nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

The lady taking tickets in front of the theatre where The Foul Stench of Death is playing described it as a cross between The Maltese Falcon and Airplane; as sound bite summaries go, that one's exactly right. The emphasis--definitely--is on the Airplane side: the m.o. of playwright Jonas Oppenheim and director Padraic Lillis is to bang out the gags, fast and furious: even if only a third of them land, the audience is in stitches from start to finish. Honest, The Foul Stench of Death is that funny--a rib-tickling riot; a side-splitting, laugh-till-it-hurts yockfest.

Is it silly? Absolutely: Oppenheim and Lillis and their remarkably game and talented company have no shame whatsoever. There are outrageous sight gags, like the one where a policeman poses, prone, next to a dead body for a crime scene photo. There are pop culture allusions galore, especially to old black and white movies like the one that's being parodied here; watch, for example, for Maria Ouspenskaya as The Wolfman's mother to show up behind a scrim at one point in Act Two. There are giddy anachronisms such as the hilarious morphing of a disembodied hand into Michael Jackson's Glove in a gleeful recreation of "Thriller." (And there are bad, bad, bad puns, like the one that immediately follows this bit, when Sergeant Harem, wanting the dancers to disperse, tells them to beat it.)

There's also a story--two of them actually, one for each act. The opener is "The Foul Stench of Death," set in Mexico in 1947 and dealing with the murder of would-be screenwriter Don Broumandi. On the case is L.A. gumshoe Sergeant Harem, with his two assistants Detective Beans and Officer O'Steinberg. Prime suspects are the drop-dead gorgeous, not-so-grieving widow Carolyn Broumandi and her Mexican lover Juanito Sanchez.

The second piece, "The One About the Severed Hand that Kills People," is about a severed hand that kills people. (Think Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman by way of The Naked Gun.) Here Harem finds himself strangely attracted to the possible murderer, a mystical medium named Madame Truffaut. Harem eventually cracks the case but loses Truffaut to a plush tin foil ottoman in which the brain of her beloved crystal ball has been transmogrified (or something like that).

Not that it matters very much; as you've probably figured out, The Foul Stench of Death is far more concerned with the laugh quotient than with sensible plotting. It would be hopelessly banal if the jokes weren't so plentiful; and it would be hopelessly dimwitted if the material weren't so, well, witty. Oppenheim is a very funny guy and, more importantly, a very savvy and clever writer; Foul Stench displays an originality and sophistication that absolutely belie its custard-pie-in-the-face sensibility and that make us look forward to whatever he writes next.

Eight actors play what feels like dozens of roles in the two playlets. Dennis McNitt is spectacularly wonderful as Sergeant Harem, a dead-ringer tough-talking James M. Cain-Dashiell Hammett private eye spouting idiotic non-sequiturs virtually non-stop, like Fred McMurray in Double Indemnity gone haywire. Jordan Meadows and Patrick Burch lend able comic support as Beans and O'Steinberg (and others). Gretchen McGinty is perfect as the dangerous blonde in the first piece, and Jenny Langsam is pricelessly hilarious as bizaare Madame Truffaut in the second. Kevin Cristaldi, Jeff Burchfield, and Mahlon Stewart are invaluable in all of the other roles--seemingly in several places at once, and rip-roaringly funny in each of them.

Director Padraic Lillis provides the ideal light touch for all of this heavy-handed tomfoolery; ditto the designers (Rob Odorisio on sets, Craig Lenti on sound, Lea Umberger on costumes, and John-Paul Szczepanski on lights). That's enough from me: head over to the Currican and get a whiff of The Foul Stench of Death for yourself.

The Further Adventures of Dick Piston, Hotel Detective (apparently there have been others) is a silly film noir spoof by Jeff Goode in which a relentlessly square house P.I. searches first for a stolen necklace and then for a murdered wife. The necklace is one of the crown jewels of the Czech Republic and bears the name "My Virginity"; it's that kind of comedy. Until it becomes clear that that moniker belongs to the necklace, Piston wrangles, Double Indemnity-style, with the victim, a direct-to-video Czech film star with the improbable name of Pleasure Hello, trying to understand exactly what it is she thinks she's lost. It's that kind of comedy.

Also mixed up in the caper are a thickly-accented jewel thief named Misha Novakova and a goofily-coiffed Man With No Pants called Havel Presley (evidently the love child of Elvis, though named for the Czech president). There's also a deliberately odd lounge "wizard" known as Zing the Amazing who is not only implicated, in a prologue-flashback, as the criminal, but is also responsible for introducing diversionary entertainments in between the nine "episodes" that comprise Dick Piston. (Goode has structured the script like an old-time serial, though it's presented at The Medicine Show as a hapless vaudeville bill.)

Goode's script blends noir parody (which he writes rather well) with Ionescally self-aware absurdism (at which he's less assured). Barbara Vann's staging, which is pokier than the material deserves, throws in surreal touches, like characters moving furniture for no apparent reason or suddenly toasting marshmallows in the middle of one of Piston's big monologues. And every ten minutes or so, the whole enterprise stops cold for another lounge act. (Happily, though, at the performance attended, a couple of those acts featured the delicious eccentric dancing of Dieter Riesel.)

It's all, frankly, a bit of a mess. Which is not to say, however, that it's not a fun mess: it is, in its way, especially when Vann hams it up as Novakova, doing a cross between Fanny Brice and Greta Garbo. Katherine Billingsley, as Pleasure Hello, has some choice moments as well.

Sometimes silliness is the cure for what ails you; if it is, you can do far worse than a visit with Dick Piston.

The Holy Mother of Hadley New York, the new play by Barbara Wiechmann currently being presented by New Georges theatre company, explores what happens in a small town after one of its residents reports that she has been visited by the Virgin Mary in a vision. The play's opening image is of an array of tiny houses, over which a mysterious man named Vincent watches from a nearby tree. It reminded me of Our Town, but that's not where Wiechmann or her director Rachel Dickstein ultimately take us: the houses are quickly cleared away, and we spend the next hour and a half or so inside many of these residences, encountering several dozen of the denizens of Hadley in more or less random fashion, observing their reaction to this extraordinary event.

It turns out that Agnes La Voie's vision, though at first variously doubted and ridiculed by many, finally galvanizes her town. (Indeed, those seeing this play after September 11 may well react differently to it than I did.) The climactic scene of Holy Mother is one in which the town's inhabitants gather, noiselessly and separately, at the appointed place and time where the Virgin Mary said she would make her next appearance. It's a moving scene, and a fascinating one; but what happens next comes from so far out of left field as to be totally mystifying. I left this play lacking a clear idea as to exactly what Wiechmann and her collaborators were trying to tell me.

The production sustains a tone of portent throughout; Dickstein has staged it rather like a suspense drama, keeping us guessing throughout as to whether or not the Virgin Mary is actually going to appear to the people of Hadley as Agnes divines. The ensemble of eleven actors turns in commendable work, creating portrait after portrait of the many townsfolk we meet. It's unfortunate that, for me at least, none of this effort provides much in the way of elucidation.

Along the front of the stage at 29th Street Rep right now is a length of chain-link fence, from one end of the proscenium to the other, effectively sealing off the actors from the audience. It's the perfect visual realization of Brett Neveu's fine new play The Last Barbecue: it signals the disconnected Middle American heartland where the story takes place; it symbolizes the chained-up emotions of its characters; and it effectively turns this too-typical family into an Exhibit. Like all the best theatre, The Last Barbecue offers an intimate glimpse at humanity at its most human.

Neveu's play takes place in the yard between two houses in a medium sized town in late summer. It begins with Ted, the owner of the yard and its attached house and garage, making silent preparations for a family barbecue. He finishes mowing the lawn; he puts stuff away in the garage and generally straightens up, stealing a quick glance to make sure he's alone before sweeping the debris off the porch and back onto the grass. Next he wheels out the grill, and then out comes a cooler. It's as familiar as your own hand, but--and here's where the extraordinary potency of Neveu's play and Tim Corcoran's splendid production come in--we're always conscious of exactly what Ted is thinking as he goes about his chores. That quiet desperation that Thoreau wrote about is palpable.

Soon we meet Ted's wife Jan; the tension that characterizes their troubled marriage is revealed through the pauses, growls, shouts, and generally missed connections that pass for communication as they, through force of habit, get the chairs and refreshments set up and prepare for the afternoon's gathering. We learn that their guests will be their son, Barry, and his wife Tammy; and also their recently widowed next-door neighbor (her husband died a year ago while mowing the lawn to prepare for a barbecue much like this one). Barry and Tammy arrive with the news that they won't be staying; they're going out to dinner and then to Barry's 10-year high school reunion. Jan is disappointed, Ted is belligerent, Barry is whiny and restless, Tammy tries to keep the peace. Again, an all-too-familiar scene; again, the volley of emotions just below the surface is what counts.

Some incidents do finally occur in Neveu's determinedly stagnant drama; but stasis is what this play is all about, and Corcoran and his actors capture it spectacularly. The Last Barbecue is a somber examination of lost opportunities and dashed expectations and--mostly--our powerlessness to handle them. In the play's climactic scene, Ted and a visitor from outside the family compare notes about disappointment. Ted concludes, in his only honest and assertive moment in the play, that you can't escape the facts of who you are--and who you've turned out to be--no matter how far away you roam. It's a doctrine of homespun existentialism, and it resonates loud and clear in the still, claustrophobic atmosphere of this caged-in backyard.

Corcoran's company--four of whom are members of 29th Street Rep's excellent acting ensemble--do outstanding work here. Leo Farley is magnificent as Ted, telegraphing his thoughts and intentions with marvelous economy and effect. Barbara Myers matches him note for note as perpetually disappointed wife Jan. Peyton Thomas exudes restless energy as Barry, a powder keg of a man ready to blow up; and Moira MacDonald shows us the resolve of his young wife Tammy, who is determined to stave off that explosion. Elizabeth Elkins balances the otherness and the ordinariness of outsider Kathy, presenting her as the catalyst for cataclysmic events that nevertheless fail to occur in the lives of this discontented family.

The (uncredited) costumes--Barry's yellow on yellow shirt and tie, Jan's blouse and shorts, Kathy's faux-elegant black pants suit--are dazzlingly revelatory of character. Steve Swenson's set is stunningly realistic, as are Douglas Cox's lighting and Tim Cramer's sound design (which starts with the somehow comforting motor of a lawn mower moving closer and farther away with astonishing felicity). Corcoran, who is also co-artistic director of 29th Street Rep, has done a terrific job taking us to the heart of Neveu's thoughtful and ultimately sad meditation on what's lost every day in the silos where we live our lives.

