Forever Young

Spare of actors and set pieces, Chris Harcum's one-man trip down memory lane, Some Kind of Pink Breakfast, is long on talent. Pink, which debuted this summer at the New York International Fringe Festival and is now playing at the Gene Frankel Theater, is a throwback to the year 1986. Harcum, playing himself, prefaces the show by saying that a recent e-mail from a high school ex-girlfriend set the wheels in motion, as he debated whether he should attend the 20th high school reunion in 2008 at his North Carolina high school.

Harcum then embarks on a 70-minute journey back to school, in which he plays a total of 27 characters all at once, with no artifice—only body language, facial tics, and varied vocal tones to distinguish all of them, including friends, classmates, family members, and even his then girlfriend Molly. It is hard not to pity Harcum as he relays what a whirlwind his sophomore year was. Standing only 5 feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, he is catnip for the bullies who ride the bus with him, and he faces just as much opposition from his vice-happy parents.

Over the course of the play (crisply directed by Bricken Sparacino), Harcum sprinkles plenty of 1980s references—just about every entertainment nugget, including Dune, Quicksilver, "Bette Davis Eyes," even Trapper Keepers, gets a mention. But Pink is more than just a recap of an episode of VH1's I Love the '80s. In fact, it is downright riveting. As the taut show progresses, one realizes that Harcum isn't interested in nostalgia, and his high school experience included moments far more scarring than most.

Like Van Halen, Harcum too was hot for his English teacher, only she returned the interest. He also details his first sexual encounter, an unsettling tryst with a near stranger whom he eventually learns has many emotional problems. That he plays both of these characters, and does so using a chair as a prop, is impressive. That the scene never draws laughs or snickers is downright miraculous.

This is a very hard show to pull off, even if there had been an ensemble to shoulder the load, so the fact that Harcum is able to do it alone makes his work one of the most vital stage performances of the year. As defined as each of his characters are, Pink moves at a quick pace, with Harcum constantly and sleekly morphing out of one skin and into another. There also is plenty of humor here; Harcum's piece is rich enough that it successfully entwines comedy with pathos, hitting his emotional truths home all the more easily.

Given his soulful performance, it would be easy to overlook the technical help he receives. Maryvel Bergen's sharp lighting design helps punctuate the highs and considerable lows of Harcum's 15th year. (Apparently, the Frankel experienced considerable technical glitches on the night of the performance, but the show was sturdy enough to have survived this bare-bones situation without even calling attention to it.)

At the end of Harcum's tale, he again poses the question of whether he should attend his high school reunion. His trip may or may not be rewarding, but a trip to see Pink surely is.

On the Edge

I'm not sure whether Chad Beckim's 'nami is a good play, but its inaugural production is a very good piece of theater. With layered and passionate performances, evocative and polished design elements, and expertly paced and composed staging, Partial Comfort Productions has demonstrated that ambition, craft, and determination can overcome the logistical and financial difficulties that so often lead us to make excuses for unfinished, substandard work from Off-Off-Broadway companies. The play's plot is difficult to summarize. Publicity materials describe it as the story of two women who begin to suspect that their landlord is going to sell a young Indonesian refugee girl into sex slavery, but this plot point comes fairly late in the play's action. Beckim's play is really a character study of two downtrodden couples who live next door to each other in a rundown apartment building in a very bad neighborhood. The story's more sensational elements are actually among its weakest, while the carefully observed interactions between four shattered people are what lends this piece its considerable power.

At the core of the production's success are the actors, particularly the women. As Keesha, Quincy Tyler Bernstine turned a series of stereotypes on their heads by balancing the aggressively gritty backstory of her former prostitute/recovering crackhead character with grace, intelligence, and strength. Eva Kaminsky, as the psychologically unstable Lil, conquered a series of challenges to her technique—in addition to her emotional disorder and paranoia, Lil is sometimes heavily medicated—while maintaining the character's emotional core.

Both actresses dove into the extreme situations and reactions demanded of them by the script while still contributing to the story's urgency and momentum. As a direct result of their performances' discipline and energy, the production never bogged down in onstage histrionics.

Alfredo Narciso and Marc Rosenthal were similarly successful as Roachie and Harry, respectively. Rosenthal in particular stood out, finding a number of quirky but entirely believable idiosyncratic gestures to fully humanize his performance as Lil's beleaguered husband. Michael Gladis, clearly a competent actor in his own right, was a little less successful as Donovan, the slumlord/pimp/crack dealer who rules with violence. He wasn't quite able to convincingly pull together the menace, charm, and entrepreneurial intelligence that are all necessary components of the character; in a daunting, all-or-nothing situation, he was neither seductive nor frightening in a role that requires both in equal measure.

Director John Gould Rubin worked with his design team to construct a convincingly appalling world of barely suppressed desperation that threatened to burst into violence at any moment. Set designer Heather Wolensky and lighting designer Jason Jeunnette integrated their work seamlessly to evoke grunge and dilapidation while achieving a surprisingly beautiful visual poetry. Sound designer Zach Williamson rendered tangible the claustrophobic nature of low-end apartment living by allowing sounds to seep through the walls of the onstage apartments and into the audience, without their sounding canned and artificial.

Rubin and Williamson did make some questionable choices in scene-change music, however, which was set too loud and had little to do with the world of the play. Presumably, these jarring sound cues were meant to further underscore the extended moments of silence that punctuated the production. But, as my companion at the show said, they seemed more like selections from a hipster's iPod playlist than an integral part of the design.

Far too many of this production's strengths were actually solutions to problems built into the script. The playwright has indicated in interviews and press materials that he wanted to show audiences a world they have had little or no contact with, but it's difficult not to suspect that the world of 'nami is similarly alien to Beckim himself. While he delineates the characters with distinct psychologies and vernacular tendencies, too many of the details feel as if they were borrowed from a particularly seedy episode of Law and Order: SVU.

To be fair, though, the strengths of the performances and of the production would not have been possible were there not something beautiful in the text itself. At its core, the play is about people in danger of being crushed under the weight of their personal histories, and finding some hope of redemption in the possibility of helping a vulnerable stranger. With another rewrite to burn away the clichés and the false notes, Beckim may well have a play that earns the beauty and polish of this production.

Get Thee to a Nunnery

There is much to like about The Tragic and Horrible Life of the Singing Nun—a campy and over-the-top musical homage to Sister Jeanine Fou (aka Sister Smile), the singing nun and unlikely pop chanteuse who found herself catapulted to superstardom (and a Grammy Award) with her wildly popular 60's hit song "Dominique." The production, presented at the New York Musical Theater Festival, features an infectious score by Andy Monroe and a deliriously silly cast. Yet despite all its great qualities, it is undermined by Michael Schiralli's weak staging and Blair Fell's overwritten and disjointed plot. Nun recounts the story of Sister Jeanine (Laura Daniel), from her childhood in Belgium with her crazy Maman (Eileen F. Stevens) and true love/best pal Annie Nevermind (Tracey Gilbert), to her life in the convent, to her success as an international pop sensation. After leaving home for the convent, Jeanine encounters the aggressively competitive Sister Maria (Kristen Beil) and the delightfully inappropriate Mother Helen Lawson (Kristine Zbornik). A vision of Saint Dominique (Randy Blair) then leads Jeanine to write the song that will forever change her life. When the convent falls on hard times, sexy Father Lyon (Michael Hunsaker) and his former paramour, Sister Coco Callmesimael (Stephen Michael Rondel), record the song and turn her into a pop superstar.

