Tennessee Prose

Tennessee Williams is quite the popular playwright this season. Five by Tenn opened off Broadway in the fall, and The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire are currently enjoying runs on Broadway. Now at 59E59 Theaters, Linda Marlowe is starring in Mortal Ladies Possessed, a new work based on Williams's short stories. Perhaps the show's creators should have left those books on the shelf. The night begins with a door frame and a woman's personal effects strewn about a black box stage, and disembodied voices talking loudly and impatiently. Some character names and facts are thrown around, but it's tough to absorb this information out of context. Then Marlowe enters as the Widow Holly, patiently listening to the cacophony. There is silence, which the Widow Holly breaks with the sort of absurd personal statement that authors use to start their plays/books off with a laugh. (In this scenario, it does not have the desired effect.)

It turns out that she rents out rooms, and we see bits of the lives of the boarders at her New Orleans residence. Blackouts and the addition or subtraction of scarves and eyeglasses indicate changes of stories and characters. Since all of the tales are reminiscences, time is not linear, and in moments the characters jump from the near past to the faraway past to the present. But what makes perfect sense on the page, accompanied by character names and narrative directions, does not translate here to the stage.

Marlowe is a fine actress who speaks in a delightful girly rasp and commits fully to the physical and emotional presence of her characters. Her accent, though, does not play as effectively. The honey-coated drawl of Tennessee Williams's heroines is almost as iconic as the characters themselves, and certain expectations are inevitably formed. As Widow Holly, Marlowe spoke like an Australian who lived in New York for several years and then recently relocated to the South. There was no consistency, as if she was struggling to find the character's voice during her performance.

The only role in her repertoire here that needed no dialect coaching was Flora Goforth, the imperious owner of a Mediterranean villa. Marlowe was able to use an accent close to her own as she played up this deliciously vicious woman. This piece, in the middle of the set, was very funny, had an understandable story progression, and did not overstay its welcome. The same could not be said for its companion pieces.

A theatergoing audience appreciates it when the crafters of a show do not underestimate their intelligence, or their ability to interpret text and subtext. But when a production makes its audience work too hard to figure out who's who and what's what, oftentimes the audience stops trying. At the conclusion of Mortal Ladies Possessed, there was a hesitancy on the audience's part to clap, as they were not sure if they had, indeed, arrived at the end. All they, and this show, needed was a little more structure.

Butch/Femme Reign Again

The packed audience at La MaMa bubbled with excitement on opening night for Split Britches' Dress Suits to Hire. New York's most renowned lesbians

Much Ado, Indeed

Couplets, Mike Bencivenga's highly original new play about the rights and wrongs of love, proves that the Bard's sonnets are as malleable as his plays. Spinning a narrative thread out of the raw emotional material contained in several poems by Shakespeare, Bencivenga's text respects the wholeness of each sonnet's basic component

True Believers

You can run, but you can't hide. Religion seems to be everywhere these days, infusing everything from mainstream films (Kingdom of Heaven) to the Broadway stage (Doubt) to our national government's rhetoric. Joshua Feldman's play How Light is Spent examines the effects of religion and belief on the lives of four seemingly disparate characters. This cleverly wrought character study is a virtual human crockpot. But instead of boiling these characters down to their essentials, Feldman adds too much to the mix, leaving us with a puzzling array of actions, motivations, and outcomes. The play begins and ends with Judith and her boyfriend, Peter, who lies in a hospital bed receiving treatment for cancer. Judith, a stubborn atheist, cannot understand his new affiliation as a born again Christian, so she decides to break up with him. She moves back home to live with her widowed father, Ezra, a rabbi.

Ezra has befriended Amanda, a young girl who wanders into his synagogue one day. A recovering religious fanatic to the extreme (she recites religious texts by heart and once nailed her hand to a board), Amanda is being treated for schizophrenia. She adopts Ezra as a father figure of sorts and discovers that a traumatic event in her past somewhat fatefully links her to Peter, Ezra, and Judith. As Amanda reveals her secret, their lives are changed and they must reposition themselves both in their ideas of faith and their relationships with one another.

What does it cost to believe? How do we define and create faith? Why do we move toward (or away from) religion and notions of faith? How Light is Spent, with its captivating title, asks us to examine how faith works and reworks the lives of its characters. Faith cannot exist in a vacuum, and here we find characters who influence, challenge, bolster, shake and deny each other's faith.

It is also a critique of the believer. Each character accepts or rejects faith for unique reasons, often for what it can bring him or her. As Peter puts it, "If I have cancer, I'll have my reward. If I believe in the cancer, I can believe in God."

