten comfortable enough with the text to quite do it justice. No One's message is important right now for the insights it contains about who we are and what happened to us; I'd like to see a more straightforward staging to make those insights more accessible to the audience.

Response: Stories About What Happened doesn't provide the closure we crave: that would be too much to expect at this juncture. But it does allow us to share feelings and emotions with artists who are thinking hard about what 9/11 means. We need to be doing that now and in the months to come.

The exciting and eventful reign of King Henry II of England has provided fodder for dramatists for decades: think of Becket, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Lion in Winter. Now comes Richard & Philip, which takes place during the final years of Henry's life, during which he pitted his two remaining sons Richard and John against each other and himself in a deadly endgame whose prize was the throne. Playwright George Barthel introduces another king to the mix, Philip of France, who embroils himself in Henry's familial conflict for his own purposes, and winds up–at least in this telling–sacrificing his soul.

Though Henry's endless conniving and manipulating sets the play's events in motion, this is very much Richard and Philip's story, especially the latter's. Barthel depicts Philip as a strong, willful ruler, bent on restoring the land and the glory that was lost to France during the reign of his saintly but weak father. When King Henry decides to send Richard to Philip's court to negotiate a truce in the seemingly endless wars between their countries, Philip quickly hatches a plan to turn the situation to his advantage. In a seduction scene worthy of Mata Hari, Philip maneuvers a private, late-night audience with Richard, and deftly seduces–or more accurately arranges to be seduced by–his vulnerable prey.

Soon Richard and Philip are lovers, plotting to overthrow Henry, whom Richard detests anyway, and share the booty between them. But events overtake the pair, as events are wont to do. First the King of Jerusalem is murdered, causing Richard to decide to go on Crusade. And then Henry, unwilling to let himself be defeated by these two upstarts, takes devious measures to break up the alliance. It will probably not surprise you that, in addition, Philip finds himself falling in love–for real–with the more noble Richard; the stakes for these two men and their countries run as high as they possibly can as the play progresses to its climax.

It's fascinating, compelling stuff, and even if there is no way to be sure how much is speculation and how much is true, Richard & Philip represents the best kind of romantic historical drama, a genre we see too little of these days. Barthel's writing is at its best juxtaposing the big political and moral issues facing these larger-than-life characters with the trivial, sometimes petty, details of their personal lives. He's less assured in the love scenes, where the dialogue sometimes veers into Barbara Cartland territory.

Laura Kleeman has done a fine job realizing Barthel's work on stage. Ray Wagner is the standout in the company as vengeful, nearly-broken King Henry, refusing to his last breath to relinquish control over his domain to anybody, God included.  Anthony Amen makes a stalwart, appealing Richard; Richard Bacon, as Philip, is a bit over-the-top in Act One but tones down his performance as his character matures in the play's final scenes. Michael E. Lopez, Gregory Mikell, and Anthony Le Fever round out the company as advisors/servants to the two kings.

In Room, co-produced by Classic Stage Company and Anne Bogart’s SITI Project, novelist Virginia Woolf makes a distinction between “being” and “non-being.” Moments of being are filled with meaning and significance for the person experiencing them; moments of non-being are stretches of relative blankness, the unmemorable filler of everyday life. Woolf believed that “real novelists” could write about both kinds of consciousness. Unlike her heroes—Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy—Woolf couldn’t capture the monotony of these nonevents in her own fiction without transforming them into moments that illustrated the prismatic nature of the mind; this she saw as an artistic failure. While her conclusion is debatable, her observation is accurate: Virginia Woolf is a writer whose style doesn’t allow her reader to rest for a moment. On the page, this is fine: the reader can take a break. But when hearing her work read or performed aloud, the listener may soon become fatigued.

Though her production is engaging, director Anne Bogart doesn’t get around this problem; Room is physically tiring to watch. A monologue dealing with Woolf’s favorite themes of fiction and perception, this show packs more (and more effective) stimuli into its 75 minutes than most productions do in twice that length. To mirror the multiple perspectives of Woolf’s style, Bogart adds a variety of theatrical devices to the author’s words, most notably a set of dancelike gestures that make Woolf’s abstract ideas easier to follow. For example, when the actress Ellen Lauren holds her arms up, one hand clenched shut and the other splayed open, the gesture interacts with Woolf’s context to express the concept of Oppositions, which can nourish artistic creation or stifle it, depending on the situation. These movements give the eye something to focus on in Neil Patel’s stark minimalist set; the three white scrims, with a ghostly window hanging behind the far one, suggest that a room’s furnishings are less important than the thoughts and actions accomplished within.

A less confident actress would make Bogart’s gestures into eccentric tics rather than expressive movements, but Lauren, as Woolf, gives a masterful performance. She establishes a rapport with the audience immediately, rising from a seat in the crowd and making her way to the stage. Lauren’s intensity is so great that we hardly notice that once she’s arrived onstage, she doesn’t move for a half hour. She interacts with the audience more than most performers do—a gracious nod after laughter, a prim grimace when a cell phone goes off—which gives the evening a rare intimacy. And most importantly, she keeps her audience focused on Woolf’s ideas, communicating through stream-of-consciousness, digression, and observation. Like Woolf, Lauren doesn’t let her audience’s attention rest for a moment.

Working closely with Bogart, Jocelyn Clark has adapted most of the text from Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” the seminal feminist speech that addressed the need for solitude in every woman’s existence, and by extension the artist’s need for independence and every person’s right to autonomy. Clark has fitted letters, essays, and other excerpts into that speech to create a new and surprisingly coherent script that explores why Woolf was driven to write, despite—or perhaps because of—her unstable psyche. The hybrid work adds Woolf’s musings on memory, fiction, childhood, and perception to the original speech, retaining her dense style and languid flow. But paradoxically, rather than opening it up, these additions almost turn a work of universal importance into a biographical set piece. When Woolf muses, “I wish you could live in my brain for a week,” Clark takes this statement as a challenge to condense and summarize her thoughts. She almost turns Woolf’s work into an ode to non-being.

But Bogart and Lauren overcome the script’s underachievement to reach a staggering climax. Woolf’s prose combines with Bogart’s lexicon of gestures to prove why writing is necessary for both artists and their audiences: “one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.” All art deals with Woolf’s moments of “being.” Room demonstrates this fact by applying a particularly Woolf-like combination of action and intellect. The play, like Woolf’s own work, is emotionally draining yet intellectually filling, and stands as both a defense and a celebration of Virginia Woolf’s genius.

Rude Entertainment is not rude at all; nor, alas, is it as entertaining as one might hope. The intelligence, insight, heart, and wit that Paul Rudnick gave us in his breakthrough play Jeffrey are mostly absent here (as they were from The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told). Instead, we get arch humor about gay stereotypes and pop culture iconography–funny stuff, to be sure, but it's mostly fluffy and forgettable. Rude Entertainment has its moments, but there aren't enough of them to make this slight, brief (75-minute) trio of playlets feel like a satisfying evening of theatre.

Kicking things off is Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach, which has been seen in New York several times in the last couple of years. Peter Bartlett, whom Rudnick considers his muse, stars as the title character, a middle-aged queen who was kicked out of Manhattan for being "too gay," and now resides in exile in Florida, where he holds forth on a late-night cable access show. Though he purports to more or less have invented taste, he doesn't seem to have any himself, either in clothing (Gregory A. Gale's mutedly flamboyant ensemble seemed to me to be the last thing Mr. Charles would be caught dead in) or in men (his current paramour is his "ward," Shane, a dumb hunk who appears wearing various sexy costumes (and, fleetingly, wearing nothing at all)).

The idea of Mr. Charles is to poke fun at contemporary mainstreaming gays who are ignorant of–or resentful of, or both–the swishy, courageous, effeminate gays who were out there first. There's nothing wrong with this premise, but Rudnick and Bartlett don't seem to have thought very deeply about their creation: Mr. Charles talks a good game, but the pathetic life they've sketched for him isn't much different from the one Tennessee Williams assigned to his saddest gay characters twenty-five years ago. On the other hand, maybe I'm taking Mr. Charles too seriously: it's hardly a play at all, actually, more of a special material-monologue for Bartlett. (Neal Huff, by the way, is wasted in the thankless role of Shane.)

The second item on the Rude Entertainment menu is Very Special Needs, in which Huff and Bartlett play a striving gay couple who want to adopt a baby. What they get is a strange and oversized girl named Katinka from a remote Balkan country who has, well, very special needs. Harriet Harris is hilarious as this weird creature, especially when she reveals exactly what those needs are.