The show is really quite amusing, thanks in large part to a very funny cast that is not afraid to look stupid. Zbornik hilariously channels Ethel Merman as the deliciously sinful Mother Helen. Stevens's Maman recalls Piper Laurie in Carrie with her hysterically exaggerated screams of "They're gonna laugh at you!," while Blair steals the show, playing Dominique as the love child of Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly.

Unfortunately, there are moments when the show is just a mess: the jokes become stale, the stage cluttered, and the "arched eyebrow" acting irritating. Many of the scenes come off as superfluous, and there are too many subplots to sustain focus. Schiralli's prosaic direction does little to advance the story. Under his guidance, scenes are stilted, and the actors don't connect.

Nun began life as a play, and one senses a reluctance to trim down the original writing with the later addition of music. As a result, Sister Jeanine's story goes from entertaining to tiresome while clocking in at over two hours. In the process, a great idea is lost and a comedic gold mine squandered.

School Days

With the success of Broadway's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, among other shows, and given that Generations X and Y seem to have never recovered from the trials and traumas of junior high, a post-punk, post-ska, pop-rock musical about, as publicity materials describe it, "love in the eighth grade" probably seemed to be a strong idea. Despite its promise, though, Shawn Northrip's Lunch, part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, fell short in production. Many of the songs are clever ("A Change in Me"), and a few of them ("Dead Dad") come close to capturing the kind of anarchic adolescent energy Northrip was apparently aiming for. Yet the tongue-in-cheek style that pervades the show fails to capture how very serious adolescence seems when you're in the middle of it. We are supposed to laugh at these characters because we recognize ourselves in them, but the show spends so much time pushing the "look how ridiculous they all are" angle that it's hard to have any empathy. One notable exception, the almost jarringly touching "For Mikey," sung by Ben (Rich Hollman), is written—and was performed—with such irony-free sincerity that it threw the rest of the production's superficiality into sharp relief.

The two-dimensional, caricature-like style adopted by most of the cast only exacerbated this problem; when adult actors play kids, it's all too easy for them to come across as condescending toward their characters' emotions. The actors were mostly in fine voice, but some had difficulty keeping up with the relentless, drum-driven pace of the music.

The show's narrative strategy is a surprising departure from the musical theater rulebook. After each exchange of dialogue, a short song expands on, and makes a joke out of, the characters' emotions but never moves the plot forward. I can only assume this was a deliberate move by Northrip, who holds a graduate degree from N.Y.U.'s Musical Theater Writing program and is the author of the well-regarded Titus X. Nevertheless, it felt like a major flaw.

Lunch probably came across as very funny at the early read-throughs and workshops. A paying audience and a full production, however, demand more from a show than potential. Lunch serves as a sometimes uncomfortable reminder that what seems brilliant and hysterically funny when shared with friends over a bottle of wine can still fall flat when the lights dim and the curtain rises.

Hard Knocks

Have a Nice Life, Conor Mitchell's new musical now premiering as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, offers up little in the way of originality. And despite what the program notes purport, Mitchell's musical stylings are not revolutionary. Nevertheless, his show proves to be an enjoyable and lighthearted (if by the numbers) musical romp highlighted by Rhonda Miller's excellent choreography and a powerhouse cast led by the fierce Emily Skinner and the fantastic Nichole Ruth Snelson. The formulaic plot focuses on members of a therapy group who gather weekly to confront issues of anger, depression, loneliness, and love. They find their routine shaken when a newcomer arrives and forces them to finally confront their darkest secrets. Each fits a type: the tough, quiet guy; the lovable loser; the eternally unhappy, perky optimist; the angry woman scorned; the vengeful psychopath; the mysterious newcomer; and the group's sensible leader. The situations are contrived and the outcomes obvious within the first 10 minutes. Mitchell and co-writer Matthew Hurt stumble most during an inane Lifetime-esque story line involving postpartum depression and baby napping that takes up far too much of the show.

But as a composer and lyricist, Mitchell does offer up some very good songs. "Other Women" perfectly captures the rage and hidden hurt of scorned women everywhere. "Old Fashioned Romance" is a wonderful ode to the days of wine and roses. And the Cabaret-inspired "Hate Mail in the Morning" is a sensational, sexy number that brings down the house.

It is no coincidence that these songs also feature the show's best performers. Skinner is simply sublime as the rage-filled Jean. She delivers a brilliant performance with a soaring voice and comedic timing that befits a 1940s screwball-comedy heroine. Kevin Carolan is equally touching and funny as misfit Chris, while Snelson is divine as the deliciously unstable Barbara. The entire cast benefits greatly from Rhonda Miller's inventive and energetic choreography. She mines her dance catalog to create a thrilling roller-coaster ride of movement—the perfect remedy to Pip Pickering's pedestrian direction.

Nice Life ultimately does overcome its trite scenarios and staid direction. The outstanding cast even manages to overcome an ending that overstays its welcome. And while Mitchell may not be reinventing the world of musical theater, his show is a welcome addition to the genre.

September Song

It was the little show that could, and apparently it still can. Timeless, ageless, and apparently dauntless, The Fantasticks has been revived with plenty of heart at the new Snapple Theater Center. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's paean to young love debuted Off Broadway in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse; when it finally closed in 2002, it had played over 17,000 performances, spawned some 11,000 productions in the United States and 700 productions worldwide, and was the longest-running theatrical production ever. But why does a story about the flutters and foibles of young love still capture our hearts? Why pay to see a production whose special effects include colorful confetti and a cardboard moon when, across the street, you can see monkeys swinging from the eaves in Wicked? And, above all, why revive this musical less than five years after it ended its epic run?

Somehow, it is still impossible to fight the magic that is The Fantasticks, starting with "Try to Remember," the opening ballad that quickly became a standard. The song is an invitation to a simpler, more innocent moment and mind-set, and during the performance on the five-year anniversary of 9/11, it resonated with chilling poignancy. As El Gallo (Burke Moses), villain and narrator, gently began to sing, stillness embraced the audience:

Try to remember the kind of September When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

The song coaxes us toward faith and innocence, which the audience collectively struggled to summon despite the reality of what September has come to mean.