Paul Gelinas's set works brilliantly in design but fails in execution. He has framed the stage with a three-sided box of wooden boards, which cover the floor, ceiling, and back wall of the stage. As the show progresses, the upstage planks individually move forward and backward to create different configurations. The design seems to suggest the changing landscape of the characters' beliefs and relationships, but unfortunately the scene changes take so long that they distract from the show's flow.

Alison Cherry's lighting shines beautifully and hauntingly through the cracks between the boards, and an uncredited sound designer provides underscoring throughout the play that creates a cohesive mood

Musical Dostoyevsky

La MaMa e.t.c. is presenting the world premiere of Robert Montgomery's A Case of Murder, which is billed as "a singing detective story." A musical murder mystery inspired by Crime and Punishment, the play transplants Dostoyevsky's timeless story to modern-day New York City, to distracting effect. In the process, Montgomery also offers up little more than forgettable music, stock characters, and a story line that is more limp than literary. A Case of Murder follows the plot of the novel, a meaty book ripe for interpretation. After committing a horrific double murder, a young man lurks in limbo, dreading punishment yet yearning for redemption. This "musical" sidesteps any psychological complexities in favor of stereotypical TV-cop-show protocol. Told from the point of view of the distant, hardboiled (and sometimes drunk) Detective Porfiry (Brian McCormick), the show plays like a lost episode of the short-lived TV series Cop Rock.

Truth be told, this show is all over the map. Everything about it is abrupt. It begins abruptly with each of the eight characters taking to the stage and bursting into song with nary an introduction as to who they are. The murders, so integral they reverberate throughout the story, creating the impetus for everything that happens, are never seen by the audience. The victims are mentioned briefly and are nearly incidental. It's all tell and no show. One character abruptly moves to L.A. because that's what she's always wanted. Other characters abruptly fall in love

Reconceiving Strindberg

"I find 'the joy of life' in life's cruel and mighty conflicts," wrote August Strindberg in his preface to Miss Julie. Although published in 1888, the play was banned in many countries for its rejection of melodrama and its adoption of realism, and the frank discussion of sex and servitude broke class and gender-role taboos. In the play, the title character is the playful and manipulative mistress of the house, who corners one of her father's servants, Jean. What begins as simple flirtation soon unravels into a chaotic mess that explores the dynamics of their relationship to each other and to their families.

Lord Cromer, who banned the play from performance in England, wrote, "There is a sordid and disgusting atmosphere, which makes the immorality of the play glaring and crude." Of course, Miss Julie went on to become an essential part of the modern theatrical canon, the bridge between the mystical, romantic Symbolists of the late 19th century and the kitchen-sink realism that emerged at the beginning of the 20th.

With its production of Julie, the Theatre-Arts Connection has adapted the play for its art installation-cum-performance. The group has taken the realistic dialogue and abstracted it, using a surrealistic tone and design with a text freely adapted from the original. Spliced in are excerpts from works by Sophocles and Shakespeare, along with a tip of the hat to Charles Mee, the master of intertextual weaving. Alongside physical and vocal manifestations of the characters' subconscious drives, the play becomes overwrought, and what could have been an insightful and inventive production gets dragged down by its own overzealousness.

Despite the play's renown for displaying the beginnings of theatrical realism, Strindberg gives the audience numerous clues that the action takes place in a mystical void, outside of time and space. Its setting on Midsummer's Eve, an all-night festival celebrating the summer solstice, involves Dionysian abandon in dancing and drinking.

The master of the house is nowhere to be found, although reminders of his presence, in the form of his newly shined boots and the bell that summons the servants, constantly hang over the characters. The installation design by Liat Hazan and David I.L. Poole and lighting by James Bedell do a marvelous job of setting the tone. White scrims separate the audience and the actors as a dreamlike filter. The house is made of the same scrim, framed with a delicate wood. The scrims indicate the evanescence of the evening and the ease with which the house

Hello, Brooklyn

Holding up a "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt, Deanna Pacelli, star of the one-woman show There Goes the Neighborhood, looks at it with embarrassment. "O.K., I bought this in 1996 when it was ironic," she says. "I can't wear it now. I'd look like an [expletive]."

Pacelli is speaking as Peter, a white, thirtysomething architect living in Carroll Gardens. A resident of the neighborhood for more than a decade, the affable Peter is one of the early invaders of what not long ago was a close-knit, working-class Italian neighborhood. He is also one of the 10 characters of varying ages, races, and sexual orientations whom Pacelli inhabits to recount the story of Carroll Gardens's rapid gentrification.

