Under Terror

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something," says a gun-wielding terrorist to a trembling husband-and-wife catering team. "We are fighting to eliminate you." If this line sounds scary in a fictional context, you may not want to know that it is a direct quote from Hussein Masawi, the former leader of Hezbollah. In the pulse-pounding play The Caterers, playing at the 29th Street Repertory, fact and fiction are blended together as writer Jonathan Leaf reimagines the events in a 1977 hostage situation where Islamic terrorists stormed buildings in protest of a film called Mohammed, Messenger of God.

The Caterers opens in a tiny lobby two hours before this controversial movie is to premiere. Caterers David Weintraub (Ian Blackman) and his wife, Nina (Judith Hawking), bask in the preopening excitement, discussing their own dreams of screenwriting stardom while arranging bottles of wine and water on a linen-white table.

Suddenly, a bearded man in blue overalls barrels through the door wielding a gun. He immediately informs the Weintraubs that he is a terrorist, they are his hostages, and they can call him Mohammed. Moments later, the film's British writer, Warren Heath (Peter Reznikoff), enters, ecstatic to be at his premiere. By this point, the tension in the room is suffocating.

Warren is a self-centered man whose true nature is revealed when he takes a drastic measure to save his own life while putting someone else's at risk. David and Nina are a resourceful couple who attempt to talk their way out of the situation, even complimenting Mohammed by noting that he does not seem like a typical terrorist. Smirking, he replies, "You encounter us regularly?"

Mohammed is played frighteningly well by Brian Wallace, and the audience finds itself pulled into this claustrophobic lobby where you start to see every prop as a potential weapon. This is the type of story where you desperately look for a loophole, some small point of implausibility to assure you that this could not really happen. But Leaf has covered every base. There is no way to escape the room or to reason with a hateful, violent man who is willing to kill everyone in it.

The Caterers forces its audience to confront an issue they spend every day trying to avoid. Terrorists are the bogeymen in the closet, threatening to strike when we are rushing to a subway, starting a day of work, or even walking down the street. Moments before Nina and David were held at gunpoint, they were watering lobby plants. Before Warren was Mohammed's tortured captive, he was a wealthy, honored writer eagerly anticipating the opening of his film. Their situation is disturbing on many levels, the most being our deepest fear: that this can happen to anyone at any moment.

It is also important to note that Leaf does not take sides or preach politics in the play. World issues are occasionally discussed, but there is no Bush-bashing, no criticism or praise of the Iraq war, no attack on conservatives, and no praise for liberals. The core issue is Mohammed, Messenger of God, which the terrorists do not want people to see because they think the film will disgrace Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.

Whether it truly does, the terrorists will never know because they refuse to watch it. This is the issue Leaf stresses the most: the "conclusions people come to without looking at the evidence." People will lose their lives over the premiere of an unseen film, based entirely on paranoid speculation.

This tightly plotted play moves at a fast pace with no intermission to break up the suspense or spoil the illusion that you are trapped in the room. Because of this, the anxiety level can get quite high, and several audience members were crying or covering their mouths in horror. When the play ends, it is hard to shake the feeling that you have just spent the past 80 minutes locked in a room with a terrorist.

Of Excess and Incest

Behind its pomp, the Italian city of Parma festers and pullulates with lust and greed. Everyone has secrets, and is faithless to them. Violence, nihilism, and corruption rule the day; love itself is just a lubricant to more swiftly fetch one to the grave. The atmosphere of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, John Ford's 17th-century classic play, is like the black calk on a mirror's back, reflecting Romeo and Juliet's lightsome and impassioned Verona in macabre distortions. Whereas Romeo and Juliet were merely star-crossed lovers, the lovers in 'Tis Pity are double-crossed as well. As dramaturge Ben Nadler writes, "In Ford's play the nurse ends her life being tortured, the friar gives up on his young ward, the clown is wrongly assassinated, and the lovers just happen to be incestuous."