Signature Theatre Company is currently presenting what seems to me to be a top-notch production of The Late Henry Moss, the newest play by Sam Shepard. As staged by frequent Shepard collaborator Joseph Chaikin, the play is brutal, intense, compelling, and mystifying: at its center is an ambiguous and ambivalent consideration of what makes someone alive and what might make the same someone dead--whether the rotted-out soul of the title character represents something larger than a mere mortal gone astray is a question I will leave for you to ponder. Rising star Ethan Hawke is commanding and consistently watchable as Henry Moss's younger son Ray, and Arliss Howard is rather terrifying as the older son Earl; the other cast members--Guy Boyd as Henry; Shelia Tousey as Conchalla, Henry's girlfriend and Life Force Incarnate; Jose Perez as Esteban, Henry's neighbor; and Clark Middleton as a hapless taxi driver who gets mired in Henry's business--are extraordinary as larger-than-life, eccentric characters. The spare set by Christine Jones, the astonishing costumes by Teresa Snider-Stein, the stark soundscape of David Van Tieghem and Jill B.C. Du Boff (much of it played live by percussionist Luke Notary), and the evocative lighting of Michael Chybowski--all of these elements enhance and enlarge Chaikin and Shepard's bitter, bleak vision.

Now having said all that, I have to tell you that I won't exactly recommend The Late Henry Moss to you. If--especially--you are in search of comfort or compassion or hopefulness in the wake of the World Trade Center catastrophe--well, you won't find any of that here. Understand that it's not a question of good or bad or like or dislike; The Late Henry Moss is simply not my idea of theatre for this particular moment.

And now having said that, let me add that Sam Shepard's sensibility and mine--speaking generally, now--don't really mesh: I can admire what he's trying to do theatrically and dramatically but his work never touches me. So it is with The Late Henry Moss. The desolation at its core eludes and mystifies me: I just don't know where such profound disconnectedness can come from.

I need to tell you what the play is about. It takes place in a squalid, remote cabin in New Mexico, a house most un-home-like, one who's defining quality is its utter emptiness. Here Earl and Ray Moss have reunited after many years apart to cope with the death of their father Henry, a man they have both feared and hated since childhood. In flashbacks and in more naturalistic narrative scenes, Shepard exposes the raw anger that gnaws at the brothers, and sketches interesting though oblique contrast between their impotence and Henry's savage survival instinct. At the same time, weirdly, Shepard plays with the idea that Henry, while still alive, fears he may be dead: apparently he understands, on some level, that there's more to human existence than mere satisfaction of urges.

The play feels like it's about Ray and Earl, but we never get anywhere close to them: Shepard gives no information about who they are, what they do, or how they feel, except in relation to Henry. I wanted to know more about them, but I'm certain that's not Shepard's game here (though I'm not sure, on the other hand, that I can say exactly what Shepard is actually going for in this piece).

As I said, it's resonant but horribly distant-- my receiving equipment doesn't pick up the frequency at which Shepard is broadcasting. What I do tune into, mostly, is an unfettered emptiness: the world of this play is beyond even despair, wallowing in a nihilistic void that's tough for me to comprehend. I don't understand it; it makes me uncomfortable and suspicious. So much for critical objectivity.

A final note: One thing I am absolutely certain of is that B.H. Barry's fight choreography is too realistic for its own good. When we start to fear for the actors' safety, we've left theatre and veered dangerously toward sport or circus: in the relatively intimate Peter Norton Space, body slams and forced feedings distract rather than enhance our experience.

The Matchmaker, the new play at Irish Repertory Theatre, is an adaptation of John B. Keane's book Letters of a Matchmaker, an episodic yarn set in rural Ireland in the 1950s. It tells the story of Dicky Mick Dicky O'Connor, a gentleman who, late in life, decides to take on the job of matchmaker, uniting bachelors and widows and the like, mostly by mail, with pretty fair success. As adapted by Phyllis Ryan, the piece is equal parts portrait of a bygone place and time, seen through the eyes of assorted eccentric, lonely people, and narrative of Dicky's indomitable spirit. The play sees him through various job-related crises (only they never feel like crises because Dicky has such a genial, low key way about him) as well as the illness and death of his beloved wife. It's a charmer.

Ryan's dramatization mostly takes the form of letters, delivered as monologues by the show's two actors, which propel Dicky and his clients' saga gracefully and vividly. (Late in the evening, Ryan sees fit to interrupt the letters with a bit of narration, which is quite awkward and ought to be fixed.) Des Keogh, as Dicky and several other men, and Anna Manahan, as Dicky's American sister (who lives in Philadelphia) and various other women, deliver the story beautifully, creating their different characters with subtle shifts of voice and bearing and the occasional hat or kerchief. If you saw Manahan a few years back in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, then you know what a powerful actress she is; what will surprise you here is her range—there's nary a trace of that old harridan in any of the many roles she essays.

Keogh is the true star of the evening. He's jaunty, spirited, and enormously likable in the central role of Dicky, imbuing this old rascal with genuine warmth and wit. Keogh is delightful as several of Dicky's customers as well, including a lovelorn retired jockey and a devilish old bachelor looking for a young woman or, if one of those isn't available, a young man. Keogh moves from character to character with easy grace: his performance is a tour de force but there's nothing self-conscious or showy about it.

Michael Scott's direction is as deft and sprightly as his actors. Michael McCaffery's simple set, organized around two writing desks, is most effective (although the presence of two coat racks loaded down with costumes never used are a touch mystifying).

Set in the late ’20s and early ’30s, The Murals of Rockefeller Center follows three heroes as they simultaneously create and try to escape from American culture. The central hero is the Communist Mexican artist Diego Rivera, a flamboyant narrator whose claim that art requires truth, not facts, makes him a trustworthy if unreliable guide. Commissioned by John D. Rockefeller to paint enormous and ultra-modern murals for the lobby of the newly-built Rockefeller Center, Rivera comes under attack for including  Lenin in his mural, but refuses to change the work. Of course, the Rockefellers blast the mural. Undaunted, Rivera uses his paycheck to recreate the mural for anyone who asks, free of charge.

But Rivera augments his straightforward story of artistic conviction and capitalist exploitation by weaving two other heroes through the pauses in his story, Charles Lindbergh and John Dillinger. Lindbergh has had greatness thrust upon him: a humble aviator, he is unable to cope with the demands the public has on his private life. After his baby son is kidnapped and killed, he loses touch with his world, eventually spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric to defend his tacit approval of Nazi Germany. Dillinger, on the other hand, embraces his romantic adventures: as Public Enemy #1, he lives by a Robin Hood code, robbing banks not people, and becomes a folk hero to the Depression-era public. But, coming out of a movie theater, he is shot in the back by FBI agents.

Developed by the company—no playwright is credited—and directed by Jim Niesen, the play most resembles the leftist humilities of Woody Guthrie, full of humor and friendly cheer: after intermission, Dillinger robs the box office and returns a few bucks to the audience. As Rivera, Sven Miller draws the audience into his story with a friendly wink, but also explores the character’s hypocrisies as an artist and Communist. The other actors all give admirable performances as they double up on roles, giving depth to the important ones and painting the smaller ones in broad strokes. Most notably, Jack Lush, as Dillinger and Rockefeller, among others, uses the actor’s basic tools of movement and body to great effect. The set—a clanking mass of girders and platforms that evoke the skyscraper era of the play—and the lights—all angles and shapes and no color, giving the stage the black-and-white, slightly grainy feel of an old James Cagney movie—evoke the world of the play without pinning it to any one place.

At the close of The Murals of Rockefeller Center, Rivera quotes Brecht: “Unhappy is the land that has no heroes; unhappy is the land that needs one.” According to Rivera, heroes have the “Right of Provocation,” a necessity in any truly great civilization. And he wonders whether America has any heroes. But his story, by exploring the truth behind the facts, gets to the heart of American heroism, staking out an unabashedly left-wing plot with humor, hope, and vision.

The Ninth Circle is one of the more intriguing new plays I've seen in a long while. It takes place on Election Night, 1980, which you may recall was the night when Ronald Reagan routed President Jimmy Carter in a landslide that newscasters called hours before the polls closed on the West Coast. Playwright Edward Musto sees that November night as a key transition point, marking the beginning of an era of self-absorption and disconnection that we may well still be living in. At any rate, Musto's protagonist Tom Used certainly undergoes a cataclysmic transformation concurrent with the dawn of the Reagan Revolution; this transformation is what's chronicled in this fascinating drama.

The Ninth Circle is shaped something like Dante's descent into Hell (and indeed takes its title from the Inferno). In ten riveting scenes, Musto charts Tom's journey through an increasingly dark and murky night. The play begins in a seedy hotel room, where Tom has just had quick, meaningless sex with a teacher he picked up at the school where he was supposed to vote. It progresses through encounters at a bar, an art gallery, a late business dinner at an exclusive restaurant, a porno movie house, a hospital emergency room, Tom's office, the steam room in a health club, Tom's apartment, and, finally (inevitably) in a club called the Inferno: the dead end. Each stop pits Tom against something of value in his life—his secretary, his job, his wife; eventually the very core of his moral fiber—and each confrontation drives him further away from life and closer to a cathartic but bitterly nihilistic revelation.

The Ninth Circle is bleak and despairing and, in its final resolution, hopeless. But Musto's writing is sharp and incisive and potent: the people Tom meets, especially the strangers, at once compel and repel, both drawing us toward and pulling us away from the damaging drift of humanity that they represent. These characters—Alley, the promiscuous elementary school teacher; Score, the stoned drug dealer; JoJo, the scarily accommodating porno house manager; Julio, the arrogant mail room clerk; and Ian, the exhausted gay businessman with whom Tom connects in a sauna—are unexpectedly unforgettable. We don't want them to, we resist—but these folks get under our skin.

The play is not without its flaws: the symbolism gets a bit heavy-handed at times, and some of the scenes, especially the one at Tom's office dinner, go on longer than they probably need to. Most problematic is the penultimate scene, in which we at last meet Tom's wife Catherine; after giving his characters brilliant, spare dialogue to speak (especially in the preceding health club scene), Musto seems to have run out of steam here, with the talk suddenly trite and portentous.

But lots of great plays fizzle out at their ends; The Ninth Circle is indisputably a valuable new work, one that I find has lingered and resonated in my consciousness more than I expected. The production, ably directed by Tom Herman, is exemplary: the company of thirteen actors, led by the extraordinary Gene Forman as Tom, all turn in fine performances; standouts include Jay Greenberg (JoJo), Whalen J. Laurence (Ian), Rodrigo Lopresti (Julio), and John D. McNally (Tom's windbag boss, Mr. Hite). Rick Juliano's sets and Michael Abrams' lighting are simple and effective. Mark Cannistraro's soundtrack, incorporating the post-disco-inflected music of Culture Club, Tears for Fears, Kim Carnes, and lots of other early 80s icons, is entirely appropriate.

The Ninth Circle isn't as sensational as its press release makes out: there is some frontal nudity (mostly male) but it's never gratuitous. But this is definitely a show for adults: the issues at its core—our responsibilities to the world and to ourselves—are not meant to be taken lightly. This is a fine, serious drama on topics worth contemplating. I hope for more of the same from playwright Musto and Crezzle Productions in the future.