Perhaps the greatest lesson taught by The Fantasticks is that although your moon may be made of cardboard, what counts is how much you believe in it. Jones's book and lyrics put forth a rather generic tale: a boy, Matt (Santino Fontana), and a girl, Luisa (Sara Jean Ford), fall in love while separated by the wall built by their quibbling fathers to keep them apart. But in a classic example of parental reverse psychology, the fathers actually want their children to marry, and they concoct an elaborate scheme, complete with the abduction of Luisa by the enigmatic El Gallo, to convince their children that their romantic attraction is real. But can romance survive when flattering moonlight gives way to invasive sunshine and thorny flaws?

Jones has directed this revival based on Word Baker's original staging, and, under the stage name of Thomas Bruce, he also jumps back into a role he originated back in 1960: Henry, The Old Actor. Jones certainly makes an older Old Actor than he once did, and his gentleness, joy, and sincerity make him a lovable and endearing mascot of the show he shepherded to life. When Henry steps out of a trunk with his sidekick, Mortimer (the delightfully rubber-faced Robert R. Oliver), they aid El Gallo in the staged abduction of Luisa.

Henry's shock and delight that El Gallo remembers one of his obscure previous performances underscores the deification of theater and its legacy. "Try to see me under light," Henry charges us, for he is convinced that under stage lights, anything and everything is possible.

Jones's uncomplicated staging gently enhances the story: The Mute (Douglas Ullman Jr.) serves as stagehand, doling out costumes from a multipurpose trunk; glitter doubles as rain; a dowel held horizontally creates the wall. Ed Wittstein's costumes contribute splashes of vitality, especially the lively mismatching of the two fathers, who wear a complementary collision of plaid, stripes, suspenders, and hats. Wittstein's spare set takes best possible advantage of the disappointingly low clearance of the Snapple Theater's space; as the latest in corporate-funded venues, it is functional but hardly alluring. El Gallo even takes a jab at the low ceiling when he attempts to tip his hat and realizes he's boxed in by his surroundings.

Fontana and Ford are appealingly fresh-faced and vibrant; Fontana uses his wide-eyed grin and warm voice to great success, and Ford gives Luisa a refreshing mix of sarcasm and wit, allowing us to see the woman lurking beneath her girlish surface. Moses is a commanding El Gallo, sinuous and seductive as required, and his thunderous voice is the perfect vehicle for Schmidt's sometimes operatic score.

Only the fathers, Bellomy (Martin Vidnovic) and Hucklebee (Leo Burmester), are slightly disappointing. Burdened with some of the more dated and clunky material, they are never as endearing as they might be as they sing, dance, and spar over horticulture. Dorothy Martin and Erin Hill contribute prodigious and playful support on the piano and harp, respectively.

At the abrupt ending, the players draw their own curtain, and when the curtain closes, it seems too soon. As Jones and Schmidt prophesized, this is a story that never really ends, and they leave audiences wanting more. If we can never return to the September they once envisioned, at least we can return to The Fantasticks, where they do their best to create it for us, again and again.

Casualty of War

Eve Ensler's intense drama The Treatment, at the Culture Project, examines the blurry line the U.S. military has drawn between interrogation and torture. The play does not specifically name a war, president, time period, or country, and it does not need to. Instead, it focuses on the mind-set of one soldier, who has forgotten what he is fighting for. He has also discovered violence within himself that he never knew existed, and has come home to a family that can no longer relate to him. The play opens in a green, sterile room with a tormented young veteran fitting this description: a soldier known only as Man (Dylan McDermott) who has just returned from a term overseas, full of inner demons from his job as an interrogator at a detainee camp. His wife sends him to a military psychiatrist, known as Woman (Portia), who speaks with a knowing calm, suggesting that she has spent most of her life counseling trembling young men who desperately "want their brains and families back."

Nothing rattles her, not even the soldier's unpredictable bouts of loud, hysterical anger, lewd sexual overtures, or uncontrollable urges to rattle the blinds and throw heavy metal chairs across the room. Through all of his psychological meltdowns, her eyes never blink, and her posture never collapses.

When the soldier sees that the psychiatrist is as good at her job as he once was at his, he starts to squirm. At the detainee camp, he was the one to initiate silent treatment, hold a gaze without looking away, and fire questions at scared, broken men until they cracked. Watching the psychiatrist use these tricks, he comes to the unnerving realization that now he is the scared and broken one, vulnerable to cracking at any moment.

The psychiatrist's steely expression creates a longing to know more about this strange and immovable woman. The title refers to her treatment of the soldier's nightmares and post-traumatic stress, which at times feel a little extreme, even for the military. Her abrasive nature raises questions about her own intentions toward a man who is in a deeply distraught state.

For a short, intermission-less, 70-minute play, The Treatment manages to hit many unforgettable notes of powerful emotion and disturbing truths. It reminds us that while soldiers are not the ones who start a war, they are the ones who will suffer the most for it. When this soldier says that horrible nightmares prevent him from being able to sleep, the psychiatrist gives him a hard dose of reality, reminding him that he is merely a solider, forced to follow orders, and that the people who gave those orders are sleeping just fine.

Portia and McDermott are fully immersed in their highly intense roles. They bare their characters' souls to the audience, letting everything pour out, often shifting between wild anger and unbearable sadness. Portia has perfected every nuance of a rigid military woman who thrives under pressure and loves rules. McDermott manages to be sympathetic even when he is at his most destructive. He is fully believable as a man who hears constant screaming in his head.

At one point, his nearly comatose character asks the psychiatrist, "Can you hear the loudness?" She answers, "I can feel it." By the end of the play, everyone in the audience will too.

Life Is a Dream

The rise of existentialism is often attributed in part to the aftermath of two world wars, one of which was devoid of any morally compelling narrative and one in which the scale of atrocity was shocking to the public imagination. After senseless cruelty and violence, how can we maintain any faith in the essential goodness of man, or in any of the platitudes whispered to us as codas to childhood bedtime stories? These thoughts entwined with new developments in psychology, biology, and physics to destabilize attitudes toward religion, nationalism, and identity itself. It should come as no surprise that events of recent years have had a similar impact on some writers and thinkers. In the program note to Bethany Larsen's new play, The Uncertainty Principle, director Julie Fei-Fan Balzer writes that "three forces collided" as inspiration for the play: Sept. 11, 2001, "an old physics textbook and a TV special on string theory," and "an apartment fire on the next block, which prompted the question: What would life be like if you lost everything?"

The Uncertainty Principle is not a perfect play by any means, but it deals with "Big Ideas" without being boring or (for the most part) overly pretentious. The largely successful script is a testament to the young Milk Can Theater Company's commitment to developing new material through workshops, readings, and constructive critical dialogue with emerging playwrights.

The play's central character is Cassie (Lauren Gleason), a young New York City temp whose apartment—along with everything she owns—is engulfed in flames. Onstage action alternates between scenes of Cassie trying to put her life back together and dream sequences involving The Ringmaster (Casey McClellan). He's a hybrid trickster/angel/tough-love counselor who urges Cassie, who is some kind of high-wire performer in her dreams, to perform without a net and, if she falls, to embody the possibilities implied by Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle by simply passing right through the floor. (Yes, the play acknowledges, and plays with, the fact that this is something of a misreading of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. His principle says it's impossible to discern simultaneously and accurately the position and momentum of an atomic or subatomic particle.)