Written by Mari Brown and based on interviews with neighborhood residents that she and Pacelli conducted over a two-year period, There Goes the Neighborhood, playing at P.S. 122 through May 29, weaves together the perspectives of nine residents and one outside observer to create a complex and insightful portrait of the neighborhood. At the same time, it offers 10 dead-on portraits of these people who live and work there. Smart, wickedly funny, compassionate, and insightful, There Goes the Neighborhood is a brilliantly written, brilliantly performed piece.

Pacelli, who carries the entire hour of the play on the strength of her characterizations, switches effortlessly, almost breezily, between characters like Peter; Vinny, a lifetime resident of Carroll Gardens and third-generation owner of Cositini's Pork Shop ("Bringing You the Best Pork in Brooklyn for Over a Hundred Years!"); and Mike, a nightclub owner from Hong Kong with an enthusiasm for the nouveau in culture, music, and art.

For example, moments after making her confession about the "Brooklyn Rocks!" shirt as Peter, Pacelli has pulled a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball cap on her head and is standing with shoulders back and chest puffed out while she booms in Vinny's classic Brooklyn Italian-American dialect, "Hello? Hello? What is this? What is this, 'Brooklyn Rocks'? Who rocks? I'm Brooklyn, do I rock?"

Inhabiting all of her characters with equal poise, Pacelli delineates each one with a few well-chosen mannerisms (adjusting her bra straps, putting on Chapstick, pushing her glasses up her nose), a prop or two, and a handful of linguistic tics.

It helps, of course, that Brown's script gives her pitch-perfect lines to deliver. In an article published in The New York Times in 2003 (There Goes the Neighborhood was first performed in Carroll Gardens in 2003), Brown says that when she began waitressing in a local bar back in 2003, listening to her customers talk was like hearing lines of dialogue.

But even if she owes some of the natural richness of the script to a good ear for conversation, Brown has taken her raw material and arranged and polished it to perfection. The rough and smooth, the bad and good, the complaints and the paeans all fit together to make a deep and compelling portrait.

In fact, the "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt is a fine metaphor for the show. Some of the characters hated it. Some loved it. A lot didn't understand all the fuss--Carroll Gardens, heart of Brooklyn, was their home, whether it rocked or not. There Goes the Neighborhood is a window into that world, and for the space of the play, it's easy to feel as if it's your home too.

Ophelia and the Prince

When Berlin fell to the Allied forces in 1945, Heiner Muller's service in the German army ended. He returned to his home, then occupied by the Soviet Army. One war had ended. Another was beginning. Muller was 16 at the time. Mentored by Bertolt Brecht, Muller eventually established himself as Germany's premier playwright. The success of his translations of classic works as well as his controversial original plays allowed him to travel through Western Europe and even to America during the peak of the Cold War. His love of socialism, fear of capitalism, and hatred for dictatorships led him to write HAMLETmachine in 1986.

Brief though the text may be (12 pages or so, depending on the version), it is nonetheless epic. It has inspired productions that last days at a time. Directors tackling HAMLETmachine have employed the use of towering LCD screens, dozens of actors, and lavish sets in attempts to bring all of the nuances of Muller's dense script to life.

In the face of all the history and the high expectations accompanying HAMLETmachine, director Taibi Ann Magar has attempted something truly ambitious: she has cut away the pomp and pretension that surrounds the play, shifting the focus from the complex political mayhem to the emotional conflict between Hamlet and Ophelia.

The stage design is minimalist in the truest sense of the word. There are no sets, no backdrops, and no props, save for two chairs. Thus it becomes the actors' responsibility to create their own world and bring the audience in with them.

Jessica Pohly does just that as Ophelia. Not only does she deliver her difficult lines clearly but she also devotes herself wholly to the words and the subtext beneath them. This is most notably evident as she seemingly dies onstage during her monologue that begins "I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep." Critic Gordon Rogoff once wrote that the play might be better called OPHELIAmachine. Pohly does all that she can to support Rogoff's thesis, giving Off-Off Broadway a performance to remember.

Evan Lubeck looks the part of the brooding Danish prince, but finds himself overpowered by Pohly. That he occasionally struggles with his lines is forgivable in a piece such as this, but Lubeck's real flaw is a failure to grasp Hamlet's emotional landscape. His Hamlet is a perpetually angry one, with occasional but brief bouts of sadness and confusion (always evoked with the same furrowed brow).

To be sure, Lubeck is not at all a bad actor, nor is his performance intolerable. Though not physically imposing, he uses his tall stature effectively to command attention. His abilities are best used toward the end of the famous "Get thee to a nunnery" scene, as he allows Hamlet's self-disgust and contempt for his mother to come out in his attacks on Ophelia.