The evening concludes with On The Fence, a play at once heartfelt and deliberately confrontational, in which the newly-dead Matthew Shepard is awakened by no less a personage than Eleanor Roosevelt, who has come to escort him to heaven. When Matthew refuses to believe that he's dead, Mrs. Roosevelt brings on the "big gun" to convince him: Paul Lynde. Rudnick juxtaposes three very different gay icons to make points about homophobia (and intolerance in general), about the capacity to love and the capacity to hate. The theme's slightly muddled–I'm not entirely sure what Rudnick is trying to tell us here; and the method of delivery is odd, to say the least: are Roosevelt and Lynde gay icons at all?

It's an interesting piece, anyway, and more ambitious and less shallow than its two predecessors: Rudnick is trying something serious here, and he deserves a hearing. Harris is dead-on wonderful as Mrs. Roosevelt, and Huff is sweetly earnest as Matthew Shepard. Bartlett gets Lynde's voice and delivery eerily right. But again, I wondered about Bartlett's costume: why would Paul Lynde want to spend eternity in a tatty caftan and sandals?

Runt of the Litter is a gift for New York theatregoers: a one-person show that isn’t gimmicky or contrived. Bo Eason’s semi-autobiographical tale of making it big in the NFL, living in the shadow of his more accomplished older brother, and seeking legitimacy in the eyes of his parents is loaded with authenticity, good humor, and humanity. It’s also anchored by a lead/solo performance that is one of the finest on display in New York currently.

Eason’s “fictional” protagonist, Jack Henry, is a safety for the Houston Oilers, who’s preparing for the biggest game of his career: the conference championship game which will decide who goes to the Super Bowl. It’s the moment he’s been waiting for his entire life. There’s only one problem: the quarterback for the opposing team is his older brother, Charlie.

Now, Eason really did play safety for the Oilers in the 1980s, and his older brother, Tony, was the starting quarterback for the New England Patriots during the same decade. They never played each other in the playoffs, though, but Eason’s embellishment works dramatically. It’s one of the many little things that makes Runt of the Litter so startling, eye-opening, and moving.

Jack Henry comes from a family that, he explains, programmed him to play professional football. He puts it succinctly when he tells the audience, “My life has been created by my dad’s eyes,” and talks about how his father makes everyone great (“You’re the best, Goddamnit!” he always shouts to his sons at their games), but can never tell anyone he loves them. His encouragement is his way of saying that. Still, Jack’s father idolizes only two people: O.J. Simpson and older brother, Charlie, who decides on an NFL career early on. Once Jack sees that the only way to make his father love him as much as he loves Charlie (and O.J.) is to play pro football, he puts himself on a twenty-year plan to succeed in the NFL, that includes rising every day at 5 a.m., and catching 1,000 passes a day. (It should be noted that Jack’s mother, an equally devoted football fanatic, never drinks on game days, and sneaks her son the x-rays of the opposing team’s injured players, so he’ll know where their weaknesses are.)

Jack’s wry, astute, and hilarious observations along the road to the pros include constant reminders that he’s too small to play pro ball (which is ridiculous considering that Eason is well over six feet tall); an admission that no college programs wanted him; and colorful descriptions of his fellow teammates, and their strange, magical camaraderie (“They’re not my best friends, they’re not great dinner guests,” he admits, but goes on to say that their natural dispositions make them perfect for football: “These guys were born into a war zone. Peace time bothers them.”). Above all, there's the haunting refrain that he could never be as good as his brother. Jack overcomes all obstacles, rises to the top, and excels anyway. And, the cost? Seven knee surgeries, and a short career.

Eason’s career as an athlete has served him well for the stage. Not only are his emotions always near the surface and easily accessible to him, but he’s also very in touch with his body. He moves smoothly, gracefully, energetically, without fear or embarrassment. He’s very physically expressive, has a lot of fun, and knows what his limits are. All of these factors help serve his performance, which is superb. He has an ease on stage that is rarely seen even in seasoned veterans, and charisma that is riveting. He commands the stage with his every word and move, and director Larry Moss should be commended for wisely allowing Eason to break the fourth wall throughout. It’s a decision that makes the show more personal and intimate to both Eason and the audience.

Runt of the Litter is not only the best one-person show I’ve ever seen, it’s also that rare theatrical experience that leaves the audience wanting to see it again, and bring all their friends along. Which is precisely what I suggest you do.

On the sidewalk in front of HERE Arts Center, after Self Defense was over, a small gathering of spectators clustered to talk about the play and what it meant. An encouraging sight, indeed, and absolutely indicative of the power of this exciting new work by Carson Kreitzer, which provokes, challenges, cajoles, and—yes—cudgels its audience into looking in a new way at how the world works. Kreitzer's subject is a prostitute who murdered seven johns in one year. Some say she killed in self-defense, while others label her a serial killer.

Kreitzer's message is that justice gets doled out in different doses, depending on your sex, your class, and your status in the American socioeconomic pecking order. What could be, viewed coolly, merely a matter of semantics or psychology (how many victims make you a serial killer? when does self-defense become self-destruction?) turns out to be,  profoundly and disturbingly, a matter of life or death: the values we think we hold dear—equality, fair treatment, due process—all seem to have been trashed in the case at hand. Sure, the random deaths of thousands at the hands of terrorists feel more compelling than the murders of hookers and johns who, on some weird moral scale, seem to be asking for it. But what Self Defense tells us, at its core, is that we have to care about these murders as much as all the others, at least, we do if we really believe that we value human life.

Self Defense also shows us that such lives might actually be saved. Kreitzer's mission, a blatantly political one, is to remind us that for all the advances made by feminists in the past decades, women are still viewed as inferior to and/or different from men and they are still objectified dangerously; and that despite the fact that we live in the most prosperous nation on earth, too many of us are forced into marginal livelihoods such as prostitution solely for economic reasons.

All of this is absolutely worth thinking about; Kreitzer is to be commended for stating her case so eloquently and passionately in this remarkably compelling play. At its center is Jolene Palmer, a character inspired by a real woman named Aileen Wuornos who killed, here and in real life, seven men in the course of a single year. Jolene works as a prostitute to support herself and Lu, the young woman with whom she is deeply in love. Jolene says she killed all seven because they were trying to kill her: "Out in the woods," she says, "I had to make the choice. Him or me."

Self Defense charts the police investigation of one of Jolene's murders, which leads to her arrest, confession, and prosecution. It's a trail littered with undercover cops and shady lawyers, with false friends and wicked betrayals. There's also the expected media feeding frenzy, as news reporters dub Jolene America's "first female serial killer" and movie rights get bought and sold in alarmingly cavalier fashion. Through the din, a couple of genuine heroes manage to emerge—a coroner with a conscience and a detective called Bucket, both of whom begin to wonder why the hookers who get killed don't attract the same level concern as Jolene's white male victims.

There's plenty one can object to in Kreitzer's writing, but it's important to remember that this is a political tract as much as anything else, so failures of objectivity and perspective seem beside the point. I will mention that in exploiting the "real" Jolene Palmer—admittedly, a public figure at this stage of the game—Kreitzer seems to be guilty of the same crime that she hangs most of the journalists with in her play. And, speaking now as an advocate of moral clarity, it would have been nice if someone had once said, during the course of the thing, that murder—whatever the reason, whatever the underlying socioeconomic cause—is always wrong.

Nevertheless, Self Defense is enormously successful in terms of achieving its goals. Furthermore, the production—a collaboration of New Georges and Reverie Productions—is exceptional; as polished and professional and assured as off-off-Broadway theatre gets. Randy White's direction is sharp and energetic and smartly paced. With designers Lauren Helpern (set) and Tyler Micoleau (lighting) he has managed the often irksome HERE mainstage space brilliantly, with the audience seated on three sides of a circus-like playing area that is itself bisected by a length of chain-link fence that both reminds us that our protagonist is in prison for most of the play and serves to segregate the real from the unreal in Kreitzer's surging and wide-ranging text. Video by Daniel Kleinfeld and sound by Stefan Jacobs contribute mightily to the multimedia cacophony that Kreitzer and White intend for us to experience.

Lynne McCollough is harrowing and intelligent as Jolene. Seven other actors play the dozens of other characters needed to tell her story. All do fine work, but allow me to single out Dee Pelletier, whose work as the Coroner I told you about and also as one of Jolene's more bizarre hangers-on, a born-again Christian named LeeAnn, is notably vivid and memorable.

Self Defense may make you feel righteous, or angry, or upset, or conflicted, or some of each. The important thing is that this galvanizing play is going to make you feel—and think. That's what incendiary theatre is supposed to do. It's a blessing when we find it.