A bright young scholar, Giovanni, falls in love with his innocent and beautiful sister Annabella

Laughs and Torments

A neurotic Jewish playwright, a crippled psychotic actress, and a disabled, gay black mime sit together in a German hospital, biding their time until a Nazi nurse puts them out of their misery. While this may sound like nothing more than the makings of a severely misconceived joke, these are the vital ingredients of Sam Forman's Krankenhaus Blues, a surrealist riff on disability, genocide, and show business. Forman's astonishingly fresh script

Fertilize or Die

Please don't be put off by the title. Or the Japanese. Billed as an "eccentric live comedy," D.K. Hollywood's We Are the Sperm Cells makes a triumphant return to New York after a successful run last March. Vibrant and electric, hilarious and exciting, this production is one of the most artistically fulfilling and shamelessly enjoyable evenings of theater I've experienced in a long time. Every day, a narrator informs us, five million gallons of sperm are launched throughout the world. But where does it go? Here we follow 10 Boiler Maker sperm cells (the strong, courageous "Navy Seals" of sperm cells) on their fertilize-or-die quest to find an egg. While sperm cells have been voiced and animated elsewhere in pop culture (Woody Allen's 1970's comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask and the 1980's hit movie Look Who's Talking are two divergent examples), the creators of We Are the Sperm Cells present sperm embodied by humans

Fun by the Wayside

Wayside School was supposed to be a typical one-story school with 30 classrooms side by side, but it was accidentally built 30 stories high with one classroom on each floor. That is only the first of many strange things at this towering elementary school where cows roam the halls, tornadoes shake the building, teachers disappear, and classes are taught on a 19th floor that does not exist. At the peak of all this madness are the children who attend class on the 30th floor. In Sideways Stories From Wayside School, playing at Manhattan Children's Theatre, John Olive has compiled the best scenes from Louis Sachar's award-winning Wayside School series and compressed them into a clever children's play that captures the wacky playfulness of the award-winning books.

The story opens in the colorful 30th-floor classroom, with its yellow walls, purple tables, green stools, and a lopsided chalkboard. Large red apples with scared faces sit on three of the classroom's five desks. The remaining two desks are occupied by students Bebe (Anna Kull) and Myron (Brian Patrick Murphy). They sit rigidly in their seats while their teacher, Mrs. Gorf (Rachel Soll), speaks with the school's beloved janitor, Louis (John K. Kucher), who would like one of her apples. Mrs. Gorf is ready to oblige when Bebe and Myron cry out in protest. When Louis leaves, Mrs. Gorf informs the quivering children that, due to their outburst, they will soon join the others as ingredients for apple pie.

In self-defense, Bebe holds a mirror in front of her face seconds before Mrs. Gorf can wiggle her fingers and cast a spell. Mrs. Gorf cackles, the children scream, and the theater goes dark. When the lights return, there are five children standing in the classroom and a giant green apple where Mrs. Gorf once stood. This time when Louis returns looking for a bite, no one stops him from taking one.

With Mrs. Gorf gone, the children are sent a new teacher, the strange but kind Mrs. Jewels, whom they immediately fall in love with. She, in turn, instantly likes the children and accepts their eccentricities. Bebe is a lightning-fast sketch artist, and Daemon always smiles and counts accurately if not numerically. Myron pulls Leslie's pigtails until he is hypnotized into thinking they are rattlesnakes. Leslie can only read upside down, and Rondi is a compulsive gum chewer.

All the actors in this production have the right amount of energy and emotion to keep their characters lively and interesting while also incorporating hints of realism into their personalities. They groan, whine, stomp, and stumble in true first-grade fashion but go back to their zany Wayside nature when solemnly confessing that Mrs. Gorf's face haunts them in clouds and mashed potatoes.

For a children's play, this is a surprisingly complex story with a strong central conflict, a moral dilemma, and a climactic ending where Myron and Bebe must confront their roles in Mrs. Gorf's disappearance. Because of these mature elements, this production lends itself to an older age group. It is perfect for grade school but could easily extend into adulthood, especially if you consider that the novel has been a favorite among young readers for over ten years.