The success of good acting, as well as the fault of inconsistent acting, lies with the director. With her lead actor, Magar seems to have made the common mistake of interpreting Hamlet as indecisive; he is far from it. As a result, her Hamlet is unfocused and fails to reach his full potential.

Magar creates very beautiful and tense visual scenes using nothing but two actors, two chairs, and lighting design. Her actors' movements are carefully choreographed, and the mere twitch of a wrist or widening of eyes grabs the audience's attention. However, the actors shift back and forth between naturalistic behavior and Grotowski-esque calculation. They are ultimately limited by Magar's direction, often remaining stoic for aesthetic reasons when the text calls for actions more explosive.

But if Magar fails to understand certain sections of the text, she certainly does not fail to grasp the larger themes that the author expressed. Muller describes his purpose for writing as such:

"What I try to do in my writing is to strengthen the sense of conflicts, to strengthen confrontations and contradictions. There is no other way. I'm not interested in answers and solutions. I don't have any to offer. I'm interested in problems and conflicts."

HAMLETmachine is certainly no exception to this rule, and Magar sets Hamlet and Ophelia onstage to explore all of their conflicts without distraction. No solutions are presented, and none are necessary. The nature of the text is such that it could easily have been misinterpreted and misused (as it sometimes is) as a soapbox for narrow-minded, anti-consumerist propaganda. But Magar refuses to trivialize the world's complex problems by offering answers, making this interpretation of Muller's classic one worth watching.

A Comedy

Poor Madame Ranevskaya. She is in debt, and the dire state of her affairs leaves her with little option but to auction her estate and its splendid cherry orchard. When presented with alternatives by the wily yet earnest businessman Lopakhin, Ranevskaya is immobile: she simply cannot forsake what took generations to build. In her thinking, to do anything other than wait for a miracle is to comply with the seemingly inevitable change about to consume her family and bring about its demise. And this is a comedy?

Well, that is debatable. Are we really meant to care much about Ranevskaya? In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov gives us a number of clues as to what he thinks of her. She's wanton. She's gullible. She abandons her daughters to go off and squander their inheritance on her extravagant whims. She has no spine and cannot bear to say no even to the most unreasonable requests. She thinks primarily of herself and her nearly delusional woes.

David Epstein, whose direction I loved in ICTC's recent production of Arcadia, has chosen to direct a show that is a wart revealer of a play. It takes guts. His cast is talented and full of an earnest zeal to feel and express their heady emotions. They are costumed marvelously (with the exception of a few unfortunate handbags) by Michael Bevins and have a lovely and appropriate set on which to play, thanks to Ed McNamee.

But something is off. I have a suspicion as to what it is: Ranevskaya. As played by Cindy Keiter, Ranevskaya's ceaseless crying jags are given a gravitas they do not deserve. And from that core all the other characters seem to crash like sentimental dominoes into each other. There is such pregnancy of thought, such precious period delicacy loose onstage, that the production often feels as if there is something very serious afoot. But with such a hollow heart as Ranevskaya at its core, who can't help feel cheated by emotions that are at best misguided?

Chekhov added two little words to the title of his play. The full title is The Cherry Orchard, A Comedy. What he knew, but very few people have ever listened to, is that Ranevskaya is a silly, obnoxious woman. Chekhov wrote a play about social change, asserting that the maudlin sentimentality of the landed class is nothing more than the childish antics of spoiled brats incapable of sharing, unwilling to cast off their faulty sense of entitlement for a new world order. Epstein occasionally has his cast nearly there, but not quite.

It is difficult to tell actors not to feel or that what they're feeling is wrong and inappropriate. Every modern acting class points to the legitimacy of emotions as the truth behind acting. It is difficult to cut what you love. But look at what Chekhov said about the play's first production, in 1904: "How awful it is! An act that ought to take 12 minutes at most lasts 40 minutes. There is only one thing I can say: Stanislavsky has ruined my play for me." You might recognize the director's name. And yes, some of Chekhov's criticism could be aptly applied to ICTC's production.

His play could be timely, if only the production took a step to make it so. Do we sympathize with the Enron executives who lost the millions they unlawfully gained at the expense of their employees? Do we think it is reprehensible when Kathie Lee Gifford is ridiculed for using child laborers from Third World countries while her son Cody tromps around redefining "spoiled"? Do we all nod our heads in assent when President Bush tells us how much he sympathizes with the poor single moms of America? Of course not. This is the same point behind The Cherry Orchard.

That said, I love this company. They have a voice, they have style, and they love what they do. The pitch-perfect near miss of a proposal scene between Varya (Beth White) and Lopakhin (Gerry Lehane) is both delightful and painful. It alone is worth admission. White's Varya is well calibrated, dancing the difficult line between absurdity and genuine emotion with grace and ease. Varya is arguably the only character punished with a fate she does not deserve, and White does her justice, then swiftly moves on. Lehane's Lopakhin is a worthy and conflicted counterpart.