Sex Ed is a funny, sly new one-act play written and directed by Suzanne Bachner that focuses on the sexual awakening of three sixth graders at a New York private school, and emphasizes the disparity between the textbook sexual education their teachers give them, and the more experience-based education they really need. It’s sweet and charming, and, despite a major plot gaffe that steers the play towards a dark, jarring conclusion, shows Bachner to be a writer of promise, and one worth keeping an eye on.

The students—Stephen (John Houfe), Pammy (Alex McCord), and Evan (Danny Wiseman)—are caught in a triangle of desire, yearning, and confusion, that culminates in an after-school session of exploration that goes terribly wrong. Their story is juxtaposed with the sexual education lecture they must endure, given by three faculty members (also played by Houfe, McCord, and Wiseman) who seem even more embarrassed to be talking about sex than the kids do.

All three actors are strong in each of their dual roles. They transition smoothly from adults to kids by relying on not only deft adjustments in voice and physical behavior, but also in attitude. Houfe is particularly funny as the school guidance counselor, Dr. Vice, who can barely utter the word “penis” without going red with embarrassment. Wiseman also shines as the school principal, Shep Allen, who has a disturbingly upbeat affinity for rainbows.

Bachner displays a good sense of the nervous, fumbling semantics of adolescent conversation. The kids hint at everything, but don’t say anything outright unless they have to. And she builds the plot well, giving Sex Ed a good sense of momentum throughout. My one problem with the ending is that, even though it introduces a promising, juicy element of menace and a topic ripe with dramatic possibilities, Bachner doesn’t follow through on it. If she’d followed the path her conclusion felt like it wanted to go in, instead of shying away from it, Bachner could have had a very compelling full-length play (albeit a very different one) instead of the entertaining one-act she does have. Consequently, Sex Ed feels like it ends right where it should be starting.

Overall, though, Sex Ed must be counted as a success. It is concise, sincere, and thankfully free of cynicism (a rarity these days). And, Bachner is clearly a talented playwright. It should be interesting to see how her work develops, especially if she allows herself to follow her instincts more fully in the future.

The evening begins with Flight, a pointedly funny sketch by Joe Godfrey about a flight attendant named Glen who worries that he's too stereotypically gay. ("I'm not just gay," he tells his best friend Keith, "I'm thrilled.") Godfrey's dialogue is crisp and clever as it explores gay archetypes and stereotypes in a fun, if superficial, way. It's nicely directed by Mark Finley; Ashok Sinha, as Glen, is amusing though perhaps not as outrageously over-the-top as he could be.

This Will Be the Death of Him provides a complete change of mood. Set in Guatemala, this drama by David DeWitt is about two American men, Tom and Ethan, investigating the murder of Tom's gay brother Jerry. Ethan, who may have been one of Jerry's lovers, is convinced that this was a hate crime and wants to do whatever's necessary to get the authorities to treat it as such. It's an arresting premise, but DeWitt hasn't succeeded in fleshing it out at this point: there's a lot of detail in the piece, but too much of it feels like red herrings; we want to go someplace deeper than the author takes us. David Mason and Brian Quirk turn in thoughtful, highly-pitched performances as Tom and Ethan.

Fag Hag Anon, by Rebekah Morgan, is a romp. The title tells it all: it's set at a meeting of Fag Hags Anonymous, a support group for women who love gay men. It's loose, outrageous satire, offering a showcase for the expert comic performances of Jodi Lynn Smith, Robyn Weiss, and (especially) Inga Hyatt as three of the "hags."

After intermission, Short Stories 3 continues with its weakest segment, The Job by Brian Deming and Adam Moore. It's a three-part exploration of the stagnation and subsequent renewal of a long-term lesbian relationship, vaguely organized around the premise of a job interview. I found it interesting but ultimately ineffective: too much of it feels as stagnant as the relationship it portrays, and neither Alice Bugman nor Kerrie McKeon convinced me that her character was worth caring about.

David Zellnik's Sunday Paper, which follows, is probably the strongest of the evening's plays. Beautifully directed by Rebecca Kendall, and acted with disarming naturalness by Pam Karlin and David Weincek, Sunday Paper is a touching, sensitive, and wise portrait of two friends dealing with grief and, perhaps more to the point, their inability to help each other deal with it. What I like best about the play is its ending: Zellnik smartly eschews obvious dramatics for a quiet resolution that's heartstoppingly, potently real.

Hand Me Downs, by Dave DeChristopher, is the brilliantly hilarious act before closing. Set in a homey suburban living room, it tells the story of Roger and Craig, a gay couple about to be "married" in a commitment ceremony. (A two-man version of "An Old-Fashioned Wedding" from Annie Get Your Gun plays over the sound system before the piece starts, setting the tone splendidly.) Much to his surprise, Roger's mother is determined to pass on a particular family heirloom to commemorate the occasion. Hand Me Downs is essentially a one-joke play, so I won't say more, except that the joke is very, very funny; and that DeChristopher and his director, David Leventhal, tell it with brio and panache: there's not a wasted millisecond in this ten-minute comedy. Jeffrey J. Bateman and Paul Hertel are appealing as the young couple, but they're outshined (by design) by Vivian Meisner's over-the-top, way-too-understanding mom and Joseph Zarro's riotously deadpan dad. Zarro gets to deliver the final (payoff) line: it's a dilly.

Rounding out the evening is David Folwell's lovely, heartfelt Afraid of Heights. I saw this piece, in (I think) a slightly different version, at last fall's Vital Signs Festival. It tells the story of an encounter between two men, Jim, a proofreader in a law firm whose life hasn't gone the way he planned, and Anthony, a young man just released from the hospital. In the course of a brief conversation, Anthony teaches Jim some profoundly important things about life. Folwell still hasn't found the right ending, but the heart of this play is terrific-- its joyously life-affirming spirit brings to mind the jubilant final scenes of Angels in America. Director Christine Jones and actors David Ari (Anthony) and Charles Major (Jim) all do fine work here.

There is a great deal to admire in [sic], the new play at Soho Rep. It represents the debut of a gifted young playwright named Melissa James Gibson; she has an original voice and an honest talent for creating believably quirky, blessedly articulate characters. It's a breakthrough for the three young actors who play its leading roles–Dominic Fumusa, the standout among them, has in fact already departed for a role in a higher-profile play (Stephen Belber's Tape), and Christina Kirk has been featured in the New York Times. [sic] also showcases some adventurous, aggressively interesting work by director Daniel Aukin, set designer Louisa Thompson, and lighting designer Matt Frey, each of whose contributions add much to the edgy, hyper-contemporary feel of the piece.

[sic] takes place in three teeny-weeny apartments sharing a corridor in a less-than-desirable apartment house in Manhattan. Here neighbors Theo, Babette, and Frank live and work, or attempt to: Theo is a composer struggling with a commercial jingle and Frank is learning to become an auctioneer (it's not clear what Babette does or wants to do). They drift in and out of each other's lives and apartments with clockwork regularity; they're friends, lovers (actual and wannabe), critics, and enemies, wrapped tightly in a strange triangle of co-dependency: think Rachel and Chandler and Joey from "Friends," but grittier and with actual depth.

Gibson's work is best as she explores the intimate obsessions of this trio, carving something like meaning out of a bleak urban landscape that seems to have none inherent in it. Babette, especially, is in love with words and their power; but all three are searching rather desperately for something to hold onto, to believe in; something more potent and lasting than the downstairs neighbors on whose lives–infinitely more vivid and eventful than their own–they occasionally eavesdrop.

Fumusa (now replaced by Richard Crawford) gives us all the shadings in his Theo, the musician whose background also includes a lost wife (that's lost in the sense of missing rather than dead, by the way). Kirk is watchable as Babette but I never felt any empathy for her; there's a spare meanness that either Gibson, Kirk or both have imbued this character with that keeps her at a distance from us. James Urbaniak is delightfully mannered as Frank, the gay auctioneer-to-be–perhaps too mannered, come to think of, though engaging and funny.

Director Aukin mines Gibson's script for portent; I think he's made too much of its post-modern ambience, with the result that [sic], which may in fact be an on-the-nose post-Gen-X comedy of manners, feels like it's pushing too hard a good deal of the time. But his conception of the shadowy half-lives of Theo, Babette, and Frank–crammed into phone-booth-sized apartments, straining to find something of import outside of their filthy windows–borders on brilliance. It's realized terrifically by Louisa Thompson's startling set design.

The seat-of-the-pants test is as good a measure of success in the theatre as any I know of, and [sic] didn't pass: even at just ninety minutes in length, my bottom got squirmy before the play reached its end. But Gibson and her collaborators are clearly enormously talented and I expect that the next work they do will be well worth paying attention to.