The Resurrectionist marks the New York debut of playwright Kate Chell and proves that she's a talent to keep an eye on. Though a little tightening is in order, this suspense thriller set in the 17th century is a fine piece of dramatic writing, the kind of play that grabs your attention and holds it as it takes you on a roller coaster ride full of surprises and shocks. It's also rather meaty: its story, which pits medieval church doctrine against the radical views of the nascent science of anatomy, will disarm and disturb you in unexpected ways.

Program notes advise us that resurrectionists, gangs of graverobbers who provided corpses to surgeons and anatomists, thrived in London in the years following the Great Fire and the final outbreak of Plague. Their trade was illegal--the Church viewed both disinterment and dissection as sinful--and consequently inordinately dangerous.

In Chell's play, the resurrectionist of the title is Molly Lark, a young woman who entered this unsavory business after the disappearance (and probable murder) of her brother. Molly's accomplice at the moment is Gabriel Shepherd, a vile and villainous fellow who may have had something to do with her brother's death. When Gabriel brings Molly the corpse of a young woman with a slit throat and a seemingly untouched shroud, Molly's suspicions become aroused. Eventually, this cadaver, sold to an earnest young anatomist named Jeffrey Rymer who is in love with Molly, will transform the lives of everyone who gets near it.

Once the exposition is out of the way, things move swiftly and relentlessly to a conclusion that is inevitable and terrible. Several moments are deliciously shocking: this really is a thriller that thrills. Director David Denson has done a splendid job staging it in the intimate performance space at The Gershwin Hotel, making ingenious use of the aisles surrounding the audience to place us literally in the thick of this exciting tale. Nicole Pintal, cast against type as Molly, gives a powerful performance, with fine support coming from Mika David Duncan (Rymer), Michael Gilpin (Shepherd), Timothy Fannon (Thom Gilhenny, another admirer of Molly's), Jennifer Larkin (Erin, Molly's friend), and Jeff Cote (Dr. Conner Pond, another anatomist).

I don't usually go to readings, let alone write about them, but The Sex King is an exceptional play and so exceptions must be made. It's a new work by Bill C. Davis, author of Mass Appeal and Avow, among others. It's a play of immense profundity and humanity: it is wise, challenging, thought-provoking, and—above all—timely. Some smart producer or artistic director needs to put this on stage so that lots of people can hear what Davis is telling us.

The title character of The Sex King is Jeremiah Rockwell, 66, an outspoken, free-thinking, half-Quaker, half-Jewish pacifist who runs an escort service in the Berkshires in affluent, rural western Massachusetts. When we meet Rockwell, he is about to go on trial, a politically-minded local prosecutor having charged him with running a prostitution ring. Rockwell has agreed to one interview, with an earnest young reporter named Maureen Laffin of the Gazette, in which he hopes to defend himself in ways that he won't be able to accomplish in the courtroom.

Maureen, for her part, is a reluctant interviewer; she's taken the job only to win points with her editor. Maureen, who turns out to be the protagonist of The Sex King, is like lots of us, wedded to sound, pragmatic ideas about the way the world works and the way people should live in it. People like Jeremiah Rockwell exploit and/or demean women; they undermine morality and family values; they should not be permitted to do what they do; they should be punished.

What happens, during the course of the brilliantly-crafted two acts of The Sex King, is that Maureen is confronted with information that runs counter to the black-and-white thinking she's so comfortable with. Rockwell is a man of grave contradictions: he seems to be a devoted family man, for one thing; he also turns out to be a philanthropist, a dedicated antiwar activist who has protested every American military action since Hiroshima, and—as Maureen eventually discovers—a wise and caring counselor who understands that honesty and compassion are the most important attributes for human survival.

I should also tell you, lest I make The Sex King sound too polemical, that Maureen's journey is genuinely suspenseful and entertaining. Davis has cooked up a plot twist to close the first act that you absolutely won't see coming and that will make you eager to discover what's going to happen next. He's also written both of his characters with great intelligence and humor: you'll recognize parts of yourself in both of them, I think.

What's most important to me about The Sex King is that  it so unflinchingly indicts us: the real obscenity in America today is that violence and hatred are embraced and encouraged while sex, for all our so-called liberation, remains scary and taboo. Listen carefully to the play and you'll see, too, that it offers a roadmap of tolerance and understanding for dealing with conflicts at all levels of social discourse. Davis reminds us of the most fundamental wisdom of all: as W.H. Auden said, we must love one another or die. What's unfortunate is that—especially so soon after 9/11—we need the reminder.

Neil LaBute and his cast would like you to think that The Shape of Things is cool as fuck. In a recent interview, Rachel Weisz, who plays the artist Evelyn, claimed, “It’s not old-fashioned theatre, it’s rock’n’roll.” Don’t be fooled. For all the play’s sleek veneer, cool attitude and snazzy marketing, The Shape of Things is actually a big moralistic blob of banal nothingness. You can blast Smashing Pumpkins as loud as you want between scenes, but this play is about as cool and controversial as a Creed album.

MFA-candidate and general bad-ass Evelyn seduces nerdy Adam. As a result of her work on his clothes and attitude, she remakes him into something presumably less nerdy. Adam’s friends Jenny and Philip, whose marriage is right around the corner, are surprised and intrigued by his transformation, especially Jenny. Adam was too nervous to approach Jenny for a date years before, but ex-roommate Philip swept away Adam’s possible sweetheart. Unsurprisingly, Philip is a macho jerk, the kind of male character LaBute loves to document under the guise of critiquing macho jerks. As Adam’s confidence grows, the inevitable happens. Couples make out with the each other’s partner, people yell in a coffee shop, and Evelyn “surprises” us all with the revelation of her thesis project. The truth is if anything in this play surprises you, then each new episode of "Friends" must be a real revelation for you.

This isn’t to say the play doesn’t have potential. A play that tackles a question such as, “What is truth in art?,” would be a great one. But while The Shape of Things pretends to a play of ideas, it is the furthest thing from it. Evelyn is made into a moron who can’t even get Adam’s boring Western Civ references. Philip and Evelyn are just yuppie stereotypes who utter nothing but the obvious. As a result, Adam comes off as the presumed “smart” one, though in any other play a character who utters the line, “Picasso didn’t take a shit and call it art,” would be laughable. Thus, all the cards are stacked up against the possibility of any dialogue or conversation about ideas from occurring. 

The four actors’ work is perfunctory. The usually charming Paul Rudd (Adam) is badly miscast. You never believe a transformation takes place. To his credit, he emerges an attractive thritysomething and remains one, regardless of the number of costume changes. Poor Weisz is saddled with such a clunker of a role in Evelyn. There are occasional moments, like when Weisz lashes out that she’d like to slit Philip’s throat while in bed with Adam. In that moment, you can see what Weisz is capable of in different circumstances. Frederick Weller and Gretchen Mol do admirable work as Philip and Jenny. But in truth, the roles don’t stretch their talents much.

In the end, you walk away wondering what this play wants to do. It has no ideas, so it’s not an idea play. Its dialogue is mediocre at best, so it’s not a play about language. As a “slice-of-life” piece, the play fails to capture the lives of young twentynothings in a Midwestern college town. What twenty-year olds act like these characters? Midwesterners, last time I checked, are not this uninteresting. Are we meant to take the whole thing as an ironic commentary about the 90s? If so, that doesn’t work. The play isn’t funny or biting enough to make it a comedy of manners about the decade of grunge. Is it supposed to be stylized and flat a la Richard Maxwell or David Lynch? If so, it doesn’t go far enough. Are the Pumpkins tunes (circa “Siamese Dream” and “Mellon Collie”) supposed to be a commentary on the packaging of teen angst? Beats me. The lengthy musical interludes between scenes reminded me that Smashing Pumpkins were really just the 90s equivalent of Boston with black eye-shadow.

What The Shape of Things is about is LaBute’s hatred for all things postmodern. Feminist performance art, fragmentation, the celebration of surface over depth, and most of all, the vertigo of moral uncertainty, all of these things piss off LaBute. This is a moralistic play. Oscar Wilde often becomes the whipping boy, his wit occasionally conflated with Nazism. In LaBute’s narrative, it’s a short leap from questioning certainty and truth to fascism, genocide, and more importantly, to hurting poor Adam’s feelings. For all its cool façade, the play has a reactionary heart: A world without moral certainty and truth is a bad bad thing. It’s a message Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell could love, provided LaBute cut out the swear words.

The play’s deep irony hits as you leave the theatre. If this play wants to lash out at postmodernism’s presumed banality and lack of depth, The Shape of Things is everything it seeks to attack. It is utterly forgettable, a beautiful instance of what Brecht called “culinary theatre.” Its audience left thinking about where to eat and how nifty it was see the actress from The Mummy on stage. All I wanted to do, however, was jump on stage and give LaBute what Evelyn gave her thesis audience: the middle finger. But that would be to take seriously a play that was undeserving of even such an empty gesture. My friend and I opted for dinner instead.

Singularity has scored a quiet success with their bare-bones production of David Greenspan’s Five Frozen Embryos and Christopher Shinn’s The Sleepers. Shinn has recently come to the attention of American audiences, thanks to the recent production of Four, though in London his plays have been staged by the prestigious Royal Court. Many know Greenspan as a first-rate actor, but may be unfamiliar with his work as a playwright. Both plays featured in this double-bill are compelling and beautiful, and under the careful direction of Jon Schumacher, they make for a incredibly satisfying hour of theatre.

Keeping the technical demands simple allows the language of both pieces to take center stage, which is ideal, for these are both plays about words. Five Frozen Embryos is full of stunning verbal ejaculations, akin to the linguistic gymnastics of a Mac Wellman or Len Jenkin play. Two women in fancy dress (Ellen Shanman and Ilka Pinheiro) discuss the ethical implications of a divorce when, in this unusual case, the property to be divided includes five frozen embryos. Their back-and-forth spirals into talk about the Bible, interpretation, and the nature of performance itself. Shanman and Pinheiro keep the words speeding along. Their sharp delivery perfectly captures Greenspan’s play of ideas, while never forgetting the play, the fun, at the heart of watching ideas unfurl. Five Frozen Embryos is a real theatrical treat, reminding us that Greenspan’s work as a writer needs to be as highly regarded as his acting turns.

Shinn’s Sleepers takes (what may be for some) a bold setup as a way to discuss the heartbreak and pleasure of communication. Two men, Silas (Russell Taylor) and Deane (Paul Juhn), meet at a bar and decide to masturbate with each other, first in the bar’s back room and then at Silas’s apartment. A woman named Barbara (Laura Ruth) acts as an omniscient narrator, revealing to the audience the thoughts that Silas and Deane can’t utter to each other. The strength of Shinn’s play is his refusal to moralize. Sleepers is at its best when it strikes a balance in representing both the pleasure and the coldness of one-time sexual encounters. Occasionally, however, Shinn opts for triteness: I want to hear a Britney Spears joke on stage as much as I want to watch another expose of Gary Condit on TV. But in the end, the play’s smartness wins out. Sleepers is effectively affecting, due to the strength of the writing and the understated performances of the three actors.