Indeed, ICTC is a company worth getting to know, even if this production lacks clarity of purpose.

Trying It Out

The Theatre-Studio Inc. offers aspiring theater artists something incredibly unique in New York City: free space in Midtown. If a play is chosen as part of the TSI/PlayTime Series, it will receive at least two performances free of charge at 750 Eighth Avenue. What this means to the audience, however, is something less exhilarating. TSI provides one of the few spaces south of Manhattan's 110th Street where actors, playwrights, directors, and producers can experiment with their art without cramming a cast of 10 into a roach-infested living room or taking on three more bartending jobs to pay for a black box rental. TSI and producing and artistic director A.M. Raychel are to be commended for that.

In addition to its Main Stage productions, the company offers a PlayTime Series, a year-round offering of various one-act plays that change almost every weekend and are produced with minimal production values.

On May 11, the Series offered three short plays, A Blooming of Ivy by Garry Williams, Feeding Ducks by Lindsay Newitter, and Lost and Found by Denis J. Harrington. It was clear that each piece was just stumbling to its feet as a solid work of theater, but a few redeeming moments in each mollified the spectators.

A Blooming of Ivy was conceived by Indiana-based writer Garry Williams, with Michael Menger at the helm of the 20-minute staging. Letty Serra plays Ivy, a 60-year-old widow who is a strong farm worker and a strong woman, having raised two daughters since her husband's death 20 years ago. Her next-door neighbor, George Thomas, is a feisty widower, and both are struggling with grief and loss. The show explores the possibility of companionship after a long and forgotten absence of it, and offers an Off-Off-Broadway audience a story from outside of the city streets.

Although Serra is an Actors' Equity member who studied with the inimitable Stella Adler, her performance as the proud and lonely Ivy does not reach above mediocre. Yes, the piece is short, but neither actor sufficiently sinks his or her teeth into the part to make this simple and sweet play as full as it yearns to be.

Feeding Ducks is a 15-minute piece, far more esoteric than A Blooming of Ivy. Newitter is a New York-based playwright, and it shows. Her work is sharp and cynical with an absurd bent. The action centers around a duck pond, perhaps in Central Park, where New York characters

Rites of Secession

When the red states won on Election Day 2004, many people in the country were devastated. Some were particularly unhappy about George W. Bush getting a second term. Others mourned the defeat of John Kerry. Massachusetts natives Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa turned their grief into Massholia, a sprawling and unfocused rock musical now playing at the Flamboyan Theater. A gimmicky prologue is set at the first Thanksgiving. This meeting between settlers and Indians is filled with the usual intentionally anachronistic speech and pop culture references that comedians love to put in "old-timey" scenes. The prologue foreshadows the nation's troubles with the settlers' assassination of a benevolent Magical Turkey that lives in the woods. (Even then, we couldn't recognize a good thing when it was right in front of us!)

Cut to Boston on Nov. 3, 2004. Reactionaries have prompted Massachusetts to secede from the union to form Massholia, a new country run by John Kerry. His son, John Kerry Jr., has plans to take over the nation through deadly cranberry gas concealed in a baseball. Junior recruits high school student and "typical Masshole" Robbie Cordeiro to throw the poison baseball at a Red Sox game. Robbie sees this as a chance to show the world his dancing skills, and to impress Jen Leonard, the new girl in school.

Yes, there are many plots, many characters, and many, many scenes in the show. They vastly outnumber the music numbers, which is odd for a musical. It's also a shame, because Brett Warwick's songs range from good to outright catchy and are far superior to those in several Broadway shows one could name. Katie Workum's energetic choreography

Taking Off

First things first: yes, the men of The Full Monty do go the full monty. But in this effervescent, first-rate production of the musical, the joy in the titillation of their final striptease lies less in the moment when they exuberantly bare all and more in the delightful journey taken along the way. Many will argue that composer David Yazbek was robbed of the Tony in 2001 when his score went unnoticed in a year bulldozed by The Producers. This quiet gem of a show played a respectable run but failed to earn the acclaim it surely would have enjoyed in a non-Producers year. Thankfully, Yazbek has brought his jazzy, pop-edged music to a new Broadway show, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the rights to The Full Monty are now available, allowing theatergoers to enjoy its charms once more. The Gallery Players have produced its first New York City revival, and it is truly a must-see.