For these reasons, Sideways Stories From Wayside School is a fun, intelligent play for children but also a guilty pleasure for adults and teens. Manhattan Children's Theatre wisely selects classic novels to adapt into children's plays so that children can appreciate the work for the first time while their parents and older siblings fondly relive it. This production proves you do not have to be a child to enjoy children's theater.

Paging Pirandello

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello's groundbreaking play Six Characters in Search of an Author premiered in Rome to great acclaim and great scandal. The innovative plot, in which six characters rebel against their author and insist on living out their own realities, made Pirandello one of the earliest writers to investigate the relationship between a playwright and his characters. His work influenced major theatrical voices throughout the 20th century, from Samuel Beckett to Edward Albee. While the idea of a "show within a show" was hardly new (see Shakespeare), Pirandello's close examination of the back-and-forth relationship between a creator and his creation offered thrilling new possibilities for shedding light on how theater is made. Which is more authentic, illusion or reality? Do you write the play, or does the play write you?

With six demanding actors surrounding one flummoxed playwright, Frank J. Avella's The Bubble seems to channel Pirandello's classic work. Unfortunately, the meandering, unfocused script and muddled production do little to explore Pirandello's questions about reality and truth. With its content often messy and frequently misguided, this Bubble is best left intact.

In Act 1 we meet The Writer (Joe Pistone), who is feverishly, spasmodically trying to pen a new script. His subjects, however, are uncooperative, forcing him to rewrite characters, experiment with styles (opera, musicals, melodrama, and performance art all appear), and generally rip out his hair in frustration and despair. A truthful account of an author's woes? Perhaps. Thought provoking or interesting to watch? Sadly, no.

By Act 2, The Writer's play has moved into rehearsals, and we find the same six characters in new incarnations as part of the production

To Love, to Be Loved

In a sea of Off-Off Broadway productions, each vying for the same theatergoing audience, it is difficult not to be drawn in, or repelled, by a publicity line. For example, Firebrand Theory's production of Venus in Furs may suffer as much as it benefits from its proudly declared themes. As described, these themes

Housebound

The postcard for Off the Leesh Productions's Belly advertises, "She'll make you laugh, she'll make you cry, she'll make you forget yourself." This is no empty promise. Belly delivers. This one-woman show presents one hour in the life of Frannie, an obsessive-compulsive housewife who, despite her obvious quirks, is not much different from the rest of us. With a soft spot for the wondrousness of Hostess cupcakes and a disinclination for the bleakness of cubicle life, Frannie could be an American Everywoman. Except that she can't even remember what the weather was like the last time she ventured outside her house.

As Frannie awaits her husband Barry's return from work, she fills her days with housework, her only human interaction a harmless through-the-mail-slot flirtation with the postman. Then one day she enters her living room to find it filled with surprise houseguests

Prime Stoppard

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead put Tom Stoppard on the map in 1968, earning him a Tony for best play. He continued with much success: Travesties (1976 winner), The Real Thing (1984 winner), Arcadia (1995 nominee), and The Invention of Love (2001 nominee). Stoppard even won the 1998 Academy Award for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. All this without ever attending a university! Artist Descending a Staircase is one of Stoppard's early plays (1972) and was specifically designed for a BBC radio broadcast. A whodunit murder mystery centering around three octogenarians and an audio recording, the play proves problematic when mounted onstage. Reviewing the 1989 Broadway production, The New York Times wrote, "The precision of [Stoppard's] wit is not consistently equaled by Tim Luscombe's staging

Role Reversals

Most people never remember what they scored on their SATs in high school. Yet when their children take the test, they suddenly remember all too well. Perhaps that is why some parents dress their children in Princeton sweatshirts from the time they are 5, whereas others pay tutors up to $200 an hour to prepare them for the impending exam. In Maryrose Wood's delightfully unique musical The Tutor, playing at 59E59 Theatres, two desperate Manhattan parents named Richard (Richard Pruitt) and Esther (Gayton Scott) hire a young alumnus from Princeton named Edmund (Eric Ankrim) to tutor their daughter for the SATs. They tentatively introduce him to their punked-out, heavily made-up teenager, Sweetie (Meredith Bull), hoping he will see the Ivy League potential in her.