Seeing Smelling a Rat was one of the most peculiar experiences I've ever had in the theatre. The text of the play—by Mike Leigh, who is most familiar to us from films like Secrets & Lies, Naked, and Topsy Turvy—is quite funny: a farce about a nice, ordinary married couple who do a friend a favor and check in on the boss's house while he's off on Christmas holiday. Only the boss has returned early, unbeknownst to them; he's hiding in the closet while the two explore his lavish bedroom and gossip about him and his wife. And then the boss's son turns up with a young lady with whom he would dearly love to have some sort of assignation, thus forcing our hero and heroine into two other closets.

Eventually everybody discovers that everybody else is there. The young man and his girlfriend never get to bed. The well-meaning, talkative employee and his wife go home.

Nothing happens—Leigh calls Smelling a Rat an "anti-farce"—except for a whole bunch of talking. Some of it touches on subjects of class and status, suggesting a post-Joe Orton sort of thing might be happening here. Much of it is precisely written, very authentic-sounding, trivial small talk.

Now here's what makes it peculiar. I estimate that the dialogue, staged at a normal pace, would probably run about 45 minutes. But Smelling a Rat is more than two hours long. It's overflowing with pregnant pauses, awkward pauses, comic pauses, and pauses-for-the-sake-of-pausing pauses. Leigh and director Scott Elliott seem to want us to think—hard—about content and form here.

But I don't know why. The result of this slowdown is to drain the energy out of the room. During most of the play's first act, almost no one in the audience laughed at anything, despite the fact that a lot of funny stuff transpired on stage. Laughter was more frequent in the second act, but at nowhere near the level that the script's genuine wit ought to have inspired.

Perhaps this is precisely what Leigh and Elliott intend. From where I sat, though, it felt darned uncomfortable: the play seemed to be laying a giant egg, and the impulse was to make for the exits as soon as possible.

I guess the actors, whose work is really quite wonderful, are used to the non-response. Brian F. O'Byrne, in particular, deserves laugh after laugh for his shrewd, expansive take on Vic, the hapless employee who is at the center of Smelling a Rat's muddle. Gillian Foss is smart and perky as his wife, Charmaine, and Michelle Williams is delightful as Melanie-Jane, the would-be paramour of the boss's son. Terence Rigby (as Rex, the boss) and Eddie Kaye Thomas (as his son Rock) have less to do, but they do it well nonetheless.

Kevin Price's deliberately too-opulent set contains the requisite number of doors and other hiding places; Tom Kochan's jokey soundtrack, consisting of portentous-sounding chords reminiscent of a soap opera parody, sets the tone. But then director Elliott and playwright Leigh destroy it by making Smelling a Rat an excruciating chore to sit through. I wish I understood what they think they're doing.

Spooge, which is subtitled "The Sex & Love Monologues," is a sprightly, well-crafted divertissement written and directed by Joshua James. In it, a dozen actors discourse, solo and in groups, on the advertised subject. The balance is heavily on sex; I would have liked a little more material on what James terms the "number one best thing there is." But the writing is crisp and clever, the staging is savvy, and the performances are well-intended if a bit uneven. This is a tasty little show.

The vignettes–which number at least two dozen; they're not listed in the program and I lost count quickly–range from quickie blackouts about topics such as masturbation and penis size to full-fledged sketches and monologues. The evening begins with a very fanciful, very funny harangue by no less a personage than Venus herself, all about how she became the goddess of love and what a rotten gig it's turned out to be. And it ends with a pair of well-reasoned pieces about gay rights that score significant points without being preachy. In between are some genuinely clever bits, like the saga of an over-aged dominatrix, and a lot of giggly naughty stuff with a frat-boy feel that is nevertheless quite well written. Except for those final gay-themed pieces, James speaks almost exclusively from the straight white male perspective, which weakens Spooge. But the material is strong despite this drawback; and James has staged it inventively and breezily.

The program doesn't identify the actors to the sketches, so I can't single any out for praise. Several of the actors are quite fine; alas a few are clearly lacking experience and technique.

The Riant Theatre, host to Spooge, is located in Tribeca, in what was for several weeks the "frozen zone" near the World Trade Center site. This is their first production since September 11; it demonstrates a company worthy of support in troubled times.

James, one of the three young men at the center of Aaron Ginsburg's smart, intimate comedy Straight Jacket & Tie, tells us that he's been called "sweet" by 5,284 women. Well, I hate to rub salt in his wound, but he is sweet, and so is this play: Straight Jacket & Tie, which is currently at the Vital Theatre, is a warmly comic and honest account of the often perilous road to adulthood. Beautifully directed by Stephen Sunderlin and superbly acted by a cast of five, this charmer will resonate with anyone who has had to come to terms with becoming a grown-up, which is to say almost all of us. It's also one of the best-written and best-produced of this season's crop of off-off-Broadway shows.

Straight Jacket & Tie tells the story of three young men, all a year or two out of college and all keenly aware that, while they are no longer kids, they don't quite seem to be adults yet, either. Russel is in denial: a failed romance and dissatisfaction with the job market have turned him into a despondent couch potato, brooding in front of the TV with the remote in one hand and a cigarette or a beer in the other. Scott has a decent job that he doesn't like, and lives to scam girls in bars or from behind the wheel of his car, his superficiality a mask for uncertainty and, maybe, fear. James, the sweet one, knows that his youthful idea of becoming a professional musician will never come to fruition. Now he spends his days underemployed as a clerk in a bagel shop, and the rest of his time wondering what to do next.

The wonderful thing about Straight Jacket & Tie is that playwright Ginsburg doesn't let his three protagonists linger in their post-adolescent limbo. Sure, he starts off with blackout bits about picking up girls and getting wasted and having pointless discussions like we all had in college (the one about the "empirical truth of Beatles songs" is priceless, by the way). But by the end of Act One, these young men have all pretty much convinced themselves that something is missing from their lives; and by the end of the play's second act, it's clear that each is on his way to finding it. Ginsburg never goes for the obvious or the fake; his characters' progression to maturity feels organic and authentic. And their fates are by no means certain; Straight Jacket & Tie is advertised as the first play in a trilogy, so hopefully we'll eventually find out what happens to these guys later on.

The good news being, as you've probably figured out, that we actually do care what happens. Russel, Scott, and James ring very, very true. Russel's ability to rationalize every move he makes; Scott's growing awareness that the stuff he loved when he was a kid—birthdays and the circus, for example—no longer mean the same thing to him; James's romantically naive search for the perfect woman or job to make his existence complete: this is what young people are really like. Ginsburg' characters breathe; their stories matter.

The play is cleverly built out of dozens of scenes and scene-lets, some so tiny that they contain just one line of dialogue. From these sketches the details of three lives are deftly filled in. Stephen Sunderlin keeps things moving speedily, making expert use of Aaron Spivey's simple unit set and other design elements so that we always instantly know where we are: a pair of stools, a couple of beer bottles, and some loud music cue a pick-up bar; two of those little plastic hand baskets tell us immediately that we're in a grocery store.

The cast does outstanding work. Adam Groves makes Russel believable and even sympathetic. Jeff Meacham navigates Scott's journey from clueless superficiality to something approaching responsible adulthood with intelligence and sensitivity. George L. Smith is enormously appealing as sweet, questing, unsettled James. Mayhill Fowler and Norm Isakkson provide fine support in a variety of smaller roles.

Straight Jacket & Tie, debuting in the busiest month of New York's busiest theatre season in recent memory, could wind up getting lost in the shuffle. It shouldn't: it's a terrific piece of work, and it's been given the production it deserves by the ever-reliable Vital Theatre. And with tickets priced at just $15, it's one of the best bargains in town. So my advice is, the next time you're in the Theatre District this month, bypass TKTS and head over to 432 West 42nd Street instead. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

If I hadn’t been professionally obligated to sit through the whole thing, I would have walked out of Surviving Grace. That’s because Trish Vradenburg’s play is a colossal dis-grace—the most disappointing show I’ve seen all season. And, with the high level of talent involved—veteran Doris Belack (Tootsie, "Law & Order") and indie movie queen Illeana Douglas (Grace of My Heart, To Die For, Cape Fear); director Jack Hofsiss (the original Broadway production of The Elephant Man)—it makes the failure of Surviving Grace even more pointed.

Kate Griswald (Douglas) is a workaholic television producer trying to keep a tight rein on her hit sitcom and its diva leading lady (Linda Hart) when her mother, Grace (Belack), is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Kate’s father, Jack (Jerry Grayson), does his best to care for Grace, but buckles under the pressure, and leaves her for a buxom Florida vixen (Cynthia Darlow). And, as if there weren’t enough conflict inherent in all of that, an Awakenings-type turnaround, a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and a romance between Kate and Grace’s doctor, Sam (Armand Schultz) are all thrown in for good measure. Did I mention, also, that Surviving Grace is supposed to be a comedy?