When not dreaming, Cassie is struggling with listlessness and depression, much to the consternation of Jason (Chris Kloko), her gay best friend (obligatory for any twenty-something straight girl in New York); her possibly drug-addled mother (a hilarious Judy Chesnutt); and her charmingly geeky potential boyfriend Robert (Tim Downey.) To some extent, these are all stock characters, but enough little details are provided for them to walk convincingly in three dimensions.

The division between Cassie's waking life and her dreams breaks down enough for her to question her own sanity. The Ringmaster starts talking to her while she's awake and then, even more alarmingly, interacts occasionally with her friends and family. He helps her find an apartment and manipulates her physical surroundings in various ways. It's not always clear precisely what his agenda is, but he consistently urges Cassie to act with confidence and take chances, encouraging her to embrace uncertainty and instability as the source of life's exhilarating sense of possibility.

The actors all inhabited their roles well, but Chesnutt stole the show as Cassie's mother. Her performance was both gloriously over the top and extremely clever; she interacted with The Ringmaster, made contact with the audience, and, in a demanding meta-theatrical moment built into the script, acknowledged the artifice of her character and the theater itself while still gleefully throwing herself into the role.

The production's design team, doing double duty by also working on the extremely demanding Trojan Women 2.0 (running in repertory with this show), efficiently sketched out the slightly exaggerated world of the play. David Withrow's costumes allowed for Gleason's quick onstage costume changes as she moved between dream scenes and waking scenes, and each character was given an almost iconic look: a tight, slightly sparkly sweater for Jason, a pert, Florence Henderson-inspired dress for Mom, etc. Set designer Carrie Mossman was limited to a few rehearsal cubes and some flats that also had to serve for the other show's set, but the minimalist flexibility worked well with Balzer's fluid staging.

The implication that The Ringmaster is not entirely a figment of Cassie's addled imagination muddies The Uncertainty Principle's philosophical outlook somewhat. Embracing chance, accident, and uncertainty is an admirable goal, but the revelation that there really is a man behind the curtain doesn't quite support it. Throughout the play, The Ringmaster urges Cassie to work without a net, but by giving her trickster flesh and blood and prescience, Larsen has unwittingly implied that there is a kind of metaphysical net after all.

Overall, The Uncertainty Principle is a fun and entertaining exploration of serious themes and a refreshing reminder that existentialism and optimism don't have to be mutually exclusive. It is also, in the play's own words, a "New York story," a celebration of life in a city that has suffered substantial blows in the early years of the 21st century but shows no sign of giving up its high-wire act.

Love and Death

Trojan Women 2.0 is part of Charles Mee's ongoing "(re)making project," in which he has "pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the Internet" to create new plays of his own. This text draws primarily from Eurpides's Trojan Women for its first act and Berlioz's Les Troyens for its second, but also incorporates various other sources. Mee mashes his source material together with references to contemporary history and popular culture to create a beautiful and often devastating mosaic that is simultaneously an antiwar play, a tone poem to erotic love, and a meditation on sex, class, and gender. A text this emotionally and philosophically complex is an ambitious undertaking for any theater company. For a small Off-Off-Broadway company with limited resources and two shows in production simultaneously, it's an almost impossible feat. Despite this production's several strengths, the Milk Can Theater Company has failed to pull off the impossible this time out. Nevertheless, at a time when commercial and institutional theater has largely failed (with notable exceptions) to engage with the events and issues dominating what remains of public discourse, Milk Can should be applauded for taking on the project at all.

The play's first half is set in a Troy shattered by both the invading Greek army and the anachronisms Mee so gleefully scatters throughout the script. A chorus of grieving women, led by Hecuba (Mary Ellen Toomey), is in mourning for their husbands, their children, and their city. There is a ragged dignity in their sorrow, but it is soon interrupted by the arrival of Talthybius (Kenneth L. Naanep) and two Greek soldiers (Malachy Orozco and Joe Sevier), who announce that each of the women will be given to a Greek soldier or nobleman to do with as he pleases. The stakes are high and the tragic tone unrelenting, with the exception of a few moments of comic relief.

Some of the actors were more up to this challenge than others. In general, the chorus of women performed admirably, particularly Toomey, who presided over their grief in an appropriately regal manner. Mary Greenwalt's comically narcissistic Helen recalled Paris Hilton, while Satomi Blair's Pat Benatar-like Cassandra brought a welcome rock 'n' roll energy to the production.

The actors playing the interloping Greeks were somewhat less successful. Naanep struggled to infuse the businesslike Talthybius with some degree of pathos by affecting a quavering and breathless vocal quality that robbed him of his authority without actually winning him any sympathy. His companions appeared so relatively meek in the face of the women onstage that it seemed the soldiers, rather than the widows, should fear for their lives. Many of the actors seemed overwhelmed by the sustained and heightened emotion required by Mee's long monologues and the plot's tragic dimensions. The result was far too much shouting for far too long.

In general, the actors fared better with the lighter and shorter second half, but the production never quite recovered from the difficult first act. Some of director Lauren Reinhard's choices were problematic as well: her "feminist utopia" Carthage at times resembled an old Evian commercial, with white-robed women performing yoga-like choreography to comfort and seduce the bewildered soldiers. As in the first act, the female lead was, appropriately, the strongest presence. In this case, Lindsay Drew presided over the stage with her multivalent portrayal of a torch song-singing Dido.

Still, there was much to admire in the coherence and scope of the production. Michael Gugliotti's ambitious and aggressive lighting created several distinct moods with a handful of instruments; Mick Moore's sound design was similarly effective. Costume designer David Winthrow employed a variety of suits, robes, belts, and tatters to reference both past and present while still contributing to the sense of a consistent onstage reality.

The actors looked exhausted during the curtain call, no doubt the result of a difficult rehearsal process leading to a sometimes frustrating opening-matinee performance. As flawed as the performance was, an ambitious failure is in many ways more rewarding than a safe bet. At the end of the show, a fund-raising pitch included the daunting statistic that only 3 percent of Off-Off-Broadway companies make it to their fifth season. The Milk Can Theater Company, at the beginning of its fourth season, took on more than it could accomplish this time around, but I can't help hoping it beats the odds and gets the chance to try again.

One-Act Trio

None of the three one-act plays in Audax Theater Group's The Beginning of the And are related. The settings and stories are very different, and the themes in each one—the unpredictability of life, the basic human need for companionship—are only loosely connected. Yet the collection feels very cohesive. Director Brian Ziv seems to have a consistent vision for each piece and how they all fit together. "APPS" takes place in the bar of a resort hotel, as Henry (Daniel Talbott) waits for Jody (Alie Carey) before their romantic honeymoon dinner. He's joined by two bar regulars: Meyers (Scott Sortman) and an incognito Ringo Starr, assuming the name of Mr. Burns (Davis Hall). An oddity in Hawaiian shirt and cowboy boots, Meyers believes himself to be a connoisseur of the "app." Appetizers represent freedom, while meals—and commitment—keep you stuck.