I am sad to say that by the time you read this the show will have closed after only four performances. One hopes that Singularity may remount these shows as a full production in the future. But in any event, this brief run served notice of the immense talent of all the parties involved in what proved to be (if you’ll excuse the pun) the sleeper success of this summer.

I can never know precisely what it feels like to be Asian in America; my Caucasian heritage–and features–make that an impossibility. Which is why a project like The Square is so invaluable: for two-and-a-half hours, I and a theatre full of people of the same and different sizes, shapes, ethnicities, together experience, up close and personal, something of what it means to be an Asian-American. In the bargain, we are expertly entertained as well as enlightened. The Square is a huge success for Ma-Yi Theatre Company, who are presenting it at The Public Theatre, and for Lisa Peterson and Chay Yew, the director and playwright who dreamed it up in the first place.

What they dreamed is a play composed of sixteen short plays, all set in a square in a Chinatown in a large American city. They asked sixteen American playwrights (see the list in the sidebar at left) to write these plays; and found a dozen actors to play the many varied roles that resulted.

What they've got is a play about difference, mostly: how keenly it's felt, and how damagingly it resonates. In Han Ong's Untitled, we meet an immigrant fresh off the boat trying to make sense of the English language and the American Way, learning his place in a society that views him as intractably alien. And will continue to view his descendants that way as well: in Diana Son's Handsome an American lady lusts after her Chinese servant but draws the line at treating him as an equal; in Jessica Hagedorn's Silent Movie the stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental is deconstructed; and in Constance Congdon's New the interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is a significant plot point. Perhaps Jose Rivera's Pediatrics, the most effective of the sixteen plays in The Square, illustrates this unpleasant truth most powerfully in its tale of prejudice and hatred among a group of immigrant children.

Other pieces in The Square focus on feelings of aloneness and other-ness. Mac Wellman's mini-serial My Old Habit of Returning to Places gives us the excellent actress Ching Valdes-Aran as a past-her-prime matriarch in search of whatever it was she was looking for when she emigrated to America. Kismet, In a Square on a Wedding Day in Spring by Bridget Carpenter offers a look at a second-generation Asian-American woman trying to understand her mother's energetic assimilation into Andy Warhol's Factory Culture. And Philip Kan Gotanda's lovely The Old Chinese Man reveals the clash between Old World and New in the defensive mindset of an Asian-American girl dating an All-American guy.

Broad issues of bigotry and stereotyping are addressed in Maria Irene Fornes's oblique The Audition, David Henry Hwang's whimsical Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet, Ping Chong's compelling Excerpts from the Diary of a Chinese Envoy, and Robert O'Hara's clever but overlong The Spot. And all of themes mentioned heretofore are refracted through the prism of homosexuality in Craig Lucas's excellent Examination and Chay Yew's moving Scissors.

Cricket, by Alice Tuan, points the way toward a new world of understanding and acceptance.

Only Kia Corthron's Anchor Aria really misses the mark. This rambling monologue feels indulgent and diffuse.

A crisp, clean staging is provided by Lisa Peterson on a unit set by Rachel Hauck, augmented by appropriate costumes (Christianne Meyers) and lighting (James Vermeulen). The ensemble is exemplary, with particularly memorable work turned in by Hamish Linklater (as an Irish kid trying to understand adult ideas of racism in Pediatrics, and as a gay man with a crush on his Asian-American doctor in Examination), Joel de la Fuente (as a smart Chinese teacher in Cricket, and as the object of the American lady's desire in Handsome), Wai Ching Ho (as a surprisingly liberated Chinese lady in The Spot), and Michael Ray Escamilla (in a surprising variety of roles, in The Spot, Cricket, The Audition, and My Old Habit of Returning to Places).

Well, I've got to tell you: I really wish I had seen The Stranger sooner. That way I could have started babbling enthusiastically about it earlier, urging you to get over to The Red Room Theatre to see it. I still will, but the show is closing on December 22nd so you only have two more chances to see this terrific stage adaptation of Orson Welles' noirish 1946 thriller about a Nazi who infiltrates a small New England community.

What's so exciting about this play is the spectacular mise en scene of its director-adaptor-designer, Frank Cwiklik. I became a Cwiklik fan earlier this year when I saw his memorably eccentric take on Shakespeare, Bitch Macbeth. I said then that he is a director of budding brilliance and I have to say after The Stranger that I was right: somebody hurry up and give this guy a budget, because he can do more with nothing than almost anybody I can think of.

His transfixing rendering of The Stranger happens in the tiny, boxy space of The Red Room with just a couple of props and only one important set piece to speak of, which is a huge clockface on the rear wall, representing the clock tower of a Connecticut church, a location that figures prominently in the plot. Yet when you watch The Stranger you will swear at various times that you are on a train crossing some unnamed European border, going through customs in the USA, playing checkers in a sunny but dingy small town general store, having a romantic tryst in a graveyard at midnight, or eavesdropping on conversations in any number of other locales. Cwiklik does it all with evocative lighting and a dazzlingly ambient soundtrack (by Youthquake!); and of course the actors do it, too, playing with economy and skill to take us on a roller coaster ride without us ever leaving our seats. This is what theatre is supposed to do: engage us, captivate us, bring us somewhere we've never been and show us something we've never seen. Cwiklik and his colleagues at Danse Macabre Theatrics do all this by melding their spectacularly vivid imaginations with our own. Result: theatre that genuinely transports its audience.

It's certainly a plus that the story is so strong. The Stranger begins somewhere in Europe, just after World War II, where we encounter Konrad Meinike, a shadowy man in a trench coat who is making his way across the border with a phony passport, telling officials that he's "traveling for his health."  Meinike is in pursuit of someone named Franz Kindler, for whom he has a message from the "All Highest." The fact that those initials are the same as Adolph Hitler's gives us our first clue into what's going on (and also, deliciously, turns out to be something of red herring). We follow Meinike to the small town of Harper, Connecticut, where his quarry apparently lives under the name Charles Rankin. It gives nothing away to tell you that Rankin is indeed Kindler, or that he is about to marry into a prominent New England family, or that he is obsessed with tinkering with a big church clock that hasn't worked properly for a century.

It would be giving something away to tell you much more. Suffice to say that another mysterious stranger named Mrs. Wilson shows up in Harper, and in between 25-cents-a-game checkers matches with Mr. Potter at the general store she carefully lowers a net around Rankin, involving his passionate wife Mary and others in her family as needed. It's a story that spins with increasing intensity as it heads toward its climax; the final moments are utterly thrilling.

Cwiklik has cast The Stranger well, with Peter B. Brown better than ever as Rankin (especially in that splendid last scene). Tom Reid is creepily enigmatic as Meinike, Josh Mertz is dead-on perfect as Potter, Dan Maccarone is appealingly earnest as Mary's younger brother Noah, and Moira Stone, Gerald Marsini and Ian W. Hill are fine in various smaller roles. Michele Schlossberg is a portrait of deadly calm as Mrs. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson was Mr. Wilson in the film). Only Sarah Jane Bunker is less than satisfying, missing the emotional peaks that Mary ought to be experiencing.

Okay, enough said; if you're reading this and it's not yet December 23rd, head to the Red Room and see The Stranger for yourself; I don't think you'll be disappointed. If it is December 23rd or later, sorry; but watch this website for news of the next Frank Cwiklik show. I'm going to get to that one early, I promise.

John C. Picardi's new play The Sweepers wants to celebrate the unsung heroism of the women who stay at home while their men go off to war: the mothers and wives who keep the home fires burning so there'll be something worthwhile to return to after the fighting's over. It's a lovely idea, and he nearly pulls it off in this period piece about three first generation Italian-American women coping with the devastating effects of World War II. Set in North Boston in the summer of 1945, just as the war is coming to an end, The Sweepers introduces us to Dotty, Mary, and Bella, lifelong friends whose relationships are sorely tested by cataclysmic events over which they have no control.

Dotty is the simple one, uneducated, earnest, and naturally hearty, though she finds herself unable to remain so in the face of the double tragedies the war has left her with—a shell-shocked husband in a psychiatric hospital and a wounded son whose leg got shot off by the Japanese.

Mary is the pious, smart, resourceful one, dutifully collecting paper, metal, and other commodities for the war effort in a child's red wagon. Her faith in God and country is severely tested by the continued lack of news about her husband and son, both somewhere in the South Pacific.

Bella is the complicated one, a single parent whose drunken Irish husband abandoned her years before, a devoted mother whose grown child, Sonny, was 4F and therefore able to become a lawyer. Sonny's about to be married to a ritzy Italian girl from New York named Karen. The wedding—and in particular the old country ritual of displaying the wedding night sheet on the morning after—serves as catalyst for the play's events.

Picardi has created interesting characters and devised an effective situation for them in the wedding dilemma: Will Sonny make Karen hang up her wedding sheet or not? Unfortunately, in the play's ineffective second act, Picardi allows his characters to indulge in soap opera melodrama instead of behaving like real people. He piles too much onto their plates, too: The Sweepers would make its points more eloquently with half the noise and half the fuss.

Matthew Walton excels in the show's best written role, Sonny; Brigitte Viellieu-Davis (Dotty), Donna Davis (Mary), Dana Smith (Bella), and Ivy Vahanian (Karen) do fine work but they can't finally make their characters believable.

The Train Play is the kind of show that is most difficult for me to review. On the one hand, it's a noble mess, loaded with interesting conceits and intriguing notions and redeemed by some startlingly good performances and production elements. On the other hand, it's a messy mess–confused, pretentious, unclear, and unsatisfying, and harmed by some alarmingly awkward performances and unfocused staging. I've not seen other plays by author Liz Duffy Adams or producer Clubbed Thumb, but I'm certain they have the best of intentions. But The Train Play doesn't work. What's a reviewer to do?

The responsible approach would seem to be to let you make up your own mind about The Train Play, armed with my assessment of the general state of the thing. Start by reading the synopsis above, which is 100% accurate, and possibly the source of some of Adams' difficulties. The Train Play does, indeed, bring together a 12-year-old would-be superhero ("Leopard Girl"), an Irishman on the run named Gabriel Angelfood, an embittered travel writer (Paul), an unraveling scientist, three peace-loving brothers from Russia (Misha, Sergei, and Dmitri), and the earth goddess Gaia. Adams puts all eight on a train that, it is immediately clear, is going to some unscheduled destination (hell or heaven or death or infinity or someplace along those lines).

Stir up those ingredients and something's bound to happen; The Train Play really does feel that random. Big Ideas drift through the night on this locomotive, but unlike the train itself, they never manage to get anywhere at all. Yet we're intrigued by this weird precocious preteen who can stop time at will; by the jaded goddess who reminisces about epochs as if they were weeks; by these three Russian brothers who speak sometimes like fugitives from a Chekhov play and other times like honest-to-God revolutionaries who have found the real answer to life's problems; by–especially–the youngest of this trio, Dmitri, a poet who finds that he has fallen in love instantaneously with the Irishman Gabriel, even though–or perhaps because–they do not speak a common language.