Based on the British film, this Full Monty takes place in working-class Buffalo, N.Y. Jerry Lukowski, out of work and down on his luck, must earn money to pay child support, or his ex-wife Pam will end their joint custody of their son. One night he and his buddy Dave Bukatinsky witness women screaming for a male stripper in a club, and Jerry is instantly inspired. Why not strip, earn money to pay alimony, and give "real men" a chance to show what they are made of? The "Hot Metal" act is born, and the rest of the show follows the men's auditions, rehearsals, and final performance. It's a simple story, but acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally has written a book that is both hilarious and touching and that lovingly gives each man his own finely drawn story.

Director Matt Schicker deserves accolades for helming such a tight production and, most important, for pulling together a gifted ensemble. Each of the six principals proves himself a triple threat

Late-Night Channel Surfing

Can three misplaced Ohio girls handle the pressures of being part of "the young and the horny"? Will Jerome's brother be able to accept two revelations in one night? And can Arnold Schecter keep Sally in Passaic, N.J., when a Martian prince comes calling? Find out tonight in a late-night-TV channel-surfing pleasure appropriately titled Incredible Sex, a trio of one-act comedies from the Foolish Theatre Company. Channel 1: HBO. Kim, Marge, and Charlene catch up on the previous night's gossip during their sexy vacation to Key West. It's Sex and the City in a steamier setting with a younger group of girlfriends and no towering skyline. The cast of Women in Heat includes a no-holds-barred "Samantha" (Charlene), a very private "Charlotte" (Marge), and the ever-conflicted "Carrie" (a post-coital Kim).

The similarities to Sex and the City are abundant: Charlene's belief that God gave us sex because "you can only tan in daylight, so here's something to do at night"; recaps of raucous romps; and overuse of words like "pussy," "threesome," and "anatomically correct blow-up doll." However, I can't remember the last time the Manhattan-dwelling foursome let the words "Bible camp" slip into their conversations. I guess that's what makes these Ohio girls so darn apologetic about their sexuality. These girls would rather cuddle after sex than get ready for Round Two. Accordingly, an anticlimactic ending leaves the viewer changing the channel rather than staying tuned for scenes from the next episode.

Channel 2: Gay and Lesbian TV Network. The paraplegic Jerome has his brother, Mark, over for a meal to reveal to him that 1) he can cook

Dissonance and Loss

One might expect Beacon Productions's There's the Story to be a musical, judging by composer Randy Redd's credits, which include Parade, By Jeeves, and Lucky Stiff. But this cryptic work is a play, impressively written by actor-playwright Timothy McCracken, that marries Redd's compositions, with their unresolved dissonance, to a painful theme of unexplained loss. There's the Story is set in the Hell's Kitchen apartment of Henry (Timothy McCracken) and his irritatingly predictable friend Curtis (Sean Dougherty). The two graduated from music school together and now barely subsist on music writing grants. Curtis works on an electric piano while Henry favors his Steinway. Curtis is prolific but uninspired, while Henry, despite previous triumphs, has become catatonically blocked.

Shadows from Henry's past have crippled his artistic process and confined him to a hermetic life on the couch. He can play the piano only up to a certain point, where he then screams and trembles with frustration.

When Curtis's new girlfriend, Alexandra (Tara Falk), enters the scene, Henry is forced to confront some painful memories. Step by step, note by note, he nears a long-awaited conclusion.

At one point, Henry describes a recital where he once played an improvised piece while on mushrooms: "Messy, but it kind of worked too." In many ways, this also captures McCracken's writing style. There are occasional stretches of drawn-out dialogue, overstated details, and half-baked humor, but in the end, the play's discursive elements combine well into a strangely satisfying whole.

Much of this is owed to director Christopher Grabowski, who skillfully guides McCracken's writing (and acting). Grabowski introduces the audience to Henry through a series of short tableaus depicting Henry's stagnated relationship with his piano: distantly staring at the instrument, caressing it, etc. The show's unlikely mixture of dramatic expressionism and psychological realism justifiably frames Henry's soul-searching struggle.

Grabowski's mastery also lies in the tempo. The play's pace is weighted by slow tension, and each scene is propelled by pivotal revelations or chilling snippets of a developing musical theme. (The music Henry composes on the piano, as well as the play's prerecorded interlude music, was written by Redd.)