Meyers repeatedly suggests that Henry should order an appetizer while he waits. Henry is skeptical, but some cajoling from the men, and an escalating newlywed spat with Jody, make a life filled with shrimp cocktail and guacamole dip seem more appealing. "APPS" is a very funny short piece, with a tiny emotional tug at the end. Hall plays the former Beatle with a convincing mix of flash and nonchalance. As Meyers, Sortman is both loopy and charismatic: the man makes you think seriously about your pre-entrée ordering. Talbott and Carey are wide-eyed and fresh-faced foils to the craggy older men, and it's fun watching their wedded bliss crumple around the edges.

"ORANGE", the second piece, is the surname of John Orange. Actually, he has quite a few names, all representing his family's pedigree. John (Will Brunson) and his equally blue-blooded mother (Arleigh Richards) live together and run an antique shop out of their garage. It is a quiet arrangement for them, and certainly a lonely one for John, who becomes instantly smitten with Julia (Carey), a lost out-of-towner traveling with her fiancé (Kevin Perri).

Julia, however, becomes smitten with the store's showpiece, an original Chippendale chair. John hopes Julia will stay, Mom hopes Julia will go, and Julia hopes the chair might someday be hers. Awkwardly social at best, John decides to give her the chair. It's a lovely gesture, and one Julia can't begin to understand, though she happily takes the chair anyway.

Carey and Perri are sweet and oblivious without being obnoxious. As the couple drives away with "the Chippy," John is the only one who didn't get what he wanted. Will Brunson's portrayal of Orange—as a dapper yet pathetic man—makes him the kind of guy you'd want to root for, even though you know he doesn't have a chance in the world.

In "OST," we meet Mr. Ost (Hall) and his wife, Lida (Richards). The Osts are vacationing at the Angel's Arms Inn, run by Monsieur (John Kaisner) and his extremely twitchy wife Fi (Romany Reagan). Both couples have their own agendas, and the tension between them builds and eventually bursts. This segment had the quirkiest humor and featured terrific performances by all four actors, including another great turn from both Hall and Richards.

However, the piece also seemed to be the odd man out in the trio. Its clever yet occasionally confusing use of "Ost" to stand for "ostentatious" and "Fi" as "fie" was never directly addressed; I wanted to be let in on the joke more. Still, "OST" felt creative and ambitious and reminded me a little of Beckett or some of the shorter works of Tom Stoppard.

Director Ziv made effective use of the space, which was good because there wasn't much space to use (the 78th Street Theater Lab is tiny). The basic set consisted of enough furniture to take us from scene to scene without seeming too generic or getting too fussy. The most important piece of scenery was the large projection screen housed in the center of the rear wall. A short video introduced each sketch by identifying the characters with captions and placing them in telling situations: it was easy to infer that the couple in the first one-act were newlyweds. The videos added a layer of context that would otherwise be missing.

The Beginning of the And was the Audax Theater Group's inaugural production in 2001. Five years later, the group appears to be thriving, as this revival made for a thoughtful, entertaining diversion. The three one-acts were funny with a touch of bittersweet, and full of endearing characters.

Meeting Her Fate

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable), Caridad Svich's unorthodox retelling of the Iphigenia myth, has received a stylish restaging by the experimental theater company One Year Lease. In bringing playwright Caridad Svich's demanding play—with its many characters and multimedia components—to visceral life, directors Ianthe Demos and Danny Bernardy create a tone poem for our blitzed-out, hyperkinetic, media-saturated age. But this production cannot escape the kitchen-sink syndrome that plagues the work itself: like the play's extra-long name, it tries to pack in so much that meaning and depth are sometimes derailed in the process.

In the Greek myth, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the goddess Artemis, who had immobilized the Greek ships in a windless sea on their way to Troy. Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia on the pretense that she is to wed the warrior Achilles. When Iphigenia learns her fate, she at first begs for her life, but then changes her mind, resolving to die.

Inspired by Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis, veteran playwright Svich transplants the myth to a modern netherworld of sex, death, and trance-inducing music, where she reimagines Iphigenia (Brina Stinehelfer) as the daughter of a dictator in an unnamed Latin American country. A news anchor (Nick Flint) reports that the death of the general's daughter would arouse the grief and sympathy he needs to win an upcoming election.

Iphigenia rebels by running off to a rave party, where she hooks up inexplicably with the androgynous rock star Achilles. Along the way, she encounters Violeta Imperial, a soothsaying chicken vendor who was tortured by her father's henchmen, and a chorus consisting of the shades of three of the Mexican factory girls raped and killed in the borderlands (played by masked male actors in drag).

One Year Lease, which has a reputation for high production values, does not disappoint. The rave party in the industrial wasteland at the city's outskirts is vividly rendered by set designer James Hunting with cinderblocks, sawdust, and metal steps and hanging rods. On three onstage TV screens, video engineer Brian Michael Thomas projects hyper-paced news clips and live streaming video that offer counterpoint and comment on the action.

Mike Riggs's inventive lighting, Kay Lee's exuberant costumes (Iphigenia's designer ball gown with its scooped-out miniskirt front is exquisite), and sound engineer David Chessman's pulsating techno music all add to the heady atmospherics of what the rave party's DJ describes as "this synthetic, hard-core fantasy we call a new century."

While sensory overload is the norm, the directors and their production team also appreciate the power of stillness. Thus they add a fascinating silent tableau of Iphigenia and her parents at the dinner table as a prelude. In some of the concluding scenes, after Iphigenia embraces her fate, the torrent of words, lights, and images tapers off and a still, softly lit landscape emerges where the TV screens reflect only the action itself onstage.

The cast deserves credit for maintaining its focus and poise amid the swirl. Stinehelfer captures the conflicting mix of naïveté, petulance, and fear that pulls Iphigenia in different directions. Susannah Malone is powerful both as the alcoholic, withholding mother and the apparition Violeta. The three male actors, playing multiple characters, are suitably creepy as the Mexican Fresa girls, while also excelling in their roles as Achilles (Danny Bernardy), the intrepid news anchor (Nick Flint), and the callous general (Gregory Waller).

One Year Lease, whose mission is to revive classic texts, took the cast and four designers to Greece for three weeks of rehearsal to soak up the country's culture and atmosphere. It's hard, given how far the work strays from the classical story, to assess what impact that strategy had on the results.

But one thing is clear: despite its excesses and occasional incoherence, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart makes for an absorbing night of theater.