All of these notions are marvelous and compelling. If only they added up to anything! Unfortunately, they don't: you leave The Train Play exhausted and unsure of what Adams was trying to communicate. It's not that the playwright doesn't supply resolution to her strange allegory. But when it comes, the play has spun so far away from comprehensibility that it barely registers.

And yet there's stuff to like and admire here. Adams has written some lovely thoughtful speeches for some of her characters, notably Gaia and Dmitri, and she's lucky to have Maria Porter and Ryan Shogren to deliver them with conviction and intelligence. Mark Leydorf and Gibson Frazier, who play the other two Russian siblings, are a treasure to watch and listen to; their joyful singing over the remains of a bottle of vodka is indubitably the high point of the evening. And David Morris's sleek, inventive set is visually arresting and serves the piece well.

But at least two of the actors–Quincy Tyler Bernstine (The Scientist) and Ami Shukla (Leopard Girl)–seem to be entirely at sea in their roles, uncomfortable with the characters they're called upon to create and the words they're called upon to speak. And director Jonathan Silverstein hasn't found a viable way to differentiate the sea of voices and ideas that Adams has presented him with: The Train Play takes a very long time to rev up, and never quite finds the momentum it needs to engage us.

So evidence of talent is certainly to be found here, but clarity of purpose is not. This isn't one of those pieces that I think can be improved by rewriting or restaging. Better these artists should all move on to something new after this, having learned from its admirable but unfulfilled ambitions.

The Twilight Series is a new experimental theatre piece from proto-type, which is one of the more adventurous, innovative, and worthy cutting-edge groups that I know of. (Their Bunny's Last Night in Limbo was reviewed by nytheatre.com last season.) The Twilight Series combines a poetically quirky text by Laura Klein with idioscyncratic staging (behind a plastic curtain) by Peter S. Petralia. It's been artfully realized by Klein and three other actors, Thomas J. Pilutik, Tristana Gonzalez, and David Sochet.

The overall effect is of a dimly remembered fever dream, or those moments just before you fall asleep when the events of your day dance through your slumbering consciousness. Arresting notions and barely-glimpsed images vie for our attention; Big Questions and little trivial questions get asked but never answered; ideas assert themselves and repeat themselves or drift away, unacknowledged.

It's fascinating, fitfully insightful, intriguingly oblique, and occasionally irritating. Petralia and Klein have distilled it to 45 minutes which is exactly the right length: less time wouldn't have been enough to get where they wanted to go, while more would have started to wear the audience down. (We are, after all, squinting through a heavy piece of plastic to make out what the actors are doing, and sifting through a dreamlike soundscape of random utterances and noises to hear what they are saying.)

I think of The Twilight Series less as a theatrical end in itself than as a laboratory: Petralia and his proto-type colleagues are innovators, pioneering a genuinely new kind of theatre. We're getting in on the ground floor, so to speak, of a multimedia form and vocabulary that portend a  fresh and original approach to making live performance meaningful and resonant. Kudos to everyone involved, particularly lighting designer Rebecca M.K. Makus, who achieves effects that are startling and beautiful.

The Woman in Black has been running for a very long time in London--about as long as Perfect Crime has been running here in New York. As far as I'm concerned, the sustained popularity of both shows is a bigger mystery than anything that either play can muster. Oh well: The Woman in Black (like Perfect Crime) is a harmless enough entertainment, built around a tour de force star part meaty enough to bring out the best in its lucky leading actor.

In this case, that actor is Keith Baxter. Thirty years ago, Baxter starred on Broadway in the (genuinely suspenseful) thriller Sleuth. It's a pleasure to see him now, dominating The Woman in Black with assurance and vigor and even a little glee. He plays a man named Arthur Kipps. who has come to the theatre to exorcise a ghost--a mysterious and terrifying presence that has haunted him for decades, ever since, while a novice solicitor, he was sent to a melancholy, isolated old castle to go through the belongings of a scary old lady.

The conceit of The Woman in Black is that Kipps and his "exorcist"--simply referred to as "The Actor"--will re-enact what happened in that awful time and place in order to banish its demons forever. This, clearly, doesn't stand up to even a little bit of scrutiny; but no matter, it makes for grand thespian opportunity for both the professional actor and the amateur one (i.e.,  Kipps). Both are astonishingly good, with The Actor taking the role of the younger Kipps and Kipps portraying everyone else (I told you Baxter's role was a tour de force).

It's wrong to reveal plot twists in any thriller, so I'll say no more. I will tell you that I wished that the thrills were more genuinely thrilling: there are no moments in The Woman in Black when something happens that's so heart-thumpingly unexpected that you literally gasp or scream or jump out of your seat. (I also wish the story were a bit more plausible; or that the theatre motif, which seems throughout to be on the verge of amounting to something substantial, were more than an elaborate red herring.)

All of this notwithstanding, The Woman in Black is indeed an entertaining show. Baxter and his costar, Jared Reed, are both splendid; the musty old Victorian theatre set by James Noone is outstanding and offers its own modest surprises; and Ken Billington & Brian F. Monahan's lighting and Chris R. Walker's sound design strike, so to speak,  just the right chords.

Randall David Cook's new play Third Finger, Left Hand is a wickedly funny, fitfully outrageous Southern Gothic murder mystery satire. It's a diverting, if uneven, hour-long show, and it's been given a swell production by Regardez-Nous Theatre Company under the direction of Michael Berry. And Barbara Helms is terrific as the determined wedding planner who emerges as Third Finger's (anti-)heroine.

The play takes place before, during, and after the wedding of Rebecca Gordon and Ward Vincent in a coastal South Carolina town. Because Third Finger is a bona fide mystery tale, it would be wrong for me to reveal too much of what happens. Suffice to say that the wedding doesn't actually take place, and that several of the participants wind up murder victims. The various plot twists--why the wedding is called off, who gets killed, and why--will surprise you; so will some plot tangents like a raucous car ride in which two of the bridesmaids suddenly realize their true natures.

And although gothic influences pop up now and again, the predominant mood of the piece is comic: the bloodshed's easier to take because the play is clearly meant to be more of a goof than a scare.

The action involves just four female characters--three bridesmaids and a wedding planner. The bridesmaids are quirky yet appealing in the Beth Henley mode: Joy (Ali McLennan), the bride's sister, is sensible but moody; Cassidy (Natalie Shull), a lovelorn, drug-addicted pharmacist, is eccentric and dangerously repressed; while Sheryl (Erin Shull), Rebecca and Joy's cousin, is an abrasive, take-charge type from up north. Marsha Sue Faircloth (Barbara Helms), the officious wedding planner from hell, rounds out the roster.

Playwright Randall David Cook is talented and imaginative; this, his first full-length play, offers a fun balance of over-the-top outrageousness and well-considered character humor. He's certainly a writer to keep an eye on.

This Thing of Darkness, the new play by Craig Lucas and David Schulner, takes place in a rustic cabin in New England "Now and Later," according to the program. The Now part concerns two young men named Abbey and Donald, who have just graduated from college and are on the verge of, well, everything, starting with mapping out lives that seem large and scary and uncertain.

The Later part offers a vision of their futures, 25 and 50 years from Now, in the same rustic living room but otherwise in a world much-changed by ravaged time. In the first vignette, Abbey, who has just been abandoned by his wife, lives with their twin sons, Reef and Skim, who are preparing to journey to Africa to do missionary work for the free-love cult they've become involved with. Donald arrives unexpectedly, remembering a pact that he and Abbey made when we first met them, in which they vowed to reunite in this house every five years on their birthday (which they share).

In the second vignette, Abbey and Donald have become virtual prisoners in the house, unnamed factors (global warming? apocalyptic nuclear winter?) having made the outside uninhabitable. Abbey is confined to a wheelchair and is, in fact, dying; the men, who have apparently been together for the past 25 years, try to offer comfort to one another even though there's really none to be had.

The glimpses of Abbey and Donald's future—and, one presumes, our own—are bleak and terrible. Without providing too much detail, Lucas and Schulner foretell a world of unimaginable hardship, fueled by mankind's willful and intractable impulses to destroy the planet and one another.

What's unclear is whether these ghosts of birthdays yet to be are harbingers of an inevitable fate or, like Scrooge's, mere portents of what may happen. The optimist in me votes for the latter, but I suspect Lucas and Schulner think otherwise: the play's ambiguous ending doesn't feel particularly hopeful to me.

This Thing of Darkness succeeds as a cautionary tale (and a mightily scary one). It's less effective in its exploration of connectedness and disconnectedness, as charted by the murky relationship between its two protagonists. Donald alludes more than once to establishing a sexual, rather than merely platonic, bond with Abbey (and there's a frankly unbelievable moment in the first scene when he shows Abbey his penis in what can easily be read as a failed attempt at a come-on). But Abbey seems to be resolutely heterosexual and it's never clear (a) whether Donald's apparent desire will ever be consummated, or (b) why Lucas and Schulner even bother to bring the issue up.

The fine young actors Chris Messina and Daniel Eric Gold play Abbey and Donald at 22 and Abbey's twin sons in the scene 25 years in the future. Thomas Jay Ryan and Mary McCann play Abbey's parents in Scene One and the middle-aged Donald and Abbey, respectively, in Scene Two. Larry Keith and Ralph Waite play the older parents and then, in the final vignette, the 72-year-old Abbey and Donald. It's actually less confusing than it sounds. But I couldn't come up with any compelling reason for the gender-bending that results from this arrangement, and in fact found it somewhat distracting.

Alexander Thomas has mined the recent history of his family to create his fine, thought-provoking one-man play Throw Pitchfork. The stories he recounts—about himself, his three older brothers James, Wesley, and Cleve, and—most compellingly—his father Willie—are well-worth telling; we are fortunate that he has taken the time to share them with us.

The narrative starts with Willie lecturing his young sons that when they grow up they must never be like him. We are then introduced to each of the boys and learn how prophetic Willie's words turn out to be. James becomes a drug addict while Wesley moves in and out of prison, a petty thief. Cleve, taunted by his older brothers as a "faggot," blossoms as an openly gay writer in New York City but falls prey to drink and, tragically, AIDS. And Alex himself has his own share of problems with hubris, booze and other issues on his way to becoming the accomplished actor—and person—that he clearly is.

Vivid accounts of pivotal events like Alex's first encounter with segregation in a public rest room in an Atlanta bus station dot the 75-minute-long show; we recoil in shock with him at that memory, then laugh at an early Hollywood scuffle involving Tony Danza and a stolen car. Thomas slips effortlessly back and forth from his present-day to younger self and to staunchly individual recreations of each of his brothers; he tells their stories with affection and humor and pride, even as he makes it clear that, perhaps unlike them, he has managed to move as far away from his father's legacy as he can.

And yet, the climax of the show is given over to Willie's story, in particular an awful, random event from his fourteenth year that changed his life forever. Without rancor and without judgment, Thomas conveys to us what it meant to be a black man in Alabama in 1933, more potently than I've ever witnessed.