Edmund sees something in Sweetie, but it is not potential. As a starving artist working on the Great American Novel, he sees young Sweetie as the perfect "cash cow" to subsidize his income while he writes, never imagining that one day this young girl could wind up teaching him.

With an onstage orchestra supplying the live music and a variety of complex scene changes sustaining the plot's fast pace, the cast and crew have no room for error as they scurry about in the darkness between scenes. The spotlights are perfectly timed, the orchestra is always exactly on cue, and everyone manages to get where he or she needs to be on this jungle gym of a stage. Often an actor will balance on a high platform while another rolls him into place. On many occasions, Ankrim dashes across the stage to quickly hoist himself atop the orchestra box, where the ceiling serves as his studio apartment's floor. It is impressive to watch how much is flawlessly accomplished in the few seconds the actors have to create their next setting.

When Edmund first appears to evaluate Sweetie's potential, he is obnoxiously well mannered and condescending to his student. Then one day in the library she asks to read some of his novel. Reluctantly, he shows her, but regrets it when she criticizes the mechanical way he writes. She offers suggestions, and Edmund is surprised to find that they help his writing. From there she becomes his trusted reader, giving comments, criticism, and general feedback at each of their sessions.

Eventually the two become close and discover that the best parts of themselves come out when they are together. Edmund's enthusiasm for writing fuels her desire to learn, and her unjaded vision of the world helps him to see his characters from a new perspective. Their bond strengthens to the point where Edmund cannot imagine writing without Sweetie, and Sweetie cannot imagine liking any other boy but Edmund. Unfortunately, he is oblivious to her feelings, and her girlhood crush leads to the play's main conflict, which has nothing to do with tests and everything to do with people.

The Tutor plays with the notion that sometimes in life we are never sure who is tutoring whom. During the course of the story, a student learns from her teacher, parents learn from their child, and a teacher learns from his student. By the end, they all learn to lighten up, listen to each other, and not take life so seriously.

It is a relief to see a play that is not afraid to try something new and has a good time doing it. The actors have an infectious energy that makes you want to follow their story wherever it may lead. There are catchy original songs by the team of Maryrose Wood and Andrew Gerle, the most memorable being "Stupid Rich Kids," "Don't Eat Your Friends," "Me Artist, You Rich," and Esther's somber ballad "That's How a Life Is Made," sung beautifully by Gayton Scott.

This production is fun enough for all ages to thoroughly enjoy, but its subject will be especially significant to high school students. When the SATs descend upon them in their senior year, it would be nice if they could see a play poking fun at all the surrounding hysteria. As The Tutor astutely reminds us, it is only a test.

Representation Is All

In one of its most basic forms, theater is about pretending

A Joan Crawford Musical

In 1997 the Turner Classic Movie channel aired The Unknown, a rediscovered 1927 silent film by Tod Browning, who later directed the more controversial Freaks. Employing real circus freaks and Hollywood film stars, such as a young Joan Crawford, Browning walked a fine line between exploiting and celebrating the oddities of the entertainment business. New York Musical Theatre Festival and Page 73 Productions have attempted to bring the film to the musical stage, cleverly titling it The Unknown: A Silent Musical. Although numerous musicals have spotlighted the desperate lives of carny folk (Side Show, Applause, and Wild Party, to name a few), The Unknown offers something the others can't

The Passion of the Antichrist

That the antagonist of a story is often more intriguing than its hero is nothing new. From its inception, Western drama has enjoyed titillating its audience with a view from the other side of the moral divide

Flying Human Puppets

Taking puppetry, music, and storytelling to new heights, Red Beads at the Skirball Center sends its audience Combine the morbidity of Edgar Allan Poe, the childish seduction of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the wonder of a Tim Burton film, and the showmanship of Cirque du Soleil, and you can begin to imagine a genre for Red Beads. No stranger to defying genres (and remaking them), Mabou Mines avant-garde artist Lee Breuer heads the mammoth artistic team that brings us Red Beads. Since 1970, when the group, named after a town in Nova Scotia, was formed, Breuer has written and directed a number of shows. In both Shaggy Dog Animation, which won an Obie for best new play, and a series of other shows, Breuer depicted zoomorphic characters (in a Kafka-like manner) using various forms of puppetry. Inspired by Bunraku, the highly stylized 17th-century Japanese puppetry that uses three black-clad puppeteers to operate one rod-puppet, Breuer was striving for an American theater that employed unconventional methods to address modern-day issues, such as feminism and sexuality.