The Band Plays On

The 1980's are a period that many people would rather forget, but authors Becky Eldridge and Amy Peterson and composer Andy Eninger have given us something wonderful to remember in Band Geeks: A Halftime Musical, playing at the Lucille Lortel Theater as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. This 80's-style musical is about a band full of social misfits trying to earn respect in a small town ruled by sports. The opening song, "Band Camp," introduces the eclectic mix of characters in a campy, high-energy dance number that features each band geek giving a musical monologue before hopping on the bus to band camp. We hear introductions from a pregnant teen, a dark goth chick, a Mennonite, a shy freshman with scoliosis and acne, an awkward orphaned boy living with his grandmother, and three seniors intent on ruling the camp and hazing freshmen. We also meet their hilarious chaperone, Mrs. Love, played by male actor Ed Jones in drag.

Unfortunately for this group of geeks ready to ship off to camp, the jocks have come to bid them farewell. Anyone who has ever dreaded gym class will love this play's depiction of the die-hard athletes who sing their praises of sports before falling to their knees and lamenting that this will be the best days of their lives before they grow up and "marry a nasty wife," lose their hair, and watch their muscle turn to fat.

But while most of the songs have catchy tunes and silly lyrics, you will occasionally catch a solemn note. At a car wash fund-raiser, the girls in the band sing about embracing physical insecurities in the song "Use What You Got." And when the kids falter before a big game, Mr. Bradford (Ross Foti), their band director, tells them, "If you can't find the rhythm and you don't know what to do, just listen to your heartbeat, 'cause the music's in you."

Audience members are also invited to embrace their inner dork by participating in the action. Two people are pulled from their seats to challenge a trumpet player for his spot, while others are given pompoms to wave at a football pep rally. Band Geeks: A Halftime Musical ends on an uplifting note for everyone, as the kids come to realize that it is O.K. to be a geek when you have your band behind you.

Martinis and Mayhem

"I give them their heads," Dawn Powell said of her characters. "They furnish their own nooses." A contemporary of Fitzgerald and Hemingway's, the prolific Powell wrote a punchy 1940s novel, A Time to Be Born, that has inspired a musical at the New York International Fringe Festival. "Inspired" is a blurry term, however, since the resulting production (with music by John Mercurio and book/lyrics by Tajlei Levis) incorporates little of Powell's reputed wit and venom. This lengthy, under-directed, but sweet musical depicts New York on the brink of World War II, when the cosmopolitan crowd was still obsessed with fashion, etiquette, and scandal (imagine that!). At the center of everything is Amanda Keeler Evans (Maria Couch), an aggressive social climber who has snared a wealthy and stuffy husband. Although his publications dutifully print rave reviews of her ghostwritten work, even Amanda has a more idealistic past, and when old flame Ken Saunders (James Sasser) resurfaces, she wants him back in her life. On the run from a broken engagement, Amanda's former hometown friend Vicky (Christy Morton) turns up asking for help, and Amanda concocts the perfect scheme—housing mousy Vicky in an apartment that Amanda and Ken can use for surreptitious lunchtime encounters. When sparks begin to fly between Ken and Vicky, however, a tense romantic triangle materializes.

Under Marlo Hunter's earnest but tepid direction, Levis's adaptation is overwhelmingly antiseptic and surprisingly sexless for a story so teeming with vitriolic gossip and thwarted passion. Mercurio's music, an amalgam of styles ranging from jazzy, Cy Coleman-esque torch songs to pulsing, contemporary musical-theater power anthems, is generally pleasing, if unmemorable.

Burdened with tedious exposition and a pocketful of repetitious songs, the production is most persuasive when its characters are candid and cutthroat. Couch is dynamic and deviously delightful as the tyrannical Amanda, while the velvet-voiced Sasser impresses as brooding writer Ken. But Morton is the show's revelation as fish-out-of-water Vicky, whose transformation to city girl is so complete that she begins to affect a Katharine Hepburn-inspired upper-crust accent.

Powell's progressiveness is evident in the presence of two strong female characters who desire not only a man but a prestigious, rewarding career. In diluting Powell's vigor, however, A Time to Be Born loses the zest that would transform this somewhat mushy romance into a razor-sharp character study.

Survivor

For the majority of us, our most direct contact with war is the upswing in gas prices and a daily smattering of photos and news stories. The battlefield is remote, and it's easy to believe that our lives are war-free zones, even as American forces remain deep in combat. The most remarkable accomplishment of the Public Theater's stirring new production of Bertolt Brecht's war play Mother Courage and Her Children is its determination to take us directly into war and its immediacy. Under the steady direction of George C. Wolfe and in the warm, prickly, and resplendent form of Meryl Streep, Mother Courage steers us into the maelstrom of battle and its very human consequences. Brecht was not chronicling the Iraq war, of course, but the Thirty Years' War in Europe, 1618-48. But even though this is not our war, per se, thanks to Tony Kushner's potent and appealingly comedic new translation, it very well could be. As religious ideologies clash, presumptuous kings are criticized, and the rich receive tax breaks, the audience clearly found the political diatribes to be all too familiar (and worthy of spontaneous, appreciative applause). Rather than focusing on the particulars of regiments and religious allegiances, Brecht accepted war as a largely unknowable, bewildering, and alienating beast and focused on one woman's struggle to make a profit selling goods from her cart while ensuring the survival of her three children.

As Mother Courage attests, however, each of her children has an undeniable "personality defect," and survival is precarious. The eldest, Eilif (Frederick Weller), is recruited into the army and becomes a swaggering, ruthless soldier; her other son, the honest but simple-minded Swiss Cheese (Geoffrey Arend), is hired as a paymaster for the Swiss army; and her only daughter, Kattrin (Alexandria Wailes), is overly sensitive and mute, silenced by a soldier's sexual violation years earlier.

Mother Courage's affection and contempt for her children spins as wildly as her wagon's wheels. In lieu of horses, she harnesses her offspring and berates them candidly to their faces. And yet, as the war snatches them away one by one, she reveals pockets of grief, prisms of love that are quickly absorbed into her surly exterior. For a war profiteer, necessity must strip away sentimentality, but it is eroded neither cleanly nor completely.

For although Streep certainly depicts an anti-maternal figure (swinging and gripping her money pouch with the bravado of a man parading his sizable endowment), she gives us very striking glimpses of Mother Courage's sensitivity, most notably through Jeanine Tesori's visceral music. Tesori (along with gifted orchestrator Bruce Coughlin) has scored Brecht's text with an ambitious palette of sounds that could very well be produced by instruments discovered lying on a war-torn roadside: a quacking trumpet here, a strummed guitar there, and most of all the drums—a persistent, persuasive, and often disturbing beat.

The designers have also adeptly cobbled materials together for this production, from the mismatched wooden shapes of Riccardo Hernandez's set to the sparseness of Marina Draghici's worn costumes. Paul Gallo's lighting is especially evocative, demonstrating the power of warm sunlight to transform even the meanest of environments into a sparkling landscape worthy of a painting.