McCracken's transforming performance as Henry is compelling to watch, if painful at times. He carefully avoids the clich

Fishing for Meaning

Oscar Wilde may have inadvertently offered an explanation for the failures of Nosedive Productions

Love and Prejudice

"You made me love you," croons a girl singer during the big band-heavy preshow music for South Pacific, and this sentiment pervades much of the drama in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical about love, loss, patriotism, and loyalty on two islands in the South Pacific during World War II. The conflict stems from two romantic relationships that are both challenged by interracial ties, an American taboo. On this island paradise, love is not an easy thing. The Heights Players's production of South Pacific certainly celebrates the energy and vitality of its characters and the sumptuousness of its score, but it falls short of probing the central relationships to a satisfying end. A winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Tony for best musical, South Pacific is one of the best-loved and oft-revived musicals. If you missed your local high school's revival, here is a brief outline of the plot. Ensign Nellie Forbush, a nurse stationed in the South Pacific, becomes smitten with a much older Frenchman, Emile DeBecque, who lives on the island. They fall in love despite differences in age and upbringing (Nellie is fresh out of Little Rock, Ark., while Emile is full of European sophistication). But their budding romance is challenged when Nellie learns of Emile's four mixed-race children, whom he fathered with his late Polynesian wife. Nellie recoils from Emile and must decide whether she will bravely bridge the cultural divide.

Meanwhile, Lt. Joe Cable arrives on the island with orders to spy on the nearby Japanese. His plan is deterred, however, by his love affair with Liat, a young girl on the nearby island of Bali Ha'i. He must examine his own racial prejudices as he considers pursuing a relationship with her, ultimately deciding that he cannot. He enlists the help of the lovelorn Emile, who is familiar with the territory, to join him on his dangerous spy mission.

South Pacific possesses one of the most melodic and soaring show scores ever composed, with classics like "Some Enchanting Evening," "There is Nothin' Like a Dame," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair," "A Wonderful Guy," "Younger Than Springtime," and "This Nearly Was Mine" packed in from start to finish. Noticeably missing from this production are the lush orchestrations, with a keyboard and minimal percussion providing only sparse and patchy accompaniment.

Tina Throckmorton makes a spunky and likable Nellie, with a bright smile to match her bright, clear voice. Her chemistry with Thomas Urciuoli's Emile, however, fails to ring true. The same can be said for the relationship between Cable (a wooden Constantine Polites) and Liat (a radiant Makie Armstrong).

In its time, South Pacific was progressive and controversial with its theme of interracial love, but the relationships here do not bear out the show's import. Scenes between Nellie and Emile feel rushed, with neither of them seeming to register the weighty choices they are facing.

The evening's strongest performances belong to its supporting players, with standout comic turns by Matthew Woods as the lovably irreverent Luther Billis and Ed Healy as the deliciously dictatorial Captain Brackett. The male ensemble of Seabees also makes a powerful impression, with a strong sound and constant boisterous energy, often carried forth by Chazmond J. Peacock's irrepressible Stewpot.

Faced with a musical of huge proportions, director Thomas N. Tyler has done an admirable job of transporting the action to a very small stage. He has able assistance from Sonia Hernandez's delightful choreography, Fabio Taliercio's brilliant and effective light design, and Gerry Newman's functional set. (And yes, Nellie actually does wash her hair onstage, like Mary Martin in the original production.)

If this South Pacific fails to live up to the emotional weight of its material (especially in its unsatisfying portrayal of the romantic relationships), it still manages to deliver its original message

Desperate Housewives

One morning a group of 12 brightly dressed, well-groomed housewives ranging in age from 20 to 80 gathered in their friend Germaine's spacious kitchen for a long day of stamp pasting. They greeted each other warmly, complimented each other profusely, and then said to hell with that, your daughter is a whore, your husband is a creep, and your happy life is a sham. This is the premise of Michael Tremblay's groundbreaking 1960's French-Canadian play Les Belles Soeurs, currently playing at Center Stage Theatre.

Germaine, played with hilariously exaggerated enthusiasm by Sarah Beth Jackson, is the lucky winner of one million stamps that, if pasted properly in one million books, can be redeemed for an entire catalog of cutting-edge household appliances. To hurry along this laborious part of winning the prize, Germaine recruits her girlfriends, sisters, and daughter to help paste. Little does she know her trusted workers are secretly stashing hundreds of stamps in their own pocketbooks as payment for their work.

Les Belles Soeurs focuses less on telling a story than on revealing the dark side of wives and mothers during the early 1960's when they were widely perceived to be meek, nurturing caregivers incapable of understanding, let alone speaking, vulgarity. Tremblay wrote this story to counter those stereotypes and show the world what really happens when 15 working-class women gather behind closed doors to "socialize." Unfortunately, in doing so he took society's view of women from one extreme to another.

Not one of the 15 women cluttering this stage is likable or sympathetic. How can they be when Tremblay has erased every ounce of compassion, sensitivity, and kindness from their personalities?