What was everyone thinking? The script is clearly flawed, at best. It has no narrative propulsion at all. It just meanders from scene to scene without any focus. Events happen without regard to logic, plausibility, or connection to other events in the play. And the script’s artistic looseness infects everyone else associated with the production. It’s like everyone took their stupid pills. Hofsiss’ direction lacks thematic cohesion. David Gallo and Ann Hould-Ward, a pair of usually dependable designers, provide impractical sets, and unflattering, insensible costumes, respectively, all of which look unfinished. Worst of all, though, are the actors, none of whom have fun, and all of whom look completely embarrassed to be on stage. Their intention throughout seems only to be to apologize to the audience. The most natural and relaxed they seem on stage is after the curtain call, when they ask the audience for a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS donation.

Despite all the professionals involved in it, Surviving Grace ends up feeling like nothing more than the work of amateurs. Avoid it at all costs.

See Syndrome. It's insightful, it's moving, it's smart, it's profound, and it's off-the-wall hilarious. Its star, Joshua Lewis Berg, gives a performance of rare intelligence, dexterity and integrity; its author, Kirk Wood Bromley, creates astonishing universes of existence and imagination from what we generally regard as mere words; its director, Rob Urbinati, keeps things focused and balanced even as the theatrical journey he takes us on jolts and surprises and unsettles and challenges us. Theatre should always be this intense and involving and dangerous–although if it were, we'd probably have to numb ourselves to its cathartic effects on our overloaded senses.

Syndrome is about a man with Tourette, a condition whose best-known symptoms are the verbal and physical tics that we commonly associate with it: seemingly spontaneous exclamations of presumably inappropriate language; contorting movements that appear involuntary and uncontrollable. Tourette has neurological and psychological manifestations, and as we spend time with Egon, the young actor who is Syndrome's protagonist, we experience, vicariously and even voyeuristically, what it might be like to live with this disease. Egon recounts events and anecdotes about himself and about others with Tourette, including a man who, he tells us, had the worst case imaginable.

The only reason he was alive was because he couldn't hold the gun steady, the pills kept falling out of his hand, his head wouldn't stay straight enough to slip into the noose.

The stuff of tragedy, almost.

Perhaps; but Syndrome doesn't traffic in anything so obvious or sensational. There's a traditional arc to this play, in which Egon relates his life story to us, avoiding and then eventually revealing the pivotal childhood event that led to the first onset of Tourette. But don't expect Movie-of-the-Week patness here: Berg and Bromley are on to something far deeper here than a mere examination of one patient or even one life.

For the shocking and remarkable truth about Syndrome–so specifically about a man quite like Berg himself–is how much it's about every one of us. Here's the line that follows the one I quoted above:

We all have this guy within us... everyone does... contained somewhere deep and dark in maximum security for the crime of inhibition. For me, I feel he is my uttermost wish, the phantom of my genes, the critter at the bottom of my psychic canyon, pulled from his sandy bed and put out on display. He's me without the button which reads "not now."

That's Syndrome. There's a spectacular rundown of Tourette's numerous diverse symptoms: five breathless minutes or so during which Berg displays dozens of the verbal, motor, and affective tics associated with the disease in a dizzying tour de force of acting/acting out. The revelation starts to click as you silently inventory which ones belong to you: licking lips? check; licking shoulder? nope; biting tongue? oh yes, sometimes. Suddenly, we see our own way in to understanding: we've all got this stuff inside us, but most of us suppress, or control, or bury it.

We also suppress, or control, or bury the impulses that Egon's alter egos revel in. We meet these "characters" when the disease kicks into higher, scarier gear. One is simply called "Syndrome," the feral Hyde to Egon's Jekyll, breaking loose with muffled obscenities or, more alarmingly but less frequently, torrents of imagery, violent and frenzied and obscene and impenetrable. The other is "Bayou Jones," a jive-talking, sex-fixated pimp who takes over whenever libido is aroused. Bayou is depicted as the basest, most derogatory black male stereotype you'd dare dream up. Don't we carry that inside ourselves too?

And there's the potent, marvelous core of Syndrome. On one level, this is a play about understanding: by sharing his experiences with a disease we barely know anything about, Egon/Berg helps us dissolve our anxieties and fears about something that was scary and alien. But on a deeper level, this is a play about the human urge to censor. What makes words, actions, sounds–thoughts–unacceptable?  Or, putting it another way, why are your tics okay, but mine dangerous? We have much to learn from Berg and Bromley here; in Syndrome they submerge us far deeper into troubled waters than we ever expect to go.

Berg's work here is explosively effective–a physical and psychological workout of immense proportions, loaded with humor and warmth and blazing intelligence. Urbanati's staging feels flawless; the design is especially impressive, particularly Bob Olson's set, which is backed by a wall of clear plastic panels that appear to fit together but nevertheless won't interlock, as shrewd a visual metaphor as anything I can remember seeing in the theatre.

Bromley's script blows me away the same as all his work does: for originality, clarity and depth of vision, humor, and utter humanity, who can match this big-souled poet? Syndrome contains riffs on downtown theatre, on pharmaceuticals, on doctors, on sex, each of which is a little time bomb of pyrotechnic linguistic imagination and ingenuity; and riffs on sounds (like the word "tic" itself) that are like verbal jazz, taking our heads and hearts on hopped-up magic carpet rides we don't see coming and we never thought we'd take.

It's been a long time since I've seen something in the theatre that excited me as much as Syndrome did. My only message to you is, see it for yourself.

There is too much talk in Talk to take in in one sitting: the atmosphere is thick with ideas, labels, categories, arguments, deconstructions, recursive artistic blather, and self-serving philosophic backchat. A talk show host who reminds us of Mike Wallace conjures images, in one of too many reminiscences, of smoky late night parties in the '50s with Capote and Kerouac; a once avant-garde filmmaker drops names of artistic influences and movements—Truffaut, Godard, postmodernism, and so on—as if they were items on a grocery list; a performance artist discourses on ancient art objects and contemporary race-gender politics; a tenaciously useless literature professor explicates a unifying hypothesis of something called recontextualization, which—surprise!—can be used to explain everything.

And that's just the first 45 minutes or so.

Talk is huge: it is playwright Carl Hancock Rux's ambition in this piece to explore the nature of identity, public and private; of art; of responsibility; and, perhaps most fundamentally, of ownership. When someone puts something out in the world—a book, say, or a film—who gets to decide what it means? More to the point: when someone lives a life in public, as we all ultimately do, who gets to decide what it means? Who defines, who owns, a legacy?

The legacy under discussion here is that of Archer Aymes, who I must point out immediately is entirely the invention of Rux, despite all the famous "real" people who figure in his story. Aymes wrote a novel in 1959 called "Mother and Son" which caused a sensation in the literary world. He later created an experimental film based on the book which won a Bunuel Prize. And he committed suicide in prison in 1970 after leading a violent demonstration in the Museum of Ancient Art in New York City which resulted in the destruction of numerous artifacts and the death of one woman.

Such are the "facts" of Aymes' life. A panel has been assembled, thirty years after his death, to explore that life and perhaps make some kind of sense of it. Participating are Ion, the academic who has written a "definitive" biography of Aymes; Phaedo, the filmmaker who collaborated with him on his movie; Meno, the talk show host who is the only TV journalist who ever interviewed him; and Apollodoros, a deliberately enigmatic performance artist who may or may not actually even be here but who seems finally to know more about Aymes than anybody.

Talk chronicles the panel's discussions, taking us on a journey through memories, misconceptions, and outright lies that slowly reveal something approaching the truth. Rux has a grand time deflating the intellectual pretensions of his characters, and he does so with immense skill: whether it's Meno babbling self-servingly about the famous writers he knew intimately, or Ion blubbering about his theory of recontextualization, Rux nails the talk perfectly. It's both stimulating and entertaining as the references and allusions fly past; half a century of would-be profundity is distilled to its meaningless essence with spectacular brio.

And at the same time, the tangles of Rux's invented hero's life pull us in and push us away. Aymes was born in 1930 or in 1936, or in some other year; he marched with Dr. King and spent a year in jail, or he didn't; he was black, or he wasn't. Rux understands that what each character imposes on Aymes is that individual's truth; the collection of "Americas" that emerges from this admittedly rarefied group is remarkably potent.