Each of the performers bravely attacks the material, and Brecht's epic script is peppered with many vibrant supporting characters. Jenifer Lewis gives a muscular performance as the strident prostitute Yvette, while Kevin Kline is affable as the quick-tongued Cook. Although Kline's mellifluous voice often seems a bit too refined for a grubby womanizer (would he really say "discombobulate"?), it is an undeniable pleasure to watch him and Streep exchange barbs with impeccable dexterity. As the curmudgeonly Chaplain, Austin Pendleton is likably tongue-tied as he sputters his lines, and his wood-chopping scene is one of the evening's comic highlights.

Weller delivers a rousing performance of an anthem about a soldier's doomed wife, while Arend is genuine and appealing as the wide-eyed Swiss Cheese. Of the three children, however, Wailes makes the most compelling impression as Kattrin, who (like us) is the silent observer of the action. An experienced deaf actress, Wailes turns in a nuanced, precise, and impassioned performance.

Streep, of course, is why people are camping out overnight for tickets, and she does not disappoint, giving a performance of unbridled range and energy (and beautiful singing, to boot!). The Public is certainly lucky to have her, for Brecht is not easy to sit through in any setting, with his characteristic wordiness and length. Undeniably the hot ticket this summer, Mother Courage is also a hot show, that all too rare example of what theater can and should be—bold, provocative, and timely. Here, war is dangerous—and not that far away.

Forget Me Not

Our brains have the ability to sweep unpleasant memories under the rug, though they lack the ability to dispose of them permanently. Everything we bury is still there, trying to work its way back to the surface, determined to re-enter our consciousness and stay until acknowledged. Eric Meyer's absurdist dark comedy An Off-White Afternoon, playing at the Connelly Theater as part of the New York International Fringe Festival, is about a middle-aged couple, Henry (Cash Tilton) and Alice (Asta Hansen), who are struggling with repressed memories and blurry gaps from a rocky past of alcoholic hazes and heroin-induced blackouts. Though they are now clean, sober, and happily married, their interaction is strange, as if they live in two different realities. When Alice asks Henry to dress nice and graciously greet the guests of her weekly women's meeting, Henry is shocked. He protests that this is the first time he has heard of a women's meeting, while Alice insists they have had lengthy conversations about it. Henry ends the argument by saying, "Let's just forget it," and Alice quickly agrees that forgetting is best.

Forgetting appears to be a daily part of their routine, especially when it comes to discussing their past. Henry is particularly stuck on a Fourth of July party that upset him deeply, although he cannot remember why. He thinks it is because Alice was so preoccupied with socializing that she ignored him, but after she apologizes he is still agitated, perhaps because he knows this is not the real reason.

Tilton and Hansen are terrific as Henry and Alice, having found the perfect balance on the fine line Meyer has drawn between realism and absurdity. Dan Pfau and Ian Schoen are also riveting as the creepy young boys who saunter into Henry and Alice's house with timid girlfriend Julie (Anne Carlisle) in tow, hours before the women's meeting is scheduled to begin. When they hint at knowing the secrets that lie within Alice's meeting and Henry's memory lapses, our interest in them intensifies.

The story contains more twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan movie, so revealing anything about the ending would spoil the excellent job Meyer has done in building the suspense. But suffice it to say that An Off-White Afternoon has a satisfying payoff and a poignant message about confronting your past before your past confronts you.

Onstage, For the Very First Time

Samuel Beckett, the existentialist playwright whose plays like Endgame and Waiting for Godot virtually defined serious high-modernist drama, is not usually discussed in the context of Bread's schlocky 1970's pop ballad "If." One could even caution the excellent Neo-Futurists, in their desire to draw a connection between the two, not to go there. But go there, with glee, they do. Multiple times. While alluding to Beckett's eight-minute play Rockaby in their new comedic work, The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled: "Never to Be Performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!, the Neo-Futurists play that cheesy love song repeatedly. And after each time, the old woman from Rockaby (actually one of the Neo-Futurists in drag) pleads for more. The gag is funny even if you haven't read Beckett. And if you have, it gives a new twist to an old classic. It's not that the old woman is sad about the wasted years she wants back, and howls about her deep need for more life. It's that she needs to continually hear the sappy song just one more time.

The premise of the piece, if you haven't guessed already, is that Beckett has written other works that have never been seen onstage before. These include works that cagily and hilariously engage in questions about existence (such as what happens when your life's work—in this case, keeping a table from falling over—turns out to be worthless).

Other pieces parody Beckett's plays, and still others end up lost again before production. Throughout this series of short works, the Neo-Futurists work in a subplot where a presence, strikingly similar to Beckett himself, makes himself known through increasingly threatening letters stating that he does not want the works presented.

As usual, this group of off-kilter grad school rejects delight in their sometimes obscure but always gratifying antics.

A Cathouse Divided

The cinema of the 1940's and '50's, with its schizophrenic blend of prurience and moral certitude, is perhaps the greatest boon to camp theater since cross-dressing. While pop culture remains the form's idiom of choice, sexuality and sincere emotion are two of camp's largest—and arguably its only—targets. Todd Michael's Vice Girl Confidential, a "film for the stage" now playing as part of the New York International Fringe Festival at the Cherry Lane Alternative, is no exception. With wig and ermine pulled snug, the author steps into camp's iconic high heels as Stella Duvall, matron of a high-class New York City brothel in 1942. When the murder of a once pure, Midwestern girl-turned-prostitute exposes a sex slavery ring, Duvall finds both the city's vice squad and the worst of its underworld knocking on her front door. Faced with losing her business—or worse—what's a girl to do but toss her head back, straighten her wig, and strike back with all the grande dame dignity she can muster?

Though the evening smacks heavily of the work of Charles Busch, Michael has a strong enough command of the form to look more like an admirer than an outright imitator. His largely able cast also helps to secure the necessary noir-ish tone, with noteworthy performances by Jeff Auer as Chief of Police Jim O'Roarke, Christopher Yustin as D.A. Walter Slade, and Johnny Calone as dim-bulb mob enforcer Trigger Martin—Of Mice and Men's Lennie gone bad, essentially.

As Stella tells Chief O'Roarke, "Jimmy, being in the indoor sporting business, I'm usually a good sport." The same might be said of theater and theatergoers. Though the otherwise twist-laden plot stumbles to a disappointingly benign conclusion in the final minutes, Vice Girl Confidential is a house of ill repute that's well worth the visit.

A Science of Love

Sue Rees's white, Orwellian set sits in pristine stillness before The Dispute begins, an engineered paradise unspoiled by the folly of man. In Neil Bartlett's new adaptation of Pierre Marivaux's 1744 play, the National Asian-American Theater Company and director Jean Randich show us a connection between this artificial Eden and reality TV. This unique perspective propels an acrobatic production into the upper echelon of high-style reinterpretations of classic texts. The Dispute concerns the fruition of an 18-year experiment dealing with the mechanics of love and original sin. The Prince decides to woo Hermiane by settling a longstanding debate over which sex is the first to falter in love. Conveniently, the Prince's father had had the same dispute with his lover years before, so he constructed an isolated environment where four orphans, two men and two women, were each raised alone in separate areas. The Prince releases the childlike foundlings, now grown, into his manufactured Eden so that he and his lady can witness both the purest form of love and the original romantic betrayal, as the four interact with other humans for the first time.