Throw Pitchfork achieves greatness as social document in that moment. What happened to Willie Thomas, and the scars that got passed on to all four of his sons, must be remembered and honored. Throw Pitchfork is his worthy and valuable memorial.

Anne Basting's new play TimeSlips offers an affecting glimpse into the lives and minds of people with Alzheimer's. The play is essentially a recreation of a series of storytelling workshops that Basting herself conducted with several patients over the past couple of years. In it, a nurse-facilitator named Polly works with five individuals at an adult day center, urging and abetting their communication by encouraging them to invent stories about people she shows them in pictures.

Invent they do, gradually and fitfully at first, and then in fertile outpourings of imagery and imagination that dazzle and delight. One woman narrates a far-fetched tale of a can-can dancer in Africa with a secret past. Another takes on the trappings of a championship swimmer. A man and a woman jointly concoct a musical love story about a cowboy and his horse. And a fretful old gentleman invents a gentle superhero alter ego who combs New York City's books in search of something long forgotten.

The stories careen and misfire and stop and restart as their tellers grapple with the dysfunction that has taken over their minds. As a result, TimeSlips is dizzily absurdist and surreal on its surface, but profoundly sad in its subtext.

The play offers outstanding opportunities to its cast of six, all of whom do superb work here. Their names are Hope Clarke, John Freimann, Jodie Lynne McClintock, Michael Shelle, Sheriden Thomas, and Judith Van Buren. Two musicians, Christopher M. Curtis and Aaron Halva, provide invaluable and lovely accompaniment. A thrillingly ingenious set design by David Korins further enhances the piece.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic story that is ingrained in the American consciousness thanks to Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and the Academy Award winning movie starring Gregory Peck. Nicu’s Spoon have their work cut out for them in bringing it to the stage. Though their intentions are admirable, they don't finally succeed.

To Kill a Mockingbird examines racism in a small Southern town as seen through the eyes of the Finch family: daughter Scout, son Jem , and patriarch Atticus, a lawyer who defends a young black man who’s accused of beating and raping a young white woman. The trial quickly divides the town as everyone shows their true colors.

On page and on celluloid, Mockingbird has been a moving and profound story, rich in humanity, subtlety, and even humor. Here, unfortunately, director Stephanie Barton-Farcas seems to have flattened any humanity or profundity that Christopher Sergel’s adaptation might contain. There’s an alarming lack of urgency to the proceedings—everything on stage is way too casual and random. Bad blocking sometimes obscures the main action of a scene and often causes confusion about onstage relationships; it is frequently uncertain just who (or what, or where) the focal point of each scene is supposed to be. Pacing, meanwhile, is so slow that it often brings the play to a grinding halt, especially in over-used and overlong pauses. All of these missteps deprive Mockingbird of its thematic power and clarity, as well as the subtlety and, yes, the humor, necessary to get its anti-racism message across.

Happily, some of the actors manage to do good work under the circumstances. Natily Blair is dead-on as the tomboyish Scout, as are Ellen Rae Huang as one of the Finches' neighbors, Miss Maudie, David Marantz as the town sheriff, and Tony von Halle doing double duty as another of Atticus’ clients and the town judge. Good impressions are also made by Jaylin Marshall, playing the Finches' loyal and long-suffering housekeeper, Julie Campbell as the victimized young white woman, and Daniel Rappaport as the Finches' mysterious next door neighbor Boo Radley.

It’s always a good thing when a young theater company tries to make its bones with an established classic, and Nicu’s Spoon prove that they have the ambition and chutzpah to try and do just that. Here’s hoping they fare better with their next endeavor.

Tom's Midnight Garden, which is having a too-short engagement at the New Victory Theatre, is a delightful surprise. Developed by England's venerable Unicorn company from a story by Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden is theatre at its most sublime. Filled with joy and wisdom and, above all, soaring imagination, this is the ideal show for the entire family.

If, like me, you aren't familiar with Pearce's book (which was written in 1958), a bit of a synopsis may be in order. Tom, a small boy, arrives at his Aunt Gwen and Uncle Alan's flat after his brother Peter is diagnosed with a case of the measles. Tom is initially very disappointed at having to stay in this stuffy place until Peter stops being contagious: his aunt makes delicious food, but there are no other children to play with and the flat, leased from a strange and rather dour old lady named Mrs. Bartholomew, offers nothing to stimulate Tom. There isn't even a garden.

And then, one night, Tom is roused from sleep. He hears the big grandfather clock downstairs strike thirteen, so he knows that something's amiss. Urged on by mysterious voices, he tiptoes out of bed and starts exploring the house. To his surprise, when he opens the front door, he discovers a wonderful, beautiful garden. He steps outside and into a series of adventures so astonishing and exciting that, before long, he's begging his parents to let him stay here, even though Peter has recovered.

I don't want to give too much away, but I will tell you that the garden leads Tom to a lonely little girl named Hatty, who lives with her aunt and cousins in a house remarkably like the one Tom lives in now, but sixty or seventy years in the past. The marvelous central premise of Tom's Midnight Garden is that a child's unleashed imagination allows him or her to travel across time to find a kindred soul to play with; Tom and Hatty wind up becoming each other's imaginary friends, bucking up one another's spirits when real-time hangs heaviest.

The story also includes a couple of mysteries: What does the inscription on the big grandfather clock mean? And just exactly who is old Mrs. Bartholomew? Even if you guess the answers before they're revealed, you're still going to delight in young Tom's earnest and often ingenious plots and plans to resolve these matters to his own satisfaction.

The production, graced by David Wood's delightfully engaging script, Tony Graham's sophisticated direction, Russell Craig's elegant design, and Stephen McNeff's evocative musical score, is superb. The talented acting ensemble takes on so many roles that we're actually surprised to see only eight of them at the curtain call; all are terrific, especially Dale Superville as young Tom, Debra Penny as the growing-up Hatty, and Joanna Wake as odd, old Mrs. Bartholomew.

I love the fact that Craig and Graham keep Aunt Gwen and Uncle Alan's flat on stage through all of Tom's late night wanderings: it's a subtle but very important reminder that Tom never actually goes anywhere at all except into his imagination. And I love, too, that the creators of Tom's Midnight Garden trust us to use our imaginations throughout the show. They never show us a bit of the magical Victorian garden where Tom has all of his adventures, leaving each of us to conjure our own in our mind's eye.

The performance I attended was filled with youngsters who seemed to have a grand time; they were rapt and attentive throughout. So were the older folk, many of whom were wiping a tear from each eye as the final curtain came down.

Tom's Midnight Garden is as enchanting an entertainment as anything on Broadway right now. Whether or not you've got kids to bring with you, this is a show you don't want to miss.

In her cyber-interview with nytheatre.com, playwright Jeanmarie Williams states that Trading Futures grew out of two separate plays, one about a performance artist trying to work out troubling events from her own past, the other about a pair of estranged brothers who can't agree on their shared family history. Unfortunately, the separateness is still very apparent: Trading Futures feels like scenes from two different, incomplete dramas, intertwined skillfully but somewhat randomly. The resulting play is filled with interesting ideas and introduces us to three fascinating characters we want to know more about. But the information provided feels muddled and limited, and consequently we leave the theatre feeling unsatisfied.

The more compelling of Williams' stories is the one about Syd and Buck, who reunite after many years apart. It seems that Syd, a successful Wall Street broker who works in arbitrage, has been getting phone calls from Buck's myriad creditors. (Buck has identified Syd to them as his "closest relative not living with you.") Syd shows up at Buck's spare but squalid apartment, determined to turn his brother's life around. His plan: get Buck a job as a runner at his Wall Street firm (a friend owes him a favor).

What happens, though, is that Buck ends up taking to the job more than Syd ever imagined. Syd finds that he must now counsel Buck about being too zealous at work: apparently Buck has been working through lunch, to the consternation of his peers, and has started issuing memos suggesting process improvements.

The scenes in which Williams shows us Syd trying to help his eccentric brother the best way he knows how are rich, humorous, and deliciously offbeat. Buck possesses a unique take on just about every life issue, it seems; his explanations of what arbitrage really is or why computers are not cost-effective are wondrous quasi-surreal reflections on the state of the world. But it's what's behind Buck's quirkiness that most interests Williams, I think, and so Trading Futures lurches into murkier terrain as it reaches its climax, as the two brothers try to piece together the truth about their sad, abusive childhoods. The denouement is terrible and moving, but feels incomplete: the psychology of buttoned-up Syd and flipped-out Buck don't quite add up.

The problem may lie with the interlocking tale of Lila, a performance artist who was once Buck's girlfriend and who becomes something of an obsession for Syd. She seeks to work out her own troubled past in her art, apparently with success. Trouble is, the links—or contrasts—between Lila's journey of self-discovery and the ones taken by Syd and Buck are never made explicit or clear. Instead, we get hints about all three of these intriguing characters, but only that.

Trading Futures benefits greatly from the three fine actors who comprise its cast. Shoshona Willow Currier is inventive and interesting as Lila, especially when enacting snippets of Lila's various performances, which poke fun at some of the more outrageous manifestations of performance art. Ryan Judd is effective as the earnest, somewhat callow Syd. Patrick Dall'Occhio is most impressive, though, as Buck, creating a detailed, three-dimensional man whom we care about and genuinely want to understand.

The fact that playwright Williams can create characters as compelling as these three is indicative of the talent she possesses. I will be interested in seeing what she comes up with next.

The new play by Kenny Finkle is a twisted concoction: a mix of drawing-room comedy, melodrama, Monty Python, and existential musing. But above all, Transatlantica is a great deal of fun. Aided by a tight cast and the careful direction of Tim Cummings, the show is a welcome trip to the world of the wacky.

Reginald Reinhold (Jack O’Neill) is the straight-laced psychiatrist who, naturally, wants to rid the impending sense of doom that torments his patient Ilyria (Jennifer McKenna) and his wife Natasha (Beth Tapper). Ilyria and Natasha feel that death is only moments away. They are not talking about death in any abstract sense, but DEATH, that horrifying conclusion of life as-we-know-it. After the suicide of a male servant who disintegrates on the lawn and the appearance of a cute deer in the bay window, the trio are joined by theatre-maker extraordinaire Udi Bohe (Alfredo Narciso). Udi and his thick faux-German accent also feel death knocking at the door. Ennui-laced discussions, naturally, ensue.

Death eventually does knock at the door, literally. When Reginald lets him in, it turns out to be none other than Jacques Jacques Debussy Debergerac in disguise. Jacques Jacques (Dean Strange) is the love of Natasha’s life. He is also the love of Udi’s and Ilyria’s lives as well. But not everyone in Transatlantica is as smitten with loverboy as these three. Manic Inspector Strang-Jay (Greg Keller) hates the man and plots his demise. Over the course of the next hour or so, Reginald, Natasha and Jacques Jacques engage in an epic sword fight, Udi and Ilyria perform their new theatrical masterwork, and pretty much everyone dies and gets reborn a few times.