Frank Rich of The New York Times once said Mabou Mines is "experimental theater at its most incendiary." But Red Beads is less an incendiary show than a sanitized form of entertainment. Departing from his usual affinity for political immediacy, Breuer stages a children's story.

The simplistic yet cryptic tale is adapted from Polina Klimovitskaya's original story, which is about a girl who is to receive her ailing mother's red bead necklace upon her 13th birthday, which is also Halloween. The text of this multimedia spectacle-poem is projected above the stage as opera subtitles. Sung arias and spoken word are used contrastingly to convey the dark tale.

Utterances from the primary actors (Clove Galilee, Gob Besserer, and Ruth Maleczech) alternate with operatic solos (Wonjung Kim, Alexandra Montano, and Alexander Tall). A chorus of 24 New York University students synchronously dance and act out the story's narration, which is spoken in a raspy female whisper over the sound system. The effect is an epic, grand-scale rite of feminine passage beautifully unraveled before us in light (an amazingly versatile design by Jennifer Tipton and Mary Louise Geiger), fabric (by Basil Twist), and music.

Ushio Torikai, who composed the show's innovative music, synthesizes Asian musical traditions with Western tonalities and instruments, including violin (Tom Chiu), harp (June Han), oboe (Jacqueline Leclair), flute (Erin Lesser), cello (Stephanie Winters), keyboard (Rob Schwimmer), and various percussion instruments, such as the xylophone (Eric Phinney and Greg Beyer). Her postmodern pastiche waxes and wanes in relation to the action onstage, even offering occasional improvisational duets, as with the violin solo and the flight of the canary.

The visual embodiment of the canary (a wind-spirited yellow strip of silk) is the puppet creation of the extraordinary fabric connoisseur Basil Twist (of Symphonie Fantastique fame). Using wind instead of water this time, Twist paints an airscape with admirable effort but limited success. Big swaths of silk blanket the stage and impressively billow up to make hills, or are sucked under the stage to turn a grave into a black hole. But the sounds of working fans and the appearance of assistance wires and fabric snags interrupt an otherwise smooth flow.

Nonetheless, Twist does not fail to inspire awe. A basement scene where a number of black scarves devour a white one, representing a cat attacked by rats, is perhaps creepier than seeing the real thing. Twist's design and Julie Archer's costume scheme cleverly exploit the vertical plane that much of the show functions on (wire-suspended actors scaling walls, perpendicular beds). The show's pleasurably surrealist design evokes a sensual mutability of space and gravity.

Extending this effect are the show's puppets

On Our Knees

Why should the nation care about a harmless bit of screwing? This is the intriguing question posed by Monica! The Musical as it spoofs, ridicules, and cartoons our former obsession with all things Lewinsky. While in need of sharper focus, this entertaining show nevertheless has moments of brilliance, with real potential to provoke discussion of important issues, both personal and political. The action begins and ends with Bill Clinton, as we follow him in sporadic leaps from 1960's rural Arkansas through his rocky terms as president to his present-day digs in Harlem. Following a chronological timeline, we meet Hillary, Janet Reno, and a host of other political faces that lead to Bill's inevitable encounter with Monica, Kenneth Starr's investigation, and the national scandal that followed.