Some hate their husbands, and all hate their children. But the most hatred is directed toward Germaine's youngest sibling Paulette (Christine Mosere), a beloved spoiled child turned middle-aged stripper. When Paulette shows up to help paste stamps, her once doting sister nearly throws her down the stairs, screaming, "Get out of here, you filthy whore!"

On this note, the guests decide to turn their own hostility up a notch. Snide, catty remarks become full-blown fits of screaming topped off with threats of eternal damnation. To add to the ensuing chaos, two elderly lesbian lovers arrive, one of whom has been having an affair with Paulette. Meanwhile, a young girl admits she needs an abortion, and Germaine's feisty older sister, Diane (Stephanie Hepburn), screams that "unwed mothers are depraved sluts who deserve no sympathy because they chose to get knocked up." All the noise wakes up a wheelchair-bound 92-year-old woman, who is promptly silenced with a blow to her head, courtesy of her daughter-in-law.

By the second act, all semblance of a narrative plot disintegrates as the story relies solely on its shock value to engage the audience. When Les Belles Soeurs enjoyed its initial success, French-Canadian viewers were delighted to see housewives and grannies throwing down the dust rags and clenching their fists. They were also thrilled at the controversial subjects the story defiantly threw into the mix, such as lesbianism, prostitution, premarital sex, and abortion. None of these topics are explored in any depth, but the mere mention of them in public, onstage, once caused quite a stir.

Unfortunately for the current production of this play, times have changed. Teens hear about abortion in school, premarital sex is glorified in mainstream media, lesbianism is used for ratings, mothers can be heard using profanity on long lines at the supermarket, women are no longer expected to give up their lives to cook dinner and raise kids, and the idea of women behaving badly is hardly a radical concept. In order to startle a New York audience in 2005 the way it did a French-Canadian one in the 1960's, this story needs to be updated.

That said, it is important to note that there are still more than a few good jolts left in this once electrifying play. It is always entertaining to hear an 80-year-old grandmother curse like a sailor while two frumpy middle-aged wives call each other filthy whores. The years may have dulled the shock this play once gave its audiences, but the 15 women featured in Les Belles Soeurs prove that you are never too old to catfight, and when socially repressed women scratch, they will draw blood.

Parallel Lives

Mark Finley's new play, The Mermaid, is a story about two people: Judith, a simple and virginal college co-ed who is coming of age in 1962, and Martin, a gay man approaching his midlife crisis in 1998. Finley draws thematic inspiration from classic authors, quoting Shakespeare's Pericles, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, as well as Jean Girandoux's Ondine. And though The Mermaid does not live up to its own lofty expectations, it is nonetheless an enjoyable tale about the far-reaching consequences of the decisions that people make. The play begins in 1962, with Judith practicing her audition piece for her university's upcoming production of Ondine. She is interrupted by Lee, a young gay actor with Broadway aspirations, and Reid, a clueless but charming athlete looking to boost his grade point average so he can stay on the team. Both Judith and Lee soon find themselves smitten with Reid.

Meanwhile, in 1998, Martin shares a drink with his actress friend Amy, who has just finished a rock opera version of Pericles. She is somewhat upset that Martin, an orphan himself, did not enjoy the classic tale of the Prince of Tyre's quest to find his orphaned daughter. Before long, Martin's boyfriend Ken joins the duo. A few years Martin's senior, Ken is ready to settle down and adopt a child, and he has found the perfect one. But Martin wants to try to find his birth mother and come to terms with his insecurities before becoming a father.

And so Judith and Martin stumble forward, making decisions that influence those around them

Sketched Out

Contemporary political satire can be powerful, exciting, controversial, and, most of all, hilarious. But political satire in the theater can suffer from some innate impediments

Disarming the Man

The Milk Can Theatre Company is tackling George Bernard Shaw's multifaceted Arms and the Man, and it's a noble endeavor. Currently being presented in repertory with the world premiere of Anne Phelan's Mushroom in Her Hands, Arms and the Man has the potential to be a sharp, funny satire about love and an important commentary on mankind's obsession with war. However, under ML Kinney's schizophrenic direction, this Arms and the Man sinks under the weight of its underdeveloped concept. Arms and the Man follows the romantic entanglements of Raina Petkoff (Meghan Reilly); her betrothed, Sergius Saranoff (Avery Clark); the heroic soldier Bluntschli (Kirsten Walsh); and Raina's headstrong handmaid, Louka (Sarah Bloom). Misunderstandings and missed connections abound: Raina loves Bluntschli but is engaged to Sergius, who loves Louka. Set against the backdrop of the Bulgarian-Serbian war, Shaw's play has his characters wax philosophical about love, the conventions of war, class struggle, and the responsibilities of man.

It is a difficult play