The cast carry off the absurd humor well and keep the laughs coming. Alfred Narciso and Jennifer McKenna nearly steal the show, however, as Udi and Ilyria. The two have wonderful comic timing and achieve the script’s balance between understated earnestness and over-the-top zaniness. A real highlight of the show is when Narciso and McKenna switch gears entirely to perform the play-within-a-play. After getting laughs aplenty, the two conjure real tenderness in those heartfelt moments as a couple contemplating the state of their relationship.

Following the conclusion of Udi and Ilyria’s play, Transatlantica runs out of steam a bit. The play could use some editing; comic energy of this degree is hard to sustain for the show’s duration. But despite the slight fizzle at the end, director Cummings and his cast give the audience a show full of comic pleasures. It is well-worth your time to meet the strange cast of characters who inhabit Finkle’s Transatlantica.

What are we to make of Charles L. Mee's new play True Love? He has described it, somewhat ingenuously, I think, as a contemporary take on the Phedre story, with a Greek chorus musing (a la Plato's Symposium) on the nature of the titular subject. That's true as far as it goes; but True Love goes farther--so far, in fact, that I think it crosses a line that oughtn't to be crossed. In twenty-odd years of adult theatregoing (and moviegoing, for that matter), I've never seen anything that I thought was honestly obscene. Until now.

How does the famous definition go: you know it when you see it. How's this: a play in which two characters have long monologues describing, graphically, incestuous molestation by a father of his son. A main plotline in which a woman fantasizes about and eventually consummates sex with her husband's 14-year-old son. A live play with one live teenage (or nearly) actor who has a long nude scene. Not to mention the definitely underage actress who is made to say all manner of "adult" things on stage (she is backstage during the nude scene).

I'm not calling for censorship; I am calling for restraint. Mee may indeed have a valid point to make--something along the lines of all humans are inherently flawed and who are we to judge what floats somebody else's boat. But True Love doesn't strike me as a plea for understanding and/or tolerance for child molesters. In fact, it may actually be a cannily disguised poke at trailer trash culture: is Mee suggesting that molesting is related to class?

I'm not sure I can sort out what the heck True Love is, in the end, but I can tell you that I was worried about that teenage girl on stage and that young nude actor (and, for the record, a live chicken who is needlessly made to participate in the goings-on, clearly against its will). Shock value and/or alienation effect aside, Mee (and his director Daniel Fish) have indeed crossed a line: as I fretted about psychological damage to youthful cast members I stopped paying attention to the play, and that can't be what Mee intends.

I certainly won't tell you not to see True Love, but go armed with the knowledge that it contains a lot of really prurient material with no apparent social value. On the other hand, I absolutely won't recommend it: believe me, if you miss True Love you won't have missed much at all.

Part of the fun of my job is that every night is a crapshoot: the nature of theatre is that you can never know in advance which play or musical is going to be the one that resonates, that strikes the chord, that reveals something fresh and wonderful and true. So it was with Glen Berger's Underneath the Lintel, which I attended, several weeks after its opening, with no expectations whatsoever. It turned out to be the most important, rewarding, nourishing show that I've seen all season.

Underneath the Lintel is a mystery story about understanding a life: gathering the debris left behind by a human being and filling in the gaps to try to make sense of the time that that human spent on this planet. Underneath the Lintel is also an extraordinary journey--via a one-man show disguised as a lecture--toward spiritual renewal. "Would you know a miracle if you saw one?" asks the play's narrator and central character. Sometimes just waking up to the wonders and mysteries of life is all the miracle we need.

I want you to see Underneath the Lintel as soon as possible, so I'm not going to give too much of it away right now. A Dutch librarian--nearing middle age; alone and a little sad; a lot resigned--happens upon an unusual book in the course of his duties one day. It's a tattered old copy of a 19th century European travel guide; the strange thing is that it is 113 years overdue.

Lucky for us, our hero does recognize a miracle when he sees one: his curiosity aroused, he tries to figure out how the book happened to show up in the return slot and--more important--who left it there. As he searches for clues to the borrower's identity, he finds himself drawn into a compelling and puzzling conundrum. His efforts to crack the case take him to England, China, and various other unexpected places, and eventually lead to a surprising conclusion that tests his faith in the unbelievable and unknowable.

It's a gorgeous, unforgettable tale that affirms the tenacity and endurance of man in a universe that feels infinite even when we don't stop to think about it. The librarian tells us that he is talking to us today in order to prove one life and justify another, and that's exactly what he does. Human contact--whether tentative or long-lasting--is only one of the miracles waiting for us in Underneath the Lintel.

Berger's text is dazzlingly rich and deliciously engrossing: the narrative flies and before you're aware of it you're drawn into the librarian's extraordinary saga. T. Ryder Smith, the play's lone actor, does remarkable work here, characterized by enormous honesty and conviction. Director Randy White lets neither pacing nor interest lag. Costume designer Miranda Hoffman has dressed Smith in a homely suit that tells us an enormous amount about the librarian before he even begins speaking. Set designer Lauren Halpern and lighting designer Tyler Micoleau provide an appropriate environment for the piece; sound designer Paul Adams works some miracles of his own (but you'll have to see the play to discover their exact nature).

Underneath the Lintel, so simple and unassuming, is the most profoundly moving and wise play on stage in New York right now. Aren't you curious about what secrets lie behind a 113-year-old book? You should be...

The Immigrants' Theatre Project,  Lower East Side Tenement Museum and The Kazbah Project have joined forces to present a double bill of one-act plays about women in Muslim cultures called Unexpected Journeys. (The production is the centerpiece of the Sixth Annual Immigrants Theatre Festival.) The title suggests exploration of a mindset we know too little about: particularly at this moment in our history, some insight into the lives and spirits of Muslin women would be significant and useful.

Alas, the two plays that comprise Unexpected Journeys, though wildly divergent in theme and tone, have in common a woeful lack of such insight. The first, Cracking Mud is Pinching Me by the Australia-based playwright Haya Husseini, is a gentle, vaguely surreal comedy about three generations of a Jordanian family. Grandma is wise and prone to visions; Mother is free-spirited, sensual, and slightly irresponsible; daughter Maya is conservative and reserved, embracing the Muslim traditions that her elders have eschewed.

This is certainly a fascinating and arresting work, and it benefits enormously from the casting of two charismatic, endlessly interesting actresses, Irma St. Paule and Tamir, as the two older women. But Husseini never gives us an explanation for Maya's decision to look backward rather than forward for a way to live her life; though the playwright doesn't explicitly judge her characters, there's a clear sense of disapproval concerning Maya's choice, but nothing substantive to back it up.

The evening concludes with Egyptian playwright Nora Amin's abstract fantasy The Bermuda Triangle, in which a woman explores and acts out power relationships with three different male archetypes, the husband, the lover, and the pimp. It's not uninteresting as far as it goes, but neither is it terribly clear, nor does it have much new to say about sexual politics. Most disappointingly, in this context, is the fact that the central character's identity as a Muslim woman is pretty much peripheral to the thing; though The Bermuda Triangle is set in Cairo, it could just as easily take place practically anywhere in the world.

Unity Fest 2001 is a  festival of new gay-themed plays, sponsored by The Fourth Unity, a cooperative of actors, playwrights, and designers that has been around for five years. This year's festival offers eighteen plays in three different evenings; I reviewed Program C.

The evening begins with Rug Store Cowboy, by Gary Garrison, which is a playful little comedy about Bradley, a young clerk in a Chelsea carpet store, and his surprising encounter with a cowboy named Nolan Fisher who wants an expensive rug and, perhaps, something more. Garrison has fun exploding stereotypes here, giving us a randy, self-assured, very masculine cowboy who is entirely comfortable with his sexuality–certainly more comfortable than Bradley can handle. It goes where you expect it to, but it gets there with honesty and wit. Courtenay A. Wendell directs; Tony Hamilton (Bradley) and especially James McLaughlin (Nolan) bring it to life nicely.

The second play is the evening's weakest–a ponderous and overlong soap opera called Evergreen, written by Amy A. Kirk and directed by Bekka Lindstrom. The best thing about this piece is the (uncredited) folk song that introduces its segments, effectively performed by Lindstrom, who accompanies herself on guitar. The play itself tells the story of two women,  best friends as girls, who reunite years later. Their childhood friendship ended just as one was realizing that her feelings for the other were sexual; now the former is in San Francisco in a committed relationship while the latter is drifting unhappily through a series of bad marriages. Kirk's work is cliché-ridden and unfocused; I really don't know what she's ultimately trying to tell us here. Donna Jean Fogel and Courtney A. Wendell flounder as Evergreen's two under-defined characters.

Anton Dudley's Pick-Up Lines, which follows, is a clever short comedy. In it, two young men meet in a noisy gay bar and manage to misunderstand each other completely, their words drowned out by insistent, loud music. It's a great idea, but Dudley hasn't quite realized it here: the missed connections should be clearer to us in the audience; and it would have been nice (as well as more in keeping with the overall tone of the evening) if the two men had talked about something other than sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Nonetheless, this is a cute diversion, with Michael Rivera and Nicholas Warren-Grey offering appealing performances under Courtenay A. Wendall's direction.

The next piece, Rich Orloff's Class Dismissed, also could use some development. In this case, however, I'd like to see a full-blown play created from this ten-minute vignette: Orloff creates here a pair of very compelling characters in a provocative and interesting situation that we really should learn more about. Keith Lorrel Manning plays Gene, a religion professor who has been fired, and Frank Anthony Polito plays Lawrence, the student with whom he has had an affair, prompting the dismissal. Both actors do excellent work here, as does director Donna Jean Fogel, leaving us wanting more information than we get in this too-brief, very promising drama.

Kim Yaged's Never Said gets the spot before closing, deservedly; this broad, very funny comedy is the most satisfying item on this particular bill. In it, a woman (Hope Lambert) is torn by memories of past lovers, one male (John Jay Buol) and one female (Bekka Lindstrom); as she wrestles with their intrusive ghosts, she also contemplates having a quickie with a horny stranger (Ivan Davila). It's a canny and witty journey into the part of our brain we pretend to control, and it's shrewdly staged by Anton Dudley. All four actors are fine, with Lindstrom and Davila particularly memorable.

The program concludes with Chay Yew's White, which is barely a play at all. It's presented here as a monologue, delivered by Patrick Wang, but it feels more like a poem (and I'm sure it reads smashingly). It's a middle-aged Chinese man's account of a night in a gay bathhouse; oddly dated, now, but filled with evocative and vivid descriptions of mechanical, passion-less sex and the deep longings it will presumably alleviate.

All in all, a mixed bag: some satisfying comedies, some intriguing dramas, all showcasing valuable voices too little heard-from as well as many talented directors and actors. If Program C is indicative of the other two evenings, you will be well-served to visit Unity Fest 2001 any time.