In a cast comprising several Urinetown alumni, it is perhaps not surprising that Monica! seems to take its cues from that celebrated former Broadway musical and its social satire. Characters are broadly drawn without limits, exaggerating the simple and grotesque, whether it's the overblown, Shakespearean evil of Starr or the vain effeminacy of George Stephanopoulos. And, of course

Brat Pack: The Next Generation

"You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal." --John Hughes The Breakfast Club gave us more than a memorable hit from Simple Minds and a young Emilio Estevez. The film firmly cemented once and for all the quintessential archetypes of high school into popular culture. You were a Molly, a Judd, an Emilio, an Anthony Michael, or an Ally, whether you liked it or not.

Ten years have passed since The Breakfast Club debuted, but these conventions of teenagedom are still pervasive, making Sonya Sobieski's new comedy, Commedia dell Smartass, all the more relevant. Commedia dell Smartass, produced by New Georges at the Ohio Theater in SoHo, takes these archetypal characters and flips them upside down and inside out. Her "cheerleader" is a type-A Girl Scout obsessed with her future; her "jock" is a Fencer with Machiavellian instincts; her "sensitive outcast" is a pantaloon-wearing Clown of ambiguous gender; and her "nerd" is a shlubby guy named Henry who dreams of teleporting to the moon.

Sobieski's irreverent style in this quirky commedia dell'arte pokes fun at hackneyed teenage stereotypes. Yet she does not denounce the existence of such stereotypes. As a result, she just might be the John Hughes of the post-9/11 generation. I mean this as a compliment: like Hughes, she has a clear insight into teenagers' lives, but unlike that iconic movie director of the 1980's, she avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality by employing a distinct snarkiness. At times, this snarkiness borders on pretentiousness, which may be Sobieski's goal. Not only is she riffing on pop culture archetypes, but she is also taking a shot at the presumed savvy of teenagers today, and at world that forces them to grow up too soon.

Sue Rees's simple set

Depression Lives

Soon of a Mornin': The Story of Gee's Bend Farms feels like the bare bones of a narrative that's wanting for more voices and more space to do it justice. After its one-hour run time has ended, your interest is piqued and you've definitely been entertained, but you feel as though you've been skimming the surface of these people's lives and could stand to go much, much deeper. Andrea Frierson-Toney has borrowed from the pages of early 20th-century American history to recount the story of Gee's Bend, Ala., and the slave-descendant quilters and farmers who lived there during the height of the Great Depression. We hear much of that story in the form of letters written by Annie Chambers (Megan Magil) and Freidberg (Fred Rose), who have been sent to Gee's Bend by the Farm Securities Administration.

Annie is a nurse whose modern practices, like sterilization and proper nutrition, are at odds with superstition and homemade remedies, while Freidberg is simply fascinated with the religious rituals and backbreaking work that he photographs. The interaction between these two outsiders and the community they've entered does not arrive fast enough or happen often enough. The play begins with their arrival at Gee's Bend by river raft, but they do not actually speak to the townspeople until several scenes later. Their arrival

In Love and War

In a desolate Israeli cafe overlooking the Plains of Armageddon, three very strange and mysterious people find themselves bonding over beer as they overlook this eerily quiet, centuries-old battlefield in Richard Lay's promising yet disjointed social satire, Lunch at Armageddon, at the Blue Heron Arts Center. Set on the balcony of this caf

Sofa, So Good

A bar with cheap drinks, a DJ spinning techno between scenes, the self-consciously urban artwork on the walls, the 10:30 start time (9 on Tuesdays), and the $10 price all give Slant Theatre Project's newest incarnation, CouchWorks, the ambience of a fun and intimate party scene. Seven topnotch playwrights with impressive r

Nothing Random About It

Our pets have their ways of communicating to us: a dog's whimper at the dinner table implies "Feed me!" and a cat's purring is a sign of pleasure. But what if animals really could engage with us in dialogue, not with sounds but with language? The Boomerang Theatre Company's world premiere of Francis Kuzler's new play contemplates just that. Set in the science department of an unidentified Eastern university and the expanses of the Little Delta Ranch somewhere in Texas, Giant-n-Variation tells the story of the titular twin talking bulls, a self-proclaimed "psychoevolutionary biolinguist" divorc