Randich and her first-rate designers present Marivaux's text convincingly as a work of science fiction. The costumes, shrewdly crafted by Kirian Lanseth-Schmidt, suggest a carefully constructed, sterile environment. The notion of using the scientific method to explore the highly irrational behavior people display while in love is both humorous and profound. In keeping with this, Rees has devised a set that equally captures the energetic design of a playground jungle gym and the austere ambience of a hospital. Robert Murphy's sound design punctuates the institutional mood with some effectively shrill alarms and whistles.

It is the gymnastic staging and the streamlined concept that give the production its life. The characters are seen hanging up and down, climbing, and, most important, playing. Randich has invigorated the centuries-old text with a stylish simplicity that captures the characters' youthfulness as they play their way through their first love affairs. The voyeuristic nature of an experiment like this validates her assessment in the production notes that this is an "18th-century reality show." Stephen Pertrilli intensifies the vitality of Randich's staging with pleasant contrasts of colors and funky MTV lighting.

Thankfully, the cast matches the concept with intensity and vigor. As the four romantic leads, Jennifer Chang, Alexis Camins, Olivia Oguma, and Lanny Joon exhibit copious amounts of energy and commitment to their roles as innocents. As they discover things as obvious as their reflections and the anatomical differences between them, all exhibit a believable, and endearing, naïveté. Jennifer Ikeda and Alfredo Narciso, as Hermiane and the Prince, both display their characters' higher-class status well and even throw in a touch of humanity here and there. Ikeda's initial facial reaction to the Prince's project seems to be the one time anyone ever questions the morality of raising four children in isolation. Mia Katigbak and Mel Duane Gionson play the children's caretakers and provide a strong, logical center in the form of wry comic relief.

The only misstep occurs at the end, when Meslis and Dina (played well, albeit briefly, by Claro de los Reyes and Annabel La Londe) suddenly emerge and seemingly refute the entire premise—that betrayal in love is inevitable. These two new characters love each other unconditionally, but whether they were raised together or separately isn't fully explained. Soon after their arrival, a quick wrap-up from Hermiane and the Prince suggests that the whole experiment was inconclusive, and the lights go down. All of this is presented to the audience in what felt like less than three minutes. Such an abrupt conclusion may leave some audience members cold or asking, "Wait ... what happened?"

But the all too brief ending is forgivable in light of the other merits of this wonderfully conceived production. The Dispute speaks to the voyeur in all of us, cynically concluding that both men and women are destined to fail in love at times. Conversely, it presents an optimistic story about the pure, scientific origins of affection and truthfully captures the enthusiasm of newfound love.

The Glutton and the Narcissist

If Shakespeare imagined what future productions of Romeo and Juliet might look like, chances are he never envisioned Romeo as a garbage can. And yet, director and writer Neal Freeman and puppet designer Michael C. Malbrough have turned the Bard's best-known lover into a tubby puppet constructed from a stout trash bin. This Romeo doesn't make a peep during Fatboy Romeo, an awkwardly abridged pop-culture reinvention of his story; instead, he flips open his hinged jaw and eats everything in sight. Freeman's concept is solid—a mission to expose America's cultural gluttony through an archetypal tale. Here, Juliet is a trashy-looking narcissist, her cousin Tybalt is a "sword lover," and her fiancé Paris is a self-obsessed bodybuilder. A series of media images—including air-brushed advertisements and celebrity photos (Michael Jackson and Britney Spears make appearances)—projected on a small screen provide a backdrop, while bouncy synthesized music underscores each scene.

After setting up these showy components, however, Freeman never brings them into meaningful dialogue. In his program notes, he admits that he never really liked Romeo and Juliet much, citing the broadly drawn characters and lack of subtlety. But in Fatboy Romeo he only recycles and reinforces this stereotypical, overblown behavior. He seems to want to teach us something about the dangers of overconsumption and cultural greed, yet the show's intended satire never coheres. While individually well defined, the puppets and projections never achieve revelatory interaction.

The narration is gamely performed by Danielle Thorpe and Patrick Toon, who voice the characters. Three puppeteers animate Malbrough's designs, which range from hand puppets to what looks like a coagulation of Barbie dolls glued on a stick. The Romeo puppet is particularly inventive, and the infamous Montague wears sneakers as well as a heavy set of jowls that age him well beyond what we expect. (To cement the discrepancy, Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Romeo on film, appears onscreen during Romeo's entrance.) Eleven-year-old Emma Park-Hazel introduces the scenes and skips around the set. She's certainly pert and playful, if purposeless.

Much of the problem comes from Romeo's silence. Impassive and unblinking, he is the ultimate ugly American consumer, impervious to feeling on his single-minded quest to feed himself. Without a voice, however, he becomes like the hundreds of people we see on the street every day, silently cramming things into open mouths. Freeman might want to consider pulling a bit of humanity from the rubbish.

Couplets in Crime

In New York, one sees Shakespeare done every which way, from strictly faithful to ultramodern to "What were they thinking?" Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather adds another twist: turning a contemporary piece classical. Playwright/director David Mann has adapted the shooting script of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, replacing curses with couplets and silencers with swords. Not surprisingly, to those familiar with both Shakespeare and Mario Puzo's story, this tale of power, vengeance, and family covers familiar bloody ground found in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and other works by the Bard, making it a perfect fit. After some initial titters at the eloquent language coming out of the mouths of characters like Sonny Corleone and the Don, the audience settled into the conceit and the show, which is a drama, after all. The killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey in the restaurant turns from a shocking character turning point to a steel-on-steel battle for survival. (It's best not to dwell on how Clemenza could hide a sword in a toilet.) Those who haven't seen the movie may be a little confused, since some scenes (like the horse's head in Woltz's bed and the death of Appolonia) are merely touched on in narration. The film's fans will be amused by the changes and then surprised at how they are drawn into the story again, even though this isn't the cast they're used to.

Drew Cortese may not be Al Pacino, but he makes a quiet, compelling Michael. Morgan Spector has a hint of Marlon Brando's marble-mouthiness in his delivery as Don Vito Corleone, but steers clear of a full-on impression. He's a bit young to be the father of the actors playing his progeny, but he has a boss's calm presence. Greg Derelian flexes both acting and bicep muscles in his portrayals of the hothead Sonny Corleone and the airhead Luca Brasi. The other cast members do equally well with iambic pentameter and playing multiple characters.

The program says the play has already earned a spot at a Houston theater next year. Mann's creation is not a show to go on Broadway or to win Tonys; it's a show to entertain, and to give smaller theaters the chance to do something more fun than another production of Romeo and Juliet. Of course, Shakespeare and Puzo were writing for the common man, so what better audience can their fictional love child hope to get?