Doug Wright's evening of short plays, now at the Vineyard Theatre, takes its title from the very brief sketch that serves as its curtain raiser. It's set in a theatre--presumably the same one we're in--and takes us into the minds of five audience members who are waiting for the show to start. They hear the now-ubiquitous announcement about cell phones and candy wrappers (hence the title) and react in extravagantly eccentric ways. It's a cute vignette--and absolutely nothing like what follows.

For what follows are three one-acts in the "Twilight Zone" vein, bizarre and fantastical tales, each with an eerie and/or sinister twist at the end. The author calls them "mordant bedtime tales for adults" which seems a misnomer--none of them struck me as terribly sarcastic or painful, nor do they seem especially adult. They also, alas, don't come off particularly as plays: these three pieces feel very much like short stories, and Wright, who has directed his own work here for the first time, hasn't done anything to make them effectively theatrical.

The first piece is Lot 13: The Bone Violin, which is set, inexplicably, in an auction house. A mother and father narrate the sad story of their violin prodigy child, with interruptions from the music professor who wanted to make him famous and the doctor who wanted to make him immortal. It feels like it's supposed to be about exploitation, except the surprise ending doesn't support that theme; maybe it's just supposed to be a nasty little horror story. Either way, Lot 13 is certainly not my cup of tea.

Next is Wildwood Park, the longest and also the most predictable segment of Unwrap Your Candy. Reg Rogers plays a suspiciously mannered fellow named Dr. Simian who is touring a famous house with realtor Ms. Haviland (Leslie Lyles). It turns out the house was the site of a gruesome mass murder; I think you can guess the rest.

The final piece is Baby Talk, in which Michi Barall plays a pregnant woman whose baby starts speaking to her from the womb. Wright keeps us guessing whether the woman is insane or the baby is the Devil. Unsatisfyingly, not only does he fail to provide a definitive answer at the conclusion; he doesn't provide any sort of meaningful conclusion at all.

The effect of the evening is a kind of warped nastiness that used to be chic but hopefully isn't anymore: this was one of the least pleasant hour-and-a-halfs I've spent in the theatre this year. And Wright's static, narrative-bound approach to story-telling doesn't help at all: I kept wanting the characters to show me rather than tell me their tales.

John Patrick Shanley's new play Where's My Money? would be funny, if only it were funny. It begins with a surreal ghostly blackout sequence featuring screams, half-dressed women in beds, and various weird apparitions, all to a Psycho-ish soundtrack, that suggests something broad and amusingly deranged is about to unfold.

What follows, for most of the remaining eighty-five painfully slow-moving minutes of the play, is broad alright, and deranged; but amusing only if you're desperate to laugh. Where's My Money? is about two married couples, Sidney and Marcia Marie and Henry and Natalie. Both men are divorce lawyers in the same firm; Natalie is a neurotic, yuppie-wannabe accountant, while Marcia Marie is a spoiled and unhappy housewife.

These are not good marriages. Sidney cheats (at the moment with a needy out-of-work actress named Celeste). Natalie is being visited by her dead ex-lover Tommy. Henry refuses to open a joint checking account with Natalie–trust issues?–and Marcia Marie clearly loathes Sidney (plus she knows he's cheating).

And, believe it or not, that's about it. Oh sure, stuff happens: Tommy crashes through a door at one point, and Celeste commits suicide. But none of it seems to matter very much, and at the end the four main characters are as resolutely self-involved and bound for unhappiness as they were at the beginning.

I suspect Shanley was going for something approaching farce, but under his own inexplicably heavy-handed direction what he achieves is leaden soap opera. The unpleasantness of the characters and their discourse only makes Where's My Money? worse: about fifteen minutes or so, for example, are given over to Celeste's detailed account of the way she has humiliated herself, sexually and personally, in her affair with Sidney. An intentionally perverse set by Michelle Malavet is momentarily interesting but eventually distracting. Performances are on the wrong side of professional, surprisingly, in all but one case (Florencia Lozano manages something like truth as Marcia Marie).

All in all, a bitter play and a bitter disappointment.

What makes a seemingly ordinary man do evil?

Suddenly, this question has enormous resonance. Woman Killer, the new play by Chiori Miyagawa, considers it with incisiveness and vigor; and though it cannot supply the answer, it reminds us–as if recent events made it necessary–that violence and evil is inextricably part of the human experience.

Woman Killer is based on a Bunraku play by Chikamitsu from 1721 about a young man who is driven to commit a heinous, senseless murder. Miyagawa has updated the story to present-day Brooklyn, in and around the homes of two apparently ordinary, well-to-do families. One of these families consists of a mother, father, and their three children: Amy, a teenager; Timothy, a college student; and Clay, the careless, spoiled oldest son.  Clay is the title character: it is his decline and fall–morally and spiritually–that is depicted in the drama, as he falls prey to drugs and an obsessive love for a smart and beautiful prostitute that eventually bring him to the breaking point.

The other family is made up of James, a businessman; his stay-at-home wife, Anne; and their young daughters. Anne, vaguely troubled but earnestly good, is Clay's victim. Woman Killer, then, emerges on one level as a representation of the struggle between pure Good and pure Evil, and it's a compelling one. But Miyagawa refines (clouds?) the issue by introducing notions of religion (eastern and western), culture, society, and family. Ultimately, Woman Killer looks within and all around Clay to find the root of his violent act. Where does such an impulse come from?

The play is supremely original, combining traditional narrative with monologues, music, and movement to present its themes from different perspectives. The effect is a clash of styles that mirrors the clash between Clay and the rest of the world, which is highlighted and underlined to great effect by director Sonoko Kawahara, with her designers David Korins (sets), Theresa Squire (costumes), Ben Stanton (lighting), and Crispin Freeman (sound). I think my understanding of Woman Killer would be further enhanced if I knew more about some of these specific references to Japanese culture and theatre. Suffice to say that the play and its staging is strikingly effective. And there's a stunning, startling coup de theatre at the climax.

The cast of nine is generally fine, with particularly excellent work turned in by Crispin Freeman as the magnetically reprehensible Clay; Kristin DiSpalto as Rebecca, the target of his obsessive love; Ronald Cohen, as Clay's weak but loving step-father; and Paul H. Juhn as a variety of characters who function as Clay's antagonists (judges?).

Woman Killer is riveting, compelling theatre, and it raises questions that don't–won't–go away. In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, it's not clear when audiences will next get a look at this piece; but when they can, they should.

World of Mirth, Murphy Guyer's intriguing but uneven new play, is set on a carnival midway--"Kaspar Kelly's World of Mirth" reads the garish sign posted overhead. The missing lightbulbs on that sign suggest that this carnival troupe has hit hard times; so does the lack of customers or anything approaching high spirits among the denizens of this particular carnival. Buffy Starr, aka the Wild Woman of Borneo, complains that she hasn't had a hot bath in a week; Emmett, the elderly, dull-witted company painter, is sourly awaiting his weekly supply of "medicine" while worrying that he be laid off.

Behind them, in a gigantic and vaguely sinister cage, Sweeney the Clown (star of the popular "Clown Dunk" attraction) hurls insults and invective at Buffy, Emmett, and anyone else who passes by. Sweeney, we learn, is always inclined to see the dark side of things, but he's particularly ruthless today because of the recent firing--and subsequent suicide--of Oscar the Frog Boy. Sweeney seems determined to escape Kaspar Kelly's World of Mirth and at the same time to expose its proprietor as a heartless hypocrite. He sets in motion a weird, self-serving plot that opens his fellow carnies' eyes and ends in tragedy.

The first act of Guyer's play sets all of this up skillfully. Despite the cliched nature of virtually every plot and character element in his play, Guyer infuses them all with life and makes the thing work. In this he is aided enormously by director Dona D. Vaughn, set designer Michael Brown (whose midway design is spectacularly good), and several talented actors, including George Bartenieff as sad, simple-minded Emmett; Jack Willis as the dangerous carnival overseer Patch; Victor Slezak, slick and deceptively complex as Kaspar Kelly; and, best of all, Deirdre O'Connell as the street-smart and world-weary cooch dancer-turned-sideshow attraction Buffy Starr.

The second act, though, is much less effective, as Guyer switches gears from melodrama to something far more serious. Sweeney suddenly becomes more symbol than man (of what, though, I can't say); as the clown becomes The Clown, World of Mirth loses its footing badly.

Mark Johannes makes the most of the showy role of Sweeney in a performance of memorable proportions. Several well-choreographed fight sequences (by B.H. Barry) enhance the excitement quotient; and Guyer's vivid dialogue is almost always interesting. But in the end World of Mirth fails to add up to very much.

Surrealist writer and poet Yi Sang--whose work prospered in the 1930’s while his country was under Japan’s severe colonial rule--is something of a national hero in Korea according to Yi Sang’s writer and director Sung Rno. He also tells us that most Koreans admit that they don’t understand Yi Sang, who died of tuberculosis in a Tokyo prison at the age of 27, and that this exquisite play is "just one more crack at "getting" Yi Sang." The play, or puzzle, or dream sequence, threads the author’s life and work through 20 short vignettes. We are told that Blue, played by C.S. Lee, "could be" Surrealist writer Yi Sang. Red (Paul H. Juhn) could be his best friend, and Green (Deborah S. Craig) could be the woman they both fall in love with.

Green is a performer in a Diet Coke strip-show of sorts, maybe. What we do know is she is an extension of the product she represents--saccharine in nice packaging, and possibly harmful to Blue’s (Yi Sang) health. Blue’s best friend Red is caught in the middle by falling in love or lust with the lascivious Green. In subsequent scenes, we see how Green becomes both the writer’s muse and the one that ultimately "clips his wings"--taking his life from its fearless flight in an ethereal world of imagination and peculiarity to one that is grounded in realism, jealousy and pain.

Sung Rno skillfully clarifies difficult and, well, surreal material and gives us a map to follow. Yi Sang's life and prose are continually woven together like a tightly structured piece of classical music. The play’s first vignette is described as a scene in which Blue, Green and Red try to "unfathom the mysteries" of ramen noodles. Blue says that someone stole his water (or maybe life-force, or maybe just water) and therefore he is unable to cook the noodles. Some other highlights: A tongue-in-cheek dance rendition of "What I Did for Love" reveals Green’s psychological abuse of Yi Sang; the writer’s prose becomes the material for a hilarious 1930’s-style tale of three scheming limbs: Blue’s Glove, Red’s foot and Green’s elbow; Red and Blue try to physically imitate the form of the one-sided Moebius strip because they want to know what it feels like to be totally subjective.

Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen is funny, morose and delicious to watch but above all, intelligent and professional. Yi Sang’s artists know how overcomplicated acting and directing can weigh down a production, and this one contains neither. All three actors are physically and emotionally exact and handle the difficult material with ease. The piece’s design elements, both lights and stark set, are as lucid and simple as they needed to be.

Sung Rno gently invites us into Yi Sang's imagination, where we see how the young writers’ prose in this piece is a place to make sense of his life and unfulfilling relationships, or maybe, on a more surreal level, a mechanism to rob them of any sense at all.