I love this play for its faults, which are the same as its virtues. Talk takes on too much for its own good and though it can't quite sustain its level of brilliance it never fails to indulge itself or its viewer in murky, fascinating intellectual argument. Cutting would be helpful though it's not obvious exactly what should be cut; clarification would be satisfying, especially at the end, but would probably undercut the work's innate power. Tempering some of the self-consciously grandiose aspects of the work—the characters' classical names, for example—would almost certainly be a good idea.

All that said, Rux emphatically should not compromise his vision to try to make this piece "accessible": Talk needs to be seen and his voice needs to be heard. There's no question that Talk is a challenging work of theatre, but that's its greatest strength: the ride—choppy, rigorous, often heavy-handed, occasionally obtuse—is thrilling. The American theatre can't afford to squander Rux's talent and vision just because he hasn't quite perfected his instrument.

Marion McClinton has staged Talk on an amazing set (by James Noone) that combines the timelessness of ancient art objects with the soullessness of contemporary art institutions. The six-member cast is fine, with James Himelsbach as the professor Ion and John Seitz as the talking head Meno better than that, delivering uncannily precise performances. Toni-Leslie James' strikingly detailed costumes contribute much, too, as do Marilyn Ernst's video, projected on the rear wall, and Tim Schellenbaum's evocative soundscape.

Tango Masculino, the new play by Clint Jefferies, brings us into a world not often explored by American audiences (or authors). We're on the patio of a bordello in the Porteño district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the turn of the 20th century. Here, a savvy, self-confident woman known simply as La Madre runs a house populated by prostitutes, bouncers, and street toughs. Among the denizens to whom Jefferies introduces us are a pair of whores, Sophia and Julia; a female impersonator ("La Marica") named Manon and his/her drug-addicted beau Lorenzo; and the cold-hearted, handsome hustler Rosendo, who controls the streets in this neighborhood and takes what he wants from Sophia and others who fear and desire him.

Into this odd community comes a young man named Jorge, who has left his home to tough it out in the city. What he wants above all is to be like his idol, Rosendo, and he quickly manages to get the older man to hire him as a sort of apprentice. Their relationship takes on sexual overtones, and eventually the two become lovers. But in Rosendo's world, a man who loves men isn't a real man. The tension between Rosendo's homophobic beliefs and his genuine feelings for Jorge ultimately lead to tragedy.

As I said, this is not run-of-the-mill fare. On the one hand, Tango Masculino is an engaging romantic drama of the kind for which Jefferies and Wings Theatre have become well-known, featuring a compelling gay-themed love story (two, actually, if you count the secondary tale of Lorenzo and Manon), plenty of intrigue and suspense, and a fair amount of shirtlessness by the leading characters. The action is supplemented by several songs that comment on the events of the play, performed by a pair of cantores who are accompanied by musicians on keyboard, violin, guitar, and bandoneon.

On the other hand, though, Tango Masculino looks, rather surprisingly, at issues of gender and sexuality that one hopes have been settled long ago. What are we to make of Rosendo and Jorge's sexual politics, in which homosexuality equals femininity equals weakness? Jefferies implies a similar direct relationship, at least in the minds of his characters, between power/strength and assumption of roles in the sex act itself. Love seems far removed from sex for these men, despite the fact that Jefferies apparently wants to believe that some kind of affection exists between them. The psychology gets a little strange here, to say the least.

Nevertheless, Tango Masculino is interesting and entertaining. The production, directed by Jeffery Corrick, is quite fine; the quality of work at Wings keeps on getting better and better every time I pay them a visit. Ivan Davila conveys all the contradictions of the sexy, conflicted anti-hero Rosendo, while JoHary Ramos is impressive as Jorge, showing us his progression from naiveté to assured manhood. Among the supporting players, outstanding work is turned in by Mickey Goldhaber as La Madre, Karen Stanion as the not-so-flighty prostitute Sophia, Roberto Cambeiro as the tragic Lorenzo, and Paul Taylor as the always self-possessed Manon.

Geoffrey Nauffts' staging of Stephen Belber's play Tape seems to me to be essentially flawless: from the opening machine-gun dialogue, delivered from offstage in an ominous but ethereal swath of light, to the final image of one character contemplating another's videotaped former self, the piece sails effortlessly and tautly by. George Xenos' low-priced motel room set is a paragon of naturalistic detail; Sarah Beers' costumes telegraph status and maturity and loads of other information; Roger Raines' sound design and Greg MacPherson's lighting match the mood tone for tone and color for color.

The three young actors who are the cast of Tape do deft, assured work here as well, and seem destined for momentary attention if not long-lasting careers on this or, more likely, the other coast after the press and the public get a look at them. Dominic Fumusa, who was so impressive earlier this season in [sic] at Soho Rep, creates a layered and rather profound portrait of wayward American youth in Vince, an aimless drug addict who at 28 has still not gotten over high school. Josh Stamberg plays his slick, possibly duplicitous, probably intellectual best friend Jon with fairly naked potency. And best of all is Alison West, in her off-Broadway debut, as Vince's former girlfriend Amy, the immediate source of contention between Vince and Jon; she is all steely self-confidence in her first scene and then, in a videotaped finale, shockingly young and vulnerable as the same character a decade earlier.

As for the play itself, well–for me, it fails miserably. I never found myself able to believe these three characters or anything they do during Tape's ninety minutes. Most of the piece is a contrived reunion, ten years after high school, in which Vince, Jon, and eventually Amy hash out events that no one is even sure occurred. It feels like self-righteous head-banging to me: an excuse to vicariously enjoy Vince's overgrown adolescent bullying and take potshots at budding Hollywood scumbag Jon.  Two codas, which take the characters another decade forward, feel tacked on and rather arbitrary, allowing Belber to score easy points about the paradox of change (along the lines of we can become better/we can never escape our pasts). It all comes off as facile and forced, despite the really impressive trappings of the production.

But that's just me: Tape is involving and entertaining enough to be worth a first-hand look.

Playwright Wade Gasque wants to cover a lot of ground in The Allegory of Golf. It's his first full-length play, and the lack of experience tells on it; that said, the piece provides ample evidence of Gasque's talent: he's created some engaging, vivid characters and he's given them lots of interesting, well-chosen things to say. A clearer, more focused vision is what's needed to make The Allegory of Golf a more satisfying work.

The play tells the story of Maggie, a 52-year-old woman who is in a major rut. One afternoon she discovers a teenage girl named Hannah hiding in her kitchen; she learns, eventually that Hannah is a runaway who has been living in Maggie's tool shed for several weeks. Hannah tells Maggie that she's heading to California, and on impulse Maggie decides to take her there herself, hoping to find whatever it is that's missing from her life on this sudden journey.

The rest of the play details Maggie and Hannah's road trip, with an interlude in Colorado, where Maggie temporarily loses Hannah and spends some time with her son, Sam. Along the way, Maggie dreams of Ayn Rand, who appears always as a golfer, and spouts morsels of wisdom couched in golf metaphors, along the lines of "the fastest and simplest route is usually the straightest."

Gasque's plotting feels awkward in places: we don't really know enough about Maggie to understand what's compelling her to take this trip, for one thing; some of her choices, like allowing a strange teenager to drive her car, seem strongly unmotivated. But the people Maggie encounters, phantom Ayn Rand included, are always intriguing: a motel manager who turns out to be one of Hannah's johns (yes, Hannah supports herself as a prostitute); Sam, Maggie's gay son; and a motel clerk whose plastic sunny attitude leads Maggie to a kind of epiphany near the end of the play. Coincidences abound, but that's the Rand connection: in part, The Allegory of Golf is about the way we each control our own destinies, even subconsciously; certainly the outcome of Maggie and Hannah's journey suggests that each has done precisely that.

Gasque has directed the piece himself, and except for way too much moving of furniture he's done a credible job. (Caitlin McCleery's scenery is ingenious but unnecessary: Gasque needs to trust his audience to fill in the blanks in their mind's eye; his play will flow much more smoothly if he does so.)

Polly Adams captures Maggie's ambivalence almost too well—she's a believable but occasionally annoying heroine. Deana Barone gets Hannah's bluff and naiveté exactly right. Ann Parker, Ryan Ross, Wendy Walker, and Ron Sheppard are fine in supporting roles. Joyce Fuerring is magnetic as Rand.

All in all, a commendable and worthy first play. Rand herself says that no hole is par 1: we will look forward to Gasque's next endeavor.

The Bigger Thing is about an artist on a quest for some undefined and unknown end (cf. the title). The artist, a young woman who is referred to only as "She," is a sculptor but what we see her do is create a movie in collaboration with her boyfriend ("He").  We also watch the two of them play all manner of games and engage in squabbles and deep conversations about everything from his ex-wife to the Lewis & Clark expedition.

It is, for the first hour or so, reasonably compelling. Playwright Pamela A. Popeson has structured The Bigger Thing in an unusual, even fanciful, manner. Scenes are often observed, and commented on, by the protagonist's two dead grandmothers; they add humor and perspective throughout. Both She and He feel free to speak directly to the audience during the play, offering still more points of view on the subjects being discussed. And the entire play is punctuated, at regular intervals, by very short videos, some commenting on the action, others revealing the still-incomplete movie that is the characters' raison d'etre as a couple and The Bigger Thing's modus operandi.

The problem with The Bigger Thing is that it finally doesn't add up to much more than a portrait of artistic angst and uncertainty. What starts off as an amusing exploration of the random enthusiasms of a questing spirit quickly turns turgid as it becomes clear that the journey has neither purpose nor real end. Indeed, The Bigger Thing doesn't so much conclude as simply stop, in mid-thought almost, its creator having run out of steam only a little bit after its audience has run out of patience.

Popeson, who is by vocation a sculptor herself and whose first play this is (as far as I can tell), proves an imaginative, visionary writer. Collaboration with a strong director would be beneficial: with tightening and sharpening of focus (not to mention some technical sprucing up to eliminate lots and lots of stage waits within the piece), The Bigger Thing might be shaped into a vigorous, intriguing work of theatre.

Manhattan Ensemble Theater's production of Franz Kafka's The Castle makes for a long, long ninety minutes: though often visually interesting (thanks to Anna Luizos' effective unit set and Howell Binkley's moody lighting), the staging by Scott Schwartz is mostly gruelingly, relentlessly grim. Every once in a while Schwartz throws in a whimsical touch that reminds us of his recent hit Bat Boy–welcome relief, to be sure, albeit beside the point. But mostly The Castle goes precisely where we expect it to, unable to provide a good reason to take a renewed look at its by now all-too-familiar themes of alienation and the inhumanity of monolithic institutions.

Indeed, in places, The Castle feels so much like Godot or an Ionesco play that we almost forget that Kafka came first. It's valuable to trot out a piece like this, but only if the artists involved can find a way to connect it to the world as we now understand it.

The plot, quickly, concerns a land surveyor named K who is summoned to The Castle, a mysterious entity that controls well nigh all of its environs. K tries to penetrate The Castle but he is defeated at every turn. Eventually his frustration yields to obsession, and he ends the play utterly defeated by the soulless bureaucracy.

There are hints, in the adaptation by David Fishelson and Aaron Leichter, that The Castle is meant to represent the Church as opposed to other modern institutions; an intriguing notion, not adequately fleshed out. The Castle is, finally, a succession of scenes in which K battles the increasingly absurd and alienating randomness that has become his destiny, losing each time. Frustrating, repetitive stuff, this.

Heading the cast is William Atherton as K, who gives a competent if not particularly compelling performance. Some ensemble members are worth remembering, notably Dan Ziskie as the ultimate keeper of The Castle's secrets; others are almost embarrassingly subpar, especially Catherine Curtin, as K's wife, whose rushed,  breathless delivery suggests either a very bad head cold or a very bad Kathleen Turner impersonation.

Winston, the young painter who is the hero of The Credeaux Canvas, is criticized for packing too much into his work. The same might be said of playwright Keith Bunin: The Credeaux Canvas, an endlessly admirable and compelling piece, is finally too intricate and too jammed full of ideas to be satisfying--at least upon a single viewing. On one level, the play is an account of a romantic triangle; on another, it's a bleak, raw glimpse of twentysomething anguish a la This Is Our Youth. And going still deeper, it's a disarmingly insightful exploration of art and artist; a fascinating and surprisingly cerebral meditation on where beauty resides. Does the artist make the object beautiful because of what he sees in it; or does the onlooker make the painting beautiful? Could the beauty reside in the object itself?

No easy answers are provided in The Credeaux Canvas; indeed, what's most provocative and challenging about the play, at least to this observer, happens almost in passing. There's a moment when Winston is talking with his roommate's girlfriend, an earnest but confused young woman named Amelia, and she makes a remark about how thwarted most older people seem to be. That's perfect, that word thwarted: so very wise. Later, in the play's best scene, Winston and his roommate Jamie are showing a painting to an art collector, Tess. She turns out to be not only knowledgeable about genre and technique but also genuinely interested and appreciative of what it is that painters do. Her commentary--about Winston's own painting as well as the work that gives this play its title--is not just incisive but profound; and layered, especially as we watch and listen to Jamie and Winston react to it.

I have to digress now to tell you some of the plot. Jamie, tired of living in Alphabet City squalor (think Rent) and devastated at being left out of his father's will, hatches a scheme to make him, his roommate Winston, and his girlfriend Amelia rich. Jamie's father was an art dealer, so Jamie decides to sell one of his father's prize customers--Tess--a forged painting. He tells her about a rare nude portrait by the obscure but about-to-be-discovered French artist Credeaux, and she bites. Eventually Winston, who is praised by his teachers as a skillful imitator, agrees to paint the Credeaux canvas, and Amelia agrees to pose for it.

Complications ensure--all kinds of them; but what so interested me in that scene I was telling you about were the unexpected and unsettling ways that this particular fraud explodes back on its perpetrators. We watch, for example, as Tess tells Winston how poor and ugly his "original" work is; and then, just minutes later, we witness her near religious experience when she gets her first look at the "Credeaux." Then, when Tess intuits some startling secrets about both painter and subject--that's Winston and Amelia, remember--we watch as not just Jamie's plot but, yes, his entire world comes tumbling down around him. Rich, incredible stuff, this.

Yet I must again point out that the details I've chosen to focus on are just that--details. The Credeaux Canvas covers a great deal more ground, of more or less interest and originality; Bunin's given us a landscape so full that each of us will manage to take in only the part that most intrigues us, I think.

The Credeaux Canvas has been given an outstanding production at Playwrights Horizons, under the strong but unobtrusive directorial hand of Michael Mayer. The cast of four is superb: Lee Pace, a recent Julliard graduate, is spectacularly impressive as the quiet, enigmatic Winston; Annie Parisse is appealingly complex as Amelia; and Glenn Howerton gets all the shadings right as mercurial, conflicted Jamie: watch him in his opening scene as he describes the reading of his father's will--a miniature tour de force of characterization. E. Katherine Kerr is magnificent as Tess, elevating what's almost a walk-on into one of the most memorable, thoughtful, and thought-provoking supporting performances of the year.

The Credeaux Canvas is scheduled to close this weekend, less than two weeks after its official opening: not much time to catch it even once, though a couple of viewings are, I think, necessary to really appreciate playwright Keith Bunin's intricate--dare I say--brushwork. It looks like this one's going to get away, which is the New York theatre's loss. 

The Dazzle may well be the creepiest play I've ever seen in the theatre. Richard Greenberg, author of the very different Three Days of Rain, Night and Her Stars, and many other works, has based this play on the lives—or, more probably—the deaths of the Collyer Brothers. They were a pair of eccentric men whose dead bodies were discovered in a nightmarishly squalid East Harlem apartment, one of them buried under the spectacular detritus that filled and overflowed every room of the place. What makes The Dazzle creepy, I think, is that Greenberg is interested not in how these two singularly odd people built a symbiosis that enabled them to survive for many years, but rather in the destruction that their strange way of life finally wrought. The Dazzle amounts, ultimately, to an indulgence of morbid curiosity; and lacking the gothic grandeur of, say, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, it's not a particularly fun one at that.

The play begins at the start of the 20th century in the crowded but still very respectable home of Homer and Langley Collyer. Langley is a pianist of great temperament and, apparently, genius: he can detect things like a note played "1/64 of a tone flat." Homer is a former admiralty lawyer who serves now, as he says, as his "brother's accountant," though caretaker is clearly more accurate. Langley is eccentric bordering on mentally ill, and certainly anti-social by any normal definition; the particular situation that Homer needs to attend to as the play begins takes the form of Millie Ashmore, a lively, lovely heiress who has decided she is in love with Langley and is setting a trap to win him for a husband.

Homer resists the notion at first—powerfully; but then he sees some merit in it, possibly because he likes the idea of such a wealthy sister-in-law, and also possibly because he has fallen in love with her himself. At any rate, plans for the wedding go forward, despite Langley's obvious unfitness for one. I don't think it should be too big a surprise that the marriage doesn't come off, and in Act Two, some years having passed, the Collyers have settled into lonely bachelorhood, with Langley sinking deeper and deeper into what is surely severe mental illness, obsessing endlessly and alarmingly over objects thrown into the apartment by taunting neighbors, and Homer stoically and selflessly keeping Langley's fragile world intact.

The story feels tragic, almost; and then Greenberg introduces complications, some unexpected, some not, before bringing the tale to its foregone and inevitable conclusion.

Plot details fail resolutely to make a lot of sense, particularly those pertaining to Millie. In Act One, she feels so much like an alien in the weird but neatly ordered Collyer household that there's an actual energy drain whenever she's on stage—good acting by Francie Swift, I suppose, but hard to sit through. In Act Two, she's too much the deus ex machina to feel authentic.

Langley's condition, and Homer's acquiescence, are played quite beautifully by Reg Rogers and Peter Frechette, but Greenberg doesn't give them backstories: we never really know who these men are, just how they self-destruct. (A pause here to mention that Rogers is uncannily moving as he contemplates a lacrosse stick, and Frechette captures all of the mercurial Homer's many moods with remarkable precision; these performances are splendid.) Greenberg has written some lovely passages, too, but The Dazzle doesn't add up, or at least it didn't for me: I just don't get what the author wants to tell us.

Or, what's worse, why he wants to repel and depress us with this unhappy tale. The Dazzle, skillful in many ways, turns out to be the opposite of entertaining. There were many more walkouts than normal during intermission on the night I attended the show, and I can't say that I blame them; this is not a show I'll be recommending to friends, or anyone else for that matter.

The Division of Memory, which examines the life and work of Dr. Ernest Everett Just, is full of missed possibilities. An African-American biologist working during the early twentieth century, Just made important contributions to science’s understanding of embryo development. Though revered for his intelligence, Just constantly faced a racist scientific and academic community that could not get beyond his skin color. Later in life, Just took refuge in Europe, Germany in particular, where he found more support for his research coupled with less racial hatred. That is until the Second World War, when Just and his second wife were forced to flee to the United States. Shortly afterwards, Just died of pancreatic cancer. This is exciting stuff. More the pity then that creators Clarinda Mac Low, James Hannaham and Tanya Barfield have come up with such an unsatisfying theatrical experience. The Division of Memory is all concept, and very little substance.

When you first enter PS 122’s converted gym space, you are struck by what a gorgeous installation piece The Division of Memory could be. A white sink filled with water and test tubes acts as a projection surface for video images; a metal lab table is suspended from a TV playing Little Sambo cartoons. Michael Kang and David Morris both deserve recognition for their respective work on the video and set design. It reminded me of the video art of Gary Hill (in its presentation) and Mona Hatoum (in its subject). The juxtaposition of racist images with the stark white materials of science were startling. I could not take my eyes away from it. But once the performance proper begins, Memory engages its audience in only fits and starts.

Hannaham takes on the role of Just, and to all extents and purposes, this is a one-man show. Tory Vazquez, best known for her work with Richard Maxwell, appears as a number of figures in Just’s life. But she almost always appears as a live video feed projected onto a screen. Incorporating live performers and video is always a difficult feat to pull off into a compelling whole. And here lies Memory’s key problem. Neither Hannaham nor Vazquez is an interesting enough performer (at least in this piece) to make it work.

Throughout, Hannaham and Vazquez tread a dull middle ground. They are certainly not interested in emotionally connecting with the audience, and yet they are not awkward enough to make that awkwardness either compelling or have its own theatrical logic. The result: You remain unsure of what they are trying to do. And after initially giving them the benefit of a doubt, you grow weary very quickly. Hannaham neither fleshes out a portrait of Just, nor significantly raises the numerous ethical issues of Just’s life, beyond the obvious. And Vazquez’s numerous characters lack any real sense of distinction, which makes them blend into a boring blob of sameness.

Memory’s strongest moments are the lectures where Hannaham treats the audience to a slide show, turning the space into an auditorium full of young scientists-in-training. These pseudo-demonstrations humorously juxtapose biology and race, science and history. We see images of war veterans next to a Viagra ad, the words “Manifest Destiny” next to a graph about Natural Selection. Hannaham’s awkwardness serves him well in these moments, as he glances at index cards and “um’s” his way through the lecture. The humor found in these moments also raises significant issues about science’s supposed objectivity. We see how bias enters into science’s methods for uncovering biological “truth.”

These moments, however, still do not rescue Memory from its overall dullness. While there is a technical sophistication to be admired, Mac Low’s direction lacks a sense of purpose, making the proceedings seem under-rehearsed and ill-focused. The text proper, written presumably by all three (Mac Low, Hannaham, Barfield), is littered with moments of bad writing, clunky and sentimental. I’m all for surface over depth, but Just’s life cries out for a performance piece of more complexity. I’m all for concept over plot, bit a concept has to have punch and provocation if it’s going to maintain an audience’s interest for over an hour. In the end, Memory just doesn’t cut it.

I can't decide whether the most impressive thing about The Doctor of Rome, Nat Colley's sequel to The Merchant of Venice, is that it's so well-crafted or that it's so smart. As presented by Revolving Shakespeare Company in repertory with their excellent production of Merchant, The Doctor of Rome emerges immediately as an important new work, one that forces us to reconsider the Bard's original "comedy" as well as our own attitudes about religion, tolerance, justice, and the institutions that surround these noble ideas.

Colley's play begins fifteen years after Shakespeare's, in Belmont, where Portia and Bassanio now live and where their godson, Daniel, spends much of his time. Daniel is the son of Jessica and Lorenzo, and as he approaches manhood his future is the source of some controversy among those who love him. Portia wants him to become a doctor of laws, like her cousin Bellario (and her alter ego Balthazar, the young attorney who saved the day at Antonio's trial against Shylock). She has convinced Jessica to send Daniel to Padua, where he will become Bellario's apprentice; Jessica, for her part, is happy to do so when she discovers that Daniel is in love with (and wants to marry) Rachel, the daughter of her old servant Launcelot Gobbo and a Moor.

Bassanio, on the other hand, wants Daniel to follow in his own footsteps (and his father Lorenzo's) and become a merchant. Neither Bassanio nor Lorenzo has had much success running Antonio's business (that gentleman having died in the ensuing years), but they have high hopes for Daniel, who is eager to prove them correct.

Portia, rather typically, decides to get her way in this matter by drugging Bassanio's drink. But as Bassanio collapses, temporarily ill, he begs Daniel to go to Venice and carry out a life-or-death deal in pork with a Roman trader named Largo. Daniel of course pledges to go. Just then, an old Jew appears, whom Jessica and Bassanio recognize as Tubal, Shylock's friend. He bears the news that Shylock has died and, in accordance with the settlement those long years ago, his property must be conveyed to Jessica. Daniel, who has grown up entirely unaware of his ancestor, suddenly comes face to face with a troubling new truth.

This truth—that a young man who has grown up as a Christian can suddenly become a Jew—propels the rest of the play. Daniel journeys with his mother to Venice, where he encounters prejudice from practically all sides. The merchants who willingly trade with a Christian wish only to spit upon and beat the same man when they discover he's a Jew. The Jews are not much more accepting of Daniel's fiancée Rachel, with her half-Muslim background. And the Duke of Venice is not at all willing to dispense justice to the now down-and-out Daniel—that is, until the economy of Venice is threatened when Daniel inadvertently exposes the fraudulent Balthazar.

Colley proves himself a worthy heir to Shakespeare with what happens next. Indeed, he very nearly trumps the master by proving that what seemed like light-hearted folly when only the life of a Jew hung in the balance, turns deadly serious as Portia and Bassanio struggle to defend themselves. What once seemed trivial to these privileged people—disguises, deceptions, wedding rings, and so on—suddenly takes on the greatest import.

Colley's final scene, itself a kind of homage to the original work, ends the play on a slightly jarring, cynical note. But his points about the way the world really works—and, especially, about what's most important to the modern polity (i.e., preservation of the status quo to ensure that the rich and powerful remain so)—are right on target. In finishing Shakespeare's famous story, Colley has also updated some of the play's most compelling themes, with an insight and intelligence that provokes and challenges us to look carefully not only at what we think we know about The Merchant of Venice but also at ourselves.

Daniel Colb Rothman directs the piece with assurance and grace. The cast is generally quite good, with particularly fine work turned in by John Peterson as the questing protagonist Daniel (though he needs to guard against occasionally swallowing his lines); Miles Phillips as the eternal weakling Bassanio; Lanie MacEwan as scheming Portia, less noble than we remember her from Merchant; Brian Linden as the pragmatic Duke of Venice; Mike Finesilver as an aged, understanding Tubal; and Lawrence Merritt as the aristocratic merchant